AlterNet.org


BELIEF

De Capo Press / By Frank Schaeffer

Insider: "The Christian Right is Aiming to Destroy All Things Public"

The Right has pushed for the state to hand over its public duties to private companies, including military operations, prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

May 13, 2011 |

The following is an excerpt from Frank Schaeffer's new book, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway (Da Capo Press, 2011). Raised in Switzerland in l'Abri, a utopian community and spiritual school his evangelical parents founded, Schaeffer was restless and aware even at a young age that "my life was being defined by my parent's choices." Still, he took to "the family business" well, following his dad as he became one of the "best-known evangelical leaders in the U.S." on whirlwind speaking tours. While rubbing shoulders with Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, Schaeffer witnessed the birth of the Christian anti-abortion movement, and became an evangelical writer, speaker and star in his own right.

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Ironically, at the very same time as Evangelicals like Dad and I were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics in the 1970s and 80s, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at “godless America” and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and homeschool them. The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders.

For instance, in the 1840s when Roman Catholics asked for tax relief for their private schools, Protestants said no and stood against anything they thought might undermine the public schools that they believed were the backbone of moral virtue, community spirit, and egalitarian good citizenship.

The Evangelical’s abandonment of the country they called home (while simultaneously demanding change in that society) went far beyond alternative schools or homeschooling. In the 1970s and 1980s thousands of Christian bookstores opened, countless new Evangelical radio programs flourished, and new TV stations went on the air. Even a “Christian Yellow Pages” (a guide to Evangelical tradesmen) was published advertising “Christcentered plumbers,” accountants, and the like who “honor Jesus.”

New Evangelical universities and even new law schools appeared, seemingly overnight, with a clearly defined mission to “take back” each and every profession—including law and politics—“for Christ.” For instance, Liberty University’s Law School was a dream come true for my old friend Jerry Falwell, who (when I was speaking at his school in 1983 to the entire student body for the second time) gleefully told me of his vision for Liberty’s programs: “Frank, we’re going to train a new generation of judges to change America!” This was the same Jerry Falwell who wrote in America Can Be Saved, “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools.”

To the old-fashioned conservative mantra “Big government doesn’t work,” the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic and Mormon cobelligerents) added “The U.S. government is evil!” And the very same community—Protestant American Evangelicals—who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere “run by the government.”

As they opened new institutions (proudly outside the mainstream), the Jesus Victims doing this “reclaiming” cast themselves in the role of persecuted exiles. What they never admitted was that they were self-banished from mainstream institutions, not only because the Evangelicals’ political views on social issues conflicted with most people’s views, but also because Evangelicals (and other conservative religionists) found themselves holding the short end of the intellectual stick. Science marched forth, demolishing fundamentalist “facts” with dispassionate argument. So science also became an enemy.

Rather than rethink their beliefs, conservative religionists decided to renounce secular higher education and denounce it as “elitist.” Thus, to be uninformed, even willfully and proudly stupid, came to be considered a Godly virtue. And since misery loves company, the Evangelicals’ quest, for instance when Evangelicals dominated the Texas textbook committees, was to strive to “balance” the teaching of evolution with creationism and damn the facts. In the minds of Evangelicals, they were recreating the Puritan’s self-exile from England by looking for a purer and better place, this time not a geographical “place” but a sanctuary within their minds (and in inward-looking schools and churches) undisturbed by facts.

Like the Puritans, the post-Roe Evangelicals (and many other conservative Christians) withdrew from the mainstream not because they were forced to but because the society around them was, in their view, fatally sinful and, worse, addicted to facts rather than to faith. And yet having “dropped out” (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding “moral” and “family” matters the society they’d renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the Evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic (and Mormon) outsider victim “approach” to public policy was perfected on a heretofore-undreamed of scale by Sarah Palin. She was the ultimate holier-than-thou Evangelical queen bee. What my mother had represented (in her unreconstructed fundamentalist heyday) to a chalet full of young gullible women and later to tens of thousands of readers, Palin became for tens of millions of alienated angry white lower-middleclass men and women convinced that an educated “elite” was out to get them.

Palin was first inflicted on the American public by Senator John McCain, who chose her as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election for only one reason: He needed to shore up flagging support from the Evangelical Republican antiabortion base. McCain wanted to prove that he was fully in line with the “social issues” agenda that Dad, Koop, and I had helped foist on our country over thirty years before. Palin lost the election for McCain but “won” her war for fame and fortune and self-appointed “prophetess” status.

She presented herself as called by God and thus cast in the Old Testament mold of Queen Esther, one chosen by God to save her people. Palin perfected the Jesus Victim “art” of Evangelical self banishment and then took victimhood to new levels of success by cashing in on white lower-middle-class resentment of America’s elites. She might as well have run under the slogan “I’m as dumb as you are!”

Palin made a fortune by simultaneously proclaiming her Evangelical faith, denouncing Liberals, and claiming that she would help the good God fearing folks out there “take back” their country. This “Esther” lacked seriousness. But born-again insiders knew that the “wisdom of men” wasn’t the point. Why should the new Queen Esther bother to actually finish her work governing Alaska? God had chosen her to confound the wise! So she became a media star and quit as governor of Alaska. Then she battled “Them”—the “lamestream media” (as she labeled any media outlets outside of the Far Right subculture)—in the name of standing up for “Real Americans.” Palin used the alternative communication network that had its roots deeply embedded in those pioneering 1970s and 1980s Evangelical TV shows and radio shows that I used to be on just about every other day. She did this to avoid being questioned by people who didn’t agree with her. By not actually governing or doing the job she’d been elected by Alaskans to do, and by using the alternative media networks as an “outsider”—all the while reacting to and demanding attention from the actual (theoretically hated) media—Palin also made buckets of money.

And the greatest irony was that many women in the Evangelical/ Roman Catholic/Quiverfull movements were cheering for Palin as a defender of “traditional family values.” Yet Palin was the least- “submissive” female imaginable. She misused her children as stage props and reduced her husband to the role of “helpmeet”; indeed, he became the perfect example of a good biblical wife.

Speaking of “good biblical wives,” in the Palin era the Evangelical Right still liked to pay lip-service to the Puritan community as an ideal to “get back to.” Yet the post-Roe Evangelicals ignored the Puritans’ actual ideas about government’s biblically mandated role.

The Puritans’ theology of government was formed in the context of an embrace of all Christians’ duty to enhance the public good. This was exemplified by such unquestioned well-established concepts as the “king’s highway,” a common road system protected by the crown (government) and a common law that applied to all.

One’s common duty to others was accepted as the essential message of Christian civilization. Public spaces were defended by government in the early New England settlements, just as they had been in England.

