The future of democracy?

In The Future of Faith, Harvard religion scholar Harvey Cox makes the case for this prayer he quotes from a novel by Aldous Huxley:

"Give us this day our daily faith, but deliver us from beliefs."

He's a hopeful exponent of the idea that religious people of all faiths in the present time period show a readiness to move from rigid, incomprehensible creeds that must be affirmed into an experience of something transcendent beyond clerical hierarchies and institutional rigidities.

Well maybe. I can join him in hoping.

But along the way he reports on developments among Brazilian Pentecostals in terms that go to the heart of the concerns of this blog. I'll quote here at length from his fascinating chapter on what the rise of this religious variety means to democracy.

Are Pentecostals contributing to the shift from belief to faith, or are they among those holding out for a belief-defined Christianity? ...The answer is that there are, after all, 500 million of them, and they vary widely in theologies and practices. Some Pentecostals, especially white North Americans, have been heavily influenced by fundamentalism. But in the global South, they are more influenced by an ethic of following Jesus, and vision of the kingdom of God. They have recently become increasingly active in social ministries, but the hostility they sometimes show toward other faiths limits their ability to cooperate. ...

My own experience of the impact of this new Pentecostalism has taken place mainly in Brazil where I have been visiting for three decades. During one of my first trips there twenty-five years ago, I met a young Brazilian sociologist from Sao Paulo who as studying the peasant leagues then springing up in the arid, poverty-stricken northeast. The famers were organizing these leagues so they could buy seed and equipment and market their products cooperatively. During her research this novice investigator, a serious lay Catholic, discovered that indigenous Brazilian Pentecostals, even though they constituted only about 10 percent of the population then (the percentage is higher now), had done the lion's share of the work and provided most of the leadership. Eager to uncover the link between their religious faith and their work with the leagues, she interviewed several Pentecostals and asked what the correlation was. They seemed puzzled by the question, she said, and shrugged their shoulders. This in turn puzzled her, but the more she lived among them, the more she understood the connection.

Pentecostals, she explained, are practiced list makers. they are used to compiling records of people they intend to invite to church meetings. They knock on doors, then check off who was not at home, who responded favorably, and who slammed the door. Then they return, sometimes again and again. If the door was opened, they learned to get their message across quickly and clearly. ...

The essential qualities of a religious faith can be discerned most clearly in the shape of it gives to the institutions it spawns. Pentecostals give birth to voluntary associations, which are vital to any healthy society and the lifeblood of any genuine democracy. They mediate between ordinary people and the larger structures of economy, government, education and press. They provide alternative patterns of organization and unofficial networks. They school people in the indispensable skills needed to make democracy work.

Despite the misapprehensions of many North Americans, the Pentecostals of Brazil have neither remained aloof from politics nor have they imitated the American Religious Right. Careful analyses of their political behavior indicate their voting patterns tend to the "center left." In the recent Brazilian presidential elections, for example, a large majority voted for Lula and the Workers' Party. ...

Historically, Latin America has not been a continent richly endowed with voluntary associations. In general one belonged to whatever one was born into. Be it state or nation or tribe or church, you find yourself in a collectivity. You do not join it. But to be a crente you have to join something. To borrow a famous distinction from William James, most Latin American collectivities are made up of the "once born." Virtually the only exceptions to this rule have been labor unions, sports teams, base communities, and Pentecostal or evangelical religious congregations, which are constituted by the "twice born," people who have made a conscious choice to join something. All this means that the stunning growth of Pentecostals is a critical key to the democratization of the whole region, especially since they are beginning to participate in political life in an active way, hold public office, and seek to formulate a "social theology" of their own. But the continued growth of Pentecostals and their contribution to democracy are in no way guaranteed. They are often fragile, vulnerable to pressures from without and threats from within. How much they will strengthen democracy is still an open question.

...Until recently the contribution of Pentecostals to democracy has been an indirect one. Their role calls to mind the observation of historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) in the early nineteenth century that is was American religion that provided the indispensable fertile soil for democracy. Without the myriad congregations and other voluntary associations he found in America, he wrote, there would not be the "habits of the heart" democracy requires. In the religious congregations he visited, Tocquevillle observed, people learned to discuss issues, make corporate decisions, compromise when necessary, link moral principles to current events, and, finally, to accept the results these procedural strategies produced. ...

There is a difference between becoming a Pentecostal in Latin America today and joining a religious congregation in the United States that Tocqueville visited in the early nineteenth century. In Latin America choosing to become a Pentecostal can exact a high price, evoking the scorn of one's neighbors and family and, until recently, legal persecution. For Latin Americans this initial choice requires more courage. It is risky. But it instills a "habit of choosing" and hence a feeling of not being trapped forever in one's station. ... To borrow a phrase from North American black culture, they can say, "I am ... somebody." ...

One clear and present inner threat to Pentecostals' capacity to nurture democracy is a tendency to curtail it in their own congregations. Their emphasis on charismatic gifts came make their leadership arbitrary: "If God has put me in this position of power, why should you question my decisions?" Further, dynastic leadership is not unusual. ...

But Pentecostals also face threats from without. Ruling regimes in authoritarian countries do not worry so much about the theology of evangelical or Pentecostal congregations. But they do worry about "list makers" who know how to get people together, regionally, nationally, and even internationally. ...

Perhaps the clearest threat to the future of Pentecostals in Latin America is a combination of within and without ... the consumerist style is not just the wolf at the door; it is also a rather large camel's nose rather far inside the Pentecostal tent. It finds expression in the "gospel of prosperity," sometimes called the "name it and claim it" theology, derived in large measure from North American sources....

What comes next? ...No one knows, of course, But two core crente beliefs will play a decisive role: conversion ("you must be born again") and holiness ("be not conformed to this world.") In political and cultural terms conversion means that people can change and that therefore fatalism -- either personal or societal -- is not acceptable. Holiness means that you need not buy into the latest mind-numbing fads of the commodity lifestyle. You can be "in but not of this world."

