Text and Subtext : The Media's Tea Party

Framing the Tea Party movement: New Left redux? Photo from RaceWire.
'Wal-Mart Hippies?'
Framing the Tea Party movement

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 10, 2010

Friday morning I was listening to my pseudo “fair and balanced” National Public Radio station, sipping my fair-trade coffee, and crunching on my organic granola while listening to two reports on American politics.

The first addressed the rising threat of the Tea Party movement to the “traditional” Republican Party. Of course, the victory of Rick Perry over Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison figured in the analysis as did the significant showing of a third, Tea Party, candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary.

The second report was on the upcoming primaries in Arkansas where incumbent but very conservative Democratic candidate Blanche Lincoln is being challenged by a much more liberal challenger, Bill Halter, who wants to be the party’s choice to run for the U.S. Senate. Lurking in the wings of this story, of course, is the Tea Party movement on the right which will run against either the conservative or liberal Democrat.

The subtext of these stories, that is texts that are partially hidden but still visible, is the rise of the new right which if the media is to be believed constitutes a major grassroots movement in the political life of the country.

Robert Borosage, announcing a June conference of progressives, captured my sense of frustration when he wrote:

Apparently, any time more than two right-wingers get together, the media gets the vapors, showers the teabaggers with fluff coverage, and heralds the beginning of a transformational movement.

Then I read David Brooks’ March 5 New York Times column, “The Wal-Mart Hippies.” Now I am not a Brooks naysayer. Sometimes he has interesting things to say even though I usually disagree with him. But this column was too much. For Brooks, the similarities between the New Left of the 1960s and the Tea Party of today are much greater than their differences. He said that the two movements have used the same shock and awe tactics. In fact, he said, the Tea Partiers are adopting the tactics of Saul Alinsky.

Most important, Brooks suggests that both movements had this simplistic notion that “the people are pure and virtuous.” Both movements “go in big for conspiracy theories.” The 60s theorists had these silly ideas about “shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks-theories that live on in the works of Noam Chomsky.” The Tea Party folks also have silly ideas about how the Federal Reserve Bank, the F.B.I, big banks, and corporations have caused our problems.

And both movements “have a problem with authority.” Brooks says both New Leftists and Tea Party activists oppose any systems of authority, reject the idea of original sin, assume the perfectibility of human kind, and believe in mass spontaneous action. The last straw was when he referred to a pundit’s comparison of Glenn Beck to Abbie Hoffman.

Brooks, while paying brief lip service to differences in the two movements, ignores the theory and political perspectives that animated the two movements. As a result he elevated the theory as well as practice of the Tea Party followers. In this way Brooks gave legitimacy to mainstream media political discourse that has made the Tea Party story a significant one. As with the New Left failures of the 1960s, “the Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the 60s political style will always be with us-first on the left, now the right.”

Perhaps David Brooks should have suggested that the “60s political style” will always be with us as long as the monopoly media choose to create, distort, and use various political currents as part of common and enticing frames.

As Robert Borosage suggested, the main stream media has created for its own purposes, and perhaps the purposes of political reaction, the imagery of an angry, grassroots movement that bravely confronts authority figures, both liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican. They are framed as well-informed, though impetuous citizens, who are suffering from the downside of big moneyed interests.

The media presents Tea Party claims that the problem with America is government with little or no reflection on the bases of their claims. The media instill in public consciousness Tea Party claims about the dishonesty of science, the heartlessness of all politicians, inhumanity of “bureaucrats,” and the distance the United States has come from the framers of the Constitution.

And the Tea Party phenomenon is presented as an authentic grassroots movement with little or no analysis of its support, encouragement, and financing by inside the beltway big capital (the very folks they presumably are railing against). Hardly a word is printed, for example, about Tea Party funding from former Congressman Dick Armey’s Freedom Works or funding by the Koch Family Foundations of Americans for Prosperity. And the media fail to discuss the racism embedded in many of their claims such as, “They are taking our country away.”

And interestingly enough, the media portrait of Republicans is of a beleaguered middle-of-the road political faction that just might have supported health care reform, climate change legislation, and other Obama proposals if it were not for the pressure from the grassroots.

While reflecting upon the Tea Party phenomenon, how it has been framed, and the Brooks comparison, I was reminded of Todd Gitlin’s book, The Whole World is Watching, which showed the radical shift of the media frame on the New Left before and after 1965. After the first major protest rally against the escalating war in Vietnam, Gitlin suggested, the media frame of the New Leftists as sweet caring young people shifted to the bomb throwing monsters that the media argued they had become.

While the Tea Party phenomenon is only a year old, according to Borosage, they are still showered with “fluff coverage.” If the media had continued its positive coverage of New Left activism after 1965, the way they seem to be covering the Tea Party today, perhaps the war in Vietnam would have been stopped sooner.

In the end, it may be that the Tea Party movement is far less pervasive than has been presented. Its level of popularity probably varies enormously from place to place. And the pain and suffering of many people identified with the Tea Party -- alienation, powerlessness, economic marginalization, inequality, and hopelessness -- is buried in stories, such as the one by Brooks, of political style.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Joseph Stack and the Texas GOP : Murder-Suicide of the King's English

Art by Cindy Flynn / Clifton Studios.
Murder-suicide of the English language:
Stack, and the Texas Republican primary

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2010

Like fabled ruts gouged into dirt by heavy wheels, or war trenches widened by running boots, English language usage has hardened against all recent attempts to veer away from a mainline madness of selfish and violent arrogance.

Suicide pilot Joseph Stack wanted to write a note that would supply enough therapy “to fix what is really broken." Instead, he found the process of writing "frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless." There was a storm in his head that he could not "gracefully articulate." And so last month he blew up his house and slaughtered a Black federal worker in a fury of violent self-expression.

Or take the case of voters in the Texas Republican Primary who last week cast 61 percent of their ballots for the last name "Porter" because it was not a Hispanic name. Their English-only prejudice ended the promising political career of Victor G. Carrillo, the sitting Chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission.

"Given the choice between 'Porter' and 'Carrillo' -- unfortunately, the Hispanic-surname was a serious setback from which I could never recover, although I did all in my power to overcome this built-in bias," explained Carrillo in a pained letter to supporters.

These ritualized usages of English that we have seen lately in Texas can only trigger rapid-fire bursts of ignorance, aggression, and intolerance. Maybe we have the internet to thank for this? Communication as flame war? Chairman Carrillo put it this way: "political dynamics have changed some."

What Stack and Republican voters share is a language they can't use properly either as an adequate expression of their own feelings or as a medium of critical democratic autonomy. Whether your advanced technology is a single-engine aircraft or an electronic voting machine, if you can't use your own language to think with, how will you make the wisest use of your tools?

Of course, the language failures of Stack and Republican voters are symptoms of something more widespread. We recall how the "great communicators" of our political life -- from Reagan to Obama -- can be most effective only when they work from ritualized scripts.

If we believe that Stack dedicated the life of his mind to the triumphant conquest of IRS code, then plain language would warn us right away that he was stalking the domain of the language slayer. The day Stack killed himself and IRS worker Vernon Hunter, I received a communication via federal mail from my online broker regarding the official tax accounting procedures for certain trusts: "Please note: 1099's will never match the original cash payments received." In plain English: my income tax for these things will never be based on my income.

As for the bramble of language that counts for Republican discourse in Texas, you could easily get hooked on the idea that Texas government is always superior to Washington government. Until they count the votes in Texas. Then you realize that Texas Republican voters don't even know the names of Republicans who run the government of Texas.

To be sure, IRS code is imperial jargon, not a living language. And voting is little more than a lottery of jargon mongers. But whatever else might be true of the new anti-taxers or Texas secessionists, they have not proved that they are capable of transcending the jargon of their own white, racist heritage.

Stack's note asks us to agree that against the jargons of power in America, violence is the "/only/" answer. But isn’t this jargon in its essential form as the murder-suicide of language itself?

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached via jargon or language at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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Ramsey Wiggins : Me and Gilbert Shelton: A Memoir

Legendary underground cartoonist and comix artist Gilbert Shelton.

