Category: Uncategorized

Right-winger + hard time = compassion

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prisonBy Alan Bean

Why are so many right-wingers suddenly arguing the case for criminal justice reform?  In this fascinating piece in Salon, Justin Elliot of Salon directs this question to Doug Berman, author of the influential Sentencing Law and Policy blog. 

Here are the highlights:

1. Prison is far more brutal than most people believe it to be

2. Most of the conservatives currently leading the smart on crime crusade have been locked up: Duke Cunningham, Charles Colson, Pat Nolan, Conrad Black

3. The religious concept of redemption generally plays a large role in these conversions.

4. Historically, mass incarceration required the enthusiastic cooperation of the political left

5. When you do hard time you realize that harsh penalties are typically applied to crimes disproportionately committed by minorities

6. Busting budgets and historically low crime rates make this a good time for reform, but . . .

7. The political forces that drove mass incarceration are always lurking. (more…)

Tom Toles explains Glenn Beck’s last theory

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By now you will have heard that Glenn Beck’s career on Fox has gone the way of all flesh.  Beck’s popularity was created by widespread dismay over the election of a black president and sustained by Tea Party fervor.  When the fall election was over, Glenn was out of bullets.  As his numbers began to tank, the desperate pundit robbed the arsenals of America’s favorite conspiracy theorists.  Eventually, even Fox News didn’t want to be associated with the bizarre tangle of intrigue appearing on Mr. Beck’s blackboard.

Ghost-writing the law: ALEC and the conservative legislative agenda

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Paul Weyrich

Is it a coincidence that conservative governors across the land are proposing remarkably similar legislation in 2011? 

Bill Berkowitz at Talk to Action doesn’t believe in coincidence. 

While the much-heralded Koch brothers from Wichita, KS. have invested untold millions in shaping pro-corporate, anti-public sector legislation, they are by no means the only players in the game.  According to Berkowitz, a Washington DC-based outfit called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) has been shaping and coordinating conservative legislative efforts across the nation since it was founded by the late Paul Weyrich in 1973.

So, if this ALEC outfit is such a major player, why haven’t you heard about the organization?  Simple, they work very hard to retain their anonymity.  Although the conservative movement has done a remarkable job of convincing middle class white folks that the federal government is their enemy, the wave of rage currently sweeping over America was sparked by a fiscal tsunami emanating from the corporate world.  It is amazing how lies prosper when backed by massive funding and how the unfunded truth can be so easily swept away in the backwash. (more…)

Tulia and the spell of mass incarceration

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Gary Gardner, moments before heading down to a protest at the state capital with Friends of Justice and a bus full of Tulia residents, September 2000

By Alan Bean

This is the text of a speech delivered at a Friends Committee on Legislation of California banquet in Whittier, California, March 26, 2011.

When I arrived in Tulia in the summer of 1998, I didn’t know very much about mass incarceration and the war on drugs. I had no idea that Texas, the state we had just moved to, had almost quadrupled its prison population between 1988 and 1998, or that the number of prisons had grown from 16 in 1980 to 108 in 2000.

Nor did I realize that the average family income of America’s poorest 20 percent increased 116% between 1947 and 1979 and had given back half of those gains between 1983 and 1998.

I didn’t realize that the American incarceration rate once mirrored western democracies like Canada, Great Britain and Germany, but had recently grown to six times the size of other nations.

For twenty years our family had been shuffling around the United States and Canada, and Nancy wanted our children to experience the love and support of family. Everything was going according to plan until we saw the headline in the local newspaper, “Tulia streets cleared of garbage.” (more…)

Careful Mike, your true colors are shining through

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By Alan Bean

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36

Last Thursday, potential presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee assured Stephen Colbert that Barack Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim (as 31% of Republicans believe).  An encouraging sign, don’t you think?  It’s nice to know that the leading Republican candidate in the South sides with the sane two-thirds of his party on this important issue.

