By David A. Love the Grio

February is here, which means that it's Black History Month. Black history is an integral part of U.S. history, with African Americans making important contributions to the lifeblood of this country in all fields of endeavor. But there are many misconceptions and mischaracterizations when it comes to the public's general understanding of black history. They say that the truth will make you free. Well, here at theGrio, we thought we'd kick off February the right way by debunking the 10 biggest myths about black history.

1. The Civil War was not fought over slavery

If you want to know whether the Civil War was fought over slavery, just read the words of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America in 1861:

The prevailing ideas entertained by...most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition.

Most historians agree that slavery was one of the primary issues leading to the Civil War. South Carolina seceded from the Union because of the clash between slave states and free states over the expansion of slavery. The Republican Party, then a new political party, made the fight against slavery in U.S. territories a key issue.

Historical revisionists have tried to whitewash history and improve the image of the Old South by eliminating slavery from the mix. And groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans insist the war was fought over self-governance and states' rights. The war was about states' rights, the right of Southern states to own black people.

2. The civil rights movement was inherently Communist

Martin Luther King's inspiration for his philosophy of nonviolence and strategy of civil disobedience came from Mahatma Gandhi. The civil rights movement was not inspired by Communist beliefs or rhetoric, but the two biggest foes of the civil rights movement -- FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and the Klu Klux Klan -- were fervently anti-Communist and characterized the civil rights workers as such.

It was the middle of the Cold War, and Hoover investigated any group that adopted the similar positions on civil liberties, racism, economic and peace as the Communist Party. Hoover thought the movement was a target of Communist infiltration, which is why his COINTELPRO program went after so-called subversive causes deemed Communist or socialist -- including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Black Panther Party and others.

3. The modern Democratic Party is still the party of the Klu Klux Klan

During the era of Jim Crow segregation, the Democratic Party ruled the South, and their reign of terror was made successful thanks to groups like the Klan, which provided the muscle that kept black people down, subordinated and 'in their place'. As historian Eric Foner noted in Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, "In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy."

Meanwhile, the Republican Party was a diverse party, a true "big tent" with liberals and moderates in their ranks. Following the Civil War during Reconstruction, blacks were overwhelmingly Republican. Even President Eisenhower received 39 percent of the black vote in 1956, while Nixon won 32 percent of the black vote in his loss against Kennedy. Moreover, greater majorities of Republican lawmakers voted for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. In fact, Democrats and Republicans outside of the South approved the bills in the face of a filibuster from Southern Democrats.

Things began to change in the 1960s, when Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, and Southern conservatives began to take over the GOP by appealing to white Southern resentment over civil rights. As a result of a Southern Strategy based on states' rights, white Democrats flocked to the Republicans. In today's South, the Republican Party is a mostly white conservative party, and the Democratic Party is disproportionately African-American. The parties switched places.

4. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, and would today be aligned with conservatives

Conservatives point to Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech -- in which he said he wanted his four children to be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character -- as proof that King opposed affirmative action and was a conservative Republican. But that is wishful thinking. First of all, the Republican Party of King's days was quite different from the party of today. Although King's father was a lifelong Republican, which made sense since the Democrats supported segregation, this does not mean the son was a Republican. Second, as PolitiFact notes, Dr. King was not a Republican, and historians and Martin Luther King III agree there is no proof of it.

In fact King spoke out passionately in opposition to conservative GOP 1964 nominee for the presidency, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. King said of Goldwater:

While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.

King also wanted to spend billions of dollars to fight poverty and was vilified for his stance against the Vietnam War. And he fought with striking Memphis sanitation workers when he was assassinated. He also said that America "must undergo a radical revolution of values" and "must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." That doesn't sound very conservative. Today's conservatives would likely brand him a socialist.

5. There were other ways to end segregation besides a civil rights movement (Rand Paul saying the free market would have ended it. Chris Christie says a referendum could have.)

Presidential candidate Ron Paul opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the grounds that it infringed on the right of business owners and threatened privacy. Paul believes that we should have left it to the free market to end segregation. Paul ignores the historical circumstances surrounding Jim Crow. The free market at that time supported segregation for African-Americans, and slavery before it, which was backed up by state officials, state laws and local ordinances, and a regime of violence by the Klan and other terrorist groups. These forces had no intention of budging from their position, as Frederick Douglass once said, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

It took a civil rights movement to apply pressure on Congress and President Johnson and force the Southern states to change their ways. This meant legislation by the federal government forbidding discrimination in public places, schools, the workplace and the voting booth.

6. Black Americans are better off (versus Africans) because of slavery

We will never know what Africa would have been today without the disruption of slavery and colonization. To argue, as conservative David Horowitz claims, that African-Americans are better off because of slavery -- and should be thankful they are the most prosperous blacks in the world-- is to ignore the high price that black people have paid. And perhaps that is the point for some people.

One cannot begin to put a price tag on what the separation of families, loss of cultural ties and lost wages has cost the black community.

7. Slavery was not a dehumanizing institution - it was just work for free, so blacks should get over it.

See number 6. Slavery was brutal and dehumanizing. To say that torture, kidnap, rape and murder are not dehumanizing is to live in a world of make-believe. As the master's property, blacks had no rights under the law, and could be beaten, raped or otherwise abused without recourse. As Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a slave owner, wrote in the Dred Scott case, blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write, and were forbidden to legally marry. They had no parental rights regarding their children, and separation of families occurred without recourse. Further, black folks had to work the fields six days a week from sun-up until sundown, from "can't-see morning" until "can't-see night."

We haven't even discussed the Middle Passage, the dreaded transatlantic slave ship journey from Africa to the Americas. An estimated 10 to 16 million Africans were stolen and transported against their will across the Atlantic. Although we will never have an accurate count, according to conservative estimates, for every 100 Africans that reached the New World, 40 to 50 percent died either during the death marches to the slave forts following their kidnap in Africa, or during the disease-ridden 60-90 day journey in the bowels of slave ships.

And speaking of working for free, slavery created an enormous wealth advantage for whites. Moreover, the badge of slavery continues to haunt African-Americans today in the form of economic discrimination, higher interest rates for mortgages, redlining and employment practices. Public policy has prevented blacks from accumulating property and wealth, and the federal government reneged on its promise to compensate blacks by giving every freedman 40 acres and a mule.

Moreover, blacks continue to suffer disproportionately in the bad economy. The wealth gap between whites and blacks slashing of public sector jobs has plunged many blacks into poverty, and the recession wiped out black wealth and with it the black middle class.

8. The founding fathers worked to end slavery (according to Michele Bachmann) or were opposed to slavery

In a bold act of historical revisionism, former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann declared that the founding fathers worked "tirelessly" to end slavery. During the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, the founding fathers included the Three-Fifths Compromise into the U.S. Constitution, which allowed Southern states to count three-fifths of their slave population for the purposes of representation and taxes. 25 of the 55 delegates at the convention -- nearly half -- owned slaves. Of course, these slaves had no rights and were unable to vote.