Me and Gilbert Shelton: A Memoir

By Ramsey Wiggins / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2010

Legendary underground artist Gilbert Shelton will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, March 9, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

Shelton is the creator of such iconic comic strips as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart Hog. His comix have sold over 40 million copies in 15 languages. Born in Houston, Shelton developed his art in Austin and then San Francisco. He now lives in France, where he is collaborating with French artist Pic on a strip called Not Quite Dead.

I. The Texas Ranger and Wonder Warthog

"Bright college days, oh carefree days that fly
To thee we sing, with our glasses raised on high." -- Tom Lehrer

In 1960 at the University of Texas (at Austin: that was the only one back then), if you helped to sell the Ranger, the student humor magazine, you got to attend the keg party that was held the weekend after the issue hit the streets. If you were only 20 years old and looked like you were 14, access to many kegs of beer on a Saturday night was a more than reasonable payment for hawking the magazine on campus for a couple of hours.

One of the other perks was that you got to hang out with the people who created the magazine. That’s when I met Gilbert Shelton and the others who brought forth the prize-winning best college humor magazine in the country.

The Rangeroos, as they called themselves, were an extraordinary bunch. Creative, smart, hard-drinking, and somehow older and more worldly-wise than the rest of us, they were the best of the best. We who were less than pretty, less than rich, or, despite being both, still disaffected, were drawn to the like minds of this social and party axis.

Lieuen Adkins and Gilbert Shelton when they both worked for the famed humor magazine, the Texas Ranger. The photo was taken at Lieuen's house on East 23rd in Austin, where the LBJ Library now stands. Photo by Bob Simmons / Austin Photos '62-69 / Texasghetto.org.

This was where I met people who knew stuff: music to listen to, authors to read, how to write, what was funny, and how to drink a lot without throwing up. I also met Janis Joplin, Bill Helmer (later a senior editor at Playboy), Dave Hickey, Billy Brammer, Tony Bell, Lieuen Adkins, Joe Brown, Hugh Lowe, Pat Brown, and all the others who couldn’t settle for life in the herd.

These were heady times. The glacial epoch of the early cold war era was transitioning into Camelot; crewcuts, panty-girdles, Eisenhower, and communist witch hunts were yielding to Ivy League, leotards, the Kennedys, and the Playboy philosophy. We joined the Civil Rights movement. We danced the Limbo, drove MGs and Volkswagens, and listened to The Kingston Trio, Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan’s acoustic incarnation. We read poetry and angry young men. It was rumored that women could have orgasms, and that love might be free. Revolution wasn’t in the air yet, but the possibility of joy extended to the horizon.

One of the newer joys back then was to pull the king’s beard. Marching and demonstrating for civil rights had been righteous, but dreadfully serious. Mockery and satire, when served up with a deft hand, were much more cool. A put-down, especially when the target remained clueless about the damage done, was the coolest of all.

The Ranger served this up and more. In 1960 the entire staff was fired three times in the course of a semester for hiding various put-downs and obscenities in successive issues of the magazine. After that, the infighting became more and more elegant, as a blustering and clueless Texas Student Publications office was outflanked again and again by subtlety, irreverence, and skill.


Enter Wonder Warthog.

He had already appeared in 1962 in the Bacchanal, an off-campus commercial attempt by Bill Killeen -- and several of the staffers fired in 1960 -- to escape the strictures of a college publication. The threat of the draft drove Gilbert back to graduate school 1962-63 where he became the editor of the Ranger and further polished the Hog of Steel.

WW sent up superheroes, arch-villains, beatniks, LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, and most concepts of morality extant at the time. Gilbert, who has nearly always had a collaborator or two, worked off and on with fellow Rangeroos Tony Bell, Lieuen Adkins, and Joe Brown to produce the first drafts of what would become world-class social satire.

Wonder Warthog later took Gilbert and friends to a wider audience, but back then the Fearless, Fighting, Foulmouthed alter ego to mild-mannered Philbert Desanex, ace reporter for the Muthalode Morning Mungpie was all ours. Frat boys might have money, cars, and high-maintenance girlfriends, but we had Wonder Warthog. Comic books had a whole new meaning.

Things change, and everybody moves on. One day I looked up and I was married, a father, a graduate student, and wore a suit to work at the Graduate Dean’s office. The summer of love came and went. John Kennedy had been assassinated, then Robert, then Martin Luther King, Jr.

Janis died of an overdose, then Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones. Woodstock had turned into Altamont. The Civil Rights movement had turned into a shooting war. Vietnam was turning teenagers into post-traumatic heroin addicts by the thousands. We all marched after Kent State; My Lai revealed us as torturers, rapists, and murderers. The ship of hope was dashed on the rocks of the military-industrial complex. I drank too much and every night before I fell asleep had the terrifying thought that my life would be the same until I died.

Meanwhile, I heard stories. Gilbert had joined Pat Brown, then a student at the Cleveland Art Institute in Cleveland, where he had tried to work for American Greeting Cards, but it hadn’t taken. Back in Austin, he did psychedelic posters for the Vulcan Gas Company, then he joined the general exodus to the west coast, hoping to do rock posters.

His new strip, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, had begun to appear in The Rag, an off-campus production with low production values and a serious antipathy for the Vietnam War. The strips in The Rag would be reprinted in rags all over the world

In 1971, my college friend Dave Moriaty showed up and told me how he, Gilbert, Jack Jackson (whose art carried the moniker "Jaxon") and Fred Todd had bought a printing press and were publishing comic books as Rip Off Press. I wanted to die from envy. He was thinking of starting a magazine, and suggested that I might want to join them.

Dave Moriaty at the Rip Off Press, 17th and Missouri in San Francisco, in 1970. Photo by Bob Simmons / Austin Photos '62-69 / Austinghetto.org.

II. Rip Off Press

"The term 'drunken printer' is redundant." -- Men’s room wall in Rip Off Press

I wanted in the game. The degree was finished, the marriage was over, my boss was about to retire, and I had more old friends in San Francisco than I did in Austin. The party wasn’t over yet. I had already stopped cutting my hair, so in May of 1972 I quit the job, took out my retirement money, and headed for the coast.

Rip Off Press had relocated from the increasingly dangerous and expensive Haight-Asbury area into the warehouse district at the bottom of the north side of Potrero Hill. There was a trucker’s bar across the street (The Bottom of the Hill Bar, now famous as a music venue), and my friend Moriaty had a flat up the hill on Arkansas Street. You could see Berkeley and Oakland from his back porch and Mount Sutro from the front window. The flat downstairs could be had for $100 a month. Jack Jackson and his old lady lived across the street. Deal.

Rip Off Press was hot. Gilbert wasn’t just an artist, he was now a franchise. He lived with a very, very smart woman, Laura Fountain, and they had a big house on a cul-de-sac that had a block party every Bastille day.

Faded glory: Your correspondent Ramsey Wiggins, upstairs at the Rip off press office in 1972. Photo by Bob Follet.

The Freak Brothers were worldwide. A German lawyer with a Polish name, Manfred Mroczkowski, had come up with the idea that all the bootleg European editions of the Freak Brothers could be licensed and made to pay royalties. The first official publication had just come out in German. Rip Off and their main competitor, Last Gasp Eco-funnies had come to détente; each sold the other’s material in their mail-order operations. Serious business.

Rip Off was begun to print rock posters, but the ancient press wasn’t good enough for close-register poster work. It was, however, good enough for underground comic book covers, and was soon augmented by a better, smaller press. Gilbert’s office/studio/playhouse was upstairs, the press, shipping office, and a cavernous, mostly empty warehouse were downstairs. In the summer, the roof was festooned with sunbathing naked hippies. The truckers loved us. At 10:30 and again at 3:00, Fred Todd would ring a bell and we would troop into the walk-in safe for a smoke break. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

I wasn’t good enough to be on the creative team, but Art can always use another handmaiden. I went to work as a dogsbody in the job printing shop we ran as a sideline and was given the nonpaying title of Managing Editor for the short-lived Rip Off Review of Western Culture.

