Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Ted Cruz, Cuba, Castro and the Giant, Enormous, Humongous Lie

It is clear that the U.S. has trade and diplomatic relations with a myriad of dictatorships around the world. Curiously the one that is among the best in terms of elevating the levels of education and health care is the one we choose to embargo.

Senator Ted Cruz went on network TV Sunday morning perpetuating the biggest lie of the 20th century that lingers to this day.

The lie is that the barrier to relations between the United States and Cuba is the Cuban Communist dictatorship that ruled the island nation since Fidel Castro took power in 1959. There are three elements to a dictatorship that are often cited as the reason for our embargo of Cuba.

Listed below, they are followed by examples of nations the U.S. recognizes:

No democratic free and open elections: China, Ethiopia, and Azerbaijan

Political prisoners: Central African Republic, Russia, Qatar

No free press: Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, Myanmar

A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF US-CUBAN RELATIONS

After Spain was driven from Cuba in 1898, the U.S. took control of the island for intermittent intervals through the 1920's.

In the 1930's Fulgencio Batista consolidated power until Castro sent him packing in 1959. By time Batista took control most land in Cuba was owned by U.S. companies. Sugar, telephone (IT&T) and other industries were controlled either by the United States or Cubans who assisted in the expropriation of Cuban land.

Poor peasants were resigned to toiling for the conglomerates and monopolies rather than working the land that once belonged to them.

When Castro took control he nationalized these businesses, taking real estate and buildings now valued in the billions of dollars.  The fight is over the compensation for the seized assets that belonged to American citizens; the fight is not about the seized assets of former (like Ted Cruz's parents) or current Cuban nationals or democracy in Cuba. The Cubans are prepared to pay.  The question is 'how much?' The Cubans have counterclaims: losses suffered in the Bay of Pigs invasion, losses resulting from a hijacked airplane and the subsequent loss of life, these are claims for injuries and loss of life caused by U.S. hostilities. The second collection of Cuban claims are based on the illegality of the embargo and the damage to the Cuban economy.

The best analysis was prepared by the Brookings Institute, Reconciling U.S. Property Claims in Cuba: Transforming Trauma into Opportunity.

Among those who lost property were Batista and his Cuban thugs, U.S. companies who established a foothold through bribery and theft, and legitimate Cuban families that came about their wealth honestly, and an assorted collections of mobsters:

...Already, a Tampa resident, Gary Rapoport, has publicly inquired about compensation for the Riviera, a 352-room waterfront hotel in Havana that was inaugurated in 1957 by Ginger Rogers. It was owned by Mr. Rapoport’s grandfather Meyer Lansky, the organized-crime figure.

In an interview with The Tampa Tribune, the mobster’s grandson put it like this: “Cuba owes my family money.”

 

New York Times on Wisconsin Results

Today's New York Times Not Your Grandmother's Wisconsin:

 

...Paul Soglin is the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin’s capital city, in cerulean Dane County. He supported Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, and said he talked at least once a week with a field organizer from the Sanders campaign during the primary. But once Mrs. Clinton locked up the nomination, it was radio silence from the Clinton campaign...

 

 

Madison Then and Now: 1960's and the Walker Protests

No, I never saw in the 1960's what is occuring today in this effort to stop Governor Walker's union busting.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:   

Soglin: "I've never seen anything like this"

Soglin said he has participated in the protests against Walker’s budget repair bill for a week, starting with a march Saturday from Memorial Union on the UW-Madison campus. The crowds have built every day, and on Thursday and Friday exceeded 20,000, he estimated.

He compared the mood of the crowds to those he saw during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. There’s anger, he said, but there was also “elements of joy and enthusiasm, and that’s what’s going on here as well.”

The anti-war movement, he said, was “all energized and angry - because it was focused on stopping a war. It could not have the almost spiritual nature of what’s going on in Madison today.”

Spiritual? Joy? Soglin said the teachers and other public employees from across the state are finding a bond with each other.

“There are a lot of people who are scared about the economic consequences of what’s going to happen” with Walker’s bill, he said. “But they’re also getting strength from all of the people they are meeting.”

Refighting the Civil War - It Was Treasonous, Not Romantic

When Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell declared April 'Confederate History Month' and overlooked slavery in his proclamation, a well deserved firestorm ensued. As an elementary school student I was taught that the Civil War was fought over slavery. By time I reached college, I learned about more complicated issues involving regional economics, foreign trade policy, and industrialization.

When it was all said and done, the Civil War was over slavery. No slavery, no war.

In his proclamation, McDonnell wrote that Virginians should "understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War."

