In These Times

A Rare Admission That Money Trumps Everything Else

David Sirota — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:53 +0000

Headlines transmit information in its rawest form—and the best of headlines crystallize indelible truths. Such was the case this week when the New York Daily News blared this simple but iconic headline: "Cuomo: Minimum Wage Harder to Get Than Gay Marriage."

The story quoted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) claiming that the effort to raise wages for the poorest of his constituents represents a "broader and deeper" divide than the recent successful fight to legalize same-sex matrimony in the Empire State. Though the piece quickly dissolved into the ether, it should have received more attention because it is an important Rosetta Stone—one that translates this era's inscrutable political rhetoric into a clear admission that money trumps everything else.

Decoding this Rosetta Stone requires just a bit of contextual information from Siena College. According to the school's surveys, only 58 percent of New Yorkers support legalizing gay marriage, while a whopping 78 percent support raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50.

Put Cuomo's declaration next to those numbers, and the revelation emerges: in a political arena dominated by corporate money, the governor is acknowledging that politicians will champion initiatives that don't challenge corporate power, but will avoid promoting those that do. Not only that, Cuomo is admitting this is the case regardless of public opinion.

Events in New York illustrate the larger dynamic at work. As the New York Times reported, despite lukewarm public support, Cuomo was able to get the state legislature to legalize gay marriage after Wall Street financiers dumped cash into the campaign for equal rights. Knowing that marriage doesn't threaten their profits, these moneyed interests opted to help their ally Cuomo notch a strategic win—one that allows the governor to preen as a great liberal champion to the state's left-leaning voters, all while he simultaneously presses an anti-union, economically conservative agenda that moneyed interests support.

Now, of course, the situation is reversed. With New York's recession-battered voters supporting a minimum wage hike, the greed-is-good crowd is firmly aligned against the initiative. Why? Because unlike gay marriage, which requires no corporate sacrifice, the modest minimum wage boost may slightly reduce corporate profits—and that's something the fat cats in the executive suites never permit without a fight.

Knowing this, a hack like Cuomo—a guy who asks "how high?" when his campaign contributors say "jump"—is using his power to undermine the popular minimum wage initiative. In this case, he is cooking up a self-fulfilling prophecy about the measure being a political non-starter.

Not surprisingly, this sleight of hand is not limited to one locale. In Colorado, Democratic activists have cast Gov. John Hickenlooper as a great liberal for supporting same-sex civil unions, all while he loyally shills for oil and gas corporations. At the federal level, the Obama reelection campaign is doing the same, trumpeting the president as a progressive hero for endorsing gay marriage, all while he slow-walks tougher bank regulations.

Even on Wall Street itself, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has lately portrayed himself as a great humanitarian. As proof, he doesn't cite any willingness to acknowledge financial-sector crimes. Instead, he cites his decision to become the Human Rights Campaign's national spokesman for gay marriage.

Noting all this isn't to disparage the push for same sex marriage (I'm a strong supporter!)—it is merely to spotlight a bait and switch whereby social issues are increasingly used to perpetuate the economic status quo.

Obviously, it's possible to simultaneously guarantee equal rights and fix the economy. But as New York most recently proves, it's much harder to do both when money dictates political outcomes, and when bought-off politicians employ social issues as an excuse to ignore economic justice.

Torie Osborn Crashes the Party

Steve Early — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:48:12 +0000

In 2008, thousands of Obama campaign volunteers got fired up about electoral politics in a way they hadn't been before. Four years later, some are now running for office themselves. But few have made a bigger splash in local Democratic circles than former In These Times staffer Torie Osborn, a nationally-known advocate for gay and lesbian rights and other progressive causes. Her insurgent campaign for a California Assembly seat has roiled the waters of Los Angeles-area liberalism and bucked the legislative leadership in Sacramento, which is circling the wagons around her main opponent.

If Santa Monica-based Osborn beats Assemblywoman Betsy Butler in the newly-created 50th Assembly district—either on June 5 or in a November general election run-off—her victory over the party establishment will be a Left Coast monument to what might have been possible, in more places, if Obama's campaign organization (or the Democratic Party) had been serious about grassroots movement building. "There could have been 100, or even 1,000 Torie Osborns, who came out of the network of energized people trying to change American politics in 2008," says California political consultant Paul Kumar, an admirer of Osborn's "extraordinary campaign organization."

Given her strong resume as a community organizer, non-profit organization leader, and influential advisor to several Los Angeles mayors, it's been surprising to some that Osborn's well-funded first-time bid for public office wasn't welcomed by Assembly Speaker John Pérez and other Democratic legislators. After helping to launch this magazine as a founding staff member in the mid-1970s, she played leadership roles in the National Organization for Women, a pioneering Los Angeles clinic for HIV/AIDS sufferers, and the national Gay and Lesbian Task Force that mobilized hundreds of thousands of civil rights marchers in Washington in 1993. While serving as director of Liberty Hill Foundation, and later with United Way, she helped channel millions of dollars from well-heeled Hollywooders into Los Angeles neighborhood projects dealing with gang violence, low-income housing, and environmental issues. Osborn's latest work, with California Calls, has focused on boosting voter registration in the state and building a coalition to end "loopholes for giant corporate property owners and the requirement of a two-thirds supermajority vote by legislators to increase taxes."

As San Francisco lawyer and Democratic Party activist Paul Hogarth noted in a February 2012 post on the Bay Area political blog Beyond Chron, California's just-completed redistricting process has given "Democrats an historic opportunity to pick up seats in November— and win a two-thirds majority that would make Republicans irrelevant." Instead, Hogarth charged, "[Speaker] Pérez has diverted resources from competitive 'swing districts' and is instead meddling into Democratic primary fights in deep-blue seats" so he can "consolidate control at the expense of everything else." The chances of the Democrats gaining the necessary two additional seats in both houses of the legislature has decreased, as a result.

The back-story to Butler vs. Osborn explains how and why. First elected to the assembly in 2010, after a career as an environmental group fundraiser, Butler won office by bravely defeating a Tea Party Republican in the South Bay communities of Torrance, Redondo Beach, Marina Del Rey and El Segundo. Through redistricting last year, more conservative voters were added to this electorate, but the Democrats still have a slight edge among those registered overall. Nevertheless, with full backing from Pérez (and 35 other Democratic legislators), Butler abandoned her constituents and fled from a re-match with the Republican she defeated last time (leaving that job this year to a weaker and now under-funded Democrat). From her new address in Beverly Hills, she announced a campaign for "re-election" in the re-jiggered 50th district that includes just 1.7 percent of the voters she currently represents.

Despite Osborn's previously announced candidacy and active support from local Democratic clubs, Pérez began twisting arms to secure big donations for Butler from statewide labor and environmental PACs. Using appointed delegates, he engineered state party convention backing for Butler in February. Since last year, Pérez and other legislators have personally donated more to their carpet-bagging colleague ($88,000) than to any other Democratic candidate for the assembly. Among the commercial interests flocking to Butler's banner is the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, a landlords' group that opposes rent control in West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and other communities that still have it. Meanwhile, back in the South Bay, the campaign of Butler's would-be Democratic successor, Torrance School Board member Al Muratsuchi, has been largely ignored by Butler donors in the state legislature. Legislative staffers from Sacramento, who could be aiding Muratsuchi's GOTV efforts against two GOP primary foes, will instead be dispatched, at Pérez's direction, to the 50th district as "volunteers" for Butler.

Under California's new "jungle primary" system, Democrats and Republicans run against each other in the same preliminary field; the top two finishers go on to a general election re-match in November. In a safe liberal district like the new 50th, that means that the competing Democratic campaigns of Osborn and Butler (or of a third possible top-tier finisher, Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom) will continue to consume financial resources that could have been used to unseat Republicans elsewhere. The several million dollars raised by Osborn, Butler, or their supporters will balloon to much greater spending during five-month's of post-primary campaigning within the same electorate of 300,000.

Among those voters are AT&T workers who belong to Communications Workers of America Local 9003, headed by T Santora. He reports that CWA's Southern California Council broke with the California and Los Angeles labor federations to endorse the "more home-grown" Osborn—after interviewing both candidates and taking into account Butler's pro-labor voting record. "Betsy's a nice lady," Santora says. "But her claiming the crown as the incumbent didn't work with our members—it just rubbed people the wrong way. If Betsy wasn't in the legislature, nobody would know who she was. And, since she's been there, she's never reached out to us."

In contrast, past legislators from the area had strong local ties to labor, tenants, consumers, environmentalists, and healthcare reformers. Santa Monica and its environs was the political base for Tom Hayden's successful post-New Left reincarnation as a state assemblyman and, later, senator. When he was term-limited out of office, Hayden passed the torch to public interest lawyer Sheila Kuehl, who became California's most effective legislative campaigner for single-payer health care. Both Hayden and Kuehl (Osborn's former partner) encouraged Osborn's run this year. According to Kuehl, "Torie absolutely fits this district. She's been a leader of one of the most successful civil rights movements of our time. Then she made the transition from LBGT campaigning to working on issues related to poverty, homelessness, and income inequality well ahead of Occupy."

On June 5 (and hopefully November 6, as well), voters in the 50th Assembly district will have a choice between someone who's already part of a cozy (if dysfunctional) incumbent protection club in Sacramento and a party crasher who plans to show up there next January with no political debts to anyone except voters who want a voice, not an echo, in the state capitol.

Dissecting the GOP Brain

Theo Anderson — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:00:30 +0000

Did humans evolve over the course of millions of years, or were we created by God just a few thousand years ago? A letter signed by more than 50 scientific societies in 2009 said that the theory of evolution is "the foundation of modern biology, and is crucial in fields as diverse as agriculture, computer science, engineering, geology and medicine." The letter was addressed to the Texas State Board of Education. That group, dominated by creationists, had only faith and the Bible on its side, yet it was squarely within the American mainstream. Polls show that about 40 percent of the population believes God created humans within the last 10,000 years.

Do tax cuts increase revenues? Is abstinence education more effective than comprehensive sex education? Does human activity create climate change? The answers are no, no and yes, if you believe experts and the body of empirical evidence that has emerged from their work over the past several decades. But clearly, many Americans don't believe experts and empirical evidence, and instead choose to base their opinions on little more than faith, or on dubious experts whose work is considered marginal within their field.

What exactly is going on when humans choose to reject truth claims that emerge from experimentation and actual evidence? And why is it that conservatives are far more likely than liberals to hold counter-factual opinions?

In his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality, Chris Mooney aims to explain why Republicans "deny science -- and reality." He looks for answers primarily in the field of psychology -- the "rarely discovered continent in our politics" -- and what he finds is fascinating and frightening. It isn't news that many Republicans hold contrarian beliefs. But did you know more education often leads to a greater level of reality denial? According to Mooney's statistics, 19 percent of college-educated Republicans believe human activity is responsible for global warming, while 31 percent of Republicans without a college degree believe so. And the same is true of the most politically engaged Republicans: The most "knowledgeable" are also the most misinformed, and presenting them with counter-evidence only makes them more sure of themselves.

It isn't that Republicans explicitly want to be detached from reality. They claim their own version of things is true, obviously. The root of the trouble is that holding beliefs that square with reality is less important to them than their need for certainty and for loyalty to their tribe. This is especially true of a subset of conservatives Mooney calls "authoritarians," who are particularly allergic to uncertainty and fiercely refuse to modify their beliefs in response to new evidence. They "extol traditional values, are very conventional, submit to established leaders, and don't seem to care much about dissent or civil liberties." When Mooney describes the "Republican" brain, it's mainly these authoritiarian conservatives who he has in mind. He doesn't attempt to quantify them, but they seem to constitute a significant minority within the GOP -- perhaps between one-third and one-half of the party's voters.

Authoritarians are best understood in contrast to their antithesis, what Mooney calls the "open" personality, which he says is the defining characteristic of liberals. Being an open personality means seeking out new experiences and having a basic curiosity about foreign ideas, people and places. Open personalities are also driven by a need for self-expression, and they value creativity with the same enthusiasm that conservatives, particularly authoritarians, value conformity.

These links between psychology and politics are well-established and supported by a solid body of scholarly work, according to Mooney. But we have less ground for certainty about the physiology of those links: how the brains of conservatives and liberals might literally be different. There is suggestive but not definitive evidence that the size of the amygdala -- "an almond-shaped bunch of neurons located in an evolutionarily older part of the brain, the limbic system" -- may play a role in one's political orientation. The amygdala is strongly associated with fear; one of its tasks is to "structure our life-preserving defense responses." Experiments have shown that conservatives tend to have bigger and more active amygdalas, but the field of "neuropolitics" is in its early stages, as Mooney notes. It's clear, though, that genetics helps shape our political beliefs. According to Mooney, "40 percent or more of the variability in our political outlooks is ultimately attributable to genetic influences."

It's also clear that, whatever the extent of its physiological origin, fear is a major motivator in the GOP's drive to deny reality. In The Republican Brain and in his previous work, The Republican War On Science, Mooney describes the network of institutions and counter-experts that conservatism has fostered over the past several decades. The well-known think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, are just the beginning. There are dozens of smaller institutions that are little-known outside of conservative circles but enormously influential within them. One example is WallBuilders, which is devoted to "America's forgotten history and heroes" and presents a highly mythologized, Christian-focused account of the nation's past. The head of WallBuilders, David Barton, has accused President Obama of being anti-Biblical.

In field after field, from economics to political philosophy to the sciences, such institutions and "experts" have created a counter-narrative that challenges and often inverts the mainstream consensus. Their aim isn't to get at the truth as it is commonly understood. Instead, it is to bind believers together and reinforce their faith. In a world that seems increasingly perilous and incomprehensible, this faith offers a measure of security. Indeed, facts seem to matter so little to modern Republicans because the facts are irrelevant to -- or else a threat to -- the elaborate alternate realities that they've constructed. And the reason the most highly educated and engaged Republicans are also the most detached from reality is that they're aware of the opposing points of view. So keeping the faith requires continual rationalizations. In other words, it takes more than cluelessness to be a reality-denying Republican. It takes hard work.

