In These Times

Where the Real Danger Lies

Marilyn Katz — Fri, 24 May 2013 02:50:09 +0000

“The operation was a success, but the patient died.” Nowhere may that old saw be more apt than about the likely outcome of the Board of Education’s decision on Wednesday to close 50 neighborhood schools.

They say this truly radical operation is necessitated by a dearth of funds and a diminishing number of students attending the targeted schools (although those numbers are disputed). But are the closings the correct remedy, or is the board, like an inexperienced medical student, treating the symptom not the disease, blithely ignoring the dangers of the operation and the serious long-term side effects, both known and unknown?

While the debate about the benefits or harm to children and schools will go on for years to come, there is one thing that is beyond debate. The most profound losses will be felt by communities that are already the most vulnerable–those communities that have become the poster children for the city’s growing income inequalities.

Last year, in a truly laudable move, the city of Chicago’s Department of Health made available online an extraordinary set of data, ranking the health of each of its 77 community areas on the basis of a variety of indices, including income, poverty, teen pregnancy and unemployment. Using the data, the City created a “hardship index” that ranks each community from 1 to 100 in order of the ease or difficulty of life.

When comparing the “hardship” list to the school closing list, one finds that all but 16 of the 50 schools targeted for closings are in communities with a hardship rating above 50. Seven targeted communities—South Lawndale, West Englewood, West Garfield Park, Englewood, North Lawndale, East Garfield Park and Humboldt Park—are among the city’s 12 most distressed communities. These eight alone will lose 16 schools.

The closings are just the latest blow felt by these communities. While it has been decades since the South and West Sides of Chicago were considered prosperous, the last 10 years have wreaked havoc with what were relatively stable communities as recently as 2000. The vast majority of closings are in communities of boarded-up homes that have been devastated by the foreclosure crisis, a crisis that has gripped Chicago harder than any other major city. The situation was born initially from the predatory lending practices of both the 1990s and 2000s, but more recently from a decline in jobs and incomes over the last decade that has seen the loss of nearly 200,000 jobs in Chicago and, as serious, the lowering of wages in Illinois by 15 percent. Some facts:

33 of the school closings are in communities that have lost more than 20 percent of their housing to foreclosures.
All but 8 of the closings are in communities where the unemployment rate is 10 percent or higher.
16 of the closings are in six communities, such as Austin, Auburn Gresham and West Englewood, where the unemployment rate remains above 20 percent.
In 10 of the communities, where a total of 22 schools are closing, the average per capita income is $15,000 a year or less.
In 15 of the communities, the teen birth rate is two to three times the national average.
The communities where schools are to be shuttered include 9 of the 11 communities with the highest homicide rates in the city, which in turn are some of the highest in the nation.

These are communities that need schools—and not just schools. They need the stable, relied-upon neighborhood schools in which their families have attended over time, which are often times the only significant public spaces and which, most important, act as community anchors and assets for growth.

The school closings, then, are just the latest chapter in the story for many communities—a story of a downward spiral of lost income, lost value, lost opportunity, lost hope. They do not, however, have to be the final chapter.

Rather than treat the symptom, population loss, we would be better off treating the disease—the policies and conditions that have created the poverty and disinvestment.

Just like global warming, the loss in these communities is the result of human activity. And it is in human activity and human decisions that the remedies lie.

Reclaim and rebuild the housing. Chicago could have been prepared, and avoided the worst of the housing bubble. Chicago was one of the first cities to put on the books anti-predatory lending ordinances—and that’s where they stayed. While there were a few prosecutions of a few individuals, the banks that wreaked havoc on these communities went unscathed. While city officials waited for the federal cavalry to arrive or the market to “right itself,” communities like Chicago Lawn, Auburn Gresham, Woodlawn and Englewood were much left on their own to struggle with the falling property values, increased violence and failing businesses that vacant and abandoned homes bring. Today, thanks to the efforts of local community and advocacy groups like Chicago Lawn’s Southwest Organizing Project and Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, there are tools like the newly created Cook County Land Bank that could, as President Obama suggests, take the thousands of vacant properties, many of them bank-owned, rehab them and put them back to use as the homes they were meant to be. Addressing the 200 vacant properties in a community like Woodlawn or the 1,000 in Chicago Lawn or the hundreds in Englewood and Auburn Gresham would provide needed housing, provide sorely needed jobs and allow the rebuilding of communities block by block.

Rebuild Chicago as a city of opportunity for all. While most of the nation’s cities are recovering from the great recession, Chicago has not, with the fastest-growing unemployment rate of any major American city and the third-highest black unemployment rate in the nation, superseded only by those of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Just as worrisome, incomes of middle and lower wage workers in the city—the vast majority of residents in the affected communities—have fallen by 15 percent while the income of those in Chicago’s richest communities has risen.

Rather than fire more than 1,000 teachers, who would join the 11,000 government employees who’ve already lost their jobs in the last year, Chicago should invest to expand the economy—not just by reclaiming homes, but also by actively funding the expansion of companies that make things—companies too often written off as too small to care about, too irrelevant or not part of the new, hip economy that has fueled the growth of Chicago’s North Side.

As a recent map published online by The Atlantic Cities graphically displays, virtually all jobs held by residents of Chicago’s West and South Side are in retail or hospitality—fields where low wages and depressed hours result not only in no benefits but in average annual wages of $15,000 or less in the communities where foreclosures, unemployment and poverty are the worst and where schools are targeted for closure. If we want our classrooms to be full, it would be useful for young people to see that if you stay in school, graduate and toe the line, you can look forward to a job that sustains—one with a guaranteed living wage and enough hours of work to make it mean something.

And finally, rather than close them, invest in and strengthen community schools, making them an asset on which communities can build. It is not an accident that when new places are settled, a school is one of the first edifices to be erected. Schools are anchors for communities. They are not only places of learning for children, they are the places that parents rely upon to keep children safe, where child and adult friendships are forged, where civic life occurs, where community is born and nurtured. Shuttering schools not only creates one more massive abandoned, unlikely-to-be-purchased structure, it deprives a community of a gathering place, causes families to move away to ”better neighborhoods,” and weakens the fabric of democracy and civic life.

In the 1990s, when Chicago was worried about losing its middle class to the suburbs, then-Chicago Public Schools Chiefs Paul Vallas and Gery Chico did something very smart. Working with the Chicago Teachers Union, they created stellar schools that could attract parents and students who would otherwise have fled to the suburbs--from competitive high schools to school/park collaborations to experiments with small and even charter schools. The difference between this approach and the magnet/charter school approach that many suspect is on the horizon from the Emanuel administration is that Vallas and Chicago’s schools are mainly open enrollment and prioritize neighborhood attendance.

More recently, with private foundation funding, a program called Elev8 co-located health clinics and ”centers for working families” in five Chicago public schools. In each case truancy declined and student turnover lessened as school buildings became an even more critical resource for the These program can only work in neighborhood-based schools where families and children are connected to institutions—schools like the 50 that are being closed. If they are underutilized, strengthen schools and ties to them by using them for co-locations for city health clinics, afterschool programs, centers for working families, community service centers replete with building permits, aldermanic offices, etc. … but keep them in service to the community and community building.

With the life of young people and communities at stake, it would have been, and still can be, far wiser to revoke the Chicago School Board’s rash proposal and instead nurture use the tremendous asset that these schools and buildings represent to ensure the life, not death of the communities they purport to serve.

The Violently Killed Femmes

Sady Doyle — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:00:00 +0000

There’s a very reliable way to begin a story: with a body. It’s young. It’s dead. And it almost certainly belongs to a pretty girl. Of course, murder mysteries don’t all hinge on virgin sacrifice. But ever since (at least) Twin Peaks, television series—from Veronica Mars to The Killing to this year’s offerings, Hemlock Grove and Hannibal—have used dead female flesh to drive the engines.

It’s not a bad thing, necessarily, the dead-girl plot. Twin Peaks and Veronica Mars are among my all-time favorite shows. Stories need to play on co llective assumptions in order to appeal to more than one person, and as archetypes go—archetypes being, essentially, congealed messes of cultural prejudice that have tremendous power in context and are almost always offensive when you take them back out—the dead girl is a handy one. She’s young, almost a child, and that means the death was wrong. (You’ll rarely see a horror film in which the monster goes around slaughtering 70-year-old retired insurance agents.) She’s female, which means vulnerability. She’s both young and female, and that, unfortunately, means innocence. Of course, this is tremendously condescending to non-fictional young women—whose experience is complicated, and varied, and human, and almost always less safe or virtuous than we’d like to think—but in a culture with flattened, distorted ideas of femininity, it works.

So, sure. If you want to tell a story about the world being out of joint, about the vulnerability of innocence being overpowered by the strength of corruption, you start with the dead teenage girl. She’s a potent, if unrealistic, symbol. But the masterpieces of the dead-girl genre— Twin Peaks , Veronica Mars—all have something in common. And this key ingredient also explains why NBC’s Hannibal is a promising show and Netflix’s Hemlock Grove is a bad one. The dead-girl shows that succeed care about who she was before she died. And they allow her to be more complicated than she appears. Twin Peak s’ Laura Palmer, Veronica Mars’ Lilly Kane: Each of them, at some point, started talking back. And the first thing they did was to call bullshit on the symbolic meaning that had been hitched to them and start creating their own.

Of the new crop, Hemlock Grove wan ts most badly to remind us of Twin Peaks . Shots in its first episode a re cribbed directly from the pilot. To be fair, Hemlock Grove wants to remind us of lots of things: Twilight , True Blood, the CW, that one time we conked out on coug h syrup and had the weirdest dream. It’s a Netflix original series, made to be chugged down over one spectacularly unproductive weekend, and its ethos is marvelously of a piece with its purpose: It looks, and feels, really cheap. It’s the sort of show where characters have intense, meaningful conversations in a “convertible” while a just-out-of-shot box fan blows their hair limply against a more or less static green screen. And let me be clear here: If this were all there was to Hemlock Grove, I would love it. There are bared breasts by the first scene and bared intestines by the fourth, and when a cast of coke-snorting werewolf teenagers who fight crime arrived, I was more than ready to ascend to sweet high-camp heaven.

But Hemlock Grove quickly turns thin and sour and unsatisfying. And it has more than a little to do with that dead teenage girl. Like Twin Peaks, Hemlock Grove starts with a small town, a dead female body, and a few shots of spooky flashing traffic lights, true. But on Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer mattered. She crept into every scene, every character’s backstory, continually unfolding. (When series creator David Lynch eventually tried to resurrect Laura, in the film Fire Walk With Me, the problem wasn’t that he had too little character to work with, it was that he had too much; all the backstory didn’t fit into one teenage girl.) Brooke Bluebell, on the other hand, has precisely three pieces of backstory: She slept with her teacher. She was a cheerleader. And she was eaten by a werewolf, as the show thoughtfully informs us, “snatch first.”

And that’s it for poor Brooke Bluebell. She died as she lived: defined largely by what other people did to her snatch. We do eventually manage to get some personality from the dead female characters, but only because, by the time the show has run through its first order of 13 episodes, Hemlock Grove has killed off almost every female character. And that’s only when other traumatic things aren’t happening to them. This is a show in which the male hero brutally rapes a classmate, erases her memory, and then uses the moment as an opportunity for some reflection on his life goal s. It’s a show in which the other male hero bre aks things to intimidate his girlfriend, screams at her to “do as I say,” then snuggles up with her and tells her how wonderful true love is for them both.

In other words, this is a show that doesn’t give half a damn for young women. The dead female flesh is just that: Flesh. Breasts, snatches, a handful of rubber and corn syrup every now and then to keep viewers awake. Which means, unfortunately, that Hemlock Grove never really frightens. It’s not that misogyny and sexual violence can’t work in horror movies—for a good-taste example, take Alien ; for a deliriously bad-taste example, take the second season of American Horror Story, in which a skin-wearing serial killer chains a lesbian career woman in his basement and calls her “Mommy,” which I think is the pr ecise screenplay you’d get if you ever dosed someone with acid and told them to adapt Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse. But a violent story isn’t a horror story unless we empathize with the victims. If all you want is to be nauseated by a bunch of meat, read about the manufacturing processes at McDonald’s.

Hemlock Grove’s flaws might not have stood out so much had I not just watched NBC’s Hannibal. True, that show starts off with a bland procedural set-up: A serial killer is killing young women because he’s got a thing for his daughter, then he tries to kill his daughter, but the heroes save her. Any other show would consider the story done, and move on to next week’s monster.

But then the daughter comes back in the second episode. And the third. She just keeps showing up; making us wonder what she feels, who she is, what she’s capable of. How she came to be on the other end of that knife. She’s unsettlingly permanent, this almost-dead girl, a reminder that all those other dead girls existed and can’t be erased by hitting the reset button at the beginning of each episode. By the third episode, she’s one of the most complex and unreadable characters on a show that stars Hannibal effing Lecter. She’s human; she’s a mystery; we don’t know how deep she goes or whether we’ll like what we find at the bottom. Like any actual teenage girl, she refuses to stay within the bounds of her symbolic meaning. If it weren’t for the fact that she’s still breathing, she’d look almost exactly like Laura Palmer.

5 Wise Ideas for Syria

Stephen R. Weissman — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:51:41 +0000

This is part 2 of a series on how the U.S. can apply lessons from Libya to interventions in Syria. Read the first part here.

As the death toll of Syria's two-year-old civil war reaches the 80,000 mark, the U.S. has upped the ante by announcing that it will provide $123 million in “non-lethal” assistance to the Free Syrian Army, including body armor, night-vision goggles and communications equipment. In addition, partly in response to new, non-definitive reports of the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons against small numbers of insurgents, administration officials are reportedly thinking of dispatching heavy weapons to the rebels and establishing “no fly” safe zones, as in Libya.

Yet, as I argued in my critique of U.S. and NATO intervention in Libya, the West’s increasing fixation on military solutions can be counterproductive. A U.S.-driven military “success” in Syria, defined as the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, is likely to have even worse dangerous local, regional and international consequences than it did in Libya. If, as I maintain in my analysis, the violent overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was to a large extent a Pyrrhic victory for NATO, then a Western-aided overthrow of Syria’s al-Assad threatens to be even more costly. Syrian insurgents are even more fractured by geography and sectarianism (including Islamic extremism) than their Libyan counterparts were, multiplying the chances of renewed fighting in a post-Assad power vacuum. Moreover, the significant Alawite minority that has benefited from the long rule of the Assad family has such fears of annihilation that it is likely to fight to the death even if the regime is driven out of Damascus. Sectarian conflict is already spreading to such fragile neighboring countries as Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. And another case of Western-sponsored regime change will no doubt exacerbate the insecurities of Russia, North Korea and Iran.

A military solution isn’t the only way forward. A glimmer of hope for an eventual political solution has just appeared in the form of a U.S.-Russia plan for an international conference in early June that would bring together the Syrian parties to the conflict. This is an attempt to revive a dormant, year-old initiative by a United Nations-sponsored “Action Group for Syria” made up of key Western and Arab countries, Russia and Turkey. As in the African Union’s proposed “Framework Agreement” for Libya, the Action Group’s plan centered on the creation of an inclusive transitional government and a timetable for democratic change.

Yet even as they endorse a peace conference, both the United States and Russia are simultaneously ignoring the plan’s warning against “further militarization of the conflict” by stepping up military aid to the rebels and Al-Assad, respectively. Their inconsistent behavior jeopardizes a major objective of the conference: to begin to persuade the combatants that they are locked in a military stalemate where–despite the ebbs and flows of battle–neither side can prevail, and that a political solution is therefore their best option. One insight of the African Union mediators in Libya was that a “humanitarian pause” in outside military assistance before the conference would help prompt both sides to reconsider their dreams of total victory.

Few details are available at this writing regarding the planned conference. But several other lessons from the Libyan mediation experience could serve the U.S. well as it attempts to advance peace:

If you want a dictator to agree to give up power via a democratic transition, you should avoid humiliating him by demanding his immediate resignation as a precondition for negotiations. In Libya, this rebel and Western condition delayed Gaddafi’s acceptance of negotiations. Keeping the former leader in the picture at the beginning can also help bring along his constituency and army. (Recent public statements by Secretary of State John Kerry suggest that he, at least, has come to understand these points.)
A neutral mediator–in the case of Syria, a U.N. special envoy, currently Joint Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi–is best positioned to lead the parties toward a negotiated settlement. In doing so, the envoy will need to work closely with the foreign powers possessing military or political clout with Syria’s regime: both Russia and Iran, both of whom should attend the conference.
In working to enlist the insurgents in a political solution, the mediator must be able to summon pressure from their Western and Arab supporters. In Libya, the lack of such pressure permitted the rebels to avoid negotiations.
Forging a political solution cannot be accomplished in a day or even a few weeks; it can take months of patient negotiations. It took two months to persuade the Libyan government to agree to direct talks with the rebels and another month to get Colonel Gaddafi to recuse himself from the negotiations.
In the aftermath of such a violent and fragmented conflict, peacemakers must be prepared to provide a neutral international force that will both keep and build the peace.

We have arrived at a dangerous moment in Syria. The Obama administration’s trajectory towards military intervention has begun to frame the public’s view of the crisis and helps legitimize hawkish senators’ and pundits’ calls for “more effective assistance.” In this context, reports of possible Syrian government use of chemical weapons and of Israeli air strikes against Syrian missile shipments (said to be headed to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon) are adding to the momentum for the U.S. to “do more,” ignoring the possibility of severe consequences for U.S. interests in reducing violence in the region and addressing larger issues in relations with Iran, North Korea and Russia.

Given Syria’s critical position in the Middle East, the stakes for the U.S. are much higher than they were in Libya. Once again, there is a plausible path, however rocky, towards a less violent and less costly solution consistent with American values and interests. But will the Obama administration take it and have the patience to see it through?

It’s Not Easy Being Blue and Green

Rebecca Burns — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:58 +0000

In a final push to halt approval of the Keystone XL pipeline this spring, many environmentalists are posing a familiar question to labor: Which side are you on?

