To the editor,
Dear President Obama: I listened attentively to your Oval Office address concerning the BP catastrophe. I want to believe that the Gulf Coast—its fragile ecology, its wildlife, its culture, its economy, and its people can be “made whole.”
But we both know that’s false.
In fact, we both know “made whole” is a manipulation designed to prevent the demonstrations, the outrage, the demand to end all off-shore and on-shore drilling that would be fomenting if American citizens took seriously the facts about this disaster.
But what we also know is how easily we’re bribed into complacency, how thoroughly we’ve been bought off by corporations like BP who convince us to identify freedom with material wealth, liberty with shopping.
We need look no further than the bankrollers of the Tea Party: Freedom Works—Dick Armey’s corporate dream-come-true, Dick Cheney’s petro-patriots, to see how successfully we’ve been suckered. While we’re busy being bought by these faux-prophets of “freedom,” these “strict constitutionalists” of “buy gold-n-guns,” these play-soldiers of “Gun Owners of America” and the “Oath Keepers,” America has become America, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupurt Murdoch, FOX, the oil corporations, the “health” insurance companies, “Big Pharma,” and “Big Box.”
What the Tea Party stands for: a “free” market whose calamitous consequences are as predictable as was the Deep Water Horizon explosion, a “free” that would impose a racist theocratic morality on American citizens—all the while giving the pass to corporate greed, false propaganda, and the exploitation of human beings, nonhuman animals, and the environment.
Were I Tony Hayward, I’d be laughing my arse off (while I pretended to “fix” stuff).
Facts:
U.S. government officials…now estimate the ruptured BP well in the Gulf of Mexico is spewing…1.5 million gallons to 2.5 million gallons…per day (news.blogs.cnn.com).
BP consistently underestimates and underreports the amount of the New Horizon rupture (emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/06/10).
BP spends more on advertising than on researching alternative fuel sources despite the name change from British to Beyond Petroleum (www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/greenest-oil-companies-460409).
On-shore drilling isn’t safer than off-shore. This is the lunacy of petro-patriots like Sarah Palin. “Take, for example, today’s (6.15) Chevron oil leak of 500 barrels (or about 17,000 gallons) into a Salt Lake City creek. At least 100 birds were covered in oil, and water quality has certainly been affected…Oil is not the only fossil fuel that poses risks—so does…natural gas…[J]ust as there were few (or at least unenforced) regulations of Deepwater Horizon’s drilling process, there are few regulations on hydro-fracking, a natural gas drilling process that is unregulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, despite regular and serious reports of it polluting drinking water in local communities” (wilderness.org/content/onshore-drilling-not-answer-offshore-drilling).
BP’s conduct is part-and-parcel of any enterprise whose objective is to turn a profit—as opposed to improve the quality of human life. This is the unregulated “free” market in action.
These are its inevitable consequences, and for as long as we continue to endorse an ideology that values profits over human life and the environment it depends on, we are the ones to blame for this catastrophe.
There is no “making whole,” Mr. President. There is no fixing the Gulf of Mexico. Until we get it that our oil-addiction is pathological, climate change is real, species extinction could include us, that our “American Dream” way of life is unsustainable—until we get it that if we gave a tinker’s damn about our children and our future we’d put a stop to the practices—mining, drilling, polluting, endless trash-producing, agribusiness, CAFOs that will lead to ecocide—there’s not only no “making whole,” there may not even be survival.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu (598 words)
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
How To Set-Up a Smear Shot, or What the Liber-Tea Party Shouldn't Have Been About
To the editor,
Less vitriolic than last year’s event, The Patriot’s Voice Liber-Tea party offered few thrills to PE reporters. Speakers spouted platitudes against “Obamacare,” and “out of control” government to a crowd of folks many of whom sat quietly in their hypocrisy—enjoying a beautiful park supported by taxes they don’t want to pay, returning home to health-care benefits they’d deny to others.
There were, however, stories to be told—just not those the PE wants its audience to hear. In her PE-letter (4.8.10), PV-Lysk writes that she “will keep an American flag” just for me—a letter in which she exploits the fact that I am a domestic violence survivor in order to imply that, because the abuser was Mormon, I am biased against Mormons, and that this informs my criticism of the PV’s association with the John Birch Society (Cleon Skousen and Glen Beck are Mormons). The claim is absurd, and we must consider what sort of person it is who’d exploit domestic battery to score political capital. Ms. Lysk cannot refute my claims (letter, 4.6) concerning the PV-mission. I quoted the website directly, and let Lysk speak for herself through her blog posts. All she’s got is character assassination.
This aside, what Ms. Lysk offered me in the park was not the American flag. Rather, it was bait disguised as the flag to score political capital for a picture obviously set-up by the Press Enterprise. Her “offering” was a calculated exploitation of the flag to smear an opponent, an example of the lengths to which the PV—and the Press Enterprise—will go to humiliate their critics. I was taking notes, and saw neither Ms. Lysk nor the photographer. Ms. Lysk claims that “[o]ur knees bumped slightly” (on WHLM, she says she bumped me accidentally with the flag stick). She is lying in both cases. She poked me with the flag-stick—twice—derisively calling me “Miss Wendy.” I said “Don’t touch me,” not yet realizing as I turned to Ms. Lysk—who was giggling as she skeetered away—that a PE photographer just ”happened” to be stationed right there to snap a picture. Friend and witness Jay Nixon asked the photographer whether the picture was set up. She denied it—but it cannot be otherwise. I asked whether I would be interviewed for this incident or the Tea Party generally; the photographer insisted that Mr. Bogdon would be over soon. I waited 2 ½ hours. He never materialized—but ran the story anyways. This is unconscionable. In a phone message response to my call the next morning, he insists that he intended to follow up. He didn’t. Instead, he included false material in a story set-up by the PE whose loaded caption is ”Outspoken liberal.”
Two issues: (1) a monopoly newspaper that colludes with the extreme theocratic right to smear a critic; (2) the extent to which fabricated “events” distract us from the real issues. The applause for “Patrick Henry’s” promotion of secession, June McWilliam’s praise for the racist Minutemen, William Reil’s insistence on the “Biblical Law” of the Constitution, James Bridge’s reference to Obama as a “Communist,” or Debra Smith’s incoherent rant about how, since she had healthcare during a “medical mess,” we ought not reform healthcare to make her access available to others—all of these were missed in favor of setting up a smear-shot—and then telling a story that’s not only a lie but was clearly intended to impugn the patriotism of someone who so obviously loves her country that not even this set-up can silence her.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
592 words
Less vitriolic than last year’s event, The Patriot’s Voice Liber-Tea party offered few thrills to PE reporters. Speakers spouted platitudes against “Obamacare,” and “out of control” government to a crowd of folks many of whom sat quietly in their hypocrisy—enjoying a beautiful park supported by taxes they don’t want to pay, returning home to health-care benefits they’d deny to others.
