For a state that prides itself on being a beacon of progress in American politics, California seems intent on proving it can be just as backwards as everyone else, at least when it comes to gay rights. A California appeals court ruled this week that California Lutheran High School didn’t violate the law when it expelled two students it suspected of being lesbians, determining that the state’s civil rights laws don’t apply to private religious schools. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The ruling is the first to consider a religious school’s status under California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination by businesses and was amended in 2005 to include discrimination based on sexual orientation. State education law also forbids anti-gay bias, but that law applies only to public schools.

The court determined that California Lutheran didn’t qualify as a business and therefore wasn’t bound by the act. The school’s lawyer applauded the ruling, telling the Chronicle that the court rightly recognized their right to exercise freedom of religion. But Kirk Hanson, an attorney for the expelled girls, told the L.A. Times that the “very troubling” decision essentially gave private schools carte blanche to discriminate against students for any reason, as long as they could defend their actions on religious grounds. The Times reports that the girls plan to take their case to the California Supreme Court.

Last month, the advocacy groups Food Not Bombs and Art and Compassion successfully challenged a West Palm Beach ordinance that made it illegal to serve free meals to homeless people on public property, according to the February issue of Z Magazine (article not available online). The lawsuit highlighted tensions between local homeless advocates and city commercial interests. The Palm Beach Post reports that the law responded to complaints from local businesses, who claimed the meal giveaways were scaring off customers.

It’s not an isolated incident: The Z article notes that other cities, including Orlando and Las Vegas, have tried similar bans in the past couple of years.

Even in the midst of the current economic crisis, few would contest the fact that humans live amidst an abundance of wealth and resources. There is plenty of food in the world, yet people continue to die of hunger every day. There is plenty of money in the world, yet people beg in the streets. The problem isn’t poverty, according to the new film The End of Poverty, directed by Philippe Diaz, the problem is wealth. 

According to the film, the global poor, especially those in the Southern Hemisphere, have been funding the wealth and greed of the global rich, concentrated mostly in the North. The film sketches out various strategies the rich have used throughout history—from colonization, to religion, to the neoliberal policies of the past few decades—which are designed, according to the films subjects, to subjugate the poor to the will of the rich. 

In this reading of history, the capitalist system is a continuation of the slave trade and the global system of subjugation that began under the Spanish Conquistadors. Moving forward, the world must reject “the religion of growth” to create a more equitable global economic system. But one of the film’s experts, William Easterly, seems to belie that reading of history in a recent article for Foreign Policy magazine.

In the past 50 years, the global economic system created “the greatest mass escape from poverty in human history,” according to Easterly. The problem is that governments, in the midst of the current economic crisis, are in danger of rejecting that system in favor of more protectionist economic strategies.

Image by  Amir Farshad Ebrahimi , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Here is the trailer for The End of Poverty:

Freedom fries may be gone, but George Bush's resentments toward the French are not forgotten. As he prepared to leave office, Bush seized the opportunity to lob a departing, symbolic food bomb at the French, according to Foreign Policy:

Apparently one of George W. Bush's last acts as president was to triple tariffs on French Roquefort cheese. This was meant as retaliation for the longstanding French ban on U.S. beef imports. But as Charles Bremner notes, many French were quick to see it as Bush's final shot at the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” who had so aggravated him during the run-up to the Iraq war.

American hormone-treated beef is actually banned by the entire European Union over health concerns, and while Bush raised tariffs on a host of EU products, he singled out Roquefort for a particularly extreme hike.

The French took notice, and made sure Barack Obama knew they weren't happy, sending him what Foreign Policy calls “a deluxe box of Roquefort” to welcome him to the White House and a letter asking him to lift the "shocking" tax. They’re now busy plotting their next move, Telegraph reports, taking hefty new tariffs on Coke products into consideration.

Image by star5112, licensed under Creative Commons.

Americans certainly weren’t alone in their eagerness to see George Bush pack his bags for Texas. Bush got a farewell lashing in editorial sections around the globe this week, while President Obama was welcomed by adoring front-page headlines. The cover of London’s The Daily Telegraph even offered a “Free Barack Obama DVD.”

