Political issues – Page 34

An Irishman speaks up for America

Michael D. Higgins, president of Ireland

Last year, when Michael D. Higgins was elected president of Ireland, I wrote a post about how delightful it is that there are countries in the world capable of electing poets for president. Higgins promised to govern Ireland from principles other than wealth.

Higgins used to live in the United States. He knows this country, and he follows our politics. Here is a link to a stunning radio interview (“A tea partier decided to pick a fight with a foreign president; it didn’t go so well”) in which Higgins gives T-total hell to some Tea Partiers. It is not to be missed.

This pairs nicely with yesterday’s post about Julian Assange. Russians — Russians! — can try to get the truth to the American people, while the American media are nothing but a pig circus. In this interview, Higgins, an Irishmen, stands up for the principles of social justice in a way that never happens in the United States, because our media are corrupt and the Democratic party is feckless and cowardly.

If people in this country who care about social justice dared to speak with passion, then perverted projects like the Tea Party would soon fade away. When did it become impossible for justice-loving people to talk like this in the United States? When did our churches start to glorify war, exploitation, and greed? Why are we such cowards in standing up to people like the Tea Partiers, or the people on hate radio?

Julian Assange

“Facebook is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.” — Julian Assange

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my constant refrains is that Americans are now the most propagandized people in the world. Whenever I say this, I also say that I’m not just throwing a rhetorical grenade. I am being completely serious. My constant concern is that, because of the failure of our media, we know very little about what is actually going on in the world. Instead, we get a constant blare of distraction, drivel, and misinformation. They tell us what they want us to know, and anything else is difficult or impossible to get. Assange expresses my precise concern: that without accurate information, we cannot understand the true state of the world or plan for our own future.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks are probably the most powerful forces in the world today, damaged though they are, that are operating to break through the lies and secrecy and get real information to people. Because of that, Assange is criminalized and hounded.

I’m posting links to a 40-minute interview with Assange last year, by Russia Today. This interview is by no means out of date, and it provides important background on the drama now playing out in London, with Assange holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy.

The ironies are incredible:

— That in our times, only a Russian organization is independent enough of U.S. and Western interests to bring us this interview. Please note that I do not allege that the Russian media tell the truth about Russia; far from it. But they can tell the truth about the United States, because they are not in our orbit or under our thumb. Nor do they need to propagandize, because the unadorned, unspun truth is so powerful on its own.

— Note how civil and intelligent this interview is — quite unlike anything on American television. No one shouts, no one interrupts. The interviewer asks excellent questions in an intelligent sequence, then listens silently, giving Assange plenty of time to respond.

— Note that no one is spinning — neither the interviewer for Russia Today, nor Assange.

I defy anyone to disprove any of the hundreds of facts that Assange covers in this interview. He is no idealogue. He is simply a truth teller. I have often said that the best journalists, the real journalists, are people who find it pretty much impossible to lie because of an honor for the truth that is almost religious. There are very few journalists like that anymore. Most journalists today are simply too weak to resist the forces that have degraded and corrupted the media. They are all equally cowed, they all sing the same song, and they all think they’re doing a great job. For those who don’t know me, I should mention that I spent my entire career in the newspaper business, that I know more than my share of (and am ashamed of) the journalists you see on television today, and that I have for decades been an amateur scholar of propaganda.

The first part of the interview deals largely with important events in the Arab world last year. The last half of the interview will be of more interest to Americans, including Assange’s statements about the threat to privacy from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. It’s worth taking the 40 minutes to listen to the entire interview, just to get a feel for the inferiority of the American media and how it deceives us, and to size up Julian Assange as a person.

Here are links to the two-part interview: Part1 — Part 2.

