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EXCLUSIVE: Records Show Military Surveyed Troops In 1940s, Prior To Racially Integrating The Forces

By Igor Volsky on Jul 20, 2010 at 10:17 pm

Earlier this month, as part of the year-long Defense Department review of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, the Pentagon distributed surveys to some 400,000 servicemembers to gauge their reaction to repealing the policy. While LGBT groups have characterized the questionnaire — which asks the troops to speculate on the sexuality of fellow servicemembers — as “derogatory and insulting,” the Pentagon continues to insist that they need to know what the troops are thinking in order to properly repeal the ban. “How do we identify beforehand the problems, the issues, and the challenges that we’re going to face? The kind of training requirements we’re going to need, the kinds of changes in regulations, the impact on benefits — all of these things need to be addressed in advance…. That’s where we want to hear from you all,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told troops stationed in South Korea.

Yesterday, the Advocate’s Kerry Eleveld reported that this is not the first time the military had surveyed the troops. “Prior to President Truman’s 1948 executive order integrating the armed forces…our preliminary research shows that branches of the armed forces undertook a number of modestly sized surveys of the attitudes of enlisted and nonenlisted troops concerning racial issues, integration, and morale,” Eleveld quoted a Defense Department spokesperson as saying.

Today, I traveled to the National Archives and recovered some of the surveys the military conducted about the troops’ attitudes towards black people between 1942 and 1946. At the time, the military — along with the overwhelming majority of the country — opposed integrating black servicemembers into the forces and preferred a ‘separate but equal’ approach that would have required the military to construct separate recreation spaces and facilities. One month before Truman’s order, a Gallup poll showed that 63% of American adults endorsed the separation of Blacks and Whites in the military; only 26% supported integration.

These surveys show that the same attitude pervaded the military: 3/4 Air Force men favored separate training schools, combat, and ground crews and 85% of white soldiers thought it was a good idea to have separate service clubs in army camps:

Final Race Wonk Room

While smaller, these racial polls share some common questions with the DADT survey. In fact, in some instances one can even replace “negro” for “gay” and end up with today’s questionnaire. Both polls ask servicemembers if they objected to working alongside minorities, how they felt serving with minorities, how effective minorities are in combat and if their feelings have changed about the minority after serving with them. (Interestingly, 77% of respondents said they had more favorable opinion).

Truman integrated the forces despite the objections of the troops and it remains to be seen if Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen and President Obama (who have to sign off on the DOD study) are willing to do the same for Don’t Ask, Don’ Tell. So far, the Pentagon insists that it will. “It is abundantly clear to this working group that their marching orders from the Secretary of Defense are to determine how to implement a repeal of DADT,” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon’s spokesperson insists. “Their job is not to determine whether or not the force wishes a repeal to take place or not to take place. Their job is to prepare for that inevitability.” (While the results of the DADT survey are obviously pending, past surveys of military veterans have found that an overwhelming majority say it’s “personally acceptable to them if gay and lesbian people were allowed to serve openly in the military.”)

Media

Ben Stein: The Unemployed Are People With ‘Unpleasant Personalities…Who Do Not Know How To Do A Day’s Work’

By Zaid Jilani on Jul 20, 2010 at 8:36 pm

benstein Today, the Senate extended unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans. Despite the terrible shape of the economy, conservatives resisted extending unemployment insurance for weeks for Americans who can’t find work, launching a filibuster to prevent a vote on the benefits.

Writing at the American Spectator yesterday, former Nixon speechwriter and TV personality Ben Stein downplayed the suffering unemployed Americans are experiencing by writing that the people who are unemployed right now are “generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities.” He claims the unemployed are Americans with “unpleasant personalities…who do not know how to do a day’s work“:

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along — not always easy.

Of course, saying that the 15 million Americans who are unemployed right now are “generally” people with “poor work habits” is as offensive as it is wrong. The current recession is a global phenomenon caused by the collective bad behavior of the world’s largest financial institutions. Before the recession, the unemployment rate hovered around six percent; it is ludicrious to say that millions of Americans suddenly got lazier and less able to work within the span of a few months.

Unfortunately, Stein is a widely respected voice on the American right who regularly appears on cable news to offer his thoughts on politics and policy. Using the Critical Mention media search engine, ThinkProgress finds that the name “Ben Stein” was mentioned 64 times in major television media networks within the past thirty days alone.

Climate Progress

How hot is it? Masters reports nine countries have smashed all-time temperature records, “making 2010 the year with the most national extreme heat records.”

By Joe Romm on Jul 20, 2010 at 7:32 pm

It’s so hot the Washington Post almost gets the story right!

A heat wave of unprecedented intensity has brought the world’s largest country its hottest temperature in history:

Globally, NOAA just reported that June is the fourth month in a row of record global temperatures, and the first half of 2010 is on a record pace.  This is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as a recent must-read NASA paper notes.

