President Obama plans to reform the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. George W. Bush’s signature educational legislation, NCLB intended to improve test scores and school accountability. It federalized educational standards and expanded the nation’s education budget.

Like most Bush policies, No Child Left Behind was poorly thought out and detrimental to the poor. It focused on standardized testing rather than learning. It penalized poor schools with high dropout rates rather than look at the deeper reasons for these educational failings. It allowed states to refuse to give exams in languages other than English, punishing schools with high immigrant populations. Schools who did not measure up to improved test scores could lose their federal funding.

Since NCLB failed to work, Americans have looked for a scapegoat. The popular victims have become teachers. Recently, a Rhode Island school district fired every single teacher in a failing school. Politicians on the national, state, and local level believe in holding teachers directly accountable for student progress. Blaming teachers is easy. It gives us someone to point to rather than ourselves, even if teachers do their best to educate our children.

Teacher unions have especially come under attack. Teachers unions’ effectiveness in protecting their members has outraged conservatives. Like during most attacks on labor rights, conservatives use the most egregious cases of teacher incompetence to attack the entire existence of teacher unions.

What Republicans really want is to eviscerate the unions, promote taxpayer funded religious schools, and bring in corporations to run public schools. Given corporate mismanagement of the economy, this is a recipe for disaster.

Do our schools have some bad teachers? Sure. But the average teacher uses every strategy possible to help students learn. They mentor students outside of class, coach them in after school sports, and try to reach them within the classroom.

I went to a poorly funded high school in a white working-class Oregon logging town. I had some terrible teachers who went through the motions. But I also had wonderful ones, including a couple that set me on the path to becoming a historian. I am forever grateful to them.

Thanks to good teachers, American schools are not failing any more than they ever have. The nation’s education system has always reflected political trends and entrenched inequality. The poor and people of color have always received substandard education. That continues today. Most of the supposedly failing schools are in poor neighborhoods, serving traditionally underrepresented communities.

Throughout the 20th century, African-Americans and other historically marginalized groups moved to northern and western cities to create a better life for themselves and their children. They hoped their children would receive better education than they did. For a time, mixed race student bodies became common.

But northern whites did not want to live next to African-Americans. Tensions in these racially mixed schools led to fights. Riots in Detroit, Chicago, and other northern cities during World War II displayed American racism for the world to see. Whites fled to the suburbs after World War II. Their tax dollars went with them, leaving impoverished, African-American dominated inner cities without the means to fund decent schools.

By the 1960s, African-Americans had become increasingly desperate over the lack of education, employment, and social services in the cities. Police violence contributed to this general frustration and led to the riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and many other cities in that decade.

White flight has caused our current education problems. Rather than blame teachers, we should recognize this problem as reflective of the massive racial and class divides in the United States. We refused to deal with these problems in the 1960s, and we continue to ignore them today.

Unfortunately, President Obama’s educational reforms, while improving on No Child Left Behind, do not deal with the root causes of educational problems. Inherent race and class prejudice is not being addressed.

Obama supports eliminating the penalization of the lowest performing schools and focusing on a longer-term measurement of school improvement over time. However, he still supports standardized testing and punishing teachers of low-performing students.
Obama also defended the firing of the Rhode Island teachers, which is little more than cheap political rhetoric.

Why would a young teacher take a job in such a school if they might get fired? How would that help their career? How does punishing all the teachers in a school help solve any problems? Who will take their place? These questions remain unanswered.

The nation does need to revolutionize its education system. Obama’s reforms are a useful start, but they are only a drop in the bucket. We need to centralize American schools under federal rather than state and local control, dividing money equally among all students rather than privileging those from wealthy backgrounds.

We will have to raise taxes to pay for better teacher salaries. If we want great teachers, we need to pay them. We must make the profession appealing for the nation’s smartest people. We have to recognize that taxes have benefits. If we want good education, it will cost us.

We also must realize that teachers cannot create educated children by themselves. Teachers play a positive role in children’s lives, but they cannot overcome a bad home environment, a lack of employment, or a paucity of after-school activities. We also need to raise taxes to finish Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Poverty combined with racism creates conditions that make it very difficult for children to learn. Fighting poverty is fighting for our children’s future.

Society, not schools and teachers, have failed our students. Standardized testing, firing teachers, and tinkering with reforms will not solve these problems. A solution must include fighting poverty and raising taxes. Nothing else will do.

Foot was a ‘genuine British radical’ according to broadcaster ITN. The BBC said: “Michael Foot was one of the great political orators, for more than half his life a political rebel and a thorn in the flesh of the establishment” – an interesting choice of words from the voice of the British establishment.

His successor as party leader, Neil Kinnock, the man who finally killed-off Labour as a socialist party, wrote that Foot was “a marvellous comrade, a magnificent man, a great socialist and libertarian”, and a “supreme parliamentary democrat.”

The Economist, hardly known for its love of socialism, offered a more negative appraisal of Foot’s life in its obituary but the opinion of the hard-headed voice of capitalism softens toward the end, writing:

“He had an instinctive understanding of people. He wrote beautifully and, after overcoming a stammer, was a wonderful orator: humorous, self-deprecating, empathetic.”

David Cameron, leader of the Foot’s lifelong enemy the Conservative, Party said he was “above all an idealist, a man who was in politics for the right reasons”.

Even Foot’s old enemy, Margaret Thatcher found time to speak kind words of him: “He was a great parliamentarian and a man of high principles,” she said, and was “very sorry to hear the news” of his death.

With all of these gushing tributes, it’s easy to forget that while he was alive, Foot was ridiculed by the press and his fellow parliamentarians as a ‘loony lefty’, a boring windbag, KGB stooge and donkey jacket-wearing joke who led the Labour party to the worst defeat in its modern history in the disastrous 1983 election.