As Hendrik Hertzberg speculates, Obama owes some of his soaring popularity among Americans—a recent poll puts his approval rating at eighty-two percent—to their equally robust distaste for Bush. The same could safely be assumed about worldwide esteem for Obama, but as Gary Younge points out in The Nation, global excitement about the recent election goes much deeper, particularly when you consider race.

“For most of the last century,” Younge writes, “progressives and the oppressed around the world have looked to black America as a beacon—the redemptive force that stood in permanent dissidence against racism at home and imperialism abroad.” Younge explains that African-American artists and sports stars have long been inspirational icons for “oppressed minorities” around the world. Lately, however, “black America's most globally prominent faces were singing and rapping about getting rich.” Obama’s election ushered in a new era of possibility, and represented to the world, just as it did to Americans, real triumph over oppression. It also signals an important racial shift, according to Younge:

The rest of the world must become comfortable with a black American, not as a symbol of protest but of power. And not of any power but a superpower, albeit a broken and declining one. A black man with more power than they. How that will translate into the different political cultures around the globe, whom it will inspire, how it will inspire them and what difference that inspiration will make will vary.

The world is watching as Obama gets down to work, and not just for inspiration—they’re also expecting results. The New Stateman devoted much of a recent issue to analyzing what the world wants from Obama and how likely he is to deliver. Don’t worry, Mr. President, you “only [have] to rescue the global economy, solve the crisis in the Middle East and fix the environment.”

Image by Muhammad Adnan Asim, licensed under Creative Commons.

After eight years of oppressive government secrecy, the new Obama administration wasted no time making strides toward what the President called “a new era of openness.” In his first full day in office, Obama signed an executive order and two presidential memoranda aimed at releasing government information from the vice grip of the previous administration.

The steps are a “spectacular start” toward greater government transparency and accountability, according to Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists and writer of the Secrecy News blog, but they are just the start. As President Obama readily acknowledged, many more transparency issues within the federal government need to be addressed.

One of Obama’s early actions was to release a memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act (pdf), making it harder for the government to “withhold” information. Though laudable, the memorandum doesn’t address the persistent over-classification that’s hampered a free flow of information. The National Security Agency can still classify a host of documents that should be available to the public.

“People from throughout the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities would acknowledge that the excessive overclassification is a problem,” according to Meredith Fuchs of the George Washington University’s National Security Archive, “and it actually puts us at risk, so it has to be fixed.”

There are a number of high-profile Freedom of Information Act requests still outstanding—including the documents surrounding warrantless wiretapping, detainee treatment, and the millions of missing Bush Administration White House emails—that aren’t addressed in Obama’s preliminary actions either. Fuchs believes these cases present opportunities for the new administration to prove themselves as the advocates to open government with real actions.

So far, according to Fuchs, Obama’s actions have been more of a statement of principals, albeit an important one, rather than a panacea for government accountability. The actions signal a drastic change in the way the government interacts with the American people, but more details are needed, including how the transparency principals are going to be carried out.

“There’s fierce bureaucratic culture of protectiveness” that has taken hold inside the federal government, according to Aftergood. Without definitive rules, the support of congress, and pressure from the public, the cloud of government secrecy won’t go away. What Obama did achieve, Aftergood said, is that “he made it clear that openness is not a slogan, and it is not even an end of itself, rather it is a means to an end, and that ultimate end is a vital and vigorous democracy.”

Image of the National Archives building in Washington D.C.

UPDATE: Talking Points Memo has a video on another angle to Obama’s transparency efforts:

In his inauguration speech, Barack Obama proclaimed an end “to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.” Judging by many internet reactions to the speech, that’s going to be difficult. A commenter on the website Hot Air reacted by writing, “F**k this RACIST swine Obama Hussein and his ape looking, lumbering wife.”

This kind of repugnant vitriol isn’t just morally reprehensible. Keith Kahn-Harris and David Hayes write for Open Democracy that it’s undermining the democratic potential of the internet by fueling political extremists and alienating moderates.

