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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Republicans Use Budget Cuts as Retribution for Re-electing Barack Obama

Political Dysfunction

Republicans Use Budget Cuts as Retribution for Re-electing Barack Obama


more from Rmuse




If it Helps



For Americans who make it their business to follow politics, it is a recurring theme that every time a Democrat is elected president, fiction writer Ayn Rand’s novels become all the rage in conservative circles. When teabaggers took control of the House in 2011, Rand devotee Paul Ryan made waves when he decried the “takers” draining assets from the beleaguered richest one percent he referred to as “makers,” and although Ryan’s characterization of the poor is despicable, he is correct that Americans are being raped by “takers.” However, the takers are not Americans ravaged by the Bush-Republicans economic malfeasance that destroyed millions of jobs and increased the number of Americans living in poverty, but Republicans in Congress and state legislatures who have spent the past two-and-a-half years taking any and everything from the American people they can lay their dirty hands on. In fact, it is an exercise in futility to cite anything Republicans have not attempted to take from Americans and with the debt and deficit falling at a record pace, it appears their cuts are anything other than retribution for electing an African American President.

Last year it was revealed that America ranked second to Romania as the nation with the highest rate of children living in poverty (23.1%) and hunger, and this week House Republicans celebrated their proposal to cut $21 billion from SNAP (food stamps) that will take food stamps away from 2 million people, as well as ensuring that 210,000 hungry kids are no longer able to get free school lunches.
It is the ultimate expression of evil to take food out of the mouths of any hungry human being, but it takes a special kind of monster to deliberately withhold food from hungry children. Conservatives prevented a farm bill from passing last year because they opposed the Senate’s bill as not harsh enough and forced them to start anew in this session of Congress.

The Senate is working on its second farm bill in less than a year that cuts $4 billion from the SNAP over ten years to garner support from selfish Republicans. Democrats attempted to eliminate cuts to food stamps, but Republicans refused to vote for any measure that fails to take food away from the poor; especially hungry children. It is just what they enjoy doing. Last year the Senate passed a similar farm bill but conservatives in the House balked because the Senate bill did not take enough food from hungry seniors, children, and working-poor Americans. As it stands now, food stamp recipients receive on average about $133.42 per month that poverty experts say is barely enough to cover two weeks in groceries, and when temporary provisions from the stimulus package expire, SNAP recipients will have even less to spend on food, regardless if the House farm bill passes or not.  However, hungry Americans and their children should not feel singled out because Republicans have left no group unaffected from their agenda of taking from Americans who are not in the richest one percent of income earners.

Over the past two years, in their drive to take everything from the people, Republicans have left few Americans untouched whether it is senior citizens’ Social Security and Medicare, low-income Americans’ Medicaid, students, seniors and minorities’ voting rights, the Affordable Care Act, meals on wheels, and even disaster relief. The dust barely settled from the devastating tornado in Oklahoma two days ago before Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn promised he will insist that before giving disaster relief to victims in his home state, the cost will have to be paid for by taking something away from other Americans in the form of spending cuts. Officials had not yet estimated the cost of the damage, or the number of lives that were lost, and Coburn said he would “absolutely” demand offsets for any federal aid that Congress provides that has been the practice of Republicans since President Obama has been in office. Republicans have typically balked at providing disaster-relief funds when there’s a devastating storm unless they can take from other Americans, but they change their minds when their constituents are affected, but Coburn is callous enough to ransom his own constituents to take something from other Americans. The depth of Republicans’ heartless taking is not confined to spending, and it informs the true nature of their evil tendencies.

They are taking representative government in states like Michigan where the Republican governor disbanded local governments and appointed dictators in the form of an “emergency managers.” In states with Republican legislatures they have taken away a woman’s right to choose their own reproductive health and put it in the hands of religious extremists, and are taking the right to vote from students, seniors, and minorities because they do not vote for Republicans. Republicans have also taken away American workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively for decent wages, and as a canard to cut budgets have regularly taken public sector workers’ pensions and delivered the proceeds to corporations in the form of tax cuts. In Congress, Republicans are actively pursuing taking away the minimum wage as well as overtime pay that prevents most working people from falling into poverty, and they have intimated they will take away child labor laws that have been in effect for over 70 years. In an alarming number of states, Republicans are taking away women’s 14th Amendment rights to conform to religious maniacs’ demand that single-celled organisms are living breathing “persons” worthy of the Constitutional protections, and all Americans are losing their right to clean air and water as Republicans are fighting to take away environmental protections at the behest of the Koch brothers and energy industry contributors.

There is really no end to what Republicans are going to take away from the American people, and they cannot claim it is because the nation is drowning in debt. Taking away women’s rights, voting rights, environmental protections, minimum wage, overtime pay, or religious freedoms have nothing whatsoever to do with debt and deficit and everything to do with callous disregard for the people they are elected to serve. One might hope that Republicans would be aghast that the richest nation on Earth has nearly a quarter of its children living in poverty and going hungry, or that the nation’s infrastructure ranks below every developed and several undeveloped countries, but they are unfazed and seek out more to take from the people. What is stunning, really, is their apparent anger that they are prevented from taking even more despite the harsh Draconian cuts they have imposed on the poorest Americans.