What’s so curious is that in this religion-inflicted country of ours, the same Evangelicals, conservative Roman Catholics, and others who had been running around post-Roe insisting that America had a “Christian foundation” and demanding a “return to our heritage” (and/or more recently trashing health care reform as “communist”) ignored the fact that one historic contribution of Christianity was a commitment to strong central government. For instance, this included church support for state-funded, or state-church-funded, charities, including hospitals, as early as the fourth century.

Government was seen as part of God’s Plan for creating social justice and defending the common good. Christians were once culture-forming and culture-embracing people. Even the humanism preached by the supposedly “anti-Christian” Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century was, in fact, a Deist/Christian “heresy,” with a value system espousing human dignity borrowed wholesale from the Sermon on the Mount.

In the scorched-earth post-Roe era of the “health care reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The Right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies—even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private “facts,” too. They claimed that global warming wasn’t real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

“Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!”

“Amtrak must make a profit!”

Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges, and trains. In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the Right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals.

The price for the Religious Right’s wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ’s reputation was tied to a cynical union-busting political party owned by billionaires. It only remained for a Far Right Republican- appointed majority on the Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that unlimited corporate money could pour into political campaigns— anonymously—in a way that clearly favored corporate America and the superwealthy, who were now the only entities served by the Republican Party.

The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their “stand” against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the twenty-first century, Ma and Pa No-name were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion is Murder!” sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in some godforsaken mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corporation, Koch Industries, Exxon, and Halliburton who were laughing.

Excerpted with permission from the publisher and author -- all rights reserved -- Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway by Frank Schaeffer (Da Capo Press, 2011).

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of many books including Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

The Right's 'Big Lie' Strategy: When Losing, Simply Lie More and Rewrite History

AlterNet.org


TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT

AlterNet / By Chauncey DeVega

The Right's 'Big Lie' Strategy: When Losing, Simply Rewrite History

Contemporary conservatives aim to disseminate an alternate version of reality through the media echo chamber and the schools.

May 13, 2011 |

America, the Tea Party GOP is coming for your kids.

Mike Huckabee, Republican front runner and presumptive 2012 presidential nominee is getting into the education business. He has started a project, "Learn Our History," where on a monthly basis--sort of like BMG or Columbia House music--Huckabee's organization will send subscribers Time Travel Academy, an animated children's cartoon featuring a group of intrepid time travelers who teach lessons about U.S. history "without a political bias."

If judged by its artistic qualities, the cartoon is so poorly done as to be a pitiable joke. Its main characters are a contrived group of multicultural "tweens." The history is predictable: Ronald Reagan is America's savior, America is a Judeo-Christian country preordained by God to be exceptional, and flag-waving jingoistic nationalism is a virtue and never a sin. The guiding principle of this right-wing approved version of U.S. history is simple: "What we see and hear isn't always the same as what we read in books, or see on TV. We know the truth. And that's good enough for us."

The takeaway here is simple. The "liberals," a cabal that ostensibly holds sway over public schools and universities, are corrupt and anti-American. In their fantasy, conservatives have access to a quasi-secret, pure and unadulterated version of history that is only available to true believers. The Right is the proverbial keeper of the flame. They are obligated, through a gospel of sorts, to both protect and share this "correct," self-validating (and quite inaccurate) version of American history with all who will listen -- and they're using education and the media to do it.

The Time Travel Academy is patently absurd. Huckabee’s effort at overt historical revisionism is part of a larger national trend that has been decades in the making. Here, conservatives are playing chess while the Left and progressives are playing checkers. To that end, the Right has developed a two-fold strategy.

First, they correctly understand that the educational system is one of society's primary sites for political socialization. There you create citizens. The classroom is also where citizens are equipped with the critical frameworks needed to ask hard questions about the common good, their role in society, and the State's obligation to the people.

Conservatives have made a series of bold strikes in politicizing the classroom in the service of their agenda.

1. David Horowitz, failed academic and incendiary polemicist, and his group, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center), have been policing college classrooms for years. They have compiled a McCarthy-like enemies list of professors who are "dangerous Leftists" that "poison" and "pollute" the minds of young people by criticizing the pet policy positions of conservatives. Offenders who earn the ire of Horowitz and his organization are routinely harassed. Some have even been drummed out of their positions as college professors for being too liberal and "Leftist" for Horowitz's taste.

2. The Koch brothers, the astroturf puppet masters of the New Right, have been funding academic programs and research centers that parrot the extreme gospel of trickle-down economics, anti-statism, and other policy positions that are favorable to the most extreme elements of the conservative agenda. Subverting the rules of academic freedom, the Koch brothers have also donated monies with the condition that faculty members support their policy positions.

3. Christian Nationalist pseudo-historians such as David Barton offer an uncritical view of American exceptionalism and the Constitution where the United States is portrayed as a theocracy beholden to Judeo-Christian beliefs. They have become darlings of the New Right and the Tea Party. A historian without credentials, he has become a mascot for popular conservatives and praised by Newt Gingrich as a preeminent scholar in his field. Barton has risen to fame on the backs of Glenn Beck and Fox News, who together pander his "righteous" and "correct" versions of American history to their audiences. As part of a cottage industry that features such factually challenged writers as Jonah Goldberg, their jackbooted and incorrect versions of history (synthesized by ideological pedants and hobbyists) have become the intellectual cornerstones of contemporary conservative thought.

4. The Arizona Ethnic Studies ban, along with the efforts to rewrite Texas school books to reflect a conservative view of U.S. history, are entry points for (re)educating children in a mold that fits the Right's social and political agenda. In the age of Obama these state-level moves are designed to quite literally whitewash American history and to remove the successes of liberals and progressives from the classroom. In total, these assaults on education are efforts to propagandize the country's youngest and most impressionable citizens by elevating conservative mythology to the level of historical certainty.

The second part of the Right's efforts to remake American citizenship involves the media. Aided and abetted by Fox News and the right-wing media echo chamber, there has been a concerted effort to create an alternate reality that destroys the post-Civil War consensus and the social contract that has guided this country since World War II. There are many examples that demonstrate the deleterious impact of the right-wing spin machine on the American public.

Viewers of Fox News are significantly more likely to be misinformed about politics and public policy. This effect becomes more exaggerated the longer a person watches Fox News. Conservative pundits are more likely to make erroneous predictions about political events. As documented by a range of independent media watchdog groups, Fox News and other right-wing outlets use the lie of the "liberal media" to disseminate factually incorrect information to their audiences. In a moment when political polarization is at an extreme, it is no wonder that conversations across divides of ideology and party are so difficult. Why? The right-wing media has succeeded in creating an alternate reality for its viewers. The consequences for Americans are dire: Any efforts to move forward as a community in search of solutions to our common dilemmas are damned because the basic terms of the debate cannot even be agreed upon.