Mooney paints the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives in broad strokes. More precision -- and more breadth -- would be welcome. Precisely how do we explain, for example, the astonishing exceptionalism of American conservatism in relationship to much of Western Europe, where conservatives are far more comfortable with scientific expertise and modernity in general? This nation's high level of religiosity surely has much to do with the disparity -- but how does that fact square with the psychological and physiological determinism at the heart of his book?

And are there any plausible solutions? It's ironic The Republican Brain will only heighten the dilemma that Mooney presumably wants to help resolve. The dilemma is that conservatives won't read or engage with this kind of book.

Mooney goes to great lengths to say that the Republican brain isn't necessarily bad, just different, but his provocations can only sound to conservatives like more liberal smugness and self-righteousness. The book's premise suggests that a solution to the dilemma he lays out is virtually impossible, and Mooney offers none, aside from a vague hope that we can all learn to appreciate our differences. But the unsettling truth is that the health and future of our democracy depend in large part on whether there are, in fact, any real solutions.

Why A Cyber Security Bill Will Pass

Kenneth Rapoza — Thu, 24 May 2012 03:50:30 +0000

It's been a year of one step forward, one step backward for Internet freedom and privacy advocates.

The tug of war over the Internet's cherished anonymity and chaotic democracy has government on one side and the public on the other holding tight. But at one point in the not-so-distant future, the gamers and the hackers and the libertarian haters of government regulation will prove no match for reality.

Every day, the Internet becomes less safe. This isn't just the view from Washington; it is also the view from Moscow and Paris cyber security officials in government and in the private sector.

"Cyberspace is crucial for social and economic development and we are getting to a point where attacks can destroy the Internet infrastructure," said Alexander Ntoko of the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency.

The orks--a rainbow blend of common hackers to rich cyber gangs and nation-states--are busting through the web's door. They are armed with botnets. Their best and brightest write code in their sleep. The privacy rights of those inside the gates are casualties in a multi-billion dollar war that is fast becoming a top defense priority for Washington. Falling face first in the mud, however, might not be the end of the world when this tug of war is finished--providing legislators can assure individual rights to privacy if snared in a dragnet of online criminal investigations.

"If enough amendments can be made to protect civil liberties, then a lot of the opposition will be removed," said Rainey Reitman, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "We are working with Congress to make those amendments."

More than the people vs. Hollywood

In the public fight to preserve Internet freedom, the biggest victory was the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in January. Thousands of individuals and activist groups like the recently defunct Media Access Project convinced legislators to shelve the bill, biting the hands of many Hollywood lobby groups that feed them. It's a rare day when grassroots activism works to defeat a bill sponsored by a major industry. But industry's support for SOPA's industry was actually relatively weak. The bill was also a one-trick pony focusing solely on copyright infringement, an issue everyone knew was in the interest of big media.

The latest Internet bills have nothing to do with copyright issues, and everything to do with security threats. The House of Representative's Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, and its deeper bill in the Senate, the 205-page Cyber Security Act of 2012, are different. In the tug of cyber war, these Acts are the sumo wrestler at the end of the rope, heels dug firmly into the sand. Cyber security is supported by the nation's most powerful lobby groups, like The American Petroleum Institute and the American Bankers Association, plus a diverse group of corporations like Facebook, Boeing and Microsoft, all of whom have experienced attacks from cyber criminals that are not interested in privacy rights. On the contrary, they are out to steal private information, whether it's credit-card account data or radar technology secrets of the F-16.

In this fight, it's not the people versus Hollywood; it's the people versus a lot of big guys from a lot of different companies that have nothing to do with each other.

CISPA easily passed the house on April 26. Senate bill S. 2105 will be voted on in June at the earliest, according to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It already has some deterrents on the Democratic side, like Minnesota Senator Al Franken, who argue that the omnibus bill erases decades of privacy laws allowing companies to share consumer information with law enforcement and spy agencies without facing legal repercussions. It's the bill's biggest downfall.

Hal Halpin, president of the Connecticut-based Entertainment Consumers Association, a group mostly representing the rights of gamers, wrote a letter to the Senate opposing the Cyber Security Act on May 10, together with like-minded associations.

"These bills were clearly written to transfer rights and responsibilities to the government and private corporations, leaving consumers rights hobbled," Halpin said. "Right now, my browsing or searching history is private. With the passage of this bill, it is not. Politicians are supposed to be vigilant about protecting our rights, not creating legislation that erodes much of our privacy rights that stem from the Forth Amendment," he said, referring to citizens' right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures.

Erik Martin, general manager at Reddit, a social media site that opposed SOPA, weighed in on the same side of the argument. "We lose credibility with our customers if they can't trust us to protect their information."

Yet like a TransUnion credit report, our private data is being searched all the time without us knowing. Unless individuals are involved in criminal online activity causing millions of dollars of damage, what are the chances of their private information being used by law enforcement to cause harm?

Hands off my Internet

From a Microsoft spokesman's point of view, CISPA's passing was the first step in the coordinated fight against cyber crime. Since November, there has been active dialogue with groups like EFF to address concerns about the House bill, and several important changes were incorporated.

As passed by the House, cyber threat and vulnerability information shared with the federal government can only be used specifically in cases related to cybercrime, national security, to protect individuals from death or bodily harm, or in child pornography cases. On the right, some legal scholars like Paul Rosenzweig of the conservative Heritage Foundation wonder what would happen if the FBI uncovered serious economic espionage or drug dealing. Would those matters fall under national security? Or would they be passed over altogether? Progressive groups like EFF wonder what would happen if a company was discovered to be hiring illegal immigrants; could that be interpreted as a national security issue by a court?

Here's where the CISPA bill sponsors are right. In cyber space, there is indeed an advanced persistent threat. Cyber security is going military. It is now a question of whether a law passes before foreign state-sponsored hackers shut down a natural gas pipeline in the dead of winter, or after.

Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab in Moscow, one of the largest Internet and software security firms in the market, said the Internet has become so insecure that it is only a matter of time before cyber crime or cyber warfare takes down a company or an important piece of infrastructure in the United States. (Kaspersky Lab was one of the companies that helped uncover Stuxnet, a worm believed to have been created by U.S. and Israeli defense forces to sabotage uranium enrichment in Iran.)

"If we fail to patch these holes in the Internet from these threats, then the Internet as we know it is gone," Kaspersky said at a Cancun conference I attended in February.

While it may sound alarmist, intrusions into corporate networks, personal computers, and government systems are occurring every day by the thousands. The FBI is already sharing information with the private sector and has prevented cyber attacks before they've occurred, said FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry at a cyber security conference in Baltimore on Oct. 20.

There are users for whom maintaining their privacy is worth the risk of intrusions into their computers or networks. But for certain critical uses of the Internet, where intrusions are entirely unacceptable because the risk of compromise is too great, something has to be done, Henry said. President Obama wants to sign a cyber security bill, but he doesn't want to do so at the risk of harming consumer privacy rights. In that regard, groups like EFF may get a more palatable bill.

American Workers: Shackled to Labor Law

Josh Eidelson — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:56 +0000

Republicans hate the National Labor Relations Board. But they're not the only ones. In speeches to workers and testimony in Congress in the '80s and '90s, then-AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland repeatedly declared that union members would be better served by "the law of the jungle." Some union presidents agreed, including Richard Trumka, who now heads the AFL-CIO. In 1987, Trumka called for abolishing both the law's "provisions that hamstring labor" and "the affirmative protections of labor that it promises but does not deliver."

In other words, it's not just Mitt Romney who argues the National Labor Relations Board -- which interprets and enforces labor law -- does more harm than good.

That's in part because the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), as amended by Congress and interpreted by the courts, bans or restricts labor's most effective tactics. The occupations of workplaces that fueled momentum for the NLRA, passed by Congress in 1935, are now illegal under it. The aggressive strikes -- shutting down workplaces or even entire cities -- that forged the modern labor movement have largely been replaced with strikes that are essentially symbolic. While anti-choice groups can target Planned Parenthood by pressuring the Komen Foundation not to fund it, and progressives can hurt Rush Limbaugh by calling on advertisers to drop his show, unions face unique legal restrictions on mounting equivalent "secondary boycott" campaigns that spread a struggle throughout a supply chain.

Of course, when Republican presidential candidates bash the NLRB, it's for restricting business, not unions. On paper, the NLRA actually commits the government "to promote collective bargaining" and requires most companies to recognize and negotiate with unions that win elections. It made it illegal for companies to spy on, threaten or retaliate against workers for union activism or other "concerted activity."

But reality has proven to be a different story. "This labor law is a scam," says Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America. "It is garbage. ... It's a fucking lie."

Getting around a failing law

During an organizing drive, managers can legally hold mandatory anti-union meetings in which they predict that unionization would shut down the company. Even when workers win a union election, 52 percent of the time they haven't won a union contract a year later, because managers can legally sabotage union contract negotiations by refusing to concede anything. If a union contract is in place, once it's up for re-negotiation managers can legally lock out union members, denying them any work until they accept a worse contract or vote out the union.

And companies don't restrict themselves to these legal union-busting tactics. In 57 percent of union elections, employers threaten to shut down the worksite. In 34 percent, they fire union activists. When a union activist is illegally fired, it's difficult to prove that the firing was retaliatory -- and even if the government sides with the union, generally the worst that can happen to management is being forced to reinstate the worker with back pay. This process often takes years, which can be more than enough time to quash an organizing campaign. Fred Feinstein, who served under President Clinton as the NLRB's top prosecutor, says the penalties available against employers "don't provide any deterrence" for companies set on breaking a union.

Efforts to reform this legal imbalance have been failing for decades. Where labor is succeeding, it's often in spite of or outside of the law, not because of it. Major unions have abandoned government-run elections in favor of "comprehensive campaigns" that leverage some combination of worker, consumer, media and political pressure to extract agreements from companies not to terrorize or stonewall. By blocking tracks, spilling grain, and defying a restraining order in Longview, Wash., members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (with help from Occupy) beat back a company's attempt to do their jobs without them. Other labor organizations -- like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, or "workers' centers" -- are growing and achieving victories through activism without identifying as unions at all.

"The majority of our work in Justice for Janitors was trying to figure out how to negotiate around the secondary boycott laws," says Stephen Lerner, the architect of that campaign for the Service Employees International Union. In the Justice for Janitors campaign, labor law restricted the Service Employees union (SEIU) from targeting building owners, even though they -- rather than the contractors who technically employed the janitors -- were the real decision-makers.

Some of labor's dramatic victories in recent years have come from organizations that, by choice or necessity, operate outside of the protections and prohibitions of labor law. Longtime farm worker Gerardo Reyes works for one such organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). The Florida-based group doesn't identify itself as a union, it doesn't seek recognition as one by management or by the government, and it doesn't negotiate union contracts. But CIW has extracted "Fair Food" agreements from the growers who directly employ farm workers. CIW has won and defended agreements with the growers by pressuring -- and sometimes boycotting -- well-known companies at the other end of the supply chain. In February, following a multi-year campaign, CIW achieved an agreement with Trader Joe's under which the company will only buy tomatoes from growers following "Fair Food" rules.

For farm workers under CIW agreements, says Reyes, "it is better as it is right now" than it would be under the NLRA. "Would we be better off if workers in Florida or in the entire nation were covered? It's hard to tell, because that's not our reality ... so we just work with what we have."

A sobering debate

Others argue that stripping away labor law would leave unions far worse off -- not because current law removes the need for aggressive worker activism, but because withdrawing the formal protection for union activity would make such activism much harder to pull off.

"If we took away the NLRA right now," says Cornell University Labor Education Director Kate Bronfenbrenner, labor "would lose the protections that they do have when employers try to break unions." While harshly critical of the current labor law regime, Bronfenbrenner suggests that labor leaders may use it as a scapegoat in an era of declining unionization. "It is not like unions are using the power they have" under current law, says Bronfenbrenner, who thinks labor should aggressively build coalitions, mount anti-corporate campaigns and nurture workplace activism.

Yet the fact is, if a union wanted to test its luck with fewer legal restrictions on strikes and boycotts and no legal right to recognition or negotiations, it could do so right now by legally dissolving itself and re-constituting as something more like the CIW. Historian and New Labor Forum editor-at-large Steve Fraser argues that the downside of the NLRA may be less in the explicit restrictions it enforces than in the way its existence has "locked the trade union movement into a juridical way of proceeding" and made it "doubt other tactics."

The law is unlikely to change, argues Lerner, as long as politicians "think the consequence of not having labor law reform is there's no conflict" with the powers that be (both corporate and political). "We're more likely to get labor law reform if we're out there mass organizing the private sector and demonstrating the need." To fix the law, he argues, we need conditions like the ones that birthed it: hundreds of thousands of workers pushing against -- and beyond -- the limits of current law by organizing, occupying or going on strike. It takes "ammunition," says Lerner, "to prove ... there's a crisis that needs to be fixed."

After the Killing

Rebecca Burns — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:00:56 +0000

Nearly a month after the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, something unusual happened: The shooting of a black teenager became the subject of national attention. When 911 recordings of the incident were released, they suggested neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman had not carried out the shooting in self-defense, as he had claimed and as police in Sanford, Fla., had accepted, but had in fact stalked Martin through the gated community where Martin's father lived on the assumption that the unarmed youth represented a threat. As news of the incident spread, tens of thousands took part in "hoodie marches" protesting the profiling of youth of color and reigniting the discussion of racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.

It is doubtful that the eventual arrest of Zimmerman would have occurred without such mobilization. But can the movement achieve broader aims in the pursuit of racial justice? In These Times turned to three authors and organizers to explore the potential of this movement: Michelle Alexander, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; Kali Akuno, director of human rights education at the U.S. Human Rights Network; and Brittney Cooper, a fellow at the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, and co-founder of the blog Crunk Feminist Collective.

What about the Trayvon Martin case has galvanized public and media attention?

Kali: This generation is being bombarded by a post-racial narrative, and this incident was a shock to that narrative. The national attention to Trayvon's murder has rekindled the people-centered memory of centuries of pain and oppression suffered here in the United States.

