The Fifth Column

By Lucy Warner
February 27, 2015



Text from:
N Or M?
By Agatha Christie
1941
Published by permission of G P Putnam's Sons,
a member of Penguin Group (USA)


“Grant said:
'You've read in the newspapers of the Fifth Column? You know, roughly at any rate, just what that term implies.'

Tommy murmured:
'The enemy within.'

'Exactly. This war, Beresford, started in an optimistic spirit. Oh, I don't mean the people who really know – we've known all along what we were up against – the efficiency of the enemy, his aerial strength, his deadly determination, and the coordination of his well-planned war machine. I mean the people as a whole. The good-hearted, muddleheaded democratic fellow who believes what he wants to believe – that Germany will crack up, that she's on the verge of revolution, that her weapons of war are made of tin, and that her men are so underfed that they'll fall down if they try to march – all that sort of stuff. Wishful thinking as the saying goes.

'Well, the war didn't go that way. It started badly and it went on worse. The men were all right – the men on the battleships and in the planes and in the dugouts. But there was mismanagement and unpreparedness – the defects, perhaps, of our qualities. We don't want war, haven't considered it seriously, weren't good at preparing for it.

'The worst of that is over. We've corrected our mistakes, we're slowly getting the right men in the right place. We're beginning to run the war as it should be run – and we can win the war – make no mistake about that – but only if we don't lose it first. And the danger of losing it comes, not from outside – not from the might of Germany's bombers, not from her seizure of neutral countries and fresh vantage points from which to attack – but from within. Our danger is the danger of Troy – the wood horse within our walls. Call it the Fifth Column if you like. It is here, among us. Men and women, some of them highly placed, some of them obscure, but all believing genuinely in the Nazi aims and the Nazi creed and desiring to substitute that sternly efficient creed for the muddled easygoing liberty of our democratic institutions.'”






http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/24/politics/supreme-court-hearing-abercrombie-fitch/

Supreme Court to hear religious freedom case
By Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter
Thu February 26, 2015

Washington (CNN)Samantha Elauf was apprehensive to interview for a sales job at retailer Abercrombie & Fitch in 2008 because the 17 year old wore a headscarf in accordance with her Muslim faith. But a friend of hers, who worked at the store, said he didn't think it would be a problem as long as the headscarf wasn't black because the store doesn't sell black clothes.

Ultimately Elauf failed to get the job, and her story has triggered a religious freedom debate regarding when an employer can be held liable under civil rights laws. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case on Wednesday.

READ: Ginsburg and Scalia on parasailing, elephants and not being '100% sober'

Like many retailers Abercrombie has a "look policy" aimed to promote what it calls its "classic East Coast collegiate style of clothing."

When Elauf sat down with assistant manager Heather Cooke to formally interview for the job, neither the headscarf nor religion ever came up. Cooke did refer to the policy, however, telling Elauf that employees shouldn't wear a lot of make up, black clothing or nail polish.

Cooke thought Elauf was qualified for the job, but after the interview sought approval from her district manager regarding the headscarf. She says she told the manager that she assumed Elauf was Muslim and figured she wore the headscarf for religious reasons. The manager told her that Elauf should not be hired because the scarf was inconsistent with the "look policy."

A federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued on Elauf's behalf saying the store had discriminated on the basis of religion in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The law makes it illegal for an employer to "fail or refuse to hire" an individual because of an individual's religion unless an employer demonstrates that he is unable to reasonably accommodate a religious observance or practice "without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer's business."

Abercrombie does not dispute that Elauf was not hired because of her headscarf. The company says its "look policy" is neutral on religion, but that employees are not allowed to wear headgear.

Although Elauf won at the district court level, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Abercrombie holding that the employer could not be held liable because Elauf never informed the company that she wore the scarf for her religious beliefs and that she need an accommodation because her headscarf conflicted with the store's clothing policy.

In court briefs, lawyers for Abercromie say that they their audience are "tough customers" in part because the stores must retain their business "through the vicissitudes of teen and young adult fashion."

"Messages that deviate from a brand's core identity weaken the brand and reduce its value," said lawyer Shay Dvoretzky .

The company prohibits facial hair, obvious tattoos and long fingernails. Caps are not allowed to be worn on the sales floor. The store says it has granted religious exemptions that have been requested over the years to employees -- some of them Muslim -- after evaluating them on a case-by-case basis. In this instance, Elauf never asked for such an exemption.

"At its core, this case presents the question of when an employer must initiate a dialogue with its employee or prospective employee about any possible religious accommodations that may be necessary under Title VII.," lawyers for the libertarian Cato Institute argued in court briefs in support of Abercrombie.

"The answer is that the employer must have actual notice of a potential conflict between an employee's religious practices and the employer's workplace rules and policies -- and that the employee bears the burden of providing that notice," they wrote.

But the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit group with an interest in religious freedom, has filed a friend of the court brief supporting Elauf.

"Abercrombie's claim is both absurd and a dangerous precedent for all people of faith seeking an exception," Eric Baxter, a lawyer for the group, "We want the court to recognize that the notice requirement has to be flexible," said Baxter. "There can't be some strict requirement that an employee has to say certain words before the employee's religion is protected."

The case will be decided this spring.




http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/dominionism.htm

Christian Right And Theocracy
Political Research Associates


When Michelle Goldberg wrote “A Christian Plot for Domination?” for the Daily Beast she chose her terms carefully. The subhead stated “Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry aren't just devout—both have deep ties to a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world.” Within hours both critics and supporters of Goldberg’s thesis littered the Internet with posts that drew no distinctions among the Christian Right, Dominionism, and Christian Reconstructionism. There are important differences, and this essay seeks to explain them. PRA takes no position on the 2012 elections, but we do take a position supporting the accurate use of language.

PRA's definition since 2005:

Dominionism: The theocratic idea that regardless of theological view or eschatological timetable, heterosexual Christian men are called by God to exercise dominion over secular society by taking control of political and cultural institutions. Competes in Christianity with the idea of Stewardship, which suggests custodial care rather than absolute power. Used here in the broader sense, some analysts use the word only to refer to forms and offshoots of Reconstructionism.

Inside the Christian Right Dominionist Movement That's Undermining Democracy

Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have all flirted with Christian Right Dominionism, but there's lots of misinformation about just what that means.

Dominionists want to impose a form of Christian nationalism on the United States, a concept that was dismissed as eroding freedom and democracy by the founders of our country. Dominionism has become a major influence on the right-wing populist Tea Parties as Christian Right activists have flooded into the movement at the grassroots.

At the same time, legitimate questions have been raised about whether or not potential Republican presidential nominees Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin have moved from a generic form of Christian Right Dominionism toward the more totalitarian form know as Dominion Theology.

Clueless journalists and crafty Christian Right pundits have mocked the idea that Dominionism as a religiously motivated political tendency even exists. Scholars, however, have been writing about Dominionism for over a decade, some using the term directly, and others describing the tendency in other ways. Many articles on Dominionism can be found on Talk to Action, especially by authors Rachel Tabachnick, Bruce Wilson, Frederick Clarkson. Several of the authors who pioneered the discussion of Dominionism have written for the Public Eye Magazine.

Dominionism is a broad political impulse within the Christian Right in the United States. It comes in a variety of forms that author Fred Clarkson and I call soft and hard. Fred and I probably coined the term "Dominionism" back in the 1990s, but in any case we certainly were the primary researchers who organized its use among journalists and scholars.

Clarkson noted three characteristics that bridge both the hard and the soft kind of Dominionism.

Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe the United States once was, and should again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.
Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.
Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, believing that the Ten Commandments, or "biblical law," should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing Biblical principles.

At the apex of hard Dominionism is the religious dogma of Dominion Theology, with two major branches: Christian Reconstructionism and Kingdom Now theology. It is the latter's influence on the theopolitical movement called the New Apostolic Reformation that has been linked in published reports to potential Republican presidential nominees Perry, Bachmann or Palin. All three of these right-wing political debutantes have flirted with Christian Right Dominionism, but how far they have danced toward the influence of hard-right Dominion Theology is in dispute. It would be nice if some "mainstream" journalists actually researched the question.

"While differing from Reconstructionism in many ways, Kingdom Now shares the belief that Christians have a mandate to take dominion over every area of life," explains religion scholar Bruce Barron. And it is just this tendency that has spread through evangelical Protestantism, resulting in the emergence of "various brands of `dominionist' thinkers in contemporary American evangelicalism," according to Barron.

The most militant Dominion Theologists would silence dissenters and execute adulterers, homosexuals and recalcitrant children. No...seriously. OK, they would only be executed for repeated offenses, explain some defenders of Christian Reconstructionism. Even most Christian Right activists view the more militant Dominion Theologists as having really creepy ideas.

Much of the controversy over the issue of Dominionism is caused by writers who use the term carelessly, often conflating the broad term Dominionism with the narrow term Dominion Theology. Some on the Left have implied that every conservative Christian evangelical is part of the Christian Right political movement; and that everyone in the Christian Right is an active Dominionist. This is false. Some critics even state that the Christian Right is neofascist. Few serious scholars of fascism agree with that assessment, although several admit that if triggered by a traumatic societal event, any contemporary right-wing populist movement could descend into neofascism.

Advocates of Dominion Theology go beyond the democracy eroding theocracy of Dominionism into a totalitarian form of religious power called a "theonomy," in which pluralistic democracy and religious tolerance are seen as a problem to be solved by godly men carrying out God's will. Karen Armstrong calls Christian Reconstructionism "totalitarian" because it leaves "no room for any other view or policy, no democratic tolerance for rival parties, no individual freedom." Matthew N. Lyons and I call Christian Reconstructionism a "new form of clerical fascist politics," in our book Right-Wing Populism in America, because we see it echoing the religiously based clerical fascist movements that existed during World War II in countries including Romania and Hungary.

According to Fred Clarkson:

Reconstructionists believe that there are three main areas of governance: family government, church government, and civil government. Under God's covenant, the nuclear family is the basic unit. The husband is the head of the family, and wife and children are "in submission" to him. In turn, the husband "submits" to Jesus and to God's laws as detailed in the Old Testament. The church has its own ecclesiastical structure and governance. Civil government exists to implement God's laws. All three institutions are under Biblical Law, the implementation of which is called "theonomy."