The timing of these events is critical. The United States is at a crossroads. The Great Recession has exposed an empire built on a house of cards. Imperial misadventures abroad have left a hollowed-out infrastructure. The country is mired in debt as wealth inequality rises to unconceivable levels, the plutocrats earn record profits, and the average worker faces stagnant wages and severe unemployment.

As highlighted by recent polling data suggesting that the most die-hard Republicans want to split and form a third party, conservatism is in an existential dilemma. The symbolic politics of the age of Obama, when a black man is president of the United States, has triggered all manner of upset and madness on the part of the Tea Party GOP. The Right faces a set of changing demographics where their core constituency is aging and dying off (what social scientists term as "generational replacement"). And looking forward several decades, whites will no longer be the majority racial group in America. In total, the base of the Republican Party is in decline and their electoral coalition is facing obsolescence.

The Tea Party GOP's search for a nominee to challenge Barack Obama has highlighted their bankruptcy of ideas. When not flailing about in the mucky waters of white populism, birtherism, and xenophobia, the positions offered by the GOP frontrunners are a laughable recycling of the failed policies of trickle-down economics, the Laffer curve, and an almost cult-like devotion to a belief that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, in conjunction with draconian cuts on public services for the middle, poor, and working classes, are the only way to balance the budget and reduce the deficit.

Despite all evidence to the contrary--and warnings from responsible voices within the Republican Party about the dangers of "voodoo economics"--these tired ideas remain at the cutting edge of the Right's vision for America in the 21st century. The irony here is deep: the Great Recession was caused in large part by these reckless policies and a devotion to "gangster capitalism." Nevertheless, the Tea Party GOP wants to continue these policies as a means of saving the country.

Although culture warriors such as Pat Buchanan, and carnival barker pseudo-historians such as Glenn Beck would suggest otherwise, the forces of social and political conservatism have repeatedly been shown to be on the wrong side of American history. The triumphs of the Civil Rights, women's and labor movements were high water marks for the country. While maligned by the New Right as near profanities, the long arc of American history suggests that the forces of progressive and liberal thought have expanded rights and liberties for the country's citizens, as well as provided a more certain future in the pursuit of the common good than those alternatives offered by the Right.

For contemporary conservatives the solution to this dilemma is a simple one. When losing simply rewrite the history. Change the narrative. Then disseminate this alternate version of reality through the right-wing media and the schools.

This is the foundation of the Big Lie. The right-wing echo chamber offers a different version of the facts. In turn, their audience internalizes a partisan and ideologically skewed version of reality. Thus, shared solutions to the challenges facing the American people are almost impossible to reach because we as citizens are proceeding from a different set of priors about the nature of the problem.

The assault by conservatives on education is prefaced on a need to destroy those with whom they disagree. The Right has long identified "the Ivory Tower" as one of the last bulwarks that stands against their agenda. Because they have long prayed at the mantle of anti-intellectualism (see the appeal of professional mediocrity Sarah Palin to her "mama grizzlies" and the Tea Party brigands as proof) this is an easy move. The efforts by conservatives to privatize schools, destroy teacher's unions, end tenure, and inaugurate a world where professors are all adjuncts subject to firing at any time (and compensated a pitiable salary) is the game plan to hobble their foes.

Collectively, conservatives want to create a class of consumer-citizens who are passive and ill-equipped to ask any hard questions about power, politics or society. The Right does not want critical thinkers or active citizens. Instead, they want to create drones who worship the market and live out a dystopian reality that is torn straight from the pages of one of Ayn Rand's unreadable novels.

While Huckabee and company's agenda may seem like child's play at first, this is a real and deadly serious business. The Right is playing a deep game where they are remaking the very notions of citizenship and reality. What will progressives and the left do in response? Will they roll over and play nice? Or will they rise to the challenge?

The Right has been playing for keeps. The Left has been letting the fight go to the scorecards. It is time to step up and go for the knockout punch.

AlterNet.org

NEWS & POLITICS

AlterNet / By Daniel Denvir

GOP Assault on Truth: Why Do Conservatives Pretend They Know More About Science Than Scientists?

Who needs the careful application of the scientific method when congressmen with absolutely no scientific training are making decisions?

May 5, 2011 |

Earlier this year, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) introduced legislation “repealing the...[EPA’s] scientific finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are endangering human health and the environment.” That’s right, politicians voted to repeal a scientific finding. It failed in the Senate. But if Republicans were to take control of the White House and Senate, the bill would undoubtedly become law.

“Politicians overruling scientists on a scientific question,” cautioned EPA Secretary Lisa Jackson on February 8, “would become part of this Committee's legacy.”

It’s too late now, Secretary Jackson. Two months after the global warming hearing, Congress for the first time ever voted to delist a species from the Endangered Species Act. Politicians have determined that the grey wolf is not, contrary to all scientific evidence, an endangered species in need of protection.

“It’s a political move,” says Joanne Padrón Carney, director of the Center for Science, Technology and Congress at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Congress is not a scientific body. They’re not a peer-reviewed body.”

Who needs the careful application of the scientific method when you have congressmen with absolutely no scientific training making these decisions? Scientists and environmentalists are worried that the wolf’s delisting could set a bad precedent, encouraging Congress to do more science by decree amidst ongoing legislative wrangling. It appears that science has joined health care for the elderly and poor on the list of things Republicans and business-friendly Democrats can hold hostage to the budget and revenue crises.

The conservative attack on science is old and driven by many factors: religious opposition to reason, Barry Goldwater-style anti-intellectualism, corporate muscle, and straight-up Nixonian lies. Nixon liked to play the role of philosopher king, privately conceding that the Vietnam War was unwinnable but declaring the American people unworthy of knowing so. There are some who resist science because of sincere if misguided religious belief, and others who consciously manipulate facts for economic gain. The result, however, is always the same: a stupider America less well-prepared to make good decisions.

“Once you allow the majority to define what science is, all kinds of possibilities open up,” says McCalla. “When religiously inspired populism meets corporate power, things can get really bad."

In the United States, a campaign against the teaching of evolutionary biology has been the fulcrum of anti-science conservatism. What began as "creationism" -- the simple and unadorned assertion that the Biblical description of the history of the earth and the creation of species as understood by fundamentalist Christians was historically factual -- has come to mimic scientific language, posturing as “creation science” and now “intelligent design.” Science, in this case, is something we all have the right to make up on our own.

“It goes right back to those basic fundamentalist points. We say what science is. It doesn’t matter what scientists say science is. We know what science is,” says Arthur McCalla, professor of religious studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia and an expert on the history of science and religion. “To what extent are today’s Republicans doing the same thing, except instead of defending the Bible, they are also defending industry?”