Writing in the Nation, Melissa Harris-Lacewell eloquently expressed the feelings of the millions of descendants of slaves:

As I child I lived in the shadow of Monticello. As a teen I lived on Jefferson Davis Highway, and there I discovered the other Virginia history. This is the Virginia history that is etched in the stony faces of confederate traitors who line Monument Avenue in Richmond. This narrative of Virginia laments the end of slavery, romanticizes traitorous action against the state and memorializes sedition. This history is built on a false and romantic notion of an imagined Confederate past that refuses to acknowledged the ways that slavery degraded not only black labor, but white labor; how it destroyed the land; and how it starved the region of innovation.

Going back to my own youth, I found that the romantic portrayal of the ante-bellum south to be a gross distortion of the truth. As Harris-Lacewell notes, little has changed for many Americans in the past fifty years.

Free Speech, Madison and UW Style: The Good and the Bad.

Today the University of Wisconsin Union Theater will host Ayaan Hirsi Ali as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series.

Originally she was rejected as a speaker -too controversial.

UW to host controversial author who rejects Islam

Students first voted against bringing Hirsi Ali because they didn't want to be seen as supporting her agenda, said Reid Tice, chair of the Distinguished Lecture Series committee. But when a scheduled speaker, sportswriter Rick Reilly, fell through, the committee reconsidered Hirsi Ali...

Hirsi Ali wrote the screenplay for "Submission," a short movie by Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh that criticized the treatment of women in Islamic society. In 2004, an extremist killed van Gogh in Amsterdam and left a death threat against Hirsi Ali pinned to his chest with a knife.

Hirsi Ali said she will focus her speech on the plight of women in Islam and the importance of talking about it, even though it can be risky.

It is sad and even frightening that students, or any one for that matter, would succumb to the notion that the right to speak is measured by the messenger being  timid, meek, and boring.

Fortunately there was an opportunity to revisit the issue and the right thing was done.

As a student I had the privilege to hear Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, Joan Baez and Strom Thurmond, Eldridge Cleaver and Averell Harriman. The campus and the university community was served well by every one of them speaking and sharing their beliefs and thoughts, no matter how controversial, outdated, narrow-minded, or enlightening their speech.

On a sadder note, Isthmus reports that the city of Madison Parks Division instituted rules banning the staff speaking to journalists, council members or just about any one, A 'gag rule' at city parks

As Isthmus has reported (Watchdog, 1/22/09), Parks Superintendent Kevin Briski, upon taking over in June 2008, began requiring that all media inquiries be routed through Whitmore. He thinks this policy has worked out well: "It's helped facilitate efficient communication."

But clearly the new policy has struck fear in the hearts of some Parks employees. One person even asked not to be quoted saying s/he could not be quoted.

A few words of advice. No one is served well by limiting the speech of city staff. In fourteen years as mayor, our office had a very simple policy - make sure you know what you are talking about, and if you are unsure refer the matter to someone who does.

That was it. No gag rule. No lengthy talking points. I do not recall any disasters. There were a few embarrassing moments when a staff member said something and did not have all the information but nothing that would remotely justify a gag order.

As the President of the Madison Parks Commission, Bill Barker noted:

"The tradition of the city has always been transparency and open government. Anything that runs counter to that is not a good idea."

City council members are a different story but, not to worry,  no one will ever keep them quiet.

 

Book Report: "Sundown Towns"

Maureen Dowd cogently argued that Representative Joe Wilson's (R - Old Dixie) outburst at President Obama had a significant component of racism, and then nailed the House's reaction: a party-line spanking.

When House Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, reprimanded the congressman on Tuesday evening for refusing to apologize to his colleagues for breaking the rules, it was quite a wonderful way to improve America.

It was a rare triumph for civility in a country that seems to have lost all sense of it — from music arenas to tennis courts to political gatherings to hallowed halls — and a ratification of an institution that has relied on strict codes of conduct for two centuries to prevent a breakdown of order.

“When you look at the various incidents of misbehavior all across the spectrum,” Representative James Clyburn, the highest ranking black lawmaker in Congress who had pushed for the reprimand, told me afterward, “the one place we ought to be able to say that such conduct is not acceptable and just cannot be tolerated is in America’s classroom, as I call Congress. Students are looking at us, and they ought not to be able to ever feel that such bad behavior would be condoned.”

...Former President Jimmy Carter weighed in with Brian Williams of NBC News on Tuesday: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.” He said he felt that was true in the South and elsewhere.

Racism "elsewhere" is the prime focus of James Loewen's "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of Racism." Lynchings, firebombings, murder, torture and other tools of domestic terrorism are related to the extreme patterns of housing segregation that developed in the twentieth century in most parts of the US with the enforcement of "sundown towns."