Conservatives hate change, but something changed since the people elected an African American as President and it is not Democrats and it is not the majority of the American people. It is Republicans and their vile teabag supporters who have taken what were typically universally supported policies of caring for the people and made it a carnal sin to help Americans whether they are disabled, elderly, hungry, sick, or jobless, and they seem to take the greatest pleasure in taking what little the great majority of Americans have left. Paul Ryan is right; there is an epidemic of takers in America, but they are wicked conservatives who are not taking out of selfishness or greed, but because it feeds their vapid soulless egos.

 
Republicans Use Budget Cuts as Retribution for Re-electing Barack Obama was written by Rmuse for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, May. 22nd, 2013. All Rights Reserved

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Sunday, May 12, 2013

Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide





More than any recent U.S. president, Ronald Reagan has been lavished with honors, including his name attached to Washington’s National Airport. But the conviction of Reagan’s old ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, for genocide means “Ronnie” must face history’s judgment as an accessory to the crime

 

 
 
The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide against Mayan villagers in the 1980s has a special meaning for Americans who idolize Ronald Reagan. It means that their hero was an accessory to one of the most grievous crimes that can be committed against humanity.

The courage of the Guatemalan people and the integrity of their legal system to exact some accountability on a still-influential political figure also put U.S. democracy to shame. For decades now, Americans have tolerated human rights crimes by U.S. presidents who face little or no accountability. Usually, the history isn’t even compiled honestly.


 
Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide 


By contrast, a Guatemalan court on Friday found  Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced the 86-year-old ex-dictator to 80 years in prison. After the ruling, when Rios Montt rose and tried to walk out of the courtroom, Judge Yasmin Barrios shouted at him to stay put and then had security officers take him into custody.

Yet, while Guatemalans demonstrate the strength to face a dark chapter of their history, the American people remain mostly oblivious to Reagan’s central role in tens of thousands of political murders across Central America in the 1980s, including some 100,000 dead in Guatemala slaughtered by Rios Montt and other military dictators.

Indeed, Ronald Reagan – by aiding, abetting, encouraging and covering up widespread human rights crimes in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala – bears greater responsibility for Central America’s horrors than does Rios Montt in his bloody 17-month rule. Reagan supported Guatemala’s brutal repression both before and after Rios Montt held power, as well as during.

Despite that history, more honors have been bestowed on Reagan than any recent president. Americans have allowed the naming of scores of government facilities in Reagan’s honor, including Washington National Airport where Reagan’s name elbowed aside that of George Washington, who led the War of Independence, oversaw the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and served as the nation’s first president.

So, as America’s former reputation as a beacon for human rights becomes a bad joke to the rest of the world, it is unthinkable within the U.S. political/media structure that Reagan would get posthumously criticized for the barbarity that he promoted. No one of importance would dare suggest that his name be stripped from National Airport and his statue removed from near the airport entrance.

But the evidence is overwhelming that the 40th president of the United States was guilty as an accessory to genocide and a wide range of other war crimes, including torture, rape, terrorism and narcotics trafficking. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]

Green Light to Genocide

Regarding Guatemala, the documentary evidence is clear that Reagan and his top aides gave a green light to the extermination campaign against the Mayan Ixil population in the highlands even before Rios Montt came to power. Despite receiving U.S. intelligence reports revealing these atrocities, the Reagan administration also pressed ahead in an extraordinary effort to arrange military equipment, including helicopters, to make the slaughter more efficient.

 

Rios Montt alongside supporter Ronald Reagan. (Photo: Upside Down World)“In the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr. Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil population was a military target, children included,” the New York Times reported from Rios Montt’s trial last month. “Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas fighting the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished Ixils and reached ‘100 percent support.’”

So, everyone was targeted in these scorched-earth campaigns that eradicated more than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands. But documents from this period indicate that these counterinsurgency strategies predated Rios Montt. And, they received the blessing of the Reagan administration shortly after Reagan took power in 1981.

A document that I discovered in the archives of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security team in 1981 agreed to supply military aid to Guatemala’s dictators so they could pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but people associated with their “civilian support mechanisms.”

This supportive attitude took shape in spring 1981 as President Reagan sought to relax human-rights restrictions on military aid to Guatemala that had been imposed by President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic-controlled Congress in the late 1970s. As part of that easing, Reagan’s State Department “advised our Central American embassies that it has been studying ways to restore a closer, cooperative relationship with Guatemala,” said a White House “Situation Room Checklist” dated April 8, 1981.

The document added: “State believes a number of changes have occurred which could make Guatemalan leaders more receptive to a new U.S. initiative: the Guatemalans view the new administration as more sympathetic to their problems [and] they are less suspect of the U.S. role in El Salvador,” where the Reagan administration was expanding military aid to another right-wing regime infamous for slaughtering its political opponents, including Catholic clergy.

