PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Clifford Berrette, 11 years old and 4 feet tall, moved like a determined little man through the choking exhaust of the bus terminal in scuffed white sneakers, unnoticed in the crush of people hurrying to leave town.

He picked up a rag from the ground and began to wipe the dirt off a blue minibus, clambering up bumpers and tires to reach the high spots. A taller boy started to clean the vehicle too, but Clifford wasn't going to let him horn in; he shoved him away. Then he extended a small palm to the driver.

"Pretty good job with just a rag," driver Gilbert Pierre said, handing Clifford 25 gourdes, about 50 cents. Beaming with pride, Clifford retreated to the shade, removed one of his sneakers and put the money inside.

It would be safe there until he could give it to his mother. "She promised to cook food tonight if I brought her money," he said.

A child made the man of the family too soon, Clifford works the margins of an urban landscape that's all margins. He's what Haitians call a kokorat, one of more than 4,000 children who work the streets of Port-au-Prince, the capital, hustling for coins and food, and sleeping wherever they grow tired.

In the three weeks since a massive earthquake struck, Clifford has moved through the maze of ravaged streets -- his streets -- like a post-apocalyptic Oliver Twist. Following him over the last week, it was clear that Clifford was a skilled survivor in a hard, unforgiving city of survivors.

But something else was clear: He was just a little boy.

The quake strikes

Clifford was begging for loose change outside the presidential palace when the quake knocked him to the ground -- five times, he said -- and the palace crumbled behind him. He didn't know it, but his mother and 5-year-old sister also were on the street, panhandling in front of the main cathedral, which also was toppling.

Begging probably saved their lives.

His mother, Natalie Pierre Charles, hurried back to their home, a one-room shack on St. Aude Road. She had left her younger daughter, who was 2, with a neighbor. The neighbor escaped with a broken leg, but her daughter didn't make it out. Her body still hasn't been recovered.

For nine days, Charles searched for her son in his usual begging haunts. She asked friends if they'd seen him, but they all said they thought he was dead. She went to stay with an uncle, sleeping in the open foyer of his collapsed home.

Clifford had spent that first night sleeping on a concrete wall in the Champs des Mars, a park across from the palace, where thousands had gathered. The next day, he panhandled some change, and then he did what any a kid might do: He used the money to rent a bike for an hour.

"I didn't have anything to do for fun," he said.

He spotted his mother on the street a day later, but he hid. "I thought she'd be mad at me," he said.

It wasn't until a week later that his mother found Clifford, eating rice someone had given him. Her first words were: "Can I have some of what you're eating?"

As they ate, she told him that his baby sister had died in the quake. For the first time in a week, he cried.

10 days after the quake

Clifford, wearing a tattered shirt, was at a Total gas station near the uncle's house, begging for coins from a long line of motorists and passengers. He was barefoot; he had taken his shoes off and put them out of sight so he looked even more deprived. His usual sweet-faced smile disappeared, replaced by an expression of utter misery as he held out his hand.

The take, after an hour, was about 50 cents.

Then he walked to the national soccer stadium, where displaced people had gathered, now a brutally hot bowl smelling of cooking fires and urine. He joined a group of boys kicking a soccer ball and was soon racing nimbly up and down the field, his worries left behind.

Later, American troops arrived to give out packages of food, and a mass of people crushed toward them. Clifford scaled a gate and wormed his way along the ground, popping up along a fence in front of the troops. But the food was gone before it was his turn.

Clifford spent the night with the family of a friend he'd made on the soccer field. He didn't know the boy's name.

12 days after

Clifford decided he wanted his soccer ball, so he made his way home, to the shack on St. Aude Road.

"Everything's crumbled," he said, trying to absorb what he saw. Homes and businesses on the twisting dirt road had collapsed and left piles of broken cinder block on the road, which was slashed with deep gashes opened by the quake. Some buildings tilted precariously on their foundations, as if seen through a fun-house mirror.

Clifford climbed over the wreckage to a rocky ravine and the small room where he, his mother and two sisters had slept on a single piece of plywood covered with carpet. The shack's rusted, corrugated-iron walls and roof were intact. Goats and pigs roamed nearby.