Michelle: At the same time, what's been lost in the conversation is that what happened on that street that night wasn't aberrational -- it was quite normal. What made the situation unusual is that Zimmerman didn't have a badge with his gun. If he had, we wouldn't even know Trayvon Martin's name today.

The primary demand of those pushing for justice for Trayvon has been Zimmerman's arrest. Now that he has been charged with murder, where could the movement go from here?

Michelle: The goal for advocacy shouldn't be just for Zimmerman to be found guilty, but for his mindset to be found guilty. In our zeal to see Zimmerman held accountable, we may be missing an important opportunity to have a moment of honest conversation and healing. While listening to an interview with Trayvon's mother, it occurred to me that perhaps even more than punishment, what she was seeking was restorative justice. She said that she had so many questions that she wanted to ask Zimmerman: Did he understand that Trayvon was just an unarmed teenager? I hope now that Zimmerman has been arrested, we'll seek to build a movement that isn't just about locking someone up for as long as possible.

Brittney: At the same time, the thing that's so profound to me is that it took marches of tens of thousands of people and a petition with two million signatures merely to get an arrest. That bespeaks the challenges that we face in turning this into a larger conversation. We have an inability to see black men as able to be victimized, so we needed all those people in the street just to convince folks that Trayvon was a victim.

This case has also called attention to "stand your ground" laws, with many activists now pushing for their repeal. Is it enough to target policies like these?

Kali: There is a serious crisis confronting the black community that needs to be dealt with on a much more profound level. Research conducted by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the U.S. Human Rights Network has discovered 36 black men and women who have been killed either by police, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes since January 2012. We're calling for a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice to be created at the federal level and then instituted at every level of government.

Michelle: Viewing one individual law or practice as the cause of Trayvon Martin's death is very problematic. Our justice system has been infected with the Zimmerman mindset for decades: a mindset that views black men in particular as a problem to be controlled. It has led to the War on Drugs, a "get tough" movement and a prison-building boom unprecedented in modern history. It's this system that must be the target -- not just piecemeal policy reform.

Could this moment help build the movement against mass incarceration, which you famously argue has created a new racial caste system?

Michelle: This incident will only become transformational if people begin to connect the dots between what happened to Trayvon Martin and what's happening to millions of other folks of color who are cycling in and out of the criminal justice system and are ultimately locked up and locked out. Today, hundreds of thousands of black and brown young men are subjected to the very kinds of interrogations that Zimmerman was trying to carry out because of "stop-and-frisk" policies. But we treat these policies as the price that black men must pay for the security of others.

Trayvon's death has highlighted how young black men are disproportionately affected by this system. But who else needs to be brought into this movement?

Brittney: One of the challenges of engaging in this narrative of endangered black men -- which is a legitimate crisis -- is that it makes it more difficult to talk about the fact that the fastest-growing rate of incarcerated folks is black women. But the forms of violence affecting black men have always affected black women as well. When black men are pulled out of communities, that affects black women's circumstances. Once we do begin to talk about the need for new forms of justice, we'll have to bring black women's experiences of violence into the conversation.

Kali: And in addition to black women, one of the fastest-growing areas of incarceration and detainment is in immigrant communities. Massive numbers of folks have been arrested in the past few years, and more than one million deported. We've got to make that link in our organizing. The system is not broken. It's been built to be the way it is. To transform it we have to build multinational, multiracial alliances.

So how can organizers build on momentum and keep this from being treated as an isolated tragedy?

Brittney: One of the challenges of recognizing that we have a new system of racial control, "Jim Crow 2.0," is that folks are still looking to the leadership models of the previous era -- the "great black racial leaders" model of Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. There's a lot of community-based organizing that has to happen in order to build momentum for another mass movement. If we focus on empowering communities to think about their problematic laws and how to change policing in their cities, these efforts have the potential to converge. But if we're looking for a top-down national movement where leaders tell us where and when to march, we're setting ourselves up for failure.

Michelle: What I want to see is more advocates willing to say the unpopular thing in a time when even speaking about race is viewed as a violation of social etiquette. In the Obama age, it's easy to be made to feel as though you're crazy or hysterical when you draw links between individual cases and systemic circumstances. But if we're going to build this movement, it's going to take a lot of bold truth-telling that has been missing from public discourse for far too long.

The GOP’s Dukakis Problem

Theo Anderson — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:00:37 +0000

Among Republican partisans, it's peak season for trash-talk. Polls show President Obama and Mitt Romney engaged in a close race, with Obama having a one- to two-point edge when recent polls are averaged. If you believe recent conservative punditry, though, it's already game over. The fat lady has sung. Obama is a one-and-done president.

"It's mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud for President Obama," Joseph Curl observed last week in the right-wing Washington Times. Curl feels that "the panic and desperation of Team Obama is palpable. . . They definitely know something we don't yet know -- and it isn't good." In American Thinker, Bruce Walker wrote that "there is a conservative voting trend building, and its momentum is going to make it truly terrifying for liberals come November."

Curl and Walker are actually restrained compared with Dick Morris, who performed the equivalent of a naked victory dance over the ashes of the Obama campaign earlier this month. Morris opined that voters who are undecided almost never end up voting for the sitting president. "So when polls show President Obama at 45 percent of the vote," Morris wrote, "they are really reflecting a likely 55-45 Romney victory, at the very least."

So November will bring not just an Obama defeat, but one of the most humiliating rejections of a sitting president in the history of U.S. elections. And that's "at the very least." No wonder Republicans can barely contain themselves.

Is there any substance behind the GOP's trash-talk? A little perspective might be helpful. Take the case of Michael Dukakis, the Democrats' presidential nominee in 1988.

In mid-May, 1988, a newly released New York Times/CBS poll showed Dukakis leading George H.W. Bush by 10 points, 49 percent to 39 percent. He had trailed Bush by a slight margin in the same poll two months earlier.

The May poll showed that voters didn't yet know much about Dukakis. But "among those who do have a view of him," the Times reported, "Mr. Dukakis was viewed favorably. Over all, 38 percent of registered voters had a favorable view of him, while 14 percent had an unfavorable view."

Most surprisingly, Dukakis polled relatively well with conservatives, mainly because voters didn't think of him as a liberal. Twenty-seven percent of registered voters -- and only a third of conservatives -- identified Dukakis as a liberal. Among the strong majority of conservatives who didn't identify him as a liberal, Dukakis ran about even with Bush.

By the end of July, a Gallup poll showed Dukakis still leading the race by six points -- 47 percent to 41 percent. The big political story of the next few months was how that lead eroded, and how Dukakis ended up winning just 111 electoral votes to Bush's 426 votes, and losing the popular vote by a spread of about eight points.

It turned out that when voters actually learned more about Dukakis, they didn't like him much. That was because the GOP succeeded in portraying him as an out-of-touch, weak-on-defense liberal. Dukakis responded by trying to remain true to his principles while recasting himself as a Cold War warrior, something he obviously wasn't. Trying to be himself while also reinventing himself, he confused and alienated voters.

Two major gaffes during the 1988 campaign reflected that tension. On the one hand, during a debate, Dukakis said that he would oppose the death penalty even for a person convicted of raping and murdering his wife. It was less the substance of his answer than the dispassionate delivery that damaged Dukakis. He came off as exactly what the Bush campaign had been saying he was: an out-of-touch bureaucrat.

On the other hand, Dukakis strapped on a helmet and rode around in a tank, grinning, and gave the GOP a gift that kept on giving. The attempt at reinvention was too obvious and pandering, and the imagery was flat-out ridiculous.The Bush campaign used the footage in a commercial, playing it against a list of military spending and interventions that Dukakis had opposed. The ad closed by calling Dukakis a risk America couldn't afford.

That attack rang true for voters because Dukakis never found a way to present himself, or articulate his liberalism, in a way that didn't come off as either bloodlessly bureaucratic or ludicrously out of character.

It's usually Democrats who struggle with this dilemma. Al Gore and John Kerry were poster children for it. But now, with Mitt Romney as their man, the GOP is saddled with the Michael Dukakis problem. Romney is torn between being himself -- a man of extreme wealth and privilege -- and being a reinvented version of himself who appeals to the average voter. So we have him, on one hand, saying that he won't apologize for his father's wealth and referring casually to "the couple of Cadillacs" that his wife drives. And then we have him telling a group of unemployed people who are struggling to find work that "I'm also unemployed."

The recent Republican gloating about the doomed Obama campaign is rooted in the slow economic recovery, and in the sense that Obama's accomplishments are unpopular with a wide segment of the voting public. And it's true that the president is vulnerable to both lines of attack. But it's also true that Bush was even more vulnerable than Obama at this point in the 1988 campaign. The same poll that gave Dukakis a ten-point lead in May also gave the Reagan administration an approval rating in the low- to mid-30s on a wide range of important issues; and it showed that 40 percent of voters believed that Democrats would do a better job of addressing the nation's problems, while 29 percent believed Republicans would do the better job.

It looked like a cakewalk for Democrats, in other words, until voters paid attention to the party's actual nominee. When they did, in the late summer, they found a man who sent all kinds of mixed messages about who he was and why they should vote for him. And so they chose the Bush -- a boring leftover from of an unpopular administration, but at least a known quantity.

When voters begin paying attention to Mitt Romney late this summer, what will they see? The wealthy venture capitalist? The "also unemployed" populist? Some of both, most likely, in addition to whatever reinventions Romney can muster in the interim.

The trash-talking pundits might want to ponder this reality. American voters haven't been kind to such divided personalities, as Dukakis and other Democratic candidates since him have learned the hard way.

Our Silent Spring

Molly Bennet — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:59:15 +0000

Fifty years ago, America was on its way to being the kind of place few species would want to inhabit. Toxic waste flowed into rivers, soot floated out of smokestacks and pesticides were driving some species to the brink of extinction. Then, amid the turbulence of the 1960s and early 1970s, people began to realize that the earth might be something worth protecting. The result was our modern framework of environmental advocacy and regulation: Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency and passed landmark legislation like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act; advocacy groups like Greenpeace, Environmental Defense Fund and the National Resources Defense Council were born; and older organizations like the Sierra Club were reinvigorated. On April 22, 1970, about 20 million people participated in the first Earth Day. The healing began.

It's a familiar narrative -- and would be a happy one if it ended there. Instead, today we face the gravest environmental threat that humanity has ever known -- a threat that our system of environmental protection, so painstakingly constructed, is powerless to address. It's been 24 years since NASA scientist James Hansen's testimony before Congress brought global warming to the public's attention. Yet despite the ceaseless work of activists and scientists, the carbon-fueled industrial economy that is wreaking havoc on the climate is still firmly in place. Neither the government nor the public evinces the will to confront it.

At such a critical moment, it is worth considering the book that first snapped the country out of its complacency and set the environmental movement in motion. In 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring asked us to reconsider the blind rush toward what the industrial world called progress. Carson warned us that by destroying the environment, humans would destroy themselves.

Somewhere along the way, her message has been lost.

The web of life

Silent Spring begins with an allegory about a pastoral town, alive with blooming flowers, flowing streams and singing birds. All is well in this village, until suddenly it isn't. Bad things start to happen: The birds disappear, livestock starts dying, the countryside turns brown and dry, and children fall sick and die from a mysterious illness. Carson goes on to explain, in descriptions that are rigorously scientific and at times moving, how the effects of organochlorine pesticides, including DDT, reverberate far beyond their intended targets, disrupting the dynamic between species and their habitats and even making people sick. "No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world," Carson wrote. "The people had done it themselves."

First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, Silent Spring is credited with changing the way we understand the natural world and our place in it. The natural world is not, Carson explained, populated by independent organisms. Rather, each element -- microbes, soil, insects, plants and animals -- functions in a complex relationship with the others. The way the inhabitants of these systems play off one another is breathtaking, but caution is required; altering a single piece could trigger a chain of destruction.

Though common knowledge now, Carson's ecological view of the world was a revelation to most readers. And she emphasized how we humans are part of this system. "Man is a part of nature," Carson told an interviewer, "and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself."

"What Silent Spring did," the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben says, "was to cause people to start questioning, for the first time, and in a big way, whether modernity was quite as shiny as they'd assumed. Or whether there were deep hazards hidden right in the middle of the huge industrial enterprise." McKibben, the founder of the environmental organization 350.org -- 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide is the upper limit of what can safely exist in the atmosphere, according to many scientists; we're currently at about 394 -- has led the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline. "It wasn't just DDT that people were reacting to. It was the idea that things were not what they seemed, that they often came with a shadow attached. That's a notion that's grown, and it turns out that the biggest shadow of all is attached to the most ubiquitous chemical of all -- CO2."

"The modern world," Carson wrote in 1963, "worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen. ... As for the general public, the vast majority rest secure in a childlike faith that 'someone' is looking after things -- a faith unbroken until some public-spirited person, with patient scholarship and steadfast courage, presents facts that can no longer be ignored."

Carson was referring to Ruth Harrison, a British animal-rights activist whose 1964 exposé of industrial livestock production, Animal Machines, Carson had agreed to preface. She was also, of course, referring to herself.

But Carson never got the chance to see Silent Spring's impact reach as far as it did; she died of breast cancer in April 1964, at the age of 56. She may not have been altogether surprised, however -- Carson carefully calibrated Silent Spring to achieve maximum effect, and in the two years following publication the book and its author were the subject of countless news stories, and even cartoons, as well as an episode of CBS Reports. Carson was invited to testify before a Senate subcommittee on the potential dangers of pesticides, and President John F. Kennedy asked his Scientific Advisory Committee to investigate the matter.

No one would have picked Carson out as the instigator of a wide-ranging social movement. Trained as a biologist, she was, according to her biographer Linda Lear, practical and reserved. She spent much of her career working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where her aptitude for explaining complex scientific concepts in lucid prose led to her writing wildlife guides for the public. Meanwhile, she began selling stories to local newspapers about things like the oyster farms of the Chesapeake Bay.