There were, however, stories to be told—just not those the PE wants its audience to hear. In her PE-letter (4.8.10), PV-Lysk writes that she “will keep an American flag” just for me—a letter in which she exploits the fact that I am a domestic violence survivor in order to imply that, because the abuser was Mormon, I am biased against Mormons, and that this informs my criticism of the PV’s association with the John Birch Society (Cleon Skousen and Glen Beck are Mormons). The claim is absurd, and we must consider what sort of person it is who’d exploit domestic battery to score political capital. Ms. Lysk cannot refute my claims (letter, 4.6) concerning the PV-mission. I quoted the website directly, and let Lysk speak for herself through her blog posts. All she’s got is character assassination.
This aside, what Ms. Lysk offered me in the park was not the American flag. Rather, it was bait disguised as the flag to score political capital for a picture obviously set-up by the Press Enterprise. Her “offering” was a calculated exploitation of the flag to smear an opponent, an example of the lengths to which the PV—and the Press Enterprise—will go to humiliate their critics. I was taking notes, and saw neither Ms. Lysk nor the photographer. Ms. Lysk claims that “[o]ur knees bumped slightly” (on WHLM, she says she bumped me accidentally with the flag stick). She is lying in both cases. She poked me with the flag-stick—twice—derisively calling me “Miss Wendy.” I said “Don’t touch me,” not yet realizing as I turned to Ms. Lysk—who was giggling as she skeetered away—that a PE photographer just ”happened” to be stationed right there to snap a picture. Friend and witness Jay Nixon asked the photographer whether the picture was set up. She denied it—but it cannot be otherwise. I asked whether I would be interviewed for this incident or the Tea Party generally; the photographer insisted that Mr. Bogdon would be over soon. I waited 2 ½ hours. He never materialized—but ran the story anyways. This is unconscionable. In a phone message response to my call the next morning, he insists that he intended to follow up. He didn’t. Instead, he included false material in a story set-up by the PE whose loaded caption is ”Outspoken liberal.”
Two issues: (1) a monopoly newspaper that colludes with the extreme theocratic right to smear a critic; (2) the extent to which fabricated “events” distract us from the real issues. The applause for “Patrick Henry’s” promotion of secession, June McWilliam’s praise for the racist Minutemen, William Reil’s insistence on the “Biblical Law” of the Constitution, James Bridge’s reference to Obama as a “Communist,” or Debra Smith’s incoherent rant about how, since she had healthcare during a “medical mess,” we ought not reform healthcare to make her access available to others—all of these were missed in favor of setting up a smear-shot—and then telling a story that’s not only a lie but was clearly intended to impugn the patriotism of someone who so obviously loves her country that not even this set-up can silence her.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
592 words
Saturday, April 3, 2010
A Spring Liber-Tea Party: The Patriot's Voice Latest Venture into the Far-Right
On April 10th, 2010. the Patriot’s Voice will hold their second Liber-Tea party in Bloomsburg Town Park. They have every right to conduct such a gathering, sponsor speakers, and have vendors.
Last year the gathering included a vendor selling Confederate Flags, and while PV “CEOs” Evy Lysk and Robert Runyon denied that they invited the vendor, the vendor knew where to find buying customers.
That was last year. Let’s take a look at what the PV stand for this year:
*In his 3.21 Op-Ed, Runyon waxes nostalgic for the good old days before the civil rights movement, promotes a nationalist theocracy, and insists that education “dumbs down” children.
*The PV-website’s “Special Bulletin” promotes the John Birch Society (The National Center for Constitutional Studies), and one of its fellow travelers Cleon Skousen: “A 1962 FBI memo described Skousen as affiliating with an "extreme right-wing" group which was promoting ‘anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.’ Skousen authored a pamphlet titled The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society, characterizing criticism of the Society as incipient communism” (Wikipedia).
As is well-documented, the JBS is simply a better-dressed version of the Klu Klux Klan. No wonder the Confederate Flag Vendor felt at home last year.
*The website calls Obama the “post-American president.” In a section of “Obama-Nation” titled “The coming battle,” they claim that Obama supports the end of marriage/family, and that he seeks to erect a one world government. Democrats are all socialists—and socialists are all evil.
*Evy Lysk calls “comrade Obama” a closet Muslim,” and insists “he appointed Communists, haters of white people, and socialist czars.” She claims his plan is to “delete” our nuclear arsenal, erect a “one world government,” “rid us” of patriotism and religion, and that he “hates America.” So sure is Lysk of her view she repeats it on www.resistnet.com and nowewont.ning.com. Last year she sported a placard promoting Glenn Beck—who recently hosted the JBS Sam Antonio on his FOX program. Beck promotes Skousen’s nationalistic screed, The 5000 Year Leap: “Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience” (www.salon.com).
*Last year’s Tea Party included speakers who called for the expulsion of gays from the country and claimed that the scourge of the nation were women who’d had abortions.
People applauded the death of Michael Jackson.
The Press Enterprise characterized the gathering as a peaceful assembly of anti-tax advocates.
What the Patriot’s Voice stands for is a matter of public record; it’s neither political conservatism nor libertarianism. The vast majority of Republicans don’t want to be associated with the patent racism, homophobia, fear-mongering and character assassination the PV deploys against its critics.
Here’s the question: Are these the views their speakers wish to be associated with? Or did Sam Rohrer, Peg Luksik, Lou Barletta, and Bloomsburg University’s Young Americans for Liberty, among others, not do their homework? The latter’s inexcusable—the PV mission is wholly accessible.
The Patriot’s Voice is no more the voice of conservatives than of liberals.
It IS the voice of xenophobic nationalism, racism, and a vision of Christianity closer to that of the Hutaree Militia than to any Christianity worthy of the name.
It’s supremely ironic that they plan to utilize a public space supported by tax dollars—to argue for the end of taxation—and their first amendment rights—to argue for the repression of liberty for all those who don’t fit their narrow vision of a patriot—or even a citizen.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
594 words
Last year the gathering included a vendor selling Confederate Flags, and while PV “CEOs” Evy Lysk and Robert Runyon denied that they invited the vendor, the vendor knew where to find buying customers.
That was last year. Let’s take a look at what the PV stand for this year:
*In his 3.21 Op-Ed, Runyon waxes nostalgic for the good old days before the civil rights movement, promotes a nationalist theocracy, and insists that education “dumbs down” children.
*The PV-website’s “Special Bulletin” promotes the John Birch Society (The National Center for Constitutional Studies), and one of its fellow travelers Cleon Skousen: “A 1962 FBI memo described Skousen as affiliating with an "extreme right-wing" group which was promoting ‘anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.’ Skousen authored a pamphlet titled The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society, characterizing criticism of the Society as incipient communism” (Wikipedia).
As is well-documented, the JBS is simply a better-dressed version of the Klu Klux Klan. No wonder the Confederate Flag Vendor felt at home last year.
*The website calls Obama the “post-American president.” In a section of “Obama-Nation” titled “The coming battle,” they claim that Obama supports the end of marriage/family, and that he seeks to erect a one world government. Democrats are all socialists—and socialists are all evil.
