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A group of citizens has called for a general strike on 9/11. Read about it here.
Has there ever been a successful nationwide general strike in the United States? Thank God the organizers aren’t calling for a “turn off your TV day.” I wouldn’t have the strength to forego the Bionic Woman fall sneak peak. I’m only human.
Fellow blogger Gayle Roberts is hosting this month’s Giving Carnival. She’s inviting all comers to write on the future of fundraising. Here’s WCT’s contribution ...
One of the most significant barriers to online giving is all the stuff that needs to happen between the time you’re moved by that National Public Radio story about homeless children and the moment you confirm your online credit card donation to Helping Homeless Children, Inc.
You’re required to start your computer, launch your browser, do a Google search for the appropriate charity, click the “Donate Now” button on the charity’s website, wait until you’re transported to the appropriate giving page, fetch your credit card, fill in the required fields, and confirm your gift.
Ten years from now, sensors surgically implanted in your brain by the Department of Homeland Security will automatically register your intention to give and send radio signals to your government-monitored bank account. A donation in the appropriate amount will be transferred to one of the DHS-approved organizations on the Patriot’s List of Market-Based Solutions to Social Problems. Finally, to confirm the transaction, a wireless signal will stimulate your pleasure center.
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Image source: [email protected]
P O S T E D B Y S A L L Y
This past April, and without much fanfare, the Center for American Progress released the final report of its Taskforce on Poverty. The report, titled From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half, lays out twelve recommendations the authors believe could cut poverty* in half over the next ten years. Taskforce recommendations range from raising and indexing the minimum wage to promoting unionization to helping former prisoners reintegrate with their communities. Omitted from the list of recommendations is any mention of universal health care, but who’s going to quibble with a plan that promises to reduce the ranks of the poor so dramatically?
You can download a copy of the report here. The Poverty and Race Research Action Council invited a range of policy experts and activists to comment on the plan in its July/August 2007 newsletter, available here.
If the body of the Taskforce report provides food for thought, its “Next Steps” section makes for an unsatisfying end to the meal:
In 2009, we will have a new president and a new Congress. Across the nation, there is a yearning for a shared national commitment to build a better, fairer, more prosperous country, with opportunity for all.
There can, and should, be active debate about the best ways to reach a national goal of cutting poverty in half. We hope and believe there is a potential for people of differing parties, ideologies, and stations in life to come together in shared commitment to the goal.
At the same time, we need not and should not wait for the federal government to act. In communities across the nation, policymakers, business leaders, people of faith, and concerned citizens can come together to ask what they can do within their community and how they can join with others to seek a national commitment to cut poverty in half in 10 years …
Yes, I suppose they can.
In his comments on the report, Herbert Gans, professor of sociology emeritus at Columbia University, calls this a bit of “consensual rhetoric,” pointing out, if I may paraphrase, that the American public doesn’t generally give a pig’s freckle about the poor.
If and when we hear that joyful tintinnabulation of the bells in 2009, will this report be remembered, I wonder? Will it resonate with a polity that was all too quick to forget the more immediate and powerful promptings of Hurricane Katrina?
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* A family of four is considered poor if the family’s income is below $19,971. By this standard, roughly one in eight Americans were poor in 2005; one in three had incomes below 200 npercent of the federal poverty threshold.
Image source: phillyringers.com
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
1. In case you haven’t heard all the hoopla, sociologist Robert Putnam, most famous for his book Bowling Alone, has published a new article arguing that “In the short to medium run, … immigration and ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital.”
2. It’s an excellent article; a thought-provoking read. Apart from a dicey section on the multivariate analysis of data to control for the effect of certain variables, the study is accessible to non-experts like me. Don’t make the same mistake as 98 percent of the people who are currently dismissing Putnam’s results: read the article for yourself.