I was surprised by Cox's optimism about the democratic potential of this form of Christian belief in Latin America. The little bit I know about Central American religious groups has not made me nearly so hopeful. I wonder whether any "free," non-established, religious community in a developing country and economy might not play a similar role in developing socially useful skills and character traits. But he opens a window here on a world of faith that might otherwise be invisible in the North American heart of empire. Interesting book.

Health care reform shorts: guys in black shirts are at it again

It's sad, though not really surprising, to see the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church lined up with Republicans in the "Just Die" faction on health care reform.

The Senate bill that will be the basis for the reconciled overall bill doesn't make it quite hard enough for poor women to get abortions for the bishops' taste. No taxpayer money will go to abortions -- that was never going to happen. But private companies that choose to sell policies in the new exchange insurance market will be allowed to include riders for abortion coverage -- so long as the insured women pay for that coverage themselves.

Get over yourselves gentlemen. You have the wrong plumbing to be trying to dictate on this.***
UPDATE: T. R. Reid in the Washington Post relates an anecdote from a Bishop who didn't have to be authoritarian about reducing abortion. Reid was trying to understand why all developed countries have a lower incidence of abortion than the United States.

One key reason seems to be that all those countries provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost. That has a profound effect on women contemplating what to do about an unwanted pregnancy.

The connection was explained to me by a wise and holy man, Cardinal Basil Hume. He was the senior Roman Catholic prelate of England and Wales when I lived in London; as a reporter and a Catholic, I got to know him.

In Britain, only 8 percent of the population is Catholic (compared with 25 percent in the United States). Abortion there is legal. Abortion is free. And yet British women have fewer abortions than Americans do. I asked Cardinal Hume why that is.

The cardinal said that there were several reasons but that one important explanation was Britain's universal health-care system. "If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it's needed," Hume explained, "she's more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn't it obvious?"

There's a Bishop who gets it.

Who cares about the people?

On the long flight eastward the other day, I got around to watching the February Frontline show "Behind Taliban Lines." Journalist Najibullah Quraishi managed to embed with a small northern Taliban unit that was trying to blow up U.S. supply trucks on the route from Tajikistan to Kabul. Quraishi's accomplishment (and daring) in getting to film these guys is admirable; the resulting film is pretty prosaic -- lots of "hurry up and wait" punctuated by bad luck and recriminations, just like real life.

This particular Taliban unit is loyal to an enduring northern warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who the U.S. once funded against the Russians; they certainly consider themselves allied and indebted to "Arabs" and al Qaeda. (Other Taliban groups in the south of the country not may be so in sync with "the Arabs" according to Pakistani sources.)

Quraishi explained in a PBS interview:

They would keep saying, "We will join in the Afghan government if the foreign forces leave Afghanistan." This was their message. All of them were saying the same. And I asked why. They said, "When Russia was in Afghanistan, all Afghan people jihad against Russia." There was at that time only one non-believer country [Russia]. "Now," they were saying, "there are 42 non-believer countries with hundred thousands of soldiers. So this is now our duty to fight against it."

In the same interview Quraishi reports:

One thing which I saw with them, they never, ever harm local people.

One day I asked one of the elders from a village, I said, "Why you guys supporting them?" They said, "Because they really care about civilians, about local people. And NATO, government and American, they don't care. They just put a bomb on civilians, they don't care and they just killing everyone." And I think this is the point [behind] the people's support for them. Even their operation, they didn't remove the bomb, because of civilians. So I think that's why local people support them.

***This much hyped Frontline segment came along with an add-on I had not expected: a warning about the dreadful failures of public Pakistani education. The U.S. journalist David Montero has reported from Pakistan for several years. I was surprised by his slant: he indicts the Pakistani education ministry with failing that nation's children using criticism from upper middle class Westernized Pakistanis and implying corruption and apathy from officials. None of that was too surprising.

But Montero also interviewed at least one leader from the religious madrassa school sector which is flourishing among the poor while the secular government schools collapse. This mullah has a simplistic explanation for why people prefer to send their children to the religious schools.




Montero treats this religious and nationalist assertion as if it were self-evident nonsense. But what if the mullah's perspective is simply ordinary common sense among Pakistanis who aren't Westernized? I imagine it is.

U.S. allies among the Pakistani elite are not going to combat the influence of this kind of thinking so long as ordinary people have experiential reason to think the West treats Pakistani life as cheap (drone attacks) and their country of 166 million people as just a staging area for its war on Afghanistan.

It's time to get the U.S. out of the Middle World.

Health care reform shorts: Pelosi time

This will be the week that my Congresscritter shows her stuff. If we get the much weakened, but probably ground breaking, version of insurance reform Democrats have muddled their way to, Nancy Pelosi will be the closest thing to a hero in the story. The President and White House political operation have been pathetic; their part of the job was to set the table, making it nearly impossible for Congress not to want to be part of the banquet. Instead they've been pretty much AWOL til the last month ... and vacillated when they showed up. The Senate has meanwhile demonstrated a level of institutional dysfunction that begs for reform or maybe just abolition -- what do most of us need with this egocentric, anti-majoritarian clunker anyway?

Though it all, Pelosi has been the only steadfast voice saying that elected Democrats must get done the job we elected them to do. She's not the most felicitous explainer, but here's what she said in a press conference last week.

I have supported -- when I say support, signs in the street, advocacy in legislatures -- I have supported single payer for longer than many of you have been -- since you've been born, than you've lived on the face of the earth. ...

...So I believe we have a very strong bill that will increase competition, will lower cost for the American people and accomplish some of the same goals. It doesn't produce the same savings, and that's why, you know, we were fighting for it. ...What we will have in reconciliation will be something that is agreed upon, House and Senate, that we can pass and they can pass.

Swampland

This week, health care reform is on her turf, the turf she sometimes seems to value above all else, the land of the legislative intricacies of U.S. Congress. And in that arcane arena, she's the master, prodding, pushing, herding small egos, greedy mediocrities and quaking violets to assemble momentary majorities. I wouldn't bet against Nancy if she says she can push something through the House.

The very virtue that sets her apart in Washington makes her a less than perfect representative for her constituents. Her base is her House caucus members -- that's who she must attend to. We in San Francisco elect her, but where she lands on issues has almost nothing to do with our wants; she does what she needs to do to hold together her fractious cats. Most of her geographical constituents are happy and proud to have elected this first woman Speaker of the House. Some of us wish more of her energies went into our issues, for example, ending Obama's Afghanistan adventure.