So far in the Keystone XL conflict, unions have largely ended up on the other side of the line in the tar sand. The Teamsters, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) and others have backed the pipeline as a way to create jobs. And as environmental groups flooded the State Department with comments opposing the pipeline, members of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) rallied to send President Obama a different message: “We can’t wait,” said BCTD president Sean McGarvey during an April 24 demonstration calling for the State Department to approve the project.

In other words, the Keystone pipeline fight has turned into an XL-sized problem for an already tenuous labor-environmental alliance.

Four years ago, the future looked more promising. In 2009, amid heady talk of an Obama-backed “Green New Deal,” the BlueGreen Alliance—a partnership between four major unions and two environmental organizations—hoped not only to push for cap-and-trade climate legislation, but to catalyze the creation of millions of green jobs. Today, the legislation lies in disarray, federal funding for a green recovery has never fully materialized, and the alliance is hamstrung over the question of the Keystone pipeline. In 2012, LIUNA left the group altogether, and President Terry O’Sullivan fired a parting shot at unions who continued to collaborate with “job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council.”

Faced with such rhetoric, environmentalists have sought to convince workers of their common cause by refuting the rosy job-creation claims made by industry groups. TransCanada says that its pipeline would create nearly 120,000 jobs, but a report produced by the Cornell Global Labor Institute and circulated by environmental activists asserts that this claim is wildly unsubstantiated. The pipeline’s opponents also emphasize that according to TransCanada’s own data, most of the jobs the pipeline does create will be temporary.

Many unions say that this critique ignores the nature of their working conditions now. “Tell me a job today that’s not temporary,” a member of Pipeliners Local 798 said during an April rally for the pipeline in Tulsa, Okla. “We’ve made a living all our lives off temporary jobs.”

This isn’t the first time that greens have been painted as latte liberals removed from the issues facing ordinary people. But the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline has actually helped “redraw the cultural map” of participation in the environmental movement, according to Kim Huynh, a spokesperson with the group Tar Sands Blockade. She notes that Tar Sands Blockade, the more radical edge of the broader movement, has drawn participation from conservative landowners, Texas grandmothers and indigenous communities in staging tree-sits, lockdowns and other dramatic demonstrations to halt the ongoing construction of the pipeline’s southern leg. She believes that this has succeeded in “legitimizing direct action” in the broader environmental movement and building, for the first time, a climate change movement “with real teeth.” But do environmental activists have any hope of successfully fighting global warming without labor’s support?

Joe Uehlein, former secretary-treasurer of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO and director of the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS), doesn’t think so. And while rhetoric like LIUNA’s may be bruising, he believes what’s crucial is that the labor movement is having a debate over the pipeline at all.

“Change comes from tension and friction,” he notes. “If we avoid all conflict, then we preserve the status quo.” The fact that the AFL-CIO initially refrained from taking a position on the pipeline, acknowledging publicly that there was disagreement within the federation on the issue, is “historic,” he says. (In February, the AFL-CIO issued an apparent endorsement of the pipeline proposal, saying in a statement from its executive council that it backed expansion of the pipeline system, though stopping short of mentioning the Keystone XL by name).

While such conflict may be uncomfortable for big institutional players in both movements, Uehlein notes that it can help catalyze change in the base of unions. That, he believes, is where the evolution of labor’s stance “from a regressive to a progressive one” has begun on every major social issue from civil rights to immigration. LNS’ goal, therefore, is to engage union membership directly and help reframe their interests around environmental sustainability.

It’s possible to imagine this kind of organizing trickling up. The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) has opposed both the Keystone XL pipeline and the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, even though CEP represents oil, gas extraction and refining workers, including some who would mine the tar sands. The union's continued member engagement on environmental issues—including sending a delegation to Fukushima, Japan to learn about the nuclear disaster and its impact on workers—have helped it stake out forward-looking stances on questions such as nuclear power and tar sands exploration.

There’s a major hurdle to this kind of change, however: labor’s partnerships with the fossil fuel industry. In 2009, LIUNA and 14 other unions signed onto the “Oil and Natural Gas Industry Labor-Management Committee” with the American Petroleum Institute, billed as “the first time that the oil and natural gas industry and its labor unions have agreed to work together formally.” Among the key functions of the partnership is to push for approval of projects such as the Keystone XL pipeline and natural-gas “fracking” in the Marcellus Shale. In 2012, the BCTD and four other unions belonging to the new partnership spent more than $1.5 million in lobbying for the pipeline.

While there may be short-term benefits to such partnerships, critics argue that in the long-term, unions are sabotaging themselves by allying with industry. Bob Wages, former president of the now-disbanded Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union (OCAW), notes that the American Petroleum Institute is not merely the bete noir of liberal environmentalists but also has a staunchly anti-worker record. “The API has fought every step of the way on every initiative to protect worker safety and health,” Wages says. “For a labor union to sign on with API is beyond astonishing.”

The picture isn’t altogether bleak. Four labor groups—the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Transport Workers Union, National Nurses United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance—have formally opposed the pipeline, although unions who support it are quick to point out that these groups have no stake in the project. Members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and other unions marched alongside the Sierra Club and 350.org during a massive climate rally in February. And outside of the Keystone XL fight, “there’s a lot happening where unions and environmental groups are working together for common purpose—you just don’t hear about it,” says Kenneth Peres, the CWA’s chief economist, citing the successful push last year by unions and environmental groups to increase fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, during which the United Auto Workers reversed a long-held position against such regulations.

And while divisions over the pipeline may look like the coup de grace for ailing blue-green alliances, Uehlein believes that there’s still room for evolution on both sides. LIUNA, for example, is one of a handful of unions that have endorsed timelines for carbon reduction, and he emphasizes that it would be foolish for environmentalists to discount unions currently on the other side of the pipeline fight as allies in the long-term.

“When you’re working on a big campaign like this, you polarize the issue—that’s just what you do,” Uehlein says. “But it’s important for the environmental movement to remember that there are no permanent enemies. We aren’t going to win the fight against climate change without working people.”

Note: CWA and the UAW are website sponsors of In These Times.

How to Handle the IRS Scandal? Reverse Citizens United

Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:15:40 +0000

The IRS, always friendless, now is a pariah. Republicans can’t stop condemning it. Democrats can’t stop agreeing.

Targeting Tea Party groups for scrutiny, even if through incompetence, not intention, turned the IRS into a nasty carbuncle on the governing body.

Carbuncles are never good. Strength-sapping, painful, ugly, they’re to be avoided. Here’s the thing, though: while every politician in Washington is cursing the carbuncle, hardly one has complained of the cancer killing the patient. Allowing unlimited, unaccounted-for corporate spending in elections is a malignancy threatening the life of the republic. Permitting Tea Party, left-wing, libertarian, middle-of-the-road—whatever—groups to define themselves as untaxed social welfare organizations that may accept unlimited, untaxed, secret corporate gifts and sponsor political ads is a sarcoma on democracy.

Nobody wants the IRS singling out applicants based on politics. The American people do, however, want someone, if not the IRS, someone else, somewhere to do something about the perversion of election finance. The IRS is hardly a good candidate for that job. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could help. A constitutional amendment would be better.

The IRS has some regulatory power. In the Tea Party case, the IRS was examining applications for “social welfare” or 501(c)(4) status, which is commonly used to circumvent campaign finance laws.

The tax code defines 501(c)(4) groups like this: “Civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” These are different from charity organizations, called 501(c)(3), such as food banks and homeless shelters. And they are different from political outfits, which have their very own place—Section 527—in the tax code.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of political groups sought “social welfare” status instead. That’s because of a 2001 law requiring political outfits to disclose their donors. “Social welfare” organizations don’t have to do that. Politicized “social welfare” groups sprouted even faster after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the Citizens United case in 2010 that corporations are people free to spend unlimited cash in elections.

“Social welfare” groups provided corporations with the ability to spend untold millions on candidates while keeping that a secret from customers and shareholders.

But here’s the problem: The tax code requires these groups to work “exclusively” to promote social welfare. Regulations permit some political activity but forbid these groups from functioning primarily for politics.

Despite that, many of these groups, from the right-wing Crossroads GPS to the lefty Priorities USA, clearly operate primarily for politics. They spent hundreds of millions in the last Presidential election. Watchdog groups have filed a dozen complaints in the past two years objecting to this apparent violation. The IRS never responded.

Not much enforcement there.

The IRS made a little effort in 2011, but backed off when GOP leaders complained.

Gifts to charities are tax exempt, but those to “social welfare” groups are not. Well, they’re not supposed to be. The IRS sent letters to a group of big donors two years ago informing them that gifts to “social welfare” groups may be subject to tax. Immediately, Republican senators Orrin G. Hatch and Jon Kyl accused the IRS of partisanship. After which the IRS “folded like wet cardboard,” said Sheila Krumholz and Robert Weinberger of the Center for Responsive Politics in a New York Times article.

No enforcement there.

Another government entity that could help cure the dark money disease is the SEC.

No enforcement there either, though.

Languishing at the SEC is a proposal to require publicly traded companies to disclose the money they pour into these “social welfare” groups—funds described as “dark money” because the source is concealed. The idea is that shareholders have a right to know how their investment is used. And it’s a popular concept, with more comments filed on this proposal than on any other suggested rule in SEC history—half a million—the vast majority in favor.

Citing the IRS scandal, Republicans demanded last week that the SEC kill the proposal to require corporations to unveil their attempts to influence elections. New SEC Chair Mary Jo White refused.

Good sign. But still no actual enforcement.

One method of enforcement is on the move. It is a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would reverse the Citizens United decision that corporations are people with First Amendment rights to free speech, which includes spending unlimited money on politics. Already, 13 states and more than 300 municipalities have called for approval of the Democracy is For People Amendment. It was introduced in Congress by Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch.

It says natural persons who are citizens of the United States may make campaign contributions. Corporations do not fit that definition of human beings, and as a result would be prohibited from making political gifts.

It would allow contributions from Political Action Committees, which are comprised of human beings who get together and donate under the IRS’ political committee rules—section 527. So groups of union members or wealthy CEOs could continue donating.

Move to Amend activists were heartened by a Pennsylvania judge’s recent decision that corporations are not people and thus do not have a constitutional right to privacy. Washington County President Judge Debbie O’Dell-Seneca is no Supreme Court justice. But she understands that there’s an important distinction in the fact that people can be heartened while corporations can’t be. Her decision included this analysis:

It is axiomatic that corporations, companies and partnership have no “spiritual nature,” “feelings,” “intellect,” “beliefs,” “thoughts,” “emotions,” or “sensations,” because they do not exist in the manner that humankind exists. . .They cannot be ‘let alone’ by government, because businesses are but grapes, ripe upon the vine of the law, that the people of this Commonwealth raise, tend, and prune at their pleasure and need.

Corporations can’t “suffer” illness. They can, however, kill democracy.

To stop toxic corporate interference in elections, the American people could demand that the IRS, which is supposed to be non-partisan, decide exactly what constitutes political activity. They could hope the SEC will do the right thing. What they should do, however, is pass a constitutional amendment clarifying once and for all that corporations are not human and can’t usurp the rights of human beings.

How the Government Targeted Occupy

Lisa Graves — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:00:12 +0000

Freedom of conscience is one of the most fundamental human freedoms. This freedom is not merely about one’s ability to choose to believe or not believe in religion or a particular philosophy. In a democracy, freedom of conscience is about the ability to be critical of government and corporations, and to be free from the chilling fear that being critical will subject you to government surveillance.

Freedom of conscience is not fully realized in isolation. Without the ability to share one’s thoughts, to speak out about injustice, or to join with others in peaceably assembling to petition for redress of grievances, this core freedom is not truly free. Americans should be able to exercise these most sacred rights in free society without worry of being monitored by the government.

In our new report, "Dissent or Terror: How the Nation's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street," written by Center for Media and Democracy contributor and DBA Press publisher Beau Hodai, we detail several ways in which our tax dollars are being squandered on law enforcement—or so-called "homeland security"personnel monitoring Americans who dare to voice dissent against the extraordinary influence that some of the world's most powerful corporations have on on our elected officials.

Through this investigation we have documented:

How U.S. Department of Homeland Security-funded "fusion center" personnel have spent endless hours gleefully monitoring their fellow Americans though Facebook and other social media, and how fusion centers nationwide have expended countless hours and tax dollars in the monitoring of Occupy Wall Street, bank activists and civil libertarians concerned about national security powers.
How some of these "counter terrorism" government employees applied facial recognition technology, drawing from a state database of driver's license photos, to photographs found on Facebook in the effort to profile citizens believed to be associated with activist groups.
How corporations have become part of the “information sharing environment” with law enforcement/intelligence agencies through various public-private intelligence sharing partnerships—and how, through these partnerships, the homeland security apparatus has been focused on citizens protesting these corporations.
How private groups and individuals, such as Charles Koch, Chase Koch (Charles' son and a Koch Industries executive), Koch Industries, and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have hired off-duty cops—sometimes still armed and in police uniforms—to perform the private security functions of keeping undesirable people (reporters and activists) away from them. As was the case in an incident involving protests of ALEC, off-duty officers working on behalf of ALEC and the resort in which an ALEC conference was being held, led riot-gear-clad officers in the pepper spraying and arrests of several peaceful, law abiding protestors.
How law enforcement agencies in Phoenix, Arizona dispatched an undercover officer to infiltrate activist groups organizing both ALEC demonstrations and the launch of Occupy Phoenix—and how the work of this undercover infiltrator officer benefited ALEC and the private corporations that were the subjects of these activist demonstrations.
How "counter terrorism" personnel monitored the protest activities of citizens opposed to the "indefinite detention" language contained in National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (which CMD has filed an amicus brief against).
How the FBI applied "Operation Tripwire," an initiative originally intended to apprehend domestic terrorists through the use of private sector informants, in their monitoring of Occupy Wall Street groups.

Even if the amount of money being wasted were small—and it’s not, we're talking millions of dollars heaped into the coffers of local law enforcement agencies annually—the notion that we the people should tolerate the deployment of police, ostensibly hired to protect us, to spy on us without any criminal predicate is an outrage. The money spent spying on Americans could be spent strengthening our public schools, providing access to life-saving medicine for our neighbors or helping to achieve the Constitution’s promise of forming “a more perfect union.”

Little evidence has emerged, in the years since the horrific violence of 9/11, of any widespread threat from al-Qaeda within the United States. Nevertheless, politicians have used that potent memory to fund an enormous domestic surveillance infrastructure. The result of this trough of money and excess capacity—the turning of "counterterrorism" resources against law-abiding American citizens—was utterly predictable.

It has been more than 30 years since Congress acted with deep skepticism regarding government agents deployed to spy on Americans. The last thorough and truly independent investigation was after Watergate, when the Church and Pike Committees spent months intensively investigating the ways in which prior administrations had violated Americans' privacy and trampled civil liberties under the guise of national security.

In 1976, then-Attorney General Edward Levi promulgated the “Levi Guidelines," investigative guidelines developed in response to domestic surveillance abuses, such as COINTELPRO, perpetrated by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Since the Carter administration, however, there has been an accelerating erosion of protections from domestic surveillance. The "Levi Guidelines" were later largely countermanded through changes by John Ashcroft and his successors at the Justice Department.

With the post-9/11 shift from enforcing the law to “intelligence gathering,” numerous public rules as well as secret guidelines were altered to maximize the gathering of information about Americans without requiring any criminal predicate. The new rule appears to be that almost everything is fair game without probable cause, except for home searches and phone taps (but even the rules for electronic surveillance and the acquisition of intelligence information are now subject to enormous loopholes due to changes pushed into law in 2008 by Director of National Intelligence-turned-Booz Allen Hamilton Vice Chairman Mike McConnell, with help from AT&T, Verizon, and others).

It was a stroke of misfortune that, on 9/11, then-Vice President Dick Cheney served as the de facto head of the national security hierarchy. Cheney's “dark side” approach created a climate in which longstanding rules intended to protect basic rights were replaced with array of questionable, if not absurd, interpretations of domestic and international law.

As President Ford’s chief of staff, Cheney, with the aid of then-Deputy Attorney General Laurence H. Silberman, tried to thwart essential reforms of surveillance agencies. Silberman was later appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and, at the urging of his former law clerk, then-Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, helped facilitate legal opinions instrumental to the George W. Bush administration's expansion of domestic surveillance activities by redefining Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.

Unfortunately, much of this backsliding has been embraced and further entrenched by the Obama administration.

The federal government, in general, claims to abide by a long-standing rule that a person will not be investigated based "solely" on protected First Amendment activity. But what does that amount to in reality? In Arizona, it appears fusion center personnel used the prospect of anarchist involvement in protests of banks, other corporations, and/or ALEC as a hook for dispatching at least one undercover officer to infiltrate groups of Americans organizing peaceful protests. Fusion center personnel even cited past instances of "violent tactics" perpetrated against ALEC in other states, when, in reality, there had only been one prior incident of graffiti (spray paint) at an ALEC event.

Quite frankly, there is no way to know if groups of American anarchists have been infiltrated by law enforcement or intelligence agents acting as agent provocateurs, urging more aggressive action. It is worth noting that, in the case of the Phoenix infiltration, the undercover officer apparently claimed to be affiliated with an alleged Mexican anarchist group that claimed to have committed acts of arson.

The idea that the prospect of graffiti can trigger months of infiltration and surreptitious surveillance of citizens exercising their freedom of conscience exposes that the idea our government will not monitor citizens based solely their exercise of First Amendment rights is little more than a joke. And that joke is on us.

Read the full report on SourceWatch.

Read the full report and view document archive on DBA Press.

Is Your Town in Transition?

Jessica Stites — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:34 +0000

When I set out to investigate the appeal of Transition, a sustainability movement that has spread to 1,105 towns in 43 countries over the past eight years, I started with what I thought was a basic question: What are "Transition Towns" transitioning to?