It was the end stage of the best of times. In 1972 the summer of love had come and gone, but there were still affordable places to live, the counterculture was alive and well, and San Francisco was -- well, San Francisco. Robert Crumb was there, along with S. Clay Wilson, Dave Sheridan, Ted Richards and all the other underground comic artists.

Rock stars came and went. Chet Helms, grand poobah of the near-defunct Family Dog, appeared from time to time to try and get us to print posters on the cuff. Eddie Wilson, who had started Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, stopped off at our house to have a shower.

Gilbert Shelton designed this poster for Austin's famed rock hall, the Vulcan Gas Company.
The great circus that was Berkeley was across the bay, and Marin County was across the Golden Gate Bridge. Occasionally a young woman would find it interesting that I worked at Rip Off Press. I got tongue-kissed by a Hell’s Angel at the Garden of Earthly Delights, and had enough class to give him some tongue back. We parted with mutual respect. I was, after all, from Texas.

Once at a party I stepped between Robert Crumb and a large, angry woman who took offense at his Big Ass Comics, keeping her at bay while he escaped down the stairs. I ate with artists, and I drank with giants.

Every morning I would drink a pot of strong coffee and walk down Arkansas Street to the bottom of Potrero Hill, arriving at the press at the civilized hour of nine o’clock. Company president Fred Todd would be in the office, pacing up and down, throwing the point of his buck knife into the floor and swearing as he waited for the mail and the daily receipts to see if we would be able to buy paper and ink or, on Fridays, meet the payroll.

The shipping clerks would already have popped their white crosses and begun packing up orders. Moriaty got us to work burning plates for the printers. By 10 the head printer, a part-time rock organist and full time drug addict, would arrive and begin his morning routine of two cups of coffee, two joints and two Desoxyns before cranking up his press. (Our motto was “Quality is not our bag”)

Gilbert would arrive around eleven and, depending on the company that showed up, work, play ping-pong, or otherwise amuse himself. Jack Jackson worked at home but would pop in, usually late in the afternoon. Various print shop customers, artists, artist wannabes, and plain delusionals would come and go through the day.

At noon we would troop across the street for a sandwich and a beer, then back to the press for the afternoon, then back across the street for beer, eighty cent highballs, and a game of pool. Then back up the hill for dinner or out into the night, depending on the amusements available for the evening.

Life was good. I worked in the print shop with a future mayor of Marble Falls and a future Austin real estate developer. One day the drug addict printer got his right arm stuck in the press. He was in a cast for a long time.

Eventually a woman joined me from Austin, and we were together for quite a while. We later had a son who became famous. The Rip Off print shop invested in a worn-out magazine web press that we could never get to work right. I almost fell into the folder.

Things, change, and everybody moves on. After I had been there for about a year, the job printing shop, never a profit center, was declared a failure, closed and the equipment was sold off except for one press used to print comic book covers. The Rip Off Review of Western Culture wasn’t cultured enough and ceased publication. I was out of a job and out of Rip Off Press.

I stayed on in San Francisco for awhile, but after three days transcribing numbers at a nut and bolt manufacturing company for a temp agency, I had had enough. I was a revolutionary, god damn it. I spent two weeks in my basement rebuilding the engine in my 1966 Volkswagen, then packed the woman from Austin and what else would fit and headed back to Austin in September of 1973: The last to come to San Francisco, and the first to go back. I was sad for a time.

Rip Off Press founders Fred Todd, Gilbert Shelton, Jack Jackson, Jackson's companion Beatrice Bonini, and Dave Moriaty.
Time passed. Rip Off Press prospered without me, and I without it. The chance meeting with Eddie Wilson in my San Francisco living room turned into a three-year rock and roll marathon as the Advertising and Public Relations Director at Armadillo World Headquarters. After I burned out at the Armadillo, I made a Faustian bargain and sold ads for the Austin Sun, and, after that I really floundered for awhile. Doug Brown took pity on me and I started one of several stays at Oat Willie’s, Austin’s oldest headshop. The Sixties were officially over, even in Austin. It was confusing for awhile.

Meanwhile, more and more comic books came out of Rip Off Press. Dave Sheridan continued to collaborate on the Freak Brothers, and Fat Freddy’s Cat became its own publication. Paul Mavrides also began collaborating on the Freak Brothers in 1978.

Foreign-language editions came out officially in every European language except Russian. I’ll bet there is at least one unofficial version there, too. So far, no one in China has offered to make a deal, nor have the African languages stepped up, but long after the counterculture had lost its currency in the U.S. it remained alive and well in Europe, and The Freak Brothers did well. The Freak Brothers appeared in High Times magazine, and Universal Studios bought the license to produce a live-action Freak Brothers movie. Gilbert did an album cover for Doug Sahm, and then one for the Grateful Dead. Money rolled in.

Then, the logical next step for the Freak Brothers: A coffee table edition.

Freak Brother Freewheelin Franklin with his customary sage advice.
III. Oat Willie’s Campaign Headquarters

Ok, so I’m a clerk at Oat Willie’s, in 1978, leading the simple life, when the word comes out that Rip Off Press has done the first Freak Brothers collection, a coffee-table sized perfect bound book, for a respectable price and at a respectable investment in production costs, which Gilbert is going to go on tour to promote. One of the places he wants to do this is Austin, and since Oat Willie’s sells more Freak Brothers comics than any place in Texas, he wants to do an autograph party here.

Did I mention spending three years flogging rock and roll at the Armadillo? Anyway, Doug asked me to help a little with the publicity, so I started calling around and, a few days before the event went around to visit a few disc jockeys at a few radio stations. It turns out that the Freak Brothers are about as famous as Jerry Garcia. Everybody talks it up on the radio, and Gilbert gets to do an on-air on the top-rated FM station in Austin.

Came the day, and the place was a mob scene. Gilbert signed autographs until his hand hurt. TV stations showed up, then more people showed up. At one point a cop showed up in a patrol car, and everybody was nervous until it turned out he just wanted a signed copy of the new book like everybody else. He went to the head of the line.

I’m pretty sure that was the biggest-grossing day in Oat Willie’s history. It was the first really good day for me in a long time, anyway. I remember it fondly.

And Then…

Things change, and people move on. Gilbert and Laura escaped to Europe in 1979, first for an extended visit, and then permanently to Paris in 1982. Robert Crumb and his wife Aline Kominsky live in France, too. Two American national treasures, expatriated to France. Hmm.

Gilbert Shelton: Cool one with a cool one.
Dave Sheridan, Gilbert’s first collaborator, died of cancer in 1982. The Freak Brothers continued with collaborator Paul Mavrides. Universal Studios bought two more licenses to produce a Freak Brothers movie, and another company, bolixbrothers in Bristol, England, has been trying to produce an animated feature since 2003. The latest, but hopefully not the last, Freak Brothers collection is the full catastrophe, the Freak Brothers Compendium, which is the complete collection, all under one cover.

Gilbert’s latest undertaking is Not Quite Dead, the adventures of the world’s least-famous rock band. It’s also a collaboration, this time with the French underground cartoonist Pic. Three issues of this comic are out so far, and two have been translated into English.

Me, I stumbled around like a bull in a china shop until I had a spiritual awakening in 1989, and have been remarkably clear-headed since then. I live sedately in Austin with my wife, who understands me.

We’ve both done well, Gilbert and me.

I’ll get to see him one more time at Oat Willie’s on Friday, March 12th, where he’ll be autographing his works one more time. I’m doing a little publicity for this one, too, but maybe the lines won’t be as long. Or maybe they will.

He’ll host an art retrospective on Saturday the 13th at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture if you miss the autograph party. If you see a tall old guy with a glass of club soda, it’ll be me.

Until we meet again: Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers were first published in Austin's underground newspaper, The Rag.

• Cartoonist and underground artist Gilbert Shelton's work is being featured in an exhibit at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture, 1516-B South Lamar Blvd. in Austin. Shelton's work will be on display from March 13th-May 8, 2010. An opening reception, featuring the artist, will be held on March 13, starting at 7:09 p.m. Original art and prits will be available for sale.
• Gilbert Shelton -- whose published work includes The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, Wonder Wart Hog and Not Quite Dead (with French cartoonist Pic) -- will autograph copies of his work at Oat Willie's Campaign Headquarters, 617 West 29th St. in Austin, beginning at noon on Friday at noon, March 12, 2010.
• Shelton -- whose Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are to be featured in a movie now under development, will appear in "A Conversation with Gilbert Shelton" at South by Southwest (SXSW), at the Austin Convention Center, Monday, March 15, 2010, at 3:30 p.m.