Foot was never much of a radical, truth be told. He supported wage restraint, attacked Irish political hunger strikers and cheer-led then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s pointless military adventures in the Falkands war. Still, his politics of old-fashioned Western European state socialism did represent a challenge to the neo-liberal orthodoxies then being fashioned by Thatcher and Reagan and, as such, make him an unlikely candidate for secular sainthood.

Just what is going on here, exactly?

It’s simple. Foot got old and then he died.

Insofar as the likes of Foot are a ‘thorn in the side of the establishment’ at all, the final act of life – dying – magically transubstantiates the rebel into the ‘great parliamentarian.’ The 2006 funeral of Irish Communist Party stalwart Michael O’Riordan was a gathering of the country’s great and good, including leaders of Ireland’s governing parties. Even the president and prime minister paid him tribute.

In some cases it doesn’t even require death, just age. Any politician who lives long enough will soon find themselves a model of bipartisanship, whether they like it or not. One of the curses of age, it seems, is respectability.

British Labour leftwing ‘firebrand’ Tony Benn has himself lamented that, upon retirement, he suddenly found himself being referred to as ‘father of the House of Commons’ and a ‘true parliamentarian’ and ‘great democrat’. Benn’s problem was that he knew this meant his political career was over: he was now too old to be a threat to anyone.

The death in 2009 of ‘liberal’ Democrat Ted Kennedy was described by president Obama as “passing of an extraordinary leader”. Well, they were both in the same political party… George W. Bush wasn’t, though, and he made a phone call to Kennedy’s wife upon hearing of his hospitalisation in 2008, saying “take care of my friend”. Excuse me?

Of course, Chappaquiddick was impossible to ignore but it was certainly played-down. So bizarre and global was the reaction to Kennedy popping his well-heeled clogs that Ireland’s finance minister, Brian Lenihan, prefaced his vicious slash-and-burn budget with a rambling eulogy to the man.

It’s not just the left that loses its meaning in old age and death. The death of Ronald Reagan unleashed a torrent of tears not seen since the elite-led hysteria over the death of Princess Diana. Television news journalists editorialised, newspaper columnists waxed lyrical about the Great American Hero, talking heads appeared to speak of him in hushed tones as a ‘unifier’ and ‘great communicator’.

Sane people vomited – I hope.

Brave was the commentator – if indeed there were any – who stood-up to say that Reagan presided over murderous wars, a quasi-criminal administration 138 of whom were investigated, indicated or convicted, and whose economic shock therapy didn’t so much reinvigourate the US economy as much as build a flaky and rent-seeking financial empire atop the dungheap of deindustrialisation.

It’s easy to say one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead but, frankly, some corpses deserve to be defiled. Journalist Mark Ames wrote of his book, Going Postal, that it was “an attempt to dig-up Reagan’s remains, hang them upside-down from the nearest palm tree and subject him, at last, to a proper trial.” It’s hard to disagree.

The crimes of Foot are mere misdemeanours beside those of Reagan but let’s not kid ourselves that he was a great hero. Instead, let’s remember Foot and the rest as they really were, not how they’d like to be remembered. At least that would have the benefit of not only being honest, but also giving some meaning to political positions.

But is Islamic-based terrorism a primary threat? Maybe the face of terrorism is more diverse than that. Perhaps it is also a middle-aged white man. Perhaps it looks like Joe Stack.

On February 18, Stack, an Austin, Texas man with tax problems, flew his personal airplane into the Internal Revenue Office Building in Austin. He killed one IRS employee and himself. His manifesto explained that the IRS forced him to violence after a tax code switch in the 1980s ruined his life. Stack’s violent attack on a federal institution is only the latest example of right-wing terrorism to afflict the United States in recent years.

Some have questioned Stack’s right-wing credentials. They point out a reference to communism in his manifesto. This is possible. Parsing the political leanings of an unhinged and suicidal man can be tricky and counterproductive. However, his anti-government leanings and attack on the Internal Revenue Service comes straight from the right-wing playbook.

Regardless, conservatives have taken up Stack’s mantle. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, a likely candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination, told the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend that conservatives needed to “smash the windows out of big government.”

Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King went a step further, expressing sympathy for Stack’s actions. He told a CPAC crowd that they also needed to “implode” IRS offices. Stack’s own daughter has portrayed him as hero. Samantha Bell told Good Morning America that her father’s noble death should serve as a wake-up call to people to stand up against government agents she considers “pompous political thugs and their mindless minions.”

The man Stack killed, Vernon Hunter, served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War. Yet the hero is apparently his murderer.

Stack is the latest in a long string of violent right-wing attacks in recent years. On May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers, was shot and killed in his church by the anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. On June 27, 2008, an unemployed truck driver named Jim Adkisson walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire, killing two. He attacked the Unitarian church for its acceptance of gays and support of abortion rights, and claimed he wanted to kill every Democrat in the House and Senate.

The right-wing Tea Party movement has employed violent rhetoric as well, including a speaker at a Washington state rally claiming she wanted to hang Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray. Some have called Stack the first Tea Party terrorist. While Stack doesn’t seem to have had explicit connections to organized right-wing activism, his actions come from the same conservative anger at the federal government and liberalism.

The most famous example of right-wing terrorism occurred in April 1995, when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, two men with long-connections to right-wing militias, blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. 168 people died that day.

These rural-based militias preach anti-government extremism, often mixed with white supremacy, and constitute a real threat, as McVeigh and Nichols proved. Yet the United States has yet to have a serious public dialogue about increasingly frequent right-wing terrorism.

We have three major public spaces to remember victims of terrorism and to think about terrorism’s impact upon national identity. The first is the former World Trade Center site in New York. The second is where Flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania. And the third is the Oklahoma City Memorial.

At the first two, visitors can visualize the bad guys, but the Oklahoma City Memorial does a remarkably poor job at contextualizing the attacks. The site is tremendously heartbreaking, but you get no sense that McVeigh and Nichols had right-wing connections. They read like isolated crazy people who just wanted to kill innocent women and children. You see the McVeigh and Nichols as two evil men, not as representatives of a larger terrorist movement.

