Featured blog entries

Outright Barbarism vs. The Civil Society

Sara Robinson — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:35:14 -0400

I live in a nice place.

I mean that literally. It took some getting used to. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, where people put a premium on being direct and to the point, have no time to waste on small talk or personal sharing, and will call a stupid idea stupid to your face, moving to Canada required a whole lot of gearing back on that brusque American aggressive-in-your-face thing. The humbling fact was: We had to learn to mind our manners.

Much of the adjustment work that first year involved re-learning the art of Being Nice. We had to get used to meetings that started with 10 or 15 minutes of personal chit-chat. We had to train ourselves to stop interrupting people, and to be more careful to say "please" and "thank you." We had to discover (sometimes, the hard way) that losing your temper with Canadians means that you will invariably lose the conflict. The more terse and irritated you get, the more determinedly calm and polite Canadians become, until you're standing there looking like a raving idiot and they're still firmly in control (though they're very sorry you're having such a bad day).

We also learned the unofficial Canadian motto, which is "I'm sorry." Canadians will say "I'm sorry" even if you were the one who bumped into them. (Americans, on the other hand, won't say it at all: apologizing is admitting fault, which is an invitation to lawsuits.) We used to respond to this by pleading with them out of our own misguided sense of Niceness: "No. Please. Don't be sorry. It was MY fault." But after a while, we gave up, went with the flow, and started apologizing for everything, too. It was really...well, nice, once we got used to it.

The whole world makes fun of Canadians' resolute civility -- but once I'd read a little Canadian history, I realized that this Being Nice thing isn't just a cute cultural quirk. In fact, up here, it's is a deadly serious matter of national survival. Canada's 13 provinces and territories are, effectively, three separate nations—each with its own culture, language, religion, and history. On top of that, the country is the world's largest importer of new immigrants, a large fraction of whom are from cultures very different from Canada's aboriginal and European bedrock. The federal constitution that binds all this together is very weak (it's not unlike the U.S.'s original Articles of Confederation), and the overwhelming bulk of government power is still tightly concentrated in the hands of the provincial premiers (that's Canadian for "state governors"). Secession is eminently possible, as the Quebecois so often like to remind us.

In the face of all that, there's the constant possibility—which does not exist in the U.S.—that one cranky politician having one bad day could stand up and say one idiot thing that would cause one faction or another to decamp en masse, thus precipitating the instant demise of Canada-as-we-know-it. The threat is real. It could happen. And the only thing that keeps it from happening is that resolute collective determination to stay calm, keep the peace, and Be Nice.

Civility is, in a very real sense, the glue that holds this big, diverse nation together. Name-calling, othering, and losing one's temper is, quite simply, un-Canadian and unpatriotic. Failure to be civil in public is the fastest way (perhaps the only way) to get Canadians genuinely peeved at you. In the land where "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is supplanted by "peace, order, and good government" as the organizing values, there is simply no excuse at all for that kind of behavior, ever.

Our essential reliance on civil discourse—and the big trouble that awaits us when we try to function without it—is the same idea that Jeffrey Feldman explores, far more pointedly, in his new book, Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. Feldman, whose indispensable Frameshop blog has done a lot of the heavy lifting in deconstructing the way the American right uses and abuses language, briskly and thoughtfully deconstructs seven specific ways 30 years of us-versus-them rhetoric has polarized the country, forced us into unnecessary conflicts against each other and everyone else, and virtually destroyed our ability to govern ourselves.

Dave Neiwert, who coined the term "eliminationist rhetoric" to describe the language Americans have so often used to justify violence against each other, has carefully outlined the process by which ugly talk can easily devolve into horrific action. Call it holocaust, lynching, or apartheid -- whatever the atrocity, it always begins with language that privileges us, dehumanizes them, and somehow justifies their removal from our midst. Feldman's book breaks out another side to this conversation, by showing that the right wing has scored some very specific and tangible (and otherwise politically untenable) benefits by the simple act of grinding our discourse down the point where it's now mostly conduced in the coarsest of us-versus-them terms.

For each of the seven topics Feldman calls out, there's one conservative spokesperson who's led the rhetorical race to the bottom -- and one specific long-term conservative political agenda item that got served as a result. In his first example, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre sells a "vision of the world where violent assaults on individuals are inevitable, all laws and institutions are powerless to stop them, and the only guarantee for survival is for citizens to be prepared to fire a gun at the oncoming danger." Feldman argues that America can only adopt this worldview at the cost of its own democratic ideals, by fostering a "command-obedience" relationship between the governors and the governed—one that places the use of force outside the rule of law and beyond the control of the people's government. In the presence of arms, people are silenced, and the creative give-and-take required for good problem-solving suffers. Those who hold the guns prevail. This way, he warns, lies tyranny.

Then there's Pat Buchanan, leading the charge against immigration, which he insists is a calculated, well-planned "Reconquista" which has enlisted millions of triumphant Mexicans to invade America and exact their terrible revenge for the defeat of Santa Anna 160 years ago. Our only defense against the barbarian horde is to kill or be killed. Feldman notes that this kind of overheated eliminationist framing has been a boon to corporate conservatives, because it's made it impossible to have a nuanced (or even coherent) conversation that acknowledges NAFTA's grotesque destruction of the economy and the environment on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border.

"Immigration has become a political issue because of trade, not because of race or 'civilization,'" notes Feldman. "At its most primary, political level, America's immigration problem is a product of what David Sirota has aptly named the 'hostile takeover' of key economic policies in our government by vast corporations in control of unimaginable wealth."

But as long as we're talking about anchor babies and bilingual culture, we won't be talking about that. And that's just fine with those who are making a killing of their own on the status quo.

Ann Coulter's success is largely built on her ability to take any issue and instantly use it to justify violence against the right wing's favorite targets. Feldman traces the way this dubious gift has defined the trajectory of her career, culminating in her insistence that liberals need to be eliminated because they're traitors who are ready to hand the country over to al-Qaida. That's always the bottom line with Ann—and that quickness to write off anyone capable of a creative or nuanced thought creates a climate that stifles our ability to solve problems together, which is the essence of democratic government. It also effectively discourages people from participating in politics at all, lest they become targets of people who've learned their moves from Ann. "Coulter's rhetoric," writes Feldman, "poisons the soil in which civic identity takes root."