Gilbert Shelton: Things are looking up.

Gilbert Shelton and the Simpsons' Matt Groening.

Gilbert did this jacket art for the Grateful Dead.

Wonder Wart Hog at home.

Fat Freddy's Cat speaks in many tongues.





Shelton's latest effort, done in collaboration with French artist Pic.

Still from long-in-development Freak Brothers movie, Grass Roots.

Texas Ranger party in 1963 at 18th and Brazos in Austin. That's Fontaine Maverick dancing on the furniture. Ramsey Wiggins is the tall guy in glasses and the gray sports jacket (already) turned to the left. Photo by Bob Simmons © 2000.

Some of the Rip Off Press crew at the corner of Franklin and Golden Gate Ave. in San Francisco in 1969. Photo by Bob Simmons.


Rip Off Press staffers dine in San Francisco, 1972. L-R: Bob Follet, editor of the Rip Off Review; Beatrice Bonini, Jack Jackson, Dave Moriaty, Aline Kominsky, Ramsey Wiggins, and Philipp Carlisle. Grab from a polaroid photo taken by the waiter.

Oat Willie's crew, 1977. Ramsey's the tall dudely one in the shades. Photo by Ken Hoge.

Ramsey Wiggins, his own self. Photo by Eric Rosenblum from the Austin Sun Reunion, October 31, 2009.
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San Antonio : Thousands Rally for International Women's Day

More than 2,000 demonstrators celebrated International Women's Day, Saturday, March 6, in San Antonio. Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.
International Women’s Day:
Multi-ethnic coalition
Celebrates the struggles of women

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2010

SAN ANTONIO -- International Women’s Day, celebrated the world over on March 8th, has its origins in the struggle of women garment workers in the United States. But, like May Day that also commemorates a U.S. labor struggle, International Women’s Day is often ignored in this country.

It’s not ignored in San Antonio, Texas. Continuing a 20-year tradition, a coalition of San Antonio groups celebrated the power of women organizing with a march and rally that drew an estimated crowd of 2,200 on Saturday, March 6. Beginning at the doorstep of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, the rally featured Iola Scott, Hyatt employee and member of Unite Here, a union organizing hotel workers in the tourist-intensive district.

Leaving the Hyatt to the beat of indigenous dancers, the march snaked down Market to Milam Park, chanting

“Hyatt, Escucha! Estamos en la lucha.”
“Money for homes, not for prisons. Money for healthcare, not for war.”
“Se Oye! Se Siente! La Mujer Esta Presente!”

With an inspiring mix of African American, Mexican-American, Latinas, and Anglos, the march commemorated organizers past and present. Images of San Antonio 1930-era labor organizers like Emma Tenayuca of the Pecan Shellers Union danced above the crowd. Crosses commemorated the women dead in Juarez. One sign read: “End NAFTA, Stop the Femicide in Juarez.”

A somber procession honored the dead from violence against transgender people. Life-size black plywood figures stood on small altars with wheels, carrying the stories of the victims. Photos of their faces stood out in color against the black wood.

More than 20 organizations co-sponsored the march, including academic women’s studies centers, Planned Parenthood, gay and lesbian alliances, and several labor organizations. Providing 20 years of organizational stability to this kind of coalition building is the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. www.esperanzacenter.org

At Plaza del Zacate, speakers and entertainers included Betita Martinez -- Chicana social justice activist, writer and educator -- Suzy Bravo, Amanda Flores, Kiawitl Xochitl, and many more.

I guess it takes 70 miles down an interstate to experience the kind of coalition work that Austin doesn’t dare to dream of. I marched with a contingent of Austin CodePink. It was invigorating to be part of an effort that transcended the divides of race, class, and sexual preference. An excerpt of the coalition’s vision statement states:

We, like women and girls all over the world, are the voices of conscience, the roots of change, and the leaders of local and global movements. We seek healthcare, housing, education, environmental justice, and fair wages not just for women, but also as people of color, as youth and elders, as immigrants and indigenous people, as lesbian, bisexual, intersex, two-spirit, transgender, and queer women, and as poor, and working class people.

We oppose all forms of violence. We advocate for reproductive choice. We call for an end to war, genocide, and occupation. We claim our own voices and come together to share them in public spaces. We march in solidarity with women and social justice movements around the world.

• For more of Alice Embree's photos, go here.

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The Women of Bolivia : A Reason to Celebrate

Bolivia's President Evo Morales congratulates his new Minister of Productive Development Antonia Rodriguez Medrano in La Paz on 23 Jan 2010. Photo by Juan Karita / AP.
International Women's Day:
In Evo Morales' Bolovia
Women are playing a major role

By Richard Lee / The Rag Blog / March 8, 2010

LA PAZ, Bolivia -- Usually my birthday message, on International Working Women’s Day, is a report of little progress for women. This year is different. This year women have something to celebrate as do I.

The country of Bolivia has a new Constitution which in part frees women from the yoke of Catholicism, and a new way to govern, which includes women at all levels of government.

The women of La Paz, a double victory

In the early 19th Century, Bolivian women fought alongside men for the country's independence from colonial Spain. They stormed into battle on horseback, seized cities and were on the front line. But their presence on the battlefield did not translate into presence in the political life of their nation. For many, their education, job opportunities and political rights were limited -- until now.

Justice Minister Nilda Copa. Photo by Chávez / IPS.
Recently appointed Justice Minister, Nilda Copa, who started her political career as a trade unionist told the BBC at her office, "for a long time, we women have been excluded -- it was one of the dark legacies of the colonial model. I remember my mother didn't know how to read and write, neither did my grandmother... not because they didn't want to learn."

Ms. Copa joined a trade union very young, when she was only 16, because she felt a drastic change was needed and that was the only platform where women "had some voice."

And that change seems to have arrived. Today, posters proclaiming the slogans of female Bolivian heroes such as indigenous rebel Bartolina Sisa and independence icon Juana Azurduy plaster the walls of several ministries. That shows the fervor felt in the Bolivia of President Evo Morales, who seems to be changing things not only for the country's indigenous majority, but also for its women.

Half of Mr. Morales's new cabinet is made up of women.

Today women are involved in running the country as never before. Mr. Morales began his second mandate last month with a cabinet reshuffle that complies with the gender parity stated in the new constitution he pushed for. Now the new cabinet has 10 men and 10 women, three of them indigenous.

"There used to be a lot of racism and machismo. There is still some, but now that structure is changing thanks to brother Evo Morales," Ms Copa says. "Today, for example, there are no illiterate women, but women with enough capacity to develop activities at the same level as men. But the fight has been harsh and long."

Her voice trails off and she focuses on a picture of her and Mr. Morales from the times when she was a member of the assembly that wrote Bolivia's new constitution.


The Bolivian cabinet: 50 percent women
Homage

For Mr. Morales, achieving gender parity in the cabinet was a long-held aim. "One of my dreams has come true -- half the cabinet seats are held by women," Mr. Morales said recently. "This is homage to my mother, my sister and my daughter."

Mr. Morales said that since his early days as a leader of the coca trade union, he had always worked towards getting women into decision-making posts based on the chacha warmi, a concept that in the local Aymara indigenous culture means that men and women are complementary in an egalitarian way.

Senator Gabriela Montano

Ms. Montano believes women have been key supporters of Mr. Morales. But another sign that women's political influence is on the rise is the fact that they now occupy an unprecedented 30% of seats in Bolivia's new legislative branch. One of them is Gabriela Montano, a senator who represents the eastern city of Santa Cruz -- Bolivia's opposition heartland -- on behalf of Mr. Morales's party, the “Movement towards Socialism” (MAS).

"This is the fruit of the women's fight: the tangible proofs of this new state, of this new Bolivia, are the increasing participation of the indigenous peoples and the increasing participation of women in the decision-making process of this country," Ms Montano told the BBC.