As he approached the door, Clifford saw something covered in blue plastic. Was it a body? He was too afraid to find out, soccer ball or no soccer ball. He fled.

That night, Clifford decided that he wanted to stay with his mother. He fell asleep on a sheet of cardboard with his sister, Bebe, and a friend.

13 days after

In the morning, a long queue formed near the palace, where United Nations troops from Brazil were handing out family packs of food.

Clifford, wearing a blue shirt that someone had given his mother, cut in line. But by the time he got to the front, the soldiers had run out of food packs and were handing out packages of crackers and two bottles of water. He didn't mind -- he had scored.

As he walked away, he ran into his mother and gave her some of his crackers and the water. Then he sneaked back into line for another handout.

Sitting in the shade of an almond tree, he shared his food and water with several passers-by. "When he haves, he gives," his mother said. "He's a good boy."

Later, he tried to cut in line again. But this time people complained to one of the blue-helmeted soldiers, who gently shooed him away.

As the sun set, he walked back to the stadium, dodging pedestrians and the groaning, brightly painted buses known as tap-taps. He was tired, and all he wanted to do was play soccer.

14 days after

Clifford was back at the gas station. He hadn't eaten since the day before at the stadium. ("A nice lady there gave me some rice and gravy," he said.) And his mother had told him that she'd make him a meal if he brought her some money.

It was tough going. "Even when they have money, they won't give," he said. He took a break to watch with fascination as a woman skillfully used a knife to peel oranges, which she was selling from a plastic bucket. A young pastor driving a pickup took pity on him and gave him 50 gourdes -- about $1.

The creole word for begging is bwose, and the streets are filled with people doing it. "I sometimes feel really bad when I have to bwose," Clifford said. He'd rather have a job, he said, but that's not an option for a young boy.

He strolled a few blocks to Portail Leogane, the staging point for buses headed to the countryside south of Port-au-Prince. As he walked, he picked up a long strip of sugar cane bark from the road and playfully twirled it with one hand. A one-legged man struggling with crutches caught his eye, and he walked up for a closer look.

At the terminal, sweltering passengers were sitting inside large buses, awaiting departure. Looking up at the windows, Clifford called out, asking passengers if they needed anything. One said he wanted a cell phone case, so he found a peddler. That got him a tip of about 10 cents.

As he roamed the station, he paused to write the word "police," in English, on the dusty window of a minivan. He rubbed it out with his hand.

Later, Clifford said he wants to be a policeman when he grows up, "because then no one will mess with me."

Natalie Charles is a small, thin woman of 27. When Clifford was 9, she worked as a cleaning woman. She earned enough to pay the $14-a-month rent on the shack and had enough to put Clifford in school. The school fees were about $30 a year; she paid them what she had, $20.

Each night, she remembers, Clifford would come home from school and show her how he was learning to write his name. "He's a very intelligent boy," she said.

But she couldn't pay the $10 she owed and, after three months, the school kicked him out.

She has relied on her son to support her since they were reunited after the quake. She's tried to beg for money, she said, but "people tell me they are as bad off as I am." A child, she knows, particularly one as cute as Clifford, has an easier time. And survival, not guilt, was foremost on her mind.

Charles never knows, from one night to the next, whether her son will be home.

"Clifford doesn't like to be around a lot of people at night," she said. "It's difficult for him to share a bed."

Her dream is that someday, someone "will help me take care of him, so he can do something good with his life, something better than he's doing now."

15 days after

In the afternoon, Clifford was back in front of the palace, where the U.N. soldiers were handing out large bags of rice to hundreds of people lined up in the sweltering heat.

Clifford sneaked into the line and waited. A man approached, offering 25 cents to take Clifford's place. He accepted and, a few minutes later, cut in line again. This time, he made it to the front, collecting his rice.

Holding the bag with both arms, he headed off to see his mother, but a man cut him off and demanded that he hand over the rice. Frightened, Clifford gave him half the bag -- but he made sure he got some money too, about $3.