If the planet as a whole is busting global records,  you wouldn’t be surprised if national temperature records were dropping like overheated flies.  And they are, as uber-meteorologist Jeff Masters reported last week:

Read more

Climate Progress

Lieberman: Utilities Want A ‘Breather’ From Letting People Breathe

By Brad Johnson on Jul 20, 2010 at 6:40 pm

Joe LiebermanAs negotiations on a stripped-down bill to limit global warming pollution from coal-fired power plants reach the final hour, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is sympathizing with the utility industry’s attempt to suspend Clean Air Act rules on pollutants that kill tens of thousands of Americans a year. At a meeting with environmentalists, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers “led the call for regulatory relief on a number of existing Clean Air Act programs dealing with sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury, including a new EPA rule proposed last week that deals with interstate pollution.” However, thirty-one environmental and health organizations sent a letter to senators last week calling such rollbacks “simply unacceptable.” Center for American Progress senior fellow Van Jones called it a “literal poison pill.” Today, Lieberman made the ironic claim that polluters “just want a breather” from clean air rules:

That’s a tough one. They frame it in a different way. They just want a breather. And not an eternal pre-emption. These are all topics of negotiation. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing here.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Lieberman’s partner in developing a Senate climate bill, last Thursday said there was a little room for negotiation, but opposed any “rollback.” “If we put those requirements into a different form so that we are still adhering to them, that is a different issue and those are two different choices,” Kerry said. “But there is not going to be a rollback of current requirements.”

Other Democrats don’t find this one of the acceptable “topics of negotiation.” “I’d not want to see any weakening of the authority they have today,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) said last week. “It’s been a major tool for cleaning up our air.”

The environmental and public health community — including NAACP and Green For All, Public Citizen and the American Lung Association, the Environmental Defense Fund and Environment America, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists — are united in their opposition, saying that “delaying the cleanup of these plants threatens the health of millions of Americans.” “I’m sure people throw everything on the table,” said League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski. “But we’ve made it damn clear … that there are no trade-offs of any regulation of any [conventional] pollutants.”

Update

In Friday’s E&E News, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) — who opposes a cap on carbon pollution but supports stronger regulations on other pollutants — criticized Kerry and Lieberman’s negotiations:

You mean to spew more sulfur, nitrogen and mercury, and less carbon? That’s not my idea of progress.

Politics

NAACP backtracks on criticism of Sherrod: ‘We were snookered.’

By Faiz Shakir on Jul 20, 2010 at 6:23 pm

Yesterday, following the forced firing of former Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, the NAACP rushed out a statement saying that it was “appalled” by her “shameless” actions. While the Obama administration is standing by its decision to force Sherrod’s resignation, the NAACP has courageously reversed course, saying it had been “snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart.” The civil rights organization says the incident highlights “the lengths to which extremist elements will go to discredit legitimate opposition.” “This is a teachable moment, for activists and for journalists,” the statement reads. Read it below: Read more

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 20, 2010 at 6:14 pm

Kids get high and make out on the train:

— The Obama administration’s handling of this Shirley Sherrod business has been shameful.

— Andrew Breitbart’s conduct is also shameful, but that’s to be anticipated.

— The costs of 2009.

— The American aristocracy.

— University of Phoenix becomes the first university to get $1 billion in Pell Grants.

Going back to the well with “Cry When You Get Older”.

Politics

White farmers at the center of Shirley Sherrod controversy: ‘No way in the world’ she is a racist.

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Jul 20, 2010 at 6:10 pm

As it becomes increasingly clear that the video that brought down former USDA official Shirley Sherrod’s career was deceptively edited to make her appear racist, the two white farmers she allegedly discriminated against vigorously defended her. The video shows how Sherrod “racially discriminates against a white farmer,” BigGovernment.com owner Andrew Breitbart claimed. But that farmer, Roger Spooner, and his wife Eloise, flatly denied that this afternoon on CNN, telling host Rick Sanchez, there is “[n]o way in the world” Sherrod is a racist:

SANCHEZ: In all your time knowing Shirley Sherrod, has there ever been anything about her, either through her attitude, her words, her opinions or behaviors that would lead you to believe that she is in any way a racist?

ROGER SPOONER: No way in the world. No way. No way. I don’t even want to talk about it. It don’t make sense. She was just so nice to us as — she didn’t — there wasn’t no — there wasn’t no racism attitude at all in it. Heck no. … They don’t know what they’re talking about. Let me say. They don’t know what they’re talking about, if you want to know my opinion.

ELOISE SPOONER: She always treated us really good. She was nice mannered, thoughtful, friendly. Good person.

CNN also reported that Sherrod’s father had been murdered by a white farmer in an apparently racially-motivated crime, which a grand jury refused to pursue. Asked how she dealt with that, Sherrod said, “what I had to do was turn that into a positive. And I did it by devoting my life to working for change.” “I made a commitment the night my father died that I would not leave the South and that I would stay here and work to make a difference,” she added. Watch a compilation:

Yglesias

Shrugging at the Long-Term Deficit

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 20, 2010 at 5:27 pm

cash-wad 1

From a technocratic point of view, I agree with the idea that it makes sense to pair short-term stimulus (i.e., bigger deficits) with measures that reduce the long-term deficit. In practice, however, I don’t think it makes sense to spend 2010 & 2011 worrying about what the deficit may or may not look like in 2047.