In 1937, an article Carson published in The Atlantic Monthly titled "Undersea" caught the attention of an editor at Simon & Schuster, and in 1941 Carson published her first book, Under the Sea-Wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life. A second book, The Sea Around Us, followed 10 years later. Initially serialized in The New Yorker, the book made Carson famous and won her the National Book Award. It was also a bestseller, as was her third book, The Edge of the Sea.

But as advances in science and technology sped forward, something changed for Carson, and describing the wonders of the sea no longer sufficed. She became unsettled by the unknown costs of so much change. In a letter to a friend written in 1958, as she was preparing to begin work on Silent Spring, Carson explained what drove her to take on the project:

It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man ... . These beliefs have almost been part of me for as long as I have thought about such things. To have them even vaguely threatened was so shocking that ... I shut my mind -- refused to acknowledge what I couldn't help seeing. But that does no good, and I have now opened my eyes and my mind.

Yes, We Can Walk and Chew Gum

David Sirota — Fri, 18 May 2012 10:00:22 +0000

One of the most overused metaphors in a writer's arsenal is the one about "walking and chewing gum at the same time." As a hiker and Big League Chew enthusiast, I particularly hate this cliché. Nonetheless, I feel it is fitting right now because it so perfectly summarizes the argument being made by Republicans. They now insist that America cannot simultaneously walk the walk on equal rights and also chew economic gum.

In the last week, Colorado was the testing ground for this talking point. At the presidential level, Republican nominee Mitt Romney criticized a Denver television reporter for daring to ask about his position on, among other issues, same-sex marriage. Before restating his opposition, he scoffed at the question, asking: "Aren't there issues of significance that you'd like to talk about (like) the economy? The growth of jobs? The need to put people back to work?"

At the same time, Colorado's Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? "We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and (when) far too many Coloradans remain out of work," he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is "promoting (a) divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation."

Obviously, it's perplexing to see the Republican Party allege that social issues are insignificant and "divisive." This is, after all, the party whose most recent presidential nominating contest was dominated by attacks on contraception--the same GOP whose politicians have made an art out of riding a "guns, god and gays" focused agenda to electoral victory.

But while such naked hypocrisy is enraging, the substance of the Republican rhetoric about gay rights is downright offensive. Essentially, conservatives are asserting that we cannot extend equal rights to all Americans and fix the economy. In the process, they are deliberately insinuating that the twin goals are somehow contradictory.

Well, you might ask, do they have a point? History says no. Our country's story is the story of multitasking--a tale of extending the franchise to women while passing progressive legislation to deal with crushing economic inequality, a tale of both passing civil rights legislation and creating Medicare.

In light of such achievements, would anyone retroactively argue that America should have opposed the campaign to let women vote because the economy was so bad in the early 20th century? Would anyone insist that lawmakers should have halted civil rights legislation in the 1960s because there was a simultaneous need for a War on Poverty? Probably not, because most of us recognize such arguments for what they are: diversionary non-sequiturs whose real goal is to preserve institutional bigotry and prejudice.

That's the same objective of today's GOP when it comes to rights for same sex couples. For proof, just consider the abruptness of the shift: the Republican Party that spent the last decade insisting that we should simultaneously cut taxes, prosecute foreign wars and fight to limit a woman's right to choose an abortion now suddenly says we can't even discuss equal rights because of a recession.

The language changed not because the new "can't walk and chew gum" mantra makes sense (seriously--would any sane person really claim that a bad economy justifies continued persecution of lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people?). It changed because the cause of equal rights is involved. And, clearly, that cause is what today's Republicans are now most committed to stopping--no matter how much their flawed logic indicts their credibility.

Javier Sicilia: Leading His Caravan to Washington

Joel Bleifuss — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:00:33 +0000

Last summer, the eyes of the Mexican people were fixed upon Javier Sicilia, a poet, columnist, and the spokesman of a new social movement, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity. As Sicilia and his fellow activists toured through Mexico in a "Caravan for Peace," they called for fundamental political and social reforms and for a radical reassessment of Mexican (and U.S.) drug policies. In August, he will lead the Caravan from San Diego to Washington, D.C.

Sicilia was propelled into his new role when his son Juanelo, 24, was murdered in Temixco, Morelos, on March 28, 2011. Juanelo is but one of tens of thousands of Mexicans who have lost their lives to the rampant violence that has gripped Mexico in recent years. In the wake of his son's death, Sicilia wrote his last poem, which began, "The world is no longer worthy of the word." He has no intention of writing poetry again.

Prior to Juanelo's death, Sicilia was a writer at Proceso, an independent magazine not unlike In These Times, based in Mexico City.

On April 28, Proceso journalist Regina Martinez was murdered in Xalapa, Veracruz. According to authorities, she was found in her bathroom with signs of "heavy blows to her face and body." In These Times spoke to Sicilia earlier that month, when he was visiting Chicago.

What is your assessment of U.S. drug policy?

It has led to a war in Mexico that has cost us almost 60,000 lives, more than 18,000 missing and 230,000 displaced. And these numbers keep growing.

How does the crisis factor into Mexico's upcoming elections?

As we say in the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, these are the elections of ignominy. There can't be valid elections in a country with 60,000 deaths, with nearly all crimes committed with impunity, with areas of the country completely Balkanized.

What role do the social movements of Mexico play in the elections?

The two movements with transformative potential are the Zapatistas and the Movement for Peace. The Zapatista movement is besieged by the military, and the Movement for Peace is at risk of being dismantled by the absence of media attention, and by the scorn of Mexico's political class who consider us a pebble in their shoe.

When you say that "the Zapatista movement is besieged," what do you mean?

It's trying to survive in handcuffs, localized and enclosed. The state of war that Mexico is in gives the state the pretext to declare that we have a national emergency and need to control the social movements, the political movements, the ones that are truly legitimate and important for the life of the nation, like the Zapatista movement.

What can people in the United States do to support the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity?

If the people of the United States were to take notice of what is happening, they could put pressure on the Obama administration, or whoever comes next, to change the current, absolutely failed policies. When other possibilities have been proposed, like legalizing drugs, controlling guns and attacking money laundering, the U.S. government hasn't wanted to try them. Instead they respond to violence with more violence.

What are you hoping to achieve with the Caravan north of the border?

First, to raise consciousness of the cost that this war is having on our political life, our national life. Families are being destroyed, as in my case. There is a large number of people who are in the United States illegally not because they want to be, but because there is no longer any security in their communities and they have been targeted by violence. But they get here, and they are not secure here either. They are isolated. They are refugees, depending on the kindness of safe houses.

What role do artists and writers play in social movements?

An important role. The two great social movements of the last 20 years in Mexico, the Zapatistas and the Movement for Peace, are both the product of a poetic discourse. Subcomandante Marcos is a poet. The power of the Zapatistas is rooted in the manner in which that man was able to translate social demands into poetry, and break through the unilateral discourse of the political elites -- a fundamental change in the national consciousness was achieved. Similarly, the Movement for Peace disrupts the one-sided political discourse -- it breaks it. And this has to do with the structures of culture, of poetry. These movements have their own poetry. And they rejuvenate the life of the country, at least at the discursive level. What's needed is for these discourses to become incarnate in terms of real justice, peace and dignity. So it's essential that the poets and the artists erupt into public life.

What role does the media play in the drug war and the Caravan?

It was thanks to the press that we were able to mobilize and demonstrate this new discourse and give visibility to the victims. Unfortunately, once we started threatening the press with demands for the democratization of the media, they began to erase the discussion, to erase the victims from reality. Now we almost don't exist in the media. Newspapers, television and radio imply by their lack of coverage that we are no longer there, that the victims are no longer there.

People get tired. It's old news.

Exactly. There's no depth. They don't report on the depth of political corruption. The victims disappear because they are no longer news. Political discourse freezes.

How has the Caravan been received in the battleground of Mexico's northern cities?

With a lot of affection, a lot of respect, a lot of hope. The people there are really in a state of despair, forgotten by the state and totally defenseless. When we arrived in these communities, the streets were once again full. The people in the towns came out. We did something very important. We said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a suffering country, and we are here to embrace you." The movement did something that was very important for human dignity. We have picked up victims who have been reduced to pieces. Not simply because narco-crime killed their children, but also because the government criminalized them, because there is no justice, because they are threatened. And many of them have become activists. Their fight, like mine, becomes the fight for others. The fight for personal justice becomes the fight for justice in the country.

Why did you stop writing poetry?

I wrote my final poem for my son. For me, poetry is the most sacred of the languages. I write in my poem to my son, "El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra" ("The world is no longer worthy of the word"). As Theodor Adorno said, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." I didn't understand this until I lived through my Auschwitz. When they kill your child, it feels like Auschwitz. When one feels the pain of so many victims who have died in this war, it's an Auschwitz. It's not about the quantity; it's about the intensity and the horror. And in Mexico, there's an unnatural intensity. I think that ultimately my words aren't capable of speaking, re-establishing, or resuscitating a language degraded by crime and political imbecility.

Are you hopeful about the future?

I'm very pessimistic about the prospects of mankind. There's a blindness, a deafness, a need to protect political interests, and a scorn for humanity. I'm hardly optimistic. I have an optimism in the order of my faith -- in a miracle. Hope is always an opening to the possibility of something miraculous happening, to something happening that allows for the transformation in the hearts of human beings, to allow for life to change. But it's a theological hope because of the reality I live in: the rotting of the institutions of my country. I don't see a future.

You have some hope. If not, you wouldn't be organizing the Caravan.

I move a bit in this territory of theological faith and hope. It's a hope that's difficult to live out because one always hopes for a hope and a faith in human beings, like the shadow of hope in God. There is a lovely anecdote about Martin Luther, in which Luther is planting a tree. One of Luther's students approaches him and asks, "What would you do if an angel of our Lord appeared before you and told you that the world would come to an end in five minutes?" Luther responded, "I would plant my tree."

That is what I am doing. Hoping against hope, I keep trying to plant a tree.

HBO’s Female Regression Analysis: Girls and Veep

Chris Lehmann — Thu, 17 May 2012 10:00:38 +0000

The HBO comedy Girls has been hailed as the feminist answer to Judd Apatow's Hollywood bromance franchise. And like Apatow's Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Superbad, Girls is a labored, extensive study in arrested development, as experienced by characters rendered as fleeting glyphs of self-knowing social privilege. Apatow has executive-produced Girls for HBO, and boy, is it easy to see why.

As in Apatow-land, the characters who undergo the rote plot reversals and drugged-out hijinks in Girls -- call it regression lite -- either hail from upper-middle-class comfort or mysteriously sustain themselves on some magical combination of pluck and attitude.

The show's creator and writer, Lena Dunham, also plays the lead protagonist, Hannah. After Hannah learns that her two college-prof parents will no longer subsidize her bohemian life and she loses an unpaid internship at a literary magazine, a crisis ensues. So naturally, she adjourns to the apartment of her actor-boyfriend -- who fancifully subsists on an $800-a-month stipend from his grandmother and the aforementioned pluck -- for vaguely self-hating rough sex. When she worries that she possesses none of the talents that one is supposed to tout in one's résumé, the indifferent swain announces that it's been so long since he's looked for a job that he can't remember what you're supposed to include in a résumé.

As the kids say: Whatever. Through Girls' turgid intrigues, interchangeably wan characters wander from jobs, boyfriends and glamorous travel destinations, marveling at the world's failure to conform to their desires. Not that they have much grasp on what those desires are: Hannah is working, desultorily, on a memoir -- with the baroque Dave Eggers-style self-knowing disclaimers that go with such a twentysomething conceit. And in a chemically fueled display of still more pluck, she brandishes the work in progress before her parents and demands a year-long stipend from them to complete the manuscript.

The only thing interesting about Girls is that it clarifies how much of American pop culture teems with similar regression-lite themes. The HBO comedy Veep sets up a phalanx of middle-school style vituperation within the fictional vice presidency of Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Dreyfus' Selina is a (notionally) grown-up and successful version of Dunham's Hannah, fretting over recondite slights to lobbyists and how well she's trending on Twitter, all pretty much in a vacuum of actual, you know, political ideas or meaningful conflict. Armando Iannucci, who directed the 2009 black comedy satirizing the run-up to the Iraq War, In the Loop, has clearly calculated that the scabrous Machiavellian conflicts that drove that more successful project won't fly for an American audience.

And why shouldn't he? From the antics of the emotionally stunted ad men of Mad Men to the faux-whimsical child worship on display in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, tragedies are hewn from the wrenching compromises and cruelly delayed gratification that attend the onset of adult responsibility.

Ironically, the one pop culture fable that bears witness to traditional adult virtues -- an appreciation for the rigors of manual work, a distrust of easy fame and celebrity and a demanding ethic of care for other, weaker souls -- is aimed squarely at teens. Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, adapted into a blockbuster movie franchise, depicts the world of adult social power as an unrelieved dystopia, rendering virtually every adult character as foolish, ruthless and/or infantile. The novel's protagonist, the omnicompetent teen warrior Katniss Everdeen, reflects thusly on her clinging, ineffectual mother: "Some small gnarled place inside of me hated her for her weakness, for her neglect." And when one of her adult handlers guesses at her contempt, she thinks: "He's right... The whole rotten lot of them is despicable."

During the industrial-age heyday of the Victorian novel, a character like Katniss would be a figure of pathos -- a child forced to grow up prematurely and provide for her hard-pressed family. But in our own terminally regressed pop cultural landscape, she's nothing less than a superhero. Small wonder that she goes on to become a revolutionary.

Attachment Parenting: Beyond the Backlash

Sady Doyle — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:46:51 +0000

Ever heard of "attachment parenting"? If you've spent more than five minutes on the Internet, or reading a magazine, the answer is yes. The New York Times ran a panel on the controversial child-raising strategy—which recommends, among other things, that a mother sleep with her baby, carry her at all times, and breastfeed for an extended period—under the oh-so-subtle title "Motherhood vs. Feminism." Last week, Time magazine did the newspaper one better, running a sensational, meme-friendly cover of a pretty woman breastfeeding her toddler to promote an article about attachment advocate Bill Sears (who, apparently, could not be pictured on the cover because he wouldn't take his top off). Countless women have weighed in on what attachment parenting means for womanhood today.