The hatred and alienation can be seen most clearly in discussions about the Middle East, according to Kahn and Harris. Conversations are dominated by passion and partisan agendas, causing comment threads to devolve into “self-obsessed and point-scoring politics.” The problems with this are twofold, Kahn-Harris and Hayes write:

First, it ensures that the more extreme protagonists on the ground are given moral support for their often violent struggles, their own passions fuelled rather than moderated by outsiders’ engagement. Second, those who choose or feel obliged to get involved in conflicts such as Gaza often do so in ways that are polarizing, dogmatic, repetitive and damaging to the space of democratic debate they choose to enter.

Convincing other people is less important than parsing minutia and scoring points. The threads are uninviting and unappealing to people who sincerely want to engage with the issue but don’t carry the same passions and baggage. Kahn-Harris and Hayes write, “In this sense such internet politics is not just self-defeating but also profoundly exclusionary.”

 Image by  Joe Goldberg , licensed under  Creative Commons .

If you’re reading this post on January 20, you’re probably not among the millions of people flooding into Washington DC for the presidential inauguration. In fact, you’re probably stuck inside an office.

For all of us poor saps who aren’t standing out in the cold on the National Mall, UsStream.tv has a live video feed from the event that you can watch below. Just remember to minimize it when your boss walks by.

You can also check for updates on the Utne Reader twitter feed.

(Thanks, Wonkette.)

Here is your inauguration day homework, in a paragraph: A Lincoln biographer imagines a conversation between Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama and digs up this nugget from Illinois senator Everett Dirkson: “The first task of every politician,” Dirkson said 50 years ago, “is to get right with Lincoln.” You should get right with Lincoln too. Here's his inaugural address. The Nation Institute’s Tom Engelhardt submits the speech he would have Obama deliver. Slate Magazine’s member-crafted People’s Inaugural Address has been posted. There is a searchable database of every inaugural address from George Washington to George W. Bush but there’s no need to read Washington’s inaugural address when you can watch it. And of course, Obama will take the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible. Be sure to read up on that burgundy velvet treasure.

Tales of the neglect of America's war veterans are as old as America's wars but still the story stings each time it's told. Aaron Glantz of the alternative newswire organization Inter Press Service keeps a steady eye on the issue and begins his latest report with a rattling string of tragic statistics:

Eighteen U.S. veterans kill themselves every day. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas. One in every three homeless men in the United States has put on a uniform and served his country. On any given night, the U.S. government estimates 200,000 veterans sleep on the street. This is the crisis General Eric Shinseki will inherit when he takes the reins at the Department of Veterans Affairs...

Read the full story here.

Image by  jmsuarez , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The rapid urbanization that’s taking place across the world is bringing people together into often uncomfortably tight quarters, but fear and the free market are making those urban centers ever more segregated. The United Nations estimates that nearly 70 percent of people will live in cities (pdf) by the year 2050. “We are more globally connected than ever,” Josh Leon wrote for Next American City, “but adjacent city blocks can be worlds apart.”

A culture of fear is separating people into two extremes of urbanization, according to Leon: isolated communities for the wealthy and slums for the poor. In 2007, the UN estimated that one out of every three city dwellers, or a billion people, live in slums.

“Global epidemics and global terrorism are two problems that principally emanated from the slums,” urban theorist Mike Davis told Eurozine. Slums are often disconnected from the global economy, and as the residents struggle to get by, Davis says they often turn to fundamentalism, extremism, and criminality. At the same time, the wealthy try to ignore the problem by walling themselves off in gated communities. “If Southern California has any significance to the development of the world's cities,” according to Davis, “it is as model for life in the protected enclaves.”

The influence can be seen clearly in Orange County, Beijing, a California-style gated community profiled by Daniel Brook in Good magazine that’s located 45 minutes from China’s Forbidden City. Private security forces and high security are ubiquitous throughout the development, possibly due to a “paranoia that comes from being conspicuously so much wealthier than one’s fellow Beijingers,” Brook writes.