“State has concluded that any attempt to reestablish a dialogue [with Guatemala] would require some initial, condition-free demonstration of our goodwill. However, this could not include military sales which would provoke serious U.S. public and congressional criticism. State will undertake a series of confidence building measures, free of preconditions, which minimize potential conflict with existing legislation.”

In other words, the Reagan administration was hoping that the U.S. government could get back in the good graces of the Guatemalan dictators, not that the dictators should change their ways to qualify for U.S. government help.

Soliciting the Generals

The “checklist” added that the State Department “has also decided that the administration should engage the Guatemalan government at the highest level in a dialogue on our bilateral relations and the initiatives we can take together to improve them. Secretary [of State Alexander] Haig has designated [retired] General Vernon Walters as his personal emissary to initiate this process with President [Fernando Romeo] Lucas [Garcia].

“If Lucas is prepared to give assurances that he will take steps to halt government involvement in the indiscriminate killing of political opponents and to foster a climate conducive to a viable electoral process, the U.S. will be prepared to approve some military sales immediately.”

But the operative word in that paragraph was “indiscriminate.” The Reagan administration expressed no problem with killing civilians if they were considered supporters of the guerrillas who had been fighting against the country’s ruling oligarchs and generals since the 1950s when the CIA organized the overthrow of Guatemala’s reformist President Jacobo Arbenz.

The distinction was spelled out in “Talking Points” for Walters to deliver in a face-to-face meeting with General Lucas. As edited inside the White House in April 1981, the “Talking Points” read: “The President and Secretary Haig have designated me [Walters] as [their] personal emissary to discuss bilateral relations on an urgent basis.

“Both the President and the Secretary recognize that your country is engaged in a war with Marxist guerrillas. We are deeply concerned about externally supported Marxist subversion in Guatemala and other countries in the region. As you are aware, we have already taken steps to assist Honduras and El Salvador resist this aggression.

“The Secretary has sent me here to see if we can work out a way to provide material assistance to your government. … We have minimized negative public statements by US officials on the situation in Guatemala. … We have arranged for the Commerce Department to take steps that will permit the sale of $3 million worth of military trucks and Jeeps to the Guatemalan army. …

“With your concurrence, we propose to provide you and any officers you might designate an intelligence briefing on regional developments from our perspective. Our desire, however, is to go substantially beyond the steps I have just outlined. We wish to reestablish our traditional military supply and training relationship as soon as possible.

“As we are both aware, this has not yet been feasible because of our internal political and legal constraints relating to the use by some elements of your security forces of deliberate and indiscriminate killing of persons not involved with the guerrilla forces or their civilian support mechanisms. I am not referring here to the regrettable but inevitable death of innocents though error in combat situations, but to what appears to us a calculated use of terror to immobilize non politicized people or potential opponents. …

“If you could give me your assurance that you will take steps to halt official involvement in the killing of persons not involved with the guerrilla forces or their civilian support mechanism … we would be in a much stronger position to defend successfully with the Congress a decision to begin to resume our military supply relationship with your government.”

In other words, though the “talking points” were framed as an appeal to reduce the “indiscriminate” slaughter of “non politicized people,” they embraced scorched-earth tactics against people involved with the guerrillas and “their civilian support mechanisms.” The way that played out in Guatemala – as in nearby El Salvador – was the massacring of peasants in regions considered sympathetic to leftist insurgents.

Reporting the Truth

U.S. intelligence officers in the region also kept the Reagan administration abreast of the expanding slaughter. For instance, according to one “secret” cable from April 1981 — and declassified in the 1990s — the CIA was confirming Guatemalan government massacres even as Reagan was moving to loosen the military aid ban.

On April 17, 1981, a CIA cable described an army massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory, because the population was believed to support leftist guerrillas. A CIA source reported that “the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas” and “the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved.”

The CIA cable added that “the Guatemalan authorities admitted that ‘many civilians’ were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants.” [Many of the Guatemalan documents declassified in the 1990s can be found at the National Security Archive’s Web site.]

Despite these atrocities, Reagan dispatched Walters in May 1981 to tell the Guatemalan leaders that the new U.S. administration wanted to lift the human rights embargoes on military equipment that Carter and Congress had imposed.
According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, when Guatemalan leaders met again with Walters, they left no doubt about their plans. The cable said Gen. Lucas “made clear that his government will continue as before — that the repression will continue. He reiterated his belief that the repression is working and that the guerrilla threat will be successfully routed.”

Human rights groups saw the same picture, albeit from a less sympathetic angle. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for “thousands of illegal executions.” [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]

But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the horrific scene. A State Department “white paper,” released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist “extremist groups” and their “terrorist methods” prompted and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Fully Onboard

What the documents from the Reagan Library make clear is that the administration was not simply struggling ineffectively to rein in these massacres – as the U.S. press corps typically reported – but was fully onboard with the slaughter of people who were part of the guerrillas’ “civilian support mechanisms.”