Senator Gabriela Montano. Photo from BBC.
Ms Montano was the subject of several physical attacks during her stint as the government's envoy to Santa Cruz, and last year she was kept at a secret location as a safety precaution after she was threatened by opposition groups.

"The awakening of women has been brewing for a while. Women have been a key element in the consolidation of this process of change led by President Morales, from the rallies, the protests, the fights. Now, they will be a key element in affairs of national interest," Ms Montano says.

However, while change for women is under way, for some there is still a long way to go until full equality is achieved. "Not long ago, 10 years ago, nobody talked about women in power in this country, that was unimaginable," explains Katia Uriona, of the women's advocacy group Coordinadora de la Mujer. "And even if I applaud all of these victories, I am aware this is not enough. Now we have to see if all of this is translated into something concrete that will truly change the gender face of this country.

A second victory

The new Constitution removes Catholicism, as the state religion. Catholic classes will no longer be taught in schools.

This is another victory for the women of Bolivia. The Pope of Rome and the Cult of the Virgin have long served to oppress the women of South America, (and much of the rest of the world). The denial of human rights such as the right of control over a woman’s own body has been an impediment to the progress of women.

That is no longer so in Bolivia. This second victory for women is enshrined in the new Constitution written with the participation of women. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, here women still don’t have equal rights under the Constitution.

And a personal victory

70 in a row and still counting.

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March Forth in Austin : Students and Faculty Protest Budget Cuts

Naomi Caballero of MACHA speaks at a rally on the West Mall Thursday, protesting budget cuts and tuition increases at UT Austin. Photo by Danielle Villasana / The Daily Texan.
Stop the Cuts Coalition at UT-Austin:
Protest against budget cuts, faculty layoffs

How can anyone think it’s a good idea to lay off lecturers, limit admissions to graduate students, cut services by firing staff, cancel informal classes, close the Cactus Cafe -- in order to give the already privileged even more?

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2010

AUSTIN -- On Thursday, March 4, more than 200 students and staff gathered at the West Mall of the University of Texas to participate in a National Day of Action to Defend Education. Together with workers and students across the country we rallied, spoke out, and marched.

Go here for a map showing actions that took place around the country.

The Stop the Cuts Coalition, started by undergraduate student Laura Evans, organized the action at UT-Austin. The action was endorsed by the Texas State Employees Union, the International Socialist Organization, the Anthropology Graduate Student Association, Students Friends of the Cactus Café, University Democrats, MEChA, ¡ella pelea!, UT Student Prison Caucus, Amnesty International -- UT Chapter, and Join the Impact -- Longhorn chapter.

The Texas State Employees Union (CWA Local 6186 - TSEU), to which I belong, is the largest union local in Texas. We have mobilized in protest of cuts and layoffs on campus since the late summer of 2009. We have collected, with the help of the Coalition, more than 3,000 signatures on a petition to support teachers and staff, stop the cuts, and oppose tuition hikes. for a copy of the petition.

First, let me cite a few statistics about the situation at UT-Austin.

• UT’s total budget 2009-10: $2,140,000,000
• Actual budget deficit: NONE, budget will actually increase by 2.8%
• General number of graduate students admitted to the Department of History each year: over 20
• Maximum number of graduate students who will be admitted to the Department of History in 2010: 8
• Proposed amount reallocated by the College of Liberal Arts to new Liberal Arts building (mainly through cuts to lecturers and AI’s): $3,800,000
• Amount of construction put on hold to save the foreign language program: 0
• 2010 pay raise for football coach Mack Brown: $2,000,000
• Average number of undergrad classes taught by lecturers that Mack Brown’s raise would fund: 400
• Proposed $65 per semester fee to fund a new Student Activity Center, per semester: $3,250,000
• Savings from canceling all informal classes and closing the iconic Cactus Café: $122,000

Go here for more.

I end the list with the closing of the Cactus Café because of its impact on our entire community. That’s the space where Townes Van Zandt and Lyle Lovett and Nancy Griffith played. Andy Smith, Executive Director of the Texas Union, who earns $138,603 a year, made the unilateral decision this year to close the Café. But the story is about much more than statistics.

One morning Jim Rubarth-Lay, a member of our union executive board and UT staff member for 17 years, came to work at 8 a.m. Jim was told to take a laptop, go home by 8:30, and not come back to work again. During the next month he was asked to complete a series of questions, kind of an exit interview, about the best and worst parts of his job. That was in September. Throughout October, Jim spent nearly every lunch hour on the West Mall helping organize our union with a sign “I was cut.” He still is unable to find full-time employment in Austin. The hardship on his family is extreme.

The man in charge of firing 70 workers in Jim’s unit (ITS) is Brad Englert, annual salary $175,000. Prior to his appointment at UT-Austin, Englert worked for the private company Accenture for 22 years, retiring as a senior partner. Accenture’s $899 million contract to privatize and outsource human services in Texas was canceled in 2007, but not until after an estimated 200,000 children had lost CHIP coverage due to Accenture’s incompetence. The Texas State Employees Union (TSEU) was proud to be in the leadership of the successful fight against the company and for the poor of Texas. Now Englert and his kind have found a new home at UT-Austin.

Labor unions often have been accused of putting the financial interests of their members ahead of the public good. This is a stereotype, used to drive a wedge between workers and students -- to the detriment of both. We in TSEU believe in public education, we care deeply about students, and we see no contradiction between the needs of students and the needs of university workers.

We lobby the state legislature for an increase to state funding for UT and inclusion of university workers in an across the board pay-raise for all state workers. That’s how it used to be before 2001. We believe that every public worker is of value, not just a privileged few.

We believe in domestic partner benefits. The lack of equality is shameful.

We oppose tuition hikes, but if tuition is raised we believe that money must go to serve those who endure massive debt just to get a UT education. That means more, not fewer graduate students, more not fewer lecturers, more staff that directly serve students, more classes, smaller class sizes, more services to students and to the community.

Another union member among the many who were laid off is Urban Geographer Eliot Tretter. Dr. Tretter helped the union inform state legislators about the cuts, which resulted in a group of Austin legislative representatives meeting with UT-Austin President William Powers to force a response. Dr. Tretter is a well-known scholar, respected by students and colleagues, who integrates political economy and social theory with questions of urban governance, culture, and urban renewal. Dr. Tretter found out that he had no job by looking at the fall course schedule.

This is no way to treat people even in the hardest of times. But what angers me most is that it has nothing at all to do with budget shortfalls.

This month, UT bought a full-page ad in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It states there was a 7 percent increase in state funding last year. It brags that billions of dollars are available to hire star professors, support research, and build new facilities. The headline reads, “Texas can take you higher.” I don’t think that this is what Sly and his family had in mind.

How can anyone think it’s a good idea to lay off lecturers, limit admissions to graduate students, cut services by firing staff, cancel informal classes, close the Cactus Cafe -- in order to give the already privileged even more?

We should be righteously angry.

We need to build organization on our campus, bringing workers into the union and students into progressive groups. We need to demand our right to transparency -- what’s getting cut and where’s the money going? Faculty, staff, and students need votes; we need inclusion; and we need organizational representation with a share in decision-making. We need to stop the cuts now and in the future. By working collectively, we can create a university that is a place of greater substance, democracy, equality, and community. That’s quality education, more than any kind of excellence rooted in privilege and exclusivity.

March 4 was a beginning.

[Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker frequently associated with Appalshop and a Senior Lecturer at UT-Austin. She was a speaker at the National Day of Action rally on the UT campus. Her film credits include: Morristown: in the Air and Sun, a working class response to globalization; Fast Food Women (POV and London Film Festival Judges' Choice); On Our Own Land about a citizens' effort to stop strip mining (duPont Award); and Associate Director, Harlan County, U.S.A. Anne Braden: Southern Patriot is co-directed with Mimi Pickering. Anne is a proud member of Local 6186 CWA-TSEU and CWA-NABET. Anne's website is www.annelewis.org.]

