Truthout 5/3

Maya Schenwar | Taking On Disgusting Politics
Maya Schenwar, Truthout: "We're all born with a gag reflex. Humans have a natural aversion to fetid, squirmy things such as excrement, worms, maggots and festering wounds. Disgust propagandists associate a group of people with this bodily reaction, driving others to distance themselves from that group - to wall it off, to quarantine it ... The politics of disgust turns people into contaminants."
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Worse Than 1789?
James Howard Kunstler, Truthout: "Sen. Carl Levin pretty much had Goldman Sachs's (GS) Lloyd Blankfein dead in a casket with that now-notorious email from GS's head of sales and trading, Tom Montag, describing one of their billion-dollar investment 'products' as 'one shitty deal.' Levin seemed to delight in crossing the boundary into the realm of the unspeakable, knowing that even the so-called 'family' newspapers and cable TV networks would have to report it."
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Financial Reform: Will We Feel Better the Morning After?
Dean Baker, Truthout: "The financial reform bills being considered by Congress will lead to a better-regulated financial system, most importantly by creating a consumer protection agency that will prevent some of the worst abuses of the last decade. However, no serious person can claim that the bills passed by the House or coming out of the Senate Banking Committee will prevent future crises."
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Report: Immigration Laws Put Five Million Children at Risk of Family Separation
Michelle Chen, ColorLines: "Children are the hidden casualties of America's war on immigrants, and the passage of Arizona's new racial profiling legislation could open up countless opportunities for local law enforcement to break up families by putting undocumented parents on the fast-track to deportation."
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Current Timeline to Shut Down Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill: Three Months
Mark Sappenfield, The Christian Science Monitor: "Federal officials gave a sobering appraisal of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill Sunday, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar saying 'ultimate relief' was 90 days away. Federal officials speaking about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill Sunday morning appeared to be steeling the Louisiana coast - and the nation - for consequences that could be 'catastrophic.'"
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Why Public Education Is More Important Than Wall Street (Video)
Robert Reich: "All over America right now, public education is in crisis. Teachers are being fired as next year's school budgets shrink. Next fall's classrooms will be far more crowded. Some districts are going to four-day weeks. And the nation's public universities are in deep trouble. The answer is for the federal government to bail out public education until state and local revenues return as the economy strengthens."
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An Arizona Vote to Secede
Connie Schultz, Truthout: "Last Wednesday, I was fielding questions in a journalism class at the University of Kansas, when one of the students asked about Arizona's new immigration law. Passed with the governor's blessing, the law makes it a state crime for immigrants not to carry documents proving they are here legally. It requires the police to demand the paperwork of anyone who triggers a 'reasonable suspicion' of being 'an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States.'"
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Broadcasting Women's Voices in Haiti's Reconstruction
Beverly Bell, Truthout: "Haitian women have been increasingly vocal and active in social, political and economic issues since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. Though it has not come easily, their progress in changing gender relations of power within the home, within social movements and within the nation has been steady."
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Campaign Contribution Records Are Open, but Hardly Transparent
Sebastian Jones, ProPublica: "In January, the United States Supreme Court overturned limits on corporate election spending, basing its decision, in part, on the assertion that campaign finance records are more open and accessible than ever before. 'With the advent of the Internet, disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters,' Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court's majority opinion."
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History's Mad Hatters: The Strange Career of Tea Party Populism
Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman, TomDispatch.com: "On a winter's day in Boston in 1773, a rally of thousands at Faneuil Hall to protest a new British colonial tax levied on tea turned into an iconic moment in the pre-history of the American Revolution. Some of the demonstrators - Sons of Liberty, they called themselves - left the hall and boarded the Dartmouth, a ship carrying tea, and dumped it overboard."
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"Soul of a Citizen": Volunteers Can't Solve Our Problems
Paul Rogat Loeb, Truthout: "Through Global Youth Service Day, millions of young women and men got involved in their communities last week, often taking their first steps into lives of commitment. That's a powerful potential force for change. But how do we help them, and ourselves, take the next steps to tackle the roots of the problems we face? Given the morass of America's national politics, it's tempting to reserve our money, energy and creativity for trying to help people one-on-one, through efforts that seem purer and less corrupted by ambition and contention than trying to change our country's national direction. But as I explore in this excerpt from 'Soul of a Citizen,' pure volunteerism has its limits as a way to change society."
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Tory Lessons for Republicans
E.J. Dionne Jr.: "'There's something else you need to know about me,' declared the earnest young politician, 'which is I believe the test of a good and strong society is how we look after the most vulnerable, the most frail and the poorest.'"
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The Ten Worst Man-Made Environmental Disasters
Maura O'Connor, GlobalPost: "The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is now about the size of Puerto Rico. It's already reached the marshes of Louisiana. Oil-covered wildlife are starting to show up along the shores. Shrimp, fish and oyster harvest areas have been closed. Residents of Mississippi and Alabama are just waiting for the oil to hit."
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News in Brief: Halliburton Under Scrutiny for Possible Role in Oil Disaster and More ...
Halliburton potentially liable for oil explosion in the Gulf; authorities continue search for those responsible in attempted New York car bombing; Greek Bailout Package approved.
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Anti-Choice Groups Condone "Biblically Justified" Violence Against Gays, Women
Wendy Norris, RH Reality Check: "Army of God adherent and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Neil Horsley is under arrest for a series of bizarre diatribes against pop star Elton John. Gay rights activists are also demanding an investigation into perceived death threats directed at a gay New York travel agent on a website bearing an eerie similarity to Horsley's infamous 'Nuremberg Files.' Kenyan abortion providers are named on the site under 'not-wanted' banners sporting animated illustrations of dripping blood."
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Bill Ayers: The Journey of a Teacher
Laura Flanders, GRITtv: "We heard a lot about Bill Ayers during the 2008 election cycle; mostly attempts at using his name as a smear because of his past with the Weather Underground. But for the past forty years Ayers has been a teacher, an occupation he calls the most intellectually challenging thing he's ever done. His book 'To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher' has seen multiple editions, and when the publisher asked him about doing a new one, he wanted to do it a little differently."
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