The American Tradition

A few weeks ago, I saw an exchange between Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) and Bill O'Reilly about what are the "traditional American values". As you may be be aware, I tend to favor the progressive side of the conversation.

The point from BO'R was that America is a faithful and moral society, where Bible inspired morality, family and capitalism as an expression of self-reliancew are the norm. The funny thing about this view is that it has never been real.

It seems the image many people have in their head s is a consequence of the 1950's propaganda efforts that the American government initiated to "sell" America in the third world. Part of a global image campaign (remember the Cold War?). This image was sold in part via TV shows, which extended well beyond the original effort and went all the way into the Reagan era (80's). A world where a perfect family with deep christian values, where the American Dream always delivered came to us via the magic screen. Think sitcoms.

On the other hand, JS made the point that the real "American Value" was that of being a progressive society. A society where through time individual freedom, equality, anti-slavery, desegregation, women's rights, etc. were always being adopted into the society. Therefore Gay Marriage is the next step into this progression (which I support).

Interesting to see that many of those progressions were not adopted or driven by the society at large (the masses, as in the culturally challenged majority), they were driven by fringe groups and through the judicial system, at least on the beginning.

So it turns out, that it is the "activist judges", derided by the Conservative movement, are the ones who keep this country aligned or true with its core values.

The right to die initiative and other topics...

Here in Washington, there is right now an  initiative in the upcoming ballot to allow terminally ill patients to request for a prescription that will end their lives (they have to administer the drugs themselves).  

This week was "Life week" at the Catholic church. The pro-life argument expanded over this initiative and it was as expected, the main topic on the sermon last Sunday.

On going to church, I see the time as a structured time for reflection/meditation more than anything, I also see the benefit of my daughters seeing a community that in many occasions does the right thing in providing services and support for people in need. Of all the different religions and churches/temples I have seen, catholics (specially Jesuits) can be a reasonable crowd.

Now, my problem is that I honestly do not believe in the need of all the rites and ceremony involved, and more often than not, I end up having a silent discussion with the priest on the sermon, which although it is stimulating intellectually, it kills the quiet meditation time idea. 

So, going back to the initiative idea, I can see why the church opposes it and I understand where their arguments come form. Still I do not oppose it. Opposing it, means to me that I am telling someone who hopes their next breath is their last and curse their last one was not, that I know better. Even I am not you or in your situation I know what is best for you. Not because I am doing the right thing for you, but because by doing so I prove that my beliefs are right. 

I take away the options from you.

I think that is my issue with the whole thing. Taking your options away. It is not that you did the right thing, it is that you have no option but to do what I think is right. So forget about all that rhetoric around free will. 

Free will means that I make a decision based on my needs and knowledge, and in many cases my fears. But that is not allowed. If you are anti-abortion you can claim that you need to remove the free will of the woman expecting because the fetus cannot defend itself. But I see the problem a little different. 

I believe that abortion is not the first option a woman takes, but the last (and yes, I know you can always find an example that proves this wrong, but  it is the exception not the rule). I see that my efforts, and I hope others is to make sure that there are other options. This defines me as a pro-life pro-choicer, or some other word game like that.

More often than not, a single mother is guaranteed a life of poverty. Why not provide support services for them (job and education)? Why not provide comprehensive sexual education, so there is no pregnancy in the first place? 

But I know, it is easier to preach compassion than to act, abstinence only is expected, where being a single mother is still a stigma and you can show violence but never sex, when poverty is seen as a character flaw, all this is a very tough sale. 

So there you have the paradox created, you want people to make the right choice, without giving them the tools to make them and by pretty much giving them a single option, so there is really not choice.

Naomi Wolf...

You may agree or not with her, but she is quite thought provoking. 

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

• Naomi Wolf
• The Guardian, 
• Tuesday April 24 2007
• Article history

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.

The religious right in the US... (random thoughts)

Something that amazes me of the US (and it applies to many other countries) is the power of the religious right or the Evangelical movements. 

All this comes BTW from the current electoral environment in the US. It is very hard not to get emotional (and regardless of my beliefs, I grant I can also be irrational) around the issues discussed in the news and the political sphere. 