Christian Reconstructionists believe that as more Christians adopt Dominion Theology, they will eventually convert the majority of Americans. Then the country will realize that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are merely codicils to Old Testament biblical law. Because they believe this is God's will, they scoff at criticism that what they plan is a revolutionary overthrow of the existing system of government. Over the past 20 years the leading proponents of Reconstructionism have included founder Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, David Chilton, Gary DeMar, and Andrew Sandlin. Kingdom Now theology emerged from the Latter Rain Pentacostal movement and the concept of Spiritual Warfare against the literal demonic forces of Satan. It has been promoted by founder Earl Paulk as well as C. Peter Wagner, founder of the New Apostolic Reformation movement.

For many, President Obama and the Democratic Party are among these "demonic forces." This has real world consequences.

In 2006 former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris told thousands of cheering Christian Right activists that beating the Democrats in the upcoming elections was a battle against "principalities and powers," which many in the audience would hear as a Biblical reference to the struggle with the demonic agents of Satan. Harris (who played "ballot bowling" in Florida to elect George W. Bush in 2000) told the audience at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington DC that she had studied religion in Switzerland with the godfather of the Christian Right, theologian Francis A. Schaeffer. Her speech there, which I witnessed and wrote about, qualifies her as a Dominionist.

In 2004 Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, another Dominionist, oversaw the election apparatus giving his favored candidate George W. Bush a boost into the Oval Office.

Religion scholar Bruce Barron explains that "unlike the Christian Right, Reconstructionism is not simply or primarily a political movement; it is first and foremost an educational movement fearlessly proclaiming an ideology of total world transformation." According to sociologist Sara Diamond, Christian Reconstructionism spread the "concept that Christians are Biblically mandated to `occupy' all secular institutions" to the extent that it became "the central unifying ideology for the Christian Right."

William Martin is the author of the 1996 tome With God on Our Side, a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name (Martin and I were both advisers to the PBS series). Martin is a sociologist and professor of religion at Rice University, and he has been critical of the way some critics of the Christian Right have tossed around the terms "dominionism" and "theocracy." According to Martin:

It is difficult to assess the influence of Reconstructionist thought with any accuracy. Because it is so genuinely radical, most leaders of the Religious Right are careful to distance themselves from it. At the same time, it clearly holds some appeal for many of them. One undoubtedly spoke for others when he confessed, `Though we hide their books under the bed, we read them just the same.'

Martin reveals that "several key leaders have acknowledged an intellectual debt to the theonomists." The late Christian Right leaders Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy "endorsed Reconstructionist books" for example. Before he died in 2001, the founder of Christian Reconstuctionism, R. J. Rushdoony, appeared several times on Christian Right televangelist programs such as Pat Robertson's 700 Club and the program hosted by D. James Kennedy.

"Pat Robertson makes frequent use of `dominion' language," says Martin. Robertson's book, The Secret Kingdom, "has often been cited for its theonomy elements; and pluralists were made uncomfortable when, during his presidential campaign, he said he `would only bring Christians and Jews into the government,' as well as when he later wrote, `There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.' "

Martin also pointed out that Jay Grimstead, who led the Coalition on Revival, "brought Reconstructionists together with more mainstream evangelicals." According to Martin, Grimstead explained "`I don't call myself [a Reconstructionist]," but "A lot of us are coming to realize that the Bible is God's standard of morality...in all points of history...and for all societies, Christian and non-Christian alike....It so happens that Rushdoony, Bahnsen, and North understood that sooner."

Then Grimstead added, "there are a lot of us floating around in Christian leadership--James Kennedy is one of them--who don't go all the way with the theonomy thing, but who want to rebuild America based on the Bible."

So let's choose our language carefully, but let's recognize that terms such as Dominionism and Theocracy, when used cautiously and carefully, are appropriate when describing troubling tendencies in the Christian Right that are helping push the current political scene toward confrontation and intolerance.

More background articles on the roots of Dominionism:
The Roots of Dominionism





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becket_Fund_for_Religious_Liberty

Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is a non-profit organizationbased in Washington, D.C. that describes itself as "a non-profit, public interest law firm defending the freedom of religion of people of all faiths." The Becket Fund operates in three arenas: in the courts of law (litigation), in the court of public opinion (media), and in the academy (scholarship).

The Becket Fund's stated mission is to "protect the free expression of all religious traditions." Clients have included Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians. The organization maintains that "freedom of religion is a basic human right that no government may lawfully deny; it is not a gift of the state, but instead is rooted in the inherent dignity of the human person. Religious expression (of all traditions) is a natural part of life in a free society, and religious arguments (on all sides of a question) are a normal and healthy element of public debate. Religious people and institutions are entitled to participate in public life on an equal basis with everyone else, and should not be excluded for professing their faith."[1]

Litigation activities[edit]

The Becket Fund has represented groups and persons from many different religious traditions in litigation, pre-litigation, and appeals, including Buddhists, Christians,Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Santeros, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians.

Notable clients include the nation's oldest Hindu temple, the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in Flushing, New York City, Prison Fellowship International, Muslim students in Richardson, Texas, seeking to pray the dhuhr prayer on the campus ofLloyd V. Berkner High School, and a Zen Buddhist silent meditation center in New York state that neighbors claimed would make too much noise.

The Becket Fund was counsel for the Petitioner church in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. As a result of the case, theUnited States Supreme Court recognized for the first time the ministerial exceptiondoctrine. They also served as the counsel to Hobby Lobby in its case to be exempt from covering drugs it viewed to be abortifacients. Among cases they have currently slated to be heard by the Supreme Court is one in which they represent a Muslim prison inmate seeking the right to grow a beard.[2]

Previous clients also included the City of Cranston[3] in the attempt to preserve the Prayer Banner at Cranston High School West.

The Becket Fund represented Sacramento-area public school students who sought to continue reciting the current form of the Pledge of Allegiance (including the words "under God") in Newdow v. Carey, the second case brought by Michael Newdowseeking to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. The Becket Fund also represented intervenors in the challenge to the Pledge of Allegiance inHanover, New Hampshire public schools.[4] Both cases were resolved in favor of the current Pledge language.

Another Becket Fund client is a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that was denied the right to use its building by a local court after complaints that the mosque was promoting terrorism.[5]

Among the Becket Fund's governmental clients have been the states of Colorado,Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, the city of Jersey City, New Jersey, and Spartanburg County School District No. 7.

The Becket Fund has also litigated on behalf of prisoners who seek to continue following their beliefs in prison. The Becket Fund has sought to ensure that observant Jewish prisoners are provided with kosher food in every prison in the United States. Currently pending is the case of Moussazadeh v. Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which seeks kosher food for the Becket Fund's client Max Moussazadeh. The Becket Fund is also representing a prisoner seeking kosher dietary accommodations from the Florida Department of Corrections.

Another significant area of litigation for the Becket Fund has been religious land use. The Becket Fund brought the first case under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), and has been involved with RLUIPA litigation throughout the United States.[6]

The Becket Fund has also represented a number of amici curiae at the United States Supreme Court in appeals related to religious liberty, including various civil and religious liberties organizations, such as the American Jewish Congress, the Hindu American Foundation, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, United Sikhs, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the American Civil Liberties Union andPeople for the American Way.

International activities[edit]

The Becket Fund advocates on behalf of religious liberty in international fora. It has represented Muslim clients in the European Court of Human Rights, and has assisted in pre-litigation and litigation in Europe, Asia, and Australia.[7] As a non-governmental organisation in Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the Becket Fund has also made annual presentations on religious liberty issues of concern at meetings of United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and since 2006, at the United Nations Human Rights Council. The Becket Fund also operates the Becket Institute, an academic center focusing on religious liberty issues.

The Becket Fund has been a strong opponent of the concept of "defamation of religion" as it has been presented at the United Nations and elsewhere. The Becket Fund has argued that protecting religions against defamation puts governments in the position of deciding which religious concepts are valid and thus worthy of protection, and would lead to the suppression of both religious and non-religious speech.





I believe strongly in the freedom of religion and the freedom from a required religious participation or belief. This modern trend toward Dominionism is a direct threat to our democratic principles and must be fought at every turn. When the radical right began winning elections I was disturbed, but it has taken a very dangerous direction on all civil rights issues in the last decade. Until recently I dismissed far right viewpoints as being a distinct minority in our country, but as more and more states make new laws to disable our Constitutional principles – women's rights in all ways, freedom of religion including Atheism or Agnosticism, oppression of racial and ethnic minorities, legal oppression and economic abuse of the poor, the elimination of the Social Security and medical care systems, the propagandizing of the public school system and even its entire defunding – I have decided that it's time for all people who believe in the Constitution of the USA, as it has been written and amended over the last 150 years, to form a new political unit that guarantees these rights. I would like to see a well informed and very active energizing of the Democratic Party.

I do believe that the Koch brothers et al set aside, the real force behind this new Right is the rise of religious fanaticism and the continued taint of racism. Reconstruction just didn't carry us all the way past the Civil War. Part of the problem with racial integration on the social level in this country is the fact that the Protestant churches have never been integrated, partly due to the differences in style of worship between the black and white Protestant churches. The Catholic Church, however, has never been segregated doctrinally from the Vatican, though I found Internet articles on the subject. The US and Ireland were mentioned.

I asked a black woman I knew if she wanted to go to my UU church and she said “It sounds too quiet for me.” The UU church is too quiet for the white Dominionists also. The Religious Left, of which we are a member, advocates quiet, deep thought, championing ethical political beliefs, non-literal reading of religious materials and social activism. My church does have several black members, and is one of the churches that have married gays and lesbians in the last decade and welcomed their membership. The United Methodist Church, the Friends, and many Catholics are also liberal on civil rights, though the Vatican still forbids homosexual and lesbian sexual activity. I think those things promote the message of Jesus when he taught so long ago; but fanatical beliefs from the very beginning have been a part of Christianity when it became an established religion – by Emperor Constantine in the Roman Empire and then again during the Reformation in Europe. There is a basic flaw with a mandated and established national religion -- it cannot exist alongside a free citizenry. I put the freedoms in our culture above any one religious viewpoint. We are still, thank God, free to follow our own spiritual paths. That may not continue for much longer.

