Browsing PBH By Articles

What’s Holding Palestine Back

Posted on September 9, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Occupation, Not Culture, Is Holding Palestinians Back by Munib Masri in The New York Times.

The Text: EARLIER this week, while Israel’s cheerleaders and Las Vegas casino moguls were parsing every syllable uttered by Mitt Romney in Jerusalem as fastidiously as the Olympic judges were scrutinizing every back flip in London, millions of Palestinians issued a giant collective yawn.

There was little anger when Mr. Romney made thinly veiled racist allusions to the supposed inferiority of Palestinian culture and genuflected at the altar of distant fund-raising thrones in New York and Los Angeles.

Of course, Hamas sputtered rejections and the Iranians hyperbolically accused Romney of “kissing the foot” of Israel — shrill criticisms easily dismissed in the West.

Profiting From Immigration Detention

Posted on September 8, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Private Prisons Spend $45 Million on Lobbying, Rake in $5.1 Billion for Immigrant Detention Alone by Aviva Shen in TruthOut.

The Text: Nearly half of all immigrants detained by federal officials are held in facilities run by private prison companies, at an average cost for each detained immigrant is $166 a night. That’s added up to massive profits for Corrections Corporation of America, The GEO Group and other private prison companies:

A decade ago, more than 3,300 criminal immigrants were sent to private prisons under two 10-year contracts the Federal Bureau of Prisons signed with CCA worth $760 million. Now, the agency is paying the private companies $5.1 billion to hold more than 23,000 criminal immigrants through 13 contracts of varying lengths.

CCA was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2000 due to lawsuits, management problems and dwindling contracts. Last year, the company reaped $162 million in net income. Federal contracts made up 43 percent of its total revenues, in part thanks to rising immigrant detention. GEO, which cites the immigration agency as its largest client, saw its net income jump from $16.9 million to $78.6 million since 2000.

Growing Up Gay And Mormon

Posted on September 7, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Forced Out of School and Church, Watching Friends Commit Suicide: What It’s Like Growing Up Gay and Mormon by Carey Purcell in AlterNet.

The Text: By the age of 18, Ryan Shattuck had crossed several key moments of being a young Mormon man off of his checklist. He had attended seminary classes throughout high school, was enrolled in Brigham Young University for college and was going to Mexico for a two-year mission. But one of the most important — and probably most life-changing — things on the list was one Ryan did not think he would ever be able to do: marry a Mormon woman.

A fourth-generation Mormon, Ryan knew he was gay by the time he was 16 years old. A homosexual lifestyle is not approved by the Mormon Church, which resulted in great internal conflict for Ryan. This conflict would affect much of his life going forward: he lost several people to suicide; he organized a support group for gay Mormons that would result in him leaving college; and eventually, he left the church.

Growing up Mormon, according to Ryan, is like growing up in a bubble. When talking about his upbringing, he is often asked why he did certain things or followed specific protocol, and his answer is that he didn’t consider different alternatives because there were none. The path of a Mormon child is a straight and narrow one, and it wasn’t until he went to college that Ryan began to stray from that path.

The GOP Slouches Toward Theocracy

Posted on September 6, 2012 in Articles

The Article: GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party by Mike Lofgren in Salon.

The Text: Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.

Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.

The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.

Puritans Still In America?

Posted on September 5, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Are Americans Still Puritan? by Matthew Hutson in The New York Times.

The Text: “I THINK I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores,” the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after visiting the United States in the 1830s. Was he right? Do present-day Americans still exhibit, in their attitudes and behavior, traces of those austere English Protestants who started arriving in the country in the early 17th century?

It seems we do. Consider a series of experiments conducted by researchers led by the psychologist Eric Luis Uhlmann and published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. In one study, they investigated whether the work habits of today’s Americans reflected the so-called Protestant work ethic. Martin Luther and John Calvin argued that work was a calling from God. They also believed in predestination and viewed success as a sign of salvation. This led to belief in success as a path to salvation: hard work and good deeds would bring rewards, in life and after.

In the study, American and Canadian college students were asked to solve word puzzles involving anagrams. But first, some were subtly exposed to (or “primed” with) salvation-related words like “heaven” and “redeem,” while others were exposed to neutral words. The researchers found that the Americans — but not the Canadians — solved more anagrams with salvation on the mind. They worked harder.