Feldman goes on to unmask Bill O'Reilly's bluster as a smokescreen that makes it impossible to talk seriously about national security and the things that really threaten us; John Gibson's "War on Christmas" as an assault on our ability to teach diversity in schools; and James Dobson's weird ideas about child discipline and family authority as a noxious cognitive pattern that influences the way we approach larger issues of community, authoritarianism, citizen discipline, and even foreign policy (inasmuch as some policymakers tend to view smaller countries exercising their sovereignty as wayward children in need of correction).

In the final chapters, his dissection of Dinesh D'Souza's rhetoric ties it all up with a bow. According to Feldman, every issue D'Souza touches down to the inevitable conclusion that liberals are to blame—a broad and breathtaking act of scapegoating that makes it impossible for us to get a collective handle on the true chain of responsibility that resulted in everything from 9/11 to the disastrous war that followed.

Taken as a whole, Feldman argues persuasively that the right wing's use of violent language and imagery over the past 30 years has gravely, deeply—perhaps even mortally—wounded the American body politic. As social theorists from John Dewey to Miss Manners have pointed out—and as my Canadian neighbors seem to understand as the central fact of their civic existence—civility is the necessary ingredient that allows democracies to function. Without it, there is no common good, no mutual respect, no reason to have faith in our ability to govern together wisely and well. When these basic agreements fail, so does our ability to self-govern. Reading this book from my peaceable perch on a mountainside in western Canada, the destruction of America's civic order, as Feldman describes it, looks utter and complete.

Somehow, we need to find our way back to each other. And, as simple as it sounds, it may start with a determined resolution that we are going to be civil to each other. Always. Even to your obnoxious Dittohead neighbor. Even to your annoying fundamentalist sister-in-law. Even to that jerk with the faded W'04 bumper sticker who stole your parking space. Even to the whinging concern troll in the comments thread. Catharsis feels like a birthright in our I-want-it-now society; but it's a luxury that progressives can no longer afford. Every time we give into it, the culture splits a little wider, and our odds of ever healing again it grow a bit more remote. It's time for progressives to step up and show the rest of the country how grownups behave. We've got an example to set, and a hundred million people to educate.

It's a lot to ask of "please" and "thank you." But the stakes are too high to ignore.

If we want democracy, we need to be able to see our fellow citizens as human beings, possessed of their own inherent worth and dignity.

If we want justice, we need to grant them the same rights and respect we feel entitled to—even when they're strenuously disagreeing with us, or when their interests and ours line up on opposite poles.

If we want security, we must first learn to be safe with each other, and trust ourselves as guardians of our collective well-being.

If we want to rebuild the country, we need to remember that we are all heirs to the same vast trust of social, political, and physical capital built up by previous generations; that our livelihood and liberties depend entirely on how well we can manage to sustain that common legacy; and that we share a duty to ensure our children's future by passing all of that on to them, not only intact but richer yet.

The only disagreements we should have are over the best means to achieve all this. The goals themselves should be beyond question. Feldman gives us a useful primer on how the right wing has carefully and deliberately separated us from both our founding goals and the means to achieve them. It's up to us to put put it all back together, and that starts with Being Nice.

A final note. The idea that Being Nice is a sign of weakness is, as noted above, inherent in the conservative narrative Feldman describes. Anger merchants like Coulter and O'Reilly have sold an entire generation of Americans on the idea that the mere desire to gather facts, contemplate them calmly, and discuss them rationally with people who might have other points of view makes one a traitor to the nation—weak, ineffectual, and dangerously liberal.

The horrifying result of this is a political climate in which many Americans believe that those who can throw the biggest tantrum deserve to get their way. (Which is not democracy, or anything like it. It's rule by bullies.) If you want to know why American politics sounds like a sandbox fight in the kindergarten playground, there's one good answer. Look at it this way, and it becomes clear that the Obama/Hillary partisan pissing matches of the past many weeks are, once again, playing right into conservative hands. Never mind the fact that when those two fight, McCain wins. Look beyond that to the more distressing fact, which is that too many Democrats have finally become every bit as ugly as the GOP has always been. They've gotten to us. We've finally become what we most despise.

For the record: Being Nice, done well, has a ferocious strength all its own, as anyone who's watched a CBC news interviewer or dealt with a Canadian school headmaster can tell you. Over the past four years, I've seen fastidious politeness and heartbreaking compassion used in the hands of master practitioners, and marveled at the power of sheer civility to defeat hotheads, deflect crazy ideas, and send shit-stirrers right out the door. It's a skill we need to relearn, and soon. Fortunately, we have 32 million neighbors and authors like Jeffrey Feldman to show us the way.

A Little Love for Big Oil

Robert Borosage — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:27:01 -0400

Oil companies report record profits. Gas is headed towards $4 a gallon. A caravan of more than 100 truckers rallied in Washington Monday to protest diesel fuel prices already over that mark. Across the country, Americans are getting pinched by rising fuel and food prices.

So politicians, as Rev. Jeremiah Wright would say, "do what politicians do." Arizona Sen. John McCain offers up a temporary "gas tax holiday," suggesting the Congress suspend the 18.4-cent federal tax for the summer, at a cost of about $10 billion in money earmarked for highways, bridges and other transportation projects. Not to be outdone, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton instantly agrees, adding she'd replace the money to the highway fund with an excess profits tax on oil companies. Both immediately scorn Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as "elitist" for saying that it is a "bad idea." Now this exchange will be a staple of the talk shows whenever gas prices go up.

Now neither McCain, married into a $100 million fortune, ushered about in his wife's corporate jet, nor Clinton are exactly convincing populists. But McCain knows this is political gold, offering folks "a little bit of relief so they can travel a little further and little longer and maybe have a little bit of money left over to enjoy some other things in their lives."

Only there's one small problem with this tax cut: The oil companies are likely to pocket most of it.

Rising demand for gas and oil has driven prices up around the world. In this country, the oil companies say their refineries are pumping out as much gas as they can, so prices are likely to rise even higher this summer as Americans set out on family vacations. They can sell all the gas they can produce at $3.50 to $4 a gallon, including the 18 cents in gas taxes. So McCain and Clinton revoke the gas taxes. Is there any reason to think that the oil companies won't continue to sell their gas at the $4 a gallon that it already commands, and pocket the difference?