On the positive side, churches create a support network for its members, which in a society is always positive. On the other side, the fundamentalism of many of the evangelicals is beyond the borders of simple hysteria. {Ten points if you can find the reference to the "hysterical" masses; you will be surprised}

I think it comes from being a nation that tends to look inside itself and lives with a constant fear to anything outside its norms or control. On the movie "Bowling for Columbine" Michael Moore made an argument around this, although more centered on gun control issues.

I like a couple of comments from comedian Lewis Black: 

• He ponders on why he has never seen a Rabbi on Saturday night TV, interpreting the New Testament to his audience, and yet...
  
• What drives him crazy about creationists, is that they see the Flinstones as a documentary...
  

I also like the comment from Father George Coyne, the  retired head of the Vatican Observatory and former member of the Academy of Sciences: 

“There is no science in the Bible. Zero, none,” Coyne says. “The Bible was written in different times by different people. Some of the books are poetry, some of them are history, some are stories.”

Still, as I mentioned above I understand the "community" aspect churches provide, although as a rationalist humanist I wish that after 200, 000 years of evolution, we would be able to satisfy it just for being humans.

I need to add to my book list "The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore. Although I may not, I can get so passionate about reason (irony intended) that I will just add some stress I do not need and lose the humanism part I try to anchor in, and therefore becoming one more fundamentalist in the whole discussion. The danger of  fundamentalism can be simply summarized on the total lack of empathy for anything it is not like you. This is the definition of evil, no matter how rational or holy it presents itself.

Or as it has been said before:

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Dr. Gustav M. Gilbert (1946), assigned by the U.S. Army to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg tribunals. 

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/4519/81

On Eco-regulation and other matters...

On a recent thread in a website, there was this person who, on a more Libertarian vein, talking about how he opposed any taxation or government regulation in support of curving global warming. It was his given right as an American to decide if he wanted to do something and how. Although he was on the "eco-friendly" side, his arguments sounded more founded on individual supremacy than common good. 

A few hours later I heard what is the best argument I have ever heard on why government needs to regulate and force industries and individuals to reduce their carbon footprint. 

It was from the administrator of a government facility in California (Ports Authority maybe), who had recently signed an order to change its entire car fleet for electric units and change some of its systems to produce less airborne particles, all with a high price tag. 

When he was asked, in part in order to showcase how irresponsible he was with tax payers money, on why he had done it, his answer was more or less: 

"Well, based on the amount of pollution (airborne particles in particular) we produced, the estimate is that we were cutting short the life (kill) of 1,200 people a year in the city."

The reporter did not asked more questions...

Funny thing about this is that regardless of what an individual does, it is subject to what someone else is doing. It is a forced "second-hand smoker" like issue at a massive scale. As long you share the atmosphere and resources within, you are affected by it. 

Welcome to the 3rd world...

Not long ago I attended a meeting where a motivational speaker made an effort to dispel the idea of a 3rd world country. Although I appreciate his efforts or goals, since then, I have been thinking on what that label means or defines, as compared to a 1st World one or a Failed State. 

I believe a 3rd World country is defined by the multiple factors which complement each other and have a big effect on the overall health of the country; they tend to feed on each other, so resolution tends to be very hard (although not impossible):

