In all seriousness - if this is the kind of attack that the Right is going to base its hopes on, then its going to be a massive Democratic landslide in November.

"Agricultural trade liberalization has largely failed to bring lasting benefit to rural areas in Latin America, where small-holder agriculture remains a key economic activity says a new report...Trade liberalization has provided a few countries in Latin America with unprecedented export opportunities, say authors Mamerto Pérez, Sergio Schlesinger and Timothy A. Wise in their report "The Promise and Perils of Agricultural Trade Liberalization: Lessons from the Americas," but it has not generated broad-based development and has caused long-term harm to small producers and consumers."

Remember this report the next time you hear Tom Friedman or Fareed Zakaria tell us they support "free" trade policies because they want to help poor rural farmers in the developing world.

I'll admit it - I'm more than a bit obsessed with the ongoing attempts by today's propagandists (read: politicians and Washington pundits) to distort where the mythic "center" is. Whoever controls the definition of the center, controls a huge amount of political power because they control the very parameters of what policies are - and are not - acceptable for serious consideration.

Back in 2005, I wrote this article for the Nation on how forces inside the Democratic Party exist almost exclusively to make Democratic politicians believe the "center" is far to the right of the American public. Now this week, I wrote this new newspaper column looking at the debate surrounding Barack Obama's recent policy shifts.

For the last few weeks, every reporter, politician and pundit in Washington have been saying Obama's endorsement of warrantless wiretapping and shifting statements on NAFTA and Iraq are moves to the center.* But, as my column shows, the empirical public opinion data show that those are moves away from the center of American public opinion.

This is the invisible propaganda system I'm talking about - the one that tries to impose the skewed center of elite opinion in Washington, D.C. on the rest of the country - even though the center of opinion in the rest of the country is far different from that Washington "center." And if you think this distortion is inadvertent, then I've got some real estate to sell you. As the column shows, there's a very clear reason why those in D.C. want to distort the center.

You can read the full column at the San Francsico Chronicle, Denver Post, Ft. Collins Coloradoan, In These Times, TruthDig, Credo Action or Creators Syndicate's website.

The column relies on grassroots support, so if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your help.

* Obama has said he has not shifted position on NAFTA and Iraq - and that he's been entirely consistent. Whether that's true or not is not important in the context of looking at how the media and politicians try to skew the terms of our political debate. The point here is that the Establishment portrays positions supporting warrantless wiretapping, NAFTA and staying in Iraq as "centrism" when the empirical data shows such positions are on the extreme fringe of American public opinion.

I'm in Dallas for a book event tonight, and I stopped by to check out Dealy Plaza, where President Kennedy was killed. This is the view from behind the fence at the infamous grassy knoll.

People who live in states with few blacks seem more open to the idea of a president who is not white. Perhaps race is more of an abstract, an ideal. The raw, sometimes tribal clashes of ethnic groups, where a long-ago slight can harden into a political attitude, seems less pronounced.

Thus, Obama is ahead in Oregon, which has a black population of 1.9 percent, but is having trouble in Michigan, where 14.3 percent of the population is black and the white suburban diaspora has complicated views about race informed by black-majority Detroit. (emphasis added)

That part in bold makes me wince, actually. He seems to be employing euphemisms that - whether deliberately or accidentally - seem to justify the racism inherent in the race chasm. For instance, he seems to be substituting the innocuous word "complicated" for the word "racist." Worse, he appears to be using the term "informed by" as a euphemism for the term "understandable considering." After all, "informed" implies that the racism they have developed from living near black-majority Detroit is merely a product of being objectively educated (a synonym for "informed") - and therefore, those racist views are supposedly understandable because they are the supposedly logical result of objective education, rather than prejudice.

I'm not saying Egan is a racist, as this was probably inadvertent (and again, I am a fan of Egan's work). But when I read this passage, the phrasing really jumped out at me as yet another example of how racism can be so subtly woven into our language and our media.

This clip shows the good side of Dobbs - the side where he's the only person on cable television consistently talking about major economic issues and questioning the corruption of both political parties. For doing that, he should be applauded.

Of course, there's a bad side of Dobbs: the side that comes out when he talks about - and takes extremist positions on - cultural issues like immigration. This is not admirable, to say the least.

The interchange is instructive for two reasons.

First and foremost is the admission: namely, that Republicans still want America to believe that the way to steady the economy is to follow Bush's efforts to slash taxes for millionaires. As I show in the very first chapter of my book, this is a prescription being rejected even in some of the most conservative parts of the country.

Second, there is the denial: When called onto the carpet for wanting to continue the policies of the most unpopular president in history, Republicans start running for cover to the point of claiming they never said what they just said. The denial is a tacit acknowledgment of the power of the populist uprising now boiling throughout the country. The GOP knows the country is very angry at conservatives' free market fundamentalism - and so will deny and obfuscate to pretend they aren't championing such fundamentalism.

Of course, moments after appearing on Fox, my email in-box was filled with hate mail from conservative viewers. For instance, Dave in Bokeelia, Florida told me "Gramm was abolutely correct" in blaming Americans for the economic downturn, then asked, "Why don't you get and your boyfriend move to Denmark or some other socialist country?" (apparently, he's not aware I'm happily married to my wife, Emily). Then he declared, "Obama has already lost, you moron."

A guy named Charles angrily asked, "When did raising taxes ever stimulate economic growth?" then said "raising taxes will only cause a deeper recession," and added "Do your homework before berating someone on television." Apparently, he forgot that our most recent economic boom during the 1990s came immediately after President Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy.

My favorite was from a guy named Steve who wrote, "hey girlyboy, do you have any idea how pitiful you look to normal folks when you open your sissy moth beging the government to help?" (that is his spelling - for real).

These comments show how powerful conservative propaganda has been - it has convinced a number (albeit a dwindling one, according to polling data) of people to believe that the real problem in our country is that we have too few royalists running the government - not too many. Though this conservative ideology is clearly on the ropes, the Fox News clip shows that the GOP is going to continue trying to ram it down our throats.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

The upshot: if someone qualifies for even $1 in energy assistance, their food stamp allocation can be increased by as much as 50%. Paterson's proposal essentially amounts to a plan to enroll more folks in Section 8 housing into the energy assistance program. Absent much-needed food stamp aid in the recent economic "stimulus" package, this plan should provide at least a partial solution for mitigating the swipe at folk's pocket books (and stomachs) that the agribiz giants are taking as they bring in record profits in these times of need.

Hopefully other states will follow New York's lead.

As our culture has homogenized and as our economy has been Wal-Mart-ized, our politics have - rather unfortunately - followed suit. As I've found in my travels, the concept of thinking globally, acting locally is a foreign one to many political activists. No matter where you go, the focus is almost exclusively on federal elections - and more specifically, the presidential election - to the exclusion of almost everything else. I'm not saying great local work isn't being done - it sure is. But it is undeniable that the political focus in this country - whether among rank-and-file voters or even among activists - is almost completely on the palace drama of presidential campaigns.

The rise of truly "national politics" is something of a modern phenomenon. In many past eras, Congress and the presidency has been seen as secondary or merely equal in importance to state and local politics. A century ago, for instance, a congressional seat was seen as almost a ceremonial position when compared to offices like mayor or alderman.

The column delves into why there has been such a monumental shift in political focus. And let me be clear: the change is due to more than just a broad shift toward cultural homogenization. Congress and the president has usurped more and more power from states, meaning the federal arena has, indeed, become more important in recent years than it was in the past.

That said, the balance is way out of whack. You can have a conversation about the presidential race with almost anyone these days - yet most people have no idea who their state legislator is. Just like Wal-Mart has destroyed local downtown commerce, the one-size-fits-all national political culture is destroying local political cultures all over America.

As I say in the column, there are certainly some upsides to the homogenization of our politics. We can have truly national conversations about major issues. But the downside is that for all the sound and fury of national cable television and radio talk shows, many of the most pressing crises we now face require major changes in state and local political arenas. And if those arenas are ignored under a flood of cable television shows that make, say, David Gergen's blathering about the latest presidential soap opera drama more important than, say, your local legislator's votes, then those crises are not going to be solved - or worse, they will be manipulated by Big Money interests that will fill the political void at the state and local level because they know those arenas are where the real rubber hits the road.

You can read the full column at the San Francsico Chronicle, Denver Post, Ft. Collins Coloradoan, In These Times, TruthDig, Credo Action or Creators Syndicate's website.

The column relies on grassroots support, so if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your help.

Check out the whole post here.

As with John McCain's health care reform proposals, the Florida and Georgia plans are indicative of the Right's allegiance to "consumer-driven health care" - the idea that Americans will use less care if they must pay more out-of-pocket. As the New York Times reports, Sen. McCain wants Americans to purchase their insurance in the volatile and costly individual market, eschewing the stronger bargaining power and better consumer protections found in employer-based and large group coverage. The problem with this approach is that high out of pocket costs - which are the result of high deductible and limited benefit plans - lead consumers to avoid necessary care, resulting in worse outcomes and higher system-wide costs in the long run.

Adam's piece does a great job of outlining the flaws of state-level attempts to implement the kind of bilking-in-disguise approach that I slammed McCain for introducing yesterday. It also comes on the heels of another timely article in the Times about the vangard of the health care reform battle in the states. Colorado's legislation to subject insurance premium rate hikes to strict supervision gets a much-deserved nod. More importantly, the article spends a good deal of time expounding the benefits of pooling, the best thing going as far as pragmatic approaches to health care for all making real advances at the state level.

What the McCain proposal outlined in the article lacks is any real solution for how to address the problem within a comprehensive framework, and opts instead to further privatize the market by removing tax breaks for people who receive employer-funded coverage, incentivizing more expensive individual coverage plans, and throwing subsidies at a broken system, much like the much ballyhooed Massachussetts plan which hasn't really succeeded in much other than marginally increasing the number of insured and filling insurance company coffers by forcing folks to buy coverage plans they can't afford.

The main impact of McCain's plan would most likely be to further pad insurance company profit margins while doing nothing to put a lid on the spiraling costs of coverage plans and provider services. His proposal, which essentially amounts to moving the burden of providing health care from employers to workers, who will be coereced into entering the more expensive individual coverage market, seems like a recipe for further leveraging the inequities in health care coverages that currently make the U.S. the laughing stock of the developed world.

For a real solution, we need to come up with comprehensive approaches to cover all people in a way that equitably splits costs between employers and employees and which puts competition to work in a way that forces profit-bloated insurance companies to compete for people's business rather than prey on their inability to exit a captive market. Obama's proposed requirement that health insurance companies not refuse coverage to anyone is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't address the larger issue of how to avoid singling out high risk individuals for targetted bilking or how to create a comprehensive framework to help everybody achieve greater access to affordable care.