Economist Dean Baker of the Center on Economic and Policy Research calls it a "summer tax break for Exxon," noting, "We have a fixed amount of gas entering the market, the question is simply what price clears the market. If we reduce or eliminate the gas tax, the price doesn't change, the lower tax will simply allow Exxon and other oil companies to keep more profits."

This is economics 101, a subject that McCain admits is "not something I've understood as well as I should." (He later denied making the statement.) Obama isn't an economist either, but he's had experience with gas tax holidays in Illinois. As The Washington Post reports, Obama voted for a six-month suspension of Illinois' gas tax in the summer of 2000 when prices soared to a then-obscene $2 a barrel. The state lost about $175 million in revenue; the price of gas fell by an average of 3 percent, suggesting that about 60 percent of the savings were passed on to consumers.

But any increased demand that might have resulted in Illinois from cutting the tax could be accommodated by transferring gas from another state. In a federal program, any increased demand from an initially lower price would drive that price back up to its current market clearing levels. There are only two ways to lower the price—increase supply or decrease demand. McCain and Clinton's tax cut would do neither of these.

That, of course, won't stop either of them from peddling the tax and from scouring Obama for being "out of touch." For Clinton, this is just part of the "kitchen sink" she's throwing at Obama. For McCain, inconvenient truths don't seem to matter. He knows what he thinks and doesn't want to be confused with facts. Capital gains tax cuts always generate more revenue. Al Qaeda is the biggest threat in Iraq. Corporate trade deals don't hurt wages. Privatization of Social Security will make seniors more secure. And don't worry, big oil won't charge what the market will bear for the price of gas.

A version of this post appeared on HuffingtonPost.com.

NotSo! — and a new request

Rick Perlstein — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:48:03 -0400

On Wednesday I posted the highlight reel from my BloggingHeadsTV debate with David Frum, noting that the trouble with our conservative friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so. I then asked you intrepid readers to respond with your own favorite conservative NotSo's: oft-repeated conservative clichés that in fact are patently false.

Your response was spectacular. Over 75 comments.

Daniel Brin:

"Jimmy Carter cut the military budget." Actually, he increased the military budget beyond the rate of inflation. This followed several years of post-Vietnam budget cuts in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Reagan just accelerated what Carter already started.

"Jimmy Carter gave us double-digit inflation and interest rates." Actually, these syndromes began during the Nixon and Ford administrations that preceded Carter. Nixon tried wage-and-price controls. Ford tried "WIN" buttons. Carter did the only thing that worked by nominating Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. Volcker choked the money supply so severely that the economy fell into a near-depression, but by God, it killed inflation and let the economy reboot under Reagan. Carter's act of political suicide made Reagan a hero.

Dan Ancona likes the one about how "tax cuts create jobs."

Tax cuts don't create jobs, people do. If you relentlessly cut taxes, starve the schools and limit the opportunities kids have... no, my poor confused conservative pals, that is not good for the economy.

The peerless Digby says of the class, "Reagan proved lowering taxes raises revenues":

The fact is that Reagan signed one of the largest tax increases in history and even then by the time Reagan left office, a combination of lower tax revenues and sharply higher spending for defense had created the biggest budget deficit in history.

Steven Kyle debunks the myth that Reagan was more popular than Clinton with this chart. Joe Smith says you don't even need a link to bunk the NotSo that the stock market soars when Republicans are in office; "Anyone who can hold a graph right side up can prove that one false." Scott Bowles is sick of hearing that "America has the finest healthcare system in world." Yes: unless "you go by life expectancy. Or infant-mortality rate. I guess we're at the top in terms of percentage of GDP spent on healthcare, but that's hardly a measure of how good the system is, just how much it costs. Tom Geraghty gives us a Google search for the chestnut that Democrats are anti-business, then links to this stunning table comparing average economic performance under Republican and Democratic presidents: GDP growth between 1930 for instance, 5.4 percent in Democratic administrations and 1.6 under Republicans.

It goes on and on. Read them yourself. I love it!

And now to my request. It's for a bit of community building, and a bit of solidarity in defeating the full-time professional bullshitters of the conservative movement. There are several new utterances of the NotSo! description every day, of course. I'd like Big Con readers to keep an eye out for ones they hear, and record them in the comments to this post. Ideally, I'd like to get enough so that by every Friday I can list three or four for readers to vote on—the coveted Big Con Of The Week!™ Leave your own nominations in the comments, or email me directly at rperlstein@ourfuture.org.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines...

Axis of Um, Um: Where Do We Go Frum Here?

Rick Perlstein — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:59:04 -0400

Conservatism is on the ropes; if my dialogue below with David Frum suggests anything, it's that. So Bob Borosage, in the comments, makes a suggestion:

What we need is to catalog the 10 or 20 classic conservative "not sos"— the big lies or cons that have become central to the story they tell both to themselves and to the country—with the basic refutation. So that those of us who aren't historians of the Nixon era can share in the same delightful moment of uh,uh,uh, dither that you produced in Frum.

So: let's make this a community project. Any nominees?

No Golden Rule For Conservatives

Cliff Schecter — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:56:16 -0400

I was heartened when George Stephanopoulos, for all the heat he has taken over the ABC debate, asked John McCain a question on This Week this past Sunday that I have been waiting to hear for a long time now. To paraphrase, he wondered why if government health care has been good enough for John McCain to receive his entire life, why it is not good enough for the rest of us?

That's right, John McCain, the son of an Admiral, has been getting taken care of by the government for the last seven decades, at taxpayer expense, yet when asked about it he is only able to muster lame jokes about his time "being taken care of at the Hanoi Hilton" and doesn't feel compelled to explain why he voted against the State Children's Health Insurance Program, so that countless children would lose the very health care to which he seems to feel entitled.

But just remember, it is Barack Obama who is the elitist.

In any case, McCain's rhetoric vs. reality on government health care is important in not only what it says about John McCain, but what it conveys about modern conservatism. Remember, Senator Trent Lott didn't believe in "big government," except when Hurrican Katrina decided to destroy HIS house. Many more examples exist of conservatives who are progressive on an issue where they have been personally affected, but remain steadfastly opposed to government assistance in all other areas of lif e.