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Student Protests : Education Funding Cuts vs. Sports Largesse

Students and supporters rallied against funding cuts to higher education at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif. on Thursday, March 4, 2010. Photo by Rich Pedroncelli / AP.
National Day of Action:
Students protest massive funding cuts
While millions goes to coaches, stadiums

By Dave Zirin / March 7, 2010

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." -- Frederick Douglass

On Thursday, I was proud to take part in a student walkout at the University of Maryland in defense of public education. It was just one link in a National Day of Action that saw protests in more than 32 states across the country.

I am not a student, and haven't been since those innocent days when Monica Lewinsky mattered, but I was asked to come speak at a post walkout teach-in about the way sports is used to attack public education. It might sound like a bizarre topic, but it's the world that students see every day.

At the University of Maryland, as tuition has been hiked and classes cut, football coach Ralph Friedgen makes a base salary of 1.75 million bucks, which would be outrageous even if the team weren't two-steps past terrible. Friedgen also gets perks like a $50,000 bonus if none of his players are arrested during the course of the season.

Ground zero of the student protest movement is the University of California at Berkeley. Over at Berkeley, students are facing 32% tuition hikes, while the school pays football coach Jeff Tedford 2.8 million dollars a year and is finishing more than 400 million in renovations on the football stadium. This is what students see: boosters and alumni come first, while they've been instructed to cheer their teams, pay their loans, and mind their business.

The counterargument is that college athletic departments fund themselves and actually put money back into a school's general fund. This is simply not true. The October Knight Commission report of college presidents stated that the 25 top football schools had revenues on average of $3.9 million in 2008. The other 94 ran deficits averaging $9.9 million. When athletic departments run deficits, it's not like the football coach takes a pay cut.

In other words, if the team is doing well, the entire school benefits. If the football team suffers, the entire school suffers. This, to put it mildly, is financial lunacy. A school would statistically be better off if it took its endowment to Vegas and just bet it all on black.

If state colleges are hurting, your typical urban public school is in a world of pain with budgets slashed to the bone. Politicians act like these are problems beyond their control like the weather. ("50% chance of sun and a 40% chance of losing music programs.")

In truth, they are the result of a comprehensive attack on public education that has seen the system starved. One way this has been implemented is through stadium construction, the grand substitute for anything resembling an urban policy in this country.

Over the last generation, we've seen 30 billion in public funds spent on stadiums. They were presented as photogenic solutions to deindustrialization, declining tax bases, and suburban flight. The results are now in and they don't look good for the home teams. University of Maryland sports economists Dennis Coates and University of Alberta Brad R. Humphreys studied stadium funding over 30 years and failed to find one solitary example of a sports franchise lifting or even stabilizing a local economy.

They concluded the opposite: "a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area… Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city's economy."

These projects achieve so little because the jobs created are low wage, service sector, seasonal employment. Instead of being solutions of urban decay, the stadiums have been tools of organized theft: sporting shock doctrines for our ailing cities.

With crumbling schools, higher tuitions, and an Education Secretary in Arne Duncan who seems more obsessed with providing extra money for schools that break their teachers unions, it's no wonder that the anger is starting to boil over. It can also bubble up in unpredictable ways.

On Wednesday night, after the University of Maryland men's basketball team beat hated arch-rival Duke, students were arrested after pouring into the streets surrounding the campus. In years past, these sporting riots have been testosterone run amok, frat parties of burning mattresses and excessive inebriation. This year it was different, with police needing to use pepper spray and horses to quell the 1,500 students who filled Route 1. In response, students chanted, "Defense! Defense!"

At the Thursday teach in, I said to the students that I didn't think there was anything particularly political or interesting about a college sports riot. One person shot his hand up and said, "It wasn't a riot until the cops showed up." Everyone proceeded to applaud.

I was surprised at first that these politically minded students would be defending a post-game melee, but no longer. The anger is real and it isn't going anywhere. While schools are paying football coaches millions and revamping stadiums, students are choosing between dropping out or living with decades of debt. One thing is certain: it aint a game.

[The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

Source / The Nation

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Marc Estrin : Skulkstack

Austin's Echelon Building, which housed offices of the IRS, was destroyed on Feb. 19, 2010, when disgruntled software engineer Joseph Stack allegedly crashing his single-prop Piper Cherokee into building.
Creepy connection:
Stack's attack and my novel Skulk

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2010

Writing fiction is a curious business. Given that most fiction is generated from one's past experience, one finds oneself stroking a lamp whose vapors snake around through lost time, evoke its smell, and sometimes even genie up the future.

Joseph Stack's alleged kamikaze attack on an IRS building in Austin was creepily like the events described in my novel, Skulk, written three years earlier:

Frustrated, well-educated, white Americans with trenchant analyses of what's going on decide to provide America with a teaching moment to kick some ass in a stuck system. They both use or steal single engine planes, and crash them into a local building creating scenes reminiscent of 9/11. They both publish manifestos of dissection and complaint.

Initially, all of this provoked merely a slight smile and a squinty-eyed shaking of my head until the final similarities began to fall into place: embryonic net-rumors of a plot behind the plot, the possible involvement of false flags and patsies and government manipulation.

(Google "stack irs oddities" for a start, or link here or here for good introductions to this material.)

It's too early, and the evidence too skimpy and tenuous to come to any conclusions about the Stack affair. But what has resonance for me is this: in Skulk, although the protagonists were involved in a pedagogic plot of their own, and stalking a possible accomplice, they were simultaneously being stalked by their stalking beast, a secretive department store Santa with an odd knowledge of martial arts, explosives, and access to tools.

Skulk might have been about a simple, if extreme, act of pedagogy. It was planned that way. But while writing, smoke from the past and a whiff of the future curled back into the text, and Santa began to infiltrate the plot, bringing gifts as usual. 
"Gift" means "poison" in German.

So I was struck by this new development in the Stack story, and wonder about how right-on predictive Skulk actually was. Is the MSM reporting as mendacious as that in my novel? Who has been black-hooded? Who benefits by the obscurity?

One thing can be said: Skulk is a lot richer and funnier than the current initial and investigative reporting. Check it out.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

• Find Skulk by Marc Estrin on Amazon.com.

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KBR and the Army : Rewarding Incompetence and Scandal

Image from Ms. Sparky.
Repeating bad behavior:
Houston's KBR gets $2.8 billion contract

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2010

It looks like the United States Army is incapable of learning from past mistakes. On Tuesday, the Army awarded defense giant KBR (once an affiliate of Halliburton) a new contract for support work in Iraq. The contract could be worth as much as $2.8 billion for the Houston-based company.

KBR was quick to jump on the new contract saying, "The award demonstrates that the government recognizes KBR's ability and expertise in delivering high quality service in challenging contingency environments." Despite their bragging, the record shows that KBR has definitely NOT shown "ability and expertise" in its Iraqi operations. Let me remind you of just a few of KBR's screw-ups in Iraq.

First, consider the death of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a 24 year-old Green Beret. Maseth was electrocuted while taking a shower in 2008. It turned out that his death was due to faulty electrical work done by KBR. An investigation then found 17 other deaths due to faulty electrical work, most of it done by KBR. The company was denied $25 million in awards for this shoddy work.

But this was not all. Earlier, it was discovered that KBR had been selling the Army contaminated water. The water caused our soldiers to experience skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, diarrhea, and other illnesses. Instead of fixing the problem, KBR covered it up and continued selling the contaminated water to the Army for THREE YEARS (from January 2004 through December 2006).

And it goes on. In 2005, a young woman named Jamie Leigh Jones was working for KBR in Iraq when she was raped by several male employees of KBR. Did KBR report this to the proper authorities? Of course not! When the young woman tried to go to authorities, they had her kidnapped and held in a shipping container with no food, water or medical help.

Thank goodness there was a single KBR employee with a shred of a conscience who allowed her to use his cell phone. She called her father in the United States, who then called Houston Rep. Ted Poe. Poe contacted the State Department and demanded her release. The State Department sent investigators, who rescued Ms. Jones and got her medical help.

Ms. Jones sued KBR, and instead of doing the right thing, the company is fighting the case tooth-and-nail. They even tried to get the case thrown out of court, claiming that her contract with the company denied her the right to file suit. Fortunately, the court did not buy this feeble argument and ruled she had the right to sue.