Everyone has their own truth. Whichever rendition has the most powerful patron wins. “Facts” get made up about everything: science, abortion, the budget, and Iraq.

Arizona Republican Jon Kyl took to the Senate floor and claimed that abortion was “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does,” when the number was actually just 3 percent.

Caught in a lie, Kyl released a statement matter-of-factly explaining that his comment was “not intended to be a factual statement.” Kyl, notes Stephen Colbert, simply “rounded up to the nearest 90.”

And why not? Kyl’s dissembling is more than idiotic or crassly misleading. It represents a purely instrumental and self-interested relationship to the very notion of truth or fact. This is the political equivalent of parents telling adolescents that masturbation will make hair grow on their hands. We are a nation infantilized.

Conservatives tell women that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer and infertility -- statements that don’t, to be sure, have the virtue of being true.

The Bush administration was notoriously hostile to science and wholeheartedly embraced what Colbert dubbed “truthiness” in decision-making, from the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the scientific evidence on global warming.

In 2005, the New York Times discovered that the Bush White House “removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved.” The Times obtained the incriminating documents from whistleblowers, so one can at least give the Bush administration credit for trying to hide its misbehavior. Exiled from the executive branch, conservatives must now practice science by decree in broad daylight. And they don’t seem very embarrassed.

Some on the Right are sincere in believing the Bible over science. Others, one suspects, know all too well that they are lying. Business-friendly Republicans -- and, to be sure, Democrats -- trade in an opportunistic relativism that holds “facts” to be no more than objects of political convenience.

“I think it’s far more cynical at the corporate level,” says McCalla. “I think they know what the science is. Many fundamentalists don’t understand it. But at the corporate level, they’ve found a populist strategy they can capitalize on.”

The entire Republican platform is currently based on ill-intentioned lies: if they repeatedly pin the blame for the economic crisis on teachers and Medicare, maybe the public will forget that unregulated bankers brought the economy to its knees and robbed the rest of us blind.

“We are divided,” intoned Colbert, “between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.”

The scientific elite is so proud of their facts, scorning the proudly ignorant everyman and Sarah Palin, their surprisingly lithe mama bear and champion of aerial wolf hunting.

The anti-science attitude, particularly strong in the United States, is rooted in a conflation of "elites" and the specialized knowledge of experts that -- and I'm sure Tea Party readers will appreciate this -- goes back to the very early days of the Republic.

“A key element of the Revolution for later American history", says McCalla, "was its rejection of elites of all kinds. For a period after the Revolution, anyone could practice as a doctor or a lawyer, for example. The governing ethos was the populist credo that no one has the right to tell me how to understand the world. While certain professional groups have been able to reassert their professional status, in many areas of American life -- including science -- the questions of elitism and expertise seem to be hopelessly muddled. There is a great suspicion of experts."

Senator Inhofe, who humbly calls himself “the most outspoken critic of man-made global warming alarmism in the United States Senate,” places the entirety of science squarely within the realm of the culture war -- “the likes of Al Gore, the United Nations, and the Hollywood elite.” Science is another calculated immorality that liberals embrace, like homosexuality, yoga and Mexicans.

Though anti-intellectualism may thrive here, it is far from uniquely American. And at the risk of running afoul of Jon Stewart’s prohibition on noting historical parallels between authoritarian regimes of the past and the 21st-century United States, I would suggest that the Soviet Union’s treatment of science offers an illuminating parallel.

In 1948, a Soviet state Agricultural Sciences summit declared that genetics was scientifically false. For ideological reasons, they decided that instead of Mendel, a 19th-century French scientist named Lamarck and his theretofore unknown Russian popularizer Trofim Denisovich Lysenko were correct: characteristics acquired by organisms during their lifetime are heritable, meaning that they can be passed on to the next generation. The admixture was christened “creative Soviet Darwinism.”

Under Stalin, science was reduced to just another ideological plaything: reactionary “bourgeois science” versus revolutionary “proletarian science.”

One scientist was forced to secretly carry out his research under the guise of breeding foxes for their fur. Soviet state campaigns against quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity and cybernetics followed, justified as a critique of “bourgeois” and “idealist” science. Stalin’s Soviet Union was also hostile to basic research, mandating that everything be justified by clear practical aims.

Stalin was so interested in deciding the big questions of the universe that he took it upon himself to personally edit the speeches of major Soviet scientists. For Stalin, the communist state could make not only new men and women, but also an entirely new reality. As historian of Soviet science Kirill O. Rossianov put it, Stalin recreated scientific fact in the image of his own ideological needs, “a new picture of the world as it purportedly was, articulated by the political leadership.” He even wrote “definitive” articles on linguistics under his own name.

The personal touch is striking.

“It is hard to imagine similar behavior on the part of the political leaders of democratic countries (such as Roosevelt or Churchill) or even of other dictators (such as Hitler or Mussolini),” writes Rossianov. “Even in George Orwell's famous classic, 1984, the top political leaders who stood behind the mythical ‘Big Brother’ did not do this themselves: the work of rewriting history was done by small clerks in the Ministry of Truth.”

The conservative attack on science is sometimes this explicit, but often far more subtle. There is now apparently “Democrat [sic] science” and “Republican science.”

The Right, like the rest of us, is confused by the complex and fast-changing world we live in. What to make of the ever more rapid creation of wealth and poverty, the widespread migration of peoples, the waging of war through remote controlled aerial drones? What sets the Right apart, however, is the degree of hypocrisy at play:

“Conservatives still don’t know what to make of the modern world. They embrace the internal combustion engine and nuclear power while rejecting the theory of evolution and the science of global warming; puzzling over the depravity of ‘Jersey Shore;’ they daydream about small-town geniality from the confines of the sprawling rec room of an exurban McMansion.”

Science is only appreciated when it delivers results that can be consumed in the home or blown up abroad. Science is a political buffet, where politicians legislate research at the meeting point of scriptural delusion and economic self-interest.

In 2008, Sarah Palin infamously maligned federal funding for “fruit fly research in Paris, France,” thoroughly oblivious to the important role drosophila play in science.

People on the Right prefer the more instrumental sciences that reinforce the status quo of war, capitalism and ecological destruction. The building blocks of matter and the history of the universe are to be mocked as the idle curiosity of pointy-headed and effete nerds.

“Many of them,” says McCalla, referring to conservatives, “have technical degrees in communications and high-tech. Technology they love. Science they define in such a way that it allows them to pick and choose what’s good science and bad science.”

Studies have found that in the United States, results-oriented engineers are far more likely to identify as conservative than professionals in any other discipline.