Reporter Matt Cooper noted this phenomenon in his New Republic piece "Liberals for a Day" almost 10 years ago. In his work, Cooper established the voting records of Republican Senators Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, as the sine qua non of proving liberalism by close encounter. As Cooper stated, Domenici is "to the left of Ted Kennedy" on mental health issues, because his daughter suffers from mental illness. Meanwhile, former Senator DeWine, whose daughter was tragically killed in an auto accident at only 22 years of age, was an active supporter of related regulations, from speed limits to seatbelt safety laws.

Over the years, these men have remained consistently passionate on these issues, and consistently hostile to government protection of virtually everyone else. In 2004, Domenici supported the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Campaign and American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals a combined 0 percent of the time. DeWine (who lost his reelection race to then-Congressman Sherrod Brown in 2006) was marginally better, standing with the ACLU 22 percent of the time and the Human Rights Campaign for 25 percent of crucial votes.

Meanwhile, back when he was in the House and thankfully could do somewhat less damage, Dick Cheney's voting record was to the right of Newt Gingrich's—he voted against Head Start, Meals on Wheels for seniors and the Department of Education, to name only a few of his more infamous positions. After his daughter came out as a lesbian, however, he began calling for federal protection for gay men and lesbians—including civil unions, a position way to the left of most of his ideological brethren—as if he had begun breaking bread with Barney Frank.

Similarly making the personal political, former Senator Connie Mack and House Member Clay Shaw, both cancer survivors, consistently supported government investment in cancer research, despite supposed "small government" philosophies. And let's not forget African-American former Congressman J.C. Watts, who opposed GOP led efforts to end affirmative action in 1996, because as he told then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich "in practice we still don't have a level playing field." Yet, the serrated surface of the pitch for women, like the two who became pregnant after teenage dalliances with Watts, did not merit equal concern for the proudly pro-life recipient of the Christian Coalition's Friend of the Family Award.

While it's great to have conservative support on important issues wherever and whenever one can get it, these examples lay bare their supposed conservative philosophy much like the outrageous pork-barrel projects that continue to increase unabated. Broadening one's worldview to see a role for government in protecting regular people is no easy task. But it seems to be no problem for those on the right when personal interest is involved. Just ask Senator McCain, if he's not too busy getting a doctor's check up on your dime.

Cliff Schecter is a guest blogger at Campaign for America's Future and the author of The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him And Why Independents Shouldn't

Rand To The Rescue

Digby — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:06:20 -0400

Paul Krugman points to an article that should send chills down the backs of good progressives everywhere:

Ayn Rand's novels of headstrong entrepreneurs' battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand's novel ``Atlas Shrugged'' would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

I have written about the pernicious effect of Rand before, and noted that the Ayn Rand Institute provides nearly half a million free copies to American high schools to indoctrinate teen-agers into romantic selfishness (thus validating their natural adolescent tendencies as being acceptable adult behavior.) But this is truly beyond the pale.

Corporations, which have very good reasons to train young people into an ethos that extols the alleged virtues of heroic captains of industry and their lonely fight to retain freedom in the face of left wing collectivism, should not be buying academic curriculum of any kind. The very idea of academic freedom is that the academics decide what to teach, not the government or the community or especially some company who wants to promulgate a puerile political philosophy designed to make people believe that selfishness is a virtue. That it's in the form of a very bad romance novel makes it even worse. (To those romance novel aficionados out there, please note that I said "bad" romance novel. It's not a slam at the whole genre.)

The Ayn Rand Institute, ever creative, has come up with a new marketing scheme to promote the book. Sensing a change in the zeitgeist, and seeking to take advantage of what they perceive as this opening in academe, they are pushing the anti-religious side of objectivism.

Yaron Brook, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit organization in Irvine, California, that promotes objectivism, said some professors are re-evaluating Rand.

``We're definitely seeing more of an interest in the academic world,'' Brook said. He said he senses a softening of opposition from academics and sees more conferences and articles about Rand.

``Ayn Rand has a kind of absolutist ethics,'' Brook said. ``She believes in right or wrong, good and evil, but based on secular principles, not religious principles, and I think there's an appeal for that now.''

Very, very clever. As for its moral dimension, objectivism simply holds that it's moral to be completely selfish and rapacious. Indeed, it is immoral not to be. That would seem to be something of a difficult sell in an age of greedy sub-prime mortgage brokers and billionaire hedge fund operators, but you have to give them credit for perseverance in the face of abject philosophical failure. It's hard to believe that any academic worth his or her salt would take this line of argument seriously, but apparently the lure of big money is enough to make them consider it:

Allison's BB&T, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in March pledged $2 million to establish the first U.S. chair in the study of objectivism, at the University of Texas at Austin.

That school and 27 others have accepted an aggregate $30 million from the bank's foundation in the last decade.

``These gifts are really about the study of capitalism from a moral perspective and all we want is to make Rand part of the dialogue,'' said Bob Denham, a spokesman for BB&T, the parent of Branch Banking & Trust Co.

The BB&T Charitable Foundation made a five-year, $1 million commitment to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in January 2005 after a dinner meeting between Allison and Claude Lilly, then dean of UNC Charlotte's business school.

The grant agreement described ``Atlas Shrugged'' as ``required reading'' in a course about the fundamentals of capitalism.

This is the real agenda. It's not about literature or about philosophy. The point of this is to indoctrinate young business majors into the Rand philosophy, which is a perverted and radical form of capitalism that bears no relationship to the way the world really works. (In fact, it's real agenda may be to indoctrinate young people into believing that overpaid executives actually deserve to make hundreds of times the average worker's pay while driving the company into the ground.)

This book has gotten a powerful hold on enough young minds that I think it has made a difference in our politics over the last generation or so. The question is what to do about it? I suspect that we will get nowhere with protests. But no self-respecting university wants to be accused of propagandizing its students purely because some big corporation with an agenda gave them some money, right? What if there were a concerted effort to pressure these universities to offer a competing view?

If so, what book should progressives push to counteract the Randian propaganda?

Bitter? Of Course. Here's Why

Isaiah J. Poole — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:03:11 -0400

Honest discussion about the roots of working-class angst and how to address it has gotten seriously burned in the firestorm of controversy fanned around comments by Sen. Barack Obama that working-class people are "bitter" about the economy and government.

However poorly phrased his original comments were, they were based on a fundamental truth: that conservatism, having failed for more than three decades in its promise to bring broad prosperity to all Americans, has exploited the issues of God, guns and gays—and the lie that government is their enemy—to keep their con going.