"Resilience," I was told. "What does that mean?” I asked, thinking vaguely of steel. “The ability to absorb shocks to a system!” was the reply. Well, yes, but …? Pressed for details, Nina Winn, who runs a Transition initiative at the Institute of Cultural Affairs in Chicago, said, “I don’t think there’s a conclusion. Like when a person’s trying to self-improve, it’s a constant growth. Our communities would grow to be a lot more intimate. We wouldn’t be hesitant to ask for that cup of sugar or tomato. The streets would be narrower instead of expanding; there would be fresh produce on every corner that was grown just down the street. You would see people on the street because of that—because where there’s food, there’s people.”

Such bucolic but fuzzy visions are typical of Transition, which is more about shifting paradigms than prescribing solutions. With an it’ll-take-shape-as-we-go ethos, most Transition Town websites sport a “cheerful disclaimer”: “Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact. ... Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.”

On a basic level, however, the experiment seeks to address what founder Rob Hopkins sees as a source of frustration in the environmental movement: Personal action feels like a drop in the bucket, while governments often move at a glacial pace.

“Until now, there’s been the things you can do at home on your own—changing your lightbulbs and sharing your lofts and things—and then there’s everything else that someone else is meant to do: the sort of mythical ‘they,’” says Hopkins. “Transition is what’s in the middle, what you can do with the people on your street.”

The seed for Transition came in 2004 when Hopkins, a young teacher with a degree in environmental quality and resource management, encountered the concept of peak oil: the theory that easy-to-reach oil will run out at a specific date—some say 2020—precipitating a rapid decline in oil availability followed by the collapse of civilization as we know it. At the time, Hopkins was teaching a permaculture course at the Kinsale College of Further Education, an alternative school on Ireland’s southern coast. Permaculture is another one of these concepts that, as Hopkins notes, is “notoriously difficult to explain in two minutes in the pub,” but it’s most commonly described as an ecological design movement that sees nature in terms of interlocking systems. Alarmed by peak oil, Hopkins assigned his students to apply the principles of permaculture to the problem.

The result was a concrete plan to make Kinsale dramatically less fossil-fuel dependent, with recommendations such as a green buildings officer and a horse-and-cart taxi. The Kinsale Town Council enthusiastically adopted the plan, and the principles underlying it became the precepts of Transition, as outlined in Hopkins’ 2008 Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience and as adopted by Transition Towns worldwide.

But it would be a mistake to think that becoming a Transition Town means setting off on a clear-cut path to energy independence. From permaculture, the movement has inherited a non-linear, bottom-up approach—even the original 12 “steps” outlined in Hopkins’ handbook have been renamed “ingredients.” If the Transition movement has a sine qua non, however, it is the belief that communities must become more resilient in the face of three catastrophic threats: peak oil, global warming and economic instability. Whether the movement means to avert or adapt to future disasters is ambiguous; when I ask, Transition members tend to respond, “Both!” as though I have just recited their favorite koan.

Practically, this means preparing towns to better survive sudden shortfalls of such necessities as food, oil, water or money. These preparations take many forms, some infrastructural—such as solar energy programs and local economic initiatives—others interpersonal, like the “heart and soul” groups that encourage people to help each other in times of need and open their minds to new solutions.

Totnes, England, declared the first official Transition Town in 2006, offers perhaps the most fully realized example. The town, with a population of 7,400, boasts nearly 30 Transition projects and sub-projects. Some are small-scale, like nut-tree planting and a free “bike doctor,” while others are more ambitious, like an incubator for sustainable businesses and a 305-page Energy Descent Action Plan to cut the town’s energy usage in half by 2030. The movement is enthusiastically backed by the city mayor and the town councilors, one of whom attests that “the [Energy Descent Action Plan] has filtered into everyone’s plans for everything, so that’s had a major impact.” A much-heralded neighborhood-level project has been Transition Streets, which brought residents together, block by block, to support each other in decreasing their home energy use through improvements like insulation and solar panels. On average, each of the 550 participating households cut its annual carbon use by 1.3 tons and its annual energy bill by £570 (about $883).

Hopkins stresses, however, that the Transition movement is not in the business of stamping out cookie-cutter copies of Totnes. Transition spreads primarily through serendipity. One member likens it to a mycelium network, a fungus with underground roots that can sprout new shoots miles away. In effect, this means that someone—often with a background in sustainability—stumbles across Transition online or in print and decides to start a local chapter.

While guidance is available from umbrella support groups such as Transition U.S. and the U.K.-based Transition Network, the movement is intended to mutate as it grows. “We designed it with a simple set of principles and tools and sort of set it off, and it keeps popping up in the most incredible, surprising places, in the most incredible, surprising ways,” says Hopkins. “When there’s Transition happening in Brazil, it feels like a Brazilian thing, it doesn’t feel like an English imported thing.”

Indeed, the organizers of Brazil’s Transition movement say that two of the three core principles—peak oil and climate change—don’t resonate strongly with the Brazilian public, so Transition trainings focus more on “assuring education and health for all, protecting biodiversity and enhancing autonomy of traditional (indigenous or not) local communities.” In Brasilândia, one of the slums of São Paulo, Transition primarily fosters social enterprise projects; it has given birth to a community bakery and a business turning old advertising banners into bags.

In parts of Europe, Transition has had to respond to the pressing needs of communities decimated by the ongoing Eurozone crisis. When the city of Coin, Spain, went bankrupt and decided to privatize the water, Coin En Transicion gathered 3,000 signatures to convince the city to squash the plan. Now the movement is working with the city government to design a regional water plan grounded in principles of sustainability and resilience.

In Portugal, where unemployment is at 16.9 percent and climbing, the Transition Town of Portalegre has drawn inspiration from ajujeda, an ancient rural practice of trading chores in the fields. This month, Portalegre em Transição will meet to figure out how to translate the principle of ajujeda into a functioning gift economy, allowing those whose skills are not being used (for instance, the unemployed) to share them with those whose needs are not being met.

Across the pond

In making the leap across the Atlantic to the United States, where more than 139 Transition Towns and 200 unofficial “mullers” have sprouted, Transition has also taken its own, distinct path.

Most of the Transition towns in the United States have popped up in places one might expect: relatively moneyed, green, hippie enclaves like Boulder, Colo. (the first official U.S. Transition Town); Sebastopol, Calif.; Northampton, Mass.; and Woodstock, N.Y. None have taken root so far in any conservative strongholds, although there are a number of urban initiatives, in Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Cleveland, to name a few.

As in the United Kingdom, members of the U.S. Transition movement tend to split up into working groups around specific projects. A common one is an “emergency preparedness” group, which devises things like phone trees and alternative heating sources for use in the event of disaster. “Yard share” working groups match would-be gardeners to landowners willing to lend a patch of fertile ground. “Heart and soul” or “inner transition” working groups stress psychological and spiritual transformation, drawing on the teachings of thinkers such as Buddhist deep ecologist Joanna Macy. “Reskilling” working groups offer trainings in all manner of practical pre-industrial skills, from cheesemaking to animal husbandry to knot-tying to knitting.

Of course, Transition is not the only sustainability game in town. Wherever it goes, and especially in cities, it enters a terrain thick with environmental non-profits and local government initiatives. More than 1,060 mayors have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a pledge to meet the goal of the Kyoto Protocol (the United States was one of only four countries not to join) to reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. Some cities have gone beyond that: Last year, Chicago drafted a sustainability plan for the year 2015 that reads something like Totnes’s Energy Descent Action Plan—a laundry list of goals such as improving citywide energy efficiency by 5 percent and decreasing water use by 2 percent (14 million gallons a day). To get there, the city has launched numerous projects, such as eco-friendly overhauls of city buses, a “rails-to-trails conversion” of a disused train line into a park (modeled on New York City’s High Line), and a Sustainable Backyards Program that urges residents to install compost bins and rainwater collectors.

Given this abundance of initiatives, many Transition movements, especially in cities, take on a networking role to connect existing sustainability projects. Transition Pittsburgh’s mission is to offer “resources—such as educators, movie screenings and licenses, and a library of shared knowledge—to various local initiatives, as well as a city-wide community and some of our own projects.” Chicago’s Transition chapter—called Accelerate 77 after the division of the city into 77 unofficial communities by social scientists at the University of Chicago—set out by creating a dense map of the more than 800 sustainability projects underway in Chicago, which are remarkably evenly spaced throughout the areas of poverty and wealth that stratify the city. It hosted a “Share Fair” in September for the various groups to connect with each other, followed by three neighborhood gatherings on Chicago’s South, West and North Sides to connect with residents.

I asked Ryan Wilson of the nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a sustainability “think-and-do tank” that participated in the Share Fair, whether he thinks Transition has anything to add to Chicago’s wealth of sustainability initiatives. “It was helpful to learn what other projects are out there—maybe more helpful for some of the smaller groups,” he says. “The Transition folks—I like the people. I like their energy.”

This jives with Hopkins’ thinking on Transition, which has progressed from seeing “resilience” as a strictly environmental process to a more social one: “We have all the technologies to [achieve sustainability],” he says, “but we don’t have the social technologies to make it happen.”

The art of hosting

Transition’s freewheeling structure, however, does mean that certain problems—or “challenges”—seem to crop up frequently. As with any volunteer-driven movement, members describe burnout and lack of accountability. After a stage of initial enthusiasm, projects can fall dormant. More successful Transition Towns often have paid staff. After observing that most initiatives “were struggling with an all-volunteer leadership team,” Transition Sarasota founder Don Hall decided to raise the money to pay himself as a full-time organizer, cobbling together his salary from “a mix of event and workshop fees, donations, local business sponsorships and grants.” In many cities, Transition has been adopted by non-profits that provide paid staff, like Chicago’s Institute of Cultural Affairs, a 50-yearold organization dedicated to sustainability and social change, and Jamaica Plain’s Institute for Policy Studies, the Boston branch of a progressive, multi-issue D.C. think tank.

The Transition movement also grapples with the challenges of non-hierarchical, collective leadership. When I contacted Transition Sebastopol, in California, a longstanding, apparently thriving Transition town with a busy events calendar, I was surprised to learn that all was not well. A dispute in September had put the central Working Group Council on hold, although several working groups—an elders salon, the “heart and soul” group—are chugging along independently. Former working group member Julia Bystrova ascribes the blow-up to a lack of conflict-resolution mechanisms. She hopes that a fresh team will take over and resuscitate the group.

Hopkins is quick to cop to these pitfalls, and Transition is good at tapping into existing knowledge bases to fix problems. Transition U.S. has partnered with an organization called The Art of Hosting to offer facilitation trainings and will begin hosting regional courses on “effective groups” starting in September. Transition U.K. offers Thrive workshops for the same purpose, and ecofeminist and spiritual activist Starhawk gave a workshop in Totnes last month about clear communication and constructive critique in collective decision-making.

Another common concern about Transition, levied from both within and without, is that it is a movement of “white hippies.” While the definition of “hippie” is open to debate, each of the half dozen Transition towns I surveyed in the U.S. indeed lamented a lack of diversity. In addition to being predominantly white, participants in several towns mentioned that their initiative was made up primarily of older women.

While many in the Transition movement said they were working to increase diversity, by far the most impressive effort I encountered is being staged by the Boston branch of IPS’ Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition (JP NET), which has hired an organizer to help meet this challenge. Carlos Espinoza-Toro, a Peruvian immigrant with a master’s in city planning from MIT, aims to identify spaces where different demographics intersect—farmers’ markets, festivals—as well as to find people like himself who enjoy serving as cross-cultural bridges. But he’s going beyond mixed-race spaces to foster Transition in the heart of Jamaica Plain’s Latino community. A series of IPA-hosted meetings in Spanish (with simultaneous English translation) encourages residents to talk about how they are weathering environmental and economic crises. Espinoza-Toro’s bilingual fliers for the first meeting read:

Us Latinos have adapted to economic crises in our countries and in the US for many years. And we have always prevailed! We are creative, resourceful and entrepreneurial. Currently in the US, MA and JP we are experiencing a crisis that challenges our capacity of adaptation. Work opportunities are scarce, rent keeps going up, it becomes more difficult to afford a healthy diet and take the T, the quality of education in our public schools diminishes. …We invite you to share how you are adapting to this crisis or how you have adapted to previous crises. Tell us your stories of adaptation. We could transform your effort into a neighborhood effort with great impact in JP.

Espinoza-Toro anticipates that the needs of Jamaica Plain’s Latino immigrant community may be very different from the white, middle-class needs that have prompted JP NET’s existing programs, such as garden shares and urban orchards. “Folks in the Latino community may say, ‘Well, we cannot do our own gardening if we are getting evicted from our homes,’ ” he says. JP NET has one program underway to address housing issues, a community land trust called Pueblo, but Espinoza-Toro estimates that it is years from fruition thanks to high property costs in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. He hopes other ideas will emerge from the meetings.

Outside of urban areas, the barriers that limit the reach of Transition can be subtler than ethnicity. In New York state’s Hudson Valley and other agricultural areas around the United States, Transition is one of many sustainability initiatives to run up against a cultural divide between traditional farmers and those who practice newer, more sustainable methods like organic, permacultural and biodynamic farming.

“You have organic farmers who are pretty disdainful and smug, and traditional farmers who are kind of threatened,” says Maria Reidelbach, an artist and member of Transition Marbletown, N.Y., who found herself spanning both sides when she partnered with a 177-year-old local farm to create a mini-golf course featuring entirely edible plants (along with the world’s third-largest garden gnome, “Gnome Chomsky”). “When the traditional farmers adopted machinery and pesticides in the 20th century, the yield increased incredibly, and all of a sudden they were able to feed so many more people with the same amount of land and less help,” says Reidelbach. “To them, that’s great. And then we come along 30 years later and start telling them that they are feeding people poison.”

Reidelbach thinks Transition Marbletown has gone some way toward bridging this divide. The movement, she says, managed to “rope in” the local growers’ association to cosponsor a “Common Ground Celebration” last fall. At a farmers’ market, growers mingled and tasted each other’s crops, and farmers of all stripes were recognized with “Signs of Sustainability Awards.”

“There’s a value to the farmers listening to each other, humanizing each other,” says Reidelbach. “Then they are much less likely to dis each others’ methods, modus operandi and motives. I think everybody’s got to get down off their high horses. That’s one of the things that Transition enables.”

Modest expectations, high spirits

Asked if he eventually envisions Transition scaling up and being adopted by regional or national governments, Hopkins assents cautiously, explaining that the goal would be for government to better enable local projects (for instance, by making laws more friendly to small-scale farming). He also hopes that Transition will hit a tipping point at which new solutions seem possible—where, for instance, local governments don’t feel that the only solution to economic hardship is to try to attract large corporations in a deregulatory race to the bottom.

Espinoza-Toro says that he chooses Transition over other forms of organizing because he is inspired by the movement’s tangibility. “What I find most fruitful and rewarding about my work here is that I’m dealing with folks face-to-face in order to tackle some of these issues,” he says.

Again and again, for Transitioners, it seems to come back to that social aspect. “Between you and me, I don’t know if we’re going to solve the world’s problems,” says Reidelbach. “[But] the underlying ethos is that the process needs to be fun enough to be worth doing anyway. I love that about it. There’s a bit of anarchy, which is wonderful. People who are attracted to it tend to be upbeat, optimistic, joyous people.

“I don’t see anything meaningful happening at the top, with governments and multinational corporations,” Reidelbach continues. “Whether or not we win, Transition is the only group offering a model where I can deal with fossil fuel depletion and climate change myself.”

Woodstock in Transition

Polly Howells — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:22 +0000

I was away from home on Aug. 29, 2011, when Hurricane Irene cut a devastating path inland through New York state and into Vermont, leaving a deep, impassable ditch across my road, south of Woodstock, N.Y. When I returned, I learned that men who had never before said more than a passing “hello” to each other had labored for hours piling rocks into the ditch, finally enabling the traffic to flow. They remarked on how unusual and pleasurable the experience was. All over the Hudson Valley, people came forward and did what they could for the victims of the storm, donating food and clothing to people whose homes had been washed away.

It was pure coincidence—or synchronicity—that Hurricane Irene came along just as the Transition Town movement was taking root in Woodstock. But Irene gave the nascent movement a push by providing both evidence that environmental crises are escalating and a template for neighborly cooperation. Such cooperation lies at the heart of the Transition movement, which is guided by the philosophy, “If we wait for the government, it’ll be too late. If we act as individuals, it’ll be too little. But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.”

I first joined the movement in June 2011, when I participated in a two-day Training for Transition in the mid-Hudson Valley. Seven participants from the Woodstock area and I went on to form the Woodstock Transition Initiating Group, a body that was planned from the outset to dissolve, so that people would not become attached to leadership positions. Transition rests on a very serious commitment to growing through a non-hierarchical, leaderless—or to put it another way, leader-full—process.

This does not mean deciding everything by consensus (we have instituted a supermajority 2/3 vote for contentious matters), but it does mean being supremely mindful of how we treat one another. For example, when one of our members wrote a somewhat “scolding” email to the group about people not following through on commitments, he followed up with a heartfelt apology for his tone. This sort of sensitivity is palpable in the face-to-face meetings as well. Coming out of the sometimes brutally argumentative and un-self-conscious anti-war and women’s movements of the late ’60s and early ’70s, this process has given me hope that we have learned something as a culture—or at least as a counter-culture—about how to function healthily in groups.

Following the guidelines of founder Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook, we held “public awareness” meetings for a year to build interest in the movement. Woodstock’s meeting topics included water, food sustainability, winterization, waste management, tool exchange, permaculture, seed swap and the new economy. We publicized these meetings through email and ads in local papers and magazines. In the spring of 2012, Woodstock became the 115th official Transition Town in the United States.

The meetings culminated in the Woodstock Transition Festival on Sept. 22, 2012, underwritten by local businesses and attended by more than 200 people. In the Big Tent, we honored the town’s elders and those who had made sustainability central to their missions. Two Woodstock residents, Jill Olesker and Jo Schwartz, have been interviewing elders in the town to document what Woodstock has lost as it has turned from farming community to tourist destination. They both spoke at the Festival, and Jo recalled former farmer Macky Carnwright, a man in his 80s, telling her that farmers used to go over to one another’s farms to help each other butcher hogs and cattle. It’s this spirit of community that the Transition movement is helping to revive.