*Evy Lysk calls “comrade Obama” a closet Muslim,” and insists “he appointed Communists, haters of white people, and socialist czars.” She claims his plan is to “delete” our nuclear arsenal, erect a “one world government,” “rid us” of patriotism and religion, and that he “hates America.” So sure is Lysk of her view she repeats it on www.resistnet.com and nowewont.ning.com. Last year she sported a placard promoting Glenn Beck—who recently hosted the JBS Sam Antonio on his FOX program. Beck promotes Skousen’s nationalistic screed, The 5000 Year Leap: “Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience” (www.salon.com).
*Last year’s Tea Party included speakers who called for the expulsion of gays from the country and claimed that the scourge of the nation were women who’d had abortions.
People applauded the death of Michael Jackson.
The Press Enterprise characterized the gathering as a peaceful assembly of anti-tax advocates.
What the Patriot’s Voice stands for is a matter of public record; it’s neither political conservatism nor libertarianism. The vast majority of Republicans don’t want to be associated with the patent racism, homophobia, fear-mongering and character assassination the PV deploys against its critics.
Here’s the question: Are these the views their speakers wish to be associated with? Or did Sam Rohrer, Peg Luksik, Lou Barletta, and Bloomsburg University’s Young Americans for Liberty, among others, not do their homework? The latter’s inexcusable—the PV mission is wholly accessible.
The Patriot’s Voice is no more the voice of conservatives than of liberals.
It IS the voice of xenophobic nationalism, racism, and a vision of Christianity closer to that of the Hutaree Militia than to any Christianity worthy of the name.
It’s supremely ironic that they plan to utilize a public space supported by tax dollars—to argue for the end of taxation—and their first amendment rights—to argue for the repression of liberty for all those who don’t fit their narrow vision of a patriot—or even a citizen.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
594 words
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The manipulation of a small town newspaper and the control of public opinion: The Press Enterprise
We all know that Editor Jim Sachetti [of Northeast Pennsylvania's The Press Enterprise] manipulates 30 Seconds [a call-in/email opinion feature] through placement, delays, snide remarks, strategic silences, and comments aimed at fueling the local fires of bigotry, encouraging personal assault on his nemeses, and encouraging those with whom he agrees to post more often.
What we didn’t know, until now, is that the same strategy governs the Op-Ed page, putting the lie to any respect Sachetti may have had for the first amendment. Fact is, he cares no more for free speech than suits the promotion and protection of the Eyerly Tabloid Empire.
Indeed, Sachetti’s cliam to be impartial with respect to who gets a hearing on the Op-Ed page is a sham.
Example: Jay Nixon recently submitted a letter to the editor where he demonstrates Sachetti’s manipulation of 30 Seconds. Each case Nixon details shows how Sachetti accomplishes this objective.
When Evy Lysk used 30 Seconds to make the unsubstantiated claim that Benton School Board members are guilty of recruiting, Sachetti not only let the remark stand without challenge, but printed several reiterations of it.
When she and other Patriot’s Voice members accuse president Obama of being a member of an Islamic terrorist sleeper cell—no comment.
Yet when Jerome Cragle offers a remark critical of the climate change deniers, Sachetti asks about his profession snidely implying that Cragle has too much time on his hands.
There are no names John Pushinaitis cannot call me that Sachetti sees as unfit to print, but when I show that Pushinaitis’ anti-choice rhetoric effectively condones the murder of reproductive healthcare providers, Sachetti bans me from 30 Seconds, demands I make my case as Op-Ed (I did), claims to convene a three-member panel to consider it, and then pretends to chivalry reinstating me at Pushiunaitis’ “request.”
When Nixon challenges Sachetti to provide evidence to the claim that Nixon is disingenuous with respect to calling Sachetti out about the manipulation of 30 Seconds, Sachetti calls Nixon “delusional.”
This sample represents a fraction of the distortion and control with which Sachetti maneuvers 30 Seconds into Eyerly Empire sales.
But here’s the real story: Sachetti REFUSES to print Nixon’s letter, importing to the Op-Ed page the same control, the same disdain for free speech, that governs 30 Seconds. Perhaps those who benefit from this will celebrate.
After all, they win.
Thing is, they don’t.
Sachetti could change his mind, and because his decision-making—however cloaked in the ideological—is really an expression of his personal feelings of affection and loathing, even his love-fest with Pushinaitis, the Patriot’s Voice, Togno, etc. could end.
Love, after all, is fickle.
Nixon offers at least two examples in his letter that make the Eyerly Empire potentially vulnerable to lawsuit, and it’s no wonder that Sachetti doesn’t want that to come to light.
A terrible bind for the poor guy: He forfeits his integrity to sell Eyerly’s tabloid but fails to calculate that some of us might figure out that the empire is the Truman Show.
The Eyerly Empire’s goal is to control public opinion.
But Sachetti has choices:
He can “man up” and print Nixon’s letter demonstrating that he’s not Eyerly’s puppet.
He can print my letter and Nixon’s demonstrating that he really does care about free speech.
He can refuse to print one or both revealing once and for all that the PE is neither a newspaper nor a venue of democratic discourse—but instead an agent for an empire that manipulates its readers into PAYING to be the autonomic vehicles of its profiteering.
What’s it going to be, Mr. Sachetti?
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
592 words
What we didn’t know, until now, is that the same strategy governs the Op-Ed page, putting the lie to any respect Sachetti may have had for the first amendment. Fact is, he cares no more for free speech than suits the promotion and protection of the Eyerly Tabloid Empire.
Indeed, Sachetti’s cliam to be impartial with respect to who gets a hearing on the Op-Ed page is a sham.
Example: Jay Nixon recently submitted a letter to the editor where he demonstrates Sachetti’s manipulation of 30 Seconds. Each case Nixon details shows how Sachetti accomplishes this objective.
When Evy Lysk used 30 Seconds to make the unsubstantiated claim that Benton School Board members are guilty of recruiting, Sachetti not only let the remark stand without challenge, but printed several reiterations of it.
When she and other Patriot’s Voice members accuse president Obama of being a member of an Islamic terrorist sleeper cell—no comment.
Yet when Jerome Cragle offers a remark critical of the climate change deniers, Sachetti asks about his profession snidely implying that Cragle has too much time on his hands.
There are no names John Pushinaitis cannot call me that Sachetti sees as unfit to print, but when I show that Pushinaitis’ anti-choice rhetoric effectively condones the murder of reproductive healthcare providers, Sachetti bans me from 30 Seconds, demands I make my case as Op-Ed (I did), claims to convene a three-member panel to consider it, and then pretends to chivalry reinstating me at Pushiunaitis’ “request.”
When Nixon challenges Sachetti to provide evidence to the claim that Nixon is disingenuous with respect to calling Sachetti out about the manipulation of 30 Seconds, Sachetti calls Nixon “delusional.”
This sample represents a fraction of the distortion and control with which Sachetti maneuvers 30 Seconds into Eyerly Empire sales.
But here’s the real story: Sachetti REFUSES to print Nixon’s letter, importing to the Op-Ed page the same control, the same disdain for free speech, that governs 30 Seconds. Perhaps those who benefit from this will celebrate.
After all, they win.
Thing is, they don’t.