For awhile it worked, as millions of voters were convinced to vote against their interests by conservatives armed with polarizing rhetoric. But there is no disputing the anger as these same working-class voters are finding that they've been duped.

The percentage of Americans polled by Gallup who say that they are worse off than they were five years ago—31 percent—is the highest recorded by the polling firm since it started asking the question in the mid-1960s. And that belief is based in reality: Median household income in 2006, $48,201, was lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was in 1999, the Census Bureau reports. The latest Democracy Corps memo includes a poll finding that 74 percent of Americans believe the economy is seriously off track.

That same memo also suggests that voters have caught on that conservatives who claimed they were taking government "off the backs" of the working class have put in into the pocket of corporations. "The focus of people’s anger are the corporate special interests that dominate government, producing a demand that politicians make it a priority to take back government for middle class Americans," the memo says.

But there's been a lot more interest among the punditocracy in branding Obama "elitist" for trying to synthesize this working-class anger than in talking about causes and solutions. As former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes in his blog:

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then -- by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame "liberal elites," to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones. The rest have merely "reported on" it. Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are failing and our kids are falling behind their contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China; instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax system to finance better schools and access to health care, and green technologies that might create new manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been mired in the old politics.

Andy Ostroy of The Ostroy report writes:

Both Clinton and the McCainiacs know exactly what Obama was referring to when saying the nation's poor and middle classes were bitter. And why shouldn't they be? Starting with Ronald Reagan in the 80's, their values were co-opted and their loyalties misused and abused, and they were routinely directed towards hot-button issues like abortion, gay marriage and gun control. These Reagan Democrats, by the time George Bush and Karl Rove got through with them, felt duped, dirty and betrayed. And now they're still without proper health care, jobs, quality education for their kids, and are mired in a housing crisis. You're damned right they're bitter, and they ought to be. They were mercilessly used and abused. And that's what Obama was talking about.

Dave Lindoff at Democratic Underground writes of his experience in rural Republican communities in upstate New York that have been left impoverished by conservative government policies and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to the disappearance of thousands of factory jobs.

It’s Republicans who have whispered the poison in their ears that their high taxes are because “the Blacks” are getting all that welfare money and are getting all the jobs through “quotas.” It's the Republicans who have warned them about "hoards" of Mexicans coming across the border to steal their jobs. It’s the Republicans who have been warning them that Democrats are going to take their hunting rifles and shotguns away. It’s the Republicans and their Christian fundamentalist front men who have been saying that the Democrats have been causing the nation’s decline by supporting licentiousness and a “gay” agenda. And it's Republicans and Democrats who have been hyping the bogus issue of national defense to keep people from focusing on the deliberate dismantling of the U.S. economy that is underway. (Over years of Republican and Democratic administrations, the tax contribution of U.S. corporations to the national budget has fallen from 50% in 1940 to just 14% today. Between 1996 and 2000, 61% of all corporations and 39% or large corporations paid no taxes at all, and that situation has only gotten worse in the Bush years.)

Anything but the real issue, which is how to provide funds so that the children in places like Spencer and Hancock (towns in upstate New York) can get a decent education without bankrupting the local taxpayers, how those communities can get jobs again, so that their children won’t have to move out, how to ensure that everyone in town can have health insurance and access to medical care.

It is true that "bitterness" does not tell the whole story of these voters. Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, in a study of white working-class voters for Brookings, says that these voters actually have "a bifurcated view of their economic situation":

On the one hand, they tend to believe that things have changed for the worse—that the economy is doing poorly, that the security that families once enjoyed is disappearing, that leaders just don't get it. On the other hand, these very same members of white working class believe that they are holding up their end of the economic bargain, that they are working hard and doing right by their families, that their story is one of optimism and hope, not pessimism and despair. Even today, with most white working class voters embracing a negative economic story overall, many still believe a positive economic story applies to themselves.

Their conclusion: A successful appeal to these voters would "connect economic security to economic opportunity." It would frame the progressive principles that brought the nation the New Deal and the Great Society and link them to the desires of individuals and families to move forward toward the American Dream. And, as the Democracy Corps has been saying, it is time "to change who government works for"—all of the people, not just the wealthy few.

Campaign for America's Future co-director Robert Borosage outlined the challenge in his post on working-class voters:

Progressives have to prove that government can work. That it can make health care and college affordable. That it can help generate good jobs here at home. That it can curb the Wall Street casino and insure that increased profits and productivity are widely shared. We have to take reinventing government seriously, not as a slogan or a gimmick, but as a fundamental project of reform.

Republican Sen. John McCain was scheduled to give an address Monday in which he was expected to pile on to the so-called "elitism" of telling the truth of the working-class mood. But if McCain stays within the framework of the conservatism he espouses—a conservatism that truly wants government, as the title of Grover Norquist's latest book suggests, to "leave us alone," abandoned in the midst of record economic inequality, instability and injustice—he will be at a loss to offer more than stale, attack-dog rhetoric. With the bankruptcy of conservative ideology as plain as the foreclosure signs popping up on millions of homes around the country and the lengthening lines at unemployment offices, voters have lost their taste for that bitter pill.

Bringing the White Working Class Into the Progressive Majority

Robert Borosage — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:00:56 -0400

These are excerpts of remarks delivered April 9 at the Conference on a New New Deal in Washington, sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

Let me offer a simple set of propositions.

1. Conservatism has failed—and conservatives, while they cannot admit it, understand that. You’ve heard this before, but it is important to repeat it. The failure is not simply that of clueless George. Conservatism failed not because the Bush administration was incompetent, although incompetence has been its hallmark. It failed not because Bush and the DeLay Congress were corrupt, although corruption has been pervasive. Conservatism failed because it is wrong. Wrong about the world. Wrong about the economy. Wrong about the society.

Its imperial and military fantasies led directly to Iraq, surely the worst foreign policy debacle since Vietnam. Its market fundamentalism generated Gilded Age inequality, a Depression-era financial crisis, stagnant wages and rising insecurity, and left America the world’s largest debtor, dependent on the kindness of strangers. Their celebration of deregulation and scorn for government ended up poisoning our kids, with uninspected toxic toys and diseased lunch-room foods.