These are just some of the more well-known examples of KBR demonstrating its "ability and expertise" in Iraq. I'm sure there are more. KBR has not only not shown a level of excellence, it has not even shown a basic level of competence in Iraq. They have also shown they care little about our soldiers or even about their own employees.

But the company did make billions of dollars from the Iraqi war, and now it stands to make billions more. How can the Army reward this incompetence with a new multi-billion dollar contract? Even the dumbest individuals know better than to touch a stove a second time, after being burned the first time. Why can't the Army learn from its past mistakes?

There are those who think our government is broken. Things like this make me think they could be right.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Leonardo Boff : The World Society of Blindness

Image from Camelia Elias / FRAG/MENTS.
The World Society of Blindness

These are global problems that transcend our paradigm of specialized knowledge. Life does not fit into a formula, nor caring into a calculus equation.

By Leonardo Boff / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2010

Poet Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna and Portuguese Nobel Laureate for literature, Jose Saramago, have made "blindness" a theme of their severe criticisms of present day society, which is based on a reductionist vision of reality. They showed that there are many conceited seers who are blind, and a few blind men who are seers.

It is pompously publicized now that we live in the society of knowledge, a sort a new age of light. Effectively, that is the way it is. We know more and more about less and less. Specialization has colonized all areas of knowledge. The knowledge gained each year is greater than all the knowledge accumulated in the last 40 thousand years. If, on the one hand, this brings undeniable benefits, on the other, it makes us infinitely ignorant, putting blinders over our eyes, and thus preventing us from seeing the whole.

What is at stake now is the totality of human destiny and the future of the biosphere. Objectively, we are paving our way to the abyss. Why is this brutal fact not seen by most specialists; neither by the heads of State, nor by the immense means of mass communication that claim to predict possible scenarios for the future? Simply because, for the most part, they are cloistered within their specific knowledge, in which they are very competent, but which, for the same reason, blinds them to the urgent global problems.

Which of the great centers of world analysis of the 1960's foresaw the climatic changes of the 1990s? Which Nobel laureate in economics foresaw the economic-financial crisis that has devastated the more developed countries in 2008? They were all eminent specialists in their limited fields, but ignorant with respect to the fundamental questions.

In general, we see only that which we understand. Since specialists only understand the small portion that they study, they wind up seeing only that minimum part, remaining blind to the whole. To change this type of Cartesian knowledge we would have to undo consecrated scientific habits and recreate an entire world vision.

That the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, quantum mechanics, and others are independent is an illusion. All areas of knowledge are interdependent, a function of the whole. The science of the Earth system was born of this perception. From it derives the Gaia theory, which is not just a New Age topic, but the result of very detailed scientific observation. It offers a basis for global policies to control the warming of the Earth, which, in order to survive, tends to reduce the biosphere and even the number of living organisms, human beings not excluded.

The COP-15 on climate change in Copenhagen was emblematic. Since in our culture the majority is held hostage to its habit of the atomization of knowledge, what dominated the speeches of the heads of state were limited interests: levels of carbon, degrees or warming, investment quotas and other partial data. The central question was different: what destiny do we want for the totality that is our Common House? What can we collectively do to guarantee the necessary conditions, such that Gaia may continue being inhabitable for us and all other living beings?

To grasp that whole, we need systemic learning, together with cordial and compassionate reason, because it is this type of reasoning that moves us to action.

We urgently need to develop the capacity for integrating, for interacting, the capacity of re-linking, of re-thinking, to re-do that which has been undone; and the capacity to innovate. This challenge is addressed to all specialists, so that they may be convinced that a part without the whole is not a part.

By integrating all these pieces of knowledge we will redesign the global view of reality, to be understood, loved and cared for. That totality is central to a planetary consciousness: yes, this one, the era of a guiding light that will free us from the blindness that afflicts us.

Translated from the Spanish by Melina Alfaro.

[A Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, and author of more than 60 books, Leonardo Bofff lives in Jardim Araras, an ecological wilderness area in the municipality of Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Boff is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. A former Franciscan priest with a doctorate from the University of Munich, Boff was an early advocate of liberation theology. In 1991, after a series of clashes with the Vatican, Boff renounced his activities as a priest and "promoted himself to the state of laity."]

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Earth to Obama : Nuclear Just Can't Cut It

Dreamscape VII by Midnight-digital / Flickr / The End of Capitalism.

Not in your wildest dreams:
Five reasons nuclear just isn't sustainable

By Alex Knight / The Rag Blog / March 6, 2010

President Obama recently announced an $8.3 billion loan of taxpayer dollars for the construction of two new nuclear reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia. He has also proposed tripling the loans for new nuclear reactors to $54 billion in his 2011 budget.

In his announcement he argued, “To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we’ll need to increase our supply of nuclear power. It’s that simple.”

Sadly, Mr. Obama is mistaken on all points.

If by “we” the President means to speak on behalf of his Wall Street advisers and the industrial capitalist system he represents, “our” energy needs are not growing. They’re shrinking along with the economy. And while preventing the worst consequences of climate change is necessary, nuclear power is not. It’s not necessary by any stretch of the imagination.

Here are five simple reasons why nuclear is not a sustainable solution to the energy woes of the 21st Century:

1. Nuclear is too expensive.

In economic hard times such as ours, we need cheap, readily-available sources of energy to create jobs and keep the lights on. Nuclear is the opposite. Nuclear reactors require billions of dollars of government subsidies just to be built, because no private investors wants to throw their money into an expensive and dangerous project that might never produce a return.

To grab those government subsidies, nuclear companies regularly lowball their price tags, knowing they’ll have to beg for more money later and that the feds will always give in. The recent TIME article, “Why Obama’s Nuclear Bet Won’t Pay Off,” explains:

If you want to understand why the U.S. hasn’t built a nuclear reactor in three decades, the Vogtle power plant outside Atlanta is an excellent reminder of the insanity of nuclear economics. The plant’s original cost estimate was less than $1 billion for four reactors. Its eventual price tag in 1989 was nearly $9 billion, for only two reactors. But now there’s widespread chatter about a nuclear renaissance, so the Southern Co. is finally trying to build the other two reactors at Vogtle. The estimated cost: $14 billion. And you can be sure that number is way too low, because nuclear cost estimates are always way too low.

Environment America’s report, “Generating Failure: How Building Nuclear Power Plants Would Set America Back in the Race Against Global Warming," explains nuclear’s faulty economics further:

Market forces have done far more to damage nuclear power than anti-nuclear activists ever did. The dramatic collapse of the nuclear industry in the early 1980s -- described by Forbes magazine as the most expensive debacle since the Vietnam War -- was caused in large measure by massive cost overruns driven by expensive safety upgrades after the Three Mile Island accident revealed shortcomings in nuclear plant design. These made nuclear power plants far more expensive than they were supposed to be. Some U.S. power companies were driven into bankruptcy and others spent years restoring their balance sheets.

At the end of the day, there are much cheaper and better ways to produce energy. The TIME article points out, “Recent studies have priced new nuclear power at 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, about four times the cost of producing juice with new wind or coal plants, or 10 times the cost of reducing the need for electricity through investments in efficiency.”

Instead of pouring billions of dollars into something the market wants to keep its distance from, why not spend that money on efficiency improvements or wind and solar, for which there is a growing market and massive public support?

2. Nuclear is too inefficient.

A big part of why nuclear is so expensive is that it’s incredibly inefficient as an energy source, requiring a high proportion of energy inputs as compared to what it produces in output. Between the cost of building the plants and equipment (tons of steel, concrete, and intricate machinery), mining the uranium, enriching the uranium, operating under stringent safety regulations, disposing the radioactive waste, and eventually decommissioning the plants, there is a tremendous about of energy and money poured in to nuclear reactors, making the energy they produce proportionally less impressive than is often touted.

Because of all the secrecy and bureaucracy involved in nuclear operations, we have no thorough documentations of exactly how much energy must be invested in order to produce a return (this fraction is sometimes called Energy Returned on Energy Invested -- EROEI).