But this week, on health care reform, I expect to see my Congresscritter at her best.

Weather delay

We blew into New York City/Newark Airport in the middle of the night after delayed cross country flights. Oblivious Californians that we are, we didn't realize we were flying into a major storm.

Utility crews pushed through fallen trees and windblown debris to reach downed power lines Sunday, working to restore electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses as strong winds and heavy rain that wreaked havoc in parts of the Northeast pushed on into New England.

The storm, which battered parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut on Saturday with gusts of up to 70 mph, struck about two weeks after heavy snow and hurricane-force winds left more than a million customers in the Northeast in the dark. More than a half-million customers in the region lost electricity at the peak of Saturday's storm, and roughly 500,000 were waiting for power to be restored Sunday morning.

In Manhattan, Broadway's sidewalks and trash cans were littered with hundreds of shattered umbrellas.

AP

I can testify to that.

Having got to bed only briefly at 6am New York time today, regular blogging will have to wait until I get more sleep. Until tomorrow ...

Saturday scenes and scenery: Faces of our future

The young people on the street last week at the education funding march are the future of California.


Sure, they can be cute.


But there is also an earnestness in some of their expressions ...


a seriousness of purpose that belies their youth.


Some of them are going to be accomplished rabble rousers. That's good -- we need them.


Bang that drum!


Determination will carry many of them far.

Friday critter blogging: Climbing the walls

It's raining. I'm wrestling unhappily with a writing project. Outside on the wall alongside the front steps, these guys are slowly escaping the puddles.




Back to work, human!

Paul Farmer calls for "pragmatic solidarity"

Haitians can rebuild their country -- we can help. [2:16]

Yet another reason to have it in for Blanche Lincoln

The Democratic Senator from Arkansas is at it again. On labor issues, she represents Walmart better than workers; she has also been a nasty roadblock on the way to health care reform. But a new Lincoln move is truly incomprehensible: she has hooked up with five other Dems to try to kill the administration's effort to cut banks out of the federal student loan program.

Since the government guarantees the loans, bank involvement amounts to a giveaway:

Banks have been making government-guaranteed college loans under the Federal Family Education Loan program for decades. These lenders deal directly with borrowers and collect the interest, but if the loan defaults, the government eats 97 percent of the loss.

Kathleen Pender, San Francisco Chronicle

Nice work if you can get it. The Obama administration wants to make the loans through the government directly and use the money now paid to banks to increase student aid grants.

At present six Dem Senators are balking at the shift, Thomas R. Carper (DE), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Bill Nelson (FL), Mark Warner (VA) and Jim Webb (VA). Most of them are swimming in campaign funds from the institutions that make the loans. But Chris Kromm at Facing South is puzzled by Lincoln's participation in the blockage.

The more puzzling case is Sen. Lincoln of Arkansas. Her position on the Senate Finance Committee has made her a magnet for banking and finance campaign dollars ($246,700 for the 2010 cycle). But a search of her campaign contributions show no special ties to the student lending industry.

Maybe she's just being a rotten legislator.

Lincoln is likely to be history in November; her approval is way underwater among her Arkansas constituents. But progressives are taking the opportunity to demonstrate that there are consequences for Democrats who block the party agenda in office. Netroots activists including MoveOn have contributed well over $1 million to Democratic primary challenger Bill Halter. Unions and conservation organizations are also on the project of replacing Lincoln. You can join the effort here. I'm sure the guy isn't perfect, but lawmakers like Lincoln need to learn that the people aren't entirely passive.

UPDATE: Latest word is that the Senate Democratic leadership may attach the student loan clawback legislation to the health care bill in reconciliation. Well maybe. Nobody ever went broke betting the Senate can't get something done ... but just maybe someone up there is taking student needs seriously.

Just let him lie ...

Seen in a doorway yesterday, taking advantage of a weak spring sun.

I read the news yesterday; it didn't improve my good humor

One of my secrets is that I don't read newspapers every day. Enough news flies by at various blogs and other sites that I frequent that I don't feel I miss much. But yesterday I delved into the New York Times; I probably shouldn't have. There were some scary items from the far reaches of empire.

Iraq
The paper's editorial writers waxed lyrical about Iraqis voting on Sunday.

Iraq’s citizens once again showed tremendous courage and determination, defying bombs and a flawed pre-election process to cast their ballots.

Okay -- we know by now that the U.S. likes it when nations we impose ourselves on hold elections. And maybe the elections really are a good thing, though they always get reported as some kind of triumph for the U.S., less so for the electors..

But elsewhere in the paper, one Michael Slackman marvels to discover Region Unimpressed by Balloting in Iraq. Oh my, oh my ...

the mere act of voting was not seen as a step toward democracy. That perception, combined with Election Day violence, American occupation and Iranian influence, left few analysts and commentators in the Middle East declaring the elections a success and Iraq on the road to stability.

“Iraq is a failure and a big mess,” said Hussein al-Shobokshy, a columnist for the Saudi Arabian owned pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Alawsat.

Well what did you expect? When you invade a country amid a fog of lies, turn 20 percent of its people into refugees, kill some 300,000 to a million people, and set off a civil war, it really shouldn't be a surprise that neighbors don't think a little voting shows that everything is now hunky-dory. Get a grip, reporters!

Oh -- and I probably should add that the NYT gave oped space to someone with the unlikely name of Bartle Breese Bull to spin out cheerful but substance-free journalistic nostalgia from election sites. Bleech!

Iran
I can only conclude that we're being primed for an attack on Iran from reading this NYT offering: "For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier." Topped by a picture of Ahmadinejad playing the politician's role of "interested President inspecting a scientific facility which he doesn't comprehend," the article warns that, because of how the enrichment process works, Iran could make bomb-grade uranium with a lot less centrifuges that it now has making low grade uranium.

It is not until the second half of the article that we learn such important tidbits as these:

In the desert, at the Natanz complex, Iran presented atomic inspectors with evidence that it had succeeded in enriching some of its 4 percent uranium to 20 percent, the United Nations agency said in a Feb. 18 report. But American and European officials said the amounts were small so far.