Sachetti could change his mind, and because his decision-making—however cloaked in the ideological—is really an expression of his personal feelings of affection and loathing, even his love-fest with Pushinaitis, the Patriot’s Voice, Togno, etc. could end.
Love, after all, is fickle.
Nixon offers at least two examples in his letter that make the Eyerly Empire potentially vulnerable to lawsuit, and it’s no wonder that Sachetti doesn’t want that to come to light.
A terrible bind for the poor guy: He forfeits his integrity to sell Eyerly’s tabloid but fails to calculate that some of us might figure out that the empire is the Truman Show.
The Eyerly Empire’s goal is to control public opinion.
But Sachetti has choices:
He can “man up” and print Nixon’s letter demonstrating that he’s not Eyerly’s puppet.
He can print my letter and Nixon’s demonstrating that he really does care about free speech.
He can refuse to print one or both revealing once and for all that the PE is neither a newspaper nor a venue of democratic discourse—but instead an agent for an empire that manipulates its readers into PAYING to be the autonomic vehicles of its profiteering.
What’s it going to be, Mr. Sachetti?
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
592 words
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilly: Racism's God
To the editor,
While thousands of Haitians struggle to deal with an incomprehensible disaster, the racist right’s Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly leap at the opportunity to exploit it. Robertson claims that the earthquake is God’s punishment for a “’pact with the Devil’ Haitian people made in order to defeat French colonizers in the 19th century.” "They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' "True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal,' …"Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another." A 700 Club “clarification” reassures its audience that Haiti is “cursed.” The remark was roundly condemned by Christians and non-Christians, but that’s not the point.
The point is that from within the racist fundamentalism that IS the Christian right, this claim makes perfect sense. Once reason is replaced by violent religious mythology, anything, no matter how cruel and absurd, goes.
Will Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, or Brit Hume forcefully condemn this deluded rant? Call to boycott 700 Club sponsors? Don’t hold your breath.
Then there’s Limbaugh who can’t resist an opportunity to attack Obama, and he’s willing to use injured, dying, and dead people to do it. In response to the president’s pledge of aid, Limbaugh accuses Obama of “apologizing for the American people.” In response to being corrected about Venezuela’s dispatch of aid workers, Limbaugh says that they can’t wait to leave Chavez’s socialist regime—tacitly identifying Obama with Chavez.
What he says next, however, takes the cake. Considering why Haiti’s poverty remains so entrenched, Limbaugh responds (referring to the island as “cruise-ship stop”) that it’s because of “Communism,” claiming that aid to Haiti is effectively a “Communist” strategy of the Obama administration to further Obama’s “Communist” goals. He accuses the president of viewing the disaster as a “crisis too good to waste,” an opportunity to get closer to “light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks.” Really. Any fair-minded person MUST wonder how this ass stays on the air.
Answer: “Dittoheads”: Bigots whose vision of the world is armed white men defending their women and children against the “Other.”
Bill O’Reilly, however, wins the prize for the most tasteless use of others to advance his anti-liberal agenda. In his 1/13 Talking Points Memo he claims that “[t]he problem with Haiti is massive corruption. The nation could be a tourist Mecca …No matter how much charity is given, no matter how many good intentions there are, Haiti will remain chaotic until discipline is imposed.”
In other words, what’s wrong with Haiti is that it enjoys too little corporate exploitation of a people who could be working to turn their island nation into a tourist paradise for wealthy Westerners like O’Reilly, a people who would, in other words, be benefitted by becoming subservient (say, like Atlantic City) to us.
What’s wrong isn’t too much corporate exploitation of those who use-up Haiti’s resources and then leave. No, it’s too little.
What’s wrong is that Haiti’s people need “discipline,” namely the discipline we (white wealthy) Westerners are in a position to “impose.”
This piece of racist trash could have come right out of a pre-Civil War defense of slavery. Robertson insists that Haiti will only be saved by soliciting the Christian god for forgiveness, Limbaugh and O’Reilly by soliciting the capitalist god for investors.
Trouble is, it’s all the same god—the one that allows “brown” people to die as an example of human sin. Whether a pact with Satan or a run with “Communists,” such a “god” deserves no patronage, and his followers should be ashamed.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
593 words
While thousands of Haitians struggle to deal with an incomprehensible disaster, the racist right’s Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly leap at the opportunity to exploit it. Robertson claims that the earthquake is God’s punishment for a “’pact with the Devil’ Haitian people made in order to defeat French colonizers in the 19th century.” "They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' "True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal,' …"Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another." A 700 Club “clarification” reassures its audience that Haiti is “cursed.” The remark was roundly condemned by Christians and non-Christians, but that’s not the point.
The point is that from within the racist fundamentalism that IS the Christian right, this claim makes perfect sense. Once reason is replaced by violent religious mythology, anything, no matter how cruel and absurd, goes.
Will Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, or Brit Hume forcefully condemn this deluded rant? Call to boycott 700 Club sponsors? Don’t hold your breath.
Then there’s Limbaugh who can’t resist an opportunity to attack Obama, and he’s willing to use injured, dying, and dead people to do it. In response to the president’s pledge of aid, Limbaugh accuses Obama of “apologizing for the American people.” In response to being corrected about Venezuela’s dispatch of aid workers, Limbaugh says that they can’t wait to leave Chavez’s socialist regime—tacitly identifying Obama with Chavez.
What he says next, however, takes the cake. Considering why Haiti’s poverty remains so entrenched, Limbaugh responds (referring to the island as “cruise-ship stop”) that it’s because of “Communism,” claiming that aid to Haiti is effectively a “Communist” strategy of the Obama administration to further Obama’s “Communist” goals. He accuses the president of viewing the disaster as a “crisis too good to waste,” an opportunity to get closer to “light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks.” Really. Any fair-minded person MUST wonder how this ass stays on the air.
Answer: “Dittoheads”: Bigots whose vision of the world is armed white men defending their women and children against the “Other.”
Bill O’Reilly, however, wins the prize for the most tasteless use of others to advance his anti-liberal agenda. In his 1/13 Talking Points Memo he claims that “[t]he problem with Haiti is massive corruption. The nation could be a tourist Mecca …No matter how much charity is given, no matter how many good intentions there are, Haiti will remain chaotic until discipline is imposed.”
In other words, what’s wrong with Haiti is that it enjoys too little corporate exploitation of a people who could be working to turn their island nation into a tourist paradise for wealthy Westerners like O’Reilly, a people who would, in other words, be benefitted by becoming subservient (say, like Atlantic City) to us.
What’s wrong isn’t too much corporate exploitation of those who use-up Haiti’s resources and then leave. No, it’s too little.
What’s wrong is that Haiti’s people need “discipline,” namely the discipline we (white wealthy) Westerners are in a position to “impose.”
This piece of racist trash could have come right out of a pre-Civil War defense of slavery. Robertson insists that Haiti will only be saved by soliciting the Christian god for forgiveness, Limbaugh and O’Reilly by soliciting the capitalist god for investors.