While some in the Tea Party members want to rewrite history to be nicer to the founders, the fact remains that many of these founders owned slaves. Twelve presidents owned slaves, 8 of them while serving in office. For example, George Washington owned over 200 slaves, Thomas Jefferson owned over 100 and fathered children with his slave, and James Monroe owned up to 40. James Madison and Ben Franklin had them as well, though the latter freed his slaves and then fought against the institution. It is hard to imagine someone fighting against slavery while they kept people kidnapped and chained in their backyard, but anything is possible, right?

9. American innovation was exclusively white

Despite Pat Buchanan's belief that "this has been a country built, basically, by white folks," African-Americans have made invaluable contributions to this country through inventions, exploration, and all fields of endeavor.

As Randall Robinson noted in his book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, the U.S. government requested 100 slaves to construct the Capitol in Washington. Masters who agreed to lend their slaves to the government received $5 per month per slave. Subsequently, forced labor helped clear the land for the rest of the District of Columbia.

But black people helped build America in other ways as well. Benjamin Banneker, an African-American inventor, astronomer, mathematician, urban planner and farmer helped survey what would become the city of Washington, DC. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful open heart surgery operation, while Dr. Charles Drew was a pioneer in blood banks and the storage and processing of blood plasma. George Washington Carver was a renowned scientist and educator who reportedly found hundreds of uses for peanuts, soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. Lewis Latimer worked with Thomas Edison, and invented carbon filaments for incandescent lamps. Garrett Morgan invented the traffic light and sold it to General Electric, with his design becoming the basis for modern traffic lights. He also invented the gas mask. Marie Van Brittan Brown invented the home security system. Black explorer Matthew Henson was the first person to reach the North Pole, and the list goes on and on.

10. Blacks didn't fight in America's wars until World War II

Black people fought in every American war, including the Revolutionary War. Washington allowed black soldiers to enlist due to troop shortages. At least 5,000 blacks fought for the patriot side of the war, according to the National Park Service, and between 75,000 and 100,000 slaves escaped to the British side, with at least 20,000 fighting for the Crown. In 1779, over 500 free Haitian blacks fought for American independence at the siege of Savannah, Georgia. During the War of 1812, most Naval ship crews were 10-20 percent black, and as many as one-quarter of the Navy seamen were black.

According to the National Archives, 179,000 black men served during the Civil War in the Union Army -- 1 in 10 soldiers -- and 19,000 in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died in the Civil War. Further, more than 350,000 African-Americans fought in World War I.

Black Americans, like other Americans, have served their country and left an indelible mark on this nation. Black history is part of American history, and our contributions should be celebrated.

This is a piece called Julie-O by Mark Summer. I took it and made a celloboxing arrangement!
- Kevin Olusola

Kevin Olusola performing Ridin Solo on cello, this man's skills with a cello are uncomparable to anything youve seen before!

Also, check out his participation with PENTATONIX

Did I mention he plays saxophone and speaks five languages?

Online petition asks Apple for 'ethical' iPhone

By Suzanne Choney

An online petition asking Apple to "address dangerous conditions in factories" making the next iPhone has gotten 35,000 signatures in the first 24 hours of the effort.

"I use an iPhone myself. I love it, but I don't love having to support sweatshops, and neither do millions of other Apple consumers," said Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director of the group behind the petition, SumOfUs.

The working conditions at Apple factories in China were detailed in a recent New York Times article. In the article, a former Apple executive is quoted as saying, "We've known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they're still going on...Why? Because the system works for us."

"Right now we have a huge opportunity as ethical consumers: The launch of the iPhone 5 later this year will be new Apple CEO Tim Cook's first big product rollout, and he can't afford for anything to go wrong -- including negative publicity around how Apple's suppliers treat their workers," the group says on its site.

"That's why we're launching a campaign this week to get Apple to overhaul the way its suppliers treat their workers in time for the launch of the iPhone 5."

Apple, contacted for comment by msnbc.com about the online campaign, has not yet responded; if the company does, the post will be updated.

Apple CEO Tim Cook did send an email to employees after the New York Times story was published, saying in part, "We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain ... Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It's not who we are."

Said Stinebrickner-Kauffman: "Apple's enforcement of razor-thin profit margins at suppliers invites -- and may even force -- them to slash workers' rights. But Apple is going to have much bigger longer-term problems than paying a few extra dollars for its products if it loses its luster with ethical consumers."

Related stories:

• Bottom Line: Who's most to blame for poor conditions at Apple's Chinese suppliers?
• Behind the Wall: At Apple's Chinese factories, long hours, health woes and death
• Why Apple says it can't build an iPhone in the US

by Carl Hiaasen

Now that federal regulators have outlawed the importation of humongous, gator-eating pythons, all Floridians can breathe a grateful sigh of relief. Finally we are saved from this insidious reptilian plague!

Sorry, but no. We might as well try to ban fleas.

As anybody who knows anything about the Everglades will tell you, the giant Burmese python is here to stay. If last year's hard freeze didn't kill off the tropical snakes, nothing short of a nuclear disaster will do it.

The import ban on the Burmese and three other species of constrictors -- which was announced last week -- is being hailed by the Obama administration as a victory for Florida's native environment. In reality, it's just a classic lesson of how Washington mulls and stalls until things are out of hand.

That there was an actual debate about the invasive snake crisis is incredible to the point of satire. Some reptile dealers and breeders, joined by a few clueless Republican lawmakers (none of whom had experienced a 15-foot python in their swimming pool), claimed that a ban on imports and interstate sales would be "job killing."

As one who once collected and bred snakes, I cannot overstate how laughably bogus that position was. The realm of commercial reptile dealing, which has always had a sketchy element, is full of clever folks who always find ways to market different exotic species when one becomes unavailable. Not one real job would have been lost.

Still, the "herp" industry -- wholesale and retail herpetology enthusiasts -- hired lobbyists to fight the proposed ban, and the big-snake argument dragged on for six ridiculous years. During that period, untold thousands of baby pythons were hatched in the wilds of South Florida and dutifully commenced to devour the local fauna.

By the time the ban was approved, the government's original list of "injurious" snake species had been politically pared to four -- the Burmese python, the yellow anaconda and two species of African pythons.

Spared from the blacklist was the common boa constrictor, one of the most popular species among pet owners, and one of the most likely to be turned free when it becomes a little too interested in the family poodle. Boas don't grow as hefty as pythons, but they are equally fond of our sunny climate and tasty bird population.

The fact is, there are already so many of these snakes being captive-bred in this country that a ban on imports is essentially meaningless. Most serious reptile dealers buy from U.S. breeders who specialize in extravagantly hued strains, the product of years of genetic tinkering.

It's true that certain exotic species won't mate in captivity, and must be caught in the wild and then shipped here. However, that's not the case with the four snakes named in the new federal ban.