3. An aside: More interesting than Putnam’s article, in my view, has been the sociology of its reception. There’s a palpable hesitancy, in polite liberal circles, to bring up the subject. First, it’s never his article, but rather somebody’s gloss on it that my colleagues suggest I read. Second, no person of conscience broaches the subject of Putnam’s article unless, in the same breath, he also recommends a book or article that purports to advance a countervailing thesis. Putnam’s work is clearly radioactive.
4. Never fear the truth, whatever it might be.
5. Putnam’s article might ultimately rival Christine Letts’s “Virtuous Capital” for the volume of eyebrow-raising commentary it will generate—much of it, I predict, involving a great deal of hand-wringing.
6. Liberals are in some ways hoist on their own petard: Putnam uses variation in ethnic/racial category as a proxy for “diversity.” This is what I sometimes refer to as the Whitman’s Sampler Model of diversity, an impoverished notion that enables well-meaning liberals to declare victory when they have “one of these, one of these, and one of those” on their staff or on their board.
7. Putnam’s results will play handily to those conservatives who believe that self-segregation works with, rather than against, “the grain of human nature.” We hear this kind of argument in apologetics for “a conservatism comfortable with materialist self-interest.” These same conservatives will likely pass over in silence those sections of the article that review the many benefits of increased immigration and diversity: greater creativity; better, faster problem-solving; and more rapid economic growth, among others. Putnam never argues that diversity is, on balance, a bad thing.
8. Putnam’s results discredit the idea that greater diversity is correlated with increased inter-ethnic hostility. He stresses that “[d]iversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation.” To put it another way, “In more diverse settings, Americans distrust not merely people who do not look like them, but even people who do.”
9. Putnam points out that:
All our empirical analysis to this point has involved ‘comparative statics’—that is, we have compared people living in places with different ethnic mixes at one point in time—namely different American communities in the year 2000. Although our evidence does suggest that it is the level of diversity that matters, not the rate of change, we have not yet considered any ‘dynamic’ evidence about the effects of immigration and diversity over long periods of time within a single place (whether a single community or the nation as a whole). Exploring the dynamics, as opposed to the comparative statics, of diversity and social capital requires entirely different methods, and my research group has only begun to explore those avenues.
What would these further studies likely reveal?
10. Finally, and most importantly in my opinion, Putnam doesn’t argue that we can’t learn to respond to ethnic and racial diversity better than we currently do. We’re not fated forever to respond irrationally to fear of the “other,” however much recent history has inclined us to this view.
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
(An excerpt from The Last Shout, Part 2. London, 1996. The Monsoons’ kitchen. Edina is opening her mail.)
Edina: (Reading letter.) Do I want to do something on the Millennium Committee? Do I want to do something for the Millennium? (To Patsy.) Do you think I should do that?
Patsy: (Pinning up her hair.) Well, when is it?
Edina: (Looking at letter.) It doesn’t say. (To Saffy.) Darling, when is it, when is it, the Millennium?
Saffy: (Pointedly.) The year 2000.
Edina: (Balling up letter.) Well, why are they bothering me now, eh? Anyway, I know exactly what they should do.
Saffy: (Disdainfully.) What? Let me guess: a free Stones concert in Hyde Park.
Edina: No, no, no. A huge worldwide bacchanalian feast. They should just live it, darling.
Patsy: And a free Stones concert, Eddy.
Edina: (Quickly agreeing.) Yeah, and a free Stones concert.
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Image source: Morty’s TV
WCT roving reporter Rachel Tension is covering this late-breaking item about the federal government’s training of clergy to quell dissent by citing Romans 13 during martial law. Blogger Sally Wilde is following the story from WCT’s Colorado office …
Sally: What’s the mood in Shreveport, Rachel?
Rachel: It’s business as usual, Sally, people are shopping mostly. Earlier today I interviewed John Blanchard, chief minister at Saint Eulalia’s here in Shreveport. Father Blanchard told me he had trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, with a group of clergy who were subsequently deployed to secret CIA camps to (quote) help the faithful find solace in the moments before they experienced an accidental death. I’ll have more on that later. Back to you, Sally …
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Image source: No Utopia
Many thanks to bUM fREE for the tip.