U.S. intelligence agencies continued to pick up evidence of these government-sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province.
“The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance,” the report said. “Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.”

The CIA report explained the army’s modus operandi: “When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.” When the army encountered an empty village, it was “assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. …

“The army high command is highly pleased with the initial results of the sweep operation, and believes that it will be successful in destroying the major EGP support area and will be able to drive the EGP out of the Ixil Triangle. … The well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.”

The reality was so grotesque that it prompted protests even from some staunch anticommunists inside the Reagan administration. On Feb. 2, 1982, Richard Childress, one of Reagan’s national security aides, wrote a “secret” memo to his colleagues summing up this reality on the ground:

“As we move ahead on our approach to Latin America, we need to consciously address the unique problems posed by Guatemala. Possessed of some of the worst human rights records in the region, … it presents a policy dilemma for us. The abysmal human rights record makes it, in its present form, unworthy of USG [U.S. government] support. …

“Beset by a continuous insurgency for at least 15 years, the current leadership is completely committed to a ruthless and unyielding program of suppression. Hardly a soldier could be found that has not killed a ‘guerrilla.’”

Rios Montt’s Arrival

But Reagan was unmoved. He continued to insist on expanding U.S. support for these brutal campaigns, while his administration sought to cover up the facts and deflect criticism. Reagan’s team insisted  that Gen. Efrain Rios Montt’s overthrow of Gen. Lucas in March 1982 represented a sunny new day in Guatemala.

An avowed fundamentalist Christian, Rios Montt impressed Official Washington where the Reagan administration immediately revved up its propaganda machinery to hype the new dictator’s “born-again” status as proof of his deep respect for human life. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.”

By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his “rifles and beans” policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get “beans,” while all others could expect to be the target of army “rifles.” In October, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations in the cities. Based at the Presidential Palace, the “Archivos” masterminded many of Guatemala’s most notorious assassinations.

The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres, but ideologically driven U.S. diplomats fed the Reagan administration the propaganda spin that would be best for their careers. On Oct. 22, 1982, embassy staff dismissed the massacre reports as a communist-inspired “disinformation campaign.”

Reagan personally joined this P.R. spin seeking to discredit human rights investigators and others who were reporting accurately about massacres that the administration knew were true. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as “totally dedicated to democracy” and added that Rios Montt’s government had been “getting a bum rap” on human rights. Reagan discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Mayan villages being eradicated.

In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in “suspect right-wing violence” with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt’s order to the “Archivos” in October to “apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.”

Despite these facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. “The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year” 1982, the report stated.

Indiscriminate Murder

A different picture — far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government — was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.

New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the government carried out “virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents.”

Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said, adding that children were “thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed.” [AP, March 17, 1983]

Publicly, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face. In June 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised “positive changes” in Rios Montt’s government, and Rios Montt pressed the United States for 10 UH-1H helicopters and six naval patrol boats, all the better to hunt guerrillas and their sympathizers.

Since Guatemala lacked the U.S. Foreign Military Sales credits or the cash to buy the helicopters, Reagan’s national security team looked for unconventional ways to arrange the delivery of the equipment that would give the Guatemalan army greater access to mountainous areas where guerrillas and their civilian supporters were hiding.

On Aug. 1, 1983, National Security Council aides Oliver North and Alfonso Sapia-Bosch reported to National Security Advisor William P. Clark that his deputy Robert “Bud” McFarlane was planning to exploit his Israeli channels to secure the helicopters for Guatemala. [For more on McFarlanes's Israeli channels, see Consortiumnews.com's "How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast."]
“With regard to the loan of ten helicopters, it is [our] understanding that Bud will take this up with the Israelis,” wrote North and Sapia-Bosch. “There are expectations that they would be forthcoming. Another possibility is to have an exercise with the Guatemalans. We would then use US mechanics and Guatemalan parts to bring their helicopters up to snuff.”

Hunting Children

What it meant to provide these upgrades to the Guatemalan killing machine was clarified during the trial of Rios Montt with much of the testimony coming from survivors who, as children, escaped to mountain forests as their families and other Mayan villagers were butchered.

As the New York Times reported, “Pedro Chávez Brito told the court that he was only six or seven years old when soldiers killed his mother. He hid in the chicken coop with his older sister, her newborn and his younger brother, but soldiers found them and dragged them out, forcing them back into their house and setting it on fire.

“Mr. Chávez says he was the only one to escape. ‘I got under a tree trunk and I was like an animal,’ Mr. Chávez told the court. ‘After eight days I went to live in the mountains. In the mountain we ate only roots and grass.’”

The Times reported that “prosecution witnesses said the military considered Ixil civilians, including children, as legitimate targets. … Jacinto Lupamac Gómez said he was eight when soldiers killed his parents and older siblings and hustled him and his two younger brothers into a helicopter. Like some of the children whose lives were spared, they were adopted by Spanish-speaking families and forgot how to speak Ixil.”