Our September gathering served as what they call in the U.K. the “great unleashing,” when the initiating group dissolves and the broader community is engaged and enlisted. Approximately 50 people signed up to be in working groups to bring the Woodstock Transition into fruition.

A few of us from the initiating group, as well as several others, started meeting weekly as an administrative group, calling ourselves simply the Wednesday Night Group so as to dispel any notion that we aimed to stay in charge of things in the future, and proceeded to develop structures to support the Woodstock Transition and its working groups going forward. Anyone can attend these meetings. Attendees self-select one of three levels of involvement—core, supporter or observer—but these roles are mutable. A few people over the past six months began attending our meetings as observers, then as supporters, and then realized they were deeply enough involved to switch to identifying as core members.

So far, Woodstock has 12 working groups in addition to the Wednesday Night Group: garden share, green energy, backyard chicken coop, transportation, greenware to go, total wellness, potluck, local investment, community outreach, website, communication and finance.

The working groups are in various stages of formation. We have been very deliberate in setting up all these structures, not rushing, because we know we are in this for the long haul. Ultimately, the Transition movement is not about changing the world so much as changing oneself and one’s community to prepare for inevitable catastrophic shifts. A major precept of the movement is that the escalating crises of peak oil, climate change and economic instability will eventually topple our capitalist-industrialist society. The goal is neither to stop this nor to accelerate it, but to learn resilience. As Pamela Boyce Simms, Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub coordinator, explains, “We’re not Davids, shooting arrows at Goliath. Instead, we’re standing aside and lighting little tiny flickering flames of alternative economies, so when Goliath falls, we’ll be more ready, and perhaps our flames will comingle.”

This is the bare outline. What it does not convey is the almost magical enthusiasm the movement evokes in its participants. Katryna Barber, a member of the Woodstock Initiating Group, said in the build-up to the festival, “Transition is like when you’re a kid with your friends and you decide to make a circus. The energy level is so exciting and inviting that more kids want to join you!”

Not Your Grandma’s Wooden Nickel

Julia Pergolini — Sun, 19 May 2013 10:00:20 +0000

The American idiom “Don’t take any wooden nickels!” predates the 1930s, but that era’s bank crises did lead to the actual use of wooden currency. When local banks failed or were inaccessible in the Pacific Northwest, some merchants and towns issued wooden money as a stopgap. The wooden nickels circulated as IOUs until the banks became accessible.

The principles behind the wooden nickel are still at work in today’s alternative currency movement. Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne, authors of Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity, argue that the more than 4,000 alternative and complementary currencies in circulation worldwide have the power to help communities solve their monetary woes. The currencies—minted as a complement to (rather than a replacement for) money backed by national governments and usually administered by an independent local agency—not only provide local liquidity in the event of a cash shortage, but can also boost local economies.

Only a fraction of the money spent in big-box stores or fast-food franchises stays local, the bulk is siphoned off to corporate coffers or family fortunes. (For example, the members of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart, have enriched themselves to the tune of $115 billion.) Meanwhile, numerous case studies—in New Orleans, West Michigan and Portland, Maine, to name a few—confirm that money spent at local retailers, rather than big chains, is twice as likely to recirculate locally. And since locally issued money can only be spent locally, it encourages this recirculation.

Enter the Ithaca Hour, the first local currency created in the U.S. after World War II and the oldest currently in circulation. It was minted in the mini-recession of 1990-1991. Talking about why he created the Hour system, its founder, Paul Glover, says that “Everyone had more time than money. People had plenty of skills that Wall Street wouldn’t hire.” So he decided to write a book on the subject, Hometown Money: How to Enrich Your Community with Local Currency, which became the blueprint for the Hour.

Here’s how it works: Hours are administered by the Circulation Committee of Ithaca Hours, governed by a board of directors. The group claims $120,000 of Hours in circulation, with more than thousands of participants including 500 businesses and a credit union that accepts them for mortgage payments. While anyone can spend or accept Hours, those who sign up for an Hours membership can vote for or run for board seats, and apply for interest-free loans (in Hours, of course). The Hour resembles the U.S. dollar in size and shape, but is colorfully printed and features symbols rather than statesmen, ranging from local heroes to a spotted salamander. The unit “Hour” is meant as a reminder that money represents time and labor. One Hour is equal to $10, the average hourly wage in Tompkins County when the currency was created. Newcomers to the Hours system can go to special banks to trade U.S. dollars for Hours (but not vice versa), while member merchants can deposit Hours as cash or use them in turn to pay wages, buy products or give change to customers. Since Hours are real currency, the transactions are still subject to local, state and federal taxes, but the exchange boosts local productivity.

The Hour has inspired imitators across the nation: Anacostia Hours in eastern Maryland and Washington, D.C., BNotes in Baltimore, Trade Dollars in Arkansas. The Hour itself, however, has faded from use since its heyday in the ’90s. Ithaca Times writer Dana Khromov attributes the decline to the rise of electronic banking and Glover’s move from Ithaca to Philadelphia. With cash transactions growing less common, and without Glover to troubleshoot, some businesses had more Hours than they could spend, freezing the currency. Ithaca’s Greenstar Co-op ended up taking a loss for its surplus Hours, offering them to its customers at a discounted rate just to help revive circulation.

The BerkShares, a currency launched in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts in 2006, learned from the travails of the Hours, according to BerkShares co-founder Susan Witt. BerkShares Inc., the central BerkShares authority, recognized a freeze-up as a potential pitfall to its local currency, and decided to make banking one of its primary features. All 13 branches of the five local banks have signed on as exchanges between dollars and BerkShares, andvice versa. If merchants find they have excess BerkShares, they can simply go to the bank and exchange them for dollars. BerkShares trade at a 5 percent exchange rate, meaning that $95 can be exchanged for 100 BerkShares, backed by dollars that remain on deposit. Those BerkShares then circulate within the community at full value, with the built-in incentive to keep the money local and circulating (since trading them back to dollars results in a 5 percent loss). More than 400 businesses accept BerkShares, and more than 2.7 million have circulated through the region.

The prospect that local money may help protect against the oscillations of the global economy has led some Transition Towns to enthusiastically embrace local currency efforts. The Bristol Pound, launched Bristol, England, in September 2012 with the help of Transition Network, offers one of the most cutting-edge models. Backed by the Bristol City Council and the Bristol Credit Union, participants can take advantage of online banking and a mobile app to help navigate where to spend their Pounds. And not only can businesses pay their city taxes in Bristol Pounds, but the mayor has opted to take his full salary in the currency.

If alternative currencies still sound strange, Lietaer and Dunne quote Edgar Kampers, the director of a non-profit organization that supports a currency called Qoin, to drive home the point of what money actually is: “[F]or me, currency is information between a buyer and a seller. … I buy a sweater. We agree that it’s worth 20 units of whatever. The sweater is the thing with the value. … Money is not valuable at all, but money allows you to buy things, which are valuable.” In other words, local currencies recognize that money is an invention, which can change and be reconstructed to meet the needs of the community it serves.

Bring on the Trash

Sady Doyle — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:21:30 +0000

When word broke in 2008 that the latest cinematic version of The Great Gatsby would be directed by Baz Luhrmann—the guy who gave us Mercutio as an Ecstasy-slinging drag act in Romeo + Juliet and whose career retrospective will probably be titled SEQUINS! The Motion Picture Experience—there was much wailing in the streets. And when word broke out that the new, be-sequined Gatsby would be presented in 3-D, that wailing turned into the rending of flesh. What, faithful readers demanded to know, what could a vulgarian like Luhrmann—that impresario of gaudy, full-bore, bad-taste excess—possibly know about The Great Gatsby?

Well, for one thing, Gatsby is a novel about an impresario of gaudy, full-bore, bad-taste excess. And so, unlike the (mostly unimpressed) reviewers who seemed to never get past their shock that Luhrmann had the nerve to make the film at all, I found the film’s take on Jay Gatsby to be an inspired one. Only a director capable of genuine vulgarity could present the character in all his original, pre-canonized glory. Fitzgerald's novel has been largely killed by our respect for it: We're so entranced by the knife-sharp social distinctions and glittering descriptions of parties that we miss the fact that the parties themselves were stuffed with weirdos, proscribed substances, vomit and pop music you could hump your partner to, as offensive to genuinely sophisticated tastes as ... well, as The Great Gatsby in 3-D. Jay Gatsby has been cited as an inspiration for the dashing, astute Don Draper, but with his joyous vulgarity, his tasteless emulation of the “celebrated people” he crams into his mansion and his endless pursuit of swag, the contemporary character Gatsby actually most closely resembles is Parks and Recreation’s Tom Haverford. Leonardo DiCaprio seems to get the essential comedy of Gatsby, playing him as a teenager who’s been assigned the role of “super-cool rich guy” in a school play—earnest, stilted, over-the-top, and completely incapable of saying the phrase “old sport” without seeming like both an insecure weirdo and a lovable little boy.

The Great Gatsby has never been about elegance. It's about the emptiness of elegance, and about a point in history when the gilded fortress of money and tradition and power cracked, and the teeming hordes began to pour through. It's about the summer when a man with a bright pink suit and a bright yellow car and a ridiculously garish Rent-A-Mansion became one of the most important people in New York. It's about a decade in which new money and people of color and women began to become dangerously visible and self-determined—determining the look and sound of youth culture, forming literary movements in Harlem, and, in the case of women, voting.

But getting the excess and glitter of Gatsby right is only the first part of the problem. It’s also the easiest one; all you have to do is sprinkle on a lot of glitter, something which Baz “Could We Do It With Fireworks?” Luhrmann may actually list as a skill on his current resume. What’s harder is staying true to Fitzgerald’s weird clairvoyance—the way he managed to nail the tense undercurrents of race and class and gender inherent in the decade’s culture, while actually being on the wrong side of every single issue. And this is something that Luhrmann, who’s even less conscious of these issues than F. Scott, mostly fails.

Fitzgerald's treatment of people of color, and non-WASPs in general, is muddled and pathetic—we're supposed to hate the old-money brute Tom Buchanan for fulminating about “colored empires,” but we’re also supposed to join in on the anti-Semitic joke that is the character of Gatsby's boss. All while excessively white people who have probably never learned a black person's name in their lives celebrate the “Jazz Age.”

The female characters of the novel, meanwhile, are a record of Fitzgerald’s ambivalence toward the “new woman” of the 1920s. The women in Gatsby—the icy, athletic Jordan; the gorgeous, sparkling, self-involved Daisy—are indelibly charismatic and appealing characters, and they're both essentially villains. Jordan is a famous athlete who cheats to win, and Daisy kills a woman and lets the man who loves her take the fall.But while The Great Gatsby may be confused about the sudden influx of people of color and women, it is dead-on about how the people in power reacted, which is to say: They panicked.

It’s a shame that Luhrmann’s so intermittently perceptive on these issues, because when he’s on point, he actually outdoes Fitzgerald. He confronts the problem of the novel’s thundering whiteness by having people of color always there, always visible on the screen, having their own parties and conversations; they're also frequently audible on the soundtrack. (In a touch of something like genius, the soundtrack to Luhrmann’s Gatsby was executive-produced by Jay-Z.) The way the white characters maneuver blithely around them, as if behind some portable soundproof glass that prevents them from engaging, is strikingly—and, I think, intentionally—uncomfortable. The only person of color that anyone does talk to is Gatsby's Jewish boss, played this time around by veteran Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan. Making Meyer Wolfsheim the only person of color in the movie with a speaking part restores the full ugliness of the characters’ instinctive loathing of him—his funny accent! his vulgarity! his Otherness!—and Bachchan's restrained, menacing portrayal does the rest of the work, portraying Wolfsheim as a dangerous man in a society that has given him no opportunity to advance through more genteel means. The film also makes clear that people don't just distrust and dislike Gatsby because of his weird linguistic affectations and tacky suits; they distrust him because his job involves talking to, and respecting, non-white people. One of the many things Gatsby does to worry Nick Carraway, in this version of the story, is walk up to a black man and shake his hand.

But because Luhrmann’s treatment of race is startlingly smart, it’s all the more frustrating when he stumbles over class and gender. Class is knocked out of the picture in the opening voice-over: Whereas the novel's Nick Carraway was told, growing up, to “remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had,” the film's Nick Carraway is told to “try to see the best in people.” Which is a very different task, and a completely apolitical one to boot. Gatsby’s indelible line about the appeal of Daisy Buchanan, “her voice is full of money,” is similarly cut. Omissions like this are what keeps Luhrmann's Gatsby from ever gaining the traction it ought to have.

Which brings me to the tragedy of what Luhrmann has done with Jordan and Daisy, two of literature's most compelling exemplars of emerging 20th-century femininity—smart and witty and complicated and alarmingly autonomous; driven, to the male characters' frustration, by agendas that have little or nothing to do with men and which they never condescend to explain. Baz Luhrmann, flappers were not spangly femme glamourpusses in funny hats: They were loud, proud, frightening gender deviants—cutting their hair off, binding their breasts, smoking and drinking in public, and having the kind of sex (premarital and frequent) that women are still shamed for having today. The Daisy and Jordan of the novel are hard, cruel, reckless women whose very recklessness had something heroic about it. If they have to be women born in this particular part of the 20^th century, by God, they'll make the 20^th century pay.

In Luhrmann’s world, they’re mush, existing largely to wear Prada gowns and be mooned at by men. Daisy, in particular, is more or less reduced to The Girl In The Picture: She swans around, fluttery-voiced and teary-eyed, with none of the chilly opacity and remove that make her a sinister figure in the novel. And poor Jordan is simply not there at all. She's a clotheshorse who pops up at odd moments to deliver exposition in a newer and sillier hat. Her entire personality and back story have been torn out to make room for more sequins.

To hell with a tasteful Gatsby, I say. Give us trash. Give us the shock of the real thing: a bunch of self-involved wealthy white people arguing about who's the richest and whitest while they all listen to Jay-Z. But for the love of God, make it clear what’s causing all the noise. Fitzgerald, though he lacked the smarts to understand his novel’s political subtext in full, had the talent to deliver it nonetheless; his book outlined the flaws of 1920s boom mentality before anyone, even he, had reason to understand the flaws would be fatal. Show us what’s making Tom Buchanan so paranoid—the revolution that's providing the soundtrack to his parties and sleeping with his wife, represented in no small part by the wife herself.

There's one moment in Luhrmann’s Gatsby that I honestly loved: The moment when the doomed Myrtle's trashy girlfriends burst into a room, loud and cackling and with broader-than-broad working-class Queens accents, high on nerve pills and sloshing illegal booze. They look very recognizably like flappers. And at the moment they show up, the soundtrack bursts into stereophonic sleaze, and everything goes straight to pill-popping hallucinogenic Party Hell. As far as feminist victories go, it's not a big one. But the shock and horror of those girls and those sounds entering Nick's fragile world is a five-minute lesson on what the 20th century must have felt like to the lofty and elegant white men watching everyone else claw their way up.

If West, Texas Had Been a Terrorist Attack

David Sirota — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:25:48 +0000

If I told you that government officials possessed ironclad proof that an imminent threat to this nation had the capacity to create a 9/11's worth of injuries and deaths every year at an annual economic cost of a quarter trillion dollars, ask yourself: Would you say we should do something about it?

I'm guessing you would. Out of a basic sense of patriotism, you would probably at minimum support some new security regulations and investments in enforcing those regulations, even if that meant paying slightly higher taxes. After all, you profess to love America, and that's the least we should do in the face of such a threat to our country, right?

Now ask yourself: Would your response to the original query change if you discovered that the threat at hand was not from a terrorist, but from unsafe workplaces - and that because of that unaddressed problem, these casualties and costs have already become a fact of life in America? Come on, admit it - your response probably would change. Yes, many who would reflexively support more regulations and enforcement in the face of a foreign terrorist threat would suddenly scoff at more regulations and enforcement in the face of unsafe workplaces. Why the double standard?

That's the troubling question raised by the reaction - or, really, lack thereof - to last month's catastrophic explosion in West, Texas.

Occurring in the heart of a nation whose government data documents 4,500 workplace deaths every year, the deadly blast originated at a fertilizer plant that had not been inspected by the chronically underfunded Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985.

The location of the plant is particularly significant. As the New York Times reports, Texas promotes an "antipathy toward regulations" as "the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage" and a place where many counties "cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there."

As a result, Texas is not the nation's most populous state but nonetheless sports "the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities." When it comes to industrial disasters, the Times notes that Texas has only about a quarter more "high risk" sites than the state (Illinois) with the second most number of such facilities. However, it has, according to the Times, "more than three times the number of accidents, four times the number of injuries and deaths, and 300 times the property damage costs" as that state.

If all this data was about a terrorist threat, the reaction would be swift - negligent federal agencies would be roundly criticized and the specific state's lax attitude toward security would be lambasted. Yet, after the fertilizer plant explosion, there has been no proactive reaction at all, other than Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry boasting about his state's "comfort with the amount of oversight" that already exists.

So, again, why the discrepancy? Simply put, because this is what now passes for acceptable in a deregulated economy whose laws are written by corporate interests.

Those interests are hostile to safety regulation and enforcement because they don't want to spend even a tiny bit more on making worksites secure for employees. So they, and the politicians whose campaigns they fund, have made an epithet out of the word "regulation" in order to guarantee that almost nobody asks whether we have to tolerate 4,500 dead American workers each year.

We don't have to tolerate that level of workplace carnage, of course. There are many obvious and constructive things we could do, starting with adding resources to regulatory agencies and beefing up workplace enforcement. But if even a blast as big as the one in West, Texas cannot make us realize that simple fact, then nothing will.

The Tragedy of Self Immolation: No One Cares

Andrew Lam — Thu, 16 May 2013 20:42:36 +0000

Self-immolation isn't what it used to be.