Then, four days later, Mr. Huckabee informed a conservative radio talk show host that Obama was raised in Kenya and that anti-imperialistic stories about the Mau-Mau uprising in the early 1950s, imbibed from his father and grandfather, likely account for the president’s liberal politics. (more…)

Wisconsin: ‘Welcome to our world’

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If Wisconsin workers wanted to live in North Carolina, they’d move there.  As Chris Kromm argues over at Facing South, union-busting politics is really about the Dixification of America. 

Southern workers to Wisconsin: ‘Welcome to our world!’

By Chris Kromm
In 1959, the state of Wisconsin, a hotbed of labor activism and progressive politics, became the first state in the nation to give public workers the right to bargain collectively.

That same year, 1,000 miles away in North Carolina, state lawmakers — stoked by Cold War anti-unionism and Jim Crow-era fears of interracial cooperation — took a step in the opposite direction, passing one of a few laws in the nation that still ban public employees from having bargaining rights.

Today, the issue of labor rights for public workers is once again on the national agenda, sparked by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) move on February 11 to rescind bargaining rights there. (more…)

Stories we believe in: learning from Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm

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By Alan Bean

American liberals can’t fathom the appeal of the Tea Party phenomenon.  Here we are, struggling to recover from a recession created by massive tax cuts, military adventurism, and an under-regulated financial sector and what are they asking for: more tax cuts, even less government regulation, and more military spending.

Moreover, this message sells in the heartland, big-time.

By every standard of rationality, progressive politics should be enjoying a renaissance.  The alternative has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  And yet politicians aligned with Tea Party rhetoric are winning elections and shaping the political agenda.  How can these things be? (more…)

McWhorter: end the drug war and racial tension evaporates

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John McWhorter

John McWhorter is a conservative African-American who enjoys needling white liberals and the “racism-is-still-real” brand of civil rights advocacy.  For over a year now McWhorter’s take on race has taken on a decidedly libertarian tone.  He’s for legalizing drugs; all of them.

The Cato Institute’s current newsletter contains a PDF version of McWhorter’s new message.  The version I have pasted below appeared last year in The New Republic.

If you are a fan of HBO’s The Wire (the best television of all time in my opinion), the essential features of McWhorter’s argument will come as no surprise.  African-American youth have little incentive to look for conventional work because drug money comes so easy.  As a result, hundreds of thousands of black males are doing time on drug charges, inner city street gangs slaughter one another in turf battles, black children have no fathers, black women give up on finding a marriage partner, and everything goes to hell. (more…)

Haley Barbour won’t denounce KKK license plate

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Nathan Bedford Forrest

Haley Barbour would like to take a run at the presidency, but his close identification with Old Dixie keeps getting in the way.  This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Sons of Confederate Veterans are sponsoring a vanity license plate venerating the memory of Confederate commander  Nathan Bedford Forrest.  By all accounts, Forrest was a bold and ruthless leader with a gift for guerilla warfare, but he comes with a little baggage. (more…)

Texas history texts ripped by conservative group

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By Alan Bean

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”  – George Orwell, 1984

George Orwell learned how easily the past is misremembered as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War and during his years with the BBC in WWII.  Orwell is a hero to both the left and the right because he believed in relating historical fact as objectively and honestly as fallible flesh is able. 

As the culture wars rage, it is incumbent upon partisans on the left and right to police their own side of the conflict.  When 57% of Republicans believe the president is a Muslim, 45% believe he was born outside the United States, and 24% believe Mr. Obama may be the antiChrist, we’ve got a problem that only Republican leaders can effectively address.  We aren’t selling out when we critique our own people; we’re ensuring that the game is fairly played.

That is precisely what the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has done in its report on the historical curricula taught in American schools.  Their dissection of the Texas State Board of Education’s distorted historical vision is utterly devastating.  I have pasted some of the pithy highlights below, but I urge you to read the entire report. (more…)