2. We are headed into not simply a change election, but an election that has the potential to mark a sea change, the end of the conservative era that Reagan launched in 1980 and the beginning of a new era of progressive reform. The election will take place in the midst of an unpopular war and a recession, with over three-fourths of the country looking for a dramatic change in course. Democrats will surely pick up seats in both the House and the Senate.

Democrats know how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But the potential is there for an election that changes our course.

3. A new progressive majority is forming. You can see it in the Democratic victories in 2006; you can see it in the astounding turnout in Democratic primaries in 2008: young people turning out in unprecedented numbers; Latinos doubling their share of the primary vote; African Americans and single women raising their participation.

4. A key test of the viability of a new coalition will depend on the votes of the white working class, defined as white workers with less than a college education, still about half of the voting population. This was the heart of the Roosevelt coalition. And they are now the heart of the conservative coalition that dominated our politics over the last 30 years.

America has changed dramatically since the New Deal. As a recent paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz points out, in 1940 three-quarters of the population 25 and older were high school dropouts or never went to high school; 5 percent had college degrees. In 2007, only 14 percent were high school dropouts; 29 percent had college degrees and another 25 percent had some college. The white working class now is composed largely of white-collar, not blue-collar workers—people in sales, clerical and service jobs, rather than in industrial jobs. This white working class is smaller than the New Deal working class, better off than the New Deal working class, more educated, more white-collar and far less unionized. In the 1940s, unions represented 60 percent of the Northern blue-collar workforce. Today, unions are less than 10 percent of the private workforce.

Since Nixon, Republican majorities have depended on winning a supermajority of white working class votes. Ronald Reagan won these voters by 61 percent to 35 percent in 1980. Al Gore lost them by 17 percent; Kerry by 23 percent. As minority voters become a greater percentage of our population and of the vote, the Republicans will seek to expand these margins among the white working class.

There are ongoing arguments about why Democrats do so badly in this population. Part of the explanation traces back to the Civil Rights movement, and the Southern strategy of the Republican Party begun under Nixon. By making itself the party of white sanctuary, Republicans anchored their party in the South and attracted voters alienated by the civilizing movements of the 1960s.

Some of the switch, as we’ve seen, came from cultural appeals and from the Republican claim after Vietnam to be the muscular party of national security.

But a large part of the decline, I would argue, came because Democrats stopped making sense on economics. As Kevin Phillips put it, Democrats went from "taxing the few for the benefit of the many" to "taxing the many on behalf of the few." Republicans made Reagan’s mythic “welfare mother” a racial cue to hard-pressed white workers. Democrats went from a policy of exporting goods to exporting jobs, and from a party anchored by labor to a party funded by Wall Street. Conservatives won the argument that government couldn’t really help, and they, at least, offered to cut your taxes—perhaps the only raise you might hope to see.

And then the corruption and incompetence of conservative presidents from Reagan to Bush helped prove their ideological point that government was the problem and not the solution. Now voters are convinced that government is controlled by entrenched corporate interests, wastes billions of taxpayers money and can’t organize a two-car funeral—and the past six years of the Bush administration has made that case.

Progressives have to prove that government can work. That it can make health care and college affordable. That it can help generate good jobs here at home. That it can curb the Wall Street casino and insure that increased profits and productivity are widely shared. We have to take reinventing government seriously, not as a slogan or a gimmick, but as a fundamental project of reform.

Two political conclusions arise from this analysis. First, progressives have a monumental stake in rebuilding the strength of the union movement. White working-class voters vote two to one Republican if they are not in unions. They vote two to one Democratic if they are union members.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that is why Karl Rove and the Bush Administration have joined the business drive to crush the right to organize, and have done what they could to weaken unions and to convince Americans that unions are part of the past.

We have a great stake in turning that around, not simply by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which is the centerpiece of reviving the right to organize, but by turning government at all levels into an ally of unions. “FDR wants you to join a union,” they used to argue in the 1930s. We have to make that slogan true for governors, mayors, legislators and the next president.

We should be focusing more and more resources and energy on our secret asset among white workers—women, particularly single women. As Page Gardner of Women’s Voices, Women’s Votes has shown, single women vote overwhelmingly on economic issues and overwhelmingly for Democrats and progressives. Bu they tend not to vote. They are low-information voters, too hard pressed to pay much attention. This year they are turning out in large numbers, and we should make certain—as we should with Latinos and young people—that we develop the vehicles to communicate with them, the ability to educate and mobilize them and the agenda that attracts them. If they turn out in large numbers, if we empower unions once more, if we consolidate our majorities among the new millennium generation and the new Latino voters, we can go a long way towards a new era of progressive reform.

Two Kinds of Americans, Part II: From "Us versus Them" to "We the People"

Sara Robinson — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:59:20 -0400

In last week's essay, I noted that our ability to function effectively as a nation has been deeply compromised by the conservative movement's reflexive reliance on Us-versus-Them politics. Allowing a winners-and-losers worldview to dominate our country is a dangerous self-indulgence, I argued. History is littered with the corpses of great empires and economies that were toppled when their people got distracted from their shared identity and goals, and gave in to internal culture wars that weakened their countries to the point of eventual collapse or conquest. And it's all too clear now, looking back on what 40 years of wanton right-wing civil war has wrought, that America cannot hope to be history's first exception.

When the conservatives declared their "culture war" and effectively seceded from America in the early 1970s, they recklessly (and, on at least some fronts, knowingly) doomed us. When we reckon the toll -- the loss of a broad middle class and the educational, financial, social, and physical infrastructure that produced it; the criminal abuse of military and police power; the squandering of the intangible capital of our economic and diplomatic prestige in the world; and now the complete structural inability to address the most important issues we face -- we can no longer deny that the conservatives' inbred compulsion to create and fight external demons has weakened us militarily, economically, environmentally, and culturally.

Our survival depends on finding an alternative. Fortunately, there is one.

Several commenters on last week's piece fretted that I might be winding up to the suggestion that we get all kum-by-yah and fuzzy with the conservatives, admit they were right, and find a way to build bridges to them. Fret not. I grew up with these people, and have written extensively on how and why the hard core authoritarians among them -- the intransigent 12-15% -- can never be reasoned with. They have always been among us; and they always will be. But -- and here's the point of this week's essay -- we have not always allowed their paranoia to run the show. For much of America's history, we chose another path. And it's a path we can get back to, if we choose, with progressives showing the way.