Politics do enter the Oklahoma City Memorial. The exhibits have several references to so-called “eco-terrorism.” The museum paints eco-terrorism as a serious threat to American national security. Examples of this horror include groups like the Earth Liberation Front setting fire to SUVs in car lots and the 2008 arson of a luxury home development in a Seattle suburb.

While I’m not excusing such actions, they aren’t terrorism. They aren’t attacks upon government institutions, they are not designed to inspire terror in the American population. They are stupid acts of outrage over the destruction of the environment.

When environmentalists start killing CEO’s of chemical companies or blowing up Exxon-Mobil office buildings, then we can make legitimate comparisons between radical environmentalists and right-wing terrorists. Discussing this dubious threat at the Oklahoma City Memorial obscures McVeigh and Nichols’ political leanings.

Of course, conservatives don’t want you to make these connections. They worked hard to ensure an apolitical Oklahoma City Memorial. Say what they will, but events like Oklahoma City, Knoxville, and Austin serve conservative purposes.

Talk-radio and the internet spew an endless expectoration of hate. Republicans might publicly distance themselves from this, but Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al have created a powerful conservative movement with the potential for violence. Jim Adkisson explicitly cited right-wing radio as having influenced his actions.

The threat of right-wing domestic terrorism provides at least as great a threat to the nation as Islamic terrorism. And it’s far past time we started talking about this. How many Americans have to die before we take right-wing terrorism seriously?

Is Nigeria gifted? Yes. Is Nigeria enormously talented? Yes Is Nigeria prodigiously endowed? Yes. Is being Nigerian abysmally frustrating? Yes. Is being Nigerian, unbelievably exciting? Without a doubt, YES!

The frenzied atmosphere of the country is never ending. Characterised by a convulsed existence, a turbulent history and a chaotic present, what could be more exciting about a nation on the eve of its 50th birthday, that has nothing to show for it?

We have the record for being the only nation in history with an absent president for over two months, creating a power vacuum and leaving us in limbo. Nigerians became prisoners in their own country with an ‘incommunicado status,’ and no one was speaking to them because the political elite withdrew that privilege by veto and fed lies to foreign media about the state the ailing president. The preceding years were marred by coup d’états, which left the country incapacitated and isolated.

Nigeria is one of the world’s major oil producers and seventh largest exporter, yet many of its citizens live in abject poverty. The Niger Delta region of the country, home to the nation’s oil, is synonymous with violence and the kidnapping trade. Tribal and religious divides continue to claim lives, the most recent being the January Jos riots, where over 300 people died.

Thanks to the Christmas Day “Crotch Bomber,” as Umaru Farouk Abdulmutallah is now popularly known, Nigeria on a terrorism watch list, making life extremely hard for Nigerians as they travel. Lest we forget, Nigeria is internationally perceived as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. We are also known as 419ers, i.e. email scammers.

Following the Abdulmutallah incident, the US was quick to add us to the terrorist watch list, yet there was no president or representative to speak for us. A few members of the senate threatened to sever ties with the US, and that was laughed upon.

Keep in mind that we have a rich cultural heritage, and have made some great contributions to the world of art and culture. From the ‘Benin Bronzes’ to Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri and, from my generation, Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, we have made our mark. However, when it really counts, what we are really known for is instability.

I have watched the recent political dance in my country of birth with excitement, shame, and a sense of anger. Again and again, 150 million people have been continuously let down. It seems some part of the population have become so used to it, they excuse the bad governance or else get blindly religious about it, saying, ‘God will make things better.’ I am tired of this unending hope and hunger for real change.

In March 2009, a campaign was launched with the aim of re-branding Nigeria’s battered reputation. This was the second attempt at this task. The first came in the era of former president, Olusegun Obasanjo; needless to mention, millions of dollars were wasted.

The new effort, headed by the Minister of Information, Dora Akunyili, was lambasted by the international media. The International Herald Tribune mocked it, saying ‘Nigeria tries to change image with marketing.’ In the same article, they would go on to describe Nigeria as a ‘chaotic country.’

The question is, what do the people behind the campaign want to re-brand; Nigeria as a nation, or just an image?

Nigerians have become well acquainted with notorious power outages, which can last from a day to three weeks or more. Primary healthcare and education have become a luxury only few can afford. State-provided healthcare and education are in shambles. There is a great lack of infrastructure. People have learnt to provide their own security due to the rampant rate at which armed criminals rob, kill and rape their victims. There is no rule of law when the Police Force is a law to itself. Those charged with protecting Nigerian citizens are mini-gods who feel privileged to do as they please, going as far as killing those they are supposed to protect.

Keeping these facts in mind, I am of the opinion that Nigeria needs to first re-brand itself to its own citizens, before it makes efforts to rebrand its image to the international community.

For three months, we have had no president to perform the duties for which he was elected. Within that time frame, a bitter and ferocious power struggle ensued.

Key ministers like the Information and Foreign Ministers were locked out of key decision meetings. There have been accusations that the signature, which supposedly gave the go-ahead for the Nigerian budget to be put into action, was forged. It is a struggle that has been characterised by rife rumours of the president’s death.

What has been more appalling is the fact that those in a position of authority to take action in his absence are themselves lame ducks, who did nothing until Nigerians started demanding answers. For the first time in years, I saw the power of the people reasonably at work in Nigeria, but my excitement is laced with caution.

I cringed as I listened to Christiane Amanpour on CNN on February 10th, as she interviewed Michael Aondonkaa, the former Chief Justice. He said, it was not strange that people had not seen the sick President, Umaru Yar’Adua, and Nigeria was not having a political crisis. I was greatly relieved at news of Aondonkaa’s demotion. A man who cannot identify a problem of great magnitude is not fit for office.