P O S T E D B Y S T U A R T
Via Mother Jones
K. Daniel Glover, editor of National Journal’s Technology Daily and the author of its Beltway Blogroll, was criticized by prominent citizens of the Blogosphere this past December after he wrote a New York Times op-ed describing the cozy relationship between some A-list bloggers and various presidential campaigns. Some of these bloggers, he noted, disclosed their campaign connections only after being outed. Mr. Glover was surprised at the bloggers’ “thin-skinned” reaction to his op-ed.
Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD, lays part of the blame for this strong response on journalists who insist—strangely—that the ethical standards of their profession should also apply to bloggers. Armstrong was himself strongly criticized two years ago when he suggested that
the campus blogethicists don’t understand … that we are at war out here every day on the front lines as partisan Democratic activist bloggers against a Republican machine that uses whatever means it takes to win. So, if it’s not against the law, I don’t want to hear about it, because in the political arena, the first thing that matters in elections and campaigns is winning …
Is this an example of that “muscular liberalism” I’ve heard so much about? If so, a-rrrrr. Vigorous suspensions of the ethical get my jing-jang all wibbly-wobbly, especially when they invoke military metaphors.
Front-line-alicious!
It’s no doubt a burden for Mr. Armstrong to absolve himself—for all our sakes—of moral responsibility. We need to honor his sacrifice by applying the same principles to the execution of the War on Terror. Let’s defeat the enemy first, and later, at a more convenient time, as we dig up the mass graves and convene some Senate panels, we can indulge our feeling for ethics.
Hey, you chicken-hearted liberals: Not one more word about your moral scruples until Johnny comes marching home, dig?
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Image source: Right Wing News
P O S T E D B Y S A L L Y
Everything communicates. Learning what this means is one of the keys to good citizenship and good philanthropy.
I’ll state the case more strongly: The health of our society depends critically on the ability of each citizen to read, listen, and observe deeply; to interpret thickly; and to understand the promises and beguilements of media, both old and new. Because most of us lack these skills, or worse, fail to exercise them, we’re in danger of throwing away our democracy. We leave ourselves at the mercy of those who can exploit our ignorance to advance narrow interests.
Recent history has shown us, in a very dramatic way, how manipulation of the media can take a powerful nation into an immoral, disastrous war against an imagined threat.
The vast majority of Americans simply sleepwalk through the news. We consistently fail to detect propaganda, bias, and censorship in the media we consume.
Just as young people learn about the three branches of government in their civics classes, they should learn to identify lead-ins, angles, and talking points—and think critically about them. When they see an image, they should ask, “What’s missing from it? How was it manipulated? Why was this chosen by the editors from among all possible images?” Instead of passively watching television, they should pay close attention to the carefully constructed juxtapositions of images and sounds; they should make note of who’s given the last word in a discussion; they should challenge the narrow frame of a debate. And they should always make a point of asking, “Who pays for the news?”
I don’t think it’s an accident that in our hemisphere only Canada has mandated media literacy in its school curricula. In Europe, it was the Nordic socialist democracies that led the way.
Unfortunately, staying well informed and immunizing ourselves against manipulation by the media is only one battle in the larger war of ideas currently being fought on home turf. Once we know the truth, how will we be motivated to act? And what are the values that will animate us or fail to animate us?
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Favorite media literacy links:
Action Coalition for Media Education
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Source of images: Media Literacy Clearinghouse
We asked Q—, a national immigrant rights advocate, to describe the current environment in her field.* Here’s her surprising answer …
“The immigrant rights movement is going through an overwhelming, tense, and confused time, which is hopefully setting the stage for changes that have been needed for a long time.
“The down side:
“A lot of people didn’t like the immigration reform legislation in the Senate this year. But now the only thing that might have been a solution is gone, and both political parties are saying they won’t pursue anything comprehensive and humane for at least the next several years. And that means the lives of immigrants are likely to get a lot worse before they start to get better.