50% of us hold only 1% of American wealth

California, 1936

Right-wingers cracked up on right-wing propaganda make much of the fact that almost half (around 46 percent) of Americans pay no federal income tax. It is true. The Wall Street Journal often calls these people the “lucky duckies,” and all right-wingers just know that the lucky duckies are getting a free ride off the rest of us and that it’s the lucky duckies who are eating the lunch of the middle class. What right-wingers don’t know, though, because their propaganda machine doesn’t tell them the rest of the story, is that almost all of those lucky duckies are living at or below the poverty line (defined as an income of $23,350 or less for a family of four including two children). They pay a high proportion of their income in other taxes, but they don’t pay any federal income tax because their income is so low and they have dependents. The highest income for qualifying as one of these lucky duckies is $26,400 for a couple with two children. But many of these people make less than $15,000 a year. The reason that so many Americans pay no federal income tax is that poverty is so widespread — measured as either income or assets.

(By the way, in 2011, 78,000 taxpayers with incomes between $211,000 and $533,000 paid no federal income tax. Worse, 24,000 filers with incomes between $533,000 and $2.2 million paid no federal income tax. And not only that, but 3,000 filers with incomes above $2.2 million paid no federal income tax. What were we saying about lucky duckies? You can be sure that the Wall Street Journal hasn’t reported on these lucky duckies. And it is generally assumed by those who bother to think about it for a second that the reason Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns is that he paid no federal income tax for one or more years.)

Americans, in their bottomless ignorance and eagerness to be deceived, hold extremely warped notions of just how poor the poor are and how rich the rich are. Middle-class Americans also have a been fooled into believing that they get a much larger piece of the pie than they actually get.

My old colleague Dan Froomkin, in the Huffington Post, reports today on a study by the Congressional Research Service that shows that half of Americans hold 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. The top 1 percent hold 34.5 percent, and the top 10 percent hold 74.5 percent.

A study in 2010 by academics from Harvard University and Duke University surveyed Americans on how Americans think wealth is distributed. On average, Americans thought that the richest 20 percent hold 59 percent of the wealth. The real number is closer to 84 percent. Americans were shown pie charts showing the distribution of wealth in different countries and were asked which country they would prefer to live in. They chose Sweden, where the top 20 percent control only 36 percent of the wealth. Distribution of wealth in the United States actually is similar to Latin American countries such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Guyana.

Each year since the late 1970s, the rich have been eating more and more of our lunch. There are two main ways they have done this. First, they have drastically changed taxation, so that the rich pay are now paying taxes at the lowest rate in 80 years, while increasing the tax burden on the middle class. Part of the reason the right-wing propaganda machine goes on and on so loudly about taxes is to obscure those facts. Second, they have been scooping up almost all the gains from increased productivity, as this chart shows:

The most important task of Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine is to keep Americans ignorant of these basic facts. If you keep ’em angry at the lucky duckies, they won’t notice who actually is eating their lunch.

Another peculiarity of Americans is that they have the oddest tendency to identify with the rich, even when they’re barely getting by, falling farther behind each year, and are utterly dependent on the safety net — such things as Social Security and Medicare. It’s an excellent exercise in propaganda analysis, actually, to try to figure out how this is accomplished. I believe that the two biggest factors are television (including not only the propaganda channels but entertainment channels as well) and the “prosperity gospel” prevalent among evangelicals. This “gospel” teaches people that the poor are to be blamed for their situation, that god wants them to be rich, and that giving money to the church is the first step to prosperity. It also teaches them to love war and to hate anyone who isn’t just like them, but that’s a different rant. My point is that it’s as sorry a theology as has ever been devised, which is saying something, since there are so many sorry theologies out there. But it does pack ’em in on Sundays, because they love to hear that god wants them to be rich and to consume voraciously.

But this is nothing new. John Steinbeck was aware of it:

Note: I am aware (because I always try to diligently check my facts to avoid being corrected in a comment) that some have disputed this Steinbeck quote, but whether Steinbeck said those exact words or not, the observation is a true one.