Originally, Iran enriched its uranium to 4 percent with thousands of centrifuges in two cavernous underground halls roughly half the size of the Pentagon. The center of its new effort, according to the atomic agency, is a facility at Natanz known as the pilot plant, where Iran currently has 164 centrifuges spinning. Even with the aid of nonlinearity, that number is insufficient to enrich much uranium quickly.

In interviews and briefings, officials in Washington and diplomats in Europe said the pilot plant could make perhaps three kilograms, or about seven pounds, of 20 percent fuel per month. At that rate, they added, making enough to power the research reactor in Tehran would take five to seven years. But the reactor has only months to go before it could run out of fuel, they estimated. ...

Not much there, when you get into it. Hey -- haven't we been extras in this movie before, in 2002 and 2003?

Also notable in the ominous war drums category is an ad from Vote Vets currently turning up on progressive blogs. Ostensibly calling for energy security, it recycles discredited Pentagon claims that IEDs exploded in Iraq came across the border from Iran. As if Iraqis weren't capable of blowing up occupation troops and each other without a devilish sponsor. Good discussion of this war-mongering effort in this post.

Afghanistan
While I'm surveying imperial battlegrounds, I shouldn't neglect the current shooting war. Seems the U.S. has successfully overcome immediate opposition in an Afghan place named Marja. But nobody quite knows what it is. Here's Joshua Foust who blogs regularly at Registan.net: All Central Asia, All the Time writing in the Times last week:

Unfortunately, Western leadership is undecided about the nature of the place itself. Depending on which official is speaking, Marja is either a teeming “population center” of 85,000 residents or an isolated farming town of about 50,000 or a district with about 125,000 people. But if Marja is a district, it is unrecognized by the Afghan Interior Ministry. And if Marja is a town, then it needs to hold a constitutionally mandated election to choose a mayor, and not face a governor forced upon it by Kabul.

Regardless of Marja’s status, the choice of new “district governor,” Haji Abdul Zahir, does not make sense. Mr. Zahir has lived in Germany for the last 15 years and had never set foot in Marja until two weeks ago.

This week, it came out that Zahir served prison time in his German exile for stabbing his stepson. Smooth choice for your war marketing campaign, guys.

Meanwhile, Afghan civilians die [1:54]:


No -- reading the news has not improved my mood.

Budget follies short-takes: Fund the parks!

Given the number of things I find myself advocating for (and against), I find it almost embarrassing to be posting this. But the cliché is true: the National Parks are one of this country's best ideas.

One of the pleasures of some of my travels has been to enjoy other country's parks, notably in Mexico, Argentina and Chile. Everywhere the maintenance of areas reserved for public enjoyment is a rare instance of the public good overriding private selfishness. Let's keep it that way. ***Meanwhile in California, a large coalition of conservation organizations is working to protect and fund the 278 state parks through a ballot initiative slated for November 2010. The measure

... would provide a stable, reliable and adequate source of funding for the state park system, for wildlife conservation and for increased and equitable access to those resources for all Californians. The initiative would give California vehicles free admission to the state parks in exchange for a new $18 vehicle license fee, which would be specifically dedicated to state parks and wildlife conservation.

Like any other sensible Californian, I know that budgeting by way of initiative measures is an idiotic way to run a state. But, but, but -- with the likes of Meg Whitman on the horizon and Republicans blocking all taxes in the legislature, I have to support this one. Parks are part of what makes this state special. They are well used by all sorts of people. And once we lose the staff and even the lands themselves, we'll never get them back.

(Since we're in national budget season, I'm not going to to resist offering occasional short comments on budget matters and process under this headline, just as I have done about health care reform. I have strong foundational views on what the U.S. government ought to be doing about and with taxpayers' money that I've laid out in this post.)

Is this what the next 8 months are going to look like?

The San Francisco Chronicle asked candidates for California governor to respond to Toyota's closure of the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont. It's hard to imagine a blow to the local economy that feels more devastating to the segment of the work force that remains in the industrial economy.

Democrat Jerry Brown simply didn't get a response in on time, at least according to the Chronicle. (I expect there will be recriminations and countercharges. The Chron is, after all, at root a Republican paper.)

I won't be surprised if the campaign goes like this: Meg Whitman will knock off Steve Poizner in the Republican primary. She's well funded (by her own Ebay millions) and has good advertising talent already hard at work filling the airwaves on her behalf. Brown supporters will counter attack that she is completely unqualified to be governor of California, except in her own estimation (true -- the woman didn't even vote until she decided she wanted a political job).

And Brown may very well lose an office that some Democrat should be able to walk into, given the demographics of the state and the registration advantage the party enjoys.

Brown's a wily old political bird and an accomplished political chameleon. Heck, last time he was governor, he campaigned against the Prop. 13 tax revolt, saw the measure pass, and proceeded to claim credit for it. But I fear his time has passed. That no other Democrat came close to being able to contest him for the nomination points up how completely feeble the Democratic bench is in this state. It's likely to be a long, painful campaign season.

ACLU to Obama...

The President's men are putting out trial balloons that he intends to cave in to admitted war criminal Dick Cheney's whining and overrule the Attorney General's plan to try some al-Qaeda prisoners in civilian courts.

More of the same indeed.

The ACLU ran this ad in the New York Times today. You can weigh in here.

U.S. Torture: It's Not Over Yet

(This is a guest post from Rebecca Gordon, a member of the WarTimes group who teaches ethics at the University of San Francisco. WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras sends out monthly email updates; you can subscribe at the link. For an extensive bibliography on U.S. torture, please contact Rebecca at rgordon@usfca.edu.)

February was not a good month for U.S. torture victims or their supporters. A British court released documents detailing the tortures suffered by Binyam Mohamed, whom the U.S. had shipped to Morocco for months of torture. The Obama Administration responded by threatening to stop sharing security information with Britain. The Justice Department overruled its own Office of Professional Responsibility’s conclusion that John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the famous 2002 “torture memo” had violated professional standards. And the Administration has failed to keep its promise to shut down the prison at Guantánamo.