In the US we have had freedom of religion (except under the Puritans) as one of our most prized basic rights. Right wing voices were loud recently, however, when President Obama quietly made the point that the Crusades, pogroms against Jews, and the slaughter of many believers on both sides in the Reformation in Europe, happened under the Christian Church, not just the present appalling human rights violations under Islamic fundamentalism. Sharia Law would be equally evil. Whenever religion becomes not a spiritual path, but a system of societal control it is not only “off on the wrong footing,” but literally polluted by evil.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is a phrase that should be remembered in all places and times. It doesn't come from the Bible, but it is very true. It is a statement by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton,or Lord Acton— who was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. His words were “ "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." See Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton for his biography. He was in favor of the states rights cause of the Confederacy as he feared the strongly centralized federal government, however, so he possibly wouldn't have approved of our modern Civil Rights viewpoints. England itself took a position with the Confederacy at that time.

This Wikipedia biography is very interesting. He was a devout Catholic, but wrote about “Papal inconsistency” and opposed the infallibility of the Pope. He was a great scholar who examined issues closely and came to his own conclusions. He wouldn't approve of a doctrine that requires all people to think alike or follow a party line. See the following from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton, which is an excellent article giving some of his quotations on government:

Letter to Mary Gladstone (24 April 1881); later published in Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone (1913) p. 73 – “The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.”

Letter (23 January 1861), published in Lord Acton and his Circle (1906) by Abbot Francis Aidan Gasquet, Letter 74 – “There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.”

"Nationality" in Home and Foreign Review (July 1862); republished in The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1907), p. 288 – “Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.”

At this time in our history when we are threatened by a bizarre group of Islamic extremists who have more than once succeeded in a terroristic attack on our native soil, it is easy to make an extreme mass movement toward a greater sense of safety which can unfortunately threaten our most precious liberties and intellectual attainments. I am referring to the oppressive new laws such as the Patriot Act and the Fundamentalist Protestant intellectual war against scholarly and rational thought in general – especially on Evolutionary and Environmental issues and science of all kinds, the teaching of a truthful rather than sanitized version of the history of our society, and anything which tends to prevent the dominion of a religion, class structure, or political extremism of all kinds from gaining a foothold here. At this point, I fear we are losing this important battle.

The Pentagon And Climate Change 2015


“In 25 years, operations at most of these bases are likely to be severely compromised. Within 50 years, most of them could be goners. If the region gets slammed by a big hurricane, the reckoning could come even sooner. "You could move some of the ships to other bases or build new, smaller bases in more protected places," says retired Navy Capt. Joe Bouchard, a former commander of Naval Station Norfolk. "But the costs would be enormous. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars."... Whenever another officer or a congressperson corners White and presses him about why he spends so much time thinking about climate change, he doesn't even try to explain thermal expansion of the oceans or ice dynamics in the Arctic. "I just take them down to Norfolk," White says. "When you see what's going on down there, it gives you a sense of what climate change means to the Navy — and to America. And you can see why we're concerned."... Those who talk most about climate change — scientists, politicians, environmental activists — tend to frame the discussion in economic and moral terms. But last month, in a dramatic turn, President Obama talked about climate change in an explicitly military context: "The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security," he said in his State of the Union address. "We should act like it."

This article is easily readable and needs no explanation. Just read it and try to decide what we can do about this situation. Climate change is happening much faster than I expected. The severe droughts across the nation in the last few years are one problem, but the rising ocean may be the worst. The thawing of Alaska and other parts of the Arctic is another. If the ice melts, causing the Atlantic to become less saline, it can cause the flow of currents from north to south to cease and as a result the Gulf Stream may not be as warm, thus causing a colder climate – a new “ice age.” That is theoretical, but the logic of it makes sense and many scientists agree with it.

I'll be dead before these things happen, but it still grieves me to think of the destruction of habitat and food sources and eventually of life as we know it. It's no wonder the military is concerned about this complex problem. They may well be needed to maintain public order if our society falls apart. Perhaps it will happen slowly and we will be able to adjust to the changing situations. I don't believe that's “God's will.” It's just man's apparent stupidity.




http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-pentagon-climate-change-how-climate-deniers-put-national-security-at-risk-20150212

The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk
The leaders of our armed forces know what's coming next – but deniers in Congress are ignoring the warnings

BY JEFF GOODELL 
February 12, 2015

Naval station Norfolk is the headquarters of the U.S. Navy's Atlantic fleet, an awesome collection of military power that is in a terrible way the crowning glory of American civilization. Seventy-five thousand sailors and civilians work here, their job the daily business of keeping an armada spit-shined and ready for deployment at any moment. When I visited in December, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was in port, a 1,000-foot-long floating war machine that was central to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cranes loaded equipment onto the deck; sailors rushed up and down the gangplanks. Navy helicopters hovered overhead. Security was tight everywhere. While I was checking out one of the base's massive new double-decker concrete piers that's nearly as big as a shopping-mall parking lot, I wandered over to have a closer look at the USS Gravely, a guided-missile destroyer that has spent a lot of hours on watch in the Mediterranean. Armed men on the deck watched me warily — even my official escort seemed jittery ("I think we should step back a bit," he said, grabbing my arm).

Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story »

You can't spend 10 minutes in this part of Virginia without feeling the deep sense of history. The Battle of Hampton Roads, a famous naval showdown between two Civil War ironclads, occurred just offshore. The base was a key departure point for thousands of sailors during World War II, many of whom never returned. Their ghosts still haunt the place. Everyone's aunt or uncle has a story to tell about a night in a port in Brisbane or Barcelona or about the way their ears rang the first time they heard a cannon firing from the deck of a ship.

But within the lifetime of a child growing up here, all this could vanish into the Atlantic Ocean. The land that the base is built upon is literally sinking, meaning sea levels are rising in Norfolk roughly twice as fast as the global average. There is no high ground, nowhere to retreat. It feels like a swamp that has been dredged and paved over — and that's pretty much what it is. All it takes is a rainstorm and a big tide and the Atlantic invades the base — roads are submerged, entry gates impassable. A nor'easter had moved through the area the day before my visit. On Craney Island, the base's main refueling depot, military vehicles were up to their axles in seawater. Water pooled in a long, flat grassy area near Admiral's Row, where naval commanders live in magnificent houses built for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition. "It's the biggest Navy base in the world, and it's going to have to be relocated," says former Vice President Al Gore. "It's just a question of when."

There are 29 other military bases, shipyards and installations in the area, and many of them are in just as much trouble. At nearby Langley Air Force base, home to two fighter wings and headquarters for the Air Combat Command, base commanders keep 30,000 sandbags ready to stack around buildings when a big storm comes in. At Dam Neck, another Navy base, they pile old Christmas trees on the beach to keep it from eroding. At NASA Wallops Flight Facility, NASA armored the shoreline with 3 million cubic yards of sand to protect its launchpads from sea surges. "Military readiness is already being impacted by sea-level rise," says Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, who mentions that with all the flooding, it's becoming difficult to sell a house in some parts of Norfolk. If the melting of Greenland and West Antarctica continues to accelerate at current rates, scientists say Norfolk could see more than seven feet of sea-level rise by 2100. In 25 years, operations at most of these bases are likely to be severely compromised. Within 50 years, most of them could be goners. If the region gets slammed by a big hurricane, the reckoning could come even sooner. "You could move some of the ships to other bases or build new, smaller bases in more protected places," says retired Navy Capt. Joe Bouchard, a former commander of Naval Station Norfolk. "But the costs would be enormous. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars."

Rear Adm. Jonathan White, the Navy's chief oceanographer and head of its climate-change task force, is one of the most knowledgeable people in the military about what's actually happening on our rapidly heating planet. Whenever another officer or a congressperson corners White and presses him about why he spends so much time thinking about climate change, he doesn't even try to explain thermal expansion of the oceans or ice dynamics in the Arctic. "I just take them down to Norfolk," White says. "When you see what's going on down there, it gives you a sense of what climate change means to the Navy — and to America. And you can see why we're concerned."

Those who talk most about climate change — scientists, politicians, environmental activists — tend to frame the discussion in economic and moral terms. But last month, in a dramatic turn, President Obama talked about climate change in an explicitly military context: "The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security," he said in his State of the Union address. "We should act like it."

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math »

On one level, this is just shrewd politics, a way of talking about climate change to people who don't care about extinction rates among reptiles or food prices in eastern Africa. But it's also a way of boxing in all the deniers in Congress who have blocked climate action — many of whom, it turns out, are big supporters of the military. The Senate Armed Services Committee is made up of characters like James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and is headed by John McCain of Arizona, who, before he ran for president in 2008, had been an outspoken advocate for climate action, but has been silent on the issue in recent years. The House Armed Services Committee is now chaired by Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, who argued in a 2011 op-ed that prayer is a better response to heat waves and drought than cutting carbon pollution.

Any official who draws a link between climate change and national security is guaranteed a rabid reaction from right-wingers. Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently called climate change "a threat multiplier" that "has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today — from infectious disease to terrorism." In response, The Wall Street Journal editorial page blasted Hagel as a delusional tree-hugger: "Americans who might die at the hands of the Islamic State won't care that Mr. Hagel is mobilizing against melting glaciers." In a speech in Jakarta last year — a city of almost 30 million that is sinking rapidly — Secretary of State John Kerry called climate change "perhaps the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction" and likened it to terrorism, epidemics and poverty. McCain immediately dismissed Kerry's concerns and accused him of "butterflying around the world, saying all kinds of things"; former Republican leader Newt Gingrich tweeted, "Every American who cares about national security must demand Kerry's resignation. A delusional secretary of state is dangerous to our safety."

Before climate change became taboo for Republicans, it was possible for even conservative politicians to have rational discussions about the subject. In 2003, under Donald Rumsfeld, former President George W. Bush's defense secretary, the Pentagon published a report titled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." Commissioned by Andrew Marshall, who is sometimes jokingly referred to within the Pentagon as Yoda — and who was a favorite of Rumsfeld's — the report warned that threats to global stability posed by rapid warming vastly eclipse that of terrorism. Some of the climate science in the report was flawed, but the broader conclusions were not. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," the report stated. "Once again, warfare would define human life." 