This ultimate form of protest became global news in 1963 when the venerable monk Thich Quang Duc set himself ablaze in the middle of Saigon, Vietnam, protesting religious oppression. Doused in gasoline, the monk sat serenely in lotus position and lit a match. A bird of paradise thus blossomed and bloomed, and quickly charred his body.

The photographer Malcolm Browne captured Thich Quang Duc's fiery renouncement of the mortal coil, the image quickly becoming an icon of the Vietnam War era. The term "self-immolation," in fact, entered into common English usage after his death, which led to a coup d'etat that toppled the pro-Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem regime.

Half a century later, to die by fire in protest registers little more than a media blip.

As of this writing, 117 Tibetans have set themselves ablaze since 2009 in a series of protests against Chinese rule. The most recent incidents came in April, when two young Tibetan monks and a lay Tibetan woman set themselves on fire. There was little coverage of their deaths.

Indeed, with the exception of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire and thus sparked what became known as the Arab Spring, self-immolation has by all accounts become a failed form of protest as an agent of change. Whether in Syria or Palestine, Greece, Italy or Vietnam, individuals continue to go up in flames as crowds look on. Since Bouazizi, in fact, 150 more Tunisians have set themselves on fire protesting the new government, according to al-monitor.

"All the Tibetans who resort to self-immolation do so because they feel they have no other way to make China and the rest of the world listen to their country's call for freedom," Byrne-Rosengren, director of the London-based advocacy group Free Tibet, told Radio Free Asia last month.

Alas, China has turned a deaf ear to their cries, while the world media has averted its eyes.

Aristotle once observed that the plot of a tragedy should be so framed that, even without witnessing the events, simply hearing of them should fill one with "horror and pity"—even lead to insight and action. But the amphitheater of the 21st century has fallen into decay, scattered and fragmented into a multitude of media platforms. There are too many actors in too many theaters and their tragedies—overwhelming, lacking in context, incoherent, truncated or badly reported—have lost their grip on the human psyche.

Studies about desensitization of the modern mind are aplenty, but the general consensus is that over-saturation of images and narratives of violence have resulted in a collective numbness. A profound act of public death cannot hope to sway a world in which horror itself has lost its power.

What we want instead is entertainment, and what we gravitate toward and react to, more often than not, is profanity.

A year after Bouazizi went up in flames in Tunisia, an unknown amateur filmmaker named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula," aka "Sam Bacile," inflamed the Middle East with incendiary video clips ridiculing the prophet Muhammad. His film turned the Arab Spring of 2011 into the Autumn Rage of 2012, resulted in the death of an American ambassador in Libya, and continues to be a bone of contention in Washington.

The cynical observer can't help but wonder: If self immolation no longer works as an agent for change, then is it still worth the price? Has it been reduced to mere suicide by fire?

At its most profound the act stands as the highest form of human compassion, a confirmation of life by giving up one's own. At its most incoherent self-immolation becomes more expressive of the frustration of the powerless. The individual, enamored by death, possessed by anger, elicits neither horror nor pity but cynicism. After all, to burn with passion is very different than to be consumed by rage.

Fire—this gift and curse to humanity—is a terrifying beauty. Contained, it hints at elegance, cooks our food and propels our world. Out of control, it engulfs body and soul. It seduces. It overpowers. And it destroys.

Potential self-immolators may want to rethink their relationship with fire. In a world where individuals leverage more power online than in the public square, it may be that to live burning with desire to bring attention to one's cause—regardless of the oppression and humiliation—is the real challenge to becoming actual agents of change in the world. So why not live instead? And find new ways to force the world's attention once more back onto the stage—and evoke pity and horror in us all.

To burn with that desire, to call our attention and hold our gaze until we weep—isn't that worth living for?

Revoking Amnesty for Death Squads

Angelina Godoy — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:47 +0000

Twenty years ago in March, the government of El Salvador passed an amnesty law that granted immunity from prosecution to those responsible for crimes committed before and during the country’s civil war, which raged from 1980 to 1992. This law was promulgated only five days after a U.N. truth commission reported that an estimated 75,000 civilians had lost their lives in the conflict, more than 90 percent of them at the hands of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military and death squads.

Ostensibly intended to let the country move forward without being mired in the past, the law not only protected war criminals from prosecution but also precluded any investigation into their crimes. As a result, for two decades the law has thwarted justice for Salvadorans, forcing thousands to live without even the most basic knowledge about the fates that befell their loved ones.

Fortunately, this is starting to change. Last year, President Mauricio Funes apologized publicly for the massacre at El Mozote, calling it “the worst massacre of civilians in contemporary Latin American history.” That incident, one of countless mass killings that occurred during the war, took place on Dec. 11, 1981, when the Atlacatl Battalion—an elite Salvadoran army unit trained by the U.S. Army at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga.—killed more than 900 people, hundreds of them children. In December 2012, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled against the government of El Salvador in the El Mozote case, declaring that the amnesty law could no longer be used to deny justice to the victims of such acts.

In March, the Instituto de Derechos Humanos at El Salvador’s Universidad Centroamericana and the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights convened legal advocates from around the world in San Salvador to demand justice in cases of wartime atrocities. Forty-four criminal cases were presented to the Salvadoran justice system. The victims include a labor leader whose wife and 11-year-old daughter were “disappeared” while he was tortured behind bars as a political prisoner; survivors of rural massacres, many of which erased entire communities from the landscape; and an adult daughter of two political activists who grew up never knowing the reasons for her parents’ disappearance. Many are now coming forward for the first time.

These are positive steps, but they’re not enough. Until the amnesty law is replaced with a law supporting truth, justice and reparations for victims on all sides of the conflict, injustice will continue to fester in Salvadoran society.

The peace process of the 1990s introduced modest reforms, yet the fundamental lack of judicial independence was never addressed. Despite the decades that have passed, the war’s legacy is very much present in El Salvador today, reverberating through national politics and especially through attempts to staunch criminal violence with militarized institutions.

In a climate of assured impunity, transnational gangs that traffic in migrants, drugs and weapons have flourished. The country’s homicide rate has consequently soared to unprecedented levels, and as doing business amid flying bullets drives away investment, the economy has stagnated.

Yet El Salvador’s recent efforts to remedy this situation are aimed precisely in the wrong direction. Instead of tackling, once and for all, the ways the hamstrung justice system perpetuates privilege for a few at the cost of the majority, the government has moved to re-militarize the security forces.

In this context, renewed examination of the crimes committed in El Salvador in the 1980s represents a chance to correct course. In the United States, it is an opportunity to examine the U.S. government’s role in abetting crimes against humanity, through its support of the Salvadoran counterinsurgency policy and its protection of the oligarchy’s death squads. As current U.S. policy in the Middle East has been shaped by the architects of past involvement in El Salvador, such critical examination is urgently needed. In the United States, as in El Salvador, it is time we listen to the voices of victims of the past, and insist upon reforms to avoid the tragic repetition of the same mistakes.

The Right to Call In Sick

Ellen Bravo — Wed, 15 May 2013 10:00:06 +0000

“I’ve gone to work horribly ill many times,” says Susan Lund, a grocery worker in Portland, Ore. “[Bosses] don’t care, as long as the work is being done. I see employees run to the bathroom because they’re throwing up, but a manager doesn’t send them home.”

That won’t be true for long. On March 13, thanks to the activism of thousands of Portlanders like Lund, the City Council unanimously voted to adopt a paid sick days ordinance. The bill goes into effect in January 2014.

Two weeks later, the New York City Council made a deal for a similar measure, guaranteeing paid sick days for 800,000 workers in firms of 20 employees or more, with job protection for those in smaller firms who have to take off for family illness. Together, the victories gave a big boost to the nationwide movement for paid sick leave. Portland and New York join a growing list of places—San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Seattle; the state of Connecticut—where most workers are guaranteed a set number of paid days off for illness and hardships such as domestic or sexual violence. Similar campaigns are underway in a dozen other cities and states, including Oregon, Massachusetts and Vermont, and support is building for the Healthy Families Act, which would create a national standard.

In each location, the movement for paid sick days is backed by a broad coalition that includes dozens of partners from labor (including unions like UFCW and AFSCME, and Working America and the Working Families Party) together with small-business owners and groups that advocate for women, children, seniors, public health, racial justice and LGBT rights (Portland’s coalition is a member of the Family Values @ Work Consortium, a network of 21 state coalitions working for policies like paid sick days, of which I serve as executive director). But what’s most notable is how these groups have engaged new activists like Lund, who hadn’t been politically active before, but who share the common experience of fearing for their jobs if they or their child gets sick.

Lund says she “tripped into” activism after being asked to speak on the radio by a coalition leader about her 15 years of experience working for Fred Meyer, a superstore owned by Kroger, the nation’s largest traditional grocery chain, with sales of more than $90 billion in 2012. Though Fred Meyer does offer paid sick days, Lund says, workers don’t get paid unless they’re out for at least three days, and then only for day three and after—a phenomenon typical in grocery stores across the county, even unionized ones like Fred Meyer. Lund describes the loss of pay as “the difference between grocery shopping or not, paying my rent or not.” She agreed to do the Think Out Loud interview on Oregon Public Broadcasting (an NPR affiliate) for herself and her two kids, and for everyone she knew in the same boat.

“I wanted to get the message out about all of us trying to balance being moms and paying bills,” she says. After the interview, she
got involved in the paid sick days campaign, sharing her story with the press, speaking out at hearings and getting other UFCW members involved.

Lund knew it would be difficult to overcome the well-funded opposition. The Northwest Grocery Association, the OregonRestaurant & Lodging Association and the Portland Business Alliance dominated the corporate juggernaut that lobbied against the bill. But ultimately, the sick days coalition prevailed by having an energetic presence in the field—they knocked on more than 40,000 doors around the city to engage voters in the campaign and in rallies, talked early and often to City Council members and made use of unassailable spokes-people from a wide variety of groups including teachers, nurses, public health officials and anti-violence advocates.

“It’s like the stars aligned and people pulled together, one person joining another and another, and everyone saying this isn’t the way it should be," says Lund.

Now, Lund is active in the campaign for a state bill. “It’s not a luxury that we’re asking for,” she says. “It’s not just people who have the money who should be able to [get paid sick days].”

Corporate lobbyists and their conservative collaborators will continue to oppose fair work-family policies. But one person will keep joining another and another, building strength in broad and diverse local coalitions, all of them increasingly linked into a powerful national movement.

Has the GOP Been Watching Too Much Downton Abbey?

Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:30:22 +0000

President Obama went to Austin, Texas, last week in pursuit of an industrial and employment revival. He wants to launch manufacturing institutes to foster American innovation and job creation.

Republicans responded by ridiculing the president, in the same arrogant way that the aristocrats on the British television series Downton Abbey scorned a chauffeur who sought to marry into the patrician Crawley family: “No opportunity for the downtrodden!”

Watching Downton Abbey would be pure escapism, a simple respite from the grind of work and duties of home. That is, except for the disquieting reality that Downton Abbey’s classist mores increasingly reflect American life. There is a growing gap between the wealthy and the rest of us, abetted by to the GOP practice of continually cutting taxes on the rich while constantly cutting government services that provide opportunity to everyone else.

Income inequality in America is wide and widening. Just get this: while income stagnated for the middle class, the average annual income of the top .01 percent of U.S. households from 2002 to 2007 rose by 123 percent—a gain of $20 million each.

Even after the crash of 2008, the wealthiest .01% did just fine. Now, the stock market and corporate profits are soaring. But only the wealthy are benefitting. The New York Times reported earlier this month that corporate profits in the third quarter of 2012 took the largest share of national income for any time since 1950, while the portion that went to workers fell to the lowest point since 1966.

While making those huge profits, corporations aren’t creating jobs. For those who do have jobs but aren’t in the top 10 percent income bracket, wages fell 7 percent from 2007 to 2008. Unlike the rich, workers didn’t recover after the crash, with median household income declining 1.5 percent in 2011.

And then there’s the poor. In the richest country in the world, the U.S. Census Bureau found 46.2 million people living in poverty in 2011, the highest number in the 53 years that the Census has collected the statistic. These are America’s economic equivalent to Downton Abbey serfs and servants.

This poverty is by far the highest rate among developed countries, while the rate at which taxes and transfer programs reduce American poverty is the lowest for developed countries. Transfer programs include unemployment compensation, a crucial lifeline for millions when the jobless rate remains above 7 percent.

For those unemployed, for the struggling who saw no benefit from record corporate profits and stock market highs, President Obama went to Texas to announce formation of three manufacturing hubs, where innovation would be nurtured and good-paying industrial jobs created. By executive order, these three will be financed with $200 million from five federal agencies.

The president has asked Congress to dedicate $1 billion to create a network of 15 industrial institutes, but Republicans laughed at the proposal.

Instead of investing in America, they insist on tax cuts for the rich. They demand austerity for the rest. They love the sequester, which cut Head Start for poor children and Meals on Wheels for old folks. They’re fine with the sequester costing 700,000 jobs. All those single mothers thrown out of jobs can always work as prostitutes, like Downton Abbey maid Ethel Parks did after being fired for sleeping with a moneyed patrician, right?

Both private sector and government economists have said unemployment would be significantly lower and economic growth significantly higher if Congress had continued stimulating the economy, as it did when President Obama was first elected and Democrats were in control. Republicans reversed that successful course. When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and began abusing the filibuster in the Senate, the GOP forced the country onto the austerity path that has devastated Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland.

President Obama continues to push for stimulus and jobs because he believes the American government, founded on the premise that all men are created equal, should promote equal opportunity to achieve.

In the three decades after World War II, the government stimulated the economy by constructing interstate highways, sending veterans to college and supporting home ownership. Taxes on the rich were among the highest in the nation’s history. The economy thrived and income inequality declined. Opportunity for every child increased.

Republicans want to kill the government that accomplished that. They want to go back to Downton Abbey days. The rich stay rich; the poor stay servants. There’s a set of rules for the rich: An unmarried Lady Mary deserves forgiveness for sleeping with a distinguished foreign visitor. But there’s another set of rules for the rest: unmarried Ethel Parks gets fired for sleeping above her station in life. The Wall Street bankers whose gambling took down the economy get a bailout. The Main Street bank robber gets a prison term.

Republicans don’t seem to understand that a political system that favors the wealthy in the 21st century while failing the majority is unsustainable. Americans believe everyone is equal. They believe the system of government that their forbearers created should guarantee equity of opportunity to make a life, get a job, buy a picket-fenced home and raise a couple of kids. The New World rejected the Downton Abbey philosophy of privilege based on blood lines and inherited money.

Turn off the TV, GOP.

Foreclosing in on D.C.

Osita Nwanevu — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:00:52 +0000

Since the housing bubble burst in 2007, some 4.8 million Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure. According to data released in April, more than one-third of those subject to foreclosure proceedings at the height of the crisis were the victims of possible bank errors or illegal practices. But the Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency decided in January to simply settle with the banks for $3.6 billion. Most foreclosed-upon borrowers will receive less than $1,000 in the settlement—even if they lost their homes.

It’s this kind of indifference to the plight of underwater homeowners that Occupy-aligned anti-foreclosure groups are trying to combat.

Starting May 18, Occupy Our Homes and the Home Defenders League are leading a week of actions with two goals: real mortgage relief and the prosecution of lenders for fraud and negligence. In addition to community actions across the country, activists will converge in Washington to protest Attorney General Eric Holder’s comments in March that such prosecutions could destabilize the economy—essentially, a claim that banks are “too big to jail.”

Organizers with Occupy Our Homes hope the actions will shake the federal government out of complacency. “The crisis is far from over,” the group asserts on its website. “It’s more important than ever for us to take action.”

Deportation in 90 Minutes or Less

Nancy Fleck Myers and Susan Nelson — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:00:56 +0000

Five days a week, between 40 and 80 men and women in handcuffs and shackles are brought into Tucson’s DeConcini Courthouse, a high-rise that houses the U.S. District Court. The prisoners are dirty, hungry and sometimes injured from days spent walking across the desert before Border Patrol agents caught them entering the United States along the southern Arizona border without the proper documentation. Led into a second-floor courtroom, they sit quietly in neat rows on spectator benches and in the jury box. Across the courtroom sit two men in dark green shirts with “Border Patrol” across their backs.

Upon arriving, the judge advises the migrants en masse of the charges and their constitutional rights. In a few cases the charge is simply “illegal entry,” a misdemeanor. But for most of the defendants, this is not the first time they’ve been caught trying to enter the country, and they are charged with both the misdemeanor and felony “illegal entry.” The judge then offers those defendants a plea bargain: Plead guilty to the misdemeanor entry, and the felony entry charge (which is punishable by up to 20 years in prison) will be dismissed. The felony entry charge is “the easiest felony to prove and the fastest-growing felony in the country,” says Isabel Garcia, the co-chair of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos and Pima County Legal Defender.

All of the defendants take the deal.

Once they leave the courtroom, the migrants will have criminal records, be transferred to complete their prison terms of 30 to 180 days and then be formally removed (previously called “deported”), guaranteeing that they cannot lawfully return for at least five years, with slim-to-no chance of getting a visa thereafter. Any subsequent foiled re-entry attempt guarantees a felony entry charge.

This proceeding is Operation Streamline, an eight-year-old, little-known provision of immigration policy that was intended—along with the new fence that currently stretches 650 miles long and as high as 20 feet—to discourage illegal entry to the United States along the Mexican border. The provision is meant to “streamline” cases so that more undocumented immigrants can be efficiently processed in court. The harsh punishments are meant to deter subsequent re-entry attempts, and thereby eliminate future border problems.

If the comprehensive immigration reform bill introduced on April 17 by the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight” passes, it will triple the budget of Operation Streamline in Tucson and expand the program elsewhere. The new goal in Tucson will be to process 210 immigrants a day.