Democracy perverted, again

Rep. Becky Carney, D-Mecklenburg, who cast the “mistaken” deciding vote to legalize fracking in North Carolina

For months, tens of thousands of grassroots voters in North Carolina have been working to convince the legislature and the governor that fracking is a bad idea. We apparently succeeded. And yet we woke up this morning to find that fracking is now legal in North Carolina. How did this happen?

Well, they say that Rep. Becky Carney, D-Mecklenburg, hit the wrong button when she voted. They wouldn’t let her change her vote (though you can be sure they’d have let her change her vote if the “accident” had happened the other way around). Carney says she feels just terrible about it. Sure she does.

All over the country, state legislatures have been passing laws to prevent election fraud, even though election fraud by ordinary voters is very rare. Now we have a vote by those who make the laws that stinks to high heaven. If you believe this was an unfortunate mistake, then I’ve got a government in Raleigh I want to sell you. They will get away with this. They’ll say, too bad. Get over it. Move on.

Well, we won’t get over it, and we won’t move on.

I have been active in the county and state campaigns opposed to fracking in North Carolina. I have learned a lot. As a progressive, I’ve also seen how the people of this conservative county (65 percent Republican) have learned a lot. They’ve learned what progressives have been saying for years: that our politicians, our Congress, and our state legislatures have been taken over by corporate money and power — Democrats and Republicans alike. The word “oligarchy” is not just a rhetorical grenade. It’s a word that accurately describes American government at the national level and, increasingly, at the state level. More and more, the United States looks like Russia and corrupt countries in South America.

As a progressive, I’ve also learned how sensible conservatives can be, as long as they’re not just repeating what they’ve heard on the TV.

The conservative people of Stokes County have learned other things, too, that are not so bleak. They’ve learned that local government can still work, because the distance between politicians and the people is much shorter. We can actually pick up the phone and call our county commissioners, or our representative in the state legislature. This local process worked. Our state representative, Bryan Holloway, changed his mind and opposed fracking after he heard from the people. And our all-Republican board of commissioners unanimously passed a resolution opposing fracking after it heard from the people. Holloway’s vote alone would have kept fracking illegal in North Carolina, had there not been a “mistake” in our state House of Representatives. Had the “mistake” not happened in Raleigh, it could have been said that we in Stokes County, by raising our voices in good faith and changing the mind of our elected state House representative, turned the tide on fracking in North Carolina. That is the way the process is supposed to work. We followed the rules, expecting our elected representatives to also follow the rules.

But a law is now on the the books in North Carolina that the people clearly opposed and which our governor and legislature claim to oppose. WTF??

Sometimes it seems the only sensible response is despair and futile anger. How in the world can those of us who care, those of us who bother to be informed, stand up to the hordes who don’t care, to the lazy ignorati whose views are based on mass-media blather? How can we stand up to corrupt politicians, or to politicians like Becky Carney from the ugly, money-grubbing city of Charlotte who is either stupid enough to hit the wrong button or stupid enough to think we’ll believe it was a mistake.

In short, how can honest people who believe in the American system of government take back their own government?

One of my moments of greatest despair came when representatives of the Stokes County “Tea Party” joined the Facebook group set up by county people opposed to fracking. This Tea Party person posted a message in the No Fracking group inviting people to a meeting to talk about fracking at the same public library where the No Fracking people met. The “Tea Party” people, of course, believe the propaganda from the oil and gas industry. They think fracking is marvelous and squeaky clean. We raised no objection to their posting an invitation in the No Fracking group. We believe in free speech, and we believe — or do our best to believe — in the democratic process.

A couple of No Fracking people went to the Tea Party meeting. As expected, the Tea Party people knew nothing and simply recited gas-industry talking points. When the No Fracking people spoke up to challenge this misinformation, they were told that the meeting was a closed, private meeting. The Tea Partiers were so wrongheaded about the way American government works that they don’t understand that you can’t have closed, private meetings at the public library. They think government is their own private stick to use to beat down the people and views that they don’t like.

The people who think you can have closed, private meetings at the public library also got the fracking law they wanted — even though they had only a small following and they changed no minds.

