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Volume 1 Issue 159             Today’s News and Views         Monday, June 5, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2475

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 296

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

For Immediate Release                                                                                                June 3, 2006

2500 American Deaths in Iraq are Near:

We say, “Not one more.” Call for Peace Now.

Press Contacts:

Harold P. Donle, Veterans for Peace, Inc. #49, hdonle@insightbb.com 317/698-2450.

Heather Allen-Garde, Hoosiers for Peace, heather@hoosiersforpeace.org, 317/202-9302.

Jim Wolfe, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, jwolfe@butler.edu, 317/255-3857.

Members of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 49, Hoosiers for Peace and the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center are asking Indiana citizens to assemble on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis on the day that the 2500^th American is reported killed to mark this tragic occurrence. The target date at the current rate of KIAs is on or about Wednesday, June 14^th, eleven (11) days from today.

This action is to honor the soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq and their families, and to give our fellow Indiana citizens a visual representation of what 2500 looks like. We are against war because it kills our family members, wreaks havoc on our national treasury, makes the world a more dangerous place, and psychically damages our humanity.

Hundreds of Hoosiers have been invited to participate in this event that will combine an installation of 2500 flags to honor the dead and a memorial ceremony to call for an end to war. If the number is reached on a weekday (Mon.- Fri.) the group will gather at 6 P.M and if the number is reached on a weekend the group will gather at 4 P.M. at Veterans Memorial Plaza  in downtown Indianapolis. (The Plaza is bounded by Michigan to the south, Meridian to the west, North Street to the north, and Pennsylvania to the west.) At that time, the assembled will a field of flags on Veterans Memorial Plaza. The group will reserve 64 flags to represent the Hoosiers that have been lost in Iraq and they will plant those 64 flags around the base of the obelisk. There will be a period of brief remarks and a memorial ceremony in closing.

For more information contact Harold Donle at (317)698-2450.

Support Our Troops

IMPEACH Bush/Cheney

Hoosiers for Peace requests the honor of your presence…

What: Share Sunday Gravy with Local Progressives at Pasta for Peace. Good Food, Stimulating Conversation, Inspirational Music, Film, and Art and a Silent Auction. Did we mention the pasta was shaped like peace signs? To reserve your seat, call 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org. Seats are limited and going fast.

When: June 25, 2006 from 1 to 4 p.m. (with dinner at 2 p.m.)

Where: Indianapolis Peace and Learning Center (6040 DeLong Rd.) in Eagle Creek Park.

Why:  Now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace. Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. To find out more visit www.hoosiersforpeace.org

Cost: Adults $20, Children 5-12 $7, Children under 5 eat free. All proceeds will go towards the advertising campaign. Seats are limited, contact Heather for tickets today: 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 7, 2006

Dear Peacemakers,

Will you help to spread and encourage peace? With a record number of American soldiers dying in April 2006 and possible military action against Iran becoming daily news, now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace.

Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. We are contacting dozens of organizations to make a proposal to form a coalition to raise funds and send a collaborative message to Hoosiers to Call for Peace. The message is: Call your friends, your family, and your representatives and ask them to support the Call for Peace.

Like most Americans, we oppose war based on the following, which will be reflected in the advertisement:

A.    War Kills. More than 2,400 American Soldiers have died and nearly 1,000 Hoosier soldiers are in harms way.

B.    War depletes our resources. Billions of dollars are going to sustain war efforts while ordinary citizens struggle for social services.

C.    War will not make us secure. Studies have shown that the U.S. is no more secure today than it was before 911.

Hoosiers for Peace, a website sponsored by Progressive Indiana, requests your support to make this advertisement a success. We will use the advertisement to call for peace. Each group in the coalition  working on this project will be listed in the ad. Each group will be asked to raise $1000 by October 1, 2006. Below are some suggestions for fundraising:

1.                Letter Writing Campaign: Contact your family and friends and ask them to support this call for peace. Tell them how many people we can reach and ask them to make a generous donation and spread the word. You may collect the money through your organization or you may refer them to Progressive Indiana. Donations may be sent through our secure online giving by going to www.progressiveindiana.org and click on donate now or log onto www.hoosiersforpeace and click on donate now. Checks may also be made payable to Progressive Indiana and mailed to:

                Progressive Indiana

                P.O. Box 55253

                Indianapolis, Indiana 46205-0253

2.                Host a house party. Go grassroots and organize a pasta dinner or backyard barbecue and ask for a donation from each guest. Play poker and donate half of each pot to the campaign for peace. Have a bake sale through your church or place of employment.

3.                Plan a small event.  Invite your community to an event and ask for donations for the ad. Small concerts, speakers, and socials are some ideas for these events. Get creative and network!