Pythons and yellow anacondas reproduce exuberantly, with no shyness, in robust, rat-like numbers. The time is long past when their importation is necessary to the trade.

The significant part of the federal ban, which takes effect in March, is the illegalizing of interstate sales of Burmese pythons, their eggs and hybrids. That will sure impact the sales of some reptile dealers, but there's nothing to prevent a customer from purchasing as many snakes as they want from an in-state breeder.

And it doesn't matter if you're a reptile fancier in South Florida or North Dakota. If you've got a nice warm room in your house and a lovestruck pair of pythons, you will have bushels of fertile python eggs.

The snakes that now roam the Everglades are most likely descended from those set loose when Hurricane Andrew flattened rural reptile farms in the summer of 1992. The jumbo specimens might well be original refugees from that storm, their love lives spiced by chance encounters with ex-pet pythons whose owners had lost (or purposely ditched) them.

So ubiquitous is the python presence that the notoriously slug-like Florida Wildlife Commission last year took steps that practically bans private ownership of the Burmese and seven other species, for new collectors. Herp lovers who already owned the snakes could keep them if they bought a permit and agreed to implant microchips before July 2010.

When it comes to environmental protections, rarely does the state of Florida take a leading role over the feds. The delay speaks to the embarrassing gridlock in the nation's capital, where even a pernicious snake infestation generates pious, ideological fuming.

Sen. Bill Nelson and others worked long and hard to get the Department of Interior to do something, and a ban is a probably a good thing to have on the books as a precedent before the next invasive species settles in.

But as a way of containing the Burmese python, it's way too little, way too late. They're here, they're hungry, they're happy -- and they're getting it on.

http://mikedaisey.blogspot.com/

Related Article:

Moral Issues Behind iPhone and Its Makers

By Charles Isherwood

I hate to tell you this, but your best friend has a dark secret in his past, the kind of shameful history that might just have you looking at him (or her?) a little sheepishly, with a furtive, sidelong glance instead of the former adoring gaze.

I speak not of a human being, mind you, the walking and talking kind of best friend, but of your cherished electronic companion, that stylish helpmate, warm intimate and source of delightful entertainment known as an iPhone. As I look at mine this morning, I can't help feeling a bit guilty, and a bit betrayed. I fear some of the magic has gone out of our relationship.

This seismic shift in my consciousness came about thanks to Mike Daisey, whose latest theatrical monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," is a mind-clouding, eye-opening exploration of the moral choices we unknowingly or unthinkingly make when we purchase nifty little gadgets like the iPhone and the iPad and the PowerBook.

To be fair, while Mr. Daisey's particular obsession is the product line of the Apple corporation, the ethical problems he explores are not exclusive to owners of MacBooks and iPods. As he points out in this meditation on our wonderful world of technology and the troubling economic imbalances that underlie it, any number of other electronic gizmos filling up our homes and taking up our time are similarly morally tainted goods.

About half of all consumer electronics sold in the world today are produced at a single mammoth factory campus in Shenzhen, China, according to Mr. Daisey. His illuminating trip to this campus, the sprawling Foxconn Technology plant, forms the dramatic spine of his smart, pointed and often very funny exploration of the rise of Apple and the career and vision of Mr. Jobs, who died this month after a long battle with cancer.

Mr. Daisey has been creating monologues on various subjects -- "How Theater Failed America" and "21 Dog Years" are among his best-known -- for more than a decade. His methods are simple. Here he sits, behind a glass-topped table with just a few pages of notes and a glass of water before him, looking like a big boy who never lost all his baby fat. (Or maybe any of it.) His performance style mixes the quiet reflectiveness of Spalding Gray with more histrionic colorings.

In relating his giddy relationship with his Apple products, and impersonating fellow obsessives, Mr. Daisey transforms into a cackling mad scientist of creaky thrillers, and at his most fervid he recalls the jabbering, slightly unhinged aspect of the comic Lewis Black of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." When it comes to discussing the sobering discoveries he made at Foxconn, which employs some 430,000 people in its compound in Shenzhen, Mr. Daisey speaks more gravely and with a charged intensity.

For Mr. Daisey, as for many others, affection for Apple products evolved into reverence for Mr. Jobs, the Apple co-founder whose identification with the company and its products has been much remarked upon, and worried over, since his illness made news several years ago.

Mr. Daisey has been performing this show since July of last year, and while the death of Mr. Jobs lends the evening a certain eerie timeliness, it also means that many in the audience will be familiar with the life and career of Mr. Jobs from reading obituaries and tributes.

The hippie-meets-tech-geek ethos, the founding of and then ouster from Apple, the triumphant return and the revolutionary series of consumer products that followed: Mr. Daisey covers this material fluently and with amiable humor, mixing obvious hero worship with some pointed skepticism. (Mr. Jobs, he notes, was the kind of imperious guy who divided the world's population into "geniuses and bozos.")

But the show is most engrossing, and most disturbing, when Mr. Daisey delves into the grim realities of workers' lives in Shenzhen, a city that he memorably describes as looking as if " 'Blade Runner' threw up on itself." Here is where the agony of the title enters the picture.

The Foxconn campus is tightly controlled, its entrance secured by gun-wielding guards. A series of suicides at the plant several years ago made international headlines. When Mr. Daisey's attempts to visit through official channels were rebuffed, he simply rented a car and a driver and translator, and showed up at the gates to interview workers as they emerged from their shifts.

He had to wait quite a while. As he notes, while the official Chinese workday is 8 hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

Mr. Daisey does not go all "j'accuse" on Mr. Jobs himself, but he does observe that Apple and other American corporations have been shamefully lax in taking responsibility for the treatment of workers at the overseas plants that manufacture their products. (He does not refer to an investigation Apple made into worker conditions at Foxconn this year.)

But of course the responsibility shouldn't stop there. The conveniences and pleasures that all these gadgets have brought to our lives have been purchased at the cost of considerable human suffering, of which we remain willfully ignorant or simply choose to ignore.

Mr. Daisey pushes the notes of quiet outrage and guilt-mongering perhaps a little too hard in the show's culminating moments, although he avoids full diatribe mode. But he doesn't really need to bang the drum so hard; he has made his points clearly and powerfully already. Anyone who sees Mr. Daisey's show -- and anyone with a cellphone and a moral center should -- will find it hard to forget the repercussions that our casual purchases can have in the lives of men and women (and children) half a world away.

Uncomfortable reflections along these lines have certainly been springing into my consciousness a lot since I saw it, like psychic pop-up ads that just won't go away. I can't seem to find a little box that says "Skip this thought."

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS

Created and performed by Mike Daisey; directed by Jean-Michele Gregory; sets and lighting by Seth Reiser; production stage manager, Pamela Salling; acting general manager, Steven Showalter; associate artistic director, Mandy Hackett; associate producer, Maria Goyanes; director of production, Ruth E. Sternberg. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; Joey Parnes, interim executive director.