That night, Clifford's mother borrowed charcoal from a friend. She was going to make Clifford and his sister a proper dinner.

Often I find myself working with my Drupal sites to install add-on modules in order to add some functionality I need or want. In the past the way I did this was by first downloading the module I wanted to my local computer, unzipping it, and then uploading it to my web server that hosts  my Drupal site.

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If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that Mollom is a continual work in progress. By studying how people use Mollom, by listening to feature requests, and by examining the plugins that our software partners and others have made available, we've introduced new ways to interact with Mollom.

First, we're announcing support for blacklisting. We introduced two new methods: one based on detecting the presence of user-specified URLs, and another that detects specific phrases or keywords. In both cases, Mollom maintains custom, site-specific URL and text blacklists, and knows to search for the presence of these links or phrases when analyzing text for your site. We're adding support for this API to the next version of the Mollom module for Drupal.

read more

At least five people died and 12 more were injured after a massive gas line explosion at a power plant in Middletown, Conn., the city's mayor said. But officials acknowledge they don't yet have a clear idea of the death toll.

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Dr. Margaret Flowers at Mad As Hell Doctors Rally, 9-30-09

At least Bill Moyers hasn’t forgotten about the fight for straight-up single-payer (aka “Medicare for All”) healthcare financing.

This Friday, he interviewed Margaret Flowers, MD, Congressional Fellow with Physicians for National Health Program, fresh from yet another arrest attempting to keep single payer on the table.

Last week, Dr. Flowers and her colleague Dr. Carol Paris were arrested in Baltimore attempting to respond to the President’s disingenuous call in his SOTU address. You know the line:

If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.

They were attempting to deliver yet another request for the White House to examine single payer on the merits, especially since it meets all of Obama’s stated criteria for ideas worth entertaining. Instead, they got arrested.

Dr. Flowers was arrested last May, as part of the Baucus 13, attempting to get the Senate Finance Committee to include single-payer advocates in their hearing. Moyers subsequently devoted an entire show to single payer, on May 22.

By the way, in case you didn’t know, Bill Moyers’ Journal and its sister program, Now, are about to go off the air. More on that, including PBS’s cardboard-flavored response to a petition to keep progressive voices on the network, from FAIR.

(Photo of Dr. Flowers speaking in Washington on September 30, 2009, at the rally marking the end of the nationwide trek of the Mad As Hell Doctors)

Editor’s note: letsgetitdone also has a diary on Dr. Flowers

 

12% of those watching the Super Bowl last year also kept one eye on the web, according to analytics firm Nielsen. The average time spent online was 24 minutes.

What’s most remarkable about the stats is that most people aren’t visiting sports sites during the Super Bowl: only 18% of those online visited sports sites. Rather, users are either searching, checking email or spending time on social networks.

The most popular destination for Super Bowl viewers last year? Facebook.

Do you plan to go online during the Super Bowl? Let us know in the comments.

[via Nielsen]

[image courtesy of iStockphoto, spxChrome]

Reviews: Facebook, iStockphoto

Tags: facebook, Super Bowl, Superbowl, trending

America ponders the options for a big rocket

photo: mattwi1s0n via Flickr

In a report at Truthout, Andy Worthington described a new UN report on secret detention policies by governments around the world. The report, available in an advance, unedited version here (long PDF), concentrates on the situation over the last nine years, with “a detailed account of US policies… and also running through the practice of secret detention in 25 other countries, including Algeria, China, Egypt, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Libya, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Uganda and Zimbabwe.”

A major new report on secret detention policies around the world, conducted by four independent UN human rights experts, concludes that, “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem,” and that, “If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a crime against humanity”….

Of particular concern to the authors of the Joint Study — beyond the overall illegality of the entire project conceived and executed by the Bush administration — is the fate of dozens of men held in secret prisons run by the CIA, or transferred by the CIA to prisons in other countries. Based on figures disclosed in one of the Office of Legal Counsel’s notorious “torture memos” (PDF), written in May 2005 by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bradbury, the CIA had, by May 2005, “taken custody of 94 prisoners [redacted] and ha[d] employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these detainees.”