We need at least 14 groups to join the coalition and many more people to join the campaign to help fill in possible gaps. If we join together we can make this happen and we can bring Hoosiers together through this ad. As we Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, and call for an End to the War we can stand united for peace. We can make a difference by showing ordinary Hoosiers that there are many people like them working for peace. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to participate in this campaign. With a little work and collaboration we can make a large impact on our community.

In Peace,

Heather Allen-Garde

Director, Hoosiers For Peace

heather@hooisersforpeace.org

heatherreneeallen@yahoo.com

317/202-9302

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it – Eleanor Roosevelt

David Korten

Butler University

June 26, 2006

7pm

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Today's News and Views

June 03, 2006

Frameshop: 3 Easy Steps To Beat The 'Marriage Amendment'

To Stop GOP From Using Constitution To Strip Equal Rights, Change Debate To 'Time' Frame

This week President Bush took time out from his busy schedule to renew his support for Constitionally enforced inequality in America--a federal amendment banning equal rights.  Even though most of us believe that The Constitution of the United States should never be used to deny rights, President Bush believes it should. 

Here we go again.  Apparently, repeating the word 'terror' over and over again is not  enough to bring up President Bush's polling numbers.  So...cracking open his trusty tupperware of hate-n-divide politics, President Bush has once again served up a healthy portion of:  gay bashing for votes. 

But we know all this.  We know the old GOP strategy  What we need to know, now, is how to stop this assault on equal rights.  What can we say to put this genie back in the bottle once and for all?

Step 1:  Talk About The Constitution

Progressives cannot take control of this debate if they repeat the GOP frame of 'gay marriage.'  But we also cannot ignore the topic once it is already out there.

The solution is to steal by the ball by focusing on The Constitution.  In my informal surveys, readings and conversations, I have found that even Americans who are most uncomfortable with the idea of same-sex marriage--these same people are even more uncomfortable with the idea of turning The U.S. Constitution into a document that enforces inequality.

The idea that The Constitution is the moral foundation of our nation and that it should never be used to create inequality--is a value far deeper and far more important than the discussion of marriage rights.

When we hear talk of 'defense of marriage amendments,' we should not hesitate for a second:  change the frame to The Constitution protecting, not stripping, equal rights.

Step 2:  Talk About 'Time'

The big frame change to take control of this issue and to stop it for good is the 'time' frame. 

The 'time' frame is broad frame that defines the current issue relative to a fixed amount of time and is embodied in this deceptively powerful question:

Do we have time for this now?

Notice how this question is based on the metaphor of [time] as a [fixed and tangible resource].  Time is not unlimited, it does not grow on trees.  We only 'have' 'so much' time to 'go around,' so we better 'use' the time 'we have' wisely.

From this idea we quickly see the logic of one of the most devastating things anyone can be told in a political debate:

We do not have time for this

After we switch the debate from the 'defense of marriage' to protecting the ideals of our Constitution, we immediately take control of the time frame by saying 'We do not have time for this.' 

America has real and pressing problems to face.  We are in a war that is spiraling out of control and costing lives.  We need to spend our time on that problem  We have an energy crisis that threatens to bankrupt Americans.  We need to spend our time on that problem.  We have a health crisis in costing us billions and leaving our families unhealthy and afraid.  We need to spend time on that.  We have an environmental crisis that is deteriorating day by day.  We need to spend time on that.  We have the next hurricane season that is beating a path towards our shores.  We need to spend time on that.  We simply do not have any time to waste debating whether we should or should not use the Constitution to enforce inequality.

Time is the frame.

Step 3:  How May People Have Died?

The last step is to extend the time frame by linking it to the problems we face right now.

After we frame the debate in terms of the Constitution and limited time, we must ask a series of bold and direction questions about the dangers that result from not solving the real problems that face us:

How many people have died in Iraq because of a marriage?

How much has the price of gas gone up because of a marriage?

How many people died during Hurricane Katrina because of a marriage?

How much has the environment been damaged because of a marriage?

How many jobs have been shipped overseas illegally because of a marriage?

How many corporations have broken labor laws because of a marriage?

How many children have had their asthma untreated because of a marriage?

How many elected officials in Washington have been indicted for corruption becauseof a marriage?

The list could go on for days.  But the point is clear.  By asking these questions, we are taking control of the debate.   We are saying that America does not have time to waste on foolishness that serves only to insult the honor of our Constitution.    We are demanding that the debate stay focused on the real issues we face as a nation.

And is it any wonder President Bush and the GOP do not want to talk about these issues?  They are all problems created or made worse by GOP policies.

To beat the marriage amendment debate, follow these three easy steps.  The only way to lose is to get drawn into President Bush's frame.