The solution to the ever-growing segregation, Leon writes, is “a massive rethinking of local privatization and deregulation schemes which cater to the rich.” When the free market takes over urban planning, according to Leon, a system is created that inherently favors the rich and separates the poor. If that trend is allowed to continue through the current global economic crisis, many of the problems associated with slums will inevitably get worse.

For more on the culture of fear, read Fear Itself from the January-February issue of Utne Reader.

Image of the Andalucia gated community in Jordan.

Barack Obama is on the cover of January’s Columbia Journalism Review—but this hardly distinguishes the magazine from the others on the rack. The distinguishing feature is that Barack Obama appears something just short of sinister as he smirks and stares at you through a side-glancing eye. It’s almost as if the magazine’s art department peered inside the mind of a conservative talk show host and painted the Obama they found there.

The editorial inside calls on Obama to “turn the lights back on in the White House” and presents a laundry lists of actions he could take to decisively reject and reverse the excessive secrecy of his predecessor. 

Here’s a taste: 

* "In his first budget, restore, as Congress intended, the Office of Government Information Services to the National Archives and Records Administration, and remove it from the Justice Department, where conflicts of interest on transparency abound."

* "Get a handle on 'pseudo-secrecy'—the wholesale marking of documents with secret-ish labels outside of the official classification system—by reducing its use, establishing a system for appeals of such labels, and forbidding their use in Freedom of Information Act decisions." 

* "Revise outsourcing contracts to ensure that records generated by private companies doing government business will be treated like any agency-generated document."

The magazine's pages are peppered with points on a “Sunshine Timeline” that begins with a set of laws on public court proceedings and records passed by Henry III in 1267 and stumbles through the centuries grabbing at events as it finds them:

1766: Sweden adopts the first freedom of information law.

1935: The creation of the Federal Register, “the first comprehensive accounting of U.S. executive-branch rules and regulations.”

1953: “The American Society of Newspapers commissions a survey of all the laws (local, state, and federal) that could be used to gain access to government records—and concludes that the situation is bleak.”

1966: The Freedom of Information Act passes. “Without the votes to sustain the veto, and with Bill Moyers, his press secretary, urging him on, LBJ signs the bill.”

With the weight of the world (thankfully) off his shoulders in less than a week, George Bush will need something other than clearing brush to keep himself busy. What’s an out of favor, ex-president to do? Foreign Policy has a few suggestions for ways Bush can contribute to the world and brush a little dirt off his reputation:

1. Keep freedom on the march in corners of the globe where they still like him, like Kosovo and Georgia.
2. Devote himself to immigration reform and convince doubters that immigration makes good economic sense.
3. Create a Bush brand of humanitarianism by helping “development wonks” and “church folk” work together.
4. Push the U.S. to help “save Sudan.”
5. Instead of spreading freedom to the world, how about baseball? Bush could replace Bud Selig as commissioner of the major league and perhaps use the position to help mend U.S.-Cuban relations. As Foreign Policy's Joshua Keating writes, "If a ping-pong match helped break the ice between China and the United States 38 years ago, perhaps a baseball game could start the ball rolling to open up relations between Cuba and the United States."

In the January issue of Urbanite, a magazine that is something of a love letter to the city of Baltimore, Richard O'Mara profiles a local newspaperman who is slowly unearthing the history of his father--a Czech actor and singer who was killed by the Nazis in an Austrian concentration camp. The story covers just one page and begins like this:

Imagine, if you can, a frigid December night in 1941 at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. German soldiers haul an inmate outside. They strip him naked. They tie his hands. They douse him with cold water and leave him to die.

This is how Tom Hasler imagines his father’s death. The Gestapo’s minions at Mauthausen entertained themselves by making such “ice statues” out of human beings. The practice was a new form of torture introduced in the fall of 1941, and while accounts of Karel Hasler’s death vary, most say he froze to death. Soon after, Hasler’s wife received from the Germans notice of his death—of pneumonia. A month before he died, his son, Tom, had been born in Prague.