From Maine to California, thousands of communities kept out African Americans (or sometimes Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, etc.) by force, law, or custom. These communities are sometimes called "sundown towns" because some of them posted signs at their city limits reading, typically, "N****r, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On You In ___." Some towns are still all white on purpose. Their chilling stories have been joined more recently by the many elite (and some not so elite) suburbs like Grosse Pointe, MI, or Edina, MN, that have excluded nonwhites by "kinder gentler means." When I began this research, I expected to find about 10 sundown towns in Illinois (my home state) and perhaps 50 across the country. Instead, I have found more than 440 in Illinois and thousands across the United States. This is their story; it is the first book ever written on the topic.

Based on census data, local histories, newspaper accounts, and a wealth of other data, Loewen's book concentrates on such non-Southern states as Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, and Oregon. Loewen's comprehensive website allows a reader to search any state for suspected "sundown towns and has many resources beyond those in the book.

One typical example from Wisconsin: Loewen asks readers of the web page on Fond du Lac:

My question: why did the black population of so many WI towns decline drastically beginning around 1890 or thereafter? In Fond du Lac, for example, 178 blacks in 1880 decline to 112 in 1890, 47 in 1910, 16 in 1930, and just 5 in 1940. Why? Green Bay shows a similar decline, beginning in 1910, from 45 down to 10 in 1940.
Appleton never had many but fell from 18 in 1900 to 0 by 1930.

Loewen dismisses such factors as unavailability of work, natural population decline, and non-violent social shunning, and zeros in on racially-based terrorism, which he calls "violent expulsion."

In many Illinois towns, whites expelled blacks violently or more quietly convinced them to leave, then passed formal ordinances or reached informal understandings that the community or neighborhood would be "all white."

It's a long, hard slog through some often unpleasant facts, but "Sundown Towns" is well worth reading as a backdrop to the "intensely demonstrated animosity"  that President Obama is drawing from some portions of America's populace. 

Loewen also wrote the iconic book "Lies my Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," which also has a great interactive website.

- Barry Orton

Evangelical Lutheran Church of America - The Generational Batttle for Gay Justice

When the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted to allow gay clergy, a new chapter was written in the battle to bring justice to all Americans.

Conservatives react after Lutherans lift gay ban

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Even though the Rev. Mark Chavez believes the leaders of his church made a decision in direct contradiction of the Bible by lifting a ban on sexually active, monogamous gays and lesbians as clergy, he said he's staying with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

"I'm not leaving," Chavez said Friday night, promising an effort to keep the church from moving even further toward what he sees as an embrace of behavior condemned by Scripture...

...The change to gay clergy policy passed with the support of 68 percent of about 1,000 delegates at the ELCA's national assembly. It makes the group, with about 4.7 million members in the U.S., one of the largest U.S. Christian denominations yet to take a more gay-friendly stance.

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported in 2006 that there was growing support for equal rights for gay Americans. The surveys showed a widening generational gap on the issue.

As younger Americans, more tolerant, fairer, and more knowedgable, command greater influence in national and state affairs, the tide will turn, eventually the laws will change, and the constitutional amendments adopted in states like Wisconsin will be repealed.

The question is, why did this generation become the one to become more demanding that gays receive equal treatment under the law?

My small, and uniformed opinion is the gay community itself and the decision by so many after Stonewall to come out. Unlike my generation and those older, our children grew up with openly gay classmates, openly gay co-workers, and openly gay teammates. That is good: it breaks down biases and sterotypes.

What is sad is that so many parents and grandparents will not heed the good advice of their children and reject opinions based on ignorance or a flawed biblical interpretation, or both.

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The Difference Between the Fine Art of Heckling and The Mob

Sean Hannity is running down the well-worn streets of Berlin in the 1930's. His call to his followers to "Become a part of the mob!" is Hannity at his best.

There is nothing wrong with a little disrespect and an occasional taunt for some stuffed shirt on a podium. Asking some apologist for LBJ's or Nixon's administration about their lies from the Gulf Of Tonkin to Cambodia was well deserved.

After the fun and the tasteful display of wit runs its course, there comes a time to get down to the business of the day, ensure that the public agenda is followed, and that the discourse is civil.

As we learned on the left forty years ago, next to changing public policy, the toughest challenge for a political movement is keeping its crazies in check. Now the extreme right is determined to encourage not discourage their own 'crazies.' 

When Gustav Le Bon wrote in 1895 The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind, he was not writing about the millions of Europeans or Americans who attend the thousands of political rallies and speeches held in our countries every year, but he was thinking of the right-wing disruptive thugs who are populating the town hall meetings on heath care. He was writing about the mob:

Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence,the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly...

...Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian -- that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images -- which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd -- and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

Arlen Specter Always Uncomfortable, Never a Leader

The problem for Arlen Specter (PA) and the Democrats is that this man who knows better will probably be as uncomfortable as a Democrat as he was as a Republican.

Arlen Specter's  jump to the Democratic Party surprises no one. For the past half dozen years it was clear that Specter was uncomfortable with the Neocons and right-wing zealots in his party. The addition of one more vote in the Democratic column is all he brings, along with his desk and chair.

Over two years ago we posted Arlen Specter Makes a Deal: Sells Out The Constitution for Power. At the height of one of the Constitutional crises presented by the out of control Bush White House that had no recognition of civil liberties, Specter made a lot of noise about freedom and then collapsed:

Specter went into negotiations with the White House and his own party, knowing that his chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee was at stake. He caved.

...It is hard to believe that the Arlen Specter of the nineteen-eighties—the maverick who defied his party on an issue of the magnitude of the Bork nomination—would have considered yielding on a question as fundamental as habeas corpus ...

He destroyed the foundation of Anglo-American jurisprudence and took us back to the days of the Star Chamber Courts.

...Specter is hoping the courts will restore the rights of the detainees to bring habeas cases. “The bill was severable. It has a severability clause. And I think the courts will invalidate it,” he told me. “They’re not going to give up authority to decide habeas-corpus cases, not a chance.” Others are less sure.

When you look at Specter's record on all matters Constitutional in 2006, the man has no shame. He signaled all year that he was unprincipled and shallow.

Unlike most of the Republicans in power at the time, Specter knew better as to what was right and what was wrong. Like all of the Republicans, he failed to show any leadership.

Specter is as good as those who surround him. He is not a leader.

That is why he choose to be a Republican in the first place, that he why he failed to lead during the Bush Constitutional crisis, and that is why, faced with sure defeat as a Pennsylvania Republican, he switched parties.

What power he gathered was through seniority, not command.

His vote is welcome; his addition to the majority is welcome.

Never count on him to lead.

Harvey Milk and George Moscone

Tonight we saw Milk.  The first two minutes were as emotional an introduction to any film I have ever seen.

My reaction to the film is a reflection of the quality of the movie.  It is also a response from living through those times.

It was powerful and moving. Everything said about Sean Penn's outstanding performance is true.

The city of Madison adopted its equal opportunity ordinance protecting all individuals regardless of sexual orientation or sexual preference in the spring or summer of 1976.

Unlike Dade County, Florida, Minneapolis, or Eugene, Oregon, despite our best efforts to bait Anita Bryant, we could not lure her to Madison.  

June  1977 was the last time I saw San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. It was probably Friday June 17 at the conclusion of a hard week of work.

Moscone, U.S. Conference of Mayors President, Ken Gibson from Newark, and  Mayor John Rousakis of Savannah were at the hotel swimming pool.

Gibson and I were in the water, Moscone and Rousakis sunned themselves on lounge chairs when a young photographer from the Tuscon Citizen appeared. He had been trying to get pictures of mayors not working and he had his victims. I spotted him and alerted the others. Gibson and I simply turned our backs to his camera lens.

Moscone was exhausted since every crazed Tusconian with a San Francisco connection had called his hotel room the previous night. Moscone simply draped a towel over his face.

Rousakis did not care and did not move.

The kid snapped a few pictures and walked over to Rousakis. He asked for names. The mayor pointed to Moscone and then himself, "He is Michael Blandic, the new mayor of Chicago, and I am Maynard Jackson, the mayor of Atlanta." (Jackson left, Rousakis right)

Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk were assassinated on Monday November 27, 1978. The moment hearing of the tragedy and seeing Dianne Feinstein on the news announcing their deaths was as real last night as it was that day.

On Tuesday November 28, 1978 I made reservations for San Francisco. That night our city council met. We had ended the practice of opening the meetings with a formal prayer and instead rotated among the council members who would begin each session with some thoughts of their own. Alderman Jim Yeadon began with words memorializing the two slain leaders. Two years earlier, as a citizen serving on the Equal Opportunities Commission, Jim was instrumental in the adoption of Madison's ordinance protecting gay rights. From the Wisconsin State Journal Friday December 12, 2008:

The assassinations of Milk and Moscone marked a poignant moment for Yeadon, who asked to open the first council meeting after the slayings with a remembrance.

"I get shivers when I think about it," he recalls. "I said, 'Yesterday there were three openly gay elected officials in the country. Today there are two. And I don't know how many good mayors there were in the country, but today the world is one the less.' Then I asked people to bow their heads and pray and give their thoughts to the people in San Francisco. I was almost crying. It really brought it home."

On Wednesday November 29, 1978 I flew to San Francisco where I caught up with some friends from Madison in a city numb with grief.

to be continued