Once a leading voice on the climate, Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, now rarely mentions the issues. 

Even McCain, now firmly in the denial camp, didn't hesitate to draw the connection between climate change and national security. "If the scientists are right and temperatures continue to rise," he said on the Senate floor in 2007, "we could face environmental, economic and national-security consequences far beyond our ability to imagine."

This kind of talk vanished from the party after 2008, when the GOP turned into a subsidiary of Koch Industries. Since then, Republicans have worked hard to undermine any connection between climate and national security. Case in point: In 2009, then-CIA director Leon Panetta quietly started the Center on Climate Change and National Security. It was a straightforward attempt by the intelligence community to gather a better understanding of the changes to come. Among other things, the Center funded a major study of the relationships between climate change and social stress, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most respected scientific organizations in the country. Climate deniers in Congress didn't like it, especially Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming, a Big Coal state. By the time the report was completed, Panetta had left the CIA and his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, let it wither. "We felt constant pressure to water down our conclusions," says one of the co-authors of the National Academy report. The day the report was released, the press conference was suddenly canceled, and the report was buried. A few weeks later, the Center on Climate Change and National Security was disbanded.

Barrasso has also been a key figure in derailing Senate hearings on the connection between climate and national security. Last year, Daniel Chiu, one of the Pentagon's top strategists, testified intelligently about the national-security implications of climate change. But in the Q&A period that followed, Barrasso disappeared into fantasyland, quizzing Chiu about "global international crime syndicates" that are manipulating European environmental policies "to aid and support terrorist organizations and drug cartels that wish to do us and our allies harm."

Deniers in Congress have gone after the Pentagon where military officials feel it most: their budget. Last year, House Republicans tagged an amendment onto the defense appropriations bill that prohibited the Pentagon from spending any money implementing recommendations from the latest report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "The amendment had no effect on the defense budget, since the IPCC's recommendations don't really apply to us," one Pentagon insider told me. "But the intent was clear: This is going to be war."

The scale of military assets that are at risk due to our rapidly changing climate is mind-boggling. The Pentagon manages more than 555,000 facilities and 28 million acres of land — virtually all of which will be impacted by climate change in some way.

Nearly every naval and Air Force base on the East Coast is vulnerable to sea-level rise and storm surges, including Eglin Air Force Base, the largest Air Force base in the United States, which is on the low-lying Florida Panhandle, and Patrick Air Force Base on Florida's Atlantic Coast. In the West, the problem is often drought and flash flooding. Fort Irwin, a seven-square-mile Army base in Southern California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, has troubles with both. California's epic drought has put the base's long-term water supply into question. Fort Irwin is one of the only bases in the U.S. with the space and the isolation to allow full-scale mock tank warfare. At the same time, the base has been pounded by extreme rain events. In August 2013, when a year's worth of rain fell in 80 minutes, flooding caused $64 million in damages on the base.

Up in Alaska, the problem is thawing permafrost and coastal erosion from stronger storms and higher tides. The Air Force's early-warning radar installations, which help the U.S. keep a close watch on anything lobbed our way from North Korea or Russia, have been hit particularly hard. At one installation, 40 feet of shoreline have been lost, endangering the reliability of the radar. At other installations, thawing permafrost has caused the radar to tilt and fall out of alignment.

In some places, these impacts are little more than expensive nuisances. But in others, the future of entire installations, many of them virtually irreplaceable due to their geography and strategic location, is in question. The U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia, a small coral atoll in the Indian Ocean, like the nearby Maldives, is sure to vanish. Built during the Cold War, Diego Garcia gave the U.S. military a footing from which to counter Soviet influence in the region, as well as to protect shipping lanes out of the Middle East. In more recent years, this rare strategic asset has become a crucial logistics hub for sending supplies to joint forces in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Southern Europe. It also houses Air Force Satellite Control Network equipment used to control GPS. The ships and equipment can be moved easily enough, but giving up a military toehold in a vital but flammable part of the world is not something the military likes to do. "To the Navy, presence matters," says retired Rear Adm. David Titley.

The Pentagon is examining its 704 coastal installations and sites in a big study to try to figure out which bases are most at risk. Eventually some tough decisions will have to be made about which ones to close, relocate or protect. Even speculating about the number of possible closures is too hot a topic for anyone in the Pentagon to touch right now. But the process can't be put off much longer. The next meeting of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission could occur as soon as 2017. "In BRAC, all of the decisions are based on the military value," says John Conger, the deputy undersecretary of defense, who is responsible for BRAC. "Will climate change affect the military value of the installation? Well, sure it will. The question is, does it dominate the equation? And I don't think it does — yet." 

Just as there are climate-change hot spots, there are also climate-denial hot spots — and Virginia is one of them. The Republican-dominated Virginia General Assembly has been hostile to discussion of climate change — one legislator called sea-level rise "a left-wing term." Instead, the politically acceptable phrase in Virginia is "recurrent flooding." 

As sea levels rise, floods have become more common on the base. Photographer's Mate 1st Class Michael Pendergrass/U.S. Navy

This makes it hard for the Navy to deal with the most immediate problem Norfolk faces: keeping its roads open. One study by the Virginia Institute for Marine Science identified nearly 300 miles of flood-vulnerable roads in the Norfolk area. "If people can't get to work on the base because the roads are flooded out, we have a big problem," says Capt. J. Pat Rios, who is in charge of Navy facilities in the mid-Atlantic region. But roads in Norfolk are the state's responsibility, and rebuilding them is not a priority right now. Because a number of the men and women in the Virginia Legislature don't believe climate change is an urgent issue, they don't want to spend much money addressing the threat it poses. "They find roads to fix in other parts of the state," says Joe Bouchard.

For now, the Navy's strategy is just to buy time. In the late 1990s, Navy engineers realized that the 13 piers at the base, some dating back to World War II, were reaching the end of their life spans. Because they had been built at a time when nobody gave a thought to sea-level rise, the piers were relatively low to the water. At high tide, the utilities that ran along the underside of the pier decks — electrical, steam, phone, Internet — were often immersed in water, rendering them unusable. "It was not a nuisance problem — it was not a minor operational issue," says Bouchard. "Sea-level rise was interfering with combat readiness for the Atlantic fleet."

So far, four new piers have been built, which are higher, stronger and better-designed than the old piers. Bouchard, who was commander while the first new piers were constructed, says "they were built with sea-level rise in mind." But out on the base, nobody wants to talk directly about spending money to deal with sea-level rise, mostly because they are worried about drawing scrutiny from climate deniers in Congress, who are happy to redline any expenditure with the word "climate" in it. Instead, many people in the military end up talking about the climate similar to the way eighth-graders talk about sex — with code words and suggestive language.

"We didn't raise the piers because of climate change," Capt. Rios tells me during my visit to the base. He doesn't quite wink, but almost.

"Then why did you raise them?" I ask.

"Because we needed new piers. And as long as we were building them, it didn't cost much more to build them higher."

But building higher piers is not going to save the base in Norfolk. No matter how much money the Pentagon spends, it won't matter if people can't get to the base because roads are underwater or nobody wants to live in the area because the value of their homes is spiraling down. "To save the base, you have to save the region," says Bouchard. With the help of the White House, state and local officials recently set up an innovative two-year pilot project with the Navy to begin to address these problems. But right now, solutions are a long way off.
Sea-level rise is only one of the climate-driven threats that are making the world more dangerous and volatile. Drought contributed to the escalating food prices that triggered the Arab Spring revolt in Egypt, in 2011; it also helped trigger the civil war in Syria. In northern Nigeria, a region destabilized by extreme cycles of drought and flooding, Boko Haram is terrorizing villages and killing thousands of Nigerians.

China, the Climate and the Fate of the Planet »

Climate change is also reshaping the boundaries of the continents. Nowhere more so than in the Arctic, which is likely to become a major flashpoint in the territorial disputes and resource wars of the future. "The melting ice is opening a new ocean," says Adm. Gary Roughead, who was U.S. chief of naval operations from 2007 to 2011. "It's a once-in-a-millennium event." Thirteen percent of the world's undiscovered petroleum lies beneath the Arctic, as does 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas and more than $1 trillion of mineral wealth. "The best way I've heard it explained," says Rear Adm. Daniel Abel of the U.S. Coast Guard, "imagine if you have the Panama Canal and Saudi Arabia's worth of energy show up at the same place in your area of responsibility. How would you embrace that?"

You can already see glimpses of a militarized future in the Arctic. In 2007, Russian soldiers dived 14,000 feet beneath the North Pole in a minisub and planted a Russian flag in the seabed, marking it as their turf. "This isn't the 15th century — you can't go around the world and just plant flags" to claim territory, Canada's minister of foreign affairs, Peter MacKay, said dismissively. Last September, six Russian jet fighters were detected near Alaska; when U.S. and Canadian fighters intercepted the Russian planes about 55 miles off the coast — still outside of American airspace, but closer than they usually fly — the Russians turned around and headed home, but it was a close encounter and one that has been happening with increasing frequency in recent months. In November, a Russian sub in the Barents Sea near Greenland test-fired a Bulava intercontinental missile — the Bulava is Russia's latest and most deadly nuclear weapon. The missile has a range of about 5,000 miles and can be loaded with up to 10 nuclear warheads, each of which can be individually maneuvered. A Bulava launched from a sub in the Arctic could easily reach Boston, New York or Washington, D.C.

Within the Pentagon, these provocations were seen as more than old Cold War game-playing. In the eyes of some planners, Putin was sending a not-very-subtle message that he thinks of the Arctic the same way Americans once thought of the West: a vast, uncivilized landscape of resources that will be dominated by whomever stakes the first claim.

After the Cold War, the U.S. military largely forgot about the Arctic. It was too hostile, too forbidding, too expensive to operate there, and without the Soviets to worry about, there was little reason to. In the 1990s, as Big Oil developed plans to explore the region for oil and gas, the Navy's concern grew — Roughead says a big blowout on an offshore drilling rig in the Arctic "would make Deepwater Horizon look like a cakewalk." But given the complexities of drilling in the Arctic, that seemed like a distant-future threat. 