“We’re facing the entrenchment and elaboration of a separate and unequal legal system for immigrants that doesn’t provide checks and balances necessary for ensuring that the government follows the law.
“We’re facing a lack of hope among Americans—including immigration activists—that the federal government can fix anything, let alone anything as complicated as immigration policy.
“We’re facing an overwhelming number of anti-immigrant measures introduced in cities and states. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures,
As of July 2, 2007, no fewer than 1404 pieces of legislation related to immigrants and immigration had been introduced among the 50 state legislatures. From January to July 2nd 2007, 170 bills became law in 41 states ... State legislators have introduced roughly two-and-a-half times more bills in 2007, than in 2006. The number of enactments from 2006 (84) has more than doubled to 170 in 2007 ... In the continued absence of a comprehensive federal reform of the United States’ challenged immigration system, states have displayed an unprecedented level of activity.
“We’re facing racial profiling, as people are being asked for their documentation on traffic stops if they look ‘foreign.’
“We’re facing attacks in Congress that keep chipping away at the rights of immigrants to argue their cases in court, the power of judges to make decisions about individual cases, and assurances that detention facilities keep people safe.
“We’re facing the enforcement of ‘material support’ laws that define immigrants and others as terrorists if they have ever provided any help to a rebel group, even if that rebel group fought alongside American troops, and even if the choice was to carry water for an army or be shot in the head.
“We’re facing a seemingly endless trail of death at the US-Mexico border.
“We’re facing the tangled interests and assumptions of African Americans, Latinos, labor, agribusiness, churches, and practically every other politically powerful interest group.
“Many immigrant rights activists are feeling overwhelmed and scared. A lot of people are angry, and some are more reflective than they had been.
Continue reading "Refreshing Candor From An Immigrant Rights Advocate" »
The Ford Foundation has announced its new president. Luis Antonio Ubiñas, a director at McKinsey & Company and former South Bronx resident, will become the ninth president in Ford’s 70-year history, succeeding Susan Berresford who served in the post for 12 years. The Ford Foundation is the second largest foundation on the planet, with assets of over $12 billion and an annual grantmaking budget of $550 million. Read all about it here.
How will this choice affect Ford’s traditional championing of social justice causes? How will the new president answer the four fundamental questions of philanthropy?
Stay tuned.
P O S T E D B Y A L B E R T
I. Enemies of the Motoring Public
As I drag my way out of a week in the Sierras and crawl up the nearest magazine rack, my vision obscured by hovering midges, I discover in the July/August issue of Mother Jones that I’ve been framed as an elitist enemy of the motoring public, a bugbear of the “non-hiking people.”*
A little known law, Revised Statute 2477, passed in 1866 to encourage development by granting rights-of-way on publicly owned lands, is being used by Washington-hating local officials and big industry lobbyists to stake road claims all over the western states. Trails inside of wilderness areas and national parks are not exempt.
According to San Juan County (Utah) commissioner Lynn Stevens, who is championing an RS 2477 claim on a canyon leading to scenic Angel Arch, “These are cherished, beloved places among [local residents]. … It’s elitist to say if you can’t hike, you’re not entitled to have that beauty.”
The Bush administration is supporting many local claims, despite the fact that the feds are technically the defendants in these cases.
II. The Big Gubmint Lockout
Last year, according to the Mother Jones article, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, “the voice of the American off-road rider,” sponsored an ad
featuring a trio of cigar-chomping gangsters aiming Tommy guns and wearing slouch hats labeled “Sierra Club” and “Wilderness Society.” The headline read, “These guys wanna rub you out! Their racket is to lock you out of YOUR public lands.”
This is a sobering reminder of the value-neutrality of the Third Sector, where one man’s tax deductible donation supports another man’s environmental nightmare.
Continue reading "Highway Robbery: Notes on the RS 2477 Land Grab" »
 John Anger |
 Countess Apraxina |
 Stuart Johnson |
 Dixie Moline |
 Albert Ruesga |
 Sally Wilde |
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