So: Another day, another group of women accused of killing feminism with their personal decisions. Business as usual.

Of course, attachment parenting does have very troubling undertones. For one, attachment parenting organizations and websites heavily imply that parents—especially mothers—should not have autonomous lives or priorities outside of childcare, and preferably should not work.

"Babies and young children have an intense need for the physical presence of a consistent, loving, responsive caregiver: ideally a parent," according to the website for Attachment Parenting International (API). The "ideal" caregiver is constantly available; the website encourages parents to take their children along on dates, while exercising, and everywhere else. And, of course, children should also share the caretaker's bed to ensure full 24-hour contact. After any time away from your child, you must "spend very focused and intentional time reconnecting," presumably to heal the trauma caused by selfishly attending yoga class, having sex with your partner, seeing friends, or even sending the child to school. (Jamie Lynne Grumet, the attachment advocate on Time's cover, home-schools her children.)

API's website is coy about what this means for employment. If the child receives care from anyone other than its parents, that person must be extensively trained in attachment techniques; a regular babysitter or daycare isn't okay. But if you can't afford an attachment-specialist nanny, well: "Explore a variety of economic and work arrangement options to permit your child to be cared for by one or both parents at all times," it says, tactfully burying the lede. Of course, the vast majority of "economic and work arrangement options" won't allow 24/7 child contact unless a parent is unemployed or severely underemployed. And it's unlikely that the partner tasked with giving up on their career will be male.

At Slate, Hanna Rosin makes the point that the movement is emotionally repressive, demanding that women sacrifice autonomy in favor of 24-hour motherhoood, and making them feel guilty for not enjoying it. "Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions," she writes. "So, it's not just enough to breast-feed but one has to experience 'breast-feeding induced maternal nirvana.'"

Fair enough. All told, attachment parenting's demand for women to forgo serious careers or personal autonomy, focus their entire attention on their children, shut the world out, and perhaps even keep their children from school, makes it seem like a crunchy, granola-flavored version of the conservative Christian Quiverfull movement. Dr. William Sears, attachment parenting's most famous advocate, was an evangelical Christian until recently, suggesting that the two movements might have more in common than we've been led to believe.

And yet the conversation around it is often galling. There's been a lot of ire directed at attachment parenting. And there have been plenty of people willing to celebrate the death of feminism in its name, or shame women who don't follow its practices. But both the defenders of attachment parenting and its critics tend to focus their ire on the same people: women.

Grumet, the mother on Times's cover, has been turned into a flash-in-the-pan media sideshow. Rosin wrote an entire article about the harm attachment parenting might do to women, but seemingly couldn't avoid calling the women who do it "attachment freaks" or lashing out at Grumet, saying that "her blog's name alone ['I Am Not The Babysitter'] is so obnoxious that I don't care to delve further." Well, wait: Are they a vulnerable group of oppressed women for whom Rosin is advocating, or are they a bunch of obnoxious freaks to be dismissed without a hearing? The contradiction doesn't seem to occur to Rosin. Another woman, Bobbi Miller, expressed her disapproval of Grumet both on Twitter and in a phone interview, where she told AP that "even a cow knows when to wean their child." So, add "comparing women to cows" to the victories racked up in this debate, I guess.

Yes, the tenets of attachment parenting are regressive, and even potentially anti-feminist. But it's unlikely that the individual women who practice them are going to be feminism's downfall. What might actually kill feminism is our preference for shaming and tearing down individual women rather than advocating overdue policy changes around child-rearing: Pushing for mandatory long-term maternity or paternity leave, or high-quality childcare for all children, or a new ethos of work that doesn't penalize parents (usually mothers) for trying to maintain a healthy and flexible work-life balance.

All of these are feminist goals, and have been for quite some time. They might legitimately create an environment in which people can freely choose the parenting strategies that work best for their families. But when we're busy yelling at individual mothers for their choices, or evaluating their feminism accordingly, those goals are exactly what we fail to focus on, or achieve.

The U.S. Department of Double Standards

Leonard C. Goodman — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:00:06 +0000

On April 21, The New York Times reported that Wal-Mart de Mexico paid $24 million in bribes to local land use officials in exchange for allowing the company to build stores in virtually every corner of the country, and to make environmental objections vanish. Although its top executives apparently approved of and helped conceal the bribery scheme -- in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act -- the chances that any of them will face criminal prosecution is remote.

It's not that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn't criminally prosecute people who pay bribes to avoid land-use restrictions on their property. Rather, the feds prefer to bring such cases against people who don't have access to corporate lobbyists -- or even to private lawyers. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, just one in five felony defendants has private counsel.

Consider the case of Dumitru Curescu, a former janitor who recently faced two federal trials for the crime of paying $10,000 to an expediter for help obtaining a permit to build two additional garden apartments in his 13-unit building on Chicago's North Side. Curescu, an immigrant from communist Romania who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1988, was advised by his architect in 2006 to hire the expediter Catherine Romasanta, when he did his first renovation project. But when he called her again in 2007, she was working as an informant for the feds and recording their calls.

In the fall of 2007, Curescu paid Romasanta the agreed-upon fee and received his building permit. Seven months later, with the renovations nearly complete, federal agents arrested Curescu and his wife Lavinia and seized their building. The feds charged both husband and wife with five counts of bribery and conspiracy.

Financially ruined, the couple chose to fight the case; I was Curescu's court-appointed counsel. During a three-week jury trial, federal prosecutors played tapes of Curescu's negotiations with Romasanta and argued to the jury that he and Lavinia knowingly passed a bribe through Romasanta to a city official to get around Chicago's zoning restrictions.

The jury acquitted Lavinia on all charges but failed to reach a verdict on her husband. The government decided to try again. At the retrial, the prosecutors elicited false testimony from Romasanta about the number of apartments Dumitru Curescu had added during his first renovation project in 2006, thereby making a tape-recorded comment by Curescu about the fees he had paid her sound like a comment about a bribe payment. The prosecutors then falsely argued to the jury that this comment was proof that Curescu knew that his expediter bribed officials. Curescu was convicted on two of five counts and sentenced to six months in prison.

On March 21, Curescu's appeal was denied. In a groundbreaking opinion authored by Judge Richard Posner, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that federal prosecutors may present false testimony to prove their case "hoping the error would not be caught" as long as they can establish on appeal that the "error [did not] reduce the defendant's likelihood of being acquitted." "Judges are not to use reversal to punish governmental misconduct," Posner declared.

New York Times columnist James B. Stewart has written extensively about corporate executives at companies such as Wal-Mart and Tyson Foods, which regularly pay bribes to avoid troublesome regulations. In his recent column about the Wal-Mart scandal, Stewart reports that he "couldn't find a case of an executive at a major American-based, publicly traded company who was successfully prosecuted and sent to jail."

Yet the feds spared no expense or ethical restraints to make sure that Curescu went to jail, despite the testimony of his architect that the former janitor had "no knowledge" about the permitting process.

On April 2, after two lengthy and expensive federal trials and an unsuccessful appeal, Curescu entered a federal prison in Oxford, Wis. Three weeks later his bank sent notice that it is foreclosing on the Curescus' home where Lavinia lives with their three children. Meanwhile, in a recent SEC filing, Wal-Mart predicted its bribery scandal will not have a "material adverse effect on [its] business ... or cash flows."

Norman Solomon’s Quest for Congress

Theo Anderson — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:16:45 +0000

Norman Solomon isn't the typical candidate for Congress. And that's a compliment -- he might actually be one of the most promising candidates ever, from a progressive standpoint.

Solomon is running for the House seat currently held by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a reliable progressive who represents California's Second Congressional District. Woolsey is retiring. The district, recently redrawn, now consists of a narrow strip of land that extends along the coast from the Golden Gate Bridge to Oregon's southern border.

The Second District is among the most left-leaning in the nation, so there's no doubt that a Democrat will replace Woolsey. The question is: What kind of Democrat?

Solomon became an activist for progressive causes in his early teens and has stayed true to that path for nearly half a century. His policy positions include support for legalizing marijuana, for single-payer healthcare, for public financing of elections, and for ending corporate personhood by constitutional amendment. But the most unusual fact about him, given the current political context, is that he doesn't accept money from political action committees or lobbyists. Instead, his campaign is funded solely by relatively small donations -- about $100, on average -- from thousands of individuals.

The frontrunner in the race, Jared Huffman, bills himself as "one of the state's top environmental leaders" and has served three terms in the California State Assembly. His great advantage is name recognition. As an Assembly member, he represents more than half the population of the redrawn district. He also has the endorsement of the state's political and media establishments, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the San Francisco Chronicle.

But the sources of his funding have become a liability for Huffman, who accepts money from both lobbyists and corporations. The Anderson Valley Advertiser, a legendary Mendocino County weekly newspaper, reports that "Jared Huffman's donor base reflects the realities of a decades-long class war waged by the top 1-5% against the bottom half of America. Huffman's biggest and most well-organized donors are wealthy Marin County lawyers, real estate investors, bankers, and executives of major corporations. Some of them are liberals, but many are conservatives. Most of the liberals seem to make their money by representing the interests of conservative corporations."

Solomon, for his part, is a Democrat who works within the party -- he was an Obama delegate at the 2008 Democratic National Convention -- while spending most of his time and energy trying to building the progressive movement. A former director of Fairness and Accuracy in Media, a media watchdog organization, Solomon founded the Institute for Public Accuracy in 1997, and has published several books on the subject of media bias, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. (He's also contributed articles to In These Times since the 1970s.) He was a strong voice of dissent in the months before the war in Iraq, and he's a popular teacher and speaker -- in California and across the nation -- on behalf of progressive causes. Most recently, he has been deeply involved with the Occupy protests in California.

Solomon decided that, at this point, running for Woolsey's vacant seat was the best way to advance the movement. "His thinking was, instead of just speaking truth to power, let's take power," said Jeff Cohen, Solomon's longtime friend and writing collaborator, "without in any way surrendering the progressive values and ideals." Last year, in explaining why he was thinking about running for the seat, Solomon wrote that "dysfunctional relationships between liberals in Congress and progressive social movements serve as enablers for endless war, massive giveaways to Wall Street, widening gaps between the rich and the rest of us, erosion of civil liberties, outrageous inaction on global warming, and so much more."

Solomon has been endorsed by several of the district's weekly newspapers as well as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Democracy for America. He finished second of nearly 200 candidates in the latter group's online "Grassroots All-Stars" competition.

The primary election will be June 5. According to California's new open primary rules, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, will move on to the general election. Recent polling by the Solomon campaign puts him second among the dozen candidates who are running.

The GOP’s Dead-End Path to Prosperity

David Moberg — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:00:44 +0000

Mitt Romney may rue the day he called Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's budget proposal "marvelous," as if he were describing a splendid buffet at the mansion of a friend. The plan from the influential, youthful Republican chair of the House budget committee does offer people like Mitt and his rich buddies tasty goodies -- $10 trillion in preserved and fresh millionaire-friendly tax cuts (over a decade), to be followed later with rollbacks in financial, environmental and every other regulation.

But if President Obama is politically vulnerable on the weak recovery of the economy, Romney will be increasingly vulnerable in the presidential race for embracing Ryan's plan -- if the Democrats make clear the dangers it poses for the vast majority of Americans, the servants at Romney's "marvelous" policy buffet. Declaring the presidential race starkly as a "make-or-break moment for the middle class," Obama told Associated Press editors in April that in the much-different budgets he and Ryan have proposed, voters face a "choice between competing visions of our future [that] has [not in recent memory] been so unambiguously clear."

The Ryan-Romney plan is further to the Right -- and more hurtful to average Americans -- than anything from Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, Obama said. Calling it "thinly veiled social Darwinism," he argued that his "centrist" approach has historically drawn support even from Republicans, from Lincoln to Eisenhower, who saw government as a way to "do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves."

Few Americans may know what social Darwinism means, though many -- especially the rich -- do believe superior people naturally dominate society through harsh competition. (On the other hand, we can hope the anti-evolution religious Right will stay home in November rather than vote for Romney, a disciple of Darwin -- even if 19th-century English philosopher Herbert Spencer was the real social Darwinist.)

But polls generally show large majorities supporting Medicare, which the Ryan budget would drastically weaken, and a wide range of government activities, such as operating national parks or protecting the environment, which the budget undermines. And they favor higher taxes on the rich, not new tax cuts for them.

Two major pitfalls endanger Obama's attempt to capture the center and label Romney the right-wing extremist: He offers voters a plan tilted more to a limited defense of existing government programs than to bold, inspiring initiatives on the economy. (He should adopt more of the House Progressive Caucus budget or even Sen. Tom Harkin's more limited Rebuild America Act.) And he fails to challenge Romney sharply enough on a general vision of what government can offer, preferring instead to burnish his credentials on shrinking government's size and reach.

But even if adopting Ryan's plan may hurt him with centrists and independents, could Romney have resisted? With only four House Republicans voting against Ryan's budget and no Democrats for it in late March, he had to prove not only his right-wing credentials but also -- what now amounts to the same thing -- his mainstream party loyalty. After all, as anti-tax, anti-government zealot Grover Norquist told The Economist, Romney's own ideas are almost irrelevant: "We want the Ryan budget. We ... just need a president to sign this stuff."

The path to austerity

The Ryan budget will not only fail to do what it claims, but in most cases will do just the opposite. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, the budget is "the most fraudulent in American history."