And there you have it. There are people in this country who think that our supposedly democratic institutions are their private club. To disagree with them is tyranny. If the democratic process doesn’t give them what they want, they will simply take what they want. And why not? They always get away with it.

I don’t know what the hell we are going to do about it. But here’s a suggestion for getting started: Go to your local election board right now, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, and change your registration to no party. Let’s ignore the party machines that have betrayed the people and sold out — Democrats and Republicans equally — to big money. Let’s turn off our televisions, talk with our neighbors, think for ourselves, and remind them what democracy is all about.

After this post was written, we learned that Rep. Susi Hamilton, a Democrat from New Hanover County, sold her vote on fracking for a budget amendment that gives $60 million worth of tax breaks to her pet industry, the film industry in Wilmington. As always, corporations get the profits, taxpayers get the bills. In this case taxpayers even paid for a $60 million bribe.

The Winston-Salem Journal steps up

$fracking-foes$

One of the frustrations we’ve dealt with in fighting fracking in Stokes County — and in North Carolina — has been getting the attention of the Winston-Salem Journal. The potential fracking areas in Stokes and Rockingham counties are right in the Journal’s circulation area. We’d been trying for weeks to get the Journal to tell its readers that there are potential fracking areas right in their back yards. But other than a lukewarm editorial that did not even mention Stokes County, the Journal has ignored us — until today. They wrote quite a decent story today, and the were sensible enough to put it on A-1.

This venture into community organizing has been very interesting. Fracking — once people understand some basic facts — is a nonpartisan issue. Everyone is against it. People are grateful that you’ve let them know what’s going on, because the popular media have done such a terrible job.

The local politicians are really starting to feel the heat.

Where to start?

The garden, this morning

It’s been over a month since I posted. The abbey has been caught in a whirlwind of spring projects, spring farm work, and community organizing. I really appreciate the emails from those of you who have written to make sure everything is OK. Retirement is not supposed to be like this.

I think I’ll try to catch up with a bulleted list of items, stealing a bit from the way the late Herb Caen used to do things in the San Francisco Chronicle.

By far the biggest time sink in the past month has been getting involved with the group of people in Stokes County who are organizing to resist fracking in Stokes County and in North Carolina. Fracking is now illegal in North Carolina, but right-wing members of the North Carolina legislature are working hard to fast-track legislation to permit fracking. I was aware of what the legislature was up to. But I did not know until Ken and I went to a county commissioners’ meeting (to speak against a county resolution supporting North Carolina’s marriage amendment) that there is a potential fracking area here in Stokes County. There were people who came to the meeting to speak against fracking, and Ken and I immediately got involved with that group. Ken started a Facebook group (No Fracking in Stokes County), and I started a web site for the group (nofrackinginstokes.org). We helped set up a community meeting at the Walnut Cove Public Library, which almost 100 people attended. This isn’t over, because the legislature just reconvened in Raleigh, with right-wingers in the majority and ready to continue with all sorts of corporation-coddling, the-people-be-damned evils. The abbey — normally quiet and peaceful — has been noisy and busy, which leads me to the next bullet item.

The abbey does not have a land line telephone. Rather, we have two Verizon cellular phones with oversize antennas and 750 shared minutes a month. Normally we come nowhere close to using all those minutes, but this month we’re having to check to see how our minutes are holding up and budgeting the minutes out according to our needs. Yesterday Ken and I were on the phone at the same time. I was in a conference call with a consortium of North Carolina anti-fracking organizers, and Ken was doing interviewing for an article he’s writing. He also has calls to his literary agent in New York, his publisher, and his publicist. How did this happen? It’s temporary, but I told Ken yesterday that I feel like we’ve both been yanked out of the abbey and cast kicking and screaming back into the corporate world.

I finished with my book project. I did the editing, typography, and prepress work for People Skills Handbook: Action Tips for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence. The book is now being printed and should soon be for sale. It’s a corporate training manual, and it brought in some extra money that has been very nice for getting some projects done (which I’ll mention in later bullet items).