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called for a renewed commitment to science education. Many Americans know little about science because they did not learn much about it in school.

“The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations,” he said. “We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.”

Obama even held a science fair at the White House. But the education “reform” policies the president supports (his “Race to the Top” is much like Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”) -- more and higher stakes testing on narrowly conceived reading and math skills -- makes it increasingly hard for educators to find the time and money to teach science (let alone music, English, civics, history...).

The ever-narrowing test regime is hostile to the spirit of creative inquiry that undergirds science. The worship of test scores as ends in and of themselves has hollowed out the knowledge they are supposed to reflect. In a desperate attempt to make the grade, teachers and principals are increasingly caught cheating on their students’ tests. This is what happens when society is run like a business instead of a laboratory for good ideas.

“The fact that congress can get away with repealing scientific findings and not outrage people just shows that people don’t understand or don’t care what science is,” says McCalla. “That’s the really outrageous thing about it.”

Policymaking can only run further adrift without a scientific compass. Though perhaps wishful thinking will keep our consciences calm: monkeys will not be my uncle, the water will not rise, and the grey wolf will live happily ever after.

Daniel Denvir is a journalist in Philadelphia.

AlterNet.org

TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT

Americans United for Separation of Church and State / By Rob Boston

The 12 Worst (and Most Powerful) Christian Right Groups

The Religious Right in America is lavishly funded and politically well connected. These groups raise more than three-quarters of a billion dollars annually, mostly tax-exempt.

May 2, 2011 |

Photo Credit: VisualLightBox.com

The Religious Right in America is lavishly funded and politically well connected. While the men who lead the fundamentalist Christian political movement hold different opinions about theology, they share a deep and abiding hostility to the separation of church and state. They seek to inject religion into public schools, obtain taxpayer funding for religious schools and other ministries, roll back reproductive choice and deny civil rights to gay people. And they enjoy extraordinary influence in Washington, D.C., and in many state legislatures.

What follows is a survey of some of the nation’s leading Religious Right organizations. Collectively, these groups raise more than three-quarters of a billion dollars annually, the bulk of it tax-exempt. Budget figures are from public tax documents and are the most recent available, in most cases from 2009 and 2010.

The Pat Robertson Empire

Christian Broadcasting Network

Budget: $295,140,001

Location: Virginia Beach, Va.

Regent University

Budget: $60,093,298

Location: Virginia Beach, Va.

American Center for Law and Justice:

Budget: $13,375,429

Location: Virginia Beach, Va.

Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism

Budget: $43,872,322

Location: Atlanta, Ga.

TV preacher Pat Robertson has for many years overseen a sprawling Religious Right empire that includes a global television network, a university and an influential right-wing legal outfit. Robertson’s flagship operation, “The 700 Club,” is a daily television program that mixes news, faith healing, Christian lifestyle features and Religious Right politics. He calls church-state separation a “myth” and a “lie of the left.” Despite his extreme views, Robertson remains well connected with the GOP power structure in Washington, and congressional leaders and presidential candidates often appear on his show. House Speaker John Boehner, for example, gave an exclusive interview in February.

Religious Right attorney Jay Sekulow runs the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a legal group founded by Robertson in 1991. Sekulow’s Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, the ACLJ under a different name, serves a similar purpose. The combined annual budget for both entities exceeds $55 million.

Regent University was originally founded to offer graduate degrees in areas Robertson most wants to dominate: government, education, law, communications, psychology and ministry. It now offers undergraduate degrees as well (many of them online) and has a satellite campus in Alexandria, Va., a Washington, D.C., suburb.

The Falwell Empire

Liberty University

Budget: $395,898,255

Location: Lynchburg, Va.

Jerry Falwell Ministries

Budget: $4,208,989

Location: Lynchburg, Va.

Liberty Counsel

Budget: $1,371,795

Location: Orlando, Fla., and Lynchburg, Va.

The late Jerry Falwell, a television evangelist and founder of the Moral Majority, was a pivotal figure in the history of the Religious Right. Falwell died in 2007 and left his religio-political empire in the hands of his two sons, Jerry Jr. and Jonathan. Falwell Jr., who serves as chancellor of Liberty University, has followed in his father’s footsteps by advancing a partisan political agenda. In December of 2007, Falwell issued an e-mail on university letterhead endorsing Mike Huckabee for president. In 2009, he used university resources to engineer the defeat of the Democratic member of the House of Delegates who represented the Lynchburg area.

In April of this year, Liberty hosted “The Awakening,” a conference that featured former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), alongside Religious Right activists.

Liberty has experienced huge growth and now has an active online learning component. Despite Falwell’s anti-government rhetoric, Liberty students receive nearly half a billion dollars in federal aid every year.

Jonathan Falwell serves as pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church and oversees the remnants of his father’s TV ministry.

Liberty Counsel is a Religious Right legal group originally founded by Mat Staver and based in Orlando, Fla. It is now a part of the Falwell enterprise and operates in conjunction with the Liberty University Law School, where Staver is dean.

Family Research Council/FRC Action/FRC Action PAC

Combined Budget: $14,569,081

Location: Washington, D.C.

The Family Research Council has become the nation’s top Religious Right group in Washington, D.C. Led by former Louisiana state representative Tony Perkins, the FRC seeks to merge fundamentalist Christianity with government. It opposes individual reproductive freedom, engages in gay bashing and lately has sought to join forces with the Tea Party to create a massive, far-right phalanx.

The FRC is so extreme that this year it was designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Perkins has a checkered political past. In 1996, while managing the U.S. Senate campaign of Louisiana state legislator Woody Jenkins, he paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and notorious white supremacist David Duke $82,000 for his mailing list. In 2001, Perkins addressed the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization that grew out of the White Citizens Council.

Despite FRC’s unsavory reputation, the group sponsors an annual “Values Voter Summit” that draws leading GOP congressional figures and presidential hopefuls.

FRC maintains an “action” arm with a 501(c)(4) tax status that enables it to be more directly political. It also funnels money to candidates through a political action committee.

American Family Association

Budget: $21,408,342

Location: Tupelo, Miss.

Originally formed to advocate for censorship of racy TV shows, the American Family Association has branched out and now covers a range of Religious Right issues. The group was founded by the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a Methodist minister, and was originally called the National Federation for Decency. It advocated boycotts of companies that advertised on programs it considered salacious.

Wildmon has now turned day-to-day operations of the group over to his son, Tim. An AFA staffer, Bryan Fischer, has become notorious for making outrageous statements. Fischer calls church-state separation a “myth” and an invention of Adolf Hitler. He believes that the First Amendment protects only Christians and members of other faiths receive religious liberty as a courtesy. The AFA is stridently anti-gay and is the leading group promoting the Religious Right’s phony claim of a “war on Christmas.” It continues to boycott companies that refuse to buckle under to its demands.