1. On the economic you have a small middle class, continuously  moving up and down, a huge low income base and high concentration of production or financial means in the hands of a relatively small group. The typical ratio is 90% of the economy is owned by 10% of the population.  
2. Although there is a strong government, the "rule of law" is defined and dependent on the economics means of the individual. In other words corruption is common, if you have the means you may not gat away with crime, but you will be able to obtain or accelerate services from the different public offices. Therefore there is a cynical distrust of the civil institutions.
3. The family is the center of the society. Lacking a social contract and law umbrella, the only place where the individual can find a secure environment is within the family context; political or religious family ties (like god-parents) are equally valued.
4. This last point is related to the need to conform to the group. The idea of belonging and submitting your morality, behavior and needs to the group are far more important than the individual.  This is not true on the middle class in many cases, as I pointed out before they are not the "average" member of society by any means, and still they will most likely submit themselves to the family rule.
5. Due the lack of a real rule of law, the society as a whole has no moral issues with corruption, as long as I can pay the bribe it is seen as acceptable to pay it. The "everybody is doing it" approach, so only a fool will not take advantage of an opportunity offered by bending a law or process.
6. Since the economy is so concentrated, there is low value given in the low income classes to education as a way to move up in the social scale. As soon you can help your family and get working, the family expects you to do so. Within the middle class education is valued, but the small numbers of the group do not create a sufficient momentum to change society as a whole.
7. There is a generalized lack of hope or a cynical view of the future. You live and die where you are. This creates situations where people tend to live in the moment, there is no such thing as the "pursue of happiness", because by the time you reach your goal, either you are dead or the government will devalue the coin taking away all your efforts, therefore live on the present, "joy" is highly regarded. 

As I said before not a single factor by itself drives a country from one level to another, but corruption (the absence of laws) and the failure of the middle class seem to be common starting factors. So, when corruption and accelerated social economic inequality start growing.

When is a 3rd one falling into a "failed state"? 

• When there is no strong central authority with control over most of the territory. You may have a central government with control of an urban area, the return of the "city state", while the rest is divided by economic, political, and/or para-military clans. 
  
• When the family as a source for social order and secure is insufficient and functions no more. 
• In some African countries, the child soldiers armies are the result of the disbanding of the family unit and the lack of a central authority.

On the rule of law, one of my favorites comments is from Michael Mullane, on the "This I Believe" series. You can read it in here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5442573

The power of music...

Coming back from a recent trip, I was listening to the main theme of the "Hunt of the Red October" movie. It is one of those musical pieces that holds an interesting effect in my mind. 

I should start to point out that I do not speak Russian, therefore my understanding of the lyrics is none. Still every time I listen to it, specially if I am tired (like after a trip), I run through a nice range of emotions on a single instance.

On one side it is the pure joy of the music, the voices, they are beautiful and playful. Then there is a sense of power; just a torrent of adrenaline rushing through the brain (which explains why power is so addictive).

Then there is a huge sadness, derived from the thought of how dying in submarine can be (there is a serious tone in the lyrics), there is no such thing as a glorious dead; OK, maybe I am getting old in here, at my early teens or so my thoughts were different. Which brings me to a pure self analyzing stage, looking into the different threads in my life. 

At the end I am just happy, exhausted but happy, and ready to hit the "Play Again" button (did I mentioned this can be addictive?).

So, if you want to see how Dr. Jeckyll look on his way to Mr. Hyde and back, bring your MP3 or similar player...

Seattle's word...

On the book "Eat, Pray, Love" the author describes how she learns that every city has a single word that describes it. She later extends this concept to the individual. This word indicates what influences the majority of the individuals in that city.

In the book Rome is Sex, the Vatican is Power, New York is Achievement, while Los Angeles is Success. 

I have been thinking about what will be my word and what word you could add to Seattle, and even if this same word expands to the greater Seattle area (i.e. Kirkland).

On my side I think Learning will be the one, although as they point in the book, If I remember correctly, this may change later. 

What will Seattle be? Open? Not always. Questioning? There is a lot of debate all the time. Moving or Running? Change seems a constant in the social area, although it seems it is running in not a straight line. Confused? Hopeful? Wishful?

What do you think?

Eat, Pray, Love...

I recently finished reading a book called "Eat, Pray and Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It is a great book. It is the journal of a trip by the author between Italy, India and Indonesia (Bali) in search of balance and peace.

It is full of "Ah!" and "Doh!" moments, written in a funny and very personal way. One of my favorite conversations in the book is when she is talking to an old traditional healer in Bali. he is describing a transcendent experience to her, where he went through the 7 layers of happiness to reach heaven, which is love. Then he tells her there is other way, the 7 levels of misery, which takes you to hell. 

She asks him how is hell, and he simply replies that it is the same place on the other path. How you get there makes all the difference.