Hasler's father was not one of the Nazi's millions of Jewish victims. "One of Tom’s goals," O'Mara writes, "is to stimulate interest in an aspect of the Holocaust that he believes has not received sufficient attention: the murders during the war of millions of non-Jews—gypsies, Poles, Slavs, union leaders, homosexuals, Communists, the aged, the physically and mentally disabled, and others who deviated from Nazi ideas of who should live and who should die. Karel Hasler was one of these victims, and in a way, so was his son."

You can read the rest here. And you can watch an arresting eight-minute video about Tom Hasler and his father right here:

Now that the U.S. presidential contest is finally over, GOOD magazine suggests that people turn their attentions to six particularly interesting elections that will take place around the world in the coming year.

First up is Israel’s parliamentary election, which may be delayed due to the current conflict in Gaza. The top two contenders are Benjamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni; Netanyahu currently leads in the polls, but Livni has experience as the current Foreign Minister and a reputation of being untouched by corruption.

Other contests to follow include India’s parliamentary election in May and Iran’s presidential election in June.

Barack Obama’s inauguration bound to be raucous. People are streaming in from around the country, and CNN reports that a single ticket is selling for as much as $20,095. Craigslist has a bevy of requests to sell, buy, or trade inaugural tickets, and some of the requests seem suspiciously amorous. 

No matter how wild the Obama inauguration proves to be, attendants will be hard pressed to live up to the standards set by Andrew Jackson 180 years ago. According to the Smart Set, drunken supporters stormed the White House during Jackson’s inauguration, partying and destroying china and upholstery. Jackson was nearly crushed by the throngs of unruly well-wishers.

One eyewitness described the scene as, “a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping… Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses, and such a scene of confusion as is impossible to describe.” Eventually, according to the Smart Set, the chaos was diffused when “servants struck upon the idea of passing barrels of liquor and ice cream out the window in order to get the revelers out onto the lawn, where they could do less damage. It worked.”

Andrew Breitbart, a longtime editor at the conservative Drudge Report, has had enough with movies that vilify the government and celebrities who are admired for talking smack about their country. So he’s out to make Hollywood “pro-American” again.

Breitbart launched the conservative pop culture and politics blog Big Hollywood this week, positioning it as an outlet “for those who think something has gone drastically wrong and that Hollywood should return to its patriotic roots.”

The site encourages conservative entertainment industry insiders to come out of the closet loud and proud, and the conservative movement as a whole to “figure out pop culture.” As Breitbart sees it, right-wingers need to realize that in the battle for ideological prowess, "(pop) culture is the big prize and that politics is secondary.”

The stories posted on Big Hollywood so far include a piece by California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore praising Tom Cruise's new Nazi flick Valkyrie for its “soul and dignity”, and a post speculating that 24’s unapologetic nature may be moderated “to adapt to a new political reality”.

As the blog embarks on its master plan to remake Hollywood politics, one thing's for sure: They'll have plenty of lefties standing in their way. In a no-holds-barred takedown of Big Hollywood for the American Prospect's TAPPED blog, Adam Serwer wrote, "It consists of failed showbiz types whose insanity hasn't been tempered by the incessant mockery of the blogosphere, which means that each post is pure wingnuttia."

(Thanks, RealClearPolitics.)

The Democrats will soon control both Congress and the Presidency, but the real reason for progressives to be hopeful is the wealth of up-and-coming intellectuals of the left. Talking Points Memo’s deputy publisher Andrew Golis has compiled a good list of 10 progressive intellectuals that give him hope. The list includes the unflappable Van Jones, co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Rinku Sen, one of Utne Reader’s 50 visionaries who is changing the world.

Golis included a video of his favorite intellectuals, so I’m including one from Jay Smooth, included in the list for his hip hop video blogging:

Joseph Stalin, one of the biggest mass murderers in human history, is cool again in Russia. In a recent poll to decide who was Russia’s greatest historical figure, Stalin came in third, behind medieval prince Alexander Nevsky and former prime minister Pyotr Stolypin. Stalin led the tally for months, according to the BBC, “until the show's producer appealed to viewers to vote for someone else.”