Elena de Paz Santiago, now 42, “testified that she was 12 when she and her mother were taken by soldiers to an army base and raped. The soldiers let her go, but she never saw her mother again,” the Times reported.

Even by Guatemalan standards, Rios Montt’s vengeful Christian fundamentalism had hurtled out of control. On Aug. 8, 1983, another coup overthrew Rios Montt and brought Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores to power.

Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to murder with impunity, finally going so far that even the U.S. Embassy objected. When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that “Archivos” hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even mild pressure for human rights.

In late November, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army.

By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who favored increased military assistance to Guatemala. In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan’s State Department “is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala’s image than in improving its human rights.”

Reagan’s Dark Side

Despite his outwardly congenial style, Reagan – as revealed in the documentary record – was a cold and ruthless anticommunist who endorsed whatever “death squad” strategies were deployed against leftists in Central America. As Walters’s “Talking Points” demonstrate, Reagan and his team accepted the idea of liquidating not only armed guerrillas but civilians who were judged sympathetic to left-wing causes – people who were deemed part of the guerrillas’ “civilian support mechanisms.”

Across Central America in the 1980s, the death toll was staggering — an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the Contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political “disappearances” in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during the resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization emanating from Ronald Reagan’s White House.

It was not until 1999, a decade after Ronald Reagan left office, that the shocking scope of the atrocities in Guatemala was comprehensively detailed by a truth commission that drew heavily on U.S. government documents declassified by President Bill Clinton. On Feb. 25, 1999, the Historical Clarification Commission estimated that the 34-year civil war had claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. The panel estimated that the army was responsible for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. “The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala’s history,” the commission concluded. The army “completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops,” the report said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter “genocide.” [Washington Post, Feb. 26, 1999]

Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. “The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice” by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found. The report added that the “government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations.” The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed “acts of genocide” against the Mayans. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]

During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala dating back to 1954. “For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake,” Clinton said.

Despite the damning documentary evidence and now the shocking judgment of genocide against Rios Montt, there has been no interest in Washington to hold any U.S. official accountable, not even a thought that the cornucopia of honors bestowed on Ronald Reagan should cease or be rescinded.

It remains unlikely that the genocide conviction of Rios Montt will change the warm and fuzzy glow that surrounds Ronald Reagan in the eyes of many Americans. The story of the Guatemalan butchery and the Reagan administration’s complicity has long since been relegated to the great American memory hole.

But Americans of conscience will have to reconcile what it means when a country sees nothing wrong in honoring a man who made genocide happen.
Robert Parry
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

Is 'The Great Gatsby' a Movie or a Shopping Promo?



Culture  


Baz Lurhmann's new film makes style the star and substance the understudy. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
It’s good to see a fine book in style this year. But are we focusing on the book, or the style? Baz Lurhmann’s new movie version of The Great Gatsby opens today, and unfortunately, its obsessive attention to glittering gowns, sumptuous suits and deco trappings makes style the star and substance the understudy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a book about the very nasty things that happen when we set money as the marker of our value. But you wouldn’t know it from Lurhmann’s film, which celebrates the love of wealth and comes with more shopping tie-ins than the beads in Daisy’s dress.

Glamour! Excess! Hedonism! These are the words that repeat themselves in endless ads associated with the film’s release. High-end brands are practically characters in the movie, with appearances by Prada, Miu Miu, Tiffany and Brooks Brothers. French lace-maker Solstiss produced 1,400 meters of lace in deco patterns for the costumes. Daisy Buchanan is a walking display of runway-ready styles and glittering jewels. Her diamond-studded Tiffany headpiece retails for $200,000, if you need ideas for Mother’s Day.

All is designed to make you hit the stores the minute you leave the theater. Brooks Brothers has its own “Gatsby web experience,” complete with “behind the scenes video” featuring clips from the movie and discussion of the “partnership” between the clothing giant and the film.

The tie-ins don’t stop with the bling. Hotel advertisements tempt you to “ live the life of Gatsby” (which presumably does not include his horrible end) at any number of swank retreats. For the bibliophile traveler, the Chatwal New York provides copies of the novel in each sumptuously appointed room (hey, it beats cable!). Not to be outdone, the Seelbach Hilton in Louisville, Kentucky, touts the fact that Fitzgerald used it as a backdrop for Tom and Daisy Buchanan's wedding as a selling point.

But Donald Trump wins the prize for all-out shamelessness, offering a $14,999 three-night stay at Trump New York, which comes with dinner at Jean-Georges, a bracelet designed by Ivanka Trump and a bottle of bubbly.

When you look at current consumer trends, all this swooning over luxury makes a perverse kind of sense. Despite the fact that most of us are mighty worried about our economic well-being, wealthy America is experiencing what Brad Tuttle at Time calls the “ Splurge Surge.”