Trouble is, it’s all the same god—the one that allows “brown” people to die as an example of human sin. Whether a pact with Satan or a run with “Communists,” such a “god” deserves no patronage, and his followers should be ashamed.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
593 words
Friday, November 13, 2009
A Case Study in the Forfeiture of Journalistic Intergrity: The Press Enterprise's Jim Sachetti
To the editor,
Were there any doubt that Jim Sachetti should be replaced as PE-Editor, that is now settled. The publishing of Carter Clews’ misleading, racist “Barack Hussein Obama” tirade concerning the Fort Hood massacre leaves no room to speculate on Sachetti’s editorial irresponsibility.
Clews’ claim that Obama “soft-peddles” on Islamic terrorism is false. Obama, 7.25.08, Berlin: “This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan…The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda…We have too much at stake to turn back now.” What Carter really means is that anyone who opposed invading Iraq, rejects the “Bush Doctrine,” or is circumspect about whether sending more troops to Afghanistan is a good idea, amount to “soft-peddlers.”
Despite Carter’s denials, the history of immigration in the U.S. includes a “dark underbelly”; the sacrifice of ethnic and religious diversity, including the 4,000 Muslim soldiers serving in the U.S. military, would be a tragedy. But this doesn’t prevent Carter, and now Sachetti, from fanning the flames of bigotry. Indeed, for those looking for an excuse to spew anti-Islamic hatred in the interest of promoting their own religious agenda, Hasan is a gift.
Clews deliberately conflates terrorizing actions with the motives of a terrorist. That Hasan’s rampage was horrific and inexcusable is clear—and he will be prosecuted accordingly. However, that he saw the war on terror to be anti-Islamic or that he attended services at a mosque whose Iman held Anti-American views (how does Clews know Hasan listened with “rapt attention”?) does not meet the criteria for what counts as a terrorist according to U.S. law: “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents (U.S. Code, Title 22, Ch. 38, para. 2656f(d)).
There is no evidence that Hasan belonged to such a group; neither his mosque attendance or the people with whom he communicated demonstrates this. There’s no evidence that his actions were politically motivated; showing this requires evidence that Hasan was directed not merely by his apparent antipathy, but by an ideology he shared with others with whom he had planned the attack. There is copious evidence that Hasan suffered from psychopathology that went untreated, and while this is no excuse, it raises important questions that will remain unanswered while we busy ourselves barking up the wrong tree.
Americans for Limited Government is a fake grassroots “protest” group funded by real estate mogul Howard Rich; Clews is one of it charlatans. Clews has a colorful history: 1984, involved in the bribing of a “Spanish legislator believed to be working on energy legislation” benefitting a front corporation, Gray and Company, for which Clews was the primary lobbyist; 1985, Set up a PR firm called the Nicaraguan Refugee Fund that was directly involved in the Reagan administration’s “covert operations to supply the contras in violation of legislation passed by Congress”; 1985, “did the promotion and publicity for the World Anti-Communist League,” a fellow-traveler of the John Birch Society and associated with “assassinations, death squads, and sabotage”; 2003, sets up Laptoplobbyist.com for the Christian Coalition featuring “angry right-wing polemics aimed at stirring up visitors to send fax messages to …politicians it has selected.”
So why would Sachetti waste Op-Ed space on Clews? Is he too lazy to check out his sources? Does he agree with Clews’ ALG/JBS/WACL worldview? Will he just do anything to sell papers? The Op-Ed page IS for opinions. But surely this doesn’t mean that any syndicated pundit’s racist trash goes—unless, apparently, you’re Jim Sachetti.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
599 words
Were there any doubt that Jim Sachetti should be replaced as PE-Editor, that is now settled. The publishing of Carter Clews’ misleading, racist “Barack Hussein Obama” tirade concerning the Fort Hood massacre leaves no room to speculate on Sachetti’s editorial irresponsibility.
Clews’ claim that Obama “soft-peddles” on Islamic terrorism is false. Obama, 7.25.08, Berlin: “This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan…The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda…We have too much at stake to turn back now.” What Carter really means is that anyone who opposed invading Iraq, rejects the “Bush Doctrine,” or is circumspect about whether sending more troops to Afghanistan is a good idea, amount to “soft-peddlers.”
Despite Carter’s denials, the history of immigration in the U.S. includes a “dark underbelly”; the sacrifice of ethnic and religious diversity, including the 4,000 Muslim soldiers serving in the U.S. military, would be a tragedy. But this doesn’t prevent Carter, and now Sachetti, from fanning the flames of bigotry. Indeed, for those looking for an excuse to spew anti-Islamic hatred in the interest of promoting their own religious agenda, Hasan is a gift.
Clews deliberately conflates terrorizing actions with the motives of a terrorist. That Hasan’s rampage was horrific and inexcusable is clear—and he will be prosecuted accordingly. However, that he saw the war on terror to be anti-Islamic or that he attended services at a mosque whose Iman held Anti-American views (how does Clews know Hasan listened with “rapt attention”?) does not meet the criteria for what counts as a terrorist according to U.S. law: “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents (U.S. Code, Title 22, Ch. 38, para. 2656f(d)).
There is no evidence that Hasan belonged to such a group; neither his mosque attendance or the people with whom he communicated demonstrates this. There’s no evidence that his actions were politically motivated; showing this requires evidence that Hasan was directed not merely by his apparent antipathy, but by an ideology he shared with others with whom he had planned the attack. There is copious evidence that Hasan suffered from psychopathology that went untreated, and while this is no excuse, it raises important questions that will remain unanswered while we busy ourselves barking up the wrong tree.
Americans for Limited Government is a fake grassroots “protest” group funded by real estate mogul Howard Rich; Clews is one of it charlatans. Clews has a colorful history: 1984, involved in the bribing of a “Spanish legislator believed to be working on energy legislation” benefitting a front corporation, Gray and Company, for which Clews was the primary lobbyist; 1985, Set up a PR firm called the Nicaraguan Refugee Fund that was directly involved in the Reagan administration’s “covert operations to supply the contras in violation of legislation passed by Congress”; 1985, “did the promotion and publicity for the World Anti-Communist League,” a fellow-traveler of the John Birch Society and associated with “assassinations, death squads, and sabotage”; 2003, sets up Laptoplobbyist.com for the Christian Coalition featuring “angry right-wing polemics aimed at stirring up visitors to send fax messages to …politicians it has selected.”
So why would Sachetti waste Op-Ed space on Clews? Is he too lazy to check out his sources? Does he agree with Clews’ ALG/JBS/WACL worldview? Will he just do anything to sell papers? The Op-Ed page IS for opinions. But surely this doesn’t mean that any syndicated pundit’s racist trash goes—unless, apparently, you’re Jim Sachetti.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
599 words
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Capitalism, Human Welfare, and the Healthcare Debate: Death--American Style
10.17.09
To the Editor,
Among the most disturbing features of our current political landscape, exemplified by the tea-baggers, the birthers, the secessionists, the H1N1 vaccine-as-mind-control conspiracy-mongers, and other “patriots,” is the extent to which craving short-term gain—Obama-out-of-office-at-any-cost—drives the willingness to adopt beliefs that are not merely wrong-headed, but profoundly self-defeating.
