On Sunday I sent you a slate of candidates for KPFK's Local
Station Board. I've been asked for names of endorsers and those
who chose the slate. Here are names you should recognize, most
of whom (including me) actively chose the slate after considering
all candidates and interviewing many. Please donate to the fund drive.
-Ed
Committee to Strengthen KPFK slate endorsers include:
Blase & Theresa Bonpane*, Office of the Americas,
Don Bustany,
Tom Camerlla,
Vernicia Green,
Jordan Davis*, President , Coalition of California Black School Board
Members,
Lila Garrett,
Jan Goodman*, Paul Robeson Com. Cntr.,
Ian Masters,
Terrence McNally,
Barbara Osborne,
Shawn Casey O'Brien,
Ed Pearl,
Ricco Ross,
Mansoor Sabbagh*, Global Voices for Justice,
Henry Slucki
Carol Spooner,
Roy (of Hollywood) Tuckman,
Cristina Vazquez, Reg. VP. Workers UniteD (formerly UNITE/ILGWU,
Donna Warren*, Families to End 3 Strikes,
Noel Wiggins , President, Black America Political Association of California,
BAPAC,
Roy Ulrich,
Jon Weiner,
Suzi Weissman,
Marcy Winograd,
Prof. Lamont Yeakey*, Robeson Center.
*Org. Affiliations for Identification only
Thanks
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090928/younge
A Method to Their Madness
By Gary Younge
The Nation: September 9, 2009 (In the September 28, 2009 edition)
Spare a thought, and maybe even a dime, for Kenneth Gladney. In August he
and other members of the right-wing St. Louis Tea Party arrived at a
town-hall meeting organized by Missouri Democrat Russ Carnahan to lobby
against universal healthcare. In the spirit of this fraught summer, a fight
broke out, ending in six arrests.
Who threw the first punch depends on whom you ask. But who got the worst of
it was fairly clear. Gladney was taken to the emergency room with injuries
to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face and ended up in a wheelchair.
His troubles were just beginning. Recently laid off, this particular
anti-health reform protester, it turned out, had no health insurance. Last
heard, he was still accepting donations for his medical expenses.
It's not difficult to ridicule the American right. Its peculiar blend of
paranoia, mania, fantasy and misanthropy has been given full rein these past
few months. Those who demanded in July to see Obama's birth certificate
(which does exist) ended August invoking the British healthcare system's
"death panels" (which do not). That most of their claims were verifiably
false was of little consequence--to them at least. At one point they
insisted that if scientist Stephen Hawking were British and subject to the
National Health Service, he would be dead, even though Hawking is British,
alive and grateful to the NHS for his care.
So progressives could be forgiven for branding the right as stupid and
crazy. But they would also be wrong. For if this is madness, there is great
method in it. It is well organized and well funded. It has proven effective
in mobilizing support, creating "controversy" where little exists and
disrupting and disorienting whatever national conversation there is. If it
is stupid, then what does it say about us, since time and again it manages
to outmaneuver the left? Annoying, bizarre, incoherent, divisive,
intolerant, small-minded, misinformed, ill informed and disinformed,
certainly. But stupid and crazy--anything but. It takes considerable skill
to convince people that something that is clearly good for them--like
universal healthcare--is not. If the right is crazy, it is crazy like a Fox
News presenter. Reducing a political strategy or belief to a psychological
disorder to dismiss and ridicule its proponents may be comforting. But it
also abandons any hope of defeating it or stymieing its influence beyond
therapy.
There are three important points to acknowledge about people like Gladney.
First, they are not new. The cold war in general and McCarthyism in
particular was built on lies, misinformation, obsession and guilt by the
most tenuous of associations. After Eisenhower defeated Taft at the 1952 GOP
convention, a woman emerged insisting, "This means eight more years of
socialism." In the late 1940s, a chairman of a federal loyalty review board
conceded, "Of course, the fact that a person believes in racial equality
doesn't prove that he's a communist. But it certainly makes you look twice,
doesn't it? You can't get away from the fact that racial equality is part of
the communist line." Today the Internet distributes these slurs faster, and
cable TV gives them more outlets. But there has always been a sizable
section of society that seeks to fashion a bespoke reality out of whole
cloth. These are the people who believe that civil rights was really about
miscegenation, abortion rights is about promiscuity and gay rights is about
pedophilia. There are more of them than we'd like to think. And they are not
going away.
Second, you can't argue with them. A good two and a half weeks after failed
rescue efforts during Hurricane Katrina left bodies floating in the streets
and people abandoned on roofs, 35 percent of the country believed that
George W. Bush had done a good or excellent job responding to the crisis.
That is roughly the proportion of the country with whom there is no real
means of engagement. These are the birthers, Swiftboaters, climate change
skeptics, Obamaphobes and Palin-tologists--the base. They live in a
politically parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as
they do. They don't like established facts, so they come armed with their
own. The left has such people too, but they are marginal. With no news
channels to promote them or Congressmen prepared to advocate for them, their
views rarely reach the mainstream.
Third, we can beat them. These people gain the kind of purchase that shifts
them from an irritant to an obstacle only when there is a vacuum of
leadership and the absence of good alternatives. It is only under these
conditions that they are able to cast unreasonable doubt in the reasonable
minds of those who seek clarification, encouragement or a stake in any
substantive change. This is precisely what has happened with the healthcare
debate over the past few months.
Less than a third of the country believes Obama has clearly explained his
plans for healthcare reform. Two-thirds of independents and more than a
third of Democrats believe he hasn't. According to a CNN poll, only one in
five believes he or she will be better off after healthcare reform has
passed, and 40 percent say they are confused by the proposals. Who can blame
them?
A decisive portion of the country is desperate to be convinced. They know
that what they have now is terrible but have yet to be convinced that what
might come is better. How could it be otherwise when the very person who
launched the reform process--the president--keeps hedging on its most
essential element: the public option? The only thing that is controversial
about universal healthcare is that America does not have it. The idea that a
Democratic president with substantial Democratic majorities in both houses
of Congress might fail to pass healthcare reform, well, that's enough to
make anyone crazy.
About Gary Younge
Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute,
is the New York correspondent for the Guardian and the author of No Place
Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi) and
Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press). He
is also a contributor to The Notion. more...
***
From: "Suzanne de Kuyper" <suzannedk@gmail.com>
Almost all of Bush's signing laws are still in force. The plan to stay in
Iraq and Afghanistan another fifty years is fully operational. The plan to
control Iran as completely as possible for more than fifty years is on the
table. US and now EU foreign policies are that of AIPAC and Israel.
The Nethelands and the Belgium Queens were both threatened as if by
madmen at the exact time Brussels was perparing to demand the
Israeli/ Netherlands Agreement signed days before the Gaza attack
be shelved until the Palestinians had a state and peace.
Spy planes control the skies over Dutch cities paranoid of unrest by
immigrants, as the country has thirty thousand reluctant troops in NATO
war planning and fighting. More troops are being demanded. Presidents
do not have much power in the best of times, with the Military/Industrial/
Media/Internet Complex, Obama has no chance. He never did, that is why
they let him win.
He is the anomoly Roosevelt was, without the clout, the connections to power
from birth.
Suzanne suzannedk@gmail.com
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