The 28 men subjected to “enhanced techniques” are clearly the “high-value detainees” — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Abu Zubaydah and twelve others — who were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, but no official account has ever explained what happened to the other 14 “high-value detainees,” or, indeed, to the majority of the other 66 men.

Tracking the missing men has been difficult, and the report looks into the various black prison sites in Afghanistan, including Bagram. In addition, the report examines “the cases of 35 men rendered by the CIA to Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Morocco, between 2001 and 2004.” For many of these “ghost prisoners”, we have no idea of where they were ultimately sent, or even if they are even alive.

The Bagram Project

Andy Worthington has begun a project on Bagram prisoners not dissimilar to the research he conducted on the Guantanamo prisoners, which culminated in the excellent book, The Guantanamo Files. Ever since the Pentagon released a list of the names of 645 prisoners it was holding at Bagram as of September 22, 2009 (PDF).

Worthington has been examining this list, and trying to determine who many of these prisoners are, as well as who may be missing from the list.

However, although it is probable that a number of former “ghost prisoners” have been repatriated to face death or further detention, it is not inconceivable that some prisoners were not included in the list because they are being held elsewhere — perhaps in a corner of Bagram to which the list does not extend.

One indication that this is so is the apparent omission from the list of Amanatullah Ali, a Pakistani who was seized by British forces in Iraq in 2004 and rendered to Bagram. His detention in Bagram has been confirmed through letters to his family, and his story, which was told by David Rose in Britain’s Mail on Sunday on December 9, is significant not only because it sheds light on the British government’s complicity in the Bagram rendition program, but also because it reveals the extent to which depriving the prisoners of the right to challenge the basis of their detention perpetuates the same mistakes that were made at Guantánamo.

Andy is producing an annotated version of the Bagram prisoner list, and you can read the initial form of it here. He asks that if anyone has any further information about any of the names on this list to email him.

Obama OLC Supports Indefinite Detention Policies, or Marty Lederman Turns to the Dark Side

As I was reading the articles on the secret detentions, I was reminded that Obama’s Office of Legal Council (OLC) has been quite active in promoting indefinite detentions for some of the Guantanamo prisoners. According to Joe Palazzolo at Main Justice, OLC — which under Bush’s appointees Yoo and Bybee had authored the memos approving torture — has been quite active in advising Department of Justice attorneys who are fighting the habeas cases of Guantanamo prisoners in the federal courts. OLC also “worked closely with the [detention] task force that recently completed a yearlong review of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. The task force determined that of the 198 detainees at the military-run prison, about 50 are unprosecutable but thought to be too dangerous to transfer [i.e., they will be held indefinitely, without charges], underscoring the importance of the habeas corpus cases — the chief means for testing the Obama administration’s detention regime.

One wonders what apostasy former supposed civil liberties proponent Marty Lederman underwent once he joined Obama’s Justice Department. But Palazzolo quotes a recent study by Benjamin Wittes and Rabea Benhalim of the Brookings Institution and Robert Chesney of the University of Texas Law School, who expound upon the crucial importance of the Obama administration’s legal actions on this front (emphasis added):

They are more than a means to decide the fate of the individuals in question. They are also the vehicle for an unprecedented wartime law-making exercise with broad implications for the future. The law established in these cases will in all likelihood govern not merely the Guantánamo detentions themselves but any other detentions around the world over which American courts acquire habeas jurisdiction. What’s more, to the extent that these cases establish substantive and procedural rules governing the application of law-of-war detention powers in general, they could end up impacting detentions far beyond those immediately supervised by the federal courts. They might, in fact, impact superficially-unrelated military activities, such as the planning of operations, the selection of interrogation methods, or even the decision to target individuals with lethal force….

The other thing the detentions issue reminded me of was a quote from a document I was recently reading. The document has historical significance, and is of great importance in understanding how the dark and secretive forces that are now essentially running this country gained such power and influence.

A Look Back at the Doolittle Report

From the Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, commissioned by the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954 (otherwise known as the Doolittle Report – PDF, bold emphases added):

As long as it remains national policy, another important requirement is an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique, and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy. No one should be permitted to stand in the way of the prompt, efficient and secure accomplishment of this mission….