Ryan (and Romney) say they want, above all, to reduce the deficit, but they keep all the Bush tax cuts, slash the budget to eliminate almost all discretionary spending except for the military and cut the top tax rate to 25 percent (now 35 percent, scheduled to rise to 39.6 percent). They promise to pay for the lower rate by eliminating tax loopholes or expenditures, but fail to specify any -- thus effectively increasing budget deficits, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Under the guise of cutting deficits and protecting health and retirement security, Ryan-Romney would change federal health insurance to reduce federal costs but only by shifting the burden back to individuals -- especially the aged and poor -- not by increasing efficiency. The budget would raise the eligibility age for Medicare in the future and replace Medicare with vouchers, turn over Medicaid to the states with inadequate, declining block grants, and invalidate most of the Affordable Care Act, including its expansion of Medicaid. As a result, as many as 27 million people would lose Medicaid coverage (according to the Urban Institute), and 33 million uninsured will not gain insurance promised through the Affordable Care Act. Also, although the recently passed House budget only steers Congress toward changing Social Security, Ryan clearly envisions at least partial privatization and a higher retirement age -- increasing both economic insecurity and inequality.

Ryan and Romney claim the tax cuts focused on corporations and the rich -- sorry, "job creators" -- will boost employment, but comparing the economic records of the Clinton and Bush II administrations suggests that raising taxes on the rich can sometimes yield more jobs than cutting them. After reviewing a wide range of studies, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) tax analyst Chye-Ching Huang concludes, "There is no strong evidence taxes on high incomes affect growth strongly negatively or positively."

'Robin Hood in reverse'

With their budget and governmental revamp, Romney promises Americans freedom and Ryan predicts a new morality. (The budget is called "The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America's Promise.") But for most Americans their plan would mean greater inequality, which leads to less freedom and a more amoral social order.

"[T]his budget is Robin Hood in reverse," CBPP President Robert Greenstein says. "It would likely produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history and likely increase poverty and inequality more than any other budget ... possibly in the nation's history."

Already, the rich -- and virtually the rich alone -- are rebounding from the Great Recession, with the top 1 percent capturing 93 percent of the income gains in the first year of recovery, according to economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley. But under Ryan's plan, according to the Tax Policy Center, a centrist think tank, the average millionaire would get a new $265,000 tax cut (on top of $129,000 from extended Bush cuts), while after-tax income would fall for households earning $30,000 a year or less (and at the same time, 62 percent of all Ryan's cuts come from programs benefiting lower-income households). Lowering incomes, removing insurance, increasing individual burdens and boosting insecurity does not provide most Americans more freedom, but imprisons them in economic anxiety.

Greater inequality also increases illness and mortality, reduces social and economic mobility, lowers long-term economic growth, undermines democracy and contributes to higher crime rates. And recently a team of researchers, mainly from the University of California, Berkeley, found through seven different studies that upper-class individuals are more likely to behave unethically -- lying, stealing, cheating -- than the less affluent. Such behavior may be a major contributor to their wealth, but it also demonstrates that once they are wealthy, people are much less moral, and much more powerful. It's a message apparently lost on right-wing Christians.

But it may not be lost on all Americans. Even Ryan faces a strong political challenge from former businessman and Democratic politician Rob Zerban in a once-Democratic district. And Romney now carries the baggage of a plan that does precisely the opposite of what he claims into a campaign against a president who seems willing to take that message to the electorate all year long.

Obama’s Chicago: A Pre-NATO Summit Primer

Laura S. Washington — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:27:50 +0000

He was the nobody that nobody sent.

Barack Obama's choice of Chicago as his political and psychic home seems brilliant in retrospect. Yet in many ways, it was an unlikely launching pad for America's first black president.

Brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama was a stranger to Chicago powers large and small. The big city in the nation's heartland has always played second string to the glittering coasts. Until Obama, it was best known as the home of mobsters, racial warfare, and hardball politics. The regular Democratic Party ran the show, with a bruising and often wayward iron fist. It is said to be America's most corrupt city.

In the mid-1980s, Obama arrived in Chicago, testing the famous tale from his eventual political mentor, Abner Mikva, a longtime congressman from Hyde Park and the city's North Shore.

In a 2008 New Yorker interview, Mikva recalled his first attempt to volunteer for the Democratic Party. At the party headquarters, Mikva recalled, a "ward boss came in and pulled the cigar out of his mouth and said, 'Who sent you?' And I said, 'Nobody sent me.' He put the cigar back in his mouth and said, 'We don't want nobody nobody sent.' "

In 2012, Barack Obama is no longer a nobody. This week, he will return home to his old stomping grounds to host the NATO summit (and probably stop by his re-election campaign headquarters). As Chicago takes the world stage, here are some insights about the city that molded him.

Chicago's historic trilogy

Obama's choice of Chicago was not accidental, but shrewd. He once told his neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald: "I came home in Chicago." "Home" represented a rare but robust combination of progressive activism, sustaining black power and old fashioned, Democratic Party clout.

The president's coming of age in Chicago completed the city's historic black trilogy: DuSable, Washington and Obama. Around 1779, a French-Haitian fur trader, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, encamped at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, becoming Chicago's "founding father." In 1983, Harold Washington won a hard-fought election to become the city's first African American mayor. His victory blasted the Democratic Machine with a brand of progressive politics that brought together a progressive coalition of blacks, Latinos, liberal whites, women and gays.

Before Washington, party regulars co-opted minority politicians and voters and kept them in line with patronage jobs and contracts, but gave them little authentic power. Timuel Black, the esteemed professor emeritus and dean of black progressives, dubbed it "Plantation Politics."

In 1985 Obama was drawn to Chicago by Washington's progressive politics. Like Washington, Obama assiduously worked on coalition building, and eventually brought longtime Mayor and Chicago "boss' Richard M. Daley, other Democratic Party regulars, and even Republicans into his fold.

But first, the freshly minted graduate of Columbia University would dig into grassroots community organizing.

A careful ascension

In the 1930s, Saul Alinsky, the author of the organizing bible, Rules for Radicals, was a gritty populist-intellectual who built a lasting brand of power out of Back of the Yards, a gritty, working class enclave on Chicago's Southwest Side.

Obama learned the Alinsky way. He was the first executive director of the Developing Communities Project, which mobilizes citizens for change through local churches and community based organizations. In the 1980s the group was working on environmental justice and other causes out of a Chicago bungalow in Roseland on the far South Side.

Obama spent only three years honing his organizing chops, but the experience lent abundant street cred for his presidential campaign mantra of "Change."

Obama and other community advocates fought for the removal of asbestos from Altgeld Gardens, a depressed public housing project on the far Southeast Side. One resident of the ironically named "Gardens" was Hazel Johnson, a determined mother and activist who founded People for Community Recovery, a pioneer in the environmental justice movement.

Today, the Developing Communities Project is spearheading a campaign to extend a major rail line through Roseland and other neglected neighborhoods.

Altgeld Gardens was symbolic of the decline of public housing. The massive, racially and economically segregated "projects" has become ugly symbols of pernicious poverty, dysfunction and crime. The city's Plan for Transformation, the city's closely-watched $1.6 billion rehabilitation program launched in 2000, promised to change that. Touted as a national model for remaking federally funded housing for the poor, the plan has been controversial. In February 2012 Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced plans for a major "recalibration" of the effort.

After his organizing stint, Obama was off to Harvard Law School, where he excelled and established his academic pedigree. In 1991 he returned to Chicago and settled in Hyde Park. While Chicago remains one of America's most segregated cities, Hyde Park was the integrated oasis for progressive intellectuals, activists and professionals.

The neighborhood has been the hallowed stomping ground of myriad movers and shakers, among them boxing champion Muhammad Ali; the University of Chicago and academic icons like Enrico Fermi and Saul Bellow; Gospel songbird Mahalia Jackson; Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; Bill Veeck, the wily White Sox owner; and Hugh Hefner, the ultimate Playboy.

Obama was a lecturer at the university's law school, wife Michelle a top executive at its medical center, and his children attended its Lab School. Obama's early political career was plotted at kitchen tables throughout the neighborhood.

In 1992, Obama ran Project Vote, a voter registration campaign that helped elect President Bill Clinton and elevate Carol Moseley Braun as the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. The political work connected him to the city's political elites, wealthy donors and political gurus like Mikva and David Axelrod.

Chicago is the nation's capital of the black middle class. Michelle Obama, whom he met while they worked together at a law firm, helped him maneuver that world. She worked in government and community circles, ran the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps youth service program, and was an attorney in the city's Law Department.

The South Side native and Harvard Law graduate connected her husband to prominent black professionals like Valerie Jarrett, now his closest White House confidante; Martin Nesbitt, a best friend who runs an airport parking business; and John Rogers Jr., an Obama basketball buddy and CEO of an investment company. Such relationships helped the future president plumb a lucrative fundraising and support network.

The church is the black community's strongest institution. Obama tapped into its allure when he joined Trinity United Church of Christ, a prominent congregation on West 95th Street. Its formidable pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preached a black liberation Christian theology that promoted social justice and activism. Wright and other Obama allies like the Catholic priest, Rev. Michael Pfleger, and longtime civil rights champion Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., would become flashpoints in the 2008 presidential campaign. But the social justice institutions they molded, like the Faith Community of St. Sabina and Rainbow PUSH, remain influential forces. In January, Trinity kicked off plans for Imani Village, a 27-acre community-based conglomerate of sustainable housing, urban farming, retail stores, health centers and a sports complex.

The city's black church scene staged musical talent that set the sanctuaries rocking. Chicago artists with deep Gospel roots include Mahalia Jackson, the bandleader Tommy Dorsey, and Mavis Staples, the hit soloist and mainstay of the Staples Singers. Her swinging, "I'll TakeYou There" was a theme song for Obama's presidential campaign. Dorsey was the choir director at Pilgrim Baptist Church, the Adler and Sullivan-designed structure that was nearly destroyed in a 2006 fire. Plans are underway to revive the architectural gem.

South Side pride, and power

In 2002, his bond with the city's white progressives brought Obama to a rally at the Federal Plaza downtown. At the protest, mounted by Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq, Obama delivered a speech that sealed his anti-war credentials, and another crucial plank in his presidential campaign.

Obama's Hawaiian genes may have helped Obama surf the treacherous waters of regular, black and independent politics. His allies included his "political Godfather," now-retired State Senate President Emil Jones, a Machine stalwart; to progressive white and black independents like Mikva and Obama's former alderman and now Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle; to black nationalists like Louis Farrakhan.

Like most every South Sider, Obama is an avowed White Sox fan. During the 2008 election, he mocked the rival Chicago Cubs and their pastoral Wrigley Field. "You go to Wrigley Field, you have a beer, beautiful people up there. People aren't watching the game," he told ESPN in 2008. "It's not serious. White Sox, that's baseball. South Side."

Them's fightin' words in Chicago. During the NATO/G8 summit weekend, the Cubs will take on the Sox--at Wrigley Field.

Nestled between Hyde Park and McCormick Place sits Bronzeville, the historic heart of black Chicago. Once known as the "Black Belt," it was the port of entry for the Great Back Migration from the South in the first half of the 20th Century. Once a segregated but vibrant haven for black Chicago, the area declined, but is reemerging as a symbol of black progress and tourist destination.

Obama co-founded Bronzeville's Lugenia Burns Hope Center, a leadership development and organizing institute. A current Hope Center project is Housing Bronzeville, which works to protect affordable housing in the midst of the ongoing foreclosure epidemic.

Bronzeville boosters are pushing the area as a potential location for a future Obama Presidential Library; they'll get plenty of competition from the University of Chicago. (In 2013, presidential advisor David Axelrod will launch an Institute of Politics at the U of C).

Obama cultivated the city's multitudinous ethnic groups. According to a new director from Chicago Area Ethnic Resources, the region boasts 245 ethnic organizations spanning 57 ethnicities, and 68 ethnic media outlets. Black and ethnic media outlets who have chronicled Obama's Chicago include Johnson Publications' Ebony and Jet, run by former White House Social Director Desiree Rogers, the 106-year-old Chicago Defender, and LaRaza.

But Obama's Chicago morphed into Rahm's Chicago. In February 2011, Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor in Chicago after a 21-year Daley reign. Emanuel, Obama's former White House chief of staff, got a lot of help from his old friend.

Emanuel, a centrist Democrat who favors power over ideology, has quickly established himself as the indisputable new boss of Chicago. And the ferociously putative "Rhambo" may be eyeing a bigger prize. Progressives, beware: Emanuel could be in training for a 2016 presidential bid.

Perverts on the Bump Patrol

Susan J. Douglas — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:00:54 +0000

When feminists start applauding anything said or done by Hugh Hefner, we know we've come to an odd pass. But in the May issue of Playboy, Hefner blasts "repressed conservatives" who he says are "pounding on America's bedroom door." Citing Rick Santorum's statement that contraception is "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," Hefner denounces the "ignorance espoused by a new crop of self-appointed arbiters who are determined to oversee our morality." Amen.

But Hefner doesn't go far enough. Because what we've been seeing -- during a time of persistent economic hardship for so many, no less -- has been a national obsession with uteruses. This comes from the repressed yet lecherous religious Right, of course, but it has also come to pervade its almost polar opposite: celebrity culture. From Capitol Hill to tabloid rags, surveillance of the uterus is, weirdly, everywhere. Our country has often been neurotic about sex -- prudish yet pornographic -- but now is an especially pathological time.

Having endured, at the state and national level, the year-and-a-half long Republican "war on women" (I highly recommend a Facebook page by that name), we've heard plenty about efforts to further criminalize abortion, water down and redefine rape laws, defund Planned Parenthood and, in a completely bizarre knuckle-dragging move, to attack contraception and access to it. But when you look at some of the laws proposed, there is something deeply perverted about them -- sexually perverted. They have evidenced a keen desire to invade, monitor and manipulate women's sex organs, and thus violate our privacy.

What drove Republican men in Virginia to want to force women to have a device inserted into their vaginas prior to being allowed to have an abortion? Their devotion to "the sanctity of life"? Until the national uproar labeling the proposed legislation "state rape," Republican men in other states, like Alabama and Idaho, also wanted to mandate that a probe be inserted inside a woman's body prior to an abortion. (Not surprisingly, this is already the law in Texas.) Cloaked in the guise of prudery, this is a sadistic, pornographic fantasy. When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut for testifying in favor of insurance coverage for contraceptives and then suggested she make a sex tape, something perverted was going on.