In 2007, a Russian sub planted its country's flag on the Arctic seabed. Melting icecaps have opened up a new ocean in the resource-rich region that the U.S. is ill-equipped to protect. 

Naval leaders began to think differently about the region in 2007, which, when the history of climate change is written, will go down as one of the turning points. That summer, scientists were stunned by an unexpected vanishing of sea ice that exposed 1 million square miles of open water — six Californias — beyond the average since satellites started measurements in 1979. Roughead assembled a special Navy task force to figure out what was going on. "I wanted to really understand the long-term trends so we could begin to think strategically about the challenges we might face in the Arctic, and what we needed to operate up there," Roughead says. "The idea was to be more thoughtful about this than to just run around the Pentagon shouting, 'Hey, everybody, climate change is a big deal!' "

Navy scientists estimate that by 2025 the summer ice melt in the Arctic will be big enough to allow transpolar shipping to expand on the Northern Sea Route, which passes through the Barents Sea along the Russian coastline and cuts the transit time between Asia and Europe by a third. As the ice thaws, there will be more tourists sailing in the Northwest Passage along the Canadian coast. There will be more drilling in the Chukchi Sea west of Alaska. There will be more traffic to Greenland, where mining companies are already lining up to extract minerals that will be made accessible by the retreating ice sheets. With all this new maritime traffic, it's inevitable that the Navy will have to respond to more and more incidents up there, from search-and-rescue missions to possibly countering the aggressive actions of the Russian navy. Or, nearly as likely, from the Chinese, who are eager to tap into the rich oil and gas reserves in the Arctic. "The U.S. Navy doesn't cede an ocean to anybody," Titley argues. "We are a great power."

But the U.S. Navy is also, according to Roughead, "woefully unprepared" to operate in the icy, unforgiving Arctic. The Navy doesn't have good weather-forecasting ability there; satellite communications are unreliable; only about 10 percent of the seabed has been surveyed, so navigators are unaware of undersea obstacles. Submarine missions have also become more dangerous due to unpredictable sea ice-freezing patterns. Most important, because nobody in the Navy was prioritizing the need to operate in the Arctic, few Navy ships are prepared for cold weather. Their water and ventilation systems don't work properly in freezing temperatures, their hulls are not hardened against ice. As Titley puts it, "Every Navy commander's nightmare is that something happens in the Arctic — a ship full of tourists going down, a terrorist attack, an encounter with Russian military — and having to pick up the phone and say, 'I'm sorry, Mr. President. We'd like to do something about this, but we simply don't have the equipment to allow us to respond to the situation.' "

When it comes to safety and security in the Arctic, no piece of equipment is as important as an icebreaker. Virtually every nation with a claim to the Arctic knows this: Russia has 43 icebreakers (six of them nuclear-powered); Canada has 13; Finland has nine. The U.S. has one, the Polar Star, which is operated by the U.S. Coast Guard. It's nearly 40 years old. Within a decade, it will be scrapped, and there are no plans to build another one. "By not funding them," says Titley, "we telegraph to the rest of the world that we don't care about the Arctic."

The price tag for a new icebreaker is $1 billion — not cheap, but about one-third the price of a destroyer. And not something Rep. Duncan Hunter, the San Diego climate denier who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees Coast Guard affairs, wants to hear about. (Although he does seem to be in favor of an ice-free Arctic: "Thousands of people die every year of cold, so if we had global warming it would save lives," he told a group of Californians in 2009.) In the view of one Pentagon watcher, the problem is not just that deniers like Hunter don't see the need for icebreakers, "they don't see the need for any kind of strategic thinking about the Arctic at all." Without active icebreakers, California Rep. John Garamendi, the ranking Democrat on Hunter's subcommittee, told the Associated Press that "the control of the Arctic is in the hands of Russia."

The other issue is the lawlessness of the new ocean, especially when it comes to oil and gas exploration under the retreating ice. Every nation enjoys sovereign rights 200 miles off its coastline — but what about beyond that? How should it be divvied up? In 2010, a Chinese admiral claimed that since China has 20 percent of the world's population, it should have 20 percent of the Arctic's resources. Fair or not, that is surely not a view that Russia — or the United States, for that matter — is likely to endorse.

To resolve these sorts of claims, as well as to give legal structure to the rights and responsibilities of countries with respect to the oceans, United Nations members spent decades negotiating an agreement, formally known as the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea. Among other things, UNCLOS recognizes that nations have a right to claim resources along what is known as their "extended continental shelf," which basically means any recognizable land features that extend underwater beyond the 200-mile border. The agreement was finalized in 1982 and now has been agreed to by more than 60 countries, including Russia and every other Arctic nation — except the U.S. Although the agreement is widely supported by Big Oil, U.S. military leaders and every American president since Ronald Reagan, opponents like Sen. Inhofe, dean of the congressional climate deniers, and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan have been able to block U.S. participation by claiming the agreement infringes on American freedom and that royalty provisions in the agreement would allow a corrupt "U.N.-style bureaucracy" to divert billions of dollars from the U.S. economy by "taxing" corporate profits.

The resources that the U.S. could justifiably claim if it recognized the Law of the Sea are vast. In Alaska alone, the continental shelf extends 600 miles from the coast, with an estimated 73 billion barrels of oil and oil-equivalent natural gas. Supporters of the agreement estimate these resources could generate more than $193 billion in federal, state and local revenue over a 50-year period.

Setting aside the economic consequences, from a national-security perspective, it's foolish to exempt ourselves from the one international agreement that can resolve disputes over territorial claims before they escalate. "I believe our being in the treaty would make for greater stability and security, and not just in the Arctic," Roughead argues. "It will also allow our claims to the extended continental shelf to be recognized internationally." As for the argument advanced by Inhofe and others that by joining the treaty we would weaken the powers of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard and turn authority over to the United Nations, Roughead is immediately dismissive: "That is simply not the case."

As the world warms, the U.S. military will inevitably be called upon to conduct more disaster relief and humanitarian-aid missions. The U.S. military, of course, is not a polar-bear rescue operation. "The military has many important roles," says Sharon Burke, a former assistant secretary of defense. "But the main job is to fight wars. That means breaking things and killing people." But the military also prides itself on its practical-mindedness, both in times of war and of peace. Military leaders embraced desegregation long before the rest of the nation, in part because they wanted the best people they could find, no matter what color. "It's our job to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it could be," says Robert Freeman, a meteorologist and member of the Navy's climate-change task force.

Plastic Stones, Melting Snails: 3 New Ways To Maim a Planet »

Adm. Samuel Locklear III, who is in charge of all U.S. armed forces in the Pacific, is one of the most respected men in the U.S. military — and the one with the toughest job, with both China and North Korea to watch over. "The political and social upheaval we're likely to see from our rapidly warming planet," Locklear told The Boston Globe in 2013, "is probably the most likely thing that . . . will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.''

Soon afterward, Locklear was summoned before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Inhofe asked him to "clarify" his remarks. And he did, calmly and forcefully, schooling the senator in how steadily increasing populations in Asia would only put more people at risk from storms and other climate-related disasters. "OK, I'm going to start to interrupt you here," Inhofe said, realizing it was a losing battle. He quickly changed the subject. 

Sen. James Inhofe frilling Adm. Samuel Locklear III. J. Scott Applewhite/AP Images

What Locklear correctly foresees is that a world of climate-driven chaos is already upon us, and it's only going to get worse. And we need to start talking about it now, because not only will the threats multiply, so will the questions we have to address. It's one thing to plan for the invasion of Normandy Beach or the siege of Fallujah — it's quite another to plan for being the rescue squad for the entire planet. We have already spent more than $1 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no measurable success. How much more can we afford to do? "I think we have to make some strategic choices," says Roughead. "Which parts of the world do we care about most? What are the strategic flashpoints? Do we want to be able to operate in the Arctic or not? What kind of world are we preparing for?" Some intelligence analysts argue that U.S. military superiority will be the least significant asset in the future because no one will attack us with massive conventional force. Instead, we will be pulled deeper and deeper into smaller conflicts driven by terrorism, failed states and natural disasters. "When oceans rise, instability follows," says Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus.

Ashton Carter, Obama's pick for secretary of defense, is not known to Pentagon insiders for his focus on the threats of climate change. And the chances of any significant action in Congress before 2016 are close to zero. But as chaos rises, it is inevitable that we will ask our military to do more. At some point, climate denialism will flip into climate panic, and the demand for law and order and stability will prevail (as will the calls for quick and dangerous techno-fixes like geo-engineering to cool down the planet and stop the rising seas). As one military analyst has pointed out, the U.S. military is the only force on Earth with the ability to police, process, house, feed and move refugees on a mass scale. But you can see how this picture could turn dark fast — one of the biggest long-term threats climate change poses could be to civil liberties and freedom. "It's not a question of what the military can do for climate change," says one former Pentagon official. "It's what climate change will do to the military and its mission." It's a scary notion, but that's where we are headed. In the end, it doesn't matter how many climate-adaptation road maps the Pentagon puts out. We are now committed to a future of disorder and conflict — one in which today's emergencies will always interrupt tomorrow's plans.

One White House staffer recalls walking into the Pentagon office of an Army general not long ago. "I'd like to talk to you about climate change," the staffer told him. The general didn't even bother to look up. "I'd like to," he said. "But I have to write a letter to a family whose son has died."

From The Archives Issue 1229: February 26, 2015

ABOUT BLACKS AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
LUCY WARNER
FEBRUARY 14, 2015


The following psmag.com news article aroused my curiosity. The Republicans have been in the news in the last couple of years voicing their desire to increase the number of black Republicans and other Conservatives, such as some who register their party as Independent. This article is about the Conservative mindset in particular, and the difference between 1950s Republicans who included Nelson Rockefeller and some other “liberals.” The Republican Party was in office when the Civil Rights movement began to make progress. Gradually white men, both Southern and Northern, have been trending toward Republicans, resulting in Republican takeovers in many Southern states which in my youth were solidly Democratic. Of course they weren't always liberals, but rather “Dixiecrats,” who were opposed to racial integration and basic civil rights. The shift of white men out of the Democratic party has been marked especially since 2008 when, not coincidentally, President Obama was elected, as part of an uptick in racial events and statements by some Tea Party candidates which they hastily back away from when they made the national news in a negative light. This article about the Conservative mind is similar to some other psychological profiles which have been reported in the news this last year. See my blog CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL – OUR INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURES, JANUARY 2, 2015, at https://plus.google.com/app/basic/.../posts?cbp...sview... for several interesting articles on that subject.

