Month: June 2005

In another sign of the end of civilization as we know it, Country Music Television has hired an ex office temp to be vice president of the “Dukes of Hazard” Institute. The salary — $100,000 for a one-year contract. The job — watch nightly reruns of the 1979-85 silly sitcom on CMT and write a blog about it.

Christopher Nelson was one of 2,000 people to apply for the job. The contract mentions no time off for vacation.

“For $100,000 he’d better watch that show every night,” said James Hitchcock, CMT’s vice president for marketing.

No sooner did the American Family Association call off its nine-year boycott of Walt Disney World (universally deemed a miserable failure) than it tuned its homophobic attention to that bastion of testosterone-tanked truck drivers, Ford Motor Co. According to a Detriot Free Press article, the Ford boycott is primarily in response to Ford’s advertisements in gay publications that offer to donate $1,000 to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for every Jaguar or Land Rover sold. (Supposedly, those vehicles are considered gayer than, say, the F150 pickup or Ford Expedition.)

But, while AFA Special Projects Director Randy Sharp said with its marketing ploy, “Ford is willing to do something they have refused to do for any other group,” AFA Chairman Donald Wildmon painted Ford with a broader brush:

“From redefining family to include homosexual marriage, to giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to support homosexual groups and their agenda, to forcing managers to attend diversity training on how to promote the acceptance of homosexuality… Ford leads the way.”

Sounds terrible, don’t it, but Ford is actually a leader is such diversity and philanthropic activities.

In 2004, Ford donated $77.9 million to a wide variety of groups last year. The majority — $39.6 million — went to education. A much smaller percentage went to community organizations for gays, Hispanics, blacks, Asians and other groups.

AFA e-mailed an announcement about the Ford boycott to 2.2 million supporters. So far, less than 55,000 people have signed a pledge supporting the boycott. That’s less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the total who received the announcement.

Looks like AFA is off to another great boycott start. If they do for Ford what they did for Disney, the automaker can expect sales to increase during the boycott.

City Business Journals are reporting today that the mega-bank is looking at its past and neither minimizing or denying it profited from slavery.

Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia recently commissioned Chantilly, Va.-based historical research firm The History Factory to investigate its predecessor institutions…The investigation revealed two institutions that later became part of Wachovia through acquisitions — the Georgia Railroad and Banking Co. and the Bank of Charleston — owned slaves.

Through specific transactional records, historians determined the Georgia Railroad and Banking Co. owned at least 162 slaves and the Bank of Charleston accepted at least 529 slaves as collateral on mortgaged properties or loans, and subsequently acquired an undetermined number of slaves when customers defaulted on their loans.

Extensive Northeast banking interests eventually absorbed into Wachovia were also fat with slave profits, it was revealed.

According to the investigation, these banks outside the traditional South had founders, directors, or account holders who owned slaves and/or profited directly from slavery; invested in or transacted business with companies or individuals that owned slaves; invested in the bonds of slave states and municipalities; or invested in U.S. government bonds during years when the United States permitted and profited from slave labor directly through taxation…

Bank of North America (Philadelphia), The Philadelphia Bank (later Philadelphia National Bank), Girard National Bank (Philadelphia), Farmers’ & Mechanics’ Bank of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Company for Insurances on Lives and the Granting of Annuities (Philadelphia), Bank of Baltimore, Savings Bank of Baltimore, State Bank of Elizabeth (New Jersey), and State Bank of Newark (New Jersey).

Wachovia, whether it set out to or not, is following the Truth and Reconciliation process pioneered by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa. After apartheid, whites feared blacks would rise up and kill them in revenge. That Israel/Palestine style conflict resolution didn’t happen, and Tutu won a Nobel prize as a result.

The crucial part of the process is acknowledging the crime or wrong-doing and its hurtful effects, then sincerely apologizing. Too often in this country, we deal with slavery by saying, “Oh that was a long time ago, and I didn’t personally own slaves.” That attitude is as helpful as denying slavery took place.

We also like to pretend that racism is confined to one geographic area, that the problem is in the South. We do this by refusing to see racism when it confronts us elsewhere. When a cross is burned in Durham, as three were recently, we call it a hate crime. When a cross is burned in Chicago, as it was last week, we call it a prank. When black people are killed by police in L.A., we say it’s a police brutality issue. When the same thing happens in Houston, we say it’s southern racism.