Gene Tyner carried out one such study called “Net Energy from Nuclear Power” and estimated that “an ‘optimistic’ one‑plant analysis shows that one plant may yield about 3.8 times as much energy as is input to the system over a 40‑year period.” The “pessimistic” estimate was just 1.86, meaning less than twice the energy expended is returned through electricity.

Once again, these statistics are significantly worse than for wind, solar, or increased efficiency, each of which would produce much more net energy with the same levels of input. Wind, for example, could reach in
excess of 50:1 EROEI.

Nuclear’s energy numbers are only going to get worse as time goes on and the quantity of high-concentration uranium in the world continues to be depleted. Mining lower-quality uranium, in more difficult environments, will further reduce the net energy that nuclear can produce. Indeed, this is a whole separate problem, but nuclear is unlikely to be any kind of replacement for fossil fuels in the long run anyway, with studies stating that Peak Uranium will be here “before 2040 at the latest.”

3. Nuclear emits too much CO2 and other chemicals.

Nuclear is often touted by corporations and politicians as a “clean” energy source because the electricity generation process itself produces little to no carbon dioxide, the most notorious greenhouse gas responsible for driving our climate into chaos. However, nuclear does emit
substantial greenhouse gas pollution, of both carbon dioxide and other chemicals, if we look at its complete production profile:

...the nuclear fuel cycle does release CO2 during mining, fuel enrichment and plant construction. Uranium mining is one of the most CO2 intensive industrial operations and as demand for uranium grows CO2 emissions are expected to rise as core grades decline. According to calculations by the Öko-Institute, 34 grams of CO2 are emitted per generated kWh in Germany. The results from other international research studies show much higher figures – up to 60 grams of CO2 per kWh.

In total, a nuclear power station of standard size (1,250MW operating at 6,500 hours/annum) indirectly emits between 376,000 million tonnes (Germany) and 1,300,000 million tonnes (other countries) of CO2 per year. In comparison to renewable energy, nuclear power releases 4-5 times more CO2 per unit of energy produced taking account of the whole fuel cycle.

[....]

Aside from radioactive wastes, other waste and pollutants from the manufacture of nuclear reactor fuel include mercury, arsenic and cadmium, which are disposed of on and off site, and hydrochloric acid aerosols, fluorine and chlorine gas, which are released into the air.

None of this pollution is acceptable. Mercury and arsenic in particular are known carcinogens, meaning they cause cancer, along with birth defects and other devastating illnesses. The location of the plants, as is typical, tends to distribute the negative health effects primarily to poor communities and communities of color, making this an environmental justice issue as well.

It just doesn’t make sense. Why invest in a technology that is excessively dirty when compared to genuinely clean sources of energy like wind or solar?

Quoting once more from Environment America’s report:

Building 100 new reactors would require an up-front investment on the order of $600 billion dollars – money which could cut at least twice as much carbon pollution by 2030 if invested in clean energy. Taking into account the ongoing costs of running the nuclear plants, clean energy could deliver as much as 5 times more pollution-cutting progress per dollar overall.

4. Nuclear risks radioactive disaster.

So far we haven’t mentioned the traditional argument against nuclear reactors, that they 1) produce radioactive waste which we have nowhere to put, and 2) have the potential to melt down or be struck by a terrorist attack, which could cause almost inconceivable ecological calamity.

Few Americans realize how close we came to having to evacuate most of the Eastern Seaboard if the partial meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island in 1979 had caused an explosion in the core. This nearly happened, and the warning that the Three Mile Island disaster has given us about the extreme danger of nuclear reactors needs to be recalled today.

The reality is that even without an apocalyptic Chernobyl-style or 9/11-style event, nuclear fission everyday produces hundreds of poisonous and radioactive toxins which did not exist on Earth before the 1940s. Each nuclear plant creates approximately 1,000 metric tons of high- and low-level waste yearly, which will not fully degrade for literally thousands of years. And this is only the most controlled aspect of the problem.

As Harvey Wasserman explained on Democracy Now!, lesser-known radioactive leaks are sadly a regular occurance at nuclear facilities:

There’s a huge fight going on, by the way, in Vermont right now, where the people of the state of Vermont are trying to shut the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which has been leaking tritium. And if you’re not aware of this, twenty-seven of the 104 nuclear plants in the United States have been confirmed to be leaking tritium now. These are plants that have been around for twenty, thirty years. If they can’t control more than a quarter of the operating reactors in the United States and prevent them from leaking tritium, what are they doing turning around with this technology and pouring many more billions of dollars of our money into it? It’s an absolute catastrophe, and we will stand up to it.

An update on Wasserman’s story: On February 24, the Vermont Senate voted to close the Yankee plant in part due to these concerns about radioative leaks.

The bottom line is that while billions of dollars can be spent to secure the radioactive fuels and waste, there will always be a risk that things will go wrong due to technological breakdown or human error, and the consequences could be dire.

The only safe way to deal with nuclear reactors is to shut them down.

5. Funding nuclear is another corporate bailout.

So if nuclear energy is too expensive, too inefficient, too polluting, and too dangerous, why in the world are our well-intentioned political leaders like President Obama promoting such a technology? Have they lost their minds? No. The better question, as is usually the case in Washington, is who stands to benefit from this decision?

And the obvious answer is the nuclear industry, which has relied on government subsidies for half a century, and continues to swindle the public out of our hard-earned tax dollars with outdated lies about cheap, abundant, clean nuclear power.

Just like the defense industry or the banks, nuclear companies like Exelon use their high-placed connections in Washington to secure government contracts, loans, and bailouts behind the backs of the public, and it doesn’t really matter whether there’s a Democrat or Republican in the White House.

Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! reported on the Obama Administration’s ties to Big Nuclear:

Exelon is not just a nuclear power industry generator, it’s the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the United States. I think it has 17. And the firm was a major -- has historically been a major backer of President Obama. And two of his chief aides have ties to Exelon. Rahm Emanuel, as an investment banker, helped put together the deal that eventually merged, created Exelon. And David Axelrod was a lobbyist for Exelon. So there are very close ties between the chairman of Exelon, John Rowe, and the Obama administration.

We need to understand the actions of politicians within their context. The context for President Obama’s announcement of $8 billion in loans to a nuclear reactor in Georgia and tripling the federal government’s funding of nuclear energy in his 2011 budget, is a nuclear industry that’s been on the run from its crippling problems for 30 years, and needs a big boost from the taxpayers in order to compete with less expensive, less controversial energy sources like wind and solar.

Then you have the reality of a failed political system that relies far more on corporate donations and advertising than it does on genuine democratic participation, so that politicians like Obama are structurally dependent on pandering to corporate/financial donors to get elected and stay elected, and you have a recipe for systemic corruption and giveaways.

Ben Schreiber, climate and energy tax analyst of Friends of the Earth,
Source" target="_blank">put it succinctly, “The last thing Americans want is another government bailout for a failing industry, but that’s exactly what they’re getting from the Obama administration.”

So what should the government be putting its (our) money into instead?

I’ve made the obvious suggestion of wind and solar power, which are cheaper and produce energy more efficiently than nuclear. Wind and solar also have the added benefit of being appropriate for local, small-scale energy production.

Given the resources and trained in the skills, communities can install wind towers and solar cells, maintain them, and distribute their output themselves, without the intermediaries of corporations or government. This not only creates many thousands of jobs, it also opens up possibilities for a 21st Century that could be more democratic, locally-rooted, and decentralized than the last one.

What are your ideas? What would YOU do if you were in Obama’s position and could throw $50-some billion around towards an actually sustainable economy?

[Alex Knight is an organizer and writer in Philadelphia. He is currently organizing with Philly Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and working with others to mobilize Philadelphia for the US Social Forum this June 22-26 in Detroit. He also maintains the website endofcapitalism.com and is in the process of writing a book called The End of Capitalism. He can be reached at activistalex@gmail.com]

Also see:

• Harvey Wasserman: Putting Lipstick on a Radioactive Pig by Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / February 24, 2010
• Nuke Loan Guarantees: Obama's Atomic Blunder by Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / February 17, 2010
• Remembering the Killing of Karen Silkwood by Alex Knight / The End of Capitalism / August 11, 2009

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