As my mind began to focus on the relative lack of black conservatives, I wanted to know what their numbers are. I couldn't find an article giving specific numbers of black membership in the Republican Party. All of these articles were on black conservatives, and the Pew Research article is the closest to my search terms, the percentages of blacks versus whites on avowed conservatism. Read them all. One of the most interesting is the claim by a conservative think tank that Martin Luther King, Jr was a Republican, and a rebuttal to that statement. I think until the conservative racial bias is totally eliminated among politicians and in the general public, and blacks gain more social, educational and economic advancement, most of them won't be joining the Republican Party whose policies overwhelmingly favor the wealthy, corporations over individuals, and the socially conservative who include many defacto racist individuals. They know better than to say they are superior to blacks -- that would be racist -- but they shun them and continue to make ugly jokes and comments about them.

Whether Republicans tend to group all people with a few black genes together as "black" or not, the real question is what color they want their president and congressional representatives to be, and that is still overwhelmingly "white." Michael Dunn may not have been using a racial bias in shooting the young black man -- he was defending himself -- but he told his girlfriend who was in the car with him that he hated "thug music," which is a term popular on the Internet nowadays to mean "black music." Likewise when police officers speak of "thugs," they mean "black men." Rather than working to wipe this racial taint out of their party membership, especially members of the Tea Party, they are supporting those right wing forces with their political contributions and their policies. The deeply seated problem is not going away, as far as I can see.






http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/white-or-black-conservatives-liberals-see-faces-differently-59293

White or Black? Conservatives, Liberals See Faces Differently
New research finds people on the political right are quicker to classify a racially ambiguous face as black.
TOM JACOBS 
JUN 5, 2013

Did you notice that mixed-race gentleman who passed you on the sidewalk yesterday? During the split second as he walked by, did he register in your mind as black or white?

Disturbing new research suggests the answer to that question may depend on your political ideology.

In three experiments, “we found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to categorize a racially ambiguous person as black than white,” a research team led by New York University psychologist Amy Krosch writes in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Intriguingly, this dynamic disappeared when the study participants—white Americans—were told they were judging Canadian faces. The tendency for those on the right to more quickly categorize someone as “black” only occurred when they were evaluating their fellow countrymen.

“Conservatives exhibit stronger preferences for order, structure, and closure, and greater intolerance of ambiguity in comparison with liberals.”

As the number of mixed-race Americans rapidly grows, the issue of how they are perceived is of more than academic interest. There is no shortage of evidence of continuing discrimination against blacks, such as a new report of racial bias in arrests for marijuana possession. Categorization comes with consequences.

Krosch and her colleagues describe three experiments. The first two featured 31 and 71 participants, respectively, all recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. They indicated their political ideology on a seven-point scale (extremely liberal to extremely conservative.) The participants in the first study were white; the second featured a smattering of non-whites, but no African Americans.

All were asked to quickly label 110 male faces as black or white. The images were created by morphing two “parent” faces, one white and one black, and varying the degree to which each was represented.

In both experiments, the point at which a face was equally likely to be labeled black or white occurred before the point the two faces actually converged. (In the second study, it occurred well before.) This suggests one does not need to have 50 percent African American features to be labeled black.

What’s more, this tendency was exacerbated by ideology. Specifically, “conservatism was associated with a lower threshold for categorizing racially ambiguous faces as black,” the researchers report.

The third experiment, featuring 62 participants (all white), was identical to the first two, except that half the faces were identified as “Canadian.” They were presented against a red background, while “Americans” were seen against a blue background.

The results: “Political conservatism was associated with a lower threshold for categorizing racially ambiguous faces as black when it came to American, but not Canadian, faces.” Whatever impulse that led conservatives to think “black” was negated when they were told they were dealing with residents of a different country.

“There are several possible explanations” for these findings, the researchers write. “Conservatives exhibit stronger preferences for order, structure, and closure, and greater intolerance of ambiguity in comparison with liberals.” Thus they “might be more motivated to resolve racial ambiguity, and to resolve it in the most common or culturally accessible manner.”

Beyond that, Krosch and her colleagues suspect this reflects a phenomenon coined by New York University psychologist John Jost (a co-author of the paper): system justification theory. The term refers to the tendency, which is particularly pronounced among conservatives, to rationalize the sociopolitical system one inhabits as inherently fair and just.

In that context, these results “may reflect, among other things, the motivation to defend and uphold traditional racial divisions that are part of the historical legacy of the United States,” writes the research team, which also included Leslie Berntsen, David Amodio and Jay Van Bavel.

On the other hand, the researchers note, liberals and conservatives may simply focus their attention on different facial features, with those on the right more alert to any that deviate from the “norm” (which is to say, European ancestry).

“If so,” they write, “this would suggest that ideology may not only shape social judgments and behavior, but literally how people see the world around them.”




http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVSchrimpfFamily1105.html

New Visions Commentary – National Leadership Network Of Conservative African-Americans
It Takes More Than A Village
by Christopher Schrimpf

In her book It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton used that African proverb to argue that a community is most important for proper child development.  Downplaying the importance of the family is never sound advice, especially when a recent hearing of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that strong families are a key factor increasing and accumulating wealth.

This finding comes as no surprise to conservatives.  And it would be wise for the African-Americans to bypass Hillary's preferred proverb - despite its African origins - in favor of another mantra: Conservative values lead to wealth.

For example, there is a distinct difference between the earning and wealth potential of an intact, married black household as compared to households headed by single black women.  Professor Douglas Besharov of the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs pointed out that married families earned $66,525 on average in 2003, while black female-headed families earned just $20,670.

Professor Besharov testified: "Study after study has shown that black poverty would be much lower if family structures had not weakened beginning in the 1960s... [H]ad the proportion of children living in female-headed families remained constant since 1970, the child poverty rate in 1998 would have fallen by one percentage point, rather than rising by 3.4 percentage points."

The child poverty rate in 1998 could have been 24 percent lower if not for the long-term degeneration of the American family.  Research shows the trend has an even more dramatic effect among black Americans.  Focusing on the effects of the weakening family structure of the African-American community, Besharov noted, "Had there been no changes in the family structure between 1960 and 1998, the black child poverty rate in 1998 would have been 28.4 percent rather than 45.6 percent."

While civil rights gains led to an expected significant rise in black income levels in contrast to whites between 1959 and 1979, the pace of progress has slowed markedly since 1980.  Dr. Harry Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, testifying about the problems faced by single-parent households, said: "Clearly, the growth of families with only one potential earner limits the ability of many black families today, and their children tomorrow, to join the middle class."

Despite this bleak picture, there are clear policy prescriptions for increasing the wealth potential of black Americans.  Of paramount importance is increasing family stability.  At the very least, the number of two-income black families must increase.

What black America needs is an increasingly larger role to be played by fathers.  This can be achieved through a change in attitudes and policies to promote and preserve marriage as well as reform child support rules.  Dr. Holzer suggested, "These reforms, and perhaps some earnings supplementation for non-custodial fathers paying child support, could improve the attachment of low-income fathers to their children as well as to the labor market."

The Civil Rights Commission's hearing, while not a solution, was an important first step toward recognizing and correcting barriers to black wealth accumulation.  But it was only a first step.  Now the hard work must begin. 

While a village is not needed to raise our children the "village" of black activists - politicians, clergy, teachers, mentors and the like -  can help by spreading the word and promoting good values.  The black American family must return to the kind of strength seen prior to the Great Society programs of the 1960s.  With strengthened values comes the groundwork for wealth creation and prosperity.

###

Christopher Schrimpf is a research associate with the black leadership network Project 21.  Comments may be sent to Project21@nationalcenter.org.

Published by The National Center for Public Policy Research. Reprints permitted provided source is credited. New Visions Commentaries reflect the views of their author, and not necessarily those of Project 21.




National Center for Public Policy Research
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a self-described conservative think tank in the United States. Its president since its founding has been Amy Ridenour. David A. Ridenour, her husband, is vice president, and David W. Almasi is executive director. Key staff include Caroline May, who oversees environmental programs, and Ryan Balis, who oversees United Nations studies. Dana Joel Gattuso, Council Nedd II, R.J. Smith, Deroy Murdock and Bonner Cohen are among those who frequently speak or publish under the NCPPR banner as senior/distinguished fellows.

Policy areas[edit]

NCPPR's work is in the areas of environmental, retirement security, regulatory, economic, and foreign affairs. Particular areas of interest include global warming, endangered species, energy policy, environmental justice, property rights, legal reform, Medicare reform, health care, Social Security, civil rights, foreign affairs/defense and United Nations reform/withdrawal.

NCPPR is a member of the Cooler Heads Coalition, whose object is described as "dispelling the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific, and risk analysis".

Publications[edit]

Publications include National Policy Analysis papers, Talking Points cards, the newsletters What Conservatives Think, Ten Second Response and In the Newsamong other publications, and a National Center Blog. They also have full editorial control over the contents of the wiki-styled web portal GroupSnoop[1] which hosts conservative analyses of various high profile left-leaning non-profits.

Funding[edit]

NCPPR's revenues for the fiscal year ending 12/31/11 were $9,911,075 against expenses of $9,967,258; for the fiscal year ending 12/31/10 were $12,445,716 against expenses of $12,187,777; for the fiscal year ending 12/31/09 they were revenues of $11,609,920 against expenses of $11,521,721.[2]

As of October 31, 2013, the organizations's web site reported that its funding breakdown was 94% from individuals, 4% from foundations and less than 2% from corporations. The organization reported receiving 350,000 individual contributions a year from over 96,000 recent contributors.[3

Special projects[edit]

Since 1992, the group has sponsored Project 21, a "national leadership network of black conservatives". Project 21 provides research and commentary on public policy issues from a conservative black perspective to the U.S. news media at large and to African American community newspapers and media outlets. According to the organization, Project 21 members, all of whom are black, were published, quoted or interviewed over 12,000 times on a variety of public policy issues between 1992-2006.