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

Looks like it took them almost 50 years to fulfill the latter prediction, when Dick Cheney informed us the U.S. was going over to the “dark side”. Of course, they’d made their infernal choice decades ago, and the U.S. citizenry is still catching up with the ramifications of those hidden decisions and multiple crimes.

Also, now the enemy is not world communism, but the forces of Al Qaeda, who (supposed) wish to found a world-wide Islamic Caliphate. Of course, tomorrow the enemy may be world communism again, when the war drive against China is activated in earnest, or perhaps it will be the “Asian hordes” once again.

This is not a time for politics as usual. The “consensus building” of President Obama’s administration is a cruel joke upon the people of America and the world. What is needed is boldness in opposition, a readiness to speak the complete truth, and the preparation of the American people to accept this truth, and make the links between Wall Street’s stranglehold over any economic “reform”, and the insane military drive for extension of U.S. power around the world. The latter has led this country into the darkest crevices of human historical actions: to the secret prison and dungeon, to the torture chamber, to the use of technological devices and sciences to watch, control, and murder countless human beings.

“Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.” It is worth considering well the implications of this statement for all of us.

Also posted at Invictus

 

Well, it’s all over — and the Teabaggers didn’t disappoint.

Racism!

“We do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country…People who could not spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House — name is Barack Hussein Obama.“

Birtherism!

“The media, the politicians … all say, no, it’s all been settled. I say, if it’s been settled show us the birth certificate. Simple,” Farah’s said, as his remarks were cheered by the roughly 600 activists gathered in Nashville for the event.

Theocracy!

As fallible men and women, it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.” The country, she said, needs politicians unafraid “to go that route, not so afraid of the political correctness . . . to proclaim their alliance to our Creator.”

Faux populism!

There was another who dressed in a leather veteran’s vest with medals festooned on it. He also wore a Vietnam Veteran hat.

“I just dressed this way to get attention,” the man said, halfway through a scotch at an “Irish pub” 200 feet from the ballroom where Palin will be speaking, down a casino-style carpeted hotel hallway. “I’m really a retired millionaire.” [...] He talked in detail of the Mercedes he drove here; the Rolls Royce he bought in Florida that he won’t drive on rainy days like today, and that he’s a major donor to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Just sold my last business for $3.3 million,” he said, laughing, seemingly taking great delight in his get up and the gag he was pulling.

Ethnocentrism!

Cultures are not the same. Some are better. Ours is best.

Wagnerian melodrama!

I will live, I will die for the people of America.

And here’s the kicker. Wait for it…

Organizers said anyone who had shown up “looking too crazy” would have been tossed out.

Clearly, they were grading “crazy” on a curve.

[video via La Figa]

 

Top-seeded France faces a number of second- and third-ranked teams in the 2012 European Championship, including Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Luxembourg and Romania.

Still no explanation for BNY Mellon's monster-sizing. (photo: daveynin via Flickr)

There are a number of untrue things that serious people have to believe about financial matters. One is that this country needs giant banks to stay competitive in the modern world. This bizarre notion was the central argument made by Goldman Sachs brain boy, Robert Rubin, but that doesn’t make it true. Thanks to reader dosido, we have someone besides our usual targets, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, to explain things to us peasants: His Most Excellent CEOness, Robert Kelly of BNY Mellon.

Paul Solman, the interviewer, gives Kelly the opportunity to explain why banks should be allowed to grow to gargantuan size. Kelly offers two reasons. He notes that many large US corporations need money in large amounts.

Many of them, say, want to raise money in China to be able to be more successful over the long term. Wouldn’t you rather that business go to American banks than to foreign banks?

This is a direct appeal to US chauvinism, particularly delightful because it comes from a Canadian: Kelly is from Nova Scotia and spent most of his career at Toronto Dominion Bank. Kelly doesn’t even try to explain why banks need to be big to make big loans. When banks make big loans, they lay them off on other banks, through syndications, or recently, by securitizing and selling them. One of the big problems of Lehman Brothers was its inability to lay off some of its more bubbly private equity and other loans.