This allows us to perpetuate the myth that racism is a problem for other people, not for ourselves, and that it happens in some places, but not here. This blind eye does a disservice not only to those struggling to rise above prejudice everywhere, but particularly to the objects of racism. It’s more denial that they have a right to feel aggrieved.

Tutu says that until we, as a country, acknowledge our slave-holding past and the benefits it gave some of us while taking a huge price from others, we will continue to be mired in our race problems, endlessly trudging through the same old ground. Wachovia seems to get it:

“On behalf of Wachovia Corp., I apologize to all Americans, and especially to African-Americans and people of African descent,” said Ken Thompson, Wachovia chairman and CEO. “We are deeply saddened by these findings.”

Wachovia said it plans to partner with community organizations that are experts in furthering awareness and education of African-American history. Yesterday, Wachovia was named the principal sponsor of the National Center for Black Philanthropy (NCFBP) and national co-chair for its Fifth National Conference on Black Philanthropy.

“We know that we cannot change the past, and we can’t make up for the wrongs of slavery,” Thompson said. “But we can learn from our past, and begin a stronger dialogue about slavery and the experience of African-Americans in our country…”

Well said, Wachovia, and well done.

Jonathan Alter:

I have a gut feeling that President Bush is headed for a serious bruising on this issue, as are at least some of the 180 Republicans and 14 Democrats who voted last week against the stem-cell-research bill that passed the House.

These members may look back ruefully on this vote as one that helped get them tossed out of office. After all, every American who has a relative with one of these diseases — which means nearly every American — is beginning to understand the issue in a new way: it’s “pro-cure” vs. “anti-cure,” with the anti-stem-cell folks in danger of being swept into the medical waste bin of history…

Unless there’s another war, stem cells will become one of the defining issues of the 2006 campaign. Look for smart Democrats to run ads with relatives of the afflicted (“My sister has Parkinson’s,” “My father has Alzheimer’s”) pointing out that Congressman X is so extreme, he voted against a bill supported by many Republicans to begin curing these diseases. This will inevitably lead to backpedaling and compromise and the victory of a broad-based “pro-cure movement” that may help save not just my life, but your cousin’s or your mother’s or your own.

Human Events Online has performed the valuable public service of convening a panel of 15 “conservative scholars and public policy leaders” to develop a list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.”

The wingbut panelists were almost unanimous in their choice for number one: Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto,” followed at second by Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” I suppose it would be difficult for even a left-leaner to argue those choices, but the problem I have with the list is that it seems to do what all book-fearers do — blame the book for either the actions of the author (Hitler) or for the actions of others in the name of or under the aegis of the author (Marx).

I think you can blame Hitler, not his rambling prison-cell rant, for the Third Reich. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to read Marx, but all we can really blame him for is turgid prose, not the Great Communist Conspiracy. To say that Russia or China or North Korea really implemented Marxian ideals, as elucidated in his “Manifesto,” to create their totalitarian states and foment the Cold War is ludicrous.

Here’s the rest of the list:
3. “Quotations from Chairman Mao,” By Mao Zedong
4. “The Kinsey Report,” by Alfred Kinsey
5. “Democracy and Education,” by John Dewey
6. “Das Kapital,” by Karl Marx (a two-fer in the Top 10!)
7. “The Feminine Mystique,” by Betty Friedan
8. “The Course of Positive Philosophy,” by Auguste Compte
9. “Beyond Good and Evil,” by Freidrich Nietzsche
10. “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” John Maynard Keynes

There are some interesting selections among the runners-up as well:
“On Liberty,” by John Stuart Mill
“Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” by B.F. Skinner
“Origin of the Species,” by Charles Darwin (thought that would have scored higher)
“Madness and Civilization,” by Michel Foucault
“Coming of Age in Samoa,” by Margaret Mead
“Unsafe at Any Speed,” by Ralph Nader
“Silent Spring,” by Rachel Carson
“Introduction to Psychoanalysis,” by Sigmund Freud
“Descent of Man,” by Charles Darwin

While some of these choices perhaps are not surprising (absent Margaret Meade), it’s well to note that these are labeled as “harmful” books, not just books they disliked. Once you marginalize a book by deeming it “harmful,” can the matchbox be far behind?

Photo: Baghdad burning in 2002.

Today, June 1, is an historic day for a free and active press.

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1942, a newspaper in Warsaw published the first account of Jews being gassed to death in a concentration camp. This was the first time the news of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” became public.