Nigeria's flag. Image: iStock

I wonder if there is any chance that the Vice President, Goodluck Jonathan, a man described by The Africa Report in its February – March edition as ‘amiable and intensely religious’ as the Acting President, will end months of political uncertainty and restore confidence. Since he took on his new role, the issue of the North and South divide remains prevalent. According to the constitution of the PDP, Jonathan’s political party, the leadership of Nigeria is based on regional rotation when the party is in power. To this I say, a country or political party that dictates who leads a nation based along the lines of religious and ethnic divides is a country lost to itself.

The New York Times referred to Goodluck Jonathan as an accidental leader in a February 19th piece. He is a man who has had to become leader when his predecessors can no longer function. The NYT also claimed that he has stirred up great hope. We wondered what would happen if President Yar’dua comes back to the country alive.

Well, Nigeria lived up to its reputation of being unpredictable. Two weeks after Goodluck Jonathan was given the role of Acting President, President Umaru Yar’Adua returned, though no one has seen or heard from him. He was met at the airport by an ambulance which is believed to be fitted with intensive care facilities. It does not seem like he is a man ready to lead a country.

Why did he return? Is it because he and his allies can sense their grip on power is slipping away or, as it is claimed, is it because the Saudi Arabian government wants to avoid a mounting diplomatic crisis? Whatever the reason for his return, it could not have been at a worse time, when some sense of hope and order was beginning to take form.

The power struggle continues, with claims that the office of the Vice President was ransacked by officials of the State Security Service (SSS) and that, the president’s wife, Turia Yar’Adua is now in control. So what’s next for Nigeria? If anyone has captured my thoughts and feelings, it would be the US Assistant Secretary of State, Johnnie Carson who said, “We hope that President Yar’Adua’s return to Nigeria is not an effort by his senior advisers to upset Nigeria’s stability and create renewed uncertainty in the democratic process.”

If Nigeria is to truly rebrand, we need a leader with surgical abilities and untainted scalpels to rid us of the disease of instability. It is going to be a painstaking process that we, Nigerians, may well not like and fight against. However, if we want change like we claim and are desperate to shed the ugly image being beamed across the globe, then this is the only way to do it.

Every muscle pulling us in the wrong direction must be extracted without second thought and for that we must be ready and willing to pay the price. Whether or not Goodluck Jonathan or President Umaru Yar’ Adua is the man for the job, is left to Nigerians to decide. In order to do that, though, they must rise up and speak up. Enough really is enough.

But the rise of the filibuster as the normal modus operandi in the Senate sticks a wrench in government machinery that will be very difficult to remove.

The Senate’s collapse is the single greatest threat to democracy that the United States has ever faced. What has happened? Throughout most of American history, the filibuster was a rarely used tool. Before the last decade, the filibuster was most noted for its infamous use by southern senators to hold up civil rights and anti-lynching legislation in the early and mid 20th century.

At that time, filibustering senators had to speak until the one side gave up. Strom Thurmond once gave a 24-hour speech filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

In recent years, both Democrats and Republicans have used the filibuster with greater frequency. During the 1990s and 2000s, the filibuster proved an occasional roadblock to legislation. But Republicans decided to rely on the filibuster as their main strategy to stop Democratic legislation after the 2008 election. Majority Leaders Harry Reid’s weak leadership has allowed this strategy to succeed, in part by not forcing Republicans to stand in front of the American people and defend themselves.

The filibuster’s appeal is twofold. First, it allows the party in minority to block legislation it dislikes. Second, it gives unprecedented power to individual senators. The first means that on anything but extremely popular legislation, the Senate will not be able to pass bills, making day-to-day governance impossible.

More infuriating is why so few senators want to reform the filibuster. If you are a conservative Democrat like Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, or Mary Landrieu, simple majority rule isolates you. If the Democrats need 51 votes to pass legislation, then these conservatives can vote with the Republicans and lose. But in a situation where 60 votes are needed, each and every Senator becomes that much more important.

Joe Lieberman can personally kill any bill he doesn’t like, making him exponentially more powerful. Not only is the system broken, but individual senators have a vested interest in ensuring that it stays that way.

The closest scenario to the present happened during the Great Depression. Fighting an unprecedented economic crisis in American history, President Franklin Roosevelt and large Democratic majorities in Congress passed sweeping legislation to overhaul the nation’s financial system, regulate business, and institute the beginnings of a welfare state for poor and elderly citizens. At a time when some European nations reacted to the Depression by turning toward fascism, Americans needed real reform to avoid radical threats of their own.

The Supreme Court, however, was dominated by members appointed by the conservative Republican presidents who preceded Roosevelt. The Court routinely ruled his programs unconstitutional and got in the way of the nation putting itself back together.

Roosevelt responded by trying to pack the court with additional justices. Calling the Supreme Court too old and out of touch, he wanted to add additional justices so his New Deal programs could be ruled constitutional. This challenge to America’s system of checks and balances outraged Americans and nearly brought down the New Deal.

As much as I love Roosevelt, he was wrong there. The Founding Fathers designed the Supreme Court as arbiters of the law. While I strongly disagree with the Court’s decisions, as an institution, it worked precisely as designed.

Today, a few senators are calling for reforming the filibuster. Senator Tom Udall was the first to support changing the rules. In the past week, Udall’s ideas have gained momentum. Tom Harkin and Jeanne Shaheen have unveiled a plan to weaken the filibuster. That plan has the support of the powerful Democratic senator Dick Durbin.

However, I am deeply skeptical about real filibuster reform. Though all Republicans will bitterly complain when Democrats use the filibuster against them, they are too shortsighted to see the long-term advantages of majority rule. The filibuster is stalling Obama now, so what Republican will vote to change it? Between Republicans and empowered conservative Democrats, I believe that meaningful reform has almost no chance to pass.