For decades, large stock and bond transactions were syndicated among big underwriters, each taking a piece of the transaction and allocating it among their customers. The cover of the prospectus would list the lead and main underwriters, and in larger deals, more would be listed elsewhere. Similarly, groups of banks would get together to fund giant loans. For customers, the transaction is with one entity, and they don’t really care exactly who is providing the money.

I can’t think of any reason that one bank should make a specific loan, other than keeping all the fees, and making more money laying off the loan in a securitized package, and more money managing the securitized package of loans, and who knows, more money off the bankruptcy.

Then Kelly says that there are economies of scale for giant banks. Solman replies that economists like Simon Johnson say there are no economies of scale once a bank has reached $100 billion in assets. Kelly assures Solman that BNY Mellon was much better off than it would have been as a smaller institution.

Solman asks about the losses in 2008 of $1.5 billion. He might have added that Kelly’s bank wrote off $4.8bn in the third quarter of 2009 alone, trying to put its failed securities investments in some kind of order. 10-Q, third quarter 2009, page 5. Kelly explains how this blunder happened on his watch:

We have to do something with those deposits. And you could buy treasuries that are essentially riskless, or you could buy very high-quality securities, for example. The equities are fairly risky, so we don’t buy stocks. But we do buy bonds.

And we [sic] AAA-rated bonds, which turned — which turned which turned out to be not AAA. If we want to be kind about it, perhaps they were CCC.

Let’s run that through the Bizspeak Translator: We bought a bunch of toxic waste, but it’s really not our fault, those foul rating companies misled us.

Solman displays good form by not laughing out loud. This was a double win for him: Kelly failed to explain why banks need to grow to enormous size; and Solman points out that he failed at managing his bank’s principal job. Of course, Solman can’t spike the mike in celebration of his win. The conventions of business media require him to nod in acquiescence to whatever nonsense Kelly spouts. It has to be enough to let the emperor parade around, clothed only in his moth-eaten mythos (H/T reader knowbuddhau).

 

The Department for Transport is being investigated over claims e-mails about Heathrow airport's expansion were deleted.

A man who was injured during Stoke City's Premier League match against Blackburn Rovers dies in hospital.

Crews waded through thigh-high mud to check for gas leaks and survey damage in neighborhoods north of Los Angeles Sunday. Forty-three homes in La Canada Flintridge were damaged and 500 more evacuated Saturday.

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Didier Drogba scores twice as John Terry ends a difficult week by helping Chelsea beat Arsenal 2-0 and move back to the top of the Premier League table.

French police close down a makeshift shelter for illegal migrants in the port of Calais, a day after it opened.

Two men have built a popcorn-making robot that serves up a new batch whenever someone mentions #popcorn on Twitter.

Popcorn Tweets was created by Dave Britt and Justin Goeres as their entry into a contest held by popcorn manufacturer Fireworks Popcorn. The pair writes of the invention:

“A custom LabVIEW program polls Twitter for any mention of #popcorn, and for each Tweet, activates a LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot to power some Rube Goldberg sort of contraption that makes popcorn one Tweet at a time. “

We sure hope it’s turned off right now or the two inventors may be in for a maelstrom of #popcorn tweets.

[via Engadget]

Tags: popcorn, twitter

Afghan President Hamid Karzai tells a conference of the world's top defence officials in Germany he is considering introducing conscription.

Britain should be seen in the same category of highly indebted countries such as Greece, a leading economist says.

To date, there is no authentic, 21st Century progressive movement. Those may be fightin’ words to some, but I think they’re true. The contemporary progressive resistance arose in response to a consolidation of neo-liberal, authoritarian power, maybe just in the nick of time. The resistance knows what it resists; it’s less articulate about its own vision of a progressive future.

Our collective actions have the feel of an anti-colonialist movement. Metaphorically at least, it helps to look at the advances of the Right as an imperialistic, re-colonization of America. We resist the Right with a defensive action. We lack an effective offensive, though, because we don’t have a shared sense of where we want to lead America.