Guantánamo
Within days of his inauguration in January 2009, President Obama issued executive orders intended to close down the U.S. prison in Guantánamo and put an end to this country’s use of torture. Unfortunately, it has proven to take more than a presidential order to put an end to a practice with such a long history and entrenched infrastructure.

More than a year after Obama’s executive order, Guantánamo remains open, and close to 200 prisoners remain in limbo there. These “illegal enemy combatants” as the Bush Administration named them, have never had trials or been convicted of crimes. Over the years, plans to try them in military tribunals (later sanitized as “commissions”) have dissolved as U.S. courts repeatedly ruled such proceedings unconstitutional. Among the unsung heroes of this shameful period are the military lawyers who insisted on fair trials for Guantánamo’s prisoners.

Why are these men still in Guantánamo? At least in part because they have nowhere else to go. Some cannot be repatriated to their home countries, where they face new persecution at the hands of their own governments. Members of Congress and local government officials have prevented others from being housed in U.S. prisons. A few have been taken in by other countries, like the 13 Uighurs who have settled in the Pacific island nation of Palau.

Guantánamo prisoners’ suffering--beatings, short-shackling, forced nasal tube feedings, incessant loud noise, sleep deprivation, and the special torment of total isolation--have been documented in the heroic reporting of journalists like Andy Worthington and scholars like Peter Jan Honigsberg.

These short-hand descriptions of torture barely touch the true horror of what has been done to human beings at Guantanamo. For example, the Center for Constitutional Rights has described “forced tube-feeding” as the daily full body restraint of a prisoner, while tubes the diameter of a human finger are shoved up a nose or down a throat, after which as much a liter and a half of fluid is pumped into the victim’s stomach. Not surprisingly, this produces painful cramping, vomiting and diarrhea. No anesthesia is provided, and prisoners report that “the same tubes, covered in blood and stomach bile” are used on multiple prisoners.

This January, the Atlantic Monthly’s Scott Horton described the 2006 death by torture of two prisoners at Guantánamo, originally described to the world as suicides. Web-based projects like Honigsberg’s Guantánamo Testimonials Project of U.C. Davis’s Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas and Witness to Guantánamo have collected and centralized testimonies from hundreds of Guantánamo prisons.

At this writing it remains unclear when, or indeed if, the prison at Guantánamo will shut down for good.

Beyond Guantánamo
Even the prisoners still stuck in Guantánamo are better off, however, than others who are held in less-scrutinized detention sites. They, at least, have had access to lawyers and to visits by the International Red Cross. The fate of detainees in other U.S.-run centers is less well-known.

Guantánamo became an international symbol of U.S. use of torture in the Bush-Cheney “war on terror,” but Guantánamo was not even the site of the worst tortures. The U.S. military prison at Bagram Air Base, where two prisoners were beaten to death in 2002, is probably the best-known detention center besides Guantánamo. On February 27, 2010, the United States began a multi-year process of handing off responsibility for running it to the Afghan army, during which time, according to reporters who attended the press conference announcing the handover, “Americans will certainly continue to have a role.”

But there are other, lesser-known prisons in Afghanistan, the so-called “black sites”--the secret and semi-secret “interrogation” centers run by the CIA. Journalists such as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer have revealed that several of these operated –and for all the public knows—continue to operate in Afghanistan. These include the “Dark Prison” near the airport in Kabul, so-called says Mayer, because of “its absolute lack of light.” The “Salt Pit” is located in an abandoned brick factory north of the same city.

The same day President Obama ordered Guantánamo shut down, he signed other executive orders requiring the CIA to shut down its secret detention centers and to restrict its interrogation methods to those permitted in the Army Field Manual. U.S. citizens, however, have no way of knowing whether or not the CIA has complied.

Indeed, it can be argued that the first year of Obama’s presidency has served as an extended lesson in the limits even to presidential power when it finds itself in opposition to entrenched interests and long-standing practices.

An Enduring Torture Infrastructure
U.S. involvement with torture did not begin in the years after 9/11. Torture in North America has a history as old as European colonization and of the slavery that undergirded much of the early U.S. economy. U.S. soldiers used water tortures on Filipino captives in the late 19th century. The post-World War II period witnessed an extended project of CIA-funded academic research into torture methods designed to induce what its 1963 interrogation manual calls “DDD”: debility, dependency, and dread. Many of these will be recognizable to anyone who has followed the revelation of U.S. practices during the “war on terror.” They include sleep-deprivation, sensory overload (use of loud noise and bright lights), sensory-deprivation, and the innocuous-sounding but excruciating “stress positions” that convert the victim’s own body into an instrument of torture.

Torture, including systematic use of rape and sexual violence, is also a frequent if unacknowledged feature of incarceration in this country’s present-day prisons. Techniques such as sleep deprivation, extended isolation from human contact, and exposure to 24-hour surveillance were all perfected during the 1980’s and 1990’s in federal “Supermax” prisons. It is no accident that the members of the Army Reserve unit involved in the tortures at Abu Ghraib, and of those sent to set up Camp Delta in Guantánamo were prison guards in civilian life.

Apart from all the arguments about whether or not torture “works” to produce life-saving information (and there is staggering amounts of evidence that it does not), torture requires an infrastructure. It needs private locations, equipment, institutions of research and development, and most of all, trained and practiced torturers. None of these can be produced on the spot in a moment of extremity, despite the situation described in the infamous “ticking-bomb” scenario. In the real world, state torture is an ongoing practice, one which requires a wide network of intellectual and material support.

Accounting and Accountability
Once a nation has constructed the infrastructure of torture, it is not, as we have seen in the last year, easily dismantled. This is why it is so important that the people of the United States receive a full accounting of what has been, and continues to be, done in the name of our safety. Only when we understand the extent of the torture infrastructure can we complete the work of pulling it to pieces.

Those responsible for torture must also be held accountable. In the last month, former Vice-President Dick Cheney has publicly and repeatedly trumpeted his continued support for torture – and his critique of the Obama Administration for its attempts to curtail it. When a former vice president publicly approves the past and future commission of war crimes with complete impunity, declaring to ABC News, “I was a big supporter of water-boarding,” we are far from ending state torture in this country.