Two Kinds of Americans, Revisited
The legendary historian Arnold Toynbee postulated that all cultures throughout history have run under one of three basic cultural operating systems (or, more often, a hybrid of two or all three in which one was usually dominant). These essential storylines appear in all cultures; and every culture has unique variations on these archetypes at play. Most importantly: each of the three has its own internal logic; and that logic deeply influences the way we view the future, interpret reality, and assess events.

The first of these cultural archetypes is Us versus Them (or Winners and Losers), which is all too familiar to anyone who's spent the past 30 years in America. In this view, the world is seen in polarities: black/white, right/wrong, male/female, either/or. Humans are driven by competition and conflict; life is a zero-sum game in which survival depends on your ability to seize control over a piece of a finite pie. Winners (who are assumed to be high-prestige males) matter, and deserve to dominate. Losers deserve whatever happens to them; and winners cannot be bothered to care. Evil is caused by the deliberate workings of the enemy, and its existence is proof that that enemy must be defeated at all costs.

Us versus Them exists because it's a useful and adaptive worldview in a few limited circumstances. It's the natural logic of war and revolution -- and also of political elections, class and race conflicts, and fundamentalist religion and holy warriors. Business often operates in this mode (though not always). So do certain professions, most notably law enforcement. But, as we've seen, this winners-and-losers logic can corrode the foundations of a civilization if we allow it to dominate every aspect of our lives, or stay stuck in it too long. It's useful in short doses, but extremely toxic in the long run.

The biggest danger of Us-versus-Them is that it makes it almost impossible for cultures to invest in the common good, let alone plan coherently for the future. When people are in this mode, ideology and fear carry every decision. Those who want to discuss other worldviews or see a wider range of possibilities are considered traitors; and this forecloses almost all creative responses to problems. Furthermore, every resource the culture has must be diverted to winning the battle at hand, without regard for the future costs. Over time, relying on the Us-versus-Them archetype drives societies to eat their seed corn, leaving them bankrupt on every possible front. Still, this is the worldview that defines conservatism.

The second archetype might be called "Challenge and Response." In this view, problems aren't seen as evidence of evil; and they're not framed in terms of victory or defeat. At best, they're character-building opportunities for personal growth or gain; at worst, they're just a natural part of life that must be responded to with wisdom and ingenuity. Identifying allies and enemies is incidental to the larger goal -- which is to fix the problem, not the blame. There is no Them. There's just Us, and We have a situation on our hands that We need to figure out how to handle.

Challenge-and-response thinking is the natural logic of extended families and towns of all sizes. It's the basic habit of mind for a wide range of professions -- medicine, agriculture, engineering, management, and all the creative arts. You can't blame a virus, blight, gravity, or the behavior of markets on an evil Other -- and it's a waste of resources to try. Your job is to deal with the situation you're given today, as intelligently and resourcefully as you can; and think through preparations that will allow you to respond better or avoid this kind of problem entirely in the future. In these cultures, your level of status and prestige depends at least as much on your proven reliability as a wise and effective problem-solver as it does on how much of the pie you control. (Furthermore: owning more of the pie increases both your ability and your obligation to solve problems.) This is the world most progressives would far prefer to live in.

On a grander scale, solving problems and recovering from great challenges together builds up the internal levels of mutual trust and confidence within a society, which in turn fosters ambitious and well-considered future planning and encourages large investments in the common good. It enables groups to forge lasting alliances with other groups, expanding their networks of influence and trade. It lends itself to the establishment of meritocracies, flatter hierarchies, and other types of social order that are highly adaptive and flexible in the face of change. According to French historian Emmanuel Todd, every successful empire the world has ever seen ran on an expansive, inclusive challenge-and-response paradigm during its glory years -- and invariably fell apart when that ecumenical view devolved, for whatever reason, into defensive Us-versus-Them blame games.

One of the advantages of a Challenge-and-Response culture is that it provides a secure playing field for small and often very productive Us-versus-Them games. Police can be set to catch crooks, under the authority of the state; an army can be raised, as long as it remains under civilian control; the zero-sum games of business can be played for keeps under the watchful eye of government regulators and courts. But this only works as long as none of these zero-sum activities is allowed to become the society's guiding purpose. According to Toynbee and his modern heirs, successful societies throughout history grew and prospered as long as Challenge-and-Response remained the dominant mode -- and lost ground rapidly when that balance changed.

(Toynbee's third archetype, which isn't really germane to this discussion, is the logic of evolutionary change. These narratives assert that human cultures are prone to grow and mutate slowly over time. Evolution stories can be positive (things are slowly getting better) or negative (we're in a gradual state of decay). You often see this assumption at work in technology, biology, some of the social sciences, and certain religions; and it's not unusual to find it blended up with one of the other two archetypes as well. For the purposes of this discussion, we're going to sidestep this less common archetype, and focus on the first two.)

Both of these major storylines feature largely in American history -- and both are accessible (and usually operating simultaneously, with one dominating) at any given time. We've slipped back and forth often as history demanded different things from us. Breaking a frontier and building a farm is a Challenge-and-Response endeavor. Starting a revolution against a distant king -- or fighting a Cold War -- is Us-versus-Them.

However, over the grand sweep of our history, America has drawn strength from its persistent preference for the logic of challenge and response. And looking back, it's easy to see how our historical commitment to this confident, trusting, open-minded worldview had a lot to do with our eventual rise to power.

But it's also easy to see how the growth of the postwar military-industrial complex, and its entrenched position at the core of our economic and political life, has empowered an elite who are constantly seeking to pull us away from Challenge-and-Response, and plunge us into a permanent (and permanently profitable) state of Us-versus-Them. In recent decades, the two narratives come into serious competition, with Us-versus-Them enjoying a level of widespread, long-term acceptance we've seldom seen in the country's history. Right now, it's not clear which one will dominate the country's discourse in the years ahead.

Getting Back to Challenge and Response
But we do know how the shifts between these two worldviews happen -- and it's almost always through some combination of design and default. Something changes in the world, and a historical moment opens up that requires a different response. And, usually, there's a leader -- often backed by a movement -- standing by, ready to seize the wheel and turn it in the other direction.

FDR took power at the worst economic moment in the nation's history, as Us-versus-Them power struggles were threatening to destabilize the nation -- and then leveraged that chaos to discredit entrenched power, and justify a great progressive restructuring that unleashed our best problem-solving instincts. We have nothing to fear, he told us, but fear itself. It was a classic challenge-and-response thing to say.