©  2006 Jeffrey Feldman

Posted by Jeffrey Feldman on June 03, 2006 at 11:12 AM | Permalink

© 2004-2006 Jeffrey Feldman.

Sun 4 Jun 2006

Furious Iraq demands apology as US troops are cleared of massacre

BRIAN BRADY (bdbrady@scotlandonsunday.com)

AMERICA'S alliance with the new Iraqi government was plunged into major crisis last night as the country's prime minister and its people reacted with fury to the US military clearing its forces of killing civilians during operations against insurgents.

Iraqi leaders vowed to press on with their own probe into one of the most notorious American raids against extremist fighters, in the town of Ishaqi, rejecting the US military's exoneration of its forces.

Adnan al-Kazimi, an aide to prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, said the government would also demand an apology from the United States and compensation for the victims in several cases, including the alleged massacre in the town of Haditha last year.

The escalation in tensions comes as sources at the Foreign Office confirmed that the British Government is also urging the Americans to co-operate fully with comprehensive investigations into the deaths at both Ishaqi and Haditha.

A report filed by Iraqi police accused US troops of rounding up and deliberately shooting 11 people - including five children and four women - in a house in Ishaqi, before blowing up the building. Video footage revealed by the BBC appeared to show the aftermath of US action in Ishaqi, including a number of dead adults and children with what experts claimed were clearly gunshot wounds.

But following its own inquiries into the Ishaqi operation, the Pentagon enraged Iraqi officials by issuing a statement declaring that allegations that US troops "executed a family ... and then hid the alleged crimes by directing an air strike, are absolutely false".

US spokesman Major General William Caldwell said the US investigation into events in Ishaqi, where the military says it was attempting to capture insurgents, had found no wrongdoing on the part of the troops.

He said troops had been fired on as they raided a house to arrest an al-Qaeda suspect. They returned fire and called in air support, which destroyed the building, killing one militant and resulting in "up to nine collateral deaths".

The military had previously said one guerrilla, two women and a child were killed in the March 15 raid in the town, which is in the US-controlled zone, 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The Americans have repeatedly pledged to punish any soldier found guilty of atrocities in Iraq. But the decision to clear the troops in Ishaqi fuelled deep mistrust among ordinary Iraqis, three years after the US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein.

Police in Ishaqi say five children, four women and two men were shot in the head, and that the bodies, with hands bound, were dumped in one room before the house was blown up.

"We have it from more than one source that the Ishaqi killings were carried out under questionable circumstances," al-Kazimi said yesterday. "More than one child was killed. This [US] report was not fair for the Iraqi people and the children who were killed."

Al-Maliki, who took office two weeks ago at the helm of a US-backed national unity government, is battling a widespread public perception that US troops can shoot and kill with impunity and Iraqi leaders are too weak to do anything about it. Last week he criticised coalition forces for what he described as habitual attacks against civilians.

"Ishaqi is just another reason why we shouldn't trust the Americans," said Abdullah Hussein, an engineer in Baghdad. "First they lied about the weapons of mass destruction, then there was the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal and now it's clear to the world they were guilty in Haditha."

A tribal leader in Ishaqi said it was clear that US forces were above the law in Iraq.

"We expect the American soldiers to commit any crime to control this country," added Sarhan Jasim, 55.

Human rights minister Wijdan Michael said her ministry would send a fact-finding commission to Ishaqi in the next few days.

A Foreign Office insider confirmed last night that the British Government had become increasingly concerned about the series of allegations against US forces.

"It must be stressed that there is no conclusive proof that any of these allegations are true," she said. "But we have to be aware of them, and the Americans have to be aware of them and we are impressing upon them the need to investigate them to everyone's satisfaction whenever they arise.

"We only need to remember the incidents of abuse at Abu Graib and how damaging they were. It is in no one's interests to have these things going on."

The Ishaqi incident was one of a handful involving civilian deaths being investigated by the US military, including the deaths of two dozen civilians in the town of Haditha on November 19 last year.

US officials say murder charges may be brought against Marines after the probe into Haditha, which some commentators are comparing to the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Al-Maliki this week condemned the suspected massacre in Haditha as a "terrible crime" and demanded that the United States hand over the files on the investigation.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, met al-Maliki in Baghdad on Friday and promised to give him all the evidence and materials from the Haditha probe.

In the statement about Ishaqi, Caldwell said the investigation showed that the ground commander "operated in accordance with the rules of engagement governing our combat forces in Iraq".

But one man in the town, 40-year-old Obeid Kamil, said that US soldiers had a "licence to kill" Iraqi civilians.

"Their action is always to open fire and kill people, which is proof that they are afraid," he said.