The healthcare debate could not illustrate this any more clearly: we’re not merely willing to sell out our un/underinsured fellows to disease and death, we’re apparently willing to take the risk that we could end up among them just for the sake of opposing a public option.
The same “patriots” who condemn Obama for “cutting” their Medicare would apparently let their neighbor’s children die for lack of access to the care these “patriots” take as entitled. This isn’t merely hypocrisy; it’s perversity. Cynically exploiting the rhetoric of “free choice,” the “health” insurance industry has so successfully suckered the tea-partiers that they can be counted on to attend fake grassroots events and rally against their own interests—even their interest in living. Every placard heralding “freedom” may as well be heralding suffering and death, every endorsement of the “free market” a pitch for rationing-healthcare-by-the-mega-profits-of-Cigna-and-company. Why? Because the defeat of the public option is a win for an industry whose profits have increased by 416% over the last decade by denying coverage, refusing to pay claims, and by dropping sick people from their roles—after raping them of their hard-earned dollars.
What the tea-partiers don’t get is that the same tactics they’ve so effectively deployed against those who’d resist their ideological swill is now—through ignorance-exploiting-stealth—being deployed to insure that they, many of whom are among the most economically vulnerable, stand on the side of the super-wealthy. Quite the coup. All the “health” insurance promotion arms had to do was use the magic words “socialism,” “communism,” or “government controlled,” through their Republican Party propaganda channel—FOX—and the paranoid “patriot”-sheeple fall in lock-step—behind their pied pipers, Beck, Hannity, Malkin, O’Reilly, right off the cliff. Death is apparently OK with them so long as we get rid of a black democratic president.
Unconvinced? Offended? Think the “free market” is on your side? Check out Rendell’s Republican budget. He cuts funding for the Department of Public Welfare, discards a possible severance tax on natural gas drilling, cuts the Department of Environmental Protection 27%, and opens state park land to drilling. Who benefits? The “health” insurance analogues in the energy industry, corporations like Cabot whose suspension for environmental violations has been lifted, and White Pines who has “the state’s go-ahead to accept radioactive sludge” from natural gas drilling.
However willfully blind we are to the connection between environmental destruction and human health, the writing’s on the wall: capitalist enterprise cares nothing whatever for human welfare. Indeed, the very corporations who exercise the most power over life and death—HEALTH insurance—actively work to deny the services PAID FOR by the people who hold their policies. This IS insurance—an insurance of death. Corporations like Cabot, Cigna, Aetna, Humana, White Pines, Exxon, AIG, Citibank, and on and on have so effectively exploited the fear of “socialism” and the racist hatred of Obama that we’re willing to sacrifice our health and the environment it depends on in order to realize what? The freedom to die from untreated disease? The freedom to watch others reap the profits of environmental obliteration?
So long as Obama’s not reelected, and we get to go down waving the flag, I guess so.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
580 words.
To the Editor,
Among the most disturbing features of our current political landscape, exemplified by the tea-baggers, the birthers, the secessionists, the H1N1 vaccine-as-mind-control conspiracy-mongers, and other “patriots,” is the extent to which craving short-term gain—Obama-out-of-office-at-any-cost—drives the willingness to adopt beliefs that are not merely wrong-headed, but profoundly self-defeating.
The healthcare debate could not illustrate this any more clearly: we’re not merely willing to sell out our un/underinsured fellows to disease and death, we’re apparently willing to take the risk that we could end up among them just for the sake of opposing a public option.
The same “patriots” who condemn Obama for “cutting” their Medicare would apparently let their neighbor’s children die for lack of access to the care these “patriots” take as entitled. This isn’t merely hypocrisy; it’s perversity. Cynically exploiting the rhetoric of “free choice,” the “health” insurance industry has so successfully suckered the tea-partiers that they can be counted on to attend fake grassroots events and rally against their own interests—even their interest in living. Every placard heralding “freedom” may as well be heralding suffering and death, every endorsement of the “free market” a pitch for rationing-healthcare-by-the-mega-profits-of-Cigna-and-company. Why? Because the defeat of the public option is a win for an industry whose profits have increased by 416% over the last decade by denying coverage, refusing to pay claims, and by dropping sick people from their roles—after raping them of their hard-earned dollars.
What the tea-partiers don’t get is that the same tactics they’ve so effectively deployed against those who’d resist their ideological swill is now—through ignorance-exploiting-stealth—being deployed to insure that they, many of whom are among the most economically vulnerable, stand on the side of the super-wealthy. Quite the coup. All the “health” insurance promotion arms had to do was use the magic words “socialism,” “communism,” or “government controlled,” through their Republican Party propaganda channel—FOX—and the paranoid “patriot”-sheeple fall in lock-step—behind their pied pipers, Beck, Hannity, Malkin, O’Reilly, right off the cliff. Death is apparently OK with them so long as we get rid of a black democratic president.
Unconvinced? Offended? Think the “free market” is on your side? Check out Rendell’s Republican budget. He cuts funding for the Department of Public Welfare, discards a possible severance tax on natural gas drilling, cuts the Department of Environmental Protection 27%, and opens state park land to drilling. Who benefits? The “health” insurance analogues in the energy industry, corporations like Cabot whose suspension for environmental violations has been lifted, and White Pines who has “the state’s go-ahead to accept radioactive sludge” from natural gas drilling.
However willfully blind we are to the connection between environmental destruction and human health, the writing’s on the wall: capitalist enterprise cares nothing whatever for human welfare. Indeed, the very corporations who exercise the most power over life and death—HEALTH insurance—actively work to deny the services PAID FOR by the people who hold their policies. This IS insurance—an insurance of death. Corporations like Cabot, Cigna, Aetna, Humana, White Pines, Exxon, AIG, Citibank, and on and on have so effectively exploited the fear of “socialism” and the racist hatred of Obama that we’re willing to sacrifice our health and the environment it depends on in order to realize what? The freedom to die from untreated disease? The freedom to watch others reap the profits of environmental obliteration?
So long as Obama’s not reelected, and we get to go down waving the flag, I guess so.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
580 words.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Squandered Opportunities and Despicable Lessons for Children
9.12.09
To the Editor,
Glenn Beck’s psychotic hard-right stranglehold on local decision-making couldn’t have been evidenced more clearly than at the 9.8.09 Bloomsburg School District’s board meeting. While Superintendent Curry insists that the decision to prevent children from watching President Obama’s speech—and then his decision to tape it, “screen” it, and make it available later—were strictly his own, there’s plenty of blame to go around for a decision so poor it made a mockery of the Pledge of Allegiance for which we all stood at the meeting’s start.
Indeed, every member of every school board in the region who failed to vigorously defend the live broadcast of this speech ought to be embarrassed and ashamed. This includes Berwick’s Superintendent Brookhart whose letter home offers a lesson in suspicion and disrespect to children and confirms the groundless paranoia of some of their parents.
This would not have happened were Obama white, or Republican regardless questions about “helping the president”—and we ALL know it.