Nine years later, that same president confronted the devastation of Pearl Harbor, and moved us deftly and productively back to an all-out Us-versus-Them war footing.

After the war, JFK captured the rising challenge-and-response spirit of an optimistic nation, and aimed it directly at the moon.

Conversely, Bill Clinton came to power as the Communist world was collapsing -- but failed to realize the full potential of that extraordinary moment because he failed to reckon with the ferocity of the old cold warriors' backlash. He might have had it in him to slap down this resurgence of Us-versus-Them -- but this time, that mindset turned out to be more fiercely stubborn than anyone thought. Failing to locate any other new enemy to demonize, the conservatives settled for destroying Clinton himself.

We've been stuck in the resulting mess for the past 15 years. At this point, it seems, we no longer know who We are unless we have a Them to triangulate ourselves against. Vast sectors of our economy are now invested in identifying, tracking, and defeating Them. And our increasingly desperate and paranoid search-and-destroy missions to root Them out wherever They may lurk have made Us a serious threat to much of the rest of the world.

If we want to change this, here's what we need to do:

1. Be clear on where we're going. The open-ended, inclusive communal problem-solving style of challenge-and-response cultures is inherently progressive -- and deeply ingrained in the American character.

Half the battle is simply being aware that we have a choice -- and then making the true nature of that choice clear to everyone involved. We can listen to the blamers and take the counsel of our fears -- and produce cramped, narrow solutions that usually benefit a few a at the expense of the many, and will in time doom the nation. Or we can remind our fellow citizens -- over and over, for as long as it takes -- that Americans have always done best when they've taken on big problems with implacable courage, extravagant generosity, and incandescent ingenuity. Moreover: they've often enriched the entire culture in the process. Which way to go? It's a choice we get to make all over again with every fresh problem we face.

Another way to keep the difference clear in our minds is to find and celebrate the people who are making challenge-and-response politics work -- people like Majora Carter and Van Jones, who received progressive service awards at Take Back America. Those people are everywhere (and remember: they're not all progressive), and they're creating a vast store of intangible social capital that makes us all a little wealthier. In a time of grinding and intractable Us-versus-Them thinking, we need to make an affirmative example out of everyone who's choosing to operate the other way.

2. Be ready for the moment. You can push and push until you're black and blue; but this kind of shift doesn't happen until the stars line up just right and that historical window pops open. Still, the best definition of "luck" I've ever heard is that it's what happens when preparation meets opportunity. And, after 15 years of non-stop conservative hatemongering, you gotta know that moment's not too far off now.

And that's why we organize and blog and write letters and donate money and support new media and volunteer down at the party office. We're gaining skills and building the infrastructure of a movement -- and one of the goals of that movement is to be standing by, ready to lean hard on our leaders and make them do the right thing when the moment comes. Even Bill Clinton might have made different choices when his moment came if we'd been this organized in 1993.

3. Leaders matter. We all know this anyway, but this is one major reason why. The right leader can act in ways that help us make the most of those moments when we must transition from one set of assumptions to another. As we've learned bitterly every day since 9/11, the wrong one can seize those moments and turn them into ruinous disaster. And a truly extraordinary leader may even be able to create the shift from one paradigm to the other without any kind of external moment presenting itself at all.

When we vet candidates, this should be one of the major traits we look for. If we want a challenge-and-response culture, we need to elect people who operate naturally in that mode. If we elect people who play a mean game of Us-versus-Them, we'll have nobody but ourselves to blame when their worst authoritarian impulses kick in, and our politics curdle back into fear and division.

The difference between these two modes of thinking -- Us versus them and Challenge and Response -- is one of those things that's so obviously simple (and so simply obvious) that we seldom stop to realize that it is the core difference between civilizations that prosper and flourish; and those that rapidly spiral into decline and death. The difference is not in the specific problems we face; it's in the logic and processes we choose when we set about solving them. In deciding which of these two worldviews will govern our decisions and our politics, it's not an exaggeration to say that we are deciding nothing less than the country's future.

Would You Close Your School To Pay For Iraq?

Bill Scher — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:54:55 -0400

When Gen. David Petraeus testifies today about the status of the Iraq occupation, I'll be thinking about my neighborhood elementary school.

Because the Bridge Street School in Northampton, Mass., may have to close for lack of funds, while we continue to waste billions on a failed foreign policy.

My town is facing a shortfall in our school budget between $800,000 to $1 million. We are forced with a choice between closing an entire school, which doesn't even make up the entire gap, or a series of cuts across the entire school district, including teaching positions, school buses, special education, music and arts education and supplies.

We're not alone in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe reports:

Across Massachusetts, cities and towns face the prospect of deep cuts in what appears to be the grimmest fiscal year since 2003. Local revenue and state aid can't keep up with such rapidly rising expenses as employee health insurance, heating oil, and even street paving. School costs, like special education requirements, are sapping local budgets. And now beleaguered residents are seeing home values dip even as taxes continue to rise.

And it's not just Massachusetts, school budgets are being squeezed across the nation.

While we are starved for investment in our schools—not to mention our health, our energy, our environment and our infrastructure—the occupation saps our resources. As Joseph Stiglitz, co-author of "The Three Trillion Dollar War," said on MSNBC yesterday:

Spending on the war is the worst form of spending. I mean, just think about it. Paying a Nepalese worker to work in Iraq doesn’t stimulate the economy in the same way that spending that same dollar in the United States.

Watch it below:

Paying for cheap Nepalese labor (sometimes lying to lure them into Iraq) doesn't even help rebuild Iraq's economic foundation, let alone ours.

How does this relate to the Bridge Street School's possible closing?

According to the National Priorities Project, while my town of Northampton faces a school budget gap of nearly $1 million, Northampton's share of the cost of the occupation is a massive $55,800,000.

It is critical that we invest in America's foundation if we are to thrive in the global economy of the 21st century. If we're wasting our money on a failed foreign policy, we won't have the resources to invest in the next generation.

War always has costs. If war is a strategic necessity, then those costs may be worth sacrificing.

But the conservative goal of this war, a permanent military occupation of Iraq, is a dangerous and destabilizing goal not worth one penny or one life.

And we're paying far more than that.

You can find out from the National Priorities Project how much your town is paying for the occupation.