Republicans don’t seem to realize that Democrats will use the same tactics when they lose the majority. Perhaps the Republicans are counting on weak centrist Democrats fleeing their party on routine voting matters, but given that a filibuster only needs forty-one votes, it’s unlikely Republicans will find controlling the Senate much easier than Democrats.

The upshot of an unregulated filibuster will be unprecedented executive rule. This logical way around the filibuster is also very worrisome. Presidents will increasingly rule by executive order. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush frequently resorted to this. Barack Obama has resisted, but his talk of changing the tone in Washington has collided head-on with reality.

While executive orders make sense from the president’s perspective, an increased reliance upon executive power could permanently tilt governmental power to the presidency. This could destroy the system of checks and balances that underpinned the nation’s long-term political stability and leave the nation vulnerable to presidents unilaterally ruling as demagogues. We already saw more than a hint of this during the Bush years.

I fear the Senate’s decline will make Bush-like presidents the rule rather than the exception. And neither the nation nor the world can live with that outcome.

It’s not that I am particularly happy to note how easily the promises of the Orange Revolution were squandered, and how bitter and disenfranchised the majority of the Ukrainian electorate is. It brings me no joy to point out that in this country, people must worry about everything from the skyrocketing price of cheese to the stoking of mass hysteria surrounding swine flu, before they worry about which one of their candidates is pro-Western enough.

Still, it does bring me joy to mock Professor Kuzio’s sage advice from on high. I’m sure he can take it in stride. He’s not the one who just had to help bandage his kid brother’s arm because the ice on the streets of the capital is not getting cleaned up, and people are falling left and right, falling on the way to the polls to cast ballots for candidates who rarely deal with the reality of what it means to be an average Ukrainian. The way I see it, people who urge Ukrainian voters to lay aside petty practical concerns and see the big picture are getting off easy.

Here is where Victor Yanukovych comes in. Yanukovich, you might recall, was the reason why 2004’s Orange Revolution happened in the first place. His initial win in that election was declared to be the result of electoral fraud. Undaunted by his reputation as a Kremlin shill, Yanukovych hunkered down in the opposition and set about re-branding himself. And after the pathos and euphoria of the Orange Revolution had passed, after political deadlock seized the country, after President Victor Yuschenko utterly failed to unite Ukraine on most issues, Yanukovych began to seem more and more appealing.

Most outsiders do not quite understand the charm of Victor Yanukovych. He is not particularly eloquent. He has two criminal convictions under his belt. He is, in many ways, just as divisive of a leader as Victor Yuschenko turned out to be. But for a narrow majority of voters, Yanukovych represents a chance at stability. He is solid and calm, the very opposite of flashy. He has pledged to introduce Russian as a second state language, an issue which is seen as crucial by millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who get as fired up about it as the American conservative base does about abortion. For a man of his background, he is often surprisingly mild-mannered. His campaign slogan, “A Ukraine for human beings,” belies a certain uncomfortable truth about standards of living in this country.

"I've lived a complicated life!" Victor Yanukovych on the cover of Korrespondent. Image: Yanukovych.com.ua

“There is no one in charge in this country,” a taxi driver told me bitterly as he attempted to navigate a snow-choked street in the early morning the other day. His sentiment is one that, I believe, was echoed by millions of Ukrainians as they cast their vote. Combine this with low voter turn-out in Western Ukraine, for all intents and purposes the birthplace of the Orange Revolution, and Yanukovych’s projected win makes total sense.

For a symbol of a failed revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, who was beaten very narrowly just now, has shown remarkable tenacity. “She belongs in the opposition,” a member of Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions recently said on television. “She has that contrarian spirit.” The remark, meant to be dismissive, does highlight an important element of Tymoshenko’s politics: she appears to really hit her stride while in active conflict. Opposition politics are as crucial in Ukraine as they were five years ago, and they will continue to be crucial. When life in the country is not improving, however, in-fighting becomes exhausting. One can hope, though, that as far as her political activity is concerned, Tymoshenko will not simply take her toys and go home.

In the meantime, Ukraine remains as divided as ever. Expectations are low, which is dangerous, because low expectations automatically mean complacency on part of leaders.

Perhaps Serhiy Tihipko, who came in third during the first round of elections and is considered by many to be a breath of fresh air, will start building a decent coalition for a new opposition while everyone is still going on about Tymoshenko’s tiger and Yanukovych’s oligarch allies.

I read the speech the next day. It was better—but still a stump speech. Talk of a spending freeze that doesn’t include defense spending leaves me more angry than impressed. But I had to turn on the TV (well, the YouTube) two days later and watch a rather different kind of Obama event, one that’s since been dubbed “Question Time” after the British tradition of letting the opposition party at the Prime Minister for some unbridled fun—er, questioning.

After Joe Wilson’s shout during that health care speech, I called for less “respect” and more engagement, more criticism. Well, there were no shouts of “you lie!” at the Republican Issues Retreat, where Obama was allowed to speak his (predictable) piece and then took questions from the (white) Representatives gathered.

Indeed, the only accusations of lying came from Obama, delivered with a grin at some times, at others with a stern look and a list of the actual facts.

It was great political theater, and as many who watched the event live tweeted, it made many former supporters like the president again. He certainly ran rings around many of the reps who got up to make stump speeches of their own, grandstanding in front of a mic before the President inevitably picked apart their statements.

There was a birth certificate joke, but the wilder accusations didn’t come. There were no questions about death panels, and Michelle Bachmann was nowhere to be seen. It’s harder to lie boldly to someone’s face, I suppose.

As for Obama, he was funny, self-possessed, and capable of substantive answers to any number of gotchas. He should be funny more often. Funny breaks through to people—it keeps unrestrained anger and fear from growing. You get angry at someone, but you can laugh with them.