The AFA has underwritten a series of “pastor policy briefings” in Iowa, California, Texas and other states intended to organize fundamentalist churches into a potent political machine.

The group says it owns and operates nearly 200 radio stations across the country.

Alliance Defense Fund

Budget: $30,127,514

Location: Scottsdale, Ariz.

Formed by a group of TV and radio preachers in 1993, the Alliance Defense Fund was conceived as a funding pool for organizations that worked in the courts to promote theocratic views and undermine church-state separation. After a few years, the organization began engaging in direct litigation and formed a network of sympathetic attorneys nationwide.

ADF President Alan Sears says there is no such thing as church-state separation in the Constitution and that the bricks in the church-state wall are being removed “one by one.” The organization attacks public education and opposes legal abortion and gay rights.

Outside of court, the ADF has worked to lure evangelical churches into a vast right-wing political machine. It sponsors “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” a ploy to openly defy federal tax law by encouraging pastors to endorse or oppose candidates from the pulpit. (While the ADF claims to be nonpartisan, all the project’s participating clergy in 2008 endorsed Republican John McCain or opposed Democrat Barack Obama.)

Focus on the Family

Budget: $130,258,480

Location: Colorado Springs, Colo.

Focus on the Family was founded by child psychologist James Dobson to advocate for “biblical” solutions to family problems. Although it poses as a family-oriented ministry, the group has always been political. Vociferously opposed to church-state separation and secular government, the massive fundamentalist ministry has a worldwide presence.

Dobson, who has since retired from the group, remains an influential radio broadcaster and has authored several books. He still appears on the air daily with his son, Ryan. Dobson frequently attacks church-state separation and once said “The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution.”

FOF’s current president is Jim Daly. Although Daly said he wanted to tone down some of the ministry’s harsh attacks on gays and others, much far-right political content remains. FOF has a network of 35 state “family policy councils” that lobby in the state capitals.

Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission

Budget: $3,236,000

Location: Nashville, Tenn., and Washington, D.C.

The lobbying arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, takes stands virtually identical to the Religious Right. Southern Baptists claim 16 million members. The SBC’s government action office presses for school-sponsored religion, tax aid to religious schools, reductions in gay rights, limits on legal abortion and other far-right social issues. Commission President Richard Land has stated, “When we convince a majority of Americans that we are right, that’s not called a theocracy, that’s called the democratic process.”

Although many Baptists have historically supported church-state separation, the SBC in the early 1980s became the target of a takeover by Religious Right-style fundamentalists. Once in power, this bloc began endorsing various proposals to merge church and state (such as a school prayer amendment to the Constitution). Land works hand in glove with Religious Right organizations to promote a theocratic agenda. Despite the denomination’s tax-exempt status, he openly meddles in Republican Party politics.

Traditional Values Coalition

Budget: $9,888,233

Location: Anaheim, Calif.

Founded originally to work on “culture war” issues in California, the Traditional Values Coalition eventually expanded to become a national organization. Known for its gay bashing and attacks on Islam, TVC claims to work with 43,000 churches nationwide. The group was founded by the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, who once said, “A dangerous Marxist/Leftist/Homosexual/Islamic coalition has formed – and we’d better be willing to fight it with everything in our power.”

In 2000, Sheldon accepted money from gambling interests connected to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Sheldon, whom one lobbyist referred to as “Lucky Louie,” told Religious Right activists he was blocking the spread of legalized gambling, although the lobbying firm he was working for was actually trying to spread internet-based gambling.

Sheldon’s daughter, Andrea Lafferty, serves as TVC executive director. She is as partisan and as shrill as her father. When Democratic Party officials announced that U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) would become party chair, Lafferty pounced.

“Way to go DNC,” Lafferty snarled in a press release. “You found the candidate who best fit your profile for DNC Chairman: a junkyard dog who is mean, nasty, shrill, able to screech at a moment’s notice, aggressive, and of course able to manipulate the facts and always uncompromising.”

Coral Ridge Ministries

Budget: $17,263,536

Location: Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

Coral Ridge Ministries was founded by D. James Kennedy, a TV preacher who died in 2007. Stridently fundamentalist and far-right on the political spectrum, Kennedy insisted that separation of church and state is not in the Constitution and was known for his attacks on evolution.

Coral Ridge also produced a number of books, DVDs and pamphlets attacking church-state separation. It was known for insisting that America was founded to be a “Christian nation.” Since Kennedy’s death, the ministry has continued pumping out right-wing political material. Its website looks more like a far-right political site than a portal to a ministry.

Today the operation is run by Kennedy’s daughter, Jennifer Kennedy Cassidy. Jerry Newcombe serves as host of Kennedy’s program, “The Coral Ridge Hour.”

Faith & Freedom Coalition

Budget: Unavailable

Location: Duluth, Ga.

The Faith & Freedom Coalition is a relatively new Religious Right group founded by Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition. The organization already has developed enough clout to sponsor an Iowa forum for would-be Republican presidential candidates in March of 2011.

Reed, who became a political consultant after leaving the Christian Coalition, formed the group after his attempt to launch a political career in Georgia collapsed when his ties to disgraced casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff became an issue and after writing an unsuccessful political thriller called Dark Horse.

Although the Coalition is of modest size now, the group is just getting started. Reed’s proven ability to organize the Religious Right faithful and raise money make this an organization to watch.

During his time with the Christian Coalition, Reed was known for his intemperate, often violent, imagery. (He once bragged about leaving political opponents in “body bags.”) Time has not mellowed him. During the March forum, Reed discussed the possibility of “replacing the government by force.”

The line is apparently part of Reed’s stock speech. He also used it at an earlier gathering of Tea Party activists, telling the crowd, “[W]e have not only the right, but the moral obligation to overthrow that government by force if necessary, and form a new government that will protect our rights.”

WallBuilder Presentations/WallBuilders

Budget: $1,091,531 (plus proceeds from a for-profit arm)

Location: Aledo, Texas

WallBuilders is an organization founded by David Barton, a Texan who makes his living promoting bogus “Christian nation” history to fundamentalist groups. Barton insists that church-state separation is a myth and was never the intention of the founders. He markets books, DVDs and other materials that promote this view and speaks in fundamentalist churches and other venues.

Barton helped rewrite Texas’ social studies standards, which downplay church-state separation and elevate the “Christian nation” view. Barton does not have a degree in history (his degree, from Oral Roberts University, is in Christian Education), but he poses as a historian.