©2006 Scotsman.com

Democrats see turning point

By Ralph Thomas
Seattle Times Olympia bureau

YAKIMA — Democratic Party leaders on Saturday lashed out at President Bush and the Republicans and vowed to seize on what they described as a "golden opportunity" to win back one or both houses of the Congress and expand Democratic dominance in Olympia.

State Democratic Chairman Dwight Pelz told about 1,000 delegates gathered for the party's convention that there is a "fresh breeze blowing" in America.

"History will record that America's flirtation with the Republican right-wing agenda ended in 2006," Pelz said.

The most noticeable friction at the Democrats' pep rally came during an appearance by U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, who has been catching flak from party activists — and two Democratic challengers — for her past support of the Iraq war.

As Cantwell took the podium, scores of delegates chanted "No more war." But their chants were eventually drowned out by hundreds of Cantwell supporters shouting "Six more years."

Pelz, in his first year as party chairman, got things rolling with a scathing attack on Republicans.

"George Bush and his corrupt Congress have attacked the basic foundations of our middle class — our employer-based health-care system, our pension system, Social Security and Medicare," Pelz said.

But the most boisterous cheers came when Pelz proclaimed that, if Democrats succeed in taking back the U.S. House or Senate, "We will have subpoena power and we will investigate ... Bush, Cheney, Donald [Rumsfeld] and [former House Majority Leader Tom] Delay and we will reveal to the American people what these people knew and when they knew it."

Pelz also took shots at the state GOP, describing the party's new immigration plank as part of a "growing xenophobic movement" in the nation.

During their convention the previous week, the Republicans added a provision to their platform opposing automatic citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution recognizes citizenship for all persons born in the United States.

The Democrats on Saturday took a far different tack on immigration. Their new platform says the party opposes building walls along U.S. borders and any policy that denies "civil and/or human rights or educational opportunities for immigrants and their children regardless of immigration status."

Anti-war stand

The state's Democrats also approved a pointed anti-war plank. It says there is "irrefutable evidence" that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was unjustified and "based on false and misleading statements and faulty thinking." The Democrats also call for "an orderly, complete and rapid exit strategy" and combating global terrorism by "working on the root causes of conflict" such as poverty and political disenfranchisement.

Some anti-war Democrats are unhappy with Cantwell for not supporting a tight timeline for troop withdrawal and for not expressing regret for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq.

Pelz and other Democratic leaders rallied around Cantwell and tried to deflect attention from the Iraq-war controversy.

"This is not our war," Pelz said in his speech. "This is a Republican war."

Before Cantwell's appearance, the delegates were shown a videotaped message from former President Bill Clinton, who urged them to work hard to help Cantwell defeat Republican challenger Mike McGavick.

Clinton didn't mention the war. Neither did one of the nation's most outspoken war critics, U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, who introduced Cantwell to the crowd.

Instead, McDermott praised Cantwell for standing up to what he called a Bush-led "oil junta" and opposing a powerful Republican senator's attempts to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil developers.

Cantwell used most of her speech to decry oil-industry profits and Bush administration policies on matters such as prescription drugs and funding for agricultural research.

She made only a vague reference to the war, saying, "2006 needs to be the year of transition, when the Iraqi people stand on their own and our troops come home."

"She glossed over the Iraq issue," said Todd Boyle of Kirkland, one of several dozen delegates who held up "No War" signs throughout Cantwell's speech. "She gave it less than 30 seconds."

Boyle, who supports immediate troop withdrawal, said if Cantwell doesn't take a stronger stand on ending the war, he will not support her.

The most pointed shots at Cantwell came from her two Democratic opponents, Mark Wilson and Hong Tran. During brief floor speeches, both painted Cantwell as a privileged millionaire and assailed her reputation as an environmental leader.

"You can't be a true environmentalist when you support the pillage and plunder of war or neo-con fast-tracking, free-trading policies," Wilson said.

Cantwell said she wasn't bothered by the reaction from the anti-war delegates.

"Listen, the Democratic Party has lots of different views, and we knew that coming in," she said. "This is a time to get people excited from around the state ... and that's what we were here to do."

Seattle Times reporter David Postman contributed to this report. Ralph Thomas: 360-943-9882 or rthomas@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Gay Marriage Amendment Getting a Presidential Push

Conservatives who think Bush has buried the issue denounce the planned event as a ruse.

By Maura Reynolds and Janet Hook
Times Staff Writers

June 3, 2006

WASHINGTON — The campaign against gay marriage is scheduled to get the full White House treatment on Monday — words from President Bush in front of assembled VIPs and a bank of television cameras.

Such a carefully staged production aims to confer the grandeur of the office on the push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. But even before administration officials announced the event, some invitees denounced it as a sham.