Hitler had been in power for nine years, had never made a secret of his anti-Semitism. He had passed laws firing Jews from government jobs, dismissing them from public schools, and burning their books.

The first concentration camps were set up not for Jews but for political dissidents, unionists, social democrats; then homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Gypsies. The first people the Nazis exterminated were the mentally and physically disabled.

It wasn’t until after the invasion of Poland, with its enormous Jewish population, that Hitler began to consider what he called the “Jewish question.” There was a plan for a while to ship all the Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, but that was scrapped.

By 1941, many thousands of Jews had already been rounded up and shot in Eastern Europe, as the Nazis marched north into Russia. Historians aren’t sure precisely when the decision was made to systematically exterminate the Jews in death camps, but it was Himmler’s idea to use gas chambers, after he’d witnessed a mass execution by gunfire, which he found shocking.

The newspaper that broke the story of the death camps was an underground Polish Socialist paper called the Liberty Brigade. A young man named Emanuel Ringelblum had escaped from the death camp, and his story was published on this day. The story was picked up by the London Daily Telegraph a week later. Around the same time, secret Polish agents began to send messages to the allies about Auschwitz. They met with Churchill and Roosevelt, but when the story reached the public, it was met with disbelief, even by many Jews.

British and American intelligence experts knew it was happening because they had cracked the Nazi codes, but they were reluctant to make their knowledge public because they didn’t want to signal the fact that they’d broken the codes. And Roosevelt and Churchill were reluctant to turn the war into a “Jewish war.”

It was not until American soldiers liberated the camps in the spring of 1945 that the full truth came out. The word genocide was not even coined until after the war. It wasn’t until 1957 that people began to use the term “the Holocaust.”

The press is just as important today, probably more so. Those running our government are corrupt and conniving, and we depend on journalists to keep them honest.

But when reporters do supply information about nefarious agendas, like the Downing Street memo, we can’t turn away. That story, and so many others like it, are out there. Where are we?

On one hand, it’s surprising that Fox News has even bothered to cover the Downing Street Memo, the British government document that appears to prove that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and others were lying to the American public in early 2002 when they said that they had “no plans” to invade Iraq.

The story has been scarcely reported in the mainstream press, to say the least, so you have to wonder why the in-house propaganda network for the Bush Administration would draw attention to it unnecessarily – especially since the Bushies have so far failed to disavow its veracity.

The article has an ironic, oh-those-crazy-liberals tone as it attempts to spin the story as irrelevant. The reason for the lack of coverage, we are told, is that the memo’s contents are unimportant. After all, it was leaked to the London Times prior to the British elections last month, and Blair was reelected handily.
As is typical among rightwingers, in attempting to diminish the memo’s importance, Fox News over-reaches by including a quote from a spurious source that is an outright lie:

“As a smoking gun it leaves a lot to be desired,” said Kevin Aylward, a northern Virginia-based technology consultant who runs the conservative-leaning blog, Wizbangblog.com. “It’s interesting, but it’s probably fourth- or fifth-hand information.”

Dead wrong. The contents of the memo are based entirely on firsthand information. It presents minutes of a meeting among members of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet, which the memo-writer personally attended – and covers a report by a Blair official of conversations he personally held with Bush Administration officials.

The Fox article quickly moves then from the substance to the politics of the memo:

Aylward added: “I suspect the more interesting story at this point, seeing it three weeks later, is who is behind the letter-writing campaign to push it in the media.” Several popular left-leaning blogs have taken up the cause to keep the story alive, encouraging readers to contact media outlets. A Web site, DowningStreetMemo.com, tells readers to contact the White House directly with complaints.

Looked at from this perspective, the Fox coverage of the memo may signal genuine concern on the Right about its contents. Batting down the story now sends a signal to the Rightwing Echo Machine how to shape the coverage now for the Dittohead legions. These folks don’t care about the facts anyway.

And then there is a quote from a Rightwing pundit, who lays down the guantlet to the Left:

“This is a test of the left-wing blogosphere,” said Jim Pinkerton, syndicated columnist and regular contributor to FOX News Watch. “In many ways that memo might prove all of the arguments the critics of the war have made,” he added. “But the bulk of Americans don’t agree, or don’t seem that alarmed, so it is a power test to see if they can drive it back on the agenda.”

Challenge duly noted, Jim.