“They’re going on shopping sprees,” Tuttle writes, “.....with increasing sales seen for luxury hotel stays, high-end automobiles, and more.” Polls show that the rich really don’t think the economy is recovering, but they’re spending anyway. The reason is simple:  From 2009 to 2011, the mean net worth of households in the top 7 percent rose by 28 percent. Everbody else’s dropped by 4 percent over this same time period. There’s still a recession happening, just not for them. Whoopie!

A movie like The Great Gatsby conspires to make the 99 percent forget our credit card debt and join the rich in a shopping spree. Maybe we'll get the down-market version of Daisy's dress, but we'll think, for a moment, that we're getting a piece of the action ( Seventeen magazine highlights a variety of 1920s-style prom dresses in the $300-$600 range). All is well and good until the bill arrives.

The last time America saw such a disconnect between the experiences of the rich and the rest was, of course, the Roaring Twenties. Which ended very badly, just like Gatsby’s race to the top of the capitalist heap.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' She received her Ph.d in English and Cultural Theory from NYU, where she has taught essay writing and semiotics. She is the Director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Political ideology can dominate other factors in choosing energy efficiency


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Political ideology can dominate other factors in choosing energy efficiency



Political ideology - tracking from liberal to conservative from left to right - can influence the purchase of a bulb with (green) and without (gray) an environmental label (Image: Gromet et al. PNAS, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1218453110)

Energy efficiency sounds like a good idea on multiple fronts; mitigating global warming, reducing dependence on foreign oil and saving money. Conservatives and liberals may disagree about the first reason, but you would expect both of them to enthusiastically embrace energy efficiency based on the other two reasons. Yet we find attitudes toward energy efficiency split along politically ideological lines in this country. Why? A new study suggests one simple potential reason: the liberal environmental messaging associated with energy efficiency may discourage conservatives from using such technologies.

That is the conclusion of a study done by researchers from Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania which was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The United States with its two-party system and the traditional split among liberals and conservatives in matters of environmentalism is a good test case for this kind of project. The researchers’ goal was two-fold; firstly, to investigate how people’s political inclination tracks with their attitudes about energy efficiency, and secondly how that attitude is influenced by the individual reasons typically enunciated by proponents of energy efficiency.

To examine these factors the researchers carried out two studies, Study 1 and Study 2. Study 1 looked at a sample of about 700 individuals aged 19-81. They were provided information about the benefits of energy efficiency and then asked what psychological value they placed on energy efficiency itself and on the three benefits of energy efficiency: reducing carbon emissions, dependence on foreign oil and cost. The study found out that political leaning tracks well not just with general attitudes about energy efficiency but also with the individual benefits. Not surprisingly, conservatives placed the least value on reducing carbon emissions; what was surprising was that reducing cost and foreign oil dependence didn’t rank high on their priorities either. There was also a split along gender lines. The paper summarizes the findings of Study 1:
As expected, the more conservative participants were, the less they favored investing in energy-efficient technology. With regard to individuals’ psychological valuation of the environment, energy independence, and energy costs, all three judgments were associated with participants’ political ideology: The more conservative participants were, the less psychological value they placed on all these concerns. However, the ideological divide was greatest for reduction of carbon emissions, indicating the polarizing nature of environmental concerns (and the relatively broader appeal of energy independence and cost concerns across ideological lines). In additional analyses, we also included a sex × ideology interaction term, because conservative males tend to express the greatest denial of climate change. This interaction was a significant predictor for the valuation of carbon emission reductions but did not predict investment in energy efficiency or ratings for the other values.
This is an intriguing result but I have two thoughts about it. Firstly, the differences in attitude did not differ dramatically between conservatives and liberals although they reached statistical significance. Secondly, I think it would have been quite interesting to run a few more experiments in which participants were blinded to one or more of the three benefits of energy efficiency. For instance, what would conservatives say if they were told that the primary goal of energy efficiency is to reduce long-term cost? Psychological research has demonstrated the influence of prior information on consequent decision making and it would have been valuable to examine this influence in the present study.
Study 2 was smaller but much more interesting. In it participants were given $2 to buy either a standard incandescent light bulb or a fluorescent CFL light bulb. The CFL cost $1.50 and was more expensive than the standard $0.50 bulb. They could keep the change. Both liberals and conservatives were then provided information about the advantages of the CFL bulb, including its longer life and the significant long-term savings from it. Now comes the interesting part. The study was split into two sub-studies. In one case there was an environmental label (for instance one saying “Protect the Environment”) on the CFL bulb. In the other case there was no label.

What the researchers found out was that there was a marked difference between the choices of conservatives in the two cases. In the first case the label put them off in spite of the cost savings; seeing a connection with the environment closed their mind to the other benefits. In the second case without the label, the benefits of the CFL swayed their minds. The trends also held for moderate conservatives. The implications are clear; environmental messaging can actually discourage conservatives even from trying out technology that promises other clear benefits.

Here are some other interesting observations. When the prices of the bulbs were the same, then the label did not matter; all participants picked the CFL bulb, reflecting the dominance of both short-term and long-term economic concerns over others. In addition liberals always picked the CFL bulb, irrespective of its price.