Despite his lack of legitimate academic credentials, Barton’s profile has increased recently due to a number of appearances he made on the Glenn Beck program on Fox News Channel. Time magazine in 2005 named him one of the top 25 most influential evangelicals in America.

Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and 2008 presidential aspirant, is a huge Barton fan. Addressing a Religious Right gathering earlier this year, Huckabee opined that all Americans should be forced “at gunpoint…to listen to every David Barton message.”

The budget figures for WallBuilder Presentations are somewhat misleading. This organization is a small non-profit Barton runs – but he makes most of his money through a separate organization called simply WallBuilders. This group, which is a for-profit business, is not required to make its financial statements publicly available.

Concerned Women for America

Budget: $11,772,009

Location: Washington, D.C.

Formed more than 30 years ago to counter the growing women’s rights movement, Concerned Women for America claims to be the largest women’s organization in the country. The organization, founded in 1979 by Tim LaHaye and his wife Beverly, focused originally on opposing passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

When that issue became less prominent, the group began taking on other matters, such as opposing gay rights and legal abortion as well as attacking alleged “secular humanism” in public schools. In 1984, the group sponsored a legal challenge brought by a Tennessee woman who claimed textbooks used in her child’s school promoted humanism. A federal court initially ruled in favor of the woman, but the decision was overturned on appeal.

In the 1980s, CWA even branched into international affairs, launching a special project to attack Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Today, the group focuses mainly on opposing abortion, gay rights and public education, although it often attacks the United Nations and has increasingly engaged in Muslim bashing.

Like a lot of Religious Right organizations these days, CWA has been adding fiscal issues to its agenda, demanding that government reduce spending. Its current targets include Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, Public Broadcasting and NPR.

Tim LaHaye went on to write a successful series of apocalyptic pot-boilers called “Left Behind” and now lives in semi-retirement with his wife. Although Beverly LaHaye is still listed as CWA’s chair, the group’s president is now Wendy Wright. The organization claims 500,000 members.

It sponsors a legislative action committee that is a 501(c)(4) organization and an allied political action committee that in 2010 spent nearly $300,000 endorsing conservative candidates.

Rob Boston is the assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which publishes Church and State magazine.

Donald Trump's Lunacy Reveals Core Truth About the Republicans

Published on Friday, April 29, 2011 by The Independent/UK

Donald Trump's Lunacy Reveals Core Truth About the Republicans

He is the Republican id - finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and reality

by Johann Hari

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."

That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr)

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."

The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".

Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.

How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.

The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.

This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "

It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.

Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'

The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.

The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.

Copyright 2011 Independent Print Limited

Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world.

What’s this I hear about a plan to privatize Medicare?

What’s this I hear about a plan to privatize Medicare?

Q. Republicans in the House of Representatives just voted for a plan to cut Medicare to help reduce the budget deficit. What exactly do they have in mind?

A. The Republican plan, conceived by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee and passed last week by the House on a party-line vote, would eliminate the government-run Medicare program that’s been around since 1965 and replace it with private insurance that would push more costs onto Medicare recipients. It would also increase the Medicare eligibility age by two months a year starting in 2022 so that by 2033 it would be 67 instead of the current 65.

The plan isn’t law yet and won’t be unless the Senate also passes it—unlikely, given that President Obama and the Democrats who control the Senate say they’re opposed to it.

When fully phased in, in 2022, the Ryan plan would give people on Medicare a voucher that they could use to buy private health insurance on a special exchange similar to the exchanges to be set up for working-age adults under the Affordable Care Act. The size of the voucher would vary according to the person’s health, age, and income. Plans couldn’t turn people down on the basis of pre-existing conditions.

The problem, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan and authoritative Congressional Budget Office, is that the Ryan plan would be more expensive overall than traditional Medicare, and individuals would have to bear almost all of that extra cost themselves. The nonpartisan, nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation (no relation to the HMO) estimates that in 2022 the average 65-year-old Medicare recipient would be personally paying $12,500 of the typical plan’s total cost of $20,500. Out-of-pocket costs would be even higher in the years beyond, because the Ryan plan is set up so the value of the vouchers won’t increase as fast as the price of health care.

By contrast, if the current Medicare system stays in place, in 2022 that same 65-year-old will be paying $5,630 of the plan’s total cost of $13,530, according to the Kaiser analysis.

The Ryan plan says that people who make it to age 65 before 2022 can still get traditional Medicare and keep it as long as they want. But their benefits would decline, mainly because the Ryan plan would repeal most of the Affordable Care Act, including the part that eliminates the notorious Part D “doughnut hole.” Younger people would have no Medicare option other than a voucher and private plan.

And, of course, the 32 million uninsured Americans under 65 who were expected to get coverage under health reform would continue to go without it if it were repealed.

So, would the plan help reduce the deficit? Yes. According to the CBO analysis, if the Ryan plan were to be adopted, by 2030 the government would be spending only about 6 percent of our nation’s Gross National Product on health programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. If the current system stays in place, government spending on health would total between 8.75 and 9.75 percent of GNP in 2030, the CBO said.

But overall health spending, both public and private, would be higher—and more of it would come out of your pocket.

Sources
Congressional Budget Office analysis of Ryan plan

Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of Ryan plan

—Nancy Metcalf

AlterNet.org

TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT

The Crisis Papers / By Ernest Partridge

Shameless GOP Lies: Is There Any Limit to What Republicans Will Say -- And What People Will Believe?

If it were in the interest of the ruling oligarchs to convince a majority of the public that the earth is flat, could they succeed?

April 20, 2011 |

Photo Credit: ajagendorf25

"In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell

Is there any limit to the outrageousness of the GOP lies?

Is there any limit to the capacity of a large number of our fellow citizens to accept these lies?

If it were in the interest of the ruling oligarchs to convince a majority of the public that the earth is flat, could they succeed?

This is, after all, a public almost half of which refuses to accept evolution -- the central coordinating concept of modern biology. And approximately half of the GOP primary voters believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

These unsettling thoughts came to my mind when I heard Michael Steele remark that "not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job." This from a man who held a government job as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. That remark was echoed by Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Indiana and Sarah Palin and I can testify that I have heard it elsewhere.

Michael Steele's comment is more audacious even than the claim that the earth is flat. (After all, the earth looks flat, doesn’t it?). To say that government never created a single job flies in the face of ordinary, everyday experience. What are police, firefighters, teachers, judges, prosecutors, postal workers, military personnel, etc engaged in if not “government jobs.” What is the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges, the certification of the safety of our food and drugs, air traffic control, if they are not “government jobs.”

The claim that government never creates jobs is so preposterous that it seems pointless even to bother to refute it.