"I'm going to go and hear what he says, but we already know it is a ruse," said Joe Glover, president of the Family Policy Network, which opposes gay marriage. "We're not buying it. We're going to go and watch the dog-and-pony show, [but] it's too little, too late."

Such comments have raised the prospect that the debate over gay marriage — designed to galvanize one of Bush's most important constituencies, social conservatives — could instead exacerbate the president's political headaches.

The White House event will serve as a prelude to the Senate debate next week on the proposed constitutional amendment.

Supporters acknowledge they have little hope of reaching the two-thirds threshold — 67 votes — the measure would need to pass in the 100-member Senate. They probably won't get the 60 votes needed to shut off debate and force an up-or-down vote on the proposal.

Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), adhering to a pledge he made months ago, is bringing up the proposed amendment for debate anyway. Many Republicans on Capitol Hill contend that even if its short-term prospects appear bleak, spotlighting its merits could lay the groundwork for eventual passage.

Democrats say the reason for the push is to rally conservative activists in advance of this year's congressional elections.

"Our country faces great challenges: record high gas prices, skyrocketing healthcare costs and an intractable war in Iraq," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said. "Yet instead of addressing these issues, Sen. Frist has chosen to put the politics of division ahead of real progress by pushing for a debate on a divisive amendment that will write discrimination into the Constitution."

But if pleasing a key element of the Republican Party is the aim, the effort doesn't appear to be working.

"Social conservatives are disappointed that there hasn't been more action on the issues that were highlighted in the 2004 election," said Gary Glenn, head of the American Family Assn. of Michigan.

He added: "Increasingly, social conservatives expect real action, not just politically timed attempts to motivate and organize the base."

Other complain that Bush, despite Monday's planned event, has not put the full heft of the presidency behind the bid to ban gay marriage.

"President Bush's position is actually quite good on many … life and family issues, but he needs to get out front on them," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, wrote in a message to supporters last week. There is also dismay among some activists over the wording of the amendment.

At least two prominent social conservative groups — Concerned Women for America and the Traditional Values Coalition — believe the language contains a loophole that would allow gays to seek civil unions.

The proposed amendment reads: "Marriage in the United States shall consist solely of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any state, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman."

Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, and others say the second sentence leaves open the option that gays and lesbians could enter unions other than marriage; and that's a deal breaker for them.

On its website, the Concerned Women for America says it "does not support the Marriage Protection Amendment as currently worded because the second sentence is open to differing interpretations."

Social conservative groups such as Focus on the Family, headed by James C. Dobson, support the amendment, despite the flaws they see in it.

"We would prefer stronger language, but we're content with this language," said Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family's vice president for public policy. "It leaves the issue of civil unions to the states. We recognize that this is the best we're going to get at the federal level."

White House officials sidestepped questions about the issue for most of this week. On Friday, White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush had been an active opponent of gay marriage since he announced his support for the constitutional amendment in 2004.

And Snow dismissed criticism that the president had done little in the interim to make it a priority. "I don't know how you define what a priority is," Snow said. "The president has made it clear what he wants. He would like to see the Senate pass" the amendment.

GOP strategists are unsure how much the gay marriage debate will help the beleaguered party in November's elections.

"There is a significant amount of disenchantment, but most of the disenchantment is on the economic side" of the administration's performance, said veteran Republican strategist Eddie Mahe.

Pat Toomey, head of the anti-tax Club for Growth, agreed. He said the GOP's biggest problem was anger about federal spending and the deficit among fiscal conservatives and small-government advocates.

"I don't think [the gay marriage amendment] is going to help much," Toomey said. "The social conservative wing of the Republican Party is the part that's happiest — their most important thing was getting" conservatives added to the Supreme Court, he said, referring to the confirmations within the last year of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The gay marriage amendment is the source of a rare public disagreement between Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose youngest daughter is a lesbian.

During the 2004 campaign, Cheney said he believed decisions about same-sex marriages should be left to each state.

Two years ago, when Republicans brought the amendment to the floor less than four months before the 2004 presidential election, 48 senators voted to end debate. The GOP gained Senate seats in the '04 election, but not enough to appreciably improve the chances of reaching the 60-vote mark.

Even if the measure were to pass the Senate — and then win a two-thirds majority in the 435-member House — the arduous process for amending the Constitution could derail it. After clearing Congress, it would require ratification by three-fourths of the 50 states.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Tomdispatch Interview: Ehrenreich, The Prey and the Predators

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: This is the eleventh in an ongoing series of interviews at the site. The last three interviews were with Katrina vanden Heuvel, Mike Davis (parts 1 and 2), and Andrew Bacevich (parts 1 and 2) Tom]

A Guided Tour of Class in America

A Tomdispatch Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich

You turn into a middle-class, suburban housing project on the periphery of Charlottesville, Virginia, and at a row of attached homes, you pull up in front of the one with the yellow "for sale" sign on the tiny patch of grass. Ushered inside, you take in an interior of paint cans, a mop and pail, and cleaning liquids. On the small porch that overlooks a communal backyard, workmen are painting the weathered wood railings a nice, clean white. Later, when they're gone, we step out for a minute, on a balmy late spring afternoon, and she says, "You know what I need out here? Flowers!" And it's true, the nearest neighbor's small porch is a riot of red, orange, and purple blooms, while hanging from her railing are three plant holders with only dirt and the scraps of dead vegetation in them.