Summarizing the results of Study 2, the researchers say that:
These findings indicate that connecting energy-efficient products to environmental concerns can negatively affect the demand for these products, specifically among persons in the United States who are more politically conservative. Although the majority of participants, regardless of ideology, selected the more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was unlabeled, the more moderate and conservative participants were less likely to purchase this option when an environmental label was attached to it.
The study (with all the usual caveats including sample size and nature) says something that both liberals and conservatives need to understand. Firstly, it’s clear that economic benefits often trump environmental ones for conservatives; at the same time, the fact that the environmental message blinded conservatives to the long-term saving says that ideology can also trump self-interest. From a practical standpoint though, this means that environmentally friendly technologies advocated by liberals are likely to be embraced by conservatives if they become cheap enough, irrespective of their attitudes toward liberal environmentalism.

More importantly, the study shows that the message matters. It tells us that liberals should perhaps tone down their big environmental message if they want to convince conservatives to adopt their products. This would be somewhat counterintuitive to the belief that a greater emphasis on environmentalism is the right way to win conservatives over to your cause. To conservatives the message is also clear; if the economics makes sense, try to ignore the political message.
And the most important conclusion of this study cannot be ignored: if you really want to work together, leave ideology aside and focus on what you have in common. That’s the way to move forward.

Ashutosh JogalekarAbout the Author: Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar is a chemist interested in the history and philosophy of science. He considers science to be a seamless and all-encompassing part of the human experience. Follow on Twitter @curiouswavefn.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

The Last Word On Conservative Brain Structure




Sunday, February 3, 2013

The Last Word On Conservative Brain Structure



Today's post, "The Last Word On Conservative Brain Structure," isn't - and can't be, as new studies will be published showing that Conservative brain structures are not conducive to sound thinking or compassionate feelings.  Though the essay, "Differences in Conservative and Liberal Brains," offers "16 peer-reviewed studies show liberals and conservatives physiologically different," we will cherry-pick those that struck our eye, even though we may have written about particular studies in the past, and let you click http://2012election.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004818 for the rest:

"In the 16 peer-reviewed scientific studies summarized below, researchers found that liberals and conservatives have different brain structures, different physiological responses to stimuli, and activate different neural mechanisms when confronted with similar situations. Each entry below references the source document and a PDF of each study has been included. The studies are arranged from most recent to oldest. We included all the peer-reviewed studies on this subject which we could find. If you know about others, please contact us with details.

1. Conservatives spend more time looking at unpleasant images, and liberals spend more time looking at pleasant images.



"We report evidence that individual-level variation in people's physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations."

Michael D. Dodd, PhD, Amanda Balzer, PhD, Carly Jacobs, MA, Michael Gruszczynski, MA, Kevin B. Smith, PhD, and John R. Hibbing, PhD, "The Left Rolls with the Good; The Right Confronts the Bad. Physiology and Cognition in Politics," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Mar. 5, 2012

2. Reliance on quick, efficient, and "low effort" thought processes yields conservative ideologies, while effortful and deliberate reasoning yields liberal ideologies.



"...[P]olitical conservatism is promoted when people rely on low-effort thinking. When effortful, deliberate responding is disrupted or disengaged, thought processes become quick and efficient; these conditions promote conservative ideology… low-effort thought might promote political conservatism because its concepts are easier to process, and processing fluency increases attitude endorsement.

Four studies support our assertion that low-effort thinking promotes political conservatism... Our findings suggest that conservative ways of thinking are basic, normal, and perhaps natural."

Scott Eidelman, PhD, Christian S. Crandall, PhD, Jeffrey A. Goodman, PhD, and John C. Blanchar, "Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism," Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2012

3. Conservatives react more strongly than liberals to disgusting images, such as a picture of someone eating worms.



"People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations… In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images [measured by change in mean skin conductance], such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images."

Kevin B. Smith, PhD, Douglas Oxley, PhD, Matthew V. Hibbing, PhD, John R. Alford, PhD, and John R. Hibbing, PhD, "Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations," PLOS ONE, Oct. 19, 2011

4. Liberals have more tolerance to uncertainty (bigger anterior cingulate cortex), and conservatives have more sensitivity to fear (bigger right amygdala).



"In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI [magnetic resonance imaging]. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala...

"...[O]ur findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty. The amygdala has many functions, including fear processing. Individuals with a larger amygdala are more sensitive to fear, which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amagdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief systems... our finding of an association between anterior cingulate cortex [ACC] may be linked with tolerance to uncertainty. One of the functions of the anterior cingulate cortex is to monitor uncertainty and conflicts. Thus it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views."

Ryota Kanai, PhD, Tom Feilden, Colin Firth, and Geraint Rees, PhD, "Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults," Current Biology, Apr. 7, 2011


8. Conservatives and liberals react similarly to positive incentives, but conservatives have greater sensitivity to negative stimuli.