Of Project 21, the liberal magazine The Nation said in May 2005, "Project 21 remains a crucial gear in the right’s propaganda factory. Without [Project 21, its] cadres would probably be at home screaming at the TV. But instead, they’re on TV."[6]




http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/jan/17/raging-elephants/houston-group-says-martin-luther-king-jr-was-repub/

Houston group says Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican
By Meghan Ashford-Grooms on Monday, January 17th, 2011

Raging Elephants, a Houston-based group involved in unsuccessful efforts to stop GOP state Rep. Joe Straus from winning another turn as Texas House speaker, says on its website that it's dedicated to bringing more "Americans of color" to the ranks of conservative voters.

Posted on the site is a video of a speech by the group's leader, Apostle Claver Kamau-Imani, titled "Apostle Claver tells the world how the real party of racism is the Democrats." Also on the site, the group claims: "Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican!"

We weren't aware that the late civil rights leader ever expressed a partisan affiliation.

Yet, we discovered, Republican groups have previously declared King one of their own. In 2006, the Sarasota, Fla.-based National Black Republican Association ran radio ads in Washington, D.C.; Georgia; Maryland; Ohio; and Pennsylvania including the statement that King was a Republican, according to an Oct. 19, 2006, Washington Post news story.

And in 2008, according to news reports, the same group — whose website says it "is dedicated to promoting the traditional values of the black community, which are in concert with the core Republican Party philosophy of strong families, personal responsibility, quality education and equal opportunities for all" — paid for eight billboards bearing that message in Florida and South Carolina, as well as 50 billboards in Denver during the Democratic National Convention, where Barack Obama became the party's presidential nominee.

In July 2009, Raging Elephants made the same claim on a Houston billboard, according to a July 14, 2009, news article on the Fox News Channel's website and a July 9, 2009, column in the Houston Chronicle.

Kamau-Imani told FoxNews.com that the purpose of the billboard was to get blacks to rethink their political affiliation; African Americans typically vote for Democrats. "We think it's imperative that (the GOP) try and attract more people from the communities of color to vote their values — to vote conservative," Kamau-Imani told FoxNews.com.

The King message has drawn objections. In Houston, the Fox News story says, local activist Quanell X held a news conference to speak out against the sign. Earlier, an Associated Press news article about the billboards posted in Florida reported that the chairman of the Florida Legislative Black Caucus, Democratic state Rep. Joe Gibbons, called the statement ridiculous. "To make a claim without presenting proof is bogus," he is quoted as saying in the July 4, 2008, story.

Frances Rice, chairwoman of the National Black Republican Association, was quoted by the Post in 2006 as saying that the backlash from the radio ads was so great that she stopped answering telephone calls. But she stood by the claim that King was a Republican. "We were all Republicans in those days," she told the Post. "The Democrats were training fire hoses on us, siccing dogs on us."

The Post story says it's correct that Southern Democrats "blocked the social and political progress of black Southerners for decades."

When we asked Raging Elephants for information to support its claim that King himself was a Republican, Kamau-Imani pointed us to a video made by the National Black Republican Association featuring one of King's nieces, Alveda King, founder of the faith-based group King for America. In the Sept. 14, 2008, video, she says: "I just want to share with you a little bit about my family and my history. My uncle Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime was a Republican, as was my father, his brother, Rev. A. D. King, and my grandfather, Dr. Martin Luther King Sr."

She adds: "The Republican Party historically has supported the rights of the oppressed. During the times of slavery, many of the abolitionists were Republicans."

Our attempts to contact Alveda King were unsuccessful.

Next, we sought historical expertise, including by asking Thomas Jackson, a history professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and author of From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, for his take on the video.

He told us that Alveda King's description of the Republican Party's history was on the mark. "The Party of (Abraham) Lincoln defended black rights most vocally in the 1860s and 1870s, then abandoned the cause when the Democrats and the (Ku Klux) Klan defeated Republican state governments in the South. Blacks started their historic switch to the Democrats during the New Deal," which were economic programs implemented in the 1930s under President Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.

But Jackson said that he would not consider King a Republican, calling him instead a " 'tax and spend' democratic socialist."

"He wanted the nation to spend billions of dollars directly to employ the unemployed when the private sector failed, and a vigorous mixture of affirmative action and anti-poverty programs championed by the liberal-left, and targeted federal spending in impoverished areas, especially the nation's slums," Jackson said.

David Garrow — author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for biography — advised against assigning King to either party. "It's simply incorrect to call Dr. King a Republican," Garrow told us.

However, he said he wouldn't call King a Democrat, either, because he had "very positive feelings" about Republican Richard Nixon in the late 1950s and "extremely positive feelings" about Republican Nelson Rockefeller, the New York governor who later served as vice president. Also, Garrow said, King became "a very harsh critic" of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson over his escalation of the Vietnam War and "wouldn't necessarily have backed (Democratic presidential nominee) Hubert Humphrey in '68 had he (King) lived."

We asked Garrow about the 2006 Post article's statements that King had voted for Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He said there is little doubt that King did so.

But that doesn't mean King made public his political preferences. In his book, Garrow writes that during the 1960 race between Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon, King declined to endorse either nominee — even after Kennedy associates interceded with officials in Georgia to help secure King's release from jail on a probation violation. The closest King came to that was a few days before the election when he released a statement that said: "I want to make it palpably clear that I am deeply grateful to Senator Kennedy for the genuine concern he expressed. ... (He) exhibited moral courage of a high order."

King was more vocal about the candidates in the 1964 presidential election, when Johnson faced GOP nominee Barry Goldwater, who as an Arizona senator had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Garrow told us that King "certainly did all but explicitly endorse LBJ in '64 and strongly criticize the Goldwater candidacy." Garrow writes in Bearing the Cross that King urged his supporters to vote against Goldwater and all GOP candidates who did not disassociate from him.

Next, we wondered what the King Center in Atlanta, founded by King's wife, the late Coretta Scott King, had to say about his partisanship. In 2008, Steve Klein, the center's communications director, told theNational Journal that "there is absolutely no confirmation that (King) was a Republican. ... He was never a member of any political party — and never formally endorsed any candidates."

Klein noted Coretta Scott King's recall of a 1960 phone call from Kennedy when her husband was in jail. In her book, My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr., she wrote that she took the call but was later unsure what to say about it. "My husband had a policy of not endorsing presidential candidates," her book says. "And at this point, I did not want to get him or myself identified with either party."

The 2008 AP story about the Florida and South Carolina billboards included a statement from King's son, Martin Luther King III: "It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest that he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states."

Friends and associates of Martin Luther King Jr. also objected. The AP article says that the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King, "said there is no reason why anyone would think King was a Republican." Lowery told the AP that King almost certainly voted for Kennedy and that the only time he openly talked about politics was when he criticized Goldwater in 1964.

Finally, we checked with political experts in the states where King spent most of his adulthood. Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, said King "didn't die a Republican." But Bullock speculated that King could have been Republican in his youth when Southern Democrats were intensely segregationist. William Stewart, a political scientist at the University of Alabama, said that if King was a Republican, he kept it a secret. King focused on civil rights, Stewart said, and "partisan politics wasn't relevant."

Upshot: Raging Elephants points to a King family member whose declaration lends support for its claim that King was a Republican: his niece Alveda. We didn't divine how she reached that conclusion. Another King relative, his son, disagrees, as do respected academic experts and former King associates and friends. The record shows that as a civil rights leader, King avoided partisan identification.

We rate the statement False.




http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/04/section-9-trends-in-party-affiliation/

Pew Research Center – Section 9: Trends in Party Affiliation

The number of political independents has continued to grow, as both parties have lost ground among the public. Based on surveys conducted this year, 38% describe themselves as independents, up from 32% in 2008 and 30% in 2004.

The proportion of independents is now higher than at any point in more than two decades. Looking back even further, independents are more numerous than at any point in the last 70 years. (For trends in party identification from 1939-2012, see this interactive feature.)

Meanwhile, the percentage of self-described Democrats has fallen from 36% four years ago to 32% today. Republican identification has remained largely stable over this period (24% today, 25% in 2008). In 1991, however, there were nearly equal percentages of Republicans (31%), Democrats (31%) and independents (33%).

The Democrats continue to hold an advantage in leaned party identification: In 2012 surveys, 48% either affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic while 40% either identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP. That is little changed from recent years, but in 2008 the Democrats held a 15-point lead in leaned party affiliation (51% to 36%).

Race and Party Affiliation

As has been the case since 2008, a plurality of whites (38%) identify as independents. Among the remainder, more call themselves Republicans (32%) than Democrats (26%). Four years ago, party identification among whites was more evenly divided: 33% were independents, 30% Democrats and 31% Republicans.

African Americans continue to overwhelmingly align with the Democratic Party (69%). But blacks’ identification as Democrats has declined since the mid-1980s; in 1984, nearly eight-in-ten African Americans (78%) said they were Democrats.

By contrast, only about a third of Hispanics (32%) identify as Democrats while nearly half (46%) say they are independents; just 11% of Hispanics identify with the GOP. More than twice as many Hispanics either identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party as identify with the GOP or lean Republican (57% vs. 24%).

Gender Gap in Party ID

The percentage of men identifying as independents is up sharply since 2008, from 35% to 43%. The share affiliating with the Democratic Party has fallen from 31% to 27%. About a quarter of men continue to identify with the GOP (27% in 2008, 25% today).

Democrats maintain an advantage in party ID among women. Nearly four-in-ten women (37%) describe themselves as Democrats, compared with 33% who are independents and 24% who are Republicans. The share of women who call themselves independents has risen from 29% in 2008 to 33% this year, while the proportion of Democrats has declined (40% then, 37% today).

Nonetheless, there continues to be a gender gap in party identification. Women are more likely than men to identify as Democrats (37% vs. 27%). That gap has changed little in recent years. Men are more likely than women to identify as independents (43% vs. 33%). About the same percentages of women and men affiliate with the GOP (24%, 25% respectively).
White men, in particular, are moving away from partisan labels. Currently, 43% of white men say they are independents, up from 36% in 2008 and 33% in 2004. However, the GOP continues to hold a sizable advantage among white men who identify with a party (33% Republican compared with 20% who identify as Democrats).