Ken sent the manuscript for his book to his publisher. He had edited it through eight drafts, and of course the book got better with each draft. He has worked like a dog. The book will be published in May 2013. Now that Ken is no longer tied down with writing and editing work, he’ll be leaving soon to work on his next projects (later bullet items).

The irrigation project ended up taking way more time than we expected. It also cost a great deal more than expected. Ken spent many days wearing waders, building a dam in the small stream below the house. At last the dam is holding and is impounding a generous amount of water. The first pump I bought was underpowered; the second pump is working great. Now we just open a couple of valves, and branch water flows into a drip system down each row of the garden. This has made a tremendous difference in the garden’s yield. The garden is picture perfect. We have eaten so much lettuce that it’s a wonder we haven’t turned green. The broccoli is starting to come in. There will be cabbages — and possibly spring sauerkraut. There are two rows of very fine beets coming along, and two rows of sweet Georgia onions. Ken planted the first round of corn and my family-heirloom green beans on Sunday. The tomatoes and such are still in the greenhouse but should be ready to transplant soon (Michael Hylton of Beautiful Earth Garden Shop at Lawsonville is starting our plants for us this year).

The trees in the orchard are three and four years old, but they’re going to bear fruit this year. The orchard has never looked so good. We have observed that, if the orchard grass looks good, the trees look good. My theory is that all those organic soil amendments that we’ve spread on the grass is getting down to the tree roots. And credit for that, no doubt, has something to do with our rising population of earthworms.

Using the nice money from putting that book together, we’ve gotten two other important projects done in addition to the irrigation system. We poured the basement floor, and we had the attic floored. Both were jobs that I didn’t have the budget to do when the house was first built. There’s a good-size basement down there, but the floor was dirt, with all the dampness, cellar crickets, and ickiness that that implies. Now the basement is dry and snug with a concrete floor as smooth as marble. There’s shelving for tools and canned goods. Upstairs, the attic floor has opened up a tremendous amount of new storage space. It’s amazing that a house so small contains so much space. It’s on five levels — basement, first floor, second floor and two levels of attic. There actually have to be steps in the attic to get from the lower level to the upper level. The roof is so steep that there is standing room even on the upper level. Both these projects created a lot of fuss and disorder, and each ruined a week of peace and quiet at the abbey.

I’m going to learn to can this summer. I got an All American pressure canner. My first effort probably will be pickled beets. And later this summer I want to can as many tomatoes and green beans as possible. I’m really counting on that irrigation system to not only maximize our yields but also to make yields more predictable.

Now I have to buck up and prepare for Ken’s departure. I often marvel at how absurdly optimistic I was with my dreams for this place. I bit off more than I could chew. One person working alone can’t start a tiny farm, no matter how tiny. One person can maintain, barely, but there is no way that one person could manage all the start-up projects. Without help, I would have gone under. But not only did help magically appear, the magic was powerful enough to bring Ken Ilgunas. Ken Ilgunas! I sometimes find myself writing little Visa commercials on my morning walks. They go something like this: “Garden and orchard, with fence and hawk net: $2,208. Chicken house and chicken infrastructure: $1,422. Irrigation system: $1,088. Stone and sand for stone walkways: $792. Five hundred dinners with Ken Ilgunas: Priceless.” Ken is brilliant. Ken is modest. He is polite. He is quiet. He is tireless. His self-awareness, and the Socrates-level refinement of his character, often make me feel like a crank and a curmudgeon. Ken is a born writer.

But in the important ways, I don’t think I have ever misunderstood Ken or the deal we have: Acorn Abbey is about leveraging his freedom, not about tying him down. It’s a place to write, a place to winter over, even a place to be needed — but not needed so much that leaving feels like shirking a responsibility. Ken is an adventurer. I have always understood that. I believe his next project will take several months and stretch into the fall. I’m sure he’ll talk about that on his blog when the time comes. But I do hope he’ll be back and that Acorn Abbey will be his home base as he starts the publicity tours for his book after Thanksgiving.