Why Climate Change Will Make You Love Big Government

By Christian Parenti, TomDispatch

Look back on 2011 and you'll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees, touched off wildfires that burned four million acres, and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture, particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion--and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.

In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.

Across the planet the story was similar. Wildfires consumed large swaths of Chile. Colombia suffered its second year of endless rain, causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. In Brazil, the life-giving Amazon River was running low due to drought. Northern Mexico is still suffering from its worst drought in 70 years. Flooding in the Thai capital, Bangkok, killed over 500 and displaced or damaged the property of 12 million others, while ruining some of the world's largest industrial parks. The World Bank estimates the damage in Thailand at a mind-boggling $45 billion, making it one of the most expensive disasters ever. And that's just to start a 2011 extreme-weather list, not to end it.

Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important implications for how we think about the role of government in our future. During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to our survival.

These days, big government gets big press attention--none of it anything but terrible. In the United States, especially in an election year, it's become fashionable to beat up on the public sector and all things governmental (except the military). The Right does it nonstop. All their talking points disparage the role of an oversized federal government. Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist famously set the tone for this assault. "I'm not in favor of abolishing the government," he said. "I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." He has managed to get 235 members of the House of Representatives and 41 members of the Senate to sign his "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" and thereby swear never, under any circumstances, to raise taxes.

But don't expect the present "consensus" to last. Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security firms won't help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas. Voluntary community groups, churches, anarchist affinity groups--each may prove helpful in limited ways, but for better or worse, only government has the capital and capacity to deal with the catastrophic implications of climate change.

Consider Hurricane Irene: as it passed through the Northeast, states mobilized more than 100,000 National Guard troops. New York City opened 78 public emergency shelters prepared to house up to 70,000 people. In my home state, Vermont, where the storm devastated the landscape, destroying or damaging 200 bridges, more than 500 miles of road, and 100 miles of railroad, the National Guard airlifted in free food, water, diapers, baby formula, medicine, and tarps to thousands of desperate Vermonters trapped in 13 stranded towns--all free of charge to the victims of the storm.

The damage to Vermont was estimated at up to $1 billion. Yet the state only has 621,000 residents, so it could never have raised all the money needed to rebuild alone. Vermont businesses, individuals, and foundations have donated at least $4 million, possibly up to $6 million in assistance, an impressive figure, but not a fraction of what was needed. The state government immediately released $24 million in funds, crucial to getting its system of roads rebuilt and functioning, but again that was a drop in the bucket, given the level of damage. A little known state-owned bank, the Vermont Municipal Bond Bank, also offered low-interest, low-collateral loans to towns to aid reconstruction efforts. But without federal money, which covered 80% to 100% of the costs of rebuilding many Vermont roads, the state would still be an economic basket case. Without aid from Washington, the transportation network might have taken years to recover.

As for flood insurance, the federal government is pretty much the only place to get it. The National Flood Insurance Program has written 5.5 million policies in more than 21,000 communities covering $1.2 trillion worth of property. As for the vaunted private market, for-profit insurance companies write between 180,000 and 200,000 policies in a given year. In other words, that is less than 5% of all flood insurance in the United States. This federally subsidized program underwrites the other 95%. Without such insurance, it's not complicated: many waterlogged victims of 2011, whether from record Midwestern floods or Hurricane Irene, would simply have no money to rebuild.

Or consider sweltering Texas. In 2011, firefighters responded to 23,519 fires. In all, 2,742 homes were destroyed by out-of-control wildfires. But government action saved 34,756 other homes. So you decide: Was this another case of wasteful government intervention in the marketplace, or an extremely efficient use of resources?

Facing Snowpocalypse Without Plows

The early years of this century have already offered a number of examples of how disastrous too little government can be in the face of natural disaster, Katrina-inundated New Orleans in 2005 being perhaps the quintessential case.

There are, however, other less noted examples that nonetheless helped concentrate the minds of government planners. For example, in the early spring of 2011, a massive blizzard hit New York City. Dubbed "Snowmageddon" and "Snowpocalypse," the storm arrived in the midst of tense statewide budget negotiations, and a nationwide assault on state workers (and their pensions).

In New York, Mayor Mike Bloomberg was pushing for cuts to the sanitation department budget. As the snow piled up, the people tasked with removing it--sanitation workers--failed to appear in sufficient numbers. As the city ground to a halt, New Yorkers were left to fend for themselves with nothing but shovels, their cars, doorways, stores, roads all hopelessly buried. Chaos ensued. Though nowhere near as destructive as Katrina, the storm became a case study in too little governance and the all-too-distinct limits of "self-reliance" when nature runs amuck. In the week that followed, even the rich were stranded amid the mounting heaps of snow and uncollected garbage.

Mayor Bloomberg emerged from the debacle chastened, even though he accused the union of staging a soft strike, a work-to-rule-style slowdown that held the snowbound city hostage. The union denied engaging in any such illegal actions. Whatever the case, the blizzard focused thinking locally on the nature of public workers. It suddenly made sanitation workers less invisible and forced a set of questions: Are public workers really "union fat cats" with "sinecures" gorging at the public trough? Or are they as essential to the basic functions of the city as white blood cells to the health of the human body? Clearly, in snowbound New York it was the latter. No sanitation workers and your city instantly turns chaotic and fills with garbage, leaving street after street lined with the stuff.

More broadly the question raised was: Can an individual, a town, a city, even a state really "go it alone" when the weather turns genuinely threatening? Briefly, all the union bashing and attacks on the public sector that had marked that year's state-level budget debates began to sound unhinged.

In the Big Apple at least, when Irene came calling that August, Mayor Bloomberg was ready. He wasn't dissing or scolding unions. He wasn't whining about the cost of running a government. He embraced planning, the public sector, public workers, and coordinated collective action. His administration took unprecedented steps like shutting down the subway and moving its trains to higher ground. Good thing they did. Several low-lying subway yards flooded. Had trains been parked there, many millions in public capital might have been lost or damaged.

The Secret History of Free Enterprise in America

When thinking about the forces of nature and the nature of infrastructure, a slightly longer view of history is instructive. And here's where to start: in the U.S., despite its official pro-market myths, government has always been the main force behind the development of a national infrastructure, and so of the country's overall economic prosperity.

One can trace the origins of state participation in the economy back to at least the founding of the republic: from Alexander Hamilton's First Bank of the United States, which refloated the entire post-revolutionary economy when it bought otherwise worthless colonial debts at face value; to Henry Clay's half-realized program of public investment and planning called the American System; to the New York State-funded Erie Canal, which made the future Big Apple the economic focus of the eastern seaboard; to the railroads, built on government land grants, that took the economy west and tied the nation together; to New Deal programs that helped pulled the country out of the Great Depression and built much of the infrastructure we still use like the Hoover Dam, scores of major bridges, hospitals, schools, and so on; to the government-funded and sponsored interstate highway system launched in the late 1950s; to the similarly funded space race, and beyond. It's simple enough: big government investments (and thus big government) has been central to the remarkable economic dynamism of the country.