He also managed to slide in subtle put-downs that were red meat for progressives watching, repeating the need to find “credible” economists to support Republican proposals (though the credibility of his own economic team is hardly impeccable) and “health care experts.” His tone shifted depending on who he spoke to—Marsha Blackburn’s voice oozed condescension the way John McCain’s did during debates, but Obama coolly out-condescended her, reducing his sentences to one-syllable words.

So, yes, the event rallied the troops for Obama, and Republican reaction afterward indicated that they knew he’d won the debate.

But more importantly, this was a victory for transparency and for a possible real change in the way things are done in Washington.

Perhaps we were only riveted by the fact that it was a new event. Certainly the fact that veteran Washington reporters like Mother Jones’ David Corn called the event “gripping” says something for the novelty of the moment.

Corn wrote:

Obama campaigned to bring change to Washington. Regular public encounters between the president and the opposition party would be real change. (It might even have an impact on what sort of politician could consider becoming president.) NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd tweeted that Obama “will win tons of pundit plaudits but will policy come out of it?” Yet good debate can shape good policy. Here was an unfiltered exchange between the opposing camps of Washington. Citizens could watch and decide.

This morning, there’s a petition calling for more events of this nature. Tweeters quickly hashtagged it #questiontime and demanded more as well, and different events: many of us would like to see Obama take questions from, say, the House Progressive Caucus and have to defend his left flank, or even have a similar roasting of the Blue Dogs.

Imagine the president not only taking very basic, pointed questions from average citizens at town hall meetings on a regular basis, but fielding the questions of the opposition party for prime-time TV cameras. It would change the debate. Hyperbole and lies would have less traction if they had to, at some point, be said to someone else’s face and not a flock of fawning reporters. It’s like high school—it’s much easier to start a rumor and deny you said it later than to be forced to say it out loud.

And yet, what does it say about our news media that we have to call on the president to take questions from the opposition in order to hear him answer their points? None of the GOP talking points broached were exactly new—I was slightly surprised to hear a Republican offering a Democratic president a line-item veto, but most of the talking points were predictable deficit, spending, deficit, spending, health care, entitlements, why won’t you listen to us? These are age-old party ideas, cornerstones of their platform, even, that any White House reporter worth her press badge could ask at any press conference.

They don’t.

Transparency from the administration is a good thing. Public debate is a good thing. Yet many of the Washington reporters cheering this event could put the president on the hot seat any time they wanted just by asking serious, difficult questions.

I would take more events like this one over more prime-time speeches, certainly, and I suspect after the performance here, Obama’s people are rethinking their strategy. They certainly were reminded that the best weapon in their arsenal is the fact that this president is not a nitwit or an empty suit, and that part of his appeal has always been his ability to talk about issues in a way that people can understand, at least as much as his stirring hope-and-change rhetoric.

But I’d also love it if the White House press corps took some lessons from the Republican representatives—yes, I said it—and actually pressed the president when they have access to him on policy issues.

In fact, there were only two real contrasts – the first, and most obvious, being health care reform, which we will leave aside for the moment. After ignoring the previous administration’s excellent tutorial on party discipline, the Democrats have screwed this particular pooch to the point where all that remains is for it to slowly bleed out from its rectal hemorrhages.

The second was mostly unspoken – McDonnell didn’t address it, and the President gave the subject a mere 38 words:

This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are. It’s the right thing to do.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama pledged to be a “fierce advocate” for LGBT rights. Ending the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy (along with a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act) was one of his more visible campaign promises. During Obama’s transition, press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked if the President would “get rid of” DADT, as he had the right to do by executive order. Gibbs’ reply: “you don’t hear politicians give a one-word answer much, but it’s yes.”

One year later, DADT is still the law of the land, and the democrats have done absolutely nothing on DOMA. In addition, the Obama administration is actively fighting an order from federal circuit judge Alex Kozinski to provide equal benefits to court employees.

While some gay rights advocates are encouraged that the President has finally set a time-frame for action on DADT, the time-frame given is not one for the end of the policy, but rather for beginning to “work with” Congress on the issue. And while it is true a permanent end to DADT will require Congress to repeal the statute, President Obama has complete authority as commander in chief to issue a stop-loss order suspending its implementation.

The President refuses to do this on the grounds that the administration can’t just suspend the enforcement of laws it doesn’t like. However, there is ample legal precedent for doing so – in fact, just a few months ago the administration suspended enforcement of the “widow’s penalty” (deporting foreign nationals when their American spouses die) so that Congress would have time to “fix the law.”

And while I am disappointed with Obama’s stance – particularly his willingness to fight Judge Kozinski – I understand. Tackling gay rights is a messy business. It gets all them “real ‘merikuns” up in your face. And if they’re repressed, closeted real ‘merikuns, they might get up somewhere even less pleasant. So why make this divisive, unpleasant, messy issue a major part of your campaign? The answer is, as they say in campaign circles, the “gay ATM.”

The Democratic party makes up approximately 35 percent of the American populace, and the LGBT community around five percent. Given that most LGBT folks are Democrats and are, on average, much more politically active (and therefore likely to donate), queers make up a sizeable chunk of the party’s human and financial capital. And this doesn’t even count the sizeable number of straight allies who, like myself, find codified discrimination repugnant and for whom marriage equality is an absolute moral imperative. Taking us all together, it is probably an understatement to say that individuals with a personal stake in LGBT equality contribute a third of the party’s resources.

The Dems need our time, our effort, our money. But it’s messy and unpleasant to actually deliver the goods. So they keep on making promises, and we keep letting them make withdrawals. After all, what are we going to do, vote for Sarah Palin?

But as 2009 dragged on, and the administration’s inaction continued, more and more LGBT activists (Dan Savage chief among them) suggested we shut down the gay ATM until we start seeing results. And after last night’s State of the Union, I have to agree, at least in part. We haven’t gotten anything of substance from Obama and the Democrats in over a year. And with his speech last night, Obama deftly pulled the plug on his trademark issue – hope.