A flawed approach

Introduced in Del Rio, Texas, in 2005 as a joint operation of the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, Operation Streamline was expanded to Tucson in 2008. The program is just one component of a deterrence strategy employed unevenly by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. Proponents of Operation Streamline such as Arizona Sen. John McCain (one of those who drafted the Senate immigration bill) have long claimed that it works well as a deterrent. But there’s scant evidence to confirm that belief. Countless interviews with immigrants and multiple reports—the most recent a March 2013 study published by the University of Arizona—have shown that enforcement measures like Operation Streamline do little to deter people from re-crossing the border. Many immigrants picked up in the desert are not first-time crossers but people who have lived and worked in the United States for years. Some went back to their country of origin for a visit, commonly to see a dying parent; the majority were sent to Mexico after a traffic violation or a workplace raid. They have strong incentives to keep trying to get back to their jobs and families in the United States.

Legal and human rights activists consider Operation Streamline to be seriously flawed. Its opponents in Tucson have formed the End Streamline Coalition to raise public awareness about the little-known program and to challenge the way it is being applied. Members point out that many aspects of the operation—improper venues, lack of evidence, mass hearings and predetermined outcomes—pose constitutional and moral problems. The coalition is drafting a letter to all attorneys and magistrates participating in Operation Streamline, asking them to recuse themselves from further participation on ethical grounds.

How ‘streamlining’ works

Under Operation Streamline, each defendant is assigned an attorney, who may have as many as a half-dozen other clients in the courtroom on any given day. Called to microphones in groups of five or six, defendants and their attorneys stand before a judge to be instructed and processed with the assistance of Spanish-translation equipment.

In exchange for a guilty plea, a defendant in Operation Streamline waives his or her right to appeal and to a trial. Instead, each migrant, in a very brief attorney-client meeting, is coached to reply “guilty” (after a pause for the translator, defendants uniformly say, in Spanish, “culpable”) when asked how he or she pleads. Depending on the judge assigned, the process may take anywhere from two hours to as little as 30 minutes.

Once in a while a migrant will say he doesn’t understand, that he’s just trying to return to his family. Sometimes someone will start to cry and say he—or she—is worried about a dependent family member. When this happens, there is usually an embarrassed silence until the judge explains that there is nothing she or he can do.

On a recent Tuesday, nearly all 68 people accused of illegal entry into the United States spoke in Spanish. Fifty were citizens of Mexico, 14 of Guatemala, four of Honduras. A few Guatemalans were identified as being speakers of indigenous dialects. One indicated he was having trouble understanding proceedings because he could not understand Spanish. Predictably, all took the plea.

That day, the judge sentenced each group to 30 to 180 days in prison, depending on the number of times each migrant had been caught attempting to cross. The judge, who seemed to take care to be sure that defendants understood her questions, finished the hearing in 90 minutes.

At the end of each group’s sentencing, prisoners are led out of the courtroom by the Border Patrol agents to buses that will transport them to the small private prisons that dot the Arizona desert, where they will serve out their terms. After that they will be herded into unmarked gray buses operated by private contractors and removed—“repatriated”—driven the 70 miles to Nogales, Mexico, regardless of whether they have ties there. Or they will be delivered to another point along the border, called a “lateral repatriation,” intentionally meant to separate people from their friends and connections to make re-crossing more difficult.

In either case, they will essentially be dumped, with no money or papers, on the other side of the fence that at first glance resembles a rusty Great Wall of China.

The prison-industrial complex

The human toll is not the only cost of Operation Streamline. Taxpayers foot the bill: Under the immigration proposal before the Senate, the price of immigration enforcement, which was $18 billion in 2012, would be increased by $4.5 billion. Operation Streamline’s share last year was an estimated $180 million in the Tucson sector alone. The proposed bill’s 200 percent hike for Operation Streamline would ensure greater profits for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the Tennessee-based private prison corporation.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), another member of the Gang of Eight, has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from the nation’s two leading private prison corporations, CCA and GEO Group. Sen. McCain has received more than $30,000 from CCA.

This is the reality of having more “border security,” which both political parties agree is a necessity for comprehensive immigration reform. But that doesn’t mean just fences, drones and more Border Patrol agents; it also means breaking up families as a matter of principle.

Pima County public defender Margo Cowan, an End Streamline Coalition lawyer and a founder of the No More Deaths group, which provides humanitarian aid to border crossers, is blunt in her assessment of Operation Streamline: “Poor migrants will never be lawfully admitted to the United States because they are but pawns in our government’s great show of ‘border security’. ”

In June 2012, a year after the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would begin reviewing deportations on a case-by-case basis, President Obama praised his administration’s handling of illegal border crossings. “We focus and use discretion about whom to prosecute,” he said.

But the push to expand Operation Streamline suggests otherwise. “We should not be prosecuting innocent people—‘streamlining’ them—just because we can,” says Cowan. “Operation Streamline brings shame on the very democracy it purports to protect.”

Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher

Jane Miller — Sat, 11 May 2013 10:00:32 +0000

At the moment when it was announced that Margaret Thatcher had died, Prime Minister David Cameron must have been having breakfast and preparing to strong-arm Europe’s leaders into concessions for Britain, just as she had done years ago. He must have leapt, in mid-croissant, onto a plane for London, where—pink and puffed—he delivered his verdict on our “greatest peacetime prime minister,” who “didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country.” This was the message peddled by the BBC for most of the day. Britain was “a country that was on its knees” in 1979, despised abroad as “the sick man of Europe,” let down by its “failing state monoliths”: the remnants of rampant socialism at home. And then along came Thatcher. And look at us now.

The BBC did find an ex-miner from Durham who spoke of “a legacy of destruction” and a woman who believed Thatcher had “ruin[ed] the country,” and showed brief shots of people dancing in the streets of Glasgow and Bristol. Charles Powell, one of her advisers, has said that she’d have been disappointed if there had not been celebrations of her death.

The only time I ever saw her was during her “milk snatching” days in the early 1970s. As secretary of state for education, “Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher” abolished free milk for school children aged 7 to 11. I remember thinking her extraordinarily pretty.

She was, no doubt, accomplished. As a woman and a “grocer’s daughter,” she got to run the Conservative Party and to petrify a world of snobbish men in grey suits into doing her bidding and then spending the rest of their lives expressing their gratitude to her.

She set out to demolish the welfare state, to shift power from the government to the market, to reduce the authority of big-city governments and put as much as possible into private profit-making hands. And her successors are busy continuing to shrink “the state.”

There are women who have spoken and written interestingly and with surprising restraint about her as, of course, a role model, but also as a woman who opposed feminism and may even have set it back in some respects. She once told an interviewer that she didn’t “like strident females.” Only one woman ever got into a Thatcher cabinet, which was regularly filled with her adoring and often empty-headed male admirers. She seems to have had no women friends, and never mentioned her mother.

Glenda Jackson, once a famous actress and now a Labour MP, showed her no mercy in her parliamentary tribute: “Everything I had been taught to regard as a vice—and I still regard them as vices—under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward.”

Thatcher’s death has been a windfall for this government, a marvellous distraction from their cuts and muddles. Yet their contemptuous talk of “scroungers” and “shirkers” is bound to remind us of the devastations Thatcher’s government delivered to industries, workers and communities across the country, especially in the north. Many of the 3 million people who became unemployed in those years never worked again, and in all too many cases their children have grown up in the wasteland created by Thatcher’s policies, for there have been no concomitant attempts to replace work, repair communities or encourage hope. Council tenants were indeed invited to buy the homes they rented, but those who couldn’t afford them were consigned to the worst of such housing, and it was at that point that the post-war house-building boom slowed down, never to recover.

Russell Brand, a young comedian and actor who was born the year Thatcher became leader of her party, testifies to the effect she had on him as he was growing up in the 1980s, as he worries about his “inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people’s pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful.”

Hyperbole and deflation seem inevitable responses to this woman of extremes and contradictions.

Whose Budget? Their Budget.

Joel Handley — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:55:49 +0000

This is the third installment of “Direct Democracy in Chicago's 5th Ward,” a 5-part series following the participatory voting process in the 5th ward. This series is supported by a grant from the Local Reporting Initiative of the Chicago Community Trust. Read the first and second parts of the series here and here.

“I’ve been around here forever,” says Candace White, standing outside of Gary Comer College Prep in Chicago’s Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. “And we’ve never been allowed to vote on how the money is spent.”

Until now, that is. White is visibly happy, having just voted for her six favorite projects as part of the 5^th ward’s participatory budgeting program (PB5). This year, for the first time, ward residents have had the opportunity to decide how their alderman’s “menu money”—up to $1.3 million for small infrastructure projects—will be spent. Since last fall, volunteer community representatives have whittled down over one hundred ideas to 13 specific, feasible projects, which run the gamut from public murals to sidewalk repairs.

On May 4, White and dozens of other residents pass in and out of a classroom at the South Side high school. Walking around the perimeter of the room, or sitting at desks, voters study the 13 posters hanging on the wall, each of which includes an explanation of the proposed project, along with pictures and the estimated cost. By the end of the day, 103 residents have voted (including those who had participated in early voting the previous week).

Because of the relatively low price tags of the projects, all but two or three will likely be funded. Ward staffers will soon submit service requests to city agencies like the Chicago Department of Transportation to begin the process of repaving streets, fixing sidewalks and other tasks routinely funded by ward money. The more unique projects—like large wall murals and a community garden—will take months more work by volunteers and ward staff to finish.

White cast her ballot for many of the projects that would end up winning, including turning a vacant lot on 71^st street into an urban garden where community members can volunteer to help grow fresh food. Another winner was the installation of more than $400,000 worth of new street lights throughout the ward, the most costly project on the list. It’s clear that these two projects, though having little to do with one another, struck a chord with 5^th ward residents: Each received more than 70 individual votes, making them the favorites by far.

The popularity of the street lights, despite the fact that they cost more than twice the amount of the next most expensive project, points to a desire for anything that will increase safety in the ward’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Mary Knight, who lives south of Jackson Park, says, “I’m 61 years old and I can’t even walk the streets. They have to do something, because the violence is ridiculous.”

In addition to street lights, Knight voted for the installation of new security and police cameras in ward trouble spots, which turned out to be the sixth most popular project. Gregory Van Tingle, a long-time South Shore resident who also voted for the cameras, says, “We need more cops, but these public safety projects are a step.”

According to Van Tingle, participatory budgeting can also help even out what he sees as an inequitable amount of resources going to the 5^th ward’s Hyde Park neighborhood—the home of the University of Chicago. “People in Hyde Park are more vocal, more unified, they have more prominent residents—and they get stuff done,” he says. “I want to see our children grow up and get to be prominent in their own neighborhood.”

With only 103 votes, the 5^th ward had the lowest turnout of the four Chicago wards carrying out participatory budgeting programs this year. In the 49^th ward, which is currently in its fourth year of the process and was the first place in the United States to use participatory budgeting, 1,427 residents voted this year. The 45^th and 46^th wards—the other two Chicago wards undertaking participatory budgeting for the first time this year—each had more than 400 voters.

At a PB5 wrap-up meeting on May 7, some of the community representatives who have spent hundreds of hours crafting and fine-tuning projects since November expressed disappointment at the low voter turnout. “Democracy is for those who show up,” says Anne Marie Miles. “But I wish more had shown up.”

Around a conference table in 5^th ward Alderman Leslie Hairston’s office, the representatives discussed ways to improve the process next year—how to better plan meetings, reach out to their neighbors, and publicize participatory budgeting through local media, block clubs, churches and neighborhood associations.

But they were also proud of what they had accomplished together: successfully completing a budgetary program most had never heard of before last year, working together to navigate the often confusing specifics of getting infrastructure built in the city and voting for unique projects that their alderman might never have thought of on her own.

Maria Hadden, the Participatory Budgeting Project’s Chicago coordinator, who has helped 5^th ward residents in every step of this year’s process, says, “It’s easy to fall into the trap of using [voter turnout] as the only measurement of success.” Nervous about how the representatives would react to the low final numbers, Hadden says she was “pleasantly surprised to see they recognized the whole of what they have accomplished. … Taking the first steps towards identifying a community voice and learning how to use it is measureless.”

“When I’m driving around the city, and I’ll say, ‘Oh, they’re doing this here,’ or ‘They’re doing that there,’ I’ve always wanted to be a ‘they,’” says Angela Sims, an intern with the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, who devoted many hours to PB5. “Communities always have things put upon them. But [participatory budgeting] can bridge the ‘they’ and the community.”

Sims isn't alone in her enthusiasm for the process. After discussing the successes and shortcomings of their first year of participatory budgeting, no one at the wrap-up meeting said their disappointments would keep them from trying again. When Hadden asked who would serve as a representative next year, every person in the room raised their hand.

FCC: Fronting For Corporations?

Joel Bleifuss — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:13:28 +0000

President Obama nominated Tom Wheeler the next chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Grant Seiffert, the president of the Telecommunications Industry Association enthused: “He has the proven ability to transcend a broad range of industry perspectives to reach balanced outcomes.”

Indeed. Wheeler, 67, is the former head of—and chief lobbyist for—both the National Cable Television Association and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. Or, as Obama spins it, “He’s helped give American consumers more choices and better products.” (He’s also helped give the president more than $245,000 in bundled contributions for his re-election campaign.)

For Wheeler’s views on the challenges confronting American media, we have his blog “Mobile Musings.” It’s remarkable how one man can write so much (59 posts since 2007) yet say so little. Particularly when it comes to two critical media issues.

The first such issue is net neutrality, the idea that the nation’s information highway should be free of toll booths. In 2009, Wheeler seemed resigned to the framework of net neutrality:

How [net neutrality] is implemented thus become more important than whether it exists. ... [A] rule that allows for variable pricing is an opportunity for wireless carriers to change the revenue paradigm. ... Accepting the inevitability of the concept [of net neutrality] and working to maximize its positive effects—from appropriate network management, to flexible pricing and even new spectrum—could be the opportunity for a big win.

Yet the “flexible pricing” he advocates could be antithetical to net neutrality, depending on where the flexibility comes from. With different fee structures for different content, Internet providers could fence users out of certain areas of the web, in effect making the Internet similar to cable TV with its host of access packages.

Second, on the vital issue of media consolidation, Wheeler has expressed no opinion whatsoever. “The American people deserve to know where [Wheeler] stands,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).“More and more of our media are owned and controlled by fewer and fewer multinational media conglomerates. Will Mr. Wheeler support that dangerous trend or will he oppose it? In 1983, the American media was dominated by 50 companies. Today, media ownership is overwhelmingly concentrated in just six corporations: Comcast, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp., Viacom and CBS.”

In the end, the legacy of Wheeler’s tenure at the FCC will be owned by Obama, who when nominating Wheeler said, “As technology continues to shape the way that we do business and communicate and transform the world, we want to make sure … that we’re setting up legal structures and regulatory structures that facilitate this continued growth and expansion.”

At In These Times, we take our inspiration from anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, who said: “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.” But the president seems to view the nation’s communications infrastructure as an instrument through which to maximize widget sales—a great Sunday circular. Accordingly, he has selected an industry-friendly Babbitt to be the top media watchdog.

The Military’s 40-Year Experiment

David Sirota — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:00:58 +0000

Few probably recall the name Dwight Elliott Stone. But even if his name has faded from the national memory, the man remains historically significant. That's because on June 30, 1973, the 24-year-old plumber's apprentice became the last American forced into the armed services before the military draft expired.

Though next month's 40-year anniversary of the end of conscription will likely be as forgotten as Stone, it shouldn't be. In operations across the globe, the all-volunteer military has been employed by policymakers to birth what Gen. George Casey recently called the "era of persistent conflict." Four decades later, we therefore have an obligation to ask: How much of the public's complicity in that epochal shift is a result of the end of the draft?

There is, of course, no definitive answer to such a complex question. However, a look back at some lost history shows that today's public acquiescence to militarism was exactly what the government wanted when it ended the draft.

That loaded term—"militarism"—was, in fact, a prominent part of the 1970 report by President Nixon's Commission on an All-Volunteer Force. In its findings, the panel worried about "a cycle of anti-militarism" in a nation then questioning America's increasingly martial posture.

Noting that "the draft is a major source of antagonism" toward the growing military-industrial complex, the report praised the fact that "an all-volunteer force offers an obvious opportunity to curb the growth of anti-militaristic sentiment."

Nixon's commission did devote some empty rhetoric to downplaying "the fear of increased military aggressiveness or reduced civilian concern" about military actions in the event of an all-volunteer force. But the report's political conclusions were clear: By disconnecting most Americans from the blood-and-guts consequences of war, the end of the draft would "decrease dissent stemming from conscription" and "close one of the channels" of anti-war organizing.

Today, such conclusions read like prophecy. Though polls showed that many Americans opposed the Iraq War, that invasion and occupation was historically unprecedented in length and yet never generated the kind of mass protest that earlier shorter wars evoked. Same thing for the Afghanistan War. Same thing for all the forward deployments to far-flung bases and one-off missions.

The pattern suggests that in the absence of conscription, dissent—if it exists at all—becomes a low-grade affair (an email, a petition, etc.) but not the kind of serious movement required to compel military policy changes. Why? Because as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it, without a draft "wars remain an abstraction—a distant and unpleasant series of news items that does not affect (most people) personally.”

The danger, says West Point's Lance Betros, is that Americans then "reflexively move towards a military solution before they will try all the other elements of national power."

That reality has prompted some lawmakers in recent years to propose reinstating the draft. They argue it is the only way to compel Americans to truly care about the foreign policy and national security decisions of their government.

Well-meaning people can certainly disagree about whether a modern-day draft is a good idea or not (and it may not be). But forty years into the all-volunteer experiment, it is clear that ending conscription was as much about giving citizens the liberty to abstain from as about quashing popular opposition to martial decisions. By design, it weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces—a connection that is the only proven safeguard against unbridled militarism.

A New Era for Worker Ownership, 5 Years in the Making

Kari Lydersen — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:26:32 +0000

Today, in a revamped Campbell’s Soup building in an industrial and residential section of southwest Chicago, the New Era Windows Cooperative will celebrate the grand opening of its new factory.