Government has created roads, highways, railways, ports, the postal system, inland waterways, universities, and telecommunications systems. Government-funded R&D, as well as the buying patterns of government agencies--(alas!) both often connected to war and war-making plans--have driven innovation in everything from textiles and shipbuilding to telecoms, medicine, and high-tech breakthroughs of all sorts. Individuals invent technology, but in the United States it is almost always public money that brings the technology to scale, be it in aeronautics, medicine, computers, or agriculture.

Without constant government planning and subsidies, American capitalism simply could not have developed as it did, making ours the world's largest economy. Yes, the entrepreneurs we are taught to venerate have been key to all this, but dig a little deeper and you soon find that most of their oil was on public lands, their technology nurtured or invented thanks to government-sponsored R&D, or supported by excellent public infrastructure and the possibility of hiring well-educated workers produced by a heavily subsidized higher-education system. Just to cite one recent example, the now-familiar Siri voice-activated command system on the new iPhone is based on--brace yourself--government-developed technology.

And here's a curious thing: everybody more or less knows all this and yet it is almost never acknowledged. If one were to write the secret history of free enterprise in the United States, one would have to acknowledge that it has always been and remains at least a little bit socialist. However, it's not considered proper to discuss government planning in open, realistic, and mature terms, so we fail to talk about what government could--or rather, must--do to help us meet the future of climate change.

Storm Socialism

The onset of ever more extreme and repeated weather events is likely to change how we think about the role of the state. But attitudes toward the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which stands behind state and local disaster responses, suggest that we're hardly at that moment yet. In late 2011, with Americans beleaguered by weather disasters, FEMA came under attack from congressional Republicans, eager to starve it of funds. One look at FEMA explains why.

Yes, when George W. Bush put an unqualified playboy at its helm, the agency dealt disastrously with Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Under better leadership, however, it has been anything but the sinister apparatus of repression portrayed by legions of rightists and conspiracy theorists. FEMA is, in fact, an eminently effective mechanism for planning focused on the public good, not private profit, a form of public insurance and public assistance for Americans struck by disaster. Every year FEMA gives hundreds of millions of dollars to local firefighters and first responders, as well as victims dealing with the aftershock of floods, fires, and the other calamities associated with extreme weather events.

The agency's work is structured around what it calls "the disaster life cycle"--the process through which emergency managers prepare for, respond to, and help others recover from and reduce the risk of disasters. More concretely, FEMA's services include training, planning, coordinating, and funding state and local disaster managers and first responders, grant-making to local governments, institutions, and individuals, and direct emergency assistance that ranges from psychological counseling and medical aid to emergency unemployment benefits. FEMA also subsidizes long-term rebuilding and planning efforts by communities affected by disasters. In other words, it actually represents an excellent use of your tax dollars to provide services aimed at restoring local economic health and so the tax base. The anti-government Right hates FEMA for the same reason that they hate Social Security--because it works!

As it happens, thanks in part to the congressional GOP's sabotage efforts, thousands of FEMA's long-term recovery projects are now on hold, while the cash-strapped agency shifts its resources to deal with only the most immediate crises. This represents a dangerous trend, given what historical statistics tell us about our future. In recent decades, the number of Major Disaster Declarations by the federal government has been escalating sharply: only 12 in 1961, 17 in 1971, 15 in 1981, 43 in 1991, and in 2011--99! As a result, just when Hurricane Irene bore down on the East Coast, FEMA's disaster relief fund had already been depleted from $2.4 billion as the year began to a mere $792 million.

Like it or not, government is a huge part of our economy. Altogether, federal, state, and local government activity--that is collecting fees, taxing, borrowing and then spending on wages, procurement, contracting, grant-making, subsidies and aid--constitutes about 35% of the gross domestic product. You could say that we already live in a somewhat "mixed economy": that is, an economy that fundamentally combines private and public economic activity.

The intensification of climate change means that we need to acknowledge the chaotic future we face and start planning for it. Think of what's coming, if you will, as a kind of storm socialism.

After all, climate scientists believe that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide beyond 350 parts-per-million (ppm) could set off compounding feedback loops and so lock us into runaway climate change. We are already at 392 ppm. Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels immediately, the disruptive effect of accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is guaranteed to hammer us for decades. In other words, according to the best-case scenario, we face decades of increasingly chaotic and violent weather.

In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small "d" democracy and "community" may be key parts of a strong, functional, and fair society, volunteerism and "self-organization" alone will prove as incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges now beginning to unfold.

To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society's full range of resources. In other words, Big Storms require Big Government. Who else will save stranded climate refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?

It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all.

Christian Parenti, author of the recently published Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books), is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, a Puffin Writing Fellow, and a professor at the School for International Training, Graduate Institute. His articles have appeared in Fortune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, TomDispatch, and the London Review of Books, among other places.

Not easy. Use two words per alliteration. Give it a shot and see what I mean.

By Alan Boyle

The sunspot responsible for setting off a colorful round of northern lights over the past week got off a doozy of a parting shot today, just as it was about to pass around the edge of the sun's disk.

Sunspot 1402 let loose with an X-class flare, the most powerful class of solar outburst, at 1:37 p.m. ET today, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a sequence of ultraviolet images as the blast went out. Fortunately, this one was not directed right at Earth.

SpaceWeather.com says NASA's Goddard Space Weather Laboratory detected a "spectacular" coronal mass ejection blasting away from the sun at 5.6 million mph (2,500 kilometers per second). CMEs send out electrically charged particles that can eventually interact with Earth's magnetic field -- but here again, this particular ejection is not heading directly for Earth. There's a chance that it might strike a glancing blow on Monday or so, sparking another bout of auroral displays.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reports that the flare created R3-level radio blackouts at about 1:30 p.m. ET today. That level can result in wide-area loss of high-frequency radio comunication, as well as a temporary degradation of low-frequency GPS signals, but no significant problems came to light immediately. Solar radiation levels are elevated -- which may lead to the rerouting of some airline flights. NOAA's guide to space weather scales explains what's what.

SOHO View

(Be patient and let all the greed load)

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The Key: From the Bottom Up

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Nobody invests in and starts a business they don't expect grow over time. And of course businesses will lobby for their industry to make that growth more likely. In the case of the private prison industry that lobbying includes clamoring for tougher sentencing and jail time for even the smallest crimes as well as trying to defeat policies that will reduce crime and jail time. The last thing the private prison industry wants is a more compassionate or rational judicial and penal system since that will threaten their profits. Talk about walking down the wrong path.

No Way Out: Private Prisons Or Conservative Sponsored Gulags?