Not only did these administrators and board members fail to provide an opportunity to participate in history, to hear the president inspire kids to work hard, respect their teachers, become engaged in their educations, and comprehend their roles as citizens, they effectively taught the despicable lesson that the office of the president deserves to be treated with suspicion and that THIS president is not to be trusted. We all knew exactly what was going to be in this speech, and that that FACT didn’t matter to the very people whose decisions we rely on to set an example for our kids should provoke us to outrage.
This squandered opportunity wasn’t about THIS president; it was about respecting the office of the president. It was about being something more than a kid, namely, a citizen. The very idea that children need to be protected from an American president’s speech extolling basic human virtues teaches the contemptible lesson that a citizen only owes respect to those with whom they agree—and not to those with whom they differ.
The notion—evinced by Michelle Malkin among others—that the speech is part of a secret plot to convert kids into socialist drones—is simply crazy. But this is the Republican Party. Hi-jacked by it’s most fanatical “patriot’s voice” fringe, it’s no wonder that representatives like Joe Wilson think they can yell at the president in the middle of an important address to congress about health care.
The lesson is that Republicans are willing to do anything—exploit any perceived weakness, fuel any paranoia, fabricate any opportunity—to undermine this president. Happy to sacrifice the uninsured for their political agenda, this week we learned that they’re just as willing to sacrifice kids to regain the Whitehouse. How telling about what it is we really want our children to learn—bigotry and narrow-mindedness—that our own local representatives, board members, and even some school teachers can be so suckered?
Instead of owning up, apologizing, and assuring us that no such idiocy would occur in the future—Curry offered excuses. The speech was broadcast on all the major news channels—no Broadband was required. Hiding behind the excuse that they didn’t get “official notice” in time, Curry and Brookhart merely demonstrate how behind the ball they are with respect to important national events. Fact is, they and their acquiescent boards have set an awful example for our kids, one that demeans the integrity of the presidency and its representatives, including the public school.
That not a single school board director has gone on record publicly opposing this reprehensible decision should make us all think long and hard at election time.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
595 words.
To the Editor,
Glenn Beck’s psychotic hard-right stranglehold on local decision-making couldn’t have been evidenced more clearly than at the 9.8.09 Bloomsburg School District’s board meeting. While Superintendent Curry insists that the decision to prevent children from watching President Obama’s speech—and then his decision to tape it, “screen” it, and make it available later—were strictly his own, there’s plenty of blame to go around for a decision so poor it made a mockery of the Pledge of Allegiance for which we all stood at the meeting’s start.
Indeed, every member of every school board in the region who failed to vigorously defend the live broadcast of this speech ought to be embarrassed and ashamed. This includes Berwick’s Superintendent Brookhart whose letter home offers a lesson in suspicion and disrespect to children and confirms the groundless paranoia of some of their parents.
This would not have happened were Obama white, or Republican regardless questions about “helping the president”—and we ALL know it.
Not only did these administrators and board members fail to provide an opportunity to participate in history, to hear the president inspire kids to work hard, respect their teachers, become engaged in their educations, and comprehend their roles as citizens, they effectively taught the despicable lesson that the office of the president deserves to be treated with suspicion and that THIS president is not to be trusted. We all knew exactly what was going to be in this speech, and that that FACT didn’t matter to the very people whose decisions we rely on to set an example for our kids should provoke us to outrage.
This squandered opportunity wasn’t about THIS president; it was about respecting the office of the president. It was about being something more than a kid, namely, a citizen. The very idea that children need to be protected from an American president’s speech extolling basic human virtues teaches the contemptible lesson that a citizen only owes respect to those with whom they agree—and not to those with whom they differ.
The notion—evinced by Michelle Malkin among others—that the speech is part of a secret plot to convert kids into socialist drones—is simply crazy. But this is the Republican Party. Hi-jacked by it’s most fanatical “patriot’s voice” fringe, it’s no wonder that representatives like Joe Wilson think they can yell at the president in the middle of an important address to congress about health care.
The lesson is that Republicans are willing to do anything—exploit any perceived weakness, fuel any paranoia, fabricate any opportunity—to undermine this president. Happy to sacrifice the uninsured for their political agenda, this week we learned that they’re just as willing to sacrifice kids to regain the Whitehouse. How telling about what it is we really want our children to learn—bigotry and narrow-mindedness—that our own local representatives, board members, and even some school teachers can be so suckered?
Instead of owning up, apologizing, and assuring us that no such idiocy would occur in the future—Curry offered excuses. The speech was broadcast on all the major news channels—no Broadband was required. Hiding behind the excuse that they didn’t get “official notice” in time, Curry and Brookhart merely demonstrate how behind the ball they are with respect to important national events. Fact is, they and their acquiescent boards have set an awful example for our kids, one that demeans the integrity of the presidency and its representatives, including the public school.
That not a single school board director has gone on record publicly opposing this reprehensible decision should make us all think long and hard at election time.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
595 words.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
A School District --Bloomsburg--that Caves to the Far Right Right
[The following is a letter to John Riley, school board director, Bloomsburg School District, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania}
Dear John Riley,
I am writing to implore you to reconsider the decision of the Bloomsburg School Board to not broadcast President Obama's address to children for the opening of the 2009 school year. Not only is he participating in long-standing tradition, not only is his message to stay in school, study, work hard, and to care about education precisely the right message, it is especially the right message now--when nothing but the best possible educations will insure a stable future for American citizens.
By refusing to broadcast his address, your school board has effectively conceded to the worst--most bullying, verbally malicious, and hate-mongering-- politics of the far right who would have you believe--and apparently does--that the president's speech is a partisan ploy to advance his party's agenda. It is not. You know that it is not. And no matter what excuses you might offer, say, that lesson plans are already fixed, the real motives are plainly transparent and no one with any sense is going to see this decision as anything other than pandering to a political agenda--or at least caving to one. Surely, you know better.
This is not just any speech. This is the president of the United State's speech. The refusal to broadcast it sends a message wholly contrary to your very mission as an institution of education. Your decision converts the school district from being a politically neutral center of education into a politically manipulable mouthpiece for a single ideologically saturated world view--and one that has so profoundly mischaracterized this president's participation in this tradition that to concede to it is, well, shameful.
Wendy Lynne Lee
Wendy Lynne Lee, Professor
Department of Philosophy
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Bloomsburg, PA, USA 17815
wlee@bloomu.edu/570-389-4332
Dear John Riley,
I am writing to implore you to reconsider the decision of the Bloomsburg School Board to not broadcast President Obama's address to children for the opening of the 2009 school year. Not only is he participating in long-standing tradition, not only is his message to stay in school, study, work hard, and to care about education precisely the right message, it is especially the right message now--when nothing but the best possible educations will insure a stable future for American citizens.
By refusing to broadcast his address, your school board has effectively conceded to the worst--most bullying, verbally malicious, and hate-mongering-- politics of the far right who would have you believe--and apparently does--that the president's speech is a partisan ploy to advance his party's agenda. It is not. You know that it is not. And no matter what excuses you might offer, say, that lesson plans are already fixed, the real motives are plainly transparent and no one with any sense is going to see this decision as anything other than pandering to a political agenda--or at least caving to one. Surely, you know better.