Not surprising really. Barbara Ehrenreich, our foremost journalist of, and dissector of class is regularly not here. Practically a household name since she entered the low-wage working class disguised as herself and, in her already classic account, Nickel and Dimed, reported back on just how difficult it is for so many hard-working Americans to get by. Then, a few years later, she repeated the process with the middle class, only to find herself not in the workforce but among the desperately unemployed who had fallen out of an ever meaner corporate world. Her most recent book, Bait and Switch, The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, was the result. Now, she spends much time traveling the country talking to audiences about her -- and their -- experiences. She has become a blogger, is involved in launching a new group to help organize the middle-class unemployed, and in her spare time she's even finished a new book.

Now, after four years in Virginia (at least some of the time), she's about to head north. She gestures at the bookshelves. "There are a lot fewer books this week than last. I'm giving them to the Virginia Organizing Project." And it's true, the place is clearly being stripped down for sale. But you have the feeling, looking around, that it was a no-frills life to begin with, as Ehrenreich herself, in her short hair, jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, presents a distinctly no-frills look. (Suddenly, imagining her with an image make-over advisor in Bait and Switch trying to give herself that perfect corporate look of employability seems amusing.)

Her mind is wide-ranging and daring indeed. Some years back, in a book entitled Blood Rites, she even managed to turn traditional ideas about the origins of war on their head. She is a thoroughly no-nonsense national resource.

Looking forward to a trip to the local gym followed by a visit with her two grandchildren (the daughters of her daughter Rosa Brooks, a law professor and columnist for the Los Angeles Times), we sit down at a paper-and-book cluttered dining-room table, which shows no evidence of having held a meal in some time, and -- eye on the clock, no fooling around -- begin.

Tomdispatch: You were at a graduation ceremony recently where the students were bouncing beach balls in the stands. The college president leaned over and whispered, "This is the problem with having the commencement in the afternoon. Some of these people have been partying for hours." In response, you wrote: "There are reasons, whether the graduates know them or not, to want to greet one's entrance into the work world with an excess of Bud." Could you start by explaining why an excess of Bud might be an appropriate response to leaving college today?

Barbara Ehrenreich: Well, a lot of graduates are simply not going to find jobs appropriate to their credentials. They're going to be wait staff. They're going to be call-center operators. Their twenties could be spent like that. I recently got Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute to do some research on this. It's still tentative, but he found that 17% of people in jobs that do not require college degrees have them. Those are very often people in their twenties who can't get professional-type employment, or people in their fifties who have been through one too many lay-off and are no longer employable because they're quote too old. So I was thinking of that, and then I was thinking that for a lot of those who do get jobs, you know, the fun is over. They're going to be sitting in cubicles and they won't be able to bounce balls around when they're in boring meetings with their bosses.

TD: The real earnings of college graduates fell by 5% between 2000 and 2004, so they also have that to look forward to.

Ehrenreich: There still is a real big earnings gap between college and non-college graduates, but it's begun to shrink. Jared tells me that the reason it was growing so fast in the nineties was not that college graduates were doing so well, but that low-wage people, blue-collar people, were doing so poorly. Their wages were being held down -- and that remains true.

TD: In 1989, you published a book about the middle class, or the professional-managerial class as you call them, entitled Fear of Falling. The book was way ahead of its time. If you were titling a work on the subject today you might just call it, Falling.

Ehrenreich: What I was thinking about then was the fear of intergenerational falling, the fear a lot of upper-middle class people have that their children will not get into the same class, because you can't just bequeath your class status to them. They can't inherit. They have to go through this whole education thing. Now, it could be Free Fall, though it isn't quite that bad… yet.

TD: In Bait and Switch, the book where, as an investigative reporter, you sought a corporate job and found yourself in the world of the middle-class unemployed or anxiously employed, you wrote, "On many fronts, the American middle class is under attack as never before." What happened to the middle class between then and now?

Ehrenreich: In Fear of Falling, I was concerned with the distance between the professional managerial class and the traditional working class. I thought I saw a new class developing. The strict Marxist idea is: You've got the bourgeoisie. Everybody else is a wage earner and they're not that different, whether they're accountants or laborers. And I was saying, no, there's a real difference here. The white-collar worker who sits at a desk is telling other people what to do in one way or another. Such workers are in positions of authority when compared to blue and pink-collar people.