By Stephen D. Foster Jr

Ever heard of private sector prisons? Up until a couple of years ago, I had always assumed that prisons were owned and operated by state and federal government. It was only while researching the Arizona death panels that I discovered the existence of privately run prisons. Something that didn't shock me was the fact that Republicans were the ones pushing for the privatization of the American prison system. That's a scary prospect considering how desperate the right wing is to take total power and legislate every aspect of our personal lives. Add the fact that Republicans are literally trying to destroy their political rivals and competition and you have a recipe for tyranny that becomes easier with the addition of private prisons.

Republican support of private prisons is rapidly growing. GOP governors in many states have increased funding to these institutions and while it may seem like Republicans are only trying to support more free market ideas, the prospect for the abuse of the private prison system is very real and has already happened and is spreading.

In Ohio, Republican Governor John Kasich and many Republican state senators have proposed a plan that would privatize nearly half of the state's prisons. In Florida, the Senate President has also put privatized prisons on the table and in Arizona, Jan Brewer recently awarded several million dollars in tax payer money to the private prison industry. This is occurring in several other red states as well.

The number one private prison company is also America's first company of its type. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the first, for-profit private prison company in America has taken the lead in this quest to make money by imprisoning people. The more people imprisoned, the better the profit. But even though CCA is making profits in the millions, it treats its employees like crap and the conditions inside the prisons is substandard. Even the safety record of CCA is terrible. The list includes, failure to provide adequate medical care to prisoners; failure to control violence in its prisons; substandard conditions that have resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings; criminal activity on the part of some CCA employees, including the sale of illegal drugs to prisoners; and escapes, which in the case of at least two facilities include inadvertent releases of prisoners who were supposed to remain in custody. You can blame the company's labor policies for most of its problems. Prisons are very labor intensive institutions, so the only way a company like CCA can sell itself to government as a cheaper option while still making a profit, is by using as few staff as possible, paying them as little as possible, and not spending much on training. Sounds like the GOP platform, doesn't it?

The relationship between the Republican Party and private prison companies runs even deeper. At the federal level, CCA has given more than $100,000 to the Republican Party since 1997 as well as political action committee contributions to individual members of key Congressional committees. Not only that, CCA has close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful force that promotes the conservative policy agenda among state legislators and writes bills and pushes them to get passed. CCA has been a corporate member and a major contributor to the Council and a member of its Criminal Justice Task Force and its executives have co-chaired the Task Force over many years. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have also been contributed to Republicans at the state level. But here's where it really gets scary.

The goal of a for-profit prison or any business for that matter, is to make money. To achieve this goal, it is the interest of any business to have as many customers as possible, or in the case of prisons, as many prisoners as they can get. Every person imprisoned represents more profits for private prison owners. This opens the door to an increase in prison sentences and, in some circumstances, an increase in innocent citizens being sent to prison. This is already happening. In a plot to get rich, a former Juvenile Court judge in Pennsylvania was convicted of racketeering in a case that accused him of sending young offenders to for-profit detention centers in exchange for millions of dollars in illicit payments from the builder and owner of the lockups.

If you connect the dots, you can see a pattern that will lead to imprisoning political opponents. This won't quite happen yet but will happen slowly at the grassroots level. The best way Republicans can suppress the Democratic Party is to take voters out of the equation. Think of all the things Republicans are trying to destroy or make illegal. Millions of federal dollars are currently spent on insuring that the poor have legal services. That program is one of the many programs that Republicans are trying to cut entirely. But why? Well, if you don't have an attorney, its harder to prove your innocence. That makes it easier for the prosecution to win its case. Another fact is that in two conservative states, Kentucky and Virginia, if you are convicted of any crime, you lose your right to vote for life unless it is given back to you by the Governor, which is rare. Most of the people that go to prison in these states are often poor and NOT white. In Arizona, an immigration bill would send illegal immigrants or suspected illegal immigrants to prison, something that private prison companies are salivating over. That has the potential of taking thousands of hispanic voters out of the election equation, meaning less votes for Democrats. Another group being targeted is women. Republicans are trying to make abortion illegal and are even trying to make miscarriages, whether they are natural or not, illegal. Women would most likely be sent to prison because of this. Do you think Republican women will be targeted? Absolutely not. Poor women and women in other ethnic groups will be targeted, meaning even more Democratic voters would be unable to vote because they would be in prison. Even journalists could be imprisoned, Remember when GOP Senate candidate, Joe Miller in Alaska, detained a reporter for asking questions? Many Republicans believe that journalists should only be allowed to ask the questions it wants them to ask and report on only the stories it wants them to. It won't be long before Republicans make laws to put suspected socialists in prison, and since they have equated being liberal with socialism, we can expect many Democrats to be sent to prison as well.

Another reason to fear this scenario is that Republicans have a general disdain for the judicial branch, and are actively trying to turn the branch into a system that only represents conservative principles and views instead of interpreting the law based upon the Constitution or precedent. Their goal of creating an entirely conservative judiciary is nearly complete. Republican appointees now constitute a majority of judges on 10 of the nation's 13 federal appeals courts. As few as three more lifetime appointments on key courts would tip the balance in favor of GOP appointees on all but one appeals court - the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. This makes it easier for Republicans to enforce laws that they pass.

Never before in American history has the judicial branch been so corrupted by ideology. All it takes is a bad law, the watering down of proper defense, and an army of corrupt judges to send millions of innocent people to prisons to reach the Republican goal of absolute power and to make private prisons rich. In a few short years, America could resemble the Soviet Union, Communist China, Iran, or Nazi Germany. Americans need to wake up, or one day we will all find ourselves waking up behind bars with no way out.

The Plow and the iPhone:
Conservative Fantasies About the Miracles of the Market

by Robert Jensen Nation of Change

A central doctrine of evangelicals for the "free market" is its capacity for innovation: New ideas, new technologies, new gadgets -- all flow not from governments but from individuals and businesses allowed to flourish in the market, we are told.

That's the claim made in a recent op/ed in our local paper by policy analyst Josiah Neeley of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Austin. His conclusion: "Throughout history, technological advances have been driven by private investment, not by government fiat. There is no reason to expect that to change anytime soon."

As is often the case in faith-based systems, reconciling doctrine to the facts of history can be tricky. When I read Neeley's piece, I immediately thought of the long list of modern technological innovations that came directly from government-directed and -financed projects, most notably containerization, satellites, computers, and the Internet. The initial research-and-development for all these projects so central to the modern economy came from the government, often through the military, long before they were commercially viable. It's true that individuals and businesses often used those innovations to create products and services for the market, but without the foundational research funded by government, none of those products and services could exist.

So I called Neeley and asked what innovations he had in mind when he wrote his piece. In an email response he cited Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. Fair enough -- they were independent entrepreneurs, working in the late 19th and early 20th century. But their work came decades after the U.S. Army had provided the primary funding to make interchangeable parts possible, a transformative moment in the history of industrialization. In the "good old days," government also got involved.

As Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway explain in their book Merchants of Doubt, the U.S. Army's Ordinance Department wanted interchangeable parts to make guns that could be repaired easily on or near battlefields, which required machine-tooled parts. That research took nearly 50 years, much longer than any individual or corporation would support. The authors make the important point clearly: "Markets spread the technology of machine tools throughout the world, but markets did not create it. Centralized government, in the form of the U.S. Army, was the inventor of the modern machine age."

That strikes me as an important part of the story of the era of Edison and the Wrights, but one conveniently ignored by free-marketeers.

Neeley is playing a painfully transparent game here. He acknowledges that many basic technological advances are driven by government fiat in the basic R&D phase, but somehow that phase doesn't matter. What matters is the "adoption and relevance" phase. It's apparently not relevant that without the basic R&D in these cases there would have been nothing to adopt and make relevant for the market.

We're in real Wizard of Oz territory here -- pay no attention to the scientists working behind the curtain, who are being paid with your tax dollars. Just step up to the counter and pay the corporate wizards for their products and services, without asking about the tax-funded research on which they rely.

There are serious questions to be debated about how public money should be spent on which kinds of R&D, especially when so much of that money comes through the U.S. military, whose budget many of us think is bloated. More transparency is needed in that process.

But anyone who cares about honest argumentation should be offended on principled grounds by Neeley's sleight of hand. His distortion of history is especially egregious given the context of his op/ed, which argues against public support for solar energy in favor of the expansion of oil and gas drilling. Neeley focuses on the failure of Solyndra -- the solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy after getting a $535 million federal loan guarantee -- in trying to make a case against government support for alternative energy development. When public subsidies fail, there should be a vigorous investigation. But the failure of one company, hitched to a highly distorted story about the history of technological innovation, doesn't make for a strong argument against any public support for solutions to the energy crisis, nor does it cover up the fact that the increasing use of fossil fuels accelerates climate change/disruption.

The larger context for this assertion of market fundamentalism is the ongoing political project to de-legitimize any collective action by ordinary people through government. Given the degree to which corporations and the wealthy dominate contemporary government, from the local to the national level, it's not clear why elites are so flustered; they are the ones who benefit most from government spending. But politicians and pundits who serve those elites keep hammering away on a simple theme -- business good, government bad -- hoping to make sure that the formal mechanisms of democracy won't be used to question the concentration of wealth and power.

Throughout history, the political projects of the wealthy have been driven by propaganda. There is no reason to expect that to change anytime soon, which means popular movements for economic justice and ecological sustainability not only have to struggle to change the future but also to tell the truth about the past.

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I don't accept his ideas fully, especially regarding art, but they are definitely worth hearing.

Solar eruption sparks biggest radiation storm in seven years

Wave of charged particles expected to force rerouting of polar airplane flights

A powerful solar eruption is expected to blast a stream of charged particles past Earth on Tuesday, as the strongest radiation storm since 2005 rages on the sun.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught an extreme ultraviolet flash from a huge eruption on the sun overnight (10:59 p.m. ET Sunday, or 0359 GMT Monday), according to SpaceWeather.com.

The solar flare spewed from sunspot 1402, a region of the sun that has become increasingly active lately. Several NASA satellites, including the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Solar Heliospheric Observatory and the STEREO spacecraft, observed the massive sun storm.

A barrage of charged particles triggered by the outburst is expected to hit Earth at around 9 a.m. ET Tuesday, according to experts at the Space Weather Prediction Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. [Video and photos of the solar flare]

Colbert's Super PAC ad attacks ... Colbert

I will not be posting to this site for 24 hrs and here is why:

SOPA Blackout Set For January 18th: Here's All The Info

So I started writing my lists as usual and then I would put them in the kitchen junk drawer. After a week had gone by I would take out the list and see how many of those important things that needed to be done had been. Usually, there would be maybe two out of ten items that could be satisfactorily crossed off as accomplished and somehow life had gone on and the universe had survived without the remaining items having even been attempted.

Eventually I stopped making lists that projected chores or events that would extend beyond one day. This had the effect of liberating me from the anxiety which the former list writing had stemmed from in the first place.

Not that the anxiety went away of course; it simply found an outlet in me smoking more cigarettes or in an increase in one of my other compulsive habits. But at least I got to cross off "list making" on my several lists of things to stop doing.

This is because the right wing has no capacity for shame

Conservative Audience Boos 'The Golden Rule' During GOP Debate

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

As if the Republican Party hadn't already damaged itself enough since August, the audience of yet another GOP Debate has booed something that seriously questions their claims of being true Christians.

During the Fox News/Twitter Debate in South Carolina on Sunday, the conservative audience booed the Golden Rule which is a pillar of Christian law in the Bible. In Matthew 7:12, Christ says "Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets."

Well, when Ron Paul suggested that the United States practice the Golden Rule in foreign policy, the Republican audience booed him.

RON PAUL: "My point is that if another country does to us what we do to others, we are not going to like it very much. I would say that we maybe ought to consider the golden rule in foreign policy. Don't do to other nations what we don't want them to do to us. We endlessly bomb these countries, and then we wonder why they get upset with us?"

AUDIENCE: [Boos]

Here's the video:

Santorum Staffer Says Women Shouldn't Be President
Because It's Against God's Will

By Marie Diamond

In an article about the reasons Rep. Michele Bachmann's campaign fizzled, the Des Moines Register points to "sexism among conservatives," singling out an offensive email written by a staffer to Rick Santorum:

Rival presidential candidate Rick Santorum's Iowa coalitions director, Jamie Johnson, sent out an email saying that children's lives would be harmed if the nation had a female president. [...]

"The question then comes, 'Is it God's highest desire, that is, his biblically expressed will, ... to have a woman rule the institutions of the family, the church, and the state?' " Johnson's email said.

Johnson, who remains on Santorum's staff, complained that the email was "blown out of proportion" and should not be held against him because it was sent from a personal email account.

But he refused to back away from the substance of the email, saying "I was sharing my personal reflections with a friend...[T]hey were reflections on over 25 years of formal, theological study [based in] classical Christian doctrine."

After Bachmann left the race, several of her advisers pointed to sexism as a contributing factor. "We did believe that sexism -- I use the stronger word misogyny -- was at play," said Peter Waldron, her faith outreach coordinator. Waldron said that several influential pastors called for her to drop out of the race, reasoning "that a female could not be a civil magistrate." Johnson himself is a pastor at a central Iowa church.

Stephen Colbert's PAC Parody Explains Campaign Finance To America

by Paul Blumenthal and Dan Froomkin HuffPost

Part 1

Part 2

This is the first part of a five-part series by The Huffington Post exploring Stephen Colbert's explanation of the nation's campaign finance laws to the public. Stay tuned through the week of Jan. 16, 2012, for the rest of the series.

WASHINGTON -- Two years after the Supreme Court voided many of the country's bedrock campaign finance laws, much of the American public is still confused by the change -- and stupefied by the often-impenetrable jargon that frequently encumbers any discussion of the topic.