Chioggia beets, red beets, lettuce

The first broccoli

The spring chickens

Peaches

Apples

Patience starts her morning stroll. Note the lushness of the orchard grass. It’s all about feeding the earthworms.

New rose trellis (built from scratch by Ken and David)

The first day lily stalks. They’ll start blooming soon.

The water tank, which contains branch water for irrigation

The basement project

Two spring chickens

At the anti-fracking meeting

The virgin pressure cooker, waiting for beets

The income of the top 10 percent

Striking It Richer: Emmanuel Saez

Charts like the one above help make it clear why the right wing hates — and fears, and demonizes — progressive economic policies like those advanced by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Those policies left us with plenty of rich people, but the rich could no longer take it all. That, of course, is how the American middle class arose after World War II. By the beginning of the Reagan era, the rich got the upper hand again and started taking it all back.

Emmanuel Saez has newly updated data showing that the top 1 percent captured 93 percent of the income gains in 2010.

And yet, thanks to the right-wing propaganda machine, white working Americans in the red states are kept in a state of deep ignorance and cheer for and vote for their continuing impoverishment and marginalization.

Update: The Huffington Post has a story on this today.

Tax propaganda

Timothy Geithner

Every now and then I read dozens of versions of so-called reporting on stories that are important to the establishment, just to marvel at the shallowness of the reporting and the shocking level of co-ordination among the mainstream “news” outlets. I went through this exercise this morning on stories about President Obama calling for reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent.

It doesn’t matter who you read — the New York Times, any of the smaller newspaper chains with Washington bureaus, or the web sites of cable news channels including Fox — all the stories followed the same formula and included the same establishment quotes. I did not find a single mainstream story that compared Obama’s proposed corporate tax rate to individual tax rates. Some stories mentioned that Obama wants to raise taxes on millionaires and leave tax rates the same for people making under $200,000, but I did not find a single story saying what those rates are.

What all these stories is avoiding is telling readers that the establishment wants higher tax rates for individuals than for corporations. As far as I can tell, Obama wants a tax rate of 30 percent for those making more than a million a year. As for those making less than $200,000, the current tax code for individuals taxes income above $171,551 at 33 percent. No one bothered to report this. Only those of us with memories greater than 18 hours can hold such inconvenient facts in our heads at the same time.

The other thing that all the mainstream tax stories have in common this morning is that they make some sort of lame comparison with Mitt Romney’s tax plan. All the stories say that the U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest in the “developed world” other than Japan. Some of the stories even say that many corporations pay less than the nominal tax rate.

When you analyze all this “reporting” for what it is — propaganda — this is the message that they clearly want us to get: They are setting the stage for lower corporate tax rates, regardless of what happens with the presidential election. And does any reality-based taxpaying American believe that tax loopholes for corporations and the super-rich will be closed, given the corruptness of the Congress and the lobbyists who own Congress?

The other thing that the establishment and the corporate media don’t want Americans to know is that, despite all the hoopla about corporate tax rates in the U.S. being high (which is not true because no corporation pays the nominal rate), the tax on capital gains is absurdly low — 15 percent. In other developed countries, the tax on capital gains ranges from 20 percent to 35 percent and even 50 percent. Most Americans probably don’t understand that it’s the capital gains tax that rich people pay. That’s why Mitt Romney’s tax rate is 13.9 percent. Never in my working life did I pay a tax rate anywhere near that low.

Only the DailyKos shows the usual left-wing concern with reality rather than establishment blather and misdirection:

As has been widely reported for years, the effective (read: actual) corporate tax rate is far lower than the 35 percent headline rate that gets all the bad press. Last year, Citizens for Tax Justice reported on the 280 most profitable Fortune 500 companies. Findings? Thanks to tax breaks and subsidies, the average effective tax rate over the three-year 2008-2010 period was 18.5 percent and the companies enjoyed subsidies of $222.7 billion. During at least one of the three years, 78 highly profitable companies paid zero taxes and 30 actually had a negative tax rate.

