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Actions of the Day

Actions of the Day

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Restore Scientific Integrity
Federal government scientific information is being censored, manipulated, and distorted on an unprecedented scale. To prevent these abuses of science, members of Congress have introduced the Restore Scientific Integrity to Federal Research and Policy Making Act. They need to hear from us about the importance of protecting government science and our nation’s health, safetey, and environment. Check out the Union of Concerned Scientists efforts to restore scientific integrity in federal policy making. Click here to take action through the Union of Concerned Scientists – it’s easy and free!

Save the Media
Read the pdf version of “A New Standard,” the recent report from Free Press, Common Cause, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, and Media Access Project. Then read or listen to Bill Moyers’ speech at the close of the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis. More than 60,000 Free Press activists have already joined a call for the resignation of Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson and the creation of town hall meetings nationwide to put the public back into public broadcasting.
Add your support to the petition.

Impeach Bush
President Bush mislead Congress and the people as the Administration prepared to wage unprovoked war against Iraq. The evidence used to justify the war and “sell” it to the public was based on fabrications and lies. A number of recent revelations confirm that the Administration knowingly lied about the war and its causes. Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s key aide, was quoted in Vanity Fair magazine as saying, “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Since the Administration was flooded with angry letters, undoubtedly many from families of U.S. soldiers, the Pentagon attempted to do damage control, asserting that Wolfowitz was misquoted. The public now knows, as does every member of Congress, that in April 2002 Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair secretly agreed to wage unprovoked war against Iraq (at a meeting at Bush’s Crawford ranch in Texas). This fact, and other incriminating information about the secret maneuvers to wage unprovoked war, are contained in British government documents. In a letter to Bush earlier this month, 89 House Democrats expressed shock over the documents. They asked whether the papers were authentic and, if so, whether they proved that the White House had agreed to invade Iraq months before seeking Congress’ OK. (Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2005)
“If the disclosure is accurate, it raises troubling new questions regarding the legal justifications for the war, as well as the integrity of our own administration,” the letter says. “While the president… was telling the citizens and the Congress that they had no intention to start a war with Iraq, they were working very close[ly] with Tony Blair and the British leadership at making this a foregone conclusion,” the letter’s chief author, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, said Wednesday. As Ramsey Clark recently stated: “Impeachment now is the only way we, the American people, can promise ourselves, and the world, that we will not tolerate crimes against peace and humanity by our government. Knowing what we know, to wait longer is to condone what has been done, and risk more.” Use the quick and easy-to-use advocacy mechanism on the ImpeachBush.org website to send personal customized letters to the representatives from your district and state to urge them to support the impeachment of George W. Bush and other high officials for the commission of High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Reframing the Terms of the Discussion

Reframing the Terms of the Discussion

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I was happy that I stayed awake last night to watch Bill Moyer’s Now on PBS. The linguist George Lakoff was on. He did an absolutely marvelous piece on the framing of language in politics, which he has been publishing quite a bit about recently.

He argues that Republicans understand framing better than the Democrats. The Democrats, a bit ironically, are still in thrall to a notion of rationality in which you simply speak truth to power and reasonable people are persuaded. The Republicans know better.

An example that Lakoff uses is the mental frame evoked by the oft-repeated phrase “tax relief.”

“The relief frame is an instance of a more general rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief). The hero is inherently good, the villain is evil and the victim after the rescue owes gratitude to the hero. The term tax relief evokes all of this and more. It presupposes a conceptual metaphor: Taxes are an affliction, proponents of taxes are the causes of affliction (the villains), the taxpayer is the afflicted (the victim) and the proponents of tax relief are the heroes who deserve the taxpayers’ gratitude. Those who oppose tax relief are bad guys who want to keep relief from the victim of the affliction, the taxpayer. Every time the phrase tax relief is used, and heard or read by millions of people, this view of taxation as an affliction and conservatives as heroes gets reinforced.” – from “Framing the Dems : How conservatives control political debate and how progressives can take it back”

How should progressive democrats REFRAME? As an issue of membership and patriotism, says Lakoff. “Taxes are what you pay to be an American, to live in a civilized society that is democratic and offers opportunity, and where there’s an infrastructure that has been paid for by previous taxpayers. Wealthy Americans use that infrastructure more than anyone else, and they use parts of it that other people don’t. Are you paying your dues, or are you trying to get something for free at the expense of your country?”

Republicans spent millions every year on thinktanks to strategize on such issues. Frank Luntz puts out “a 500-page manual every year that goes issue by issue on what the logic of the position is from the Republican side, what the other guys’ logic is, how to attack it, and what language to use.” (link deleted because of malware at the site)

Last night Lakoff pointed out that the common sense Healthy Forest act was framed as a conscious opposite. It is “common sense” so experts (ecologists, environmentalists, biologists, etc) are not needed. It will make forests “healthy” – a conscious and Orwellian obliteration of the reality. Lakoff says the strategy is not simply to negate and to say that it is NOT a healthy forest initative. That has about as much power as Nixon saying “I’m not a crook.” Rather, it needs to be reframed – perhaps as The Forest Destruction Act, The Razing Act, The Slash and Burn Act.

I think he’s right. Progressives (he says we won’t be able to use the word “liberal” again for years) have to learn this strategy of reframing and repetition. It may be sad, but this is in fact the way people think.

Lakoff is part of the Rockridge Institute (as well as being a professor), where you can read more about reframing and political discourse.