There are two reasons for this. One is the lessons of the 1999-2001 period. The reaction of the conservative movement to the elimination of budget deficits wasn’t to say “great news, let’s stick to PAYGO in the future.” It was to say that budget surpluses proved the need to cut taxes. Alan Greenspan even decided that budget surpluses were a bad thing and likely to lead to socialism and doom. The second reason harkens back to the conservative argument that the Affordable Care Act won’t actually reduce the deficit because it’s deficit-reducing provisions may be repealed. Progressives are fond of observing that this proves too much, since you coud say the same of any effort to reduce the long-term deficit. Which is true, but that in turn indicates that there’s something a bit pointless about having Congress in 2010 make promises about what will happen in 2023. It really could just change in the future.

Instead of worrying about CBO projections, people should worry about financial markets. If market concern about the deficit is pushing up interest rates or leading to problematic inflation, then you should worry. And of since you probably can’t reassure markets with one-off budget stunts, you probably need to enact measures with some enduring bite. This is what was done in 1990 and in 1993, and it worked out great. But what we need to be worrying about all the time is growth. That means stimulus when needed, it means deficit reduction when needed, and it means all the time striving to make the tax base more efficient, to improve education & infrastructure, and all the rest.

Climate Progress

Kerry Emanuel calls Climategate “the latest in a series of coordinated, politically motivated attacks that represent an aggravated assault on scholarship

By Joe Romm on Jul 20, 2010 at 5:11 pm

Slams Lindzen, Singer and Happer as liars

MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel has been at the forefront of trying to explain many aspects of climate science to the public, especially in his field of expertise — hurricanes.  He has written a good essay on the hacked emails, ” ‘Climategate’: A Different Perspective,” originally published at the National Association of Scholars [NAS] website.  Near the end, he notes:

While the climategate email authors are castigated for not being paragons of virtue, the sins of others go unremarked. In the summer of 2009, a one-page letter was sent to Congress, signed by one actual climate scientist and six physicists with little or no background in climate science, three of whom were retired. Among other untruths, it contained the sentence, referring to evidence of anthropogenic global warming, “There is no such evidence; it doesn’t exist.” I confronted the sole climate scientist among the authors with this statement, and he confessed that he did not hold that to be the case. Last I checked, lying to Congress was a federal crime.

Emanuel doesn’t mention Richard Lindzen by name, but that is who he means (as is made clear here).  The laughable letter itself is here.  Emanuel is thus calling out his old friend Lindzen, plus William Happer and S. Fred Singer, as liars on climate science.  No argument here.

Kerry Emanuel is author of the terrific book, Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes.  In 2006 he was named one of Time‘s “Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World.”  Here are more excerpts from his piece:
Read more

Economy

Report: Multinational Corporations And Banks Use Tax Havens To Dodge $37 Billion In U.S. Taxes Per Year

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 20, 2010 at 5:07 pm

Last month, in Tax Notes magazine, Martin Sullivan laid out the dramatic drop in the effective tax rate of Transocean, which owns the failed Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, as it incorporated itself in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. Transocean’s tax avoidance helped it lower its tax rate by nearly fifteen points, despite the fact that it kept most of its operations in the United States.

“These tax-motivated restructurings occur with little or no real change in day-to-day business operations. Top executives, key personnel, and all significant business operations in the United States before the transaction remain in the United States,” Sullivan noted. But Transocean is far from the only company taking advantage of America’s loophole ridden tax code to park profits offshore and avoid taxes.

According to a new report from Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse, an organization backed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) that is seeking to end tax avoidance and evasion, multinational corporations and banks are ducking $37 billion annually in taxes:

Fifty years ago, corporate income taxes accounted for 23.2% of federal government receipts, and individual income tax payments were less than twice those of large corporations’ tax payments. Today, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget estimates corporate tax receipts will account for just 7.2% of federal revenues in 2010, with large corporations contributing less than one-sixth as much as small business and individual taxpayers to the Federal Treasury (small businesses most often pay taxes according to their owner’s individual tax rates).

Eighty-three of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. corporations and 63 of the 100 largest federal contractors have at least one subsidiary in a tax haven, the report says. Companies as different as Goldman Sachs, Safeway, and Liberty Mutual all share a common penchant for tax dodging. Such widespread avoidance simply shifts the tax burden onto law abiding individuals and businesses, who ultimately have to pay more to make up for the lost revenue.

The report recommends, among other things, the implementation of Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s (D-TX) International Tax Competitive Act of 2010, which “would treat a company as a U.S. company for tax purposes if its management and officers with day-to- day control are located in the U.S., even if its paper incorporation is offshore.” I spoke to Doggett back in April, when he told me, “I always find it impossible to explain why a pharmacist in Bastrop, Texas, or a small retail store in San Marcos is having to pay higher rates on the income that their hard-working small business owners are earning than some multinational that can duck and dodge taxes in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.”

Of course, doing anything to crack down on tax evasion means incurring the wrath of the Chamber of Commerce and Big Business community, which continually fearmonger about the effect of taking such steps to ensure that companies pay the tax rate that is on the books.

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