But that’s not the worst of it. In 2011, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the effective corporate tax rate fell to 12.1 percent, the lowest level in 40 years. This comes at time when corporate profits are at a 60-year high.

One source reported that Rush Limbaugh says that Obama plan for corporate tax rates would actually raise corporate taxes by closing loopholes, as though that’s bad.

Update: A friend sent this link to a detailed and wonkish piece, published today, on tax policy. I am not in the least surprised that only a socialist organization is willing to do thorough, real-world reporting on tax policy. It’s very important to understand why this is so. Tax policy screws working people while favoring corporations and the rich. That’s only going to get worse, regardless of who wins the next election. The establishment media won’t report in any serious way on tax policy, because they serve the establishment. The right-wing media not only doesn’t report, but also distorts, because it serves the interests of corporations and the super-rich. So the only honest reporting about tax policy comes only from those who are getting screwed by tax policy.

Update 2: My old colleague Dan Froomkin now checks in on corporate taxes. Once again, only the left can be wonkish and thorough. Everyone else must keep on skipping — and help keep the American people the stupidest people in the developed world.

Giving away our trees to corporate chain saws

Atlanta Journal

Right-wing state legislatures all over the country are bending over backwards to sell out taxpayers and give greedy corporations anything they want.

The Raleigh News & Observer has a story this morning about new regulations rammed through the North Carolina General Assembly that allow billboard owners to cut down more state-owned trees. The same thing has been going on in Georgia. No doubt this is happening in other states as well.

Most Americans have no idea that our laws are rarely written by legislators. Rather, lobbyists and corporations write the legislation, and legislators line up at the troughs to sponsor the legislation in exchange for fat donations. The billboard legislation — like anti-union legislation and other giveaways to private interests — is part of a coordinated push by corporations to get their legislation passed by right-wing state legislatures all over the country. It’s no different, of course, in the U.S. Congress.

The billboard themselves are bad enough. But destroying public property — living trees — to make billboards more visible ought to be a crime. Instead, new laws freely give away taxpayer-owned trees to be cut down. To right-wingers eager to drag us peasants back to the dark ages and to enrich corporations at taxpayer expense, that’s not a crime. It’s progress.

The power of ridicule

Now is a good time to try again to make my point about using ridicule to shut down right-wing craziness. I think that some people think that I’m only just being mean-spirited when I argue that liars must be told that they are liars, that people who talk crazy must be told that they are crazy, and that we must do everything possible to make them objects of ridicule.

More thoughtful people might object that if you stoop to such tactics, you risk becoming just like them. Others seem to think that to be shrill is worse than to be a liar. But I would argue that shrillness in defense of truth is not a vice, and that it is virtuous to spray ridicule in the faces of ridiculous, dangerous people. Ridicule in their faces is more effective than pepper spray.

There is historical support for this. Strident condemnation (during Senate hearings) helped bring down Joseph McCarthy. It has often been written that it was largely the work of H.L. Mencken, heaping ridicule on William Jennings Bryan in Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes monkey trial in 1925, that shamed fundamentalists out of the public square for decades until they re-emerged rebranded as evangelicals. They are back, calling themselves Christians even as they despise and blame the poor, cheer for war, worship the rich, and torch the planet. Religion like that does not deserve the slightest scrap of respect or deference. It deserves our contempt.

We could use a few Menckens right now. Though today’s gelded mainstream media would not print a Mencken, now we have the Internet.

I’ve been reading some Mencken lately. I don’t particularly like his voice (just as I don’t like the sound of my own voice when I am talking about fools), and I doubt that he was the nicest person in the world. But he did the country a huge service simply by telling the truth, by writing in such a way that the ridiculousness of deluded and dangerous people is self-evident.