But looking beyond reactionary Republicans, our media are increasingly obsessed with the uterus. You can hardly open a celebrity gossip magazine anymore (let alone scan its cover) without seeing various benighted women with a canary yellow circle drawn around their abdomens, and blaring text demanding to know what's going on in there: Did she eat too much for lunch or is there a zygote taking form? (Of course it doesn't help that some celebrities, typically on the D-list -- think Tori Spelling -- parade their "bump" to stay in the limelight and cash in on motherhood.)

The "bump patrol" is a relatively recent phenomenon in the celebrity rags. Think about the term's connotations: A patrol, typically involving police officers or soldiers, is designed to look out for criminals, enemies and threats. Despite the somewhat jocular tone of the "bump patrol," it has a militarized law enforcement valence and is of a piece with legislative efforts to keep the uterus under surveillance and render it a public space.

Why this obsession now? Is it that the more women become visible and active in the workplace and public life, the more they must be told that their lives are still determined by biological imperatives that are -- or should be -- out of their control? Is it that right-wing "religious" men, fearing their own lust, project it onto women so they think they have exorcised it? Or, in the case of the spate of vaginal probe ultrasound bills, is it just simple sexual sadism, masquerading as moral outrage?

Whatever the explanation, some politicians who excoriate the Taliban have attitudes toward women almost as warped and aggressive as members of the Islamist militant group. Girls and women everywhere should out these guys not only as reactionary misogynistic ideologues, but as deeply disturbed sexual perverts.

From California to Quebec, Students Fight Tuition Hikes

Diana Rosen — Sat, 12 May 2012 10:48:53 +0000

Though high-quality, low-cost education is fast becoming a relic, militant student protests are very much alive. This year marked the first time students in the world-renowned University of California system contributed more to their education than the state, a fact that has been met with demonstrations, boardroom occupations and a detailed proposal for free up-front tuition to be financed through repayments proportional to students' income after leaving school.

While activists in the United States have struggled to stem the tide of disinvestment in public education, students in Quebec have sustained the longest student strike in the province's history -- and they are beginning to win results.

Protests began in the spring of 2011 after the Quebecois government announced annual tuition increases of $325 for the next five years. Tuition costs have already increased by 30 percent over the last five years, and the new hikes amount to an additional increase of 75 percent.

Since last winter, more than 150 student unions have voted to strike, and nearly 175,000 Quebec college students have boycotted classes on campuses across the province. On March 22, in the biggest demonstration thus far, 200,000 protested.

In April, the unions won a meeting with Education Minister Line Beauchamp, who agreed to consider student plans for alternative financing. Though negotiations broke down after two days when the minister tried to exclude the largest of the striking student groups -- Coalition large de l'Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Etudiante (CLASSE) -- for allegedly violating a 48-hour civil disobedience truce, the provincial government has offered to spread the tuition raise over seven years instead of five.

But students voted down the compromise offer, saying they will continue to strike until the hike is called off completely. And in a show of solidarity with CLASSE, other organizations have refused to return to negotiations unless all student organizations are at the table.

"We're out again in the streets telling the government that we don't like their propositions," Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, told In These Times. "Instead of going into the pockets of the students and parents, we should be looking for other ways to finance education."

Our Guns and Butter Economy

David Sirota — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:00:42 +0000

With the economy still struggling and the debates over how to fix the problem more intense than ever, one word still evokes bipartisan consensus: exports. "I want us to sell stuff," said President Obama, summing up the bipartisan sentiment.

That nebulous word "stuff" is significant. It asks us to see all exports as the same and to refrain from making nuanced value judgments about what exactly we're shipping overseas. In this cold-blooded view, a job-creating export is a job-creating export, and that's as far as any conversation should go.

At first glance, such reductionism seems logical, rational, even boringly uncontroversial. But two recent news items highlight how in a globalized economy, there are troubling consequences that come from the particular kind of export economy we're building.

The first bit of news came from the Washington Post, which this week reported that "the Obama administration is crafting a proposal that could make it easier to export firearms and other weapons." Though the Homeland Security and Justice Departments say the new rules could make it easier for terrorist and drug cartels to further arm themselves, the White House is nonetheless citing the "stuff" theory of exports to ignore the objections.

This is part of a larger pattern since President Obama took office. During Obama's first year in the White House, he began to gut the Pentagon's approval process for arms exports, weakening controls on what could and could not be sold. Later, diplomatic cables uncovered by Wikileaks showed, as Fortune magazine put it, "American officials act(ing) as de facto pitchmen for U.S.-made weapons."

The result is that America has become the true "Lord of War," as the arms dealer motto goes. We are the leading arms supplier to the developing world and we are responsible for the majority of all weapons sales across the globe. Yes, we are so committed to selling instruments of death to the rest of the planet that military industries have almost tripled their share of the U.S. economy in just a decade.

The second bit of news came from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, whose new study shows that America is exporting our obesity crisis to Mexico. Coupling health statistics with U.S. export data since the North American Free Trade Agreement tore down Mexico's agriculture trade barriers, researchers found that the Mexican market was flooded by American agribusinesses' taxpayer subsidized commodities (corn, soybeans) and their processed derivatives. According to the report, that quickly wiped out Mexico's local food economy, leaving its food system exactly "like the industrialized food system of the United States -- characterized by the overabundance of obesogenic foods." Not surprisingly, Mexican obesity rates have consequently skyrocketed.

Taken together, these export booms represent what could be called America's new Guns and Butter economy. We are so desperate to export any "stuff" we can, we are now fattening up the world and arming it for permanent bloodshed.

Seeking to short circuit any objections to this trend, President Obama has said simply that "we're at a moment where necessity has tempered the old debates" over exports and economic policy. In terms of history, he's not wrong -- during the previous century, America witnessed fevered fights over what constitutes a moral farm policy, and in the 1930s the U.S. Senate's Nye Committee held almost 100 hearings into "greedy munitions interests" that were unduly influencing public policy. Sadly, Obama is correct - those debates have been silenced.

But should they be? Should we simply say that any exports -- no matter their moral, ethical, environmental or health implications -- are inherently good? Does "necessity" really mean that "stuff" for stuff's sake must be the basis of our export economy?

Washington and profit-at-all-cost industries certainly say yes -- but that doesn't mean it's the right answer.

A Superhero for the Ladies

Sady Doyle — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:19:09 +0000

If you saw The Avengers last weekend, then you saw many mind-blowing special effects. Flying aircraft carriers, giant robot snakes, etc. But the film's most impressive special effect has gone largely unnoticed. It's this: The Avengers presents us with a vision of Scarlett Johansson in a skin-tight leather catsuit, and then convinces us that the most interesting thing about her is what she's thinking.

With The Avengers becoming this summer's (or this year's) must-see movie, we are being treated to lots of op-eds on why it's not for girls. The problem is, those pieces don't have much to do with The Avengers, which, I would argue, has been successful in part by playing to women.

For an example of the punditry I'm talking about, take Moviefone's excruciating "One Girl's Guide to The Avengers": "As your boyfriend probably told you, The Avengers is hitting theaters this Friday... But you hate action movies and you've never even read a comic book." At this point, given that "you" are apparently a character in a tampon commercial, you expect to start hearing about how much more confident you'll feel on your date, due to increased absorbency. But, no: The piece promises "cocktail introductions a la 'Bridget Jones's Diary.'" Yikes.

At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir takes a more pro-feminist approach, bemoaning the sexism of summer movie season: He says that most big "tentpole" movies are aimed squarely at young men, that movies for women earn less critical respect than movies for men, and that Hollywood is sexist. All of this is generally correct. But specifically, O'Hehir goes on to say that The Avengers is more or less identical to Transformers and predict that "a large majority of [the movie's] ticket buyers will be teenage boys and young men."

And yet, exit polls showed that the people who saw The Avengers were "50% over age 25 and 50% under 25, while 60% were male and 40% female." That's a male majority, but a slim one. And according to a Fandango poll, The Avengers was the most anticipated summer movie for men, and second-most anticipated for women. The only movie women wanted to see more was Snow White and the Huntsman, another action movie, but with a female lead.

So it turns out women do like movies about violence. (See also: The Hunger Games.) And they're showing up in massive numbers to see this particular violent movie. Why?

I didn't see The Avengers because of its premise or its stars. (Beyond Johansson, it also features Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans and Mark Ruffalo.) I went--as I suspect many women did--because it was written and directed by Joss Whedon. Not surprisingly, the guy who's famous for writing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an overtly feminist drama about a teenage girl with superpowers, has a huge female fanbase.

Directors do matter, even with huge movies. For example, Jon Favreau, executive producer of The Avengers, made his name on Swingers, a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the sort of guys we tactfully refer to as "bros." (Less tactfully, and more correctly, we call them "sexists.") Accordingly, his Iron Man (2008) is a wish-fulfillment fantasy for bros: booze, boobs, wads of cash, and Gwyneth Paltrow as a shrill, nagging girlfriend who won't let her man have fun. Favreau's version of Black Widow, seen in Iron Man 2 (2010), existed largely to make doe eyes at men, obey orders from men and take her clothes off in front of men. Any woman who could sit through it deserves a refund and a Purple Heart.

But for The Avengers, Marvel went with Whedon, a man who spends his spare time scripting benefits for Equality Now. He fought the studio to have Johansson included, specifically because he didn't want an all-male cast. He cast TV actress Cobie Smulders to avoid having only one female character, and let Smulders, rather than any of the burly famous guys, star in the movie's first big action sequence.

And, most impressively, once he'd cast some female actors, he actually bothered to write characters for them. He gave Black Widow a backstory, a personality, and more screen time than many characters who had their own movies. He managed to transform her from a vacant sex object into a compelling character whose primary weapon is her intelligence. And she never once takes off her clothes. I shouldn't have to be grateful for this, but in a post-Favreau world, I am: A male director bothered to write a female superhero who was interesting for reasons other than cup size. It's almost as if ridiculous power fantasies weren't exclusively male!

Granted: None of this translates immediately to the outsiders who see the sexist posters. But it translates, hopefully, to word-of-mouth (the evangelical fervor of Whedon fans is already a factor in this movie's ubiquity) and repeat viewings, particularly for smart women who don't mind goofy action. We do see these movies, and we can like them. And we can make studios a lot of money by telling our friends that we like them. All a director has to do is follow in Whedon's footsteps: Prove to female viewers that you know we're in the audience, and that you care whether we're having fun.

Can Labor Strike Back?

Bhaskar Sunkara — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:15:45 +0000

On May Day, tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets. Invoking labor's militant past, Occupiers in many cities called it a "general strike." But few have asked why even the traditional strike has become almost an anachronism for America's labor movement. In 1974, there were 424 major work stoppages, each involving at least 1,000 workers. By 2009, only five such stoppages occurred.

It's easy to see this trend as damning evidence of labor's irrelevance and the need to find a fresh wellspring of social and economic change. It's even easier to place the blame squarely at the feet of conservative union leaders. Both these views lack nuance. Labor unions face a legal framework stacked against them. Laws can't be casually broken: Unions have an important responsibility to their members and the financial assets they safeguard. Yet it's worth remembering that past labor leaders believed in industrial action on a scale that would seem revolutionary even to radicals in the movement today. Figures like Samuel Gompers, Dave Beck, George Meany and Walter Reuther thought the strike was the most effective weapon of the working class. The decline of this venerable tactic has been devastating to our unions.

What's changed?

Wider economic trends have worked against labor for decades. Internationally, the 1970s saw the intersection of weak growth and persistent inflation. This structural crisis was resolved against the interests of working people, with the aftermath especially stark in America. Real wages have declined and our social safety net has eroded, while hyper-mobile corporations are glossier and equipped with slick public-relations departments, but just as exploitative as ever.

The response from reformers within the labor movement hasn't helped matters. As Joe Burns writes in Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America, "Adapting their own ideas to match this new conservative reality, these activists created the one-day strike, the corporate campaign and social unionism -- tactics that functioned comfortably within the existing structures imposed by management and the legal system."

If unions need to strike like they used to, but can't because they're justifiably afraid of the legal repercussions, what can be done?

Circumventing the law is a provocative tactic, but it may just be the Hail Mary we've been looking for.

Burns argues for the erection of independent worker organizations without assets or property that would be able to get around laws that make it difficult for unions to legally strike. Though this idea was endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers in a 2005 memo on possible future labor strategies, it's considerably more militant than most unions are ready for now.

But in a sense, the Occupy movement may be a positive influence. Labor lends its numbers, discipline and organization, while Occupy invokes a rich history of American civil disobedience.

During the past 30 years the U.S. union movement has become more progressive on issues of immigration, foreign policy and the environment, but union membership continues to fall. Yet the return of mass demonstrations offers a new climate for labor. Now is the perfect time to remember how to fight.

Reading Tolstoy in London

Jane Miller — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:00:35 +0000

I've just finished reading Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's vast novel written in 1959 about life in the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. Its central event is the battle of Stalingrad, which looms over the novel as Austerlitz does over Tolstoy's War and Peace. Grossman's hero reminds himself that "for a thousand years Russia had been governed by an absolute autocracy, by Tsars and their favorites. But never had anyone held such power as Stalin."

In March, Putin returned, re-elected as president of Russia and heir to a new version of absolute power. He was born the year before Stalin's death in 1953, and my friend Larysa was born a year later: both of them right in the middle of what the Russian poet Mandelstam called "the wolfhound century."

Larysa was born in Siberia, in Chita, where her grandfather -- one of Stalin's hated "kulaks" (independent farmers) -- had moved his family from the collective farm he'd been forced into and out of in the 1930s. After her parents divorced when Larysa was about 9, her mother took her and her two older siblings to settle in the Ukrainian steel city of Donetsk. Donetsk and Chita are an enormous distance apart and unimaginably different places. Larysa remembers Siberia with affection and has nothing but hatred for Donetsk, where she and Sasha, the man she married, worked for more than 20 years as experienced and qualified engineers for the Russian railways and the military. As Russians, Larysa tells me, they never felt entirely at home in Ukraine, and things got much worse once the country became independent.