This is not just any speech. This is the president of the United State's speech. The refusal to broadcast it sends a message wholly contrary to your very mission as an institution of education. Your decision converts the school district from being a politically neutral center of education into a politically manipulable mouthpiece for a single ideologically saturated world view--and one that has so profoundly mischaracterized this president's participation in this tradition that to concede to it is, well, shameful.
Wendy Lynne Lee
Wendy Lynne Lee, Professor
Department of Philosophy
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Bloomsburg, PA, USA 17815
wlee@bloomu.edu/570-389-4332
Saturday, August 15, 2009
It's not about "Socialism," It's About Racism
8.13.09
To the Editor,
I read with despair John-Eric Koslosky’s PE-article about the Socrates’ Café discussion over whether “socialism” is a “dirty word.” It has become so—despite the fact that much of what’s essential to our republic is socialized. How many of us could make intelligent election-decisions without public education? Where would many elderly, ill, intellectually disabled, or poor families be without Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security? What about public libraries, roads, parks, CHIP? Would we enjoy even some protection against corporate greed, pollution, and labor-exploitation without government regulation?
Would Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “though the will of the majority in all cases is to prevail…the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression” be realizable without the equal representation that defines socialism’s inherently democratic character?
The answer’s “no.”
Yet we’re apparently so comfortable taking for granted the benefits of socialism that we pretend that they’re gifts from God or features of nature. However loudly Patriot’s Voice members insist that it’s an “excuse ideology,” or that the founders would have rejected these essential institutions, that the PV had a town park for their party is a benefit of “a political system in which the means of production are controlled by the people and operated according to equity and fairness rather than market principles,” AKA: SOCIALISM (Encarta). Could they have hosted the party at a privately owned park? Only if its owner were a Confederate Flag vendor or Cleon Skousen, “one of the legendary cranks of the conservative world, a John Bircher, a grand fanaticist…about secret conspiracies…to impose a one world government” (www.salon.com, 3.17.09)—and writer of “The 5000 Year Leap,” Runyon’s gift to Mayor Knorr.
So what drives the fanatical-right to call Obama’s health care plan “socialist”? NONE of their claims are true, and many are crazy fear-mongering nonsense. FALSE: that the plan includes euthanasia, “death panels,” rationing, diminished access for veterans, disadvantage for small businesses, forcing people to forfeit insurance, or that the HNN1 vaccine’s an extermination conspiracy.
It’s FALSE that “medical research…would become political.” Indeed, it’s refreshing to have an administration that finally takes science seriously and understands that the foundation of a democracy is its PEOPLE, not the profits of its Blackwater, etc. cronies.
Health care isn’t a commodity like a car or a house because health is not merely something desirable; it’s a necessary condition for the exercise of our human rights, hence health care must be accounted among the most basic of these.
The far right’s opposition to health care reform isn’t, in fact, about health care. It’s about Obama and the willingness to resort to ANY strategy to weaken him.
Why?
Obama’s black.
Substitute “black” for “socialist” and you’ve the truth about the Tea Parties, the “Birthers,” the corporate-sponsored town hall harangues, Palin’s psychotic “tweets,” and Glenn Beck’s Neo-Birchers. This isn’t to say you can’t disagree with Obama without being a racist.
I do.
I think we should go single-payer and get the insurance/pharmaceutical vultures out of health care entirely. The least we can do is provide a public option, and a little competition for those 46 million uninsured Americans.
The current “controversy” isn’t for a minute about “free” markets, Constitutions—or the dangers of “socialism.” It’s about FOX-and-friends “real” American: White, far-right, and nationalistic; it’s about how desperate Republicans are to regain power.
The Neo-Birchean tea-baggers would rather let people suffer from lack of access to a doctor than have a black president in the Whitehouse. But they wouldn’t for a second give up their own health insurance or Social Security.
Hypocrites all.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
595 words.
To the Editor,
I read with despair John-Eric Koslosky’s PE-article about the Socrates’ Café discussion over whether “socialism” is a “dirty word.” It has become so—despite the fact that much of what’s essential to our republic is socialized. How many of us could make intelligent election-decisions without public education? Where would many elderly, ill, intellectually disabled, or poor families be without Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security? What about public libraries, roads, parks, CHIP? Would we enjoy even some protection against corporate greed, pollution, and labor-exploitation without government regulation?
Would Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “though the will of the majority in all cases is to prevail…the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression” be realizable without the equal representation that defines socialism’s inherently democratic character?
The answer’s “no.”
Yet we’re apparently so comfortable taking for granted the benefits of socialism that we pretend that they’re gifts from God or features of nature. However loudly Patriot’s Voice members insist that it’s an “excuse ideology,” or that the founders would have rejected these essential institutions, that the PV had a town park for their party is a benefit of “a political system in which the means of production are controlled by the people and operated according to equity and fairness rather than market principles,” AKA: SOCIALISM (Encarta). Could they have hosted the party at a privately owned park? Only if its owner were a Confederate Flag vendor or Cleon Skousen, “one of the legendary cranks of the conservative world, a John Bircher, a grand fanaticist…about secret conspiracies…to impose a one world government” (www.salon.com, 3.17.09)—and writer of “The 5000 Year Leap,” Runyon’s gift to Mayor Knorr.
So what drives the fanatical-right to call Obama’s health care plan “socialist”? NONE of their claims are true, and many are crazy fear-mongering nonsense. FALSE: that the plan includes euthanasia, “death panels,” rationing, diminished access for veterans, disadvantage for small businesses, forcing people to forfeit insurance, or that the HNN1 vaccine’s an extermination conspiracy.
It’s FALSE that “medical research…would become political.” Indeed, it’s refreshing to have an administration that finally takes science seriously and understands that the foundation of a democracy is its PEOPLE, not the profits of its Blackwater, etc. cronies.
Health care isn’t a commodity like a car or a house because health is not merely something desirable; it’s a necessary condition for the exercise of our human rights, hence health care must be accounted among the most basic of these.
The far right’s opposition to health care reform isn’t, in fact, about health care. It’s about Obama and the willingness to resort to ANY strategy to weaken him.
Why?
Obama’s black.
Substitute “black” for “socialist” and you’ve the truth about the Tea Parties, the “Birthers,” the corporate-sponsored town hall harangues, Palin’s psychotic “tweets,” and Glenn Beck’s Neo-Birchers. This isn’t to say you can’t disagree with Obama without being a racist.
I do.
I think we should go single-payer and get the insurance/pharmaceutical vultures out of health care entirely. The least we can do is provide a public option, and a little competition for those 46 million uninsured Americans.
The current “controversy” isn’t for a minute about “free” markets, Constitutions—or the dangers of “socialism.” It’s about FOX-and-friends “real” American: White, far-right, and nationalistic; it’s about how desperate Republicans are to regain power.
The Neo-Birchean tea-baggers would rather let people suffer from lack of access to a doctor than have a black president in the Whitehouse. But they wouldn’t for a second give up their own health insurance or Social Security.
Hypocrites all.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
595 words.
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