"Our findings suggest that conservatives are sensitive to avoidance motivation [motivation through negative stimuli], which produces 'inhibition' responses manifested in greater rigidity... Based on the studies' findings, we would not expect differences between liberals and conservatives in responding to positive stimuli or incentives (i.e., approach cues), but we would expect greater inhibitory reactions by conservatives in response to negative, avoidant cues. Self-regulation appears to provide a useful perspective for understanding how one's political views may affect categorization processes and, more broadly, the association between political conservatism and rigidity."

Mindi S. Rock, PhD, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, PhD, "Where Do We Draw Our Lines? Politics, Rigidity, and the Role of Self-Regulation," Social Psychological and Personality Science, Jan. 2010

9. Conservatives have more activity in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, the part of the brain that activates for complex social evaluations.




"The conservatism dimension, which corresponds to the liberal-to-conservative criterion, was associated with activity in the right DLPFC [dorsolateral prefrontal cortex]...

"In this study, we speculate that activity in the DLPFC may reflect a role of this region in deliberative decision-making in complex social evaluations... The observation that this region was increasingly activated by conservative beliefs could be explained by claiming that conservative statements require more complex social judgments marked by greater cognitive dissonance between self-interest and sense of fairness...

"[W]e showed that the representation of complex political beliefs relies on three fundamental dimensions, each reflected in distinctive patterns of neural activation: The degree of individualism of political beliefs was linearly associated with activation in the medial PFC [prefrontal cortex] and TPJ [temporoparietal junction], the degree of conservatism with activation in the DLPFC, and the degree of radicalism with activation in the ventral striatum and PC/P [posterior cingulate/precuneus]. Our findings support the interpretation that the political belief system depends on a set of social cognitive processes including those that enable a person to judge themselves and other people, make decisions in ambivalent social situations, and comprehend motivational and emotional states."
Giovanna Zamboni, MD, Marta Gozzi, PhD, Frank Krueger, PhD, Jean-René Duhamel, PhD, Angela Sirigu, PhD, and Jordan Grafman, PhD, "Individualism, Conservatism, and Radicalism As Criteria for Processing Political Beliefs: A Parametric fMRI Study," Social Neuroscience, Sep. 2009

11. Genetics influence political attitudes during early adulthood and beyond.




"The present research attempts to characterize how the transmission of political orientations develops over the life course... [G]enetic influences on political attitudes are absent prior to young adulthood. During childhood and adolescence, individual differences in political attitudes are accounted for by a variety of environmental influences... However, at the point of early adulthood (in the early 20s), for those who left their parental home, there is evidence of a sizeable genetic influence on political attitudes which remains stable throughout adult life."
Peter K. Hatemi, PhD, Carolyn L. Funk, PhD, Sarah E. Medland, PhD, Hermine M. Maes, PhD, Judy L. Silberg, PhD, Nicholas G. Martin, PhD, and Lindon J. Eaves, PhD, DSc, "Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Attitudes Over a Life Time," The Journal of Politics, July 21, 2009

12. Compared to liberals, conservatives are less open to new experiences and learn better from negative stimuli than positive stimuli.




"In this study, the relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli... Political ideology correlated with exploration during the game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover, more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry, such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive... Relative to liberals, politically conservative individuals pursued a more avoidant strategy to the game…

"The reluctance to explore that characterizes more politically conservative individuals may protect them from experiencing negative situations, for they are likely to restrict approach to known positives."

Natalie J. Shook, PhD, and Russell H. Fazio, PhD, "Political Ideology, Exploration of Novel Stimuli, and Attitude Formation," Experimental Social Psychology, Apr. 3, 2009

13. Conservatives tend to have a stronger reaction to threatening noises and images than liberals.


"In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats."

Douglas R. Oxley, PhD, Kevin B. Smith, PhD, John R. Alford, PhD, Matthew V. Hibbing, PhD, Jennifer L. Miller, Mario Scalora, PhD, Peter K. Hatemi, PhD, and John R. Hibbing, PhD, "Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits," Science, Sep. 19, 2008

15. When faced with a conflict, liberals are more likely than conservatives to alter their habitual response when cues indicate it is necessary.


"Our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation. Stronger conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal."

David M. Amodio, PhD, John T. Jost, PhD, Sarah L. Master, PhD, and Cindy M. Yee, PhD,"Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism," Nature Neuroscience, Sep. 9, 2007



Study after study shows the difference between the brains of liberals vs. their right-wing brethren, and we will continue to maintain that after Conservatism is criminalized that Conservative sheeplets should not be subject to the same punishments as their leaders.

Their IQs can't be increased, but surely a program of re-education, stressing Critical Thinking, Civics, History and The History of Liberlism and Progressivism, etc., can be structured to bring the sheeplets back to a life of productivity and the true understanding of democracy.  They should not be punished for their support of their leaderships' crimes, nor held responsible for them, since we can show that their actions are not completely their fault, and that their brand of "thinking" could be classified as a mental disorder.


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"There are certain romances that belong in certain cities, in a certain atmosphere, in a certain time."

Sammy Davis, Jr.


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