Back then, I was emphasizing the differences. Today, in Bait and Switch, what I'm emphasizing is the lack of difference, that the security the professional-managerial class thought it had is gone. The safest part of that class, when I was writing in the eighties, seemed to be the professionals and managers with corporate positions. Then something happened in the nineties. Companies began to look at even those people as expenses to be eliminated rather than assets to be nurtured. What I was seeing in the late eighties was this pretty tight middle class where, really, the only problem was to get your kids into it, too.

TD: Your fear was for your children. Now it's for you…

Ehrenreich: … and of course, your children, too.

TD: In Bait and Switch, you describe life in the corporate world as a "perpetual winnowing process."

Ehrenreich: One way that shows itself now is in the requirement in so many jobs for an annual -- or even an every six-month -- evaluation. You're constantly on your toes, constantly being reviewed, and potentially always up for elimination.

TD: And how do you account for the change in corporate culture?

Ehrenreich: I'm not sure. This is partly a mystery to me, but the pioneers were people like [Sunbeam's] Al ("Chainsaw") Dunlap and Jack Welsh at GE, who took pride in eliminating as many people as possible, white as well as blue collar and were richly rewarded by seeing their stock prices rise and their CEO pay go up. Leanness became the currency, what you wanted to achieve. I think part of that -- but I don't know enough yet to say this with confidence -- had to do with the fact that top executives were increasingly being rewarded with stock options, so that the distance between management and ownership was no longer there. A CEO knew that, if he could raise quarterly profits via cuts, he would get handsomely rewarded. The easiest way to raise profits is to cut expenses and the biggest expense is labor. Of course, the better way to increase profits would be to sell a better product, or more of them, or at a higher price.

TD: You're famous now for having been in two worlds as an investigative journalist, the low-wage world of the working class in Nickel and Dimed and the middle-class unemployed one in Bait and Switch. You've also, it seems to me, been one of the relatively few members of the professional managerial class to gnaw at the issue of class regularly. I suspect on this issue you really feel your politics. What was it that got you to class analysis and what kept you there when so many others were heading the other direction?

Ehrenreich: I'm sure it has something to do with my background. When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation. But ours was an amazing story of upward mobility. My father managed to get through college… well, the Butte School of Mines… while he was a miner. He was, by his own account, a genius. [She laughs.] Eventually, he got out of the mines and ended up as a corporate executive. He started out doing research as a metallurgist and then got turned into an executive. So my childhood was sort of an unguided tour of American classes.

TD: For people I've known, leaping classes tended to be a complicated, painful experience.

Ehrenreich: Well, my dad was always a heavy drinker, but he was a falling-down drunk by the time he finished his career -- or it was finished for him. He wanted all that. He wanted success. He wanted to make more money -- not that we were ever wealthy, but we certainly got toward the upper end of the middle class. But he also had this social nostalgia for the mines and would often talk about men he had worked with, things that had happened. It was clear to me that that was a real world of much stronger ties among people.

TD: And that he had lost something?

Ehrenreich: Oh yes! One thing that stuck with me and helped me when I was doing Nickel and Dimed: I had told him in the seventies about young leftists going to work in factories to organize the working class. He thought that was hilarious, but then he said something very interesting: "Do you know what they probably don't understand? If you want to do something like that, the first thing is you have to do your job right. The first thing is -- do the work." As a miner he had known communists organizing in the mines, but wasn't always impressed with them because some of them weren't good miners.

TD: Is there less mobility, and less study of it, than there was in your father's day?

Ehrenreich: There is less. We don't compare well to Europe any more on that score.

TD: You now have a blog. You travel the country extensively and, because of your books, you hear from blue-collar and white-collar people in various kinds of trouble. What sorts of stories do you hear these days? What don't we know?

Ehrenreich: Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about. Periodically, we'll have some little focus on poverty, like post-Katrina, but then it goes away again. After the dot.com crash, there was a brief moment of thinking about downwardly mobile software people; then we forgot about them. But it's there all the time, these crises in people's lives.

When it comes to the media, anything about economic pain is what gets left out. People sometimes say to me, why do you always focus on the downside? Because morally that seems to be my obligation -- to look at pain. Not to celebrate every instance of successful entrepreneurship, but always to think of who's hurting. That just seems like a basic moral requirement for everybody. But that's what's missing too often in the media, the pain.

Stories of pain, the forum on my website is full of them. People will just post them:

I have a master's degree in mechanical engineering. I give up. I've been searching for three years.

I'm living with my parents now. I had to give up my apartment, my home.

I'm working in a call center now.