Recently, there are signs that the resistance is maturing into an authentic progressive movement. Author and organizer Zack Exley’s Huffington Post piece, The New Right’s Secret Sauce, called attention to our missing worldview while pointing to the Right’s shared vision as the source of its strength. Arianna Huffington has selected Jeremy Rifkin’s fine new book, The Empathic Civilization, as her book of the month. Rifkin has penned condensed versions in recent published essays.

Jeffrey Feldman has approached the problem in many ways, most recently in his work on corporatism. I’ve tried to do my part, beginning with my book, The Politics of Deceit, and in the series, “The Promise of Popular Democracy: Origins”; “Part II: Solidarity of the Shaken”; “Part III: The Promise”.

Most recently, I’ve employed the term prairie humanism to refer to a moral vision deeply embedded in the American grain. It refers to a committed and attentive neighborliness, to an understanding that we are responsible for ourselves AND for one another. I’ve spent a lifetime among folk of the West/Southwest. They’ll break their backs to help a neighbor in need; but, as individualists, they want others to mind their own business, too.

Exley captures the economic and political implications of this spirit when he writes of the balance between individualism and cooperation:

It is the tradition of Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and so many others who saw no contradiction between individual and collective enterprise. That tradition was suppressed through the rise of big capital after the Civil War, and then it was forgotten forever when the left was flooded by European Technocrats, Communists, Socialists and Fascists in the 20th century.

There are many others I should mention as contributing to this emerging progressive worldview. My own modest efforts owe a huge debt to the work of George Lakoff, William Connolly, Franz de Waal, Marco Iacoboni, Francisco Varela, Drew Weston and others too numerous to name.

Prairie humanists depend on the human biological capacity for empathy. This isn’t surprising. There would be no human culture, and certainly no democracy, without empathy, which allows us to see the world through others’ eyes.

Rifkin writes:

Empathy is the soul of democracy. It is an acknowledgment that each life is unique, unalienable, and deserving of equal consideration in the public sphere. The evolution of empathy and the evolution of democracy have gone hand in hand throughout history. The more empathetic the culture, the more democratic its values and governing institutions…While apparent, it’s strange how little attention has been paid to the inextricable relationship between empathic extension and democratic expansion in the study of history and evolution of governance.

This is true, but Rifkin doesn’t go far enough. As I noted in “The Promise of Popular Democracy: Origins,” when James Madison spoke of the need for “intimate sympathy” among a people, he was pointing to the bonds anthropologists like Christopher Boehm have found among our earliest human ancestors, bonds that led to egalitarian, proto-democratic checks on authority. The Greeks didn’t invent democratic practices. They emerged long before Ancient Greece, 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Thorkild Jacobson, Norman Yoffee, Raul S. Manglapus, Jack Goody and others have written about these early egalitarian, democratic relations.

One possible reason it seems easier to resist authority rather than advance an egalitarian vision is that our democratic practices appear to have emerged in resistance. Empathy is a fundamental human capacity. But the will to power is also present. So is the need for leadership. When leaders became bullies, bonds among the bullied could — and did –  topple the leader. Exile, ridicule, even term limits were employed long ago by proto-democrats.

It’s also no accident that the rise of the scientific worldview and rationalism rejected empathy as dangerously emotional. Rational management and historical determinism, in both Marxism and capitalism, became hallmarks of the modern democratic era.

Prairie humanists want to return our political relationships to something like the neighborliness that marks private life across ideological boundaries. Think how much easier it would be to advance environmental initiatives and the greening of industry if we had already been re-framing progressive politics along these lines. Think how different the health care debate would be. The insurance industry argument depends upon an all-against-all worldview.

Prairie humanists drop old, liberal, technocratic talk of managed solutions. We focus upon consequences. How can our neighbors and we best secure health? What are our responsibilities to such a cause?

The unfettered pursuit of private interests obviously dooms collective opportunity and the constitutional guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have to contain — and topple –  the political and economic authority that enforces this ideological trap. As we’ve seen, humans have been doing just that for a very long time. We can do it, too.