But one public figure has managed to pierce the veil of dullness to actually demonstrate -- in an electrifying way -- just how dangerous and corrupt the current system of political campaign financing has become.

In an indication of the desperate state of campaign finance laws -- and the mainstream media -- that person is a comedian: Stephen Colbert, who plays a right-wing blowhard on the Comedy Central show "The Colbert Report."

Colbert has spent much of the past year on a crusade to accept unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and individuals in order to make political statements and lavish himself with luxuries. In so doing, he may have helped bring the troubling issues surrounding campaign finance to the public's attention more than either the reform community or traditional media.

The comedian has often used his on-air persona's actual participation in events to help educate his viewers about what he says are the craziest elements of the United States' political system. This journey began on March 30, 2011, when Colbert announced on his show that in order to influence the 2012 elections, he would be forming a political action committee.

"If you wanna be a political playa in 2012, you need a PAC," he said.

"It's not very often that money-in-politics questions wind up in pop culture," said John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that supports campaign finance transparency. "Colbert takes the most legalistic or complicated aspects of campaign finance and boils it down into a digestible popular form in a way that's unique."

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21 and a longtime supporter of tougher campaign finance regulation, is also a fan. "I think Colbert has made a real contribution to educating a broader public about the dangers involved in our current campaign finance system," he said.

Colbert's personal appearances before the Federal Election Commission and the attention he has generated on the subject even garnered the praise of FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who thanked Colbert for "shining a little light on this obscure corner of the federal government."

ABOUT THOSE PACS

Forming a PAC seemed an appropriate starting point for Colbert. The committees have traditionally been used to provide a vehicle for a group of people -- employees of a corporation, members of a union, supporters of a political figure -- to pool their money for campaign contributions or independent expenditures in support of the election of candidates.

The first PAC dates back to 1944, but their use exploded in the 1970s and the 1980s.

As he signed the forms to create his own PAC in March, Colbert joked about what else he could do with the money he raises.

"Let's say I'm Sarah Palin and I've got a couple of million dollars in my PAC there. Can I use that to, like, take private jets someplace?" Colbert asked his guest and lawyer Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman and counsel to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during his 2008 presidential run.

Potter, who has since become Colbert's campaign finance straight man, responded with a smile, "You can!"

A common criticism of PACs connected to political figures is that they can be used to pay for things like luxury travel with funds contributed by other people. A PAC belonging to former Republican vice presidential candidate Palin, for instance, provided tens of thousands of dollars for her to travel to Israel and to take private jet trips across the United States

As Colbert has demonstrated, forming a PAC can be as easy as filling out a form and asking for money.

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Occupy the Dream: The Mathematics of Racism

by Russel Simmons and Dylan Ratigan

As we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr​, it appears we are a far less prejudiced country than we once were. Individual expressions of racism are less tolerated than ever, we have an African-American President, and African-Americans are increasingly being accepted into executive suites. Yet when we look closer, we find that Greedy Bastards have rebranded racism and made it acceptable again, by calling it "the war on drugs."

These statistics compiled by New York Times columnist Charles Blow and author Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) are mind-blowing.

Since 1971, there have been more than 40 million arrests for drug-related offenses. Even though blacks and whites have similar levels of drug use, blacks are ten times as likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes.

"There are more blacks under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began."

"As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race."

In 2005, 4 out of 5 drug arrests were for possession not trafficking, and 80% of the increase in drug arrests in the 1990s was for marijuana.

There are 50,000 arrests for low-level pot possession a year in New York City, representing one out of every seven cases that turn up in criminal courts. Most of these arrested are black and hispanic men.

Why is this happening, when personal prejudice is so much less common, medicinal marijuana initiatives routinely pass around the country, and illicit drug use is accepted enough that Steve Jobs​ could praise psychedelic drugs as key to his creative success at Apple Computer?

The modern drug war in politics can be traced back to political operative named Clifford White, an advisor to Barry Goldwater​, who recognized that there were votes to be had in the backlash against the civil rights movement. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the war on drugs became convenient code for politicians who wanted to appeal to certain working class white voters with coded racist appeals. President Reagan​ used this political support to escalate the war on drugs.

A Federal law passed in 1986 allowed law enforcement agencies to seize drug money, and use it to supplement their budgets. Grabbing cash connected to drugs meant that police departments could buy more tools and training. Like the fee-for-service model in medicine, that pays doctors for performing procedures, not for making people healthier, the "forfeiture laws" effectively pay the police departments for making busts - not for reducing the drug trade.

In fact, if the war on drugs was ever won, it would be a financial disaster for law enforcement. There's so much dirty money funding law enforcement agencies that now, according to NPR, some police departments have become "addicted to drug money".

The second significant institutional incentive is of more recent origin, though it too has its beginnings in the Reagan era - the development of for-profit prison companies and their vast lobbying and political apparatus.

Prisoners now manufacture and assemble products for Microsoft, Starbucks, Victoria's Secret, Boeing, as well as body armor for soldiers and handcuff cases for law enforcement officers.

In 2007, taxpayers spent 74 billion on prisons, with the largest percentage increase of prisoners going to for-profit prison companies.

The Justice Policy Institute noted that these companies make more money through longer prison sentences, but you don't need a report from a nonprofit group to know that. Just look at their own investor reports. The Corrections Corporation of America​, the largest for-profit prison company in the country, lists as a business risk in its 10K to the SEC "any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them." CCA also told investors it would make less money if there were lower minimum sentences and more eligibility for inmates for early release for good behavior.

Putting people in jail and keeping them there is good for business. So that's what these companies lobby for. According to the Justice Policy Institute, these companies "have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts." They are large donors to state-based think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), who market harsh immigration, drug laws, and prison privatization laws to state level politicians around the country. While the rationale is no longer outright bigotry, the net effect, in terms of stripping millions of blacks of political and economic rights, is the same.

This is the face of racism today. It isn't the racist sheriff in Alabama turning hoses and dogs onto protesters, or the all-white development or country club, but the smooth lobbyist and campaign contributor discussing the efficiency of private prison initiatives or the politician too cowardly to act on decriminalizing marijuana for fear of antagonizing a powerful lobby. It's racism, Greedy-Bastards-style.

What's the alternative? David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has highlighted a very simple common sense approach known as hotspotting. He advocates for sitting down the gang members that perpetrate most of the violence, police, prosecutors, and community leaders to talk about their shared problems and the consequences of crime. Such an approach has dramatically reduced homicide rates in Boston and Chicago, and across the country. Yet these programs and programs like them with proven success in reducing crime are the first to go on the chopping block, because they don't provide the budgetary incentive that forfeiture laws do.

Today, the march for civil rights isn't about convincing Americans that racism is wrong. It is about getting money out of politics, so that the profit from institutional racism is eliminated. The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson saying "separate but equal" has been trumped by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, eliminating all restrictions on corporate cash in politics. If we are to honor Dr. King, let us make this our generation's cause. It won't be an easy fight, but as he said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."