Becoming a worker-owned cooperative is the latest chapter in the saga of the workers of Republic Windows and Doors, who gained the nation’s attention by occupying their factory—twice—and became a symbol of resistance in the face of corporate corruption and the economic crisis.

The journey to this moment has been a long and rocky one. Right before the December 2008 holidays, with the economy plunging into crisis, unemployment skyrocketing and a cold snowy winter setting in, 300-some workers at the Republic Windows and Doors factory on Goose Island in the Chicago River learned they were about to lose their jobs. Owner Richard Gillman announced that the factory would be closed, leaving workers without the unused vacation pay and severance pay legally due them. And their health insurance would be cut off promptly.

So they occupied their factory in protest, demanding the money they were owed and earning national headlines. The workers cheered when the California company Serious Materials bought the factory and promised to hire everyone back and honor the union contract.

But what followed was a roller coaster of ups and downs. Serious Materials’ business in Chicago never took off, and by early 2012 the company was planning to close and liquidate the factory. Workers staged another occupation, this one resolved more quickly as the owners agreed to give the workers time to raise money to buy the operations themselves. With the help of the New York microfinance group The Working World, they eventually gathered enough money to purchase the factory equipment and rent a less expensive space.

I visited that space on a chilly day in November 2012, when the workers were on the cusp of, in the words of leader Armando Robles, “becoming CEOs.” They had incorporated during the summer and on this day, they were gathered to officially sign the lease on the new factory.

Entering through one of the loading docks, I saw a cavernous space with an array of strange-looking machines with wheels, blades and presses—equipment standing ready to make windows and doors. In an office on the factory floor, about 20 workers were squeezed between a chunky black refrigerator and wire shelves holding four microwaves. They talked excitedly in English and Spanish below a whiteboard with the factory's floor plan and pieces of butcher paper with bilingual lists of tasks.

The tight-knit group of men and women, comprised of Latino immigrants and African Americans, discussed logistics like insurance, electric wiring, the location for the permanent office and the restrooms, and the number of heating units they’d need during the coming winter. They debated whether to elevate the air compressors on a platform, to cut down on noise and open up more space, and how to locate the office so visitors would not need to walk through the factory without safety goggles. Such pragmatic details come naturally to them, familiar as they are with the inner workings of a window and door factory. All had worked at Republic Windows and its successor for between one and three decades.

The workers know launching and running a company won’t be easy, but given their deep knowledge of the industry and their personal investment in the project, they are confident they can do it. Many of them spent last summer taking business management classes at the union hall of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE)—the progressive union that the workers have belonged to throughout their journey.

“The incredible thing is the ownership they already feel,” noted Brendan Martin, the president and founder of The Working World, which invested in New Era and advised the group.

Martin, who acted as an informal facilitator during the November meeting, has spent seven years in Argentina working with cooperatives. He says he has seen few co-ops or businesses as promising as New Era. The project was well under budget, Martin noted, thanks in part to the worker-owners’ personal hard work and commitment. For example, they spent long hours in the fall moving almost all the equipment and inventory themselves from Goose Island seven miles to the northeast, spending just $18,000 instead of the $100,000 originally planned.

“They're doing an incredible job—it shows that when workers have true control they can do things like finding ways to save costs,” he said. “They aren't just the raw material; they are the protagonists. They’re making capital work for people, not people work for capital.”

As the meeting wound down, Robles pulled a dark bottle of liquor out of the refrigerator, and someone found a stack of shot glasses. It was an almond concoction Robles had brought back from his recent trip to his native Mexico to visit workers’ cooperatives on a strip known as the “Road of Co-ops” near Mexico City. Along with numerous co-ops, he visited a sandal factory where workers have been on strike for two years. The owner was trying to get the government to declare the strike illegal, which would deny workers the strike pay they otherwise are due under Mexican labor law, Robles explained. The sandal workers will likely form a co-op.

He also visited a building co-operative in Mexico; he dreams New Era could sell them windows and doors. Though he knows there would be a lot of logistical and cost issues involving the border, it would be a powerful statement.

“I saw how people did these different things to survive,” said Robles with a touch of awe in his voice, even as he helps lead a similar struggle. “Instead of working for someone, they create these things of their own.”

The workers passed around the liquor and toasted to New Era. Then it was time to go sign the five-year lease on this space, making it truly their own. They filed upstairs to a lushly decorated office, smelling of perfume, where they greeted the building owner. The group makes decisions collectively, so in the meeting they voted on who would actually sign the lease on behalf of the cooperative. However, everyone received their own copy and read it over before the signing.

Waiting on the couches in the office lobby, Robles fooled around and told the more reserved workers, “You can talk, it’s not like church!” Robles and coworker Melvin “Ricky” Maclin noted that their company does not have a president or a hierarchical structure; they will all be owners. “It’s a lot easier for a worker to become an owner, than an owner to become a worker,” laughed Maclin.

“Some people thought we were crazy, but we did it,” said Robles, who was wearing a “Troublemakers” T-shirt from the 2012 LaborNotes conference in Chicago.

Maclin said it was no accident that the workers around the table waiting to sign the lease had stuck together through various ups and downs. The bonds they’ve formed over the years will be the bedrock of the success of New Era, he said.

“When you have a cooperative it’s not just about your skills. You have to really get along, have the ability to work together. You’re like a family.”

Robert Redford Doesn’t Know Which Way the Wind’s Blowing

Michael Atkinson — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:00:30 +0000

Robert Redford’s new film, The Company You Keep, intends to be a testament to a generation—the generation being arthritic Boomers, raised on ’60s radicalism, mashed and molded through adulthood in The Big Chill ’80s, and now gazing down the barrel of Social Security checks and Lipitor prescriptions. But the way the movie goes about this is terminally odd: It reimagines the autumn years of the Weather Underground.

Why this, in 2013? Could it be Barack Obama’s old friend Bill Ayers? Redford is one of Hollywood’s reliably lefty presences, but not in a way that has ever genuinely dented the public sphere. His films—the ones he’s directed and the ones he’s produced—have been at best weakly political. The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) tepidly went to bat for New Mexican villagers against the onslaught of overdevelopment, while the all-but-unseen Lions for Lambs (2007) danced around the invasion of Afghanistan via melodrama. 2011’s The Conspirator, the story of Mary Surratt, a boardinghouse owner and John Wilkes Booth acquaintance who was tried for conspiracy in Lincoln’s assassination and hanged, evoked Guantanamo Bay and its tribunals, hawkish administrators, disregard for judicial rights, and gangs of guilty-by-vaporous-association prisoners. But the analogy is too loose, and if Surratt, who was sacrificed in an attempt to mollify the agitated public, is a martyr to something—what is it, exactly?

Redford has somehow managed to come off as the most pious player in the industry, but his political inclinations seem to be the safe politics of a millionaire movie star, which is perhaps why he never seems to support anything except the environment and wildlife.

The Weathermen, however, are far from an unadventurous issue. The Company You Keep, adapted from Neil Gordon’s novel, begins with a tipped domino: Susan Sarandon’s Vermont housewife throws in the secret-identity towel and surrenders to the FBI. From there, Shia LaBeouf’s young cub Albany reporter follows his nose and uncovers the similarly fake identity of Redford’s upstate lawyer, sending this suede-faced ex-Weatherman running. The FBI closes in, LaBeouf’s annoying snoop pesters every other character motivated only by his journalistic creed, and withering guest-stars (Julie Christie, Sam Elliott, Richard Jenkins, a phlegm-plagued Nick Nolte) emerge to crinkle and wheeze about the good old days of bank robberies and protests.

Of course, the Weather Underground still represents a fearsome, almost toxic moral conundrum on American soil. A movie taking on this fat rattlesnake of a topic could do much worse than emulate Uli Edel’s caustic and thrilling The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008). (Or, for that matter, 1965’s The Battle of Algiers, a film the Pentagon has made itself familiar with since the invasion of Iraq.)

But Redford wimps out. His Weatherpersons are all wholly fictionalized (and therefore made historically convenient), as is the notion that rafts of them live among us under false names. [SPOILER ALERT: PLOT SPOILERS FOLLOW]. The film’s emphasis falls upon Redford’s fugitive striving to prove that he wasn’t such a big bad guilty Weatherman all those years ago, and wasn’t present for the bank robbery in which a guard was shot and killed. Talk about simplifying things—imagine the thorny questions the film could’ve raised had its hero been guilty. The actual motivations for radical violence would’ve had to have been engaged, instead of bandied about as rhetoric (from Christie’s vixen outlaw). The inevitable social battle between the militarized state and resistance to it would’ve had to be explored, and the easy answers that Hollywood craves, and American corporate culture demands, would not be forthcoming.

That authentically political film doesn’t exist. In The Company You Keep, political principles of any kind are seen as pathetic challenges to the righteousness of family, parenthood, and law and order. It’s a narrative thrust that could’ve been outlined by the Heritage Foundation. Through the film you’re on tenterhooks waiting for Redford to enter the tar pit at the center of the armed-protest idea. (I kept hoping a handcuffed Sarandon would grab a gun and go on a tear.) But Redford manages instead to defang the idea of resistance altogether.

Frack Corporate Personhood

Anthony Mangini — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:00:43 +0000

Do corporations count as people? The Supreme Court said as much in Citizens United, but a Pennsylvania judge recently issued a resounding “no.” On March 20, Judge Debbie O’Dell-Seneca ruled that the state’s constitution doesn’t guarantee corporations a right to privacy—because that’s a privilege reserved for people.

Two local newspapers had petitioned O’Dell-Seneca to unseal a 2011 settlement between a western Pennsylvania family and several fracking companies. The Hallowich family had sued over charges that hydraulic fracking operations on their land were causing them chronic nosebleeds, headaches and sore throats. The companies agreed to settle but imposed a strict gag order—something the fracking industry regularly insists upon in health-related lawsuits.

Gas extraction company Range Resources Corp. argued before O’Dell-Seneca that the companies’ privacy rights protected them from disclosing the details of the settlement. But the judge disagreed, finding the argument “meritless” because the companies have no right to privacy.

In fact, Judge O’Dell-Seneca spent roughly one-third of her 32-page decision forcefully articulating the reasons why corporations are not considered legal persons under the state’s constitution, observing that, “the constitutional rights that business entities may assert are not coterminous or homogeneous with the rights of human beings.” She continued, “It is axiomatic that corporations, companies and partnerships have no ‘spiritual nature,’ ‘feelings,’ ‘intellect,’ ‘beliefs,’ ‘thoughts,’ ‘emotions’ or ‘sensations,’ because they do not exist in the manner that humankind exists.”

“The ruling represents the first crack in the judicial armor that has been so meticulously welded together by major corporations,” Thomas Linzey, Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) executive director, told AlterNet. In what it calls a “new civil rights movement,” CELDF has helped more than 100 communities in eight states adopt a Community Bill of Rights to limit corporate personhood.

Other activists hope that Judge O’Dell-Seneca’s decisions will boost the movement for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution clarifying that corporations are not people. The Move to Amend Coalition has gathered more than 280,000 online signatures supporting such an amendment, and 12 states have passed resolutions of support.

How Breaking News Broke in Boston

Susan J. Douglas — Tue, 07 May 2013 22:14:59 +0000

In September, Gallup reported that distrust of the news media had hit a new high, with 60 percent of respondents saying they had “not very much” or no trust in the news. The recent coverage of the Boston bombings will hardly help. The whole event has raised serious questions about how speculation—some of it quite pernicious—has come to infect the news media. The New York Post’s screaming headline “Bag Men: Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon”—next to two young men, one of them a 17-year-old kid, both totally innocent—rightly created a furor, especially since Murdoch and the Post refused to apologize for this egregious defamation.

I will hardly idealize the news of the past, before the rise of the 24/7 cycle. As critics from Robert McChesney to Noam Chomsky to everyone at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting have pointed out, for decades the mainstream news media has been filled with biases and crucial omissions. But the news, typically, reported the day’s events in the immediate past tense: Congress passed a bill (or failed to), a storm hit, a court issued a ruling. Although mistakes can happen, this was relatively safe ground. Journalists had a window to get their facts straight.

But beginning in the early 1990s, around-the-clock news has become the norm, driven ever-faster by audiences primed by the Internet to receive constant information. The gaping 24/7 maw demands to be fed, and it has to be fed cheaply to maximize profits, so instead of investigative reporting or international news (both deemed too expensive), we get talking heads guessing about what might happen next. Just watch with a pad in your hand, and count how many times the words “could,” “might,” “would” and the like are used. Last fall, for example, voting machine levers had barely settled back into place before we got the speculation about whether Hillary Clinton would run in 2016.

Within this recent norm of speculation-as-news, a disaster like the Boston Marathon bombing, unfolding in real time, presents serious hazards, especially when you add Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, multiple blogs and other user-generated media to the mix. Within this maelstrom came John King’s instantly infamous claim that a law enforcement source had told him a “dark-skinned” suspect was in custody, when no one, especially no one of a café au lait hue, had been arrested. Then there was the utterly moronic: a CNN reporter speculating that something was about to break because a dog was barking—and she smelled smoke. (“We’ve got a dog, a dog that’s on its way. Interesting, that dog is barking. Whether that’s a K-9, we don’t know. But we can smell smoke.”) But probably everyone’s favorite was CNN reporter Susan Candiotti’s line during the Boston lockdown: “It’s eerie; it’s as though a bomb had dropped somewhere.” Right…

That’s not to say that media outlets haven’t pointed out these flaws—in their competitors. As soon as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken into custody, after wall-to-wall coverage, we got Round Two: wall-to-wall coverage of the coverage. Who got it wrong—John King of CNN (big time), the AP, the New York Post (also big time); and what role did social media play—like Reddit’s circulation of the rumor that a missing Brown University student was a suspect? (Reddit, to its credit, apologized for generating what it called a “witch hunt.”) CNN’s Howard Kurtz took on NBC’s Pete Williams for reporting that police were closing in on a “body” when the suspect was in fact alive; ABC derided the New York Post; David Carr of the New York Times chastised King of CNN. There wasn’t only intense competition among the corporate media to be the first to break the news, which led to both totally irresponsible and utterly inane reporting; in the aftermath there was competition about how to allocate blame and to determine who came out the worst, which led to … nothing.

Therein lies the problem. The finger-pointing is fine up to a point, and more than deserved for the Post and CNN. But past journalistic scandals have not prevented further scandals. Where is the more broad-based call for a renewed examination, across the board, of journalistic ethics and practices during disasters like this? When people stop trusting the news, they often stop following it, and such disengagement has serious consequences for maintaining anything resembling a democracy, already in deep peril in our country.

Harold Washington and the Elephant in the Room

Marilyn Katz and Bill Zimmerman — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:00:09 +0000

Thirty years ago, half of Chicago—51.7 percent, to be exact—erupted with jubilation. After two previous unsuccessful runs and despite the most ardent efforts of many, Harold Washington was elected mayor. Although today many take the victory for granted, citing the dynamism of the man and the movement, only days before the election the contest hung in the balance, and many who were at the center of the campaign, we among them, believe that only a last-minute, bold confrontation with the city’s history of racism propelled Washington across the finish line.

Two months prior to the general election, counter to the predictions of political pundits, Washington had bested sitting Mayor Jayne Byrne and then State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley to win the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Chicago. His victory was built on the strength of the African-American vote organized by long-time veterans of the civil rights movement who had over the years had forged strong bonds with progressive Latinos, Asians and White liberals—a combination that provided Washington with the 37 percent of the vote he needed to win the primary.

Like most media commentators, we in the Washington campaign were confident that the general election would be <i>pro forma</i>, as had always been the case in Chicago when the successful Democratic nominee went up against a Republican in a general election. We were wrong.

Rather than unite behind Washington, the regular Democratic Party, led by its then-chairman ”Fast Eddie” Vrdolyak, threw its support to Bernard Epton, the little-known Republican candidate. Their not-so-subtle slogan was "Epton: Before It’s Too Late.”

To our dismay, the scarcely veiled racist appeal worked. Whereas immediately after the primary, both independent and internal polls showed Washington with a commanding lead, week by week the lead eroded as white voters responded to the message that it was ‘O.K.’ to vote your race.

Even in a city known for its segregation and racist history, we were surprised by the impact and vitriol. The low point came on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1983, when former Vice-President Walter Mondale and Washington visited St. Pascal’s Church in an all-white neighborhood on the city’s Northwest Side.

With no absence of irony, as the retinue of campaign staff and leaders walked to the church, onlookers and parishioners attacked them with stones, vicious shouts and racist jeers—a scene all too reminiscent of what Martin Luther King faced when he walked through Marquette Park in 1966. Mondale and Washington had to be escorted out by the police. A local CBS cameraman filmed the event, which featured an angry middle-aged white man repeatedly shouting “nigger lover” at Mondale. The footage was played and replayed on local and national news, becoming emblematic of the state of race relations in Chicago.

While the incident may have shocked the nation, it did not seem to move Chicago’s white voters—the erosion continued. Ten days before the election, we were still losing votes. We needed to do something dramatic if we were to win. We had to confront the elephant in the room.

Throughout the campaign, we had tread carefully around the issue of race—strongly appealing to and organizing the Black vote while studiously not raising race itself as an issue. Now, however, we, who were the media team, proposed creating hard-hitting television spots using the CBS footage of the St. Pascal incident to confront the issue directly. There was great nervousness—in fact outright opposition—about doing so, particularly among the campaign's finance committee (who controlled the purse strings). The committee was comprised of older African-American businessmen who had successfully made their way in the city by consciously not confronting the issue of race directly. They feared the spots would create the kind of “backlash" that they had tried all their lives to avoid by being moderate in action if not thought.

However, finally with the tacit (albeit less-than-enthusiastic) support of the campaign manager and strong support from African American field leaders like Jacky Grimshaw, we were allowed to make two simple but powerful TV spots—although whether we would be allowed to air them remained in doubt. The first, “Pledge”, showed a racially diverse group of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, their innocent faces interspersed with footage of the St. Pascal’s mob hurling racial epithets. The screen then fades to black, with a tiny picture of Harold Washington and the slogan “Harold Washington for Mayor,” while the announcer intones, “When you vote on Tuesday, make sure it’s a vote you can be proud of.”

