19 February 2009

The brother & sister team of progressive journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman have collected several stories of people who came face to face with some of the evils of the Dubya Squad years but who made the sadly rare but always heartening decision to not take it lying down. They tell these stories in Standing Up to the Madness.

Over the course of the book, team Goodman tell us

• how the Common Ground Relief group got organized and fought back when the government tried to piggy-​back an ethnic cleansing campaign on top of Hurricane Katrina
• how when an Iraq-​born U.S. citizen got kicked off a flight for wearing a T-shirt with Arabic lettering on it, this inspired whole leagues of “I am Sparticus!”-​types to challenge effective Arabic-​on-​transit bans with their own shirts
• how when the FBI started issuing National Security Letters to libraries — simultaneously demanding patron records without a warrant or court order, denying to the press and to Congress that they were doing any such thing, and issuing a legal gag order to the letter recipients prohibiting them from contradicting the lies — one group of librarians fought back and won
• how a determined climate scientist at NASA defied White House attempts to turn the agency in to a climate change denial propaganda arm, and bypassed the oil industry public relations handlers who had been put in charge of the agency press office to take agency research directly to Congress and the press
• how a small number of American Psychological Association professionals exposed that the association’s anonymous task force on complicity with torture had been stacked with pro-​torture military psychologists in order to provide cover for psychologists who were helping the government make their torture techniques more precise and effective
• how a drama teacher and a group of persistent students responded to having their student play about the experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq War veterans banned by the school principle — by working harder to polish the play and taking it off-​Broadway
• how a community rallied around the Jena Six
• how several soldiers have refused to deploy after coming to a crisis of conscience about war, or learning about the mendacity involved in the current set

All of this is heartwarming and can be inspiring. Team Goodman is writing a book of praise and celebration. Because of this, the episodes are not presented with much nuance or objectivity. They reminded me a bit of the sort of hagiographical stories about Jackie Robinson or Neil Armstrong that I would read in elementary school.

But that said, this would be a good book to inspire any progressive who wants to move on from having correct opinions to being capable of heroic decisions.

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Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Some states, whose governments are suffering from bloated budgets and recession-​spawned drops in tax revenue, have decided to issue IOUs instead of tax refunds this year. This is causing some taxpayers, many of which are having financial problems of their own this year, to see things a little more clearly than usual. Like this fellow, who says: “Now let’s be absolutely crystalline clear on this issue: A tax refund is not some kind of bonus. It’s not a stimulus check. Not welfare! It belongs to the taxpayer. In fact, it’s not much more than a loan that the unwitting taxpayer has made to their state, and as such the government has no god-​damned right to the money!” Well, that’s all well-​and-​good, and I’ve heard such sentiments before, but what’s different and encouraging is that this fellow wants to take the next step and encourage taxpayers to end their tax withholding so that in the future, the government is coming to them, hat-​in-​hand, rather than the other way around. Maybe it’ll catch on.
• Timothy Coughlin, while serving a life sentence, successfully filed for millions of dollars in fraudulent tax refunds from the IRS. Or so says this news report. What interested me about the news article was that the conspirators were being prosecuted by a State prosecutor, who expressed frustration that he couldn’t get the feds to take any interest in the case.
• Another example for the pay-​under-​protest set, and another example also of the increasing property-​tax frustration I’m seeing in the news lately: Richard Ross paid his $4,000 property tax bill entirely in coins this week.
• Reading the news from Argentina, I’m still not sure how seriously to take the agrarian tax revolt buzz. It sometimes seems mostly to be a bluff, a gambit in an attempt to lobby the government. Eduardo Buzzi of the Agricultural Federation said, “there are farmers who, given the option of feeding your family or paying taxes, prefer the first.”
• “For nearly 35 years, BEYOND BARTER has given folks unlimited access to hundreds of valuable services, supplied by participants to one another at no charge, beyond the small membership fee.”
• The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, among others, is promoting a non-​payment campaign against the government water monopoly. I honestly don’t know much about the issues behind this campaign, and most of the web sites seem to assume that visitors are already up-​to-​speed. But this campaign’s bold picket signs helped me find a graphic and a title for my book We Won’t Pay! so I’ll give ’em props for that.
• “If you've got space you're not using — from space to park a car to an empty corner of your basement — Homstie can help you rent that space out as storage.” Seems though that might be useful to some in the living-​frugally set.