Yet somehow, some GOP politicians freely utter this absurdity without fear of being laughed off the stage of public debate. And apparently some people, failing to give the claim even a moment’s critical reflection, believe it. Otherwise, why would Steele and others say such nonsense in the first place?

And this is only the most egregious of a long string of Republican lies thrown at the public by right-wing politicians and pundits and largely unchallenged by a compliant corporate media. Among them:

• Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet and to have discovered the toxic contamination of Love Canal.

• John Kerry’s allegedly heroic war record was fraudulent.

• Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim.

• Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

• Global warming is a gigantic hoax, perpetrated by thousands of deceitful scientists.

• Obama has raised taxes.

• “Obamacare” is a “socialist government takeover of health care.”

• Ninety percent of Planned Parenthood funding is for abortion services.

• Elections in the United States are always accurate and fair.

These are not “matters of opinion,” they are flatly and demonstrably false. Clear and decisive refutation of all these claims are available to anyone who cares to examine the evidence. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked, while we are entitled to our own opinions, we are not entitled to our own facts.

Then there are the contradictions:

• Teachers, police officers and firefighters are greedy. But billionaire CEOs and hedge-fund managers are not.

• Wall street banksters are entitled to their million-dollar bonuses because these bonuses are contractual obligations with their firms. But the states are not required to honor their contractual obligations to public workers, obligations such as pensions and health coverage.

• Federal revenues are increased by cutting taxes (i.e., revenues).

• During the Bush administration, “Reagan proved [that] deficits don’t matter.” (Dick Cheney) In the Obama administration, the GOP tells us that the federal deficit is the Number One economic problem today.

• “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.” (Michael Steele, etc.). “Since President Obama has taken office, the federal government had added 200 thousand new federal jobs.” (John Boehner. Also false, by the way. The correct number is 56,000).

And finally, there is the “dogma” -- a priori “first principles” too sacred to be doubted or subjected to rational analysis and confirmation:

• “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” (Ronald Reagan).

• Market fundamentalism: “A free market [co-ordinates] the activity of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, in such a way as to make everyone better off.” (Milton Friedman)

• Privatization: "Whenever we find an approach to the extension of private property rights [in the natural environment,] we find superior results.” (Robert J. Smith).

• “There is no such thing as society.” (Margaret Thatcher)

• “There is no such entity as ‘the public.’” (Ayn Rand)

These last two dogmas bear significant implications. For if there is no such thing as “society,” it follows that there are no social problems or “social injustice. Poverty is the fault of individuals who are sinful and lazy. And if there is no “public,” then there is no “public interest,” and thus no need for government to promote same.

A large portion of the American public believes these lies, accepts these contradictions, and embraces these dogmas, not because of supporting evidence (there is none) or cogent arguments (there are none), but out of sheer unquestioned repetition in the corporate media.

Students of propaganda methods call this “The Big Lie” -- a term that has its origins in the Nazi Regime.

Congressman Steve Cohen (Democrat, Tennessee) correctly observed that when the GOP claimed that “Obamacare” was “government takeover of health care,” they were engaging in a “Big Lie.” Yet when he said this on the floor of the House of Representatives, he was so mercilessly hounded by the media and his colleagues, that he felt obliged to apologize.

So now the corporate media has, in effect, ruled the expression, “The Big Lie,” out of bounds of polite political discourse, despite the fact that the term precisely describes the successful method of the right wing propagandists. In short, those who wish to complain against this practice have been effectively disarmed.

So where is the bewildered citizen to go if that citizen is to avoid the big lies and to encounter a fund of verifiable facts and informed opinion? Rule One: stay clear of the corporate media. Even The New York Times, once regarded as “the newspaper of historical record,” can no longer be trusted to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print.”Remember the hullabaloo about Bill Clinton’s “Whitewater” deal? Remember Judith Miller’s breathless disclosure of Saddam Hussein’s nefarious “aluminum tubes”? All promoted by the New York Times. All false.

So where do we find authentic news? Try National Public Radio (while it lasts) and, of course, the internet (until it is privatized and sold to the media conglomerates) where one can find a multitude of independent progressive websites. Also deserving honorable mention is the evening contingent of MSNBC -- O’Donnell, Maddow and Schultz. Even so, along with the entire corporate media, these worthies never question the integrity of our elections and only rarely discuss the size of the military budget, now approximately equal all the other military budgets in the world combined, including those of our allies. It should be noted that NBC, the parent company of MSNBC, is half owned by the world’s largest military contractor, General Electric.

In addition, some of the best sources of news are foreign -- and all available on the internet. They include the BBC (England) and the CBC (Canada), The Real News (broadcast from Toronto, Canada), Al Jazeera English, and, amazingly, Russia Today. The Russians, it seems, are returning the favor that we bestowed upon them during the Soviet Era, when the U.S. and Western Europe sent accurate news across “the iron curtain” via The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Yes, it has come to that!

But these are all pathetically weak voices accessed by thousands, arrayed against the corporate media that is devoured by millions. And as long as this remains the case, and those millions accept uncritically the lies, myths and dogmas fed to them by the mega-corporations that own our government, there appears to be little hope of a return to economic justice and democratic government that we once enjoyed in the United States of America.

But all is not lost. As the folk tale of the boy who cried “Wolf!” reminds us, liars tend through time to lose their credibility. We should strive to accelerate this process as it applies to the corporate media by exposing the lies and boycotting the sponsors of those who tell the lies.

The experience of the Russians is instructive. My Russian friends tell me that after decades of unabashed lying by Pravda, Izvestia and Gostelradio, fewer and fewer Soviet citizens believed the state media. The facts bear them out, as history discloses that Russians instead sought out foreign sources of news such as The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. (See my “What if America Loses its Voice?”). Some Russians were so desperate for authentic news and uncensored opinion that they risked arrest and prison by producing and distributing underground manuscripts, "Samizdat," hand to hand. In the United States today, a comparable "American Samizdat" can be found on the internet.

When the Soviet government lost control of the hearts and minds of its citizens, its days were numbered.

In the United States, the corporate media, unlike the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is sensitive to market forces. As ever more Americans refuse to believe the lies served up by the corporate media, the media will either reform or become politically irrelevant, and more and more attention will be directed to responsible sources of news, both foreign and domestic. The fate of Glenn Beck’s TV show and the diminishing audience of Fox “News” may be harbingers of such reform.

Whatever the outcome, Thomas Jefferson’s warning remains enduringly true: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

The restoration of sanity in our public discourse is essential to the restoration of our democracy. Necessary, but not sufficient. In addition, the liars in public offices must be removed from those offices. And that will only happen if official election returns can once again be trusted to reflect the will of the voters, and not the output of secret software written by right wing partisans.

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He has taught Philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers".