Book Salon

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Phil Tiemeyer, Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants

2013-06-16T20:46:38Z

Welcome Phil Tiemeyer (Philadelphia University) (KALW radio interview) and Host Janet M. Davis, Associate Professor of American Studies, (University Texas, Austin) (NY Times)

Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants

On January 16, 1928, Pan American Airlines staged its first passenger flight from Key West, Florida to Havana, Cuba, an American tourist mecca. Wearing a sharp, fashionable black-and-white uniform, the nineteen-year-old flight attendant cheerfully welcomed passengers on board the Fokker F-7 aircraft, thus inaugurating what quickly would become a storied and iconic U.S. occupation. From the groovy, fluorescent miniskirt uniforms at Pacific Southwest Airlines in the 1960s and 1970s, to the smiling “Fly Me!” campaign at National Airlines in 1971, popular historical images of the U.S. flight attendant have been overwhelmingly female. Indeed, the very first U.S. flight attendant was supposedly a nurse named Ellen Church—launching a long historical association between flight, femininity, glamour, service, and sexual attractiveness.

Yet the earliest flight attendants in the United States were men. The Pan Am flight attendant who welcomed passengers aboard in January 1928 was a young Cuban American man named Amaury Sanchez. Men have worked as flight attendants throughout the history of modern aviation, but their indelible significance in shaping twentieth-century American labor, capitalism, sexual politics, and civil rights struggles has remained virtually invisible, until now. Beautifully researched and compulsively readable, Phil Tiemeyer’s Plane Queer analyzes the myriad ways that male flight attendants have made history from the 1930s to the present.

The labor of the male flight attendant was “queer” from the start (irrespective of the sexual preferences of the workers themselves) because white and light-skinned Latino men were hired to perform tasks that were traditionally relegated to women, or men of color: serving food and cleaning up. In line with broader cultural images of affluent white manhood during the Depression, male flight attendants were stylishly dressed in sleek, body hugging uniforms—a reflection of the upper-class customer base that airlines like Boeing Air Transport (now United Airlines) wanted to attract. At the same time, the flight attendant’s “queer” labor made him the subject of screwball homophobic pop cultural representations, such as “Barney Bullarney,” a bumbling comic strip character in Pan American Air Ways magazine during the late 1930s.

In the homophobic milieu of the Cold War a new cultural representation of the male flight attendant was born: the sexual predator. After William Simpson, a gay Eastern Airlines flight attendant, was murdered in 1954, he was transformed from victim to perpetrator once the hustlers who confessed to killing him claimed that they were defending themselves from his “advances.” Thereafter, Eastern stopped hiring male flight attendants altogether. Pan Am followed suit in 1958.

Tiemeyer reminds readers that economic considerations were always central to airline labor policy changes, including the decision to stop hiring male flight attendants. Unlike female flight attendants who were contractually bound to quit their jobs in their early thirties or upon marrying, male flight attendants accrued seniority and correspondingly higher salaries and benefits. Nonetheless, the economics of homophobic panic strongly influenced the decision to stop hiring male flight attendants in the 1950s. In later chapters, Tiemeyer shows that the homophobic image of the predatory gay flight attendant had enormous staying power. Media outlets had no interest in Randy Shilts’ exhaustive tome on the early history of the AIDS crisis until Shilts and his publisher cleverly recast the Air Canada flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, an early victim of AIDS, into Patient Zero—a hypersexual gay menace who brought AIDS to North America. While this claim was quickly disproved (there had been several prior cases of AIDS in North America), the titillating image of the sexually liberated Dugas as Patient Zero made And the Band Played On an international bestseller.

The homophobic Cold War hiring ban ultimately catalyzed another important social transformation: male flight attendants became civil rights activists. After being denied a position at Pan Am because of his sex, Celio Diaz filed a federal discrimination lawsuit in 1968 against the carrier with the full weight of the “sex discrimination” clause of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to support his case. Diaz v. Pan Am (1971) ended single-sex hiring policies—a momentous change for the entire U.S. workforce.

Male flight attendants were instrumental in other areas of civil rights activism, as well. While Gaëtan Dugas is infamous as the mythical Patient Zero, the story of the United Airline flight attendant and gay civil rights pioneer Gär Traynor has been virtually unknown until now. In 1983, Traynor was grounded from United because he had AIDS. Traynor filed suit with his union to preserve his job; in 1984, he became the first American with AIDS to win the right to keep working. Although Traynor’s case was settled through labor arbitration rather than in the courts, it set a de facto precedent for subsequent rulings that protected the rights of People With AIDS (PWA).

Traynor’s activism was part of an expanding LGBT civil rights movement. In the 1990s, airlines increasingly recognized the power of this growing market sector, as well as the potential public relations liability of resisting new LGBT civil rights laws in cities where carriers were based. Consequently, Tiemeyer contends that airline public relations and marketing departments—rather than unions and the courts—initiated LGBT-friendly changes to the workplace, such as nondiscrimination clauses, flight privileges for partners and friends, and health insurance for registered domestic partners. Yet airlines have simultaneously instituted neoliberal economic policies that keep ticket prices low and corporate profits high. In an age of deregulation, mergers, leveraged buyouts, and bankruptcies have given airlines the power to reorganize and rewrite their labor contracts—resulting in union paralysis, depressed wages, depleted pensions, and unaffordable health insurance.

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on gay marriage and Pedro Almodovar will release “I’m So Excited,” a zany comedy featuring male flight attendants. Plane Queer allows us to place these seemingly unrelated events into conversation with each other: to understand how an often trivialized and sometimes reviled occupation became a significant force in the modern civil rights movement.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Bob Harris, The International Bank of Bob: Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time

2013-06-16T19:57:54Z

Welcome Bob Harris (BobHarris.com) (Kiva Lending Team) (Twitter) and Host Holly Mosher (Director – Bonsai People) (Trailer)

The International Bank of Bob: Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time

We all want to make the world a better place, right? But it’s too complicated, takes too much time, or we don’t know what we, as lone human beings, can do. The International Bank of Bob will change your mind and show you how making a $25 microcredit loan through Kiva, you – collectively with other individuals just like you – will have a major impact on the recipient of that loan.

The beauty of a book like Bob Harris’ is that it takes the reader on a journey through the eyes of the author and takes us to places we could/would never go on our own. I love how he literally takes us around the globe and shares both fascinating news of what is happening in over a dozen countries, but also how he helps us feel like we’ve met the people on his journey.

In doing so, he opens our hearts and minds to the injustice that people, who are really just like us – but seem so foreign by their different religions and exotic locales – are suffering from a lack of access to financial services. In particular, I appreciated the journey through countries that have just recovered from war and have had to rebuild their lives from the rubble.

He does a beautiful job portraying how we have more in common with these strangers than we’d ever imagine. By spending a day with or sharing a meal together, he quickly pulls out our universal commonalities as humans. And by doing that, we share in the struggle that these people, who happen to be living in poverty at the moment, have in putting food on the table or paying rent. He shows if they have some support, like we had in our lives, that they too will have the chance to make decent lives for themselves.

The great thing is that he is taking us on this journey through poverty with a simple solution in hand – microcredit. He shows us both the good and the bad of microcredit, and more importantly he shows that microcredit really is hard work. The people he introduces us to: from the Kiva fellows and the microcredit loan officers to the loan recipients, all work extremely hard to make this system work so that it can really be a hand-up in life.

The amazing thing about The International Bank of Bob is that you learn so much without it feeling like a lesson in world affairs. And this is the only book where I anticipated having to look for the asterisk to read his fun and informative footnotes that you won’t want to miss.

He also adeptly takes us through a wonderful journey of his personal life that is as fascinating as the people he introduces us to.

As Arianna Huffington says

“Surprising in so many ways: a travelogue that makes the people in exotic locales as accessible as your next-door neighbors; a book about poverty alleviation that often makes you laugh out loud (or cry, sometimes on the same page); and a portrayal of loving families in challenging environments that leaves you feeling stronger, more connected to the world, and full of hope. In short: joyous, humane, and inspiring.”

After reading the book you may want to join the International Bank of Bob lending team, which has 1,311 team members who have loaned $3,433,075 via 121,912 loans.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Lori Wallach, The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority

2013-06-15T20:42:33Z

Welcome Lori Wallach (Director, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch) (The Nation) and Host Dave Johnson (Campaign for America’s Future) (Seeing The Forest) (Twitter)

The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority

You think trade is complicated, technical, boring, so you tune out and don’t pay attention to the issue… And then BANG, you’re told they are moving the facility where you work out of the country and you are going to be laid off, but if you want your severance and the chance to collect unemployment you have to train your replacement. Not long after that, in other factories and offices everyone is told to accept wage and benefit cuts or they’ll move that facility out of the country, too.

Six months later you look around and your downtown locally-owned storefronts are getting boarded up one at a time because the private-equity-owned chains that circle the town carry all that cheap stuff from China and they buy at such a large scale that no small business can compete.

After a year you finally land a job! The job is you have to dress up like a duck and stand on a corner waving a sign. These are the things that all of this arguing about trade is about. Welcome to the new America.

Lori Wallach’s book, The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority, provides a history of how we got here. It gets into how our trade agreements are negotiated, what they mean to our country, and the ongoing battle between the Congress and executive branch over what process we should use. Wallach describes the book as “actually a fun read.”

The book naturally starts with the Boston Tea Party, which was actually part of a trade war over taxes on tea. England had a government run by a wealthy few who used their wealth and power to maintain their wealth and power – largely through trade rules. (They forbid the American colony to manufacture and taxed the things we imported.)

So we revolted, won, formed a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men (and later men of color and then later women but not LGBT people yet) are created equal and wrote a Constitution with checks and balances to make sure that We the People had a big say in our trade policy.

Wallach writes of 5 trade “regimes” or periods that took place between then and now, with Congress largely in control but occasionally handing over their power to the administrative branch. But then came the idea of a new trade-negotiating process, commonly called “Fast Track,” which dramatically changed the role of Congress in trade as well as non-trade laws. It is not too much to say that Fast Track shredded the balance of powers in the Constitution, delegating Congressional trade authority to the executive branch.

Fast Track lets the trade negotiators push through domestic policies that Congress would never pass, and then gives Congress a very short amount of time to agree or not. The process, with a very short time for consideration, allows the President to, as Wallach writes, (page 87) “…shepherd the powerful arguments made in the past about damage to US credibility and foreign relations if changes to a signed agreement were sought. Congress would be put on the defensive in this case, facing enormous pressure to proceed with consideration of the pact.” On top of this Congress faces massively-funded campaigns from the corporate interests served by the agreement, generating the appearance of popular support for the agreement.

This is how agreements where Congress had mandated that there must be strong labor and environmental provisions ended up approved with weak or no labor and environmental provisions, and agreements that go so far beyond just trade that the word “trade” shouldn’t be in the treaty.

And this is how we ended up with a vast, massive, huge, terrible, enormous, mammoth trade deficit draining around $600 billion a year out of our economy. (click for larger)

And the reasons for that trade deficit are a big part of how we ended up with the loss of millions of jobs, 50,000+ factories, entire industries, extreme concentration of wealth among a very few, and the terrible pressures the rest of us face just trying to get by.

All of this is important as we get ready for the fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I’ve been beating the drum about TPP, but Lori Wallach has been the drum major. This is a vast treaty being negotiated in secret with tons of corporate input but little or no input from working people, human rights organizations, environmental organizations, consumer rights organizations and others. With a process like that the results are predetermined — great for the already-giant multinational corporations and the billionaires behind them, terrible for any remaining concept of democratic government and the people and the planet. TPP goes so far beyond “trade”, and sets aside so much of our own understanding of law and sovereignty that it could be called a framework for a new worldwide corporate state.

Now that we are all in a positive frame of mind… let the dialog begin.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

2013-06-09T19:32:35Z

Welcome Kate Brown (UMBC) (Plutopia) and Host Gar Smith (Earth Island Journal) (Environmentalists Against War) (author, Nuclear Roulette)

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

Kate Brown’s Plutopia is the tale of two atomic cities — twin siblings of the Cold War, created for the purpose of harvesting the plutonium that fueled the post-war nuclear arms race.

The top-secret reactors at the Pentagon’s Hanford plutonium plant lead to the creation of Richland, a planned city built in the wind-scraped wastelands of Washington State. The residents – all white and privileged – lived in a perfectly landscaped consumers’ paradise complete with federally subsidized housing and free medical care. Russia’s plutopia was called Ozersk. It was built in the Urals, near the plutonium mills of Maiak, and it was so secret it didn’t appear on official maps.

Both cities existed to serve a common mission – to promote the creation of nuclear bombs. Both offered unwitting residents the promise of prosperity and security while depriving them of basic freedoms and placing them at great risk. Both left a legacy of radioactive contamination that continues to haunt both countries (and will stalk generations to come).

Between them, Hanford and Maiak were intentionally (and accidentally) responsible for releasing 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes – the equivalent of four Chernobyl disasters — over thousands of square miles of downwind land, rivers, forests, wildlife, livestock, farms and families.

With astounding persistence and initiative, Kate Brown devoted several years to exhuming the hidden records that trace the secret history of these two populations – and the forces that conspired to create them. Brown’s investigations took her from dusty government archives in the US to clandestine meetings with survivors in Russia.

Brown’s discoveries reveal how US and Soviet leaders both came to adopt the same model – the construction of “middleclass” plutopias occupied by thousands of citizens blindly engaged in building doomsday devices that could kill millions. Instead of putting nuclear farming in the hands of soldiers, Washington and Moscow relied instead on communities of highly paid nuclear families living in posh, government subsidized, atomic cities.

At the same time Capitalism and Communism provided its “chosen” with the benefits of generous salaries, free medical care, entertainment and a plethora of consumer goods, they maintained parallel communities of migrant workers, prisoners, soldiers and racial minorities who were confined in nearby “staging grounds” and required to perform the most dangerous work. These workers were disposable. They received no medical care. When they became sickened by radiation exposure, soldiers were discharged and prisoners were released.

Plutopia is filled with depictions of Atomic Age working conditions that are absolutely Dickensian. The persistent issues of human corruption and racial discrimination percolate through the histories of both of these “model cities.” While Brown’s disturbing revelations tell us a lot about the buried history of nuclear technology, this “new history” of the Atomic Age also tells us much about the faults of state power and human nature. Plutopia provides a somber accounting of the dangers we have inherited from the past and it sends a chilling warning about the horrors that may still await us.

Kate Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, American Historical Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Harper’s Magazine Online.

Gar Smith is editor emeritus of Earth Island Journal, a Project Censored award-winning investigative journalist, and cofounder of Environmentalists Against War.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Anthony Stanford, Homophobia in the Black Church: How Faith, Politics, and Fear Divide the Black Community

2013-06-08T20:04:07Z

Welcome Anthony Stanford (The Beacon News) and Host Deena Bess Sherman (The Beacon News)

Homophobia in the Black Church: How Faith, Politics, and Fear Divide the Black Community

My colleague, Anthony Stanford, just published a book that couldn’t possibly be more timely. As national debates rage about homosexuality, marriage equality, and the roles of Church and State in deciding legislation, his book, Homophobia in the Black Church: How Faith, Politics, and Fear Divide the Black Community is an absolute “must-read.”

I had sometimes wondered why the Black Church, an institution that anchored black culture through generations of oppression and violence, did not show more tolerance for LGBTs–another group that has been reviled and violently opposed in this country.

The answer is complicated. Stanford masterfully tells how African-American history and the fight for equality has made black culture less (rather than more) tolerant of its LGBT members. His research is thorough and meticulous; his writing is clear and engaging.

Stanford explains the underlying reasons why blacks particularly resisted the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military and some are unlikely to ever support marriage equality. He demonstrates how former president George W. Bush’s “Faith Based Initiatives” increased strife and division by exploiting the African-American experience and encouraging cash strapped congregations to compete for federal funds.

While some saw President Bush’s Faith Based initiatives as a way for religious groups to help more people, others saw it as a clear violation of the separation of Church and State, allowing religious groups to use tax dollars, while openly discriminating and proselytizing.

When Bush could not get legislation allowing churches to receive federal money for administering social programs passed, he rammed it down America’s throat with Executive Order #13279 in December 2002.

The program created an uneasy alliance between the GOP and black churches. Stanford said that as he researched, he was “surprised by how well organized, determined and emboldened conservatives were in their attempt to buy the influence of some African American clergy.” And they succeeded to an alarming degree.

Conservative politicians and religious groups, both black and white, put aside all other differences in order to persecute and scapegoat LGBTs. Black evangelical, Rev. Gregory Daniels told the NY Times in 2004 “If the KKK opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them.”

The hypocrisy surrounding homophobia remains the same, regardless of race. Some of the harshest critics of LGBTs are people who are later found to be struggling with their own sexuality. And it’s amazing to me that those who accuse LGBTs of tearing society apart cannot see that it is their own intolerance that causes the suffering. When people are ostracized and persecuted for being who God made them, they try to please society by forcing themselves into heterosexual roles that are unnatural for them. This ultimately causes depression, the spread of AIDS to spouses, divorce, and even suicide.

In writing this book, Stanford takes a brave stand to shed light on this important issue from an African-American perspective. Perhaps Marc Morial, National Urban League President, said it best: “In an era of divisiveness, Anthony Stanford’s work provides a thoughtful analysis of one of society’s most compelling issues. Mr. Stanford boldly confronts attitudes about race, sexuality and religion, opening the door for meaningful discussion and broader understanding.”

There are people of deep faith on both sides of this issue. There are people of all races and backgrounds. The only way to make communities stronger is to listen to one another and choose dialog over hate. Let the dialog begin.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia

2013-06-02T20:22:29Z

Welcome Andrei Lankov (Kookmin University) (Wiki) and Host Karin J. Lee (Executive Director, The National Committee on North Korea – NCNK) (author, U.S. – DPRK Educational Exchanges: Assessment and Future Strategy)

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia

Over the last several decades North Korea has had a low profile here in the United States. Other than a few magazines articles inaccurately portraying the country’s second leader, Kim Jong Il, as “irrational,” the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (or DPRK, the official name of North Korea) might as well be the forgotten country, to go along with the forgotten Korean War. But the third leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, accomplished something his father and grandfather never managed to do: introduce the world to dueling images of North Korean modernity. On the one hand, there is popular culture – the young leader watching basketball with Dennis Rodman or enjoying a Mickey Mouse vignette with his hip, gorgeous wife. On the other hand, there are the advances in North Korea’s weapons program — – a third nuclear test, photos of Kim Jong Un in consultation with military leaders in front of a map of the world showing four military targets in the United States (despite the fact that North Korea has yet to successfully test a missile with that range).

What lies between these two extreme images remains difficult to explain or assess. True, the DPRK is far less isolated than portrayed in the United States. Chinese and European entrepreneurs take their chances doing business with the DPRK, North Korean students study abroad in China and Europe, well-heeled tourists can and do visit the country, and the Associated Press bureau chief on the Korean Peninsula spends half her time in the North. But there is still limited access to information, particularly regarding the lives of ordinary North Koreans.

Into this void comes Andrei Lankov with his book, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, which includes a brief though useful history of the country’s foundation, an essential review of the impact of the DPRK’s economic decline, an explanation of the North’s domestic and foreign policy strategies, and a pragmatic exploration of policy options. The book, though rich in information and analysis, remains accessible to the general reader, in part because it is peppered with illuminating vignettes and anecdotes.

Lankov is well-known in North Korea policy circles, especially for his condemnation of human rights abuses and impatience with economic policy choices that have the left the DPRK far poorer than its neighbors. Yet Lankov corrects the irritating and unhelpful tendency to view North Korea as a nation of evil perpetrators and their helpless victims. Instead, he describes a society of ordinary people who are not “brainwashed automatons,” an all-too-common assumption of human rights activists who want to “save” the North Korean people. It helps that unlike many authors writing in English he is fluent in Korean and therefore able to draw on a wide range of sources, including interviews with Koreans and reviews of North Korean propaganda.

One of the book’s highlights is the correction of the commonly held assumption that the DPRK has remained static since its foundation. As he explains, the collapse of the Soviet bloc has deeply and irrevocably changed North Korean society: “Post-1994 North Korea is very different from the country established and run by Kim Il Sung. It might be run by the same people (or their children and nephews) and the state may sound the same, but its society is very, very different.”

To me, this section is the heart of his book; it provides the basis for his explanations of North Korea’s domestic and foreign policy choices, (including the leadership’s fears that broad economic or political changes would loosen the leadership’s hold on its country), and guides his policy recommendations. Lankov believes that Kim Il Sung’s DPRK is slowly being replaced by a new society and “contradictions between the existing, old political order and the emerging social order will lead to more rapid change, and – just as importantly-to the demand for more rapid change. Where these demands will end, we cannot as yet be sure.”

An historian of strong opinions, Lankov confidently predicts possible futures for the DPRK, all of which involve some form of collapse or regime change. Lankov is difficult to categorize; he is a “hardliner” who advocates increasing the information flow into the DPRK through radio programming and engagement, including educational exchanges. He concludes that

The North Korean problem has no simple or quick solutions. Negotiations and concession will not help much, while pressure and sanctions will be even less useful. We should therefore brace ourselves for a long, winding and occasionally dangerous drive.

And, while he is unsparing of his criticism of the DPRK leadership, the US and the South Korea also come under fire for their bad policy choices. He is unable to resist mocking some North Korean peculiarities, but he brings to his topic something that is rare for authors tackling the question of what makes North Korea tick: affection and un-patronizing concern for the North Korean people and even some compassion for the North Korean leadership.

His perspective may be derived from his experiences growing up in the Soviet Union, his time as an exchange student in the DPRK, and his extensive conversations with North Koreans now living in the South. Although Lankov likely is despised by the North Korean leadership, this emotional connection with his subject distinguishes his book from others that try to explain the communist state.

Much has happened since Lankov finished his provocative book, including a successful North Korean satellite launch and the third nuclear test, a further round of UN sanctions, DPRK nuclear threats on the United States, and the closure of the Kaesong Industrial Complex (the decade-old economic zone established by the ROK just over the DMZ in the North). I look forward to discussing the book as well as learning his views on these developments and whether they influence his predictions for the future. Please join is in what is likely to be a refreshingly substantive and creative conversation about the DPRK.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Nicco Mele, The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath

2013-06-01T19:49:26Z

Welcome Nicco Mele (EchoDitto) (Harvard) (Twitter) and Host Symon Hill (SymonHill – blog) (Twitter)

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath

Nicco Mele is a man who knows the internet. The webmaster for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004 and the founder of a leading internet strategy firm, his discussion moves between the effect of Twitter on news reporting, Hollywood’s relationship with Netflix and Al Qaeda’s use of YouTube. These are only three of the many examples which make this book so interesting. The big ideas are sustained by engaging anecdotes.

The theme of Mele’s book is the effect of “radical connectivity”, which he describes as “our breathtaking ability to send vast amounts of data instantly, constantly and globally”, thus transforming politics, business and culture.

His first chapter is both alarming and unsettling. He writes:

“The devices and connectivity so essential to modern life put unprecedented power in the hands of every individual – a radical redistribution of power that our traditional institutions don’t and perhaps can’t understand”.

But for Mele, this is not as positive as it may at first sound. He warns of “the ongoing destruction of existing big institutions that remain vital to upholding social order and the Western values of democracy”.

Each of the next seven chapters looks at some of the big institutions under threat: Big News, Big Political Parties, Big Fun, Big Government, Big Armies, Big Minds and Big Companies.

Mele freely acknowledges that he is more hopeful in some of these areas than others. When it comes to news, he fears that the decline of newspapers, along with other trends, will reduce the sort of journalism that works to uphold accountability in society. He is positive about the advantages of radical connectivity for political dissidents in oppressive regimes, but points out the downside: the same technologies “empower both sides of the equation – pro-democracy human rights activists and loose networks of terrorists”.

In contrast, he is much more optimistic about the effect on business. For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of the book is Mele’s prediction that “Big Business will slowly decline over the coming decades”. He quotes some surprising statistics about the growth in small businesses and self-employment – in many cases helped along by the world wide web, which allows people to market and sell their products or services much more cheaply and easily.

If Mele’s predictions come true, then in twenty years time we might all be quoting a key paragraph from his book:

“If today, bloggers can publish anything at any time to any audience at zero cost, within the next twenty years everyone will enjoy the capability to be their own Walmart. As radical connectivity continues to advance, and as it increasingly comes to affect fabrication and manufacturing, anyone will be able to design and sell anything, and anyone else will be able to buy anything. That’s right – anything!”

Mele’s final chapter is as encouraging as his first is alarming. It is a passionate plea for people to use radical connectivity in ways that benefit individuals and society rather than harming them. He writes:

“We, not the technology, can bring about the cure by assuming control of the technology, embracing where it is taking us while also having the collective determination and strength of mind to steer it where we want”.

Mele wants us to use radical connectivity to affirm and strengthen existing democratic institutions while helping us to develop new institutions where appropriate. He explains:

“Resisting a radical, insular individualism, we must build institutions that encourage collaboration and accountability, locating such accountability in vast networks of small groups that share common culture and motives”.

His suggestions include developing mechanisms for holding to account the big companies that are on one level empowered by radical connectivity, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon (all of which are currently mired in scandal over tax avoidance, particularly in the UK). Mele believes that if people seize the opportunities afforded by “the end of Big”, they can reinvigorate a sense of community as well as the national institutions of the United States.

While I do not share Mele’s confidence in Western political institutions, I am inspired by his vision of the future. I am particularly encouraged by his understanding of the ways in which the end of big business will help the world to face the crises of climate change. “We can only hope to transform our current fossil fuel-based economy into a more sustainable system if we move collectively to small, sustainable local energy sources,” he writes. “We need to build more sustainable, local food production and distribution.”

Like all good books, The End of Big left me with as many questions as answers. In particular (speaking as someone who lives in Britain), I want to ask Nicco Mele whether his predictions and suggestions are just for the US, for the West generally or for the whole world. I also wonder how radical connectivity relates to other causes of the situations we currently face (for example, the breakdown of trust in powerful institutions has been hastened by the banking crisis). And I’m worried that climate change might threaten radical connectivity if failure to invest in renewable energy leads to major electricity shortages.

These are some of the many topics that I look forward to discussing with Nicco Mele. If his answers are as interesting as his book, they will be well worth listening to.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Jaron Lanier, Who Owns The Future?

2013-05-26T19:57:39Z

Welcome Jaron Lanier (JaronLanier.com) and Host John Nichols (The Nation) (Twitter)

Who Owns The Future?

It has been understood for several decades now that Jaron Lanier is a big thinker when it comes to the technologies that define our lives. The computer science pioneer who explained virtual reality to the rest of us inspires journalists to employ terms such as “digital visionary” (The Observer) and “Internet guru” (Publisher’s Weekly).

But he is another kind of thinker as well: a humanist speaking from an enlightenment perspective that recalls the Lunar Society days of two centuries ago, when there was broad recognition of the meeting group between technology and poetry. And where the great scientists of a new age wrestled with not just formulas and calculations but also with the question of how to build a just and humane society.

In his groundbreaking 2010 book, You Are Not a Gadget (Vintage), Lanier challenged the digital utopianism that tells us that the solutions to all our problems can be found on the Web. It may have become “fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data,” he explained, but it not healthy for citizens or for society. Rather, Lanier argued, we should recognize the value, the necessity, of human initiative and reasoned argument.

You Are Not a Gadget was an invitation to think differently about everything. And the conclusions Lanier reached confirmed conclusions that Bob McChesney and I had come to as we prepared our book The Death and Life of American Journalism. We shared – and share – Lanier’s conclusion with regard to the direction of a digital transformation that was emptying out traditional newsrooms but failing to replace them with a sufficient online journalism to employ all the laid off reporters – let alone to serve a democratic society.

“Here’s just one problem: It screws the middle class,” Lanier explained in a 2010 Amazon.com interview on the rise of ‘Web 2.0’ designs. “Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor. This is why newspapers are dying. It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone. When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians? Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.”

Lanier’s exceptional new book, Who Owns The Future? (Simon & Schuster), builds on that argument with a scorching critique of a digital transformation that is empowering not the great mass of citizens but high-tech monopolies; that is creating not equality of opportunity but a wealth gap that leaves even our most creative people with fewer and fewer options.

“The old ideas about information being free in the information age ended up screwing over everybody except the owners of the very biggest computers. The biggest computers turned into spying and behavior modification operations, which concentrated wealth and power,” Lanier explains. “Sharing information freely, without traditional rewards like royalties or paychecks, was supposed to create opportunities for brave, creative individuals. Instead, I have watched each successive generation of young journalists, artists, musicians, photographers, and writers face harsher and harsher odds. The perverse effect of opening up information has been that the status of a young person’s parents matters more and more, since it’s so hard to make one’s way.”

Jaron Lanier is reopening one of the old debates that Henry David Thoreau was wrestling with when he suggested the prospect that: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” We’ll wrestle with these ideas today, here in the Firedoglake Book Salon.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes James C. Goodale, Fighting For The Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles

2013-05-25T17:56:32Z

Welcome James C. Goodale (Wiki) (JamesCGoodale.com) and Host Kevin Gosztola (FDL, The Dissenter) (Salon) (Twitter)

Fighting For The Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles

“If in fact he goes ahead and prosecutes Julian Assange, he will pass Nixon. He’s close to Nixon now,” the former general counsel f0r the New York Times, James Goodale, said of President Barack Obama on “Democracy Now!”

The Justice Department’s seizure of the Associated Press’ phone records is a “good example of something that Obama has done but Nixon never did. So I have him presently in second place, behind Nixon and ahead of Bush II,” he added.

Goodale led the legal team that made the case in the courts in 1971 that the Times had the right to publish the Pentagon Papers, top secret Defense Department documents that exposed US policies around the Vietnam War and were provided to the news organization by Daniel Ellsberg.

In his book, Fighting for the Press: The Pentagon Papers & Other Battles, Goodale presents a first-hand account of what happened as lawyers sought to defend the newspaper from the government. He describes how Max Frankel, foreign reporter for the Times, informed him he had “documents related to the Vietnam War.” He did not, at first, see them but was confronted with the issue of whether it was legal for the press to publish classified information.

Goodale details how he informed Harding Bancroft, the executive vice president of the Times, about a “secret newsroom project” involving a “history of the Vietnam War” that was classified “top secret sensitive.” Bancroft became “visibly upset.” He said the Pentagon Papers could be the “most important event in the history of the Times” and it would be particularly “bothersome” if the Times “published top secret documents.”

He spends a chapter on his first glimpse at the Pentagon Papers. There were forty-seven volumes.

…According to Volume One, North Vietnam had been promised twice there would be elections for all of Vietnam so it could determine its own future. While Vietnam was a French colony, the French had made an agreement in 1946 for such elections and broken its agreement. Later, the 1954 Geneva Accords, which separated North and South Vietnam, also provided for such an election. The United States had used its best efforts to make sure such an election did not take place. I simply did not know that.

I felt cheated. I had always believed the North Vietnamese had violated the 1954 Geneva Accords. Now, it turned out from this secret history, it was not true. Of all the volumes I read, this had the greatest impact on me. Strangely enough, Ellsberg had the same reaction when he read it…

Goodale met with the law firm, Lord, Day & Lord. The Times received advice to not publish the Pentagon Papers. Louis Loeb of the firm argued it would “not only be a crime to publish classified information, but it would be a crime even to look at the Pentagon Papers because they were classified,” and, “the Espionage Act covered the publication of classified information.” This was “flabbergasting” to Goodale, who found the First Amendment was absent from the lawyers’ analysis. Goodale supposed this “knee jerk reaction” that it would be illegal was a result of a lack of appreciation for the First Amendment.

The Times wound up publishing after all. Nixon immediately pursued an injunction. The presses were temporarily stopped, and days later the legal team was part of a trial where the legal team was arguing over whether the Espionage Act, First Amendment or Executive Order 10501 would permit an injunction.

The book thoroughly recounts each episode in the Pentagon Papers case, including the tactics of prosecutors who tried multiple times to introduce secret evidence of “harm” or “damage” done to the national defense improperly into court proceedings.

At last, on June 30, 1971, the historic victory comes down from the Supreme Court. It was a 6-3 decision. Justice Potter Stewart ended up adopting a test for whether the government could issue an injunction that was dependent upon whether it would cause “direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation and its people.” This was similar to the test the Times legal team had asked the court to adopt.

How significant is this case in US history? Goodale writes:

The Pentagon Papers case was the first of its kind in American history. The United States Government tried and failed to use the courts to censor the press through the issuance of a prior restraint order. It will be very difficult for the government ever to succeed. The test adopted by the Supreme Court, that the government must show that a publication will surely cause direct immediate and irreparable damage to its nation or its people, is almost impossible to meet. The Pentagon Papers will never be overruled. It is a case for the ages.

While the focus of the book may be the Pentagon Papers case, Goodale also highlights other political cases as well. In 1970, the Justice Department sued Times reporter Earl Caldwell, one of the few black reporters at the newspaper, “for his notes about his coverage of the Black Panthers.” The Times decided to fight Nixon, but the Justice Department had been issuing subpoenas to the press. “Certain members of the press” chose to “work out a compromise with the Justice Department over producing information the department had requested.” And, “It was reported that that the TV program 60 Minutes and its producer, CBS, had settled a subpoena for a program they had done on the Black Panthers.”

Goodale contends, in contrast, “Today, major members of the press would band together in unified resistance. But back then, before the Pentagon Papers case, there was no organized group of media lawyers, either in or out of media organizations, to do that.”

With the entire news business outraged at the Justice Department for seizing the AP’s records in a fishing expedition, that is a good point to end this introductory post and an appropriate comment to lead us all into what should be an enlightening and important discussion on press freedom in this country.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Dina Hampton, Little Red: Three Passionate Lives Through the Sixties and Beyond

2013-05-19T20:45:45Z

Welcome Dina Hampton and Host David Farber (Temple University) (author, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s)

Little Red: Three Passionate Lives Through the Sixties and Beyond

In Little Red: Three Passionate Lives through the Sixties and Beyond, Dina Hampton does something unique in writing about the history, meaning and legacy of the 1960s in the United States. She gives us intimate portraits of three very different people whose lives were forged in the red hot political cauldron of that era: the Communist Party champion of Black Power, Angela Davis; the New Left firebrand, Tom Hurwitz; and the neo-conservative advocate of unbridled American power, Elliott Abrams. Her three subjects, fascinatingly, all attended at the same time the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, collectively known as Little Red. The name is telling: the school was founded in Greenwich Village in the 1920s as a proudly left-wing progressive private school and nothing, not even McCarthyism, got in the way of that leftist vision of social justice pedagogy. At Little Red, Davis, Hurwitz and Abrams learned even as children that challenging the political status quo was the right and proper duty of every American. As Hampton shows us, that duty took quite divergent forms in their hyper-political lives.

Little Red is not a polemic or a didactic tale. Hampton is less interested in making a case for any particular political cause or movement than she is in exploring what drives people to passionate, ideological commitment. What I found remarkable was Hampton’s ability to create empathic portraits of each of her protagonists, none of whom are without serious flaws both as people and as political actors. She can make a reader understand why Angela Davis in the 1960s decides to become a member of the Communist Party and celebrate the Soviet Union and East Germany as exemplars of human freedom and models for the American racial justice struggle. She can make us see how and why Tom Hurwitz turned to violent confrontation with political authorities in the face of America’s deadly policy in Vietnam and then embraced for several years Maoism and China’s Cultural Revolution. And perhaps most unexpectedly, especially for readers here, she can evoke how New Left tactics in the Sixties hardened the heart of Elliott Abrams and placed him on a path toward a no holds barred anti-communism that would lead him to champion the murderous right-wing regime in El Salvador in the 1980s, as well as the brutal thuggery of the Contras in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration.

I’m a university-based historian accustomed to reading, lecturing, and writing about the Sixties from the perspective of structure, event, and context—and I know that some of the academic writing about the Sixties has turned spectacular human drama into dry-as-dust stuff. Hampton makes the Sixties a story of emotion, passion, and character; of people who make hard choices in real time spurred on by lovers, friends, and the desire to act in a world turned inside out. All of us who are political people understand that far more than dispassionate analysis goes into our political decision-making. In a messy, very personal, very intimate way we develop a core set of values and a hierarchy of beliefs, almost always in conversation with friends and loved ones. Hampton helps us to understand that process in her powerfully written account of three lives in the balance in the Sixties era. How and why we become political is at the heart of Hampton’s story.

Hampton does not stop her account in the 1960s. The last third of her book follows Davis, Hurwitz, and Abrams through the changing times of last decades of the twentieth century and right up to the present. Hampton’s account of how these three brilliant, sometimes infuriating, often kinetic people figure out how to keep their Sixties-era political passions intact in the face of massive changes in American and international affairs makes for fascinating and moving reading—even when one disagrees wholeheartedly with one or another of the choices being made.

Little Red gives us another way to encounter the radical politics of the Sixties and to ponder the choices individuals made in the face of endemic racism and sexism, the catastrophic war in Vietnam, and the obduracy of the American political establishment during those turbulent times. It raises a multitude of questions about the meaning of leftist politics in the Sixties, about how social and political change can and should be made in a nation that professes democratic values, and about what an individual can and should do when confronted by public policies and social practices he or she finds immoral, destructive, and even deadly. By making these questions about human choice and not broad social structures or political economy, Dina Hampton has given us a history with which we have to wrestle at a very personal level.

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book and be respectful of dissenting opinions. Please take other conversations to a previous thread. - bev]