On February 19, the federal Office of Professional Responsibility released its report on the memos written in 2002 by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, designed to give legal cover for torture to the Bush White House. The report concludes that the two committed professional misconduct in constructing the memos, but Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis rejected the findings. Attorney General Eric Holder has in effect acceded to the content of the memos, by suggesting he will only consider prosecution of actions that fall outside of those Yoo and Bybee’s opinions permitted.

Repugnant as their legal opinions are, Yoo, Bybee, and the other legal apologists for torture are not the main culprits here. Getting them disbarred, or in the case of Bybee, removed from the federal bench, would only be nibbles at the edge of the problem of torture. Only a full accounting and real accountability for real criminals will do the job.

The Obama Administration has repeatedly gone to court in this country – and sought to intercede in British courts – to prevent U.S. torture victims from telling their stories in public. It almost seems that this Administration is more interested in hiding old war crimes than taking the necessary steps to prevent new ones.

A culture of impunity at the highest level of government reinforces in the rest of us a cowardly ignorance. It teaches us to trade our humanity for an illusion of safety. It degrades the people of this nation and opens wide the door to new generation of Bushes, Cheneys, and all the “great supporters” of torture.

Health care reform shorts: The Californicating of America

Neera Tanden, an executive at the Center for American Progress thinktank who worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, assures conservative Democratic Congresscritters that they can get behind the health care reform bill because it is truly "A Blue Dog Dream."

Some House moderates criticized the House bill for taxing the rich. Lucky for them, that’s barely in the Senate bill. While the House bill used the millionaire’s tax to raise $460 billion in revenues, the Senate bill has a Medicare tax that raises only $87 billion from high-income folks.

As I explained in the previous post about education in California, it is structural barriers against taxing the wealthy (the people who do have money) that have led to the largest state's inability to balance a budget, provide for its residents, or even run a less than laughable government. Insofar as the (d)evolution of the health care reform cements the principle that Washington cannot tax in order to do the work of government, the "reform" is a deform.

Nonetheless, on balance I hope they pass the thing. For all it's many faults, some people would get access to doctors who don't have that now. And I would rather be able to agitate for its improvement than have to agitate solely for Democrats to get some backbones.

(Saturday scenes and scenery will return next week. I figure regulars don't need another photo essay right after the one posted yesterday. Making decisions like that with no argument is one of the perks of having one's own blog.)

Marching for education, San Francisco

If you think getting most of us access to some kind of health care is hard ... you haven't yet contemplated how hard it is in this country to ensure that all children have access to a quality education. We say the country wants and needs this -- but doing it ...

Yesterday thousands of students, parents, union members and teachers took to the streets to protest ongoing and upcoming cuts in school and college budgets. Too much news coverage that I have seen focused more on a few photogenic incidents of disruption (and violent police response) than on the complex of problems that evoked the protests.

The idea for protest, also known as March Forth, was hatched at UC Berkeley last fall and has spread to campuses in dozens of states. ...

Thursday's protest was an effort to keep the momentum going. Students set up Web sites and Twitter and Facebook pages. They formed committees to connect with high schools, community colleges, union leaders, teachers and workers. ...

Calm prevailed in San Francisco, where thousands of demonstrators marched from 24th and Mission streets, stopping traffic on blocks of Mission, Market, Van Ness and Grove during a two-hour walk that concluded with a rally in front of City Hall.

Homemade signs carried by marchers in the Mission District pointed to some facets of the public education morass.


At its simplest, the problem of California education is money. A system that once led the nation in investing in its young people has fallen short for decades. Per pupil K-12 spending in California is expected to be the lowest of any state in the nation next year. At the same time the student population is the largest and most racially and linguistically diverse in the country. It's not easy making that work when an older, mostly white electorate seldom has children or even grandchildren in the schools and doesn't want to pay taxes to support education for a bunch of brown strangers. There are layers and layers of structural impediments to the functioning of the California government and education system, but the refusal of those who can most afford it to pay taxes for the general welfare is the crux of the problem and has been since the Tax Revolt of 1978.


Jamming 30 students in a room doesn't make for real education, this mother says. And the educators of California know that very well. So over the last decade, they've managed to cut class size in K-3rd grade to 20, sometimes 25 kids. And that's great. But that required more teachers. Though most teachers in California have good labor unions to represent them, they work very hard in difficult environments with little support for relatively low pay. When class size reduction opened up new jobs, quite a few senior teachers saw an opportunity to move to more affluent districts or schools where working conditions would be easier. That left serious teacher shortages in the most difficult urban schools -- shortages that tended to get filled with inexperienced new teachers, many of whom only lasted a year or two. As the budget crunch comes down, the least experienced teachers are the ones getting lay-off notices. I wasn't surprised to be handed a paper at yesterday's march showing that neighborhood schools in poor southeastern areas of the city were seeing as many as 50 percent of their teachers get pink slips. This won't help. The class size reduction story shows just how interconnected education problems are.


Students aren't stupid. They wonder what it means when the state won't invest in their schooling. Yesterday's marchers were very amiable, considering how they know they are treated.


When they get to the Community College and State University level, it gets worse. According to the SF Chronicle:

California's $20 billion budget gap this year, on top of $60 billion last year, has resulted in soaring tuition at the University of California and California State University. Courses are jammed, and many students can't get in at all. Lecturers have been laid off and employees furloughed. CSU wouldn't let new students enroll at all this semester.

More than 20,000 students will be turned away from community colleges next fall because there won't be enough classes for them, community college Chancellor Jack Scott said.

Non-profit organization try to bridge the gaps left by schools that can't do all that is needed. Mission Graduates -- one local group that tries to enrich education for local youth -- has equipped this young man with a T-shirt that speaks a hope. Will he make it?


She's got a dream -- and sees clouds on the horizon.

Says it all...

Unabashedly lifted from Ezra Klein. I'm busy today making a little "democratic" noise alongside students and teachers for continued support of public education. More much later.

Health care reform shorts: About time, Mr. President

Today Obama laid it on the line, finally insisting that Democratic majorities in Congress pass something:

At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem. The American people want to know if it's still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead.