I can hear the protests already. “Shut down the gay ATM, and the Democrats will lose, and things will be even worse off than they are now.” First off, that’s not really true. Change doesn’t happen because of politicians. Change happens because society demands it. In this vein, we have to remember that the greatest advances in gay rights happened under George W. Bush. When the dear old coke-head took office, civil unions didn’t exist, and it was illegal to be gay in 14 states. When he left office, half the country had civil unions or domestic partnerships, and we had full marriage equality in five states.

Secondly, this treats the situation as an either/or. Either we donate to the Democrats in exchange for paying lip service (and not the good kind) to our issues. Or we sit at home and do nothing. But that’s not really the choice we have – there are more effective ways to spend our time and money.

Barack Obama alone raised nearly $700 million during the 2008 campaign. Without the gay ATM, John McCain might’ve won a couple more states. But just think about what Lambda Legal, GLAAD, Equality California, or the American Foundation for Equal Rights could do with $200 million.

The late Mother Teresa once said that her ministry required her to “give until it hurts.” And in 2008, we in the LGBT equality movement did her one better. We gave until we bled. And we must keep bleeding. Our conscience demands no less. As for you, Barack, I’m still going to vote for you in 2012 (unless of course the tea-baggers start using ganja tea and nominate Barney Frank), but after tonight, I’m giving my ATM card and pin to Lambda Legal.

Rather than dealing with the issues that lead to violent action, the default answer has been racial profiling. Birmingham Labour MP Perry Barr Khalid Mahmood, who is Muslim, stated:

“I think most people would rather be profiled than blown up… It wouldn’t be victimisation of an entire community. If people want to fly safely, we have to take measures to stop things like the Christmas Day plot. Profiling may have to be the price we have to pay. The fact is the majority of people who have carried out or planned these terror attacks have been Muslims.”

This mirrors Anne Coulter’s rhetoric: “Not every Muslim is a terrorist, but every terrorist is a Muslim.” This kind of logic can only be understood if the working definition of terrorist is applicable only to those who practice Islam. It further characterizes all Westerners as good and pure, thereby demonizing Muslims.

On January 4th, it was reported that a Molotov cocktail (bomb) had been thrown inside of largest mosque in Hamilton, Ontario. The mosque is also the home of the Islamic School of Hamilton. The school educates two hundred children between kindergarten and grade eight. Fortunately, no one was injured in the attack. According to the Hamilton Spectator, the police are investigating the attack as a hate crime. This is the second time this mosque has been attacked. Nowhere in the reporting on this incident have the words “terrorist attack” been used.

MP David Christopherson expressed his pleasure that this incident was being investigated by the police and declared, “We have racism in our community, but we are not a racist society.” I suppose it was accidental that both times in which there has been an air attack on the U.S. by a Muslim, this mosque has been attacked. It certainly could not speak to the ways in which Canadians view those practicing the Muslim faith.

According to the L.A Times, a burned and torn copy of the Koran was found during New Year’s Day prayers at the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County. The proximity to the attempted bombing on Christmas Day suggests that this event was meant to terrorize the local Muslim community as a twisted kind of retribution.

The Telegraph reports that Cradley Heath Mosque and Islamic Centre in Plant Street, near Dudley in the West Midlands, was burned to the ground on Boxing Day. The fire crews have determined that the fire was set intentionally:

“This is not the first time we have been targeted,” said Vasharat Ali, secretary of the mosque and Islamic centre. “There was a similar attack four or five years ago.”

It is not only mosques that have been attacked. Muslim women have repeatedly had their headscarves ripped from their heads. Victims like Rehana Sidat have found that the justice system has failed to properly punish the perpetrators. Being ordered to pay fines and issue apologies has done nothing to halt these violent attacks.

Violence against Muslims and desecration mosques is on the rise. We do not see these incidents as terrorist acts or even as interconnected. This kind of compartmentalization allows Westerners to avoid the label of “terrorist,” thus further stigmatizing Muslims.

In news reports, the actions of one become indicative of all of those who practice the Muslim faith. The communal approach to cast a culture and people as deviant is not unique to Muslims; in fact, this is a social practice that we can see in attacks against the GLBT community, Blacks, and the differently abled. What is interesting about this phenomenon is that when it is experienced, it is easy to identify it for what it is; only when our personal biases come to the forefront do we forget what it is to be a victim of this type of profiling and social intolerance.

We often demand that the Muslim community identify those who have violent intentions, yet no such pressure is placed upon the larger Western society to regulate those who are Islamophobic. Their actions are understood to be acceptable, because they are framed as reactionary. This, in turn, erases our communal responsibility for the violent actions that Western governments have engaged in for decades in the Middle East.

Is there really a difference between strapping an explosive to yourself to blow up a building or plane and dropping bombs which kill people whose eyes you will never see? Is there really any difference between the extremist language on Islamic websites and the burning of the Koran or spraying graffiti on the walls of a mosque?

We resist having conversations on our communal responsibility because in Jihad vs McWorld, the roles have already been assigned and everyone knows that not only do the “good guys” wear white, they generally are White. This is specifically why in all of conversations regarding profiling, we continually fail to acknowledge that White Muslims do indeed exist. The policies that the Western world hopes to invoke serve two purposes; they normalize Islamophobia and insist that people of colour are backward and violent. This is seen a win-win for the ruling elite.

Western nations are secular and yet religion is often the basis of sanctioned attacks on Middle Eastern countries. In our decidedly God-fearing societies, we extol the merits of Christianity, pretending that events like the crusades and the Spanish Inquisition did not occur. History can only be your friend when it highlights your virtues rather than reveals that you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. When Europe was still mired in superstition, the Middle East was the home of human advancement; however, to truly own that history would require admitting that no single group represents the best of human achievement.