Some believe that Russia’s leaders under despotic Prime Minister Vladimir Putin are pushing for Stalin’s resurgent popularity. In December, the BBC reports that police raided the offices of the human rights organization Memorial and seized a digital archive of Stalin’s atrocities. Irina Flige, office director of the organization, believes the raid was politically motivated. Flige told the BBC, “if the terror of Stalin is justified, then the government today can do what it wants to achieve its aims.”

“Since the 1990s those in political power have been looking to the past to justify their own legitimacy,” Arseny Roginsky writes for Open Democracy. Roginsky writes that Russians have trouble reconciling the atrocities that took place under Stalin with the glory that came after defeating the Nazis in World War II. Though Stalinism can be defined as “terror as a universal instrument for solving any political and social tasks,” the memory of that terror has largely receded in modern Russia.

The absurdity of naming Stalin one of the most beloved Russians left comedian John Oliver nearly speechless. On his podcast with Andy Zaltzman, the Bugle, Oliver quipped, “This would be the perfect time for a simile, ‘Voting for Stalin is like voting for…’ but there isn’t one. Because remember, he’s the biggest mass murderer in human history.” Oliver continued, “As he was sending people to gulags, signing death warrants, and forcing the collectivization of farms, I wonder if he was thinking, ‘This could be a real vote getter in 60 years. I’m going to be captain popular.’”

The ACLU has gone to court to challenge Act 1, an Arkansas law approved by ballot initiative last November that bars unmarried couples from becoming adoptive or foster parents, the Advocate reports. The law is aimed particularly at gay couples, and the ACLU argues that the act’s language was confusing to voters. More broadly, Marie-Bernarde Miller, an attorney on the case, says that it “violates the state’s legal duty to place the best interest of children above all else.”

The suit was filed on behalf of more than a dozen families and will be presided over by Judge Timothy Fox, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He may be sympathetic to the plaintiffs: In 2004, he overturned a state ban on gay foster parents.

Image by Matt McGee, licensed under Creative Commons.

(Thanks, Feministing.)

Governor Rod Blagojevich and Bernie Madoff currently sit comfortably atop the 2008 list of biggest scandals, but plenty of hucksters, criminals, and slimebags made their marks last year. The investigative site ProPublica has a rundown in a six-part series (so far) of “This Year in Scandals.” 

The former Halliburton subsidiary KBR is accused of some of the most despicable crimes of the year, allegedly causing the electrocution of 18 solders after “installing shoddy electrical wiring in barracks in Iraq and then ignoring warnings to fix it.” They also may have exposed soldiers to a variety of toxic chemicals, according to both the Army Times and a lawsuit or two. The infamous security contractor Blackwater also makes the list, standing accused of smuggling weapons into Iraq in sacks of dog food, among various other crimes.

For more scandal coverage, read about the winners of Talking Points Memo’s 2008 Golden Duke Awards.

Scraper bikes began as low-budget analogs to the colorful, big-rimmed cars—also called scrapers—often seen cruising around east Oakland. Tricked-out scavenged frames with foil, colored tape, and candy wrappers, the bikes are a resourceful homage. Until recently they were a purely local phenomenon. But after a cameo in a YouTube rap video, prominent placement in the first-ever solar-powered hip-hop festival, and support from Bay Area businesses and museums, the bikes are garnering worldwide attention. Many people see potential in the maturing scraper bike movement; they hope the enterprising youth behind it can be a positive force for change in Oakland.

Tyrone Stevenson, the “Scraper Bike King” who pioneered the bikes, has played an energetic role in popularizing them. He sells them to places as far away as Germany, and teaches people to build them in the informal workshops he holds in his backyard. Andre Ernest, director of the Super Innovative Teens nonprofit, believes Stevenson has already made an impact. “He’s helping the kids who would otherwise be on the street,” Ernest told the Christian Science Monitor.  According to Wiretap, Stevenson recently applied for a small business grant and is working to patent his design. He hopes to open a shop where he can continue to teach bike-building skills. “If we had a center, where a lot of kids could just come, I feel deep in my heart that would really reduce a lot of the crime,” he says.

Take a look at this slideshow of scraper bike photos, and watch the video that catapulted the bikes into the limelight below:

Image courtesy of Green Jobs Now, licensed under Creative Commons.