And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I don't know how this plays politically, but I know it's right. And so I ask Congress to finish its work, and I look forward to signing this reform into law.

TPM

Glad you noticed this needed some leadership. What took you so long?

That's a serious question. Even if the President doesn't give a damn about health care "reform" (and I suspect he does want this to work), simple political self interest might have been expected to get him working visibly to pass this thing. But for months, nothing.

The punditocracy is kicking around whether to blame the White House staff. But this is Obama's show -- it's up to him to take control. Let's hope his remarks today signal he's going to get on with the job.

Progressives retool; it's never over until it is over

Okay, time to get back to the business of changing the country for the better. The Obama administration can't or won't do much unless there's a pack of pesky progressives nipping at their heels. So the progressive online infrastructure has picked out a target, hooked up with local activists and organized labor, and got itself a political campaign. The netroots was built for this under Bush -- it is finding its role again under Obama, though it still may take awhile.

Arkansas Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln made herself the target of this demonstration project by consistently sounding and voting more like an obstructionist Republican than a loyal Democrat, in particular indicating she'd never go along with reforms of labor law to help level the playing field for union organizing. She was slippery about her positions: at one point she endorsed a public option for health care reform on her web site while arguing against the measure on the Senate floor.

Lincoln is up for re-election this year and every poll of Arkansas voters says she is in trouble. In 2008, Arkansas was the only state that voted more Republican than previously as the Obama coalition nudged a new electorate into being. So the Republicans are gunning for Lincoln -- and now so are progressives who found a legitimate primary challenger in Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.


[:31] He's a little cheery for my taste -- but hey, being a candidate takes monomaniacal focus and energy. Blue Arkansas blog touts the guy's progressive issue positions, with sensible cautions:

Now I fully expect him to have a few issues that we're not going to agree with. Expecting him to support marriage equality is unreasonable for instance, and I'm sure there are others. But the point is never to elect someone who's perfect, it’s to elect the best person available, and Halter is looking awesome from the progressive viewpoint (and a number of others I imagine).

The netroots is doing one of the things it does best: raising money for Halter. The result is impressive.

As of Tuesday night, the combined efforts of four liberal groups -- MoveOn.org, Daily Kos, Democracy for America and Progressive Change Campaign Committee -- had raised $1 million for Halter in just 36 hours. (MoveOn was responsible for $900,000 of that.)

Salon

Labor has promised additional millions in independent expenditures for Halter.

Looks like we're getting to the part where we stopped mourning and are ready to organize. They are going to hate that in the White House (Obama has spoken up for Lincoln!) Fun time.

To support the folks who are supporting Halter to stick it to Lincoln, check out the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. They aren't the only outfit in this, just one of the best.

UPDATE: The Sierra Club is out for Lincoln's scalp too.

UPDATE 2: Add EMILY's List, the fundraising women, to Lincoln's defectors.

"Since she wasn't there for us," [Ellen] Malcom wrote, "we won't be there for her."

Clearly a lot of groups have decided to make Lincoln, who is likely to lose in any case, an example of what happens to wavering Democrats. This seems to fit the "can't hurt; might help" category.

Transition as a collective experience

Last night, at the urging of some smart friends, I attended a showing of the film Switch: A Community in Transition at the San Francisco LGBT Center. Like my friend Mike, I have a visceral aversion to the Center; but this event made it worth violating my casual boycott of the space.

Filmmaker Brooks Nelson wanted to give the community of people that surrounds him a chance to express what his female-to-male transition meant in their lives. He's a lucky guy: he works for an employer who actively seeks diversity among workers; his church (UCC) affirms that God loves all humankind; his community of friends -- trans, lesbian and straight -- are honest, brave and thoughtful adults; and his family, above all his longtime woman partner, love him well enough to roll through changes that arise from his necessities. Everyone should be so lucky -- or maybe special people make a good deal out of their luck.

Transition is certainly different for every transperson. And transition can be hard on the people around the individual passing through it. One of the points the film makes is that, under good circumstances, the friends and associates of the transitioning person may do more of the direct talking, explaining, and deflecting of emotional reactions than the transperson him/herself. Those of us who seek to be allies therefore probably can help by ensuring there are many resources available to help the friends of transfolks talk about stuff they might not be able to verbalize.

Though Brooks is white, his community includes folks who are visibly African-American, of various Asian backgrounds, and likely of mixed races. Everyone brings the circumstances of their racial communities to these matters; for some folks, gender issues are simply too dangerous to put front and center or nothing close to the primary emergency in their lives.

Watching Switch, I was struck that I was seeing a narrow age band of people. Like Brooks, the people in his life are mostly in mid-life. This film doesn't catch the more volatile experiences of young transfolk who may enjoy more acceptance from some age peers, but also, being less established in their economic circumstances and identities, are sometimes very vulnerable. Brooks' friends, especially his lesbian peer group, are able to be extremely articulate about gender in a way that speaks favorably for the residue of parts of the lesbian feminism of the 1980s.

During the short panel discussion after the film, the older guy who staffs the Center in the evenings added another age perspective . He transitioned in 1970 -- the whole point of his transition was to stop talking about identity and simply live his life. He seemed to find the film's exploration of these issues foreign -- but he's been at the Center for five years now and is used to the endless talking in the LGBT community.

Not clear on the concept ...

Perhaps someone should have thought a little harder about how to pitch this meeting.

Via RAG.

European conundrum: Can a continental Humpty Dumpty get itself together?

For a lot of us in the United States, Europe (not including Russia) isn't an area that ever grabbed our political attention. When my generation was young, for worse and better, we were forced by the Vietnam war to take note of East Asia -- and today we are all noticing India and China. Later in the 1980s and 90s, progressives were distressed by U.S. support for South American dictatorships and parallel efforts to crush Central American democratic uprisings. We supported the African National Congress' struggle for a non-racial state in South Africa -- and pretty much ignored the rest of the continent. We could hardly help noticing that the U.S. was supporting Israel's occupation of Palestine and angling to control oil in the complex politics of the Middle East.