That's the kind of thing I hear, over and over. And then people are losing pensions, losing health insurance. That's happening across the board -- to people in middle-class occupations too.

TD: You recently commented, "Thanks to Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, we now have a government with vastly expanded military and surveillance functions and sadly atrophied helping functions. Imagine, for an awkward zoological analogy, a lioness with grossly enlarged claws and teeth but no mammary glands."

Ehrenreich: This was something I first wrote about in 1997 in an essay in the Nation which they entitled, "Confessions of a Recovering Statist." I talked about the shift of government, at the end of the Clinton years, away from the helping functions and toward the military, penitentiaries, law enforcement. At what point, I asked, do progressives have to say: I don't want to expand the helping functions of this government because look what it's doing? A nice example is public housing -- okay, public housing's a good thing, but when you start doing drug tests on people to get in or stay in such housing, then it's become an extension of the law enforcement function of government.

I still raise that question. Today, we have this even larger federal government, more and more of it being war-related, surveillance-related. I mean it's gone beyond our wildest Clinton administration dreams. I think progressives can't just be seen as pro-big-government when big government has gotten so nasty.

TD: And also when civil society has been stripped of so many of its "civil" capacities, including, as with Katrina, the capacity to rebuild.

Ehrenreich: Katrina's a perfect example of how militarized the government has gotten even when it's supposedly trying to help people. The initial response of the government was a military one. When they finally got people down there, it was armed guards to protect the fancy stores and keep people in that convention center -- at gunpoint! I mean, this is unbelievable.

TD: And what about the fobbing off of the civil parts of government onto religious and charitable groups, often politicized?

Ehrenreich: It's partly that the evangelical churches have reached for these things, and then there's the faith-based approach coming from the Bush administration where the dream was: Let's turn all social welfare functions over to churches. A lot of the megachurches now function as giant social welfare bureaucracies. I wouldn't have found this out if I hadn't been researching Bait and Switch and gone into some of them, because that's where you go when you want to connect with people to find a job. That's also where you find after-school care, child care, support groups for battered women, support groups for people with different illnesses. As government helping functions dwindle, the role of the churches grows. What's sinister is that so many of these churches also support political candidates who are anti-choice, anti-gay, and -- not coincidentally -- opposed to any kind of expansion of secular social services.

TD: Let's turn to the hot-button issue of immigration. For Nickel and Dimed, you went to places where there was still a low-wage, white working class -- Minnesota, Maine…

Ehrenreich: Not Key West which was packed with immigrant workers. But I did choose my places carefully, because real ethnic sorting does go on. For example, my son Ben Ehrenreich, who is also a freelance journalist, decided to get a job in a meat-packing plant in LA. When he showed up, sixty guys were there and he was the only Anglo. Though he speaks perfect Spanish, he was rejected because they just think: What's he doing here? Employers get it in their minds that a certain kind of work is done by a certain kind of person and we're not going to hire someone different. When I realized that was going on in Key West, I said: Next stop, Maine, where almost everyone is white and I wouldn't run into racial sorting. I couldn't have done Nickel and Dimed so easily in LA or New York because they would have thought: Blue-eyed, white, middle-aged woman; if she wants this job, she must have a serious drug problem. [She laughs.]

TD: The issue of class and immigration threatens to split what's left of the Bush administration constituency, but not just them. How do you read the class politics of immigration?

Ehrenreich: My son went to a Minutemen gathering in the southwest and the fascinating thing was that a lot of the leaders talked a very big anti-corporate line: The corporations are crushing us, we're the real Americans, and so forth. In their minds, the immigrants are part of the thing that's crushing them and it's so much easier to pick up a gun and go to the border than to confront your employer.

Then, commentators keep saying that Americans won't take the jobs immigrants take. It's not that native-born Americans won't do heavy work and hard work and sweaty work. The problem is that these jobs pay so little. What makes it possible for immigrant workers to live on such low wages is their willingness -- at least temporarily -- to put up with just impossible situations, with many people packed into a room. After all, what does immigration do, in corporate terms? It provides a group of people you can really, really exploit. As long as they're illegal, you can do anything you want to them. Like not pay them. Not at all. If you were going to take on the immigration issue seriously, you'd have to look at what NAFTA did to the economy and agriculture for working-class Mexicans. Much of the immigration stuff is standard scapegoating. I mean, we're not going to begin to get at the problem until we take a serious look at the economies of the countries that are exporting people. Illegal immigrants are not coming here for the climate. We need to ask: How would we help Mexico, for example, become a place with stable employment and agriculture. Not with NAFTA for sure.

TD: Isn't the other side of the immigration issue, the outsourcing of jobs?

Ehrenreich: It's very hard to have a serious discussion of outsour