We put “Pledge” on the air eight days before the election. It appeared to have worked. Two days later, tracking polls revealed that Washington’s slide had stopped. The next day's numbers showed a slight increase in his support, but still not enough to win.

With only three days left and internal polls still showing us three to five points down, we were certain of the necessity of using the second, even more powerful spot, “Shame”.

“Shame” was a simple spot that opened with a series of iconic photographs—the Kennedy assassination, the My Lai massacre, the murder of Martin Luther King, the shootings at Kent State University followed by scenes of the St. Pascal’s mob. Over these powerful images an announcer simply says, “There are moments in our country’s history of which all Americans are thoroughly and profoundly ashamed. One of those moments may be happening now, here in Chicago.” The screen then faded to a picture of Harold Washington and the words “Harold Washington for Mayor,” while a voice intoned, “When you vote on Tuesday, make sure it’s a vote you can be proud of.”

We were all aware that the spot was a stretch—that even the most virulent racism in Chicago was not comparable to the murderous incidents portrayed. We also were aware, however, that if were to move even the small segment of white voters we needed to win, we needed to show something so dramatic that they would stop and think of the meaning and consequences of their actions.

Given these factors, our plan was to show “Shame” only once but at a time when virtually every potential voter would see it.

While it is hard for even those of us who were there to remember, in 1983 there were only five channels and no DVRS. By buying ads on all stations at a specific time one could reach all viewers. Taking advantage of this, without the finance committee’s knowledge we purchased a "roadblock" for the Sunday night before the election.

On April 10, 1983, “Shame” ran at 8:00 p.m. on every Chicago station and thus was seen by every person in Chicago watching television that night. Monday morning, many of the Finance Committee members were apoplectic. But on Tuesday Harold Washington won his quest to become mayor with 51.7 percent of the vote, including 19 percent of the white vote—and the rest, as they say, is history.

Did the spots make a difference? Going into the final weekend, Washington had 48 percent of the vote; on Tuesday he had gained nearly four points to ensure victory.

The campaign’s post-election polls confirmed what those of us who had fought to put the spots on had hoped for. The two spots played a large role in that final increase. They worked by confronting people with a deeper and broader view of what was happening, asking them to consider their actions in the light of history and offering a stark moral choice. Of this we are sure. They did not change all of the attitudes of the fearful white voters of Chicago, but did affect enough of them to provide the needed margin for victory.

Could this moment of collective moral examination be repeated today? Of this we are less sure.

Where once it took only four TV stations to reach every viewer in Chicago, today any particular hour’s viewing audience is fragmented among hundreds of station choices. And where there once were neutral commentators delivering the news, today most get their news in and from echo chambers of their own opinion, places that do not demand any rethinking of one's position.

Once upon a time in Chicago, two television spots made a small but decisive contribution to history. We asked the people of Chicago to reject false advertising, racial prejudice and political manipulation and instead to rise up to support a new vision of the city. While the proportion was small, some responded and made the critical difference.

The story speaks of many things: Of the power of media, for good and for ill. Of the ability of people to change. And it speaks well of the people of Chicago, who together changed history and would do so again 25 years later when they launched and carried the first African-American to the presidency.

The Gumby Act: The Republican Plan to Bend Workers Into Pretzels

Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:50:55 +0000

A century ago, workers were a lot more “flexible” than they are now. Veritable Gumbies in the mills and mines and factories they were, distorting their lives to slog 10 or 12 hours a day, for six—even seven—days a week.

Then came the 40-hour week. And weekends. And eventually sick days. And paid vacation days. Now, bosses at mills and mines and factories regard these rules as coddling and believe the workers accustomed to them are resisting corporate demands.

The GOP has an app for that. It’s called the Working Families Flexibility Act. This legislation that the Republican majority in the U.S. House is expected to pass this week would force some old-time flexibility into 21st-century workers. The forced flexibility act would award bosses the power to “offer” compensatory time off instead of overtime pay. Bosses, not workers, would determine when the comp time could be taken. The proposal puts control in corporate hands, obliging wage earners to bend over backward for bosses exactly like their Gumby ancestors were compelled to.

Trade unionists and labor rights activists died to achieve the goal of eight-hour days and 40-hour weeks. They were shot and beaten in the streets during demonstrations organized by the eight-hour movement. Their slogan was: “Eight hours for work; eight hours for rest; eight hours for what we will.”

Finally, in 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as part of the New Deal, which gave workers and families rights and security that previously had been exclusive to the wealthy.

FLSA enforces the 40-hour week with a simple measure. It requires employers to pay time and a half to wage earners for each hour worked beyond 40 in a week. That creates a financial disincentive for bosses to order work beyond 40 hours. That also creates a financial incentive for companies to avoid overtime pay by hiring more workers. That was a significant bonus during the Great Depression.

Employers still could require overtime when they needed it, but it cost them, the way it costs workers who must pay extra for child care or miss coaching a Little League game or forego Sunday dinner with parents.

Now, Republicans want to relieve corporations of their share of the cost. In fact, the GOP scheme enables corporations to profit on overtime at the expense of workers. It would reduce the financial disincentive of requiring work beyond 40 hours, which means it would also reduce the financial incentive to hire more workers. That would be a tragedy during the Great Recession.

The forced flexibility act would enable employers to give workers comp time off instead of overtime pay. Republicans contend it would be the worker’s choice, but in reality bosses foreclose options when they make it extremely clear they want comp time selected.

And they’ll want workers to “choose” comp time. That’s because workers won’t be able to specify when they’ll take the compensatory time off. Bosses will have veto power on those requests. And as workers accrue more and more hours of overtime—up to 160 a year—to be compensated later as time off, the corporation retains an increasing share of the value of their labor.

With overtime pay, the worker gets the money in the next paycheck and spends or saves it as he pleases, earning interest if he banks it. Under the GOP forced flexibility proposal, the boss can deny time off requests for as long as a year, after which the company must pay the wage earner for the extra time worked. By then, the corporation has kept the workers’ earnings, and the interest on them, for 12 months.

And if the company goes bankrupt before paying for the accumulated overtime, the GOP provides no protection for workers. Workers would lose the earnings that they would have received immediately if they had been paid time-and-a-half in the next check.

The GOP is hyping their forced flexibility bill as a measure to help women. On websites and blogs popular among women, the GOP bought ads asking Democrats if they will “stand up for” working moms by forcing women to contort themselves to employers’ whims. The same party that defeated equity measures for women like the Equal Rights Amendment and the Paycheck Fairness Act now wants the women who voted against them big time in the last election to believe the GOP forced flexibility act is good for them.

Republicans are right that women need flexibility it their work lives. The flexibility to earn 100 percent of what men do in the same jobs, instead of 23 percent less, would be great. But not so great would be a federal law giving bosses the flexibility to force women to work extra hours with a vague promise of compensatory time off some day in the future if the boss feels like granting it.

The GOP forced flexibility act is part of a list of proposals House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, calls “Making Life Work.” That’s right, Republicans intend to make life nothing but work. No eight hours for sleep. No eight hours for anything you will. Just work, Gumby, just work.

The Next Chavez?

Achy Obejas — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:47:58 +0000

The most important number to come out of April’s disputed Venezuelan election is not Nicolás Maduro’s margin of victory (1.5 or 1.8 percent, depending on who you ask). Forget, too, the 3,200 electoral irregularities alleged by opposition candidate Henrique Capriles.

The figure that should be weighing on everyone is 645,000—the number of voters, roughly, who switched sides, giving their vote to Hugo Chávez in October 2012 and then choosing Capriles in April instead of Maduro, Chávez’s chosen political heir.

And to be clear: That number, 645,000, comes not from Capriles, or from the State Department or the European Union, but from Venezuela’s own National Electoral Council (CNE), which resolutely proclaimed Maduro the winner over Capriles. In other words, Venezuela’s own Chavista-controlled and highly partisan electoral board acknowledges the Socialist Party coalition lost more than a half million votes in a mere six months.

Why the big switch? The most likely answer is that Maduro is no Chávez, and that while the people were willing to give Chávez the benefit of the doubt on the country’s recent currency devaluation (32 percent), inflation (26 percent), climbing murder rate (among the highest in the world) and increasing economic woes, they weren’t willing to extend it to Maduro.

The morning after the election, while Capriles called for a recount, Diosdado Cabello, the Chavista president of the National Assembly, called for “self-criticism.”

Both those calls were ignored. The CNE denied Capriles his recount and Cabello himself immediately began attacking the opposition. Protests exploded all over Venezuela, and by the time the smoke cleared, nine people were dead and dozens injured. Maduro banned a protest called by Capriles while promising to use a mano dura (“a strong hand”), words with an ugly dictatorial association in Latin America.

It wasn’t until an extraordinary Union of South American Nations meeting to deal with the political tension in Venezuela that the CNE agreed to a recount (which as of early May was still underway).

In the meantime, Maduro has been sworn in as president of Venezuela for the next five-some years. The Chavistas, who have led the country for the last 14 years, control the National Assembly—as well as the CNE, the Supreme Court, and 20 of 23 governorships.

What that means is this: Maduro and the Chavistas own whatever happens next. They own the economic decline and the promises to reverse it, the climbing murder rate and the promises to stop it, the decline in oil production and the promises to increase it. Whatever bill they want to pass, whatever program they want to enact, they have the structural power—and the purse strings—to do it. If they succeed, they need not share credit with anyone. But if they fail, they have absolutely no one else to blame.

Given that singular opportunity, and Maduro’s narrow victory margin, you’d think he would want to get going on some coalition-building. Instead, Maduro seems to have kicked off a campaign to marginalize the opposition. At his swearing in, rather than extend an olive branch, Maduro compared the opposition to Nazi Germany (particularly nasty given Capriles is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors). In late April, he allegedly ordered an investigation into the public statements of government workers and the firing of those found to be disloyal.

Government-controlled TV began broadcasting cadenas—a series of video loops splicing Capriles’ speeches with images of the post-election violence. Cabello called Capriles a “fascist murderer,” and Iris Varela, the minister of prisons, told a press conference she was preparing a cell for him and hoped prison would help him shed his “fascist thoughts.” Shortly thereafter, parliament set up an inquiry into the violence to determine whether Capriles should be charged with murder and conspiracy to stage a coup.

And in the meantime, with the economy in shambles, an election still in dispute and the possibility that Capriles could wind up in prison, hardly anyone is talking about those 645,000 defectors from the Chávez camp or what their action really means for Venezuela.

3 Troubling Things To Know About Billionaire Penny Pritzker

David Moberg — Fri, 03 May 2013 19:50:46 +0000

Despite her business-friendly history, billionaire heir Penny Pritzker, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce, will likely face standard Republican flak in her Senate confirmation hearings.

But progressive Democrats are the ones with real reasons to be upset with her record and that of her family, which is among the wealthiest in America. Here are just a few:

1) Union-busting. Pritzker’s family businesses have often engaged in anti-union practices. She is a director of the Hyatt Hotels, which fired and then replaced long-time room cleaners in its Boston hotels with non-union subcontracted workers. Hyatt has refused to settle several contract disputes with UNITE HERE, some lasting nearly four years, on terms similar to those accepted by other big hoteliers.

2) Conflicts of interest. The family’s $20 billion empire was built on a diverse base of businesses, including Hyatt, Marmon (an industrial conglomerate), the TransUnion credit rating agency, and many others in industries such as container leasing, insurance and travel.

The family has long had a reputation for not only accumulating its wealth through elaborate schemes of tax evasion, including offshore accounts, but also for using its political clout to win favored treatment.

For example, community and teacher union critics berated Pritzker, who recently resigned from the Chicago Board of Education, for supporting the closing of dozens of public schools because of financial pressures. At the same time, the highly profitable Hyatt was receiving financial assistance from a Tax Increment Finance fund (a pool of money intended to support blighted neighborhoods in the city) whose assets effectively had been diverted from support of the schools. Pritzker also has drawn fire for her leading role in promoting privately operated charter schools, including networks of non-profits to which she has contributed.

While some Pritzkers support Republicans, others, like Penny, are active patrons of corporate-oriented Democrats. Penny Pritzker, who knew Obama before he ran for president, served as financial chair of his first campaign and is credited with bringing in millions of dollars in donations. Many observers see her appointment to the relatively weak—if symbolically still important—commerce post as typical campaign spoils for big contributors.

But if she is approved, it will burnish her reputation and increase her potential influence. The Pritzkers, who have contributed large sums to education, medicine, architecture and the arts in their hometown of Chicago and elsewhere, gain protection from the fallout of their questionable business practices through their public image as philanthropists.

3) Shady business dealings. The Pritzkers have a long history of business malfeasance at the expense of people of modest means. In one notable case, Congress passed legislation in 2003 to address issues raised by widespread charges that the Pritzker’s credit rating agency, TransUnion, had made serious flaws in its credit reports on individuals—and then failed to correct them upon discovery.

But perhaps the most infamous and pernicious Pritzker abuse of power was the Superior Bank scandal, a predatory subprime mortgage securitization racket that led to the failure of Superior Bank in 2001 and prefigured the 2008 crash.

Penny Pritzker played a leading, decision-making role in the lead-up to the failure, which ultimately lost 1,400 depositors an estimated $10 million and cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation approximately half a billion dollars. After the Pritzkers and a family friend took over a failed suburban Chicago bank on very favorable terms in 1988, they began aggressively pursuing high-interest, high-risk subprime loans. They were able to repackage the loans in securities given an investment grade, Anderson says, because they promised to replace any failed mortgage with a good one. But as they pumped out profits for themselves, they eventually failed to live up to their promises, including a pledge to invest more capital.

Bert Ely, a prominent bank consultant, says that Superior Bank “was a really sleazy operation” and “pretty gross.” The bank essentially told others in the business to “bring us your crappiest loans you’ve got and we’ll securitize them.”

In 2001, the bank collapsed. But thanks to an unusual deal with the FDIC that allowed the Pritzkers to share in a lawsuit against the bank’s auditors, Penny and her family ultimately profited from the failure. They “didn’t own up to their responsibility,” says Ely. “My estimate is that the owners of Superior ended up making big money on the deal after taking into account tax laws, and it’s unconscionable that they made money while pensioners lost money.”

When FDIC took over, the Pritzkers continued the operation, giving it an air of legitimacy and setting up the global economy for disaster. Superior’s exploitation of securitization of sub-prime loans, coupled with federal regulators’ lax treatment of the Pritzkers, inspired other lenders, helping to spawn the huge subprime loan market in exotic derivatives that precipitated the 2008 Great Recession. “They plowed the ground,” says former Federal Reserve staffer Walker Todd. “They were the first to show how bankers could make money in the sub-prime business.”

“Penny Pritzker has still not answered for her and her family’s role in the subprime mortgage meltdown of the world-wide economy,” says bank-advisor-turned-banking-watchdog Tim Anderson.

Why it matters

The power of the Commerce Secretary is limited, with many doing little more than promoting American business. But when a Democratic president chooses a business ambassador who has played so loose with the rules, caused so much harm, and shown—despite the philanthropic overlay—so much selfishness and greed in her business practices, it sends the wrong message to an already out-of-control plutocracy.

Is this the model for American business that President Obama and the Democrats really want to promote?

What’s Speeding Global Warming

David Sirota — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:41:49 +0000

In case you missed the news, humanity spent the Earth Day week reaching another sad milestone in the history of catastrophic climate change: For the first time, measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million—aka way above what our current ecosystem can handle.

Actually, you probably did miss the news because most major media outlets didn't cover it in a serious way, if at all. Instead, they and their audiences evidently view such information as far less news-, buzz- and tweet-worthy than (among other things) the opening of George W. Bush's library and President Obama's jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Such an appetite for distraction, no doubt, comes from both those who deny the problem of climate change and those who acknowledge the crisis but nonetheless look away from what feels like an unsolvable mess.

That sense of hopelessness is understandable. After all, some of the most hyped ways to reduce carbon emissions—electric cars, mass-scale renewable energy power plants, etc.—require the kind of technological transformations that can seem impossibly unrealistic at a time when Congress can't even pass a budget.

Here's the good news, though: The fastest way to reduce climate change shouldn't seem impossible, because it requires no massive new investments, technological breakthroughs or long-term infrastructure projects. According to data compiled by former World Bank advisers Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, it just requires us all to eat fewer animal products.

In their report, Goodland and Anhang note that when you account for feed production, deforestation and animal waste, the livestock industry produces between 18 percent and 51 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Add to this the fact that producing animal protein involves up to eight times more fossil fuel than what's needed to produce an equivalent amount of non-animal protein, and you see that climate change isn't intensified only by necessities like transportation and electricity. It is also driven in large part by subjective food preferences—more precisely, by American consumers' unnecessary desire to eat, on average, 200 pounds of meat every year.

If you find it demoralizing that we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers, here's that good news I promised: In their report, Goodland and Anhang found that most of what we need to do to mitigate the climate crisis can be achieved "by replacing just one quarter of today’s least eco-friendly food products"—read: animal products—"with better alternatives." That's right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency.

The trouble, of course, is that environmentalism and conservation—like everything else—have been unduly politicized. Consequently, opposing those once-universal values now seems to be viewed by many on the right as a constructive expression of patriotic defiance. Indeed, according to one recent study, many self-described conservatives will refuse to buy a green product once they see it marketed as being environmentally responsible. Similarly, another study shows that conservatives are prone to consume more energy when warned that they are already using a lot.

In light of that, I'm sure some conservatives will read this column and send me email smugly pledging to eat even more meat than they already do, just to make some incoherent point about freedom. What they will really be proving, though, is that no matter how straightforward a climate change solution may be, we will never be able to combat the crisis until everyone is willing to sacrifice just a little bit, and nobody pretends ecological survival is anything other than what is: an apolitical, transpartisan priority.