But, aside from Bush and Cheney indulging a snit against the French, for many of us, Europe is just there. Our ancestors mostly immigrated from Europe and we might visit of the continent as the source and a sort of living theme park of "old civilization," but not as a place to worry about.

Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 fills in an awful lot of my intellectual voids about Europe. Professor Judt is a British historian who teaches at New York University. This is an incredibly ambitious book -- a survey of the political and social history of the continent in its widest definition from the end of World War II through about 2005. What follows summarizes and necessarily flattens one of the most richly textured historical narratives I've ever encountered. But Judt's accomplishment is so striking -- and in some senses disturbing -- that I want to undertake restating it, even poorly, here.

Judt's book is a history that reintegrates the eastern part of Europe, including European Russia, into the continent's story alongside the west of the continent. That shouldn't be surprising, since economic and a partial political reintegration is precisely what all of Europe has accomplished since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 -- but I am sure that I am not the only American who (along with many Europeans) barely noticed that such an intellectual reintegration was needed if we were to have a truer picture of Europe today.

Eastern Europe, thought of (rarely) as a gray zone of unknown and unknowable Soviet satellite states behind an "Iron Curtain," seemed an unquestioned feature of the postwar world to my generation. I don't remember imagining that these states were full of real people. They were cartoon regimes, implicitly deserving their obscurity (weren't they perhaps suffering for collaborating with Hitler? -- I didn't know). I absorbed this dismissive assumption despite having more reason than many in the United States to have a more nuanced attitude: the city I grew up in included the largest Polish population of any city outside of Warsaw and I had a Serbian uncle in my family. But the people who occasionally paraded downtown in the 1950s trying to raise our consciousness about "captive nations" seemed antiques from a dead world.

Judt brings out how the Soviet Union's wily Stalin played on Eastern Europeans' awareness that Western Europeans looked down on them, using this prejudice to help cement servility within the Communist puppet states. Judt maintains that Stalin himself chafed under Western condescension and rubbed it in for his subjects. They were encouraged to feel

...a deep-rooted anxiety about Russian, and more generally 'Eastern' inferiority... In a 1950 trial in Sofia of 'The American Spies in Bulgaria', the accused were charged with propagating the view 'that the chosen races live only in the West, in spite of the fact that geographically they have all started in the East.' The indictment went on to describe the accused as exhibiting 'a feeling for servile under-validation' that Western spies had successfully exploited. The West, then, was a threat that had to be exorcised, repeatedly.

And this had roots in reality. When Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and others looked west for concern for their loss of control of their own countries during the 1950s and 60s, they encountered

...widespread ignorance of the fate of contemporary Eastern Europe, coupled with growing Western indifference, that was a source of bewilderment and frustration to many in the East. ...Stalin's success in gouging his defensive perimeter deep into the center of Europe had removed Eastern Europe from the equation. ...And despite the fact that the challenge of Communism lay at the heart of Western European debates and disputes, the practical experience of 'real existing Communism' a few score miles to the east was paid very little attention: and by Communism's most ardent admirers, none at all.

Thus Western Europe found its own political way in the postwar decades without ever seriously taking into account what was going on in the lives of people in the East. In the East, a "reform Communism" was periodically raised up (Poland, 1950; Hungary, 1956; Czechoslovakia, 1968) only to be crushed by Russian forces. Judt maintains these movements erred in holding

...a curiously naive misreading of the system under which they lived. What mattered to the Communist leadership was not economics but politics. The ineluctable implication of the economic reformers' theories was that the central authority of the Party-State would need to be weakened if normal economic life was to be resumed. But faced with that choice the Communist Party-States would always opt for economic abnormality.

Eastern European economies -- "Communist," centrally planned, corrupt -- did not provide for their people, nor could they provide any individual or political freedom. By the 1970s, Communism was convicted for Eastern populations of being an ugly, backward looking relic.

Communism, it was becoming clear, had defiled and despoiled its radical heritage....If Lenin and his heirs had poisoned the well of social justice, the argument ran, we are all damaged. ...What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing.

Meanwhile, in the West, in the first two decades postwar, building upon the rubble that was all the remained of prewar prosperity, European states concentrated on economic growth and creating social peace by constructing viable welfare states. For Western Europe, the lesson of German aggression and fascism generally was that peace mattered above both ideology and acquisition of great wealth. And they made stable democracies that delivered welfare and peace.

By the 1970s, Western European economies stopped growing so fast and social peace seemed secure, so there were second thoughts about some of this. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher came to power, privatizing state-owned enterprises and breaking the unions. In France, there was a vogue for admiring U.S. capitalism. But concurrently Western Europe lurched awkwardly and haltingly toward economic union. And it was rich enough and stable enough to reintegrate Eastern Europe when those states so suddenly escaped from their gray obscurity afer 1989. And when Judt wrote in the middle of the 00s, Europeans did not doubt that they'd found a desirable form of social organization.

Europeans may have lost faith in their politicians, but at the core of the European system of government there is something that even the most radical anti-system parties have not dared to attack head on and which continues to attract near-universal allegiance. That something is certainly not the European Union, for all its manifold merits. It is not democracy; too abstract, too nebulous, and perhaps too often invoked to stand in isolation as an object for admiration. Nor is it freedom or the rule of law -- not seriously threatened in the West for many decades and already taken for granted by a younger generation of Europeans in all the member states of the EU. What binds Europeans together, even when they are deeply critical of some aspect or other of its practical workings, is what it has become conventional to call -- in disjunctive but revealing contrast with 'the American way of life' -- the 'European model of society.'

For Judt, the intellectual disjunction between East and West still endures. The two parts of Europe have never come to terms with their different political evolutions, in particular their different understandings of historical Marxism.

To many western European intellectuals, Communism was a failed variant of a common progressive heritage. But to their central and east European counterparts it was an all too successful local application of the criminal pathologies of twentieth-century authoritarianism and should be remembered thus.

Maybe Europeans can simply go forward without intellectual reintegration of their history. Perhaps these unreconciled histories will continue to bedevil them. Now that's something that people in the United States know something about, as the U.S. South continues to march to different memories than other regions even 150 years after our nation's most bloody civil disjunction.

Postwar is richly informative, deep, challenging, long and absolutely worth the effort. Highly recommended.