McWorld Vs Jihad is truly an outmoded binary. A reductionist understanding of human social engagements just leads to more violence and bloodshed. The supposed victor, in the end, will rewrite the history of these events and the defeated will be silenced and ignored; however, we all will have lost the opportunity to understand that it is our differences, rather than our similarities, which make us a unique and beautiful species. One man’s terrorist will always and forever be another man’s hero. We would at least manage to understand that, if our purpose truly was honouring the sanctity of human life.

The American right’s shrill attacks on environmentalism, accusing it of being a left wing conspiracy, are deeply unhelpful. How anyone can cast the likes of multi-millionaire tobacco heir Al Gore as a friend of the working person is a mystery, but unfortunately, his role as poster boy for the green movement has given a propaganda victory to those who seek to restrict the growth in incomes, allowing them to portray themselves as being on the side of those they seek to hurt.

The history of environmentalism is the history of the right. From its beginnings in Romantic opposition to the Enlightenment through the Nazi party of Germany, Europe’s first green party, to the Club of Rome in the 1970s, environmentalism has always been the political expression of the elite’s hatred for the masses.

The Club of Rome, a conservative think-tank founded by industrialists and diplomats, predicted in its 1972 manifesto ‘The Limits to Growth’ that tin reserves would be depleted by 1985, zinc by 1988, that petroleum oil would run out in 1990 and natural gas in 1992. The Club of Rome’s crude Malthusianism proved to be entirely incorrect – and yet its ideology lives on in endless scares about resource scarcity, scares that misunderstand the nature humanity’s relationship with resources: uranium was not a resource to Victorians, for example.

The root of green demands to restrict consumption is a distaste for the ‘lower orders’. British readers will, of course, be familiar with the figure of David Attenborough. Attenborough, brother of film director Richard, was the television naturalist who inspired generations with a sense of wonder at the natural world. His documentary films are the touchstone for natural history, each and every one a classic.

Sadly, Attenborough has now joined the ranks of the bossy greens who want to save the planet from humanity, signing-up to front a repugnant political cause. By becoming patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), Attenborough has put his sights squarely on the seething mass of humanity. The OPT opposes immigration, seeking a one-in, one-out policy it calls “balanced migration” and says “there is no unlimited right to have children,” views shared by the loathed British National Party which is regularly pilloried as fascist or even “Nazi” by liberal commentators.

The BNP’s policies of ‘blood and soil’ are anathema to right-thinking people, but strip away the crude racial caricatures and similar prejudices are common dinner party fodder in the leafy suburbs of every city in the Western world. Suburbs, incidentally, that are considered in some essential way different – and superior – to newer suburbs where the working class have settled, finally able to buy their own homes. Screeds against ‘unsustainable development’ are simply warmed-over rehashes of the anti-working class scares over so-called ‘ribbon development’ from the 1920s.

Green assaults on those with no money take on even more overt forms abroad, though. Rich Westerners are greedily buying-up potentially productive land in the Second and Third Worlds, land that could feed people, in the name of saving the planet. Green charity Cool Earth has bought-up 121,713 acres (49,256 hectares) of land in the Amazon despite opposition from local tribal leaders including Davi Kopenawa Yanomami. Cool Earth was founded by Johan Eliasch, the chairman of sporting goods manufacturer Head, and former adviser on ‘green conservatism’ to one-time British Conservative party leader William Hague. Eliasch’s project is colonialism, pure and simple.

No-longer merely a folly of the super-rich, such carbon offsetting schemes are one of the few growth ‘industries’ around today and, like all industries before them, get around the tendency of the rate of profit to all by expanding into new markets. Carbon offsetting schemes now allow the West’s guilt-ridden middle classes to take productive land out of use in order to grow trees, often in developing countries such as India.

Increasingly, that land which is used for production is used in the least efficient way possible. Organic farming, which ignores almost all food science not to mention the amazing humanitarianism of Norman Bourlag’s Green Revolution, is in the process of moving from being a semiotic prejudice of the well-fed to a real danger to the well-being of the starving. By whipping-up an unjustified panic about the safety of genetically modified crops, organic fanatics are condemning millions of people to, at best, lives of penury and squalor – and, at worst, to death.

It is true that greens do rail against capitalism, but not because the anarchic nature of capitalist production is incapable of satisfying human need and desire. Instead, green critiques of capitalism are aesthetic and moralising in nature. Support for ‘local producers’ and ’small shops’ expose the reactionary and petit bourgeois nature of environmentalism – any student of the twentieth century will tell you that the localist and petit bourgeois agenda is driven primarily by the fear of being squeezed from above by capital and below by the working class. It is on this bedrock of feared immiseration that fascism was built.

However, capitalism isn’t actually anti-green. Nor are greens really anti-capitalist. What they are is opposed to the sole progressive features of capitalism: its tendency to universalise development through the division of labour and increasing capital investment resulting in lower prices for mas produced goods.

The latest green wheeze, carbon trading, is the most astonishing of all: selling thin-air. The inevitable result of carbon trading will be unemployment as it encourages a further retreat from industrial production into the ‘post-material’ exchange of legal titles.

In fact, green scaremongering has given today’s capitalists cover for their ongoing retreat from production. The creation of farcical carbon trading markets is simply the next logical step in the process of deindustrialisation which has seen the creation of increasingly unstable economies built on the replacement of manufacturing with complex but unproductive financial instruments. The defining characteristic of the current global recession is that, unlike those that preceded it, it is not a result of capitalism’s periodic crises of ‘overproduction’. Rather, today’s collapse is a result of the cold, hard reality of underinvestment productive forces – making money from the fantast of the financialised ‘weightless’ economy could only go on for so long.

István Mészáros pointed out as far back as the 1970s that what is now called ’sustainability’ is merely an apologia for the current socio-economic order and it is becoming increasingly clear that the prejudices that inform the sustainability agenda are just that. No-one wants to live in a polluted environment and nobody should have to, but people must come first – and exaggerating threats to ‘the planet’ do nothing to serve the needs of humanity.