White women, on the other hand, are more evenly divided: 31% are Democrats, 30% are Republicans and 33% identify as independents. Though these numbers have fluctuated only slightly since 2009, Democrats have lost some ground among white women since 2008 (34% to 31%), while the number of independents has grown (30% to 33%).

Religion and Party Identification

The Republican Party has gained ground among white evangelical Christians in recent years. Currently, 49% of non-Hispanic white evangelicals say they are Republicans, up from 43% in 2009. The current figure nearly matches the 50% of white evangelicals who identified as Republicans in 2004 and 2005.

Pluralities of white Catholics (39%) and white mainline Protestants (38%) now identify as independents. In 2008, Democrats held a slight edge among white Catholics, while white mainline Protestants were divided in party affiliation (33% independent, 30% Democrat, 30% Republican).

The share of the religiously unaffiliated who identify as independents also has increased. Fully half (50%) of those with no religious affiliation say they are independents, up from 43% in 2008. The share of the religiously unaffiliated who identify as Democrats has fallen over this period, from 37% to 32%. The percentage of Republicans has fluctuated a bit, but is unchanged from four years ago (12% in 2008 and 2012).

Silent Generation Turns More Republican

The proportion of independents among the two youngest age cohorts – Millennials and Gen Xers – also has grown in recent years. Meanwhile, the oldest age group – the Silent generation – is turning more Republican.

Among Millennials, the youngest generational group (born 1981-1994), 45% say they are independents, a jump of six points since 2008. At the same time, the share of Millennials who identify as Democrats has dropped from a peak of 35% in the year Obama was elected to 31% today.

There is a similar pattern among Gen Xers (born 1965-1980). Currently, 42% say they are independents, 29% are Democrats and 24% align with the GOP. In 2008, 34% each said they were independents or Democrats, while 25% said they were Republicans.

The number of Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) calling themselves independents has edged up as well – from 31% in 2008 to 34% this year. Currently, as many say they are independents as say they are Democrats. The number of Baby Boomers saying they identify as Democrats has edged down slightly from 36% in 2008 to 34%, while the number who say they are Republicans is unchanged from four years ago (27%).

The Silent generation (born 1928-1945) is the only one in which Republicans have gained ground since 2008. Currently, 34% say they are Republicans while an equal percentage identifies as Democrats; 27% say they are independents. Four years ago, the Democrats held a 38% to 29% advantage over the GOP among the Silent generation. The proportion of the Silent generation affiliating with the Republican Party is at its highest point in two decades. (For more on age and party affiliation, see “The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election,” Nov. 3, 2011.)

Little Shift in Ideology

Despite electoral swings in recent elections, the fundamental ideological breakdown of the American public has shifted little in recent years. So far in 2012, 36% describe themselves as politically conservative, 22% say they are liberal and 37% say they are moderate.

Throughout 2008, an average of 37% said they were conservative, 21% said they were liberal and 36% said they were moderate. The breakdown in 2004 was only slightly different: 37% conservative, 19% liberal and 39% moderate.

Looking at the breakdown of the adult population within the ideological spectrum of the parties – and among independents – also shows steadiness in recent years, but some longer term shifts.

As the Republican Party has gotten smaller, it has become more conservative. Currently, 17% of the public identifies as conservative Republicans, while about half as many (8%) are moderates or liberals. That balance has changed little recently, but in the early 2000s there were more GOP moderates; in 2001 and 2002, 12% of the public identified as moderate or liberal Republicans.

The balance of self-reported ideology among Democrats has remained stable in recent years, but also has shifted over the past decade. Currently, 12% of the public calls themselves liberal Democrats, 13% are moderate Democrats and 6% are conservatives. A decade ago, moderate Democrats outnumbered liberals by nearly two-to one (15% vs. 8%).

As the number of independents has grown, the ranks of the independents include more moderates and conservatives. Currently, 18% are moderate independents, 11% are conservatives and 8% are liberals. Six years ago, 15% of the public was made up moderate independents, 8% conservative independents and 7% liberals.

Republicans Unhappy with Party

While both parties have lost adherents, they also are drawing more criticism from their bases. Just 28% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the GOP is doing an excellent or good job in standing up for its traditional positions on issues such as reducing the size of government, cutting taxes and promoting conservative social values. Fully 71% say the party is doing a poor or only fair job in advocating its traditional positions.

The proportion of Republicans and GOP leaners giving the party positive ratings has declined 12 points since November 2010, shortly after the Republicans’ sweeping victories in the midterm elections. Since 2004, there has been only one occasion – April 2009 – when Republicans gave their party lower positive marks. At that time, just 21% said the party was doing a good job in supporting traditional positions.

More Democrats than Republicans give their party positive ratings for standing up for its traditional positions (41% vs. 28%). Still, Democrats are far less satisfied with the party today than they were in April 2009, during the early months of Obama’s presidency. At that time, a majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners (55%) said the party was doing an excellent or good job of standing up for traditional positions, such as protecting the interests of minorities, helping the poor and needy and representing working people.

Within the ranks of Republicans and GOP-leaners, about a third of conservatives (32%) say the party has done an excellent or good job of standing up for its traditional positions, compared with just 19% of moderates.

Among Democrats and Democratic leaners, nearly identical percentages of liberals (45%) and conservatives (44%) say the party has done well in advocating its traditional positions; somewhat fewer moderates agree (37%).




http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2012/09/07/5_reasons_there_are_so_few_black_americans_in_the_republican_party/page/full

5 Reasons There Are So Few Black Americans In The Republican Party
John Hawkins 
Sep 07, 2012

How is it that the party of Lincoln, a party that led the way in opposing slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, the KKK, poll taxes, led the way on integration and voting rights for black Americans, and percentage wise, voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act in greater numbers than Democrats is now only getting about 10% of the black vote? Democrats say racism, but any objective observer would quickly discard that explanation given the significant number of popular black Republicans. If even a large percentage of Republicans were racist,certainly Allen West, Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, Michael Steele, Tim Scott, Mia Love, Condi Rice, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Star Parker, and Larry Elder couldn't exist, much less be popular with conservatives. Additionally, although Republicans don't support Affirmative Action, very few black Americans actually benefit from it andmany are harmed as well.

So, why are Republicans doing so poorly with black Americans?

Economics: Black Americans are suffering economically compared to the rest of the country. "In 2009, the average net worth for white households was $113,149 and $5,700 for black households." 14.1% of black Americans are unemployed compared to 7.4 percent of whites and "black households’ median annual income fell" more than twice as much over the last two years as white Americans.

Since black Americans have been monolithically voting for the Democratic Party for 40 years, those numbers are actually a terrific argument for voting Republican. Unfortunately, as a practical matter, it doesn't work that way. People who are doing poorly economically tend to welcome any short term help they can get, even if the increased dependence on the government ultimately makes it more likely that they'll remain mired in poverty. Combine that with the fact that black Americans are dramatically over-represented amongst government workers (11.6% of the population vs. almost 20% of the government work force) and there are strong short term incentives for many black Americans to stay in the Democratic Party even if they'd ultimately benefit more from adopting a more conservative philosophy.

The skin color of the speakers: One of the great ironies of the race debate in America is that Republicans have internalized Martin Luther King's famous saying, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," while most black Americans have rejected it. This creates a bit of a Catch-22 for Republicans. Black Americans are much more likely to listen and consider what black Republicans have to say, but there just aren't a lot of black Republicans to say it. This is a problem that's slowly, but surely being corrected as more and more black Americans are rising to prominence within the GOP, but we're just not there yet.

Racism culture: Even black Americans who are extremely prosperous and have never been significantly harmed by racism in their lives feel compelled to talk about America as if Democrats like George Wallace and Bull Connor were still running wild. There are three reasons for that.

It's at the core of the Democrats’ political strategy in dealing with black Americans. No matter how poorly served black Americans are by the Democrats, they won't listen to what Republicans have to say with an open mind if they're falsely convinced we hate them.

If you say that racism is no longer a serious problem for black Americans, then there still has to be some sort of explanation given for why black Americans aren't doing that well compared to white Americans. Many black Americans fear that other Americans might conclude that the old school Democratic racists were right and they are inferior. This is why pointing out that racism isn't a serious impediment for black Americans today can almost come across like a slap, as opposed to a plain statement of obvious fact.

Shouting "racism" is easy and it doesn't require you to do anything other than complain. Tackling other issues that are hurting black Americans like children being born out of wedlock and out of control crime in the inner cities is really hard.

Most Republicans do not consider racism to be a significant impediment to success anymore and that puts us up against a deeply ingrained, shared cultural belief with black Americans.

Outreach: That last item is the biggest factor in the GOP's mediocre, almost but not quite, non-existent outreach to black Americans. White Republicans assume what they say will be de facto ignored because of their race at best or they'll be called a racist no matter what they say at worst. Moreover, most Republicans have an almost instinctive dislike of identity politics that keeps us from creating a conservative NAACP and hiring our own Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons to push the conservative message to black Americans. So, the solution to this problem has been to do very little outreach and hope that black Americans will just drift into the Republican Party on their own. Judging by the number of black Americans voting for the GOP, this strategy isn't working and isn't likely to work in the foreseeable future.

Issues: The Republican Party is on the same page as most black Americans
 on "abortion, gay marriage, and being friendly to Christianity. Many black Americans also agree with the conservative stance on illegal immigration, school choice, being tough on crime, and supporting entrepreneurs." We have to do a better job of working with black Americans in areas where our interests coincide instead of expecting them to come to us. We also have to start using conservative principles to address issues that disproportionately impact black Americans. We need to find ways to implement enterprise zones and micro-loans to help black Americans in inner cities. It's also a disgrace that any American, in any neighborhood, has to worry about getting shot in his yard or drug dealers selling on the corner where his kids go to school. We're the law and order party. We should be effectively tackling that the way Rudy Giuliani did in New York. It's not enough for Republicans to say, "Look at the places we agree." As John Maxwell once said, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." We have to show black Americans we care, not just with words, but by rolling up our sleeves and tackling the issues the Democrat Party has been ignoring for decades.