By 1998, life had become so difficult for the couple that they decided to move to London. Sasha came first, and Larysa followed him some months later. They came as "asylum seekers," a depressingly supplicant label, which left them living with the sort of uncertainty they had grown up with and knew all too well. A "mistake" eventually admitted to by the Home Office put Sasha in prison for four months. He resisted deportation and went on hunger strike; Larysa found a lawyer who got him out. Miraculously, they seem to have forgiven this "mistake," remembering that it was impossible to get anyone released from a Soviet gaol.

They both found work, infinitely beneath their capabilities and experience, but are hard workers and have done well. They own the house they live in with their daughter, their son-in-law and two young grandsons, and were saved again from possible deportation by the presence of their son-in-law, who, as a Spaniard, is a citizen of the European Union, and therefore entitled to live here permanently with his extended family. They are applying for British citizenship.

Once a week for the last 10 years, Larysa has crossed London to come to my house, where we read Russian together. We've read Chekhov stories and a lot of Turgenev and Pushkin (Larysa can recite dozens of verses from Eugene Onegin), and we're reading Tolstoy's Resurrection now, a novel that lambasts Russian officialdom, the law and the treatment of dissidents and miscreants with even greater fervor than Grossman. I read a page in Russian, and Larysa reads the next one in English. We're both trying to get better at the other's language. Larysa also cleans our floors and irons our shirts. She would much rather be doing the work she was trained to do, but she performs these tasks with the energy and the intelligence she gives to everything in her life.

There are officially about 40,000 Russians living in the U.K. now, and I guess that number might be multiplied by 10 if it included people who are not here legally or who were Russians in Soviet times -- Latvians, say, or Moldovans. There are, of course, the oligarchs, but there are also Russians like Sasha and Larysa, who have managed to make a life here. There is something marvellous to me that I should now be able to talk bad Russian and read Russian novels and poems with this wise and rosy Russian woman, who has lived through nearly 60 turbulent and battering years to honor us now with her charm and her optimism.

Why the Right Really Hates Obama

Theo Anderson — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:44:41 +0000

How much influence has the Tea Party really had in American politics?

The movement scored real successes in the 2010 election, when the GOP won control of the House and narrowed the Democrats' majority in the Senate. That success bolstered the GOP's budget-cutting fervor and set up the debt-ceiling showdown last summer. And wins by Tea Party candidates at the state level have helped create the wave of abortion restrictions recently passed by state legislatures.

On the other hand, there have been major disappointments during the past year. Sarah Palin didn't run for the GOP presidential nomination, and one Tea Party favorite after another ascended in the primary race, then crashed, until Republicans settled for perhaps the least conservative candidate in the race: Mitt Romney.

And electoral successes haven't guaranteed passage of hardcore conservative legislation, as the Tea Party-approved governor of Florida, Rick Scott, has learned. Scott began his term by nixing federal funds for high-speed rail in the state, and his approval rating dropped to the low 30s. Since then he's been forced to move slightly toward the center, proposing more funding for education and backing off his campaign promises to pass Arizona-style legislation that targets immigrants.

But the Tea Party's influence can't be measured by its legislative and electoral victories alone. Its main "achievement" over the past three years has been to help the Republicans advance their goal of creating total cynicism about our institutions. The religious conservatives who form the core of the movement have theological reasons for decrying government as hopelessly broken. That makes them a perfect match with the modern GOP, whose leaders decry the corruption and overweening power of government as a strategy for gaining power within the corrupt, overweening government.

The classic example is Newt Gingrich. It's hard to remember now, after his flameout as a presidential candidate, but Gingrich was the most powerful Republican in the nation in the 1990s, and he rose to that position by coordinating a relentless attack on precisely the institutions that he sought to govern.

As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote recently in the Washington Post, "From the day he entered Congress in 1979, Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority." Ultimately, Gingrich's strategy "activated an extreme and virulently anti-Washington base . . . and helped drive moderate Republicans out of Congress."

What makes this so damaging and dangerous is that cynicism breeds only cynicism, and hopelessness is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it's interesting to consider that, at the heart of the biblical narrative that so many of the Tea Party faithful claim to believe, there's more than sin and corruption. There is also the possibility of redemption and a basis for hope. There is a Messiah.

Liberals often say that the Right's hatred of Obama is about his race. Conservatives say it's about his socialist agenda. But there's something more going on, and it's captured in the way that the Right has often mocked Obama as "the chosen one," the Messiah. Dig a little under the surface of that derision and you'll discover a world of confusion and ambivalence.

Obama is a deeply familiar figure among tea partiers and conservative Christians. He has the energy and charisma of a pastor, and he's the sort of authority figure many on the far-Right are conditioned to respect. But the context is all wrong. The messenger is a black man. The hope he offers is grounded in the possibility that human institutions can be expressions of the common good.

In truth, they want to respond to this kind of hope-affirming message, because balancing despair with hope is fundamental to their theology. And the redemptive promise doesn't even have to be otherworldly. Ronald Reagan became a demigod among conservatives by holding out a bright future for the nation while separating America from its actual institutions. He spoke to conservatives' need to actually believe in something. And he made it possible for them to believe in America's future while despising its government.

Obviously, no Republican since Reagan has rivaled his rhetorical gifts or his deftness at fusing electoral politics with a quasi-religious vision. George W. Bush seemed to understand the power of Reagan's rhetoric but didn't have the skill to pull it off. John McCain had no feel for it at all.

So the source of the Right's hatred of Obama isn't just that he's a black man and a liberal. It's also that he's so much better than any Republican at articulating "that hopey changey stuff," as Sarah Palin once derided it. The mockery of Obama as the Messiah reveals far more about the Tea Party than it does about the president. They long for a Reagan-style message of hope and possibility. What they get is...Mitt Romney.

And who wouldn't despair at that prospect?

Of course, there's far less talk of hope and change this election cycle than four years ago, especially since the Obama campaign has formally changed its slogan to "forward." And yes: It's hard not to feel disappointed, perhaps even cynical, thinking about the gap between Obama's rhetoric and his actual record these past three years.

But the Tea Party has only its cynicism, which leaves the field of positive solutions wide open for Democrats and progressives to occupy. It's important to critique and shine light on the endemic corruption of our institutions, but Obama was onto something important--in fact, radical--with the "hopey changey stuff."

Going beyond critique and offering an alternative vision--a measure of hope--isn't just a rebuttal to the Tea Party's cynicism and a good way to get under that movement's skin. Ultimately, it's the only path to reform.

Blogging Sisterhood

Sady Doyle — Tue, 08 May 2012 10:00:30 +0000

Feminist blogs saved my life. They gave me a community when I felt alone. They gave me hope, provided me with a free education and raised my expectations for myself. They helped me overcome a writer's block that had lasted since college. They radically changed my conception of writing. And then I started one, thereby shooting myself in the foot as a writer. Feminist blogs, many people will allow, are inspirational. They may even be somewhat educational. But they are not, absolutely not, real writing, apparently.

Here's a representative take, from Jenny Turner in the London Review of Books last December: "And as for feminist blogging, isn't it just one of those back-bedroom hobbies, like homemade porn and crafting, that suddenly becomes visible because the technology allows it?"

Turner's essay, titled "As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes," is too complex to summarize in just one line; it aims to be a review of contemporary feminism itself. And it is a good review -- it's intellectually engaged, radical in many of its conclusions and says very mean things about radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, which I like. Turner even name-checks a feminist blog or two. But the casual dismissiveness of that sentence stands out. Feminist bloggers are hobbyists. Other feminists are writers. This mirrors much of the criticism I've received while writing at Tiger Beatdown (the blog I founded), or that I've seen other women receive online: Feminist bloggers whine, vent, rant, have tantrums. The one thing that we never do, seemingly, is write.

To be fair, I was once a hobbyist, with no real plans to be anything else. My reasons for entering the blogosphere were not grand, noble or artistic. I was in my mid-twenties, living mostly alone in a big city while navigating a sexual and social landscape that felt frighteningly unfair. I looked for answers in dating books and conversations, and found none. So, eventually I got out my old women's studies textbooks. When I'd exhausted those, I started scouring the Women's Issues sections of local bookstores. Several of the books I read were by people who ran blogs; I started reading them. I read Feministing. I also read Jezebel, Feministe, Shakesville, Womanist Musings, I Blame The Patriarchy, Racialicious, Feminists With Disabilities, Hoyden About Town and (sooner or later) several dozen Tumblrs. Their writing felt vital and rare.

These blogs woke me up politically. I suddenly saw more than just dating problems and wardrobe issues: I saw double standards, beauty standards, sexual policing, gender roles. And I began to understand, too, how small those concerns were, and how my obsessive focus on them was intrinsically tied to my privilege. The blogs transformed me from an anxiously navel-gazing private person into a... well, into an anxiously navel-gazing political person. But a political person!

I had been interested in feminist theory as a college student, but it had always seemed like an academic concern (probably because I only encountered it within the academy). Feminist blogs gave me that theory in a voice that was urgent -- alive, contemporary, emotive. I wasn't merely discovering new subjects and ideas when I started to read these blogs; I was discovering a new form of writing.

The feminist blogosphere is, of course, a blogosphere -- meaning it prioritizes quick expression and conversational slanginess. But that's not to say it precludes elegance. Consider this sentence from Melissa McEwan:

[Romney] tells stories in which the misfortunes of people who do not share his privilege are the punchline, and he doesn't understand why the commoners do not laugh, because he has never lived among them or served beside them.

I don't know how quickly this sentence was composed, but I know that it comes from one of 14 posts McEwan published at Shakesville on March 28. Such output isn't rare in the feminist blogosphere, a fact that ought to put to rest the idea that these blogs are amateurish.

But suppose that they are? Why, in the long run, would being amateurish be a bad thing for feminist blogs? Why couldn't it be a choice -- even an implicitly political choice -- and not a weakness? If Judy Chicago's installation artwork "The Dinner Party" is any indication, feminists have no problem with craftiness. We have celebrated amateurism in music -- what else was the riot grrrl punk rock movement? -- and in publishing. The zines of Third Wave feminism were self-published; so were the mimeographed newsletters of the Second Wave. The ungroomed, the untrained and the unprofessional are celebrated in feminist writing. As they should be: A movement can hardly encourage women to reach their untapped potential if it doesn't recognize and value potential that has been, you know, untapped.

There's also the fact that feminist blogs reward voices for being what more polite or formal writers would call "ugly." The pressure of the community, the cycle of instant reward (you will always know what your readers want from you) and instant condemnation (you will always know if you haven't given your readers what they want) eggs us on to be louder, more confrontational, more provocative.

No target is unacceptable. It's a literature of confrontation and conflict, and it's not kind -- rebelling directly against the supposed sweetness and niceness of girls. But it's also, strangely, a literature of inclusion. The most intense conflicts are waged in the name of a more caring world. It can feel paradoxical. But, as much as the feminist blogosphere encourages people to find and voice their anger, it also encourages them to assume a moral seriousness based out of lived experience.

All of this is hard to parse for an eye trained toward well-groomed writing. The blogosphere is anti-hierarchy, anti-professionalism and anti-politeness. It's fast; it's loud; it's rough; it's provocative. It rewards the experimental and polarizing over the safe and crowd-pleasing. Reading feminist blogs is like listening to punk rock. It isn't a utopia. Like the rest of the world, acceptance -- being cited by influential mainstream publications, or published elsewhere, or invited onto talk shows, or having your picture in a magazine, just like all those Real Writers -- can and does depend on privilege. A fact that trans bloggers, disability bloggers and women of color have repeatedly pointed out.

On feminist blogs you will read things that make you rage; you will probably get hurt. But it's worth it because the power you feel is drawn from real, live writing. That is not the kind of empowerment you get from a freshly knitted sweater.

The Poverty of Domestic Violence

Sady Doyle — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:01:22 +0000

In late April, the Police Executive Research Forum released a new survey finding that police officers are encountering more cases of domestic violence as the economy continues to struggle. In 2010, 40 percent of the agencies in the survey reported an increase in domestic violence calls; this year, that number has risen to 56 percent. Numbers from women's shelters, released by the Mary Kay Foundation, are even more alarming. 78 percent of shelters have seen a rise in the numbers of women seeking help, and 58 percent report that the abuse they are seeing has become more violent.

These numbers seem shocking, but in fact, we've known about the connection between abuse, economic stress and poverty for a very long time. But it's rarely covered by media. I'd argue that this is in part because doing so requires us to stop adhering to prescribed boundaries -- "economic issues" versus "women's issues," psychology versus politics -- and to start making connections.

As far back as 2008, workers at women's shelters were predicting an increase in violence. Shirl Regan, director of the Women's Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh, spoke to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the rise in domestic violence she'd seen around the time of steel mill closings, and had a grim outlook on the current recession.

"We think we're starting to see some of the same things in terms of stress factors," Regan said. "Our clients aren't saying there's more violence at this point, but in the past eight weeks they've been talking a lot more about economic stress than they were before. That's a warning sign."

Now that warning has been fulfilled. The equation looks simple: Economic stress causes domestic abuse. But it's not that easy. To say that poverty "causes" abuse is classism: Plenty of folks with six-figure salaries hurt their partners, and plenty of people withstand economic strain or poverty without hurting anyone. In fact, economic stress both incites and results from abuse; to talk about how finances and abuse relate to each other requires one to trace not a linear narrative, but a downward spiral.

For example: We know that abuse itself causes severe financial harm. One in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, but more than half of women on welfare are abuse survivors. Abused women often miss work or perform poorly due to partner sabotage. Economic abuse -- preventing a partner from getting or keeping work -- often co-exists with other forms of domestic violence. This leads to a vicious cycle: Abuse harms its victims financially, but victims don't leave their abusers because they don't believe they can support themselves. Thanks to the post-recession scarcity of jobs, this is happening more often.

The idea that economic stress may contribute to the decision to abuse one's partner is harder to map. There are several theories about why abuse happens. A psychological theory might tell you that abusive behavior stems from a need for control. A feminist theory would tell you that male abuse of women also frequently stems from ideas of masculinity as dominant, in-control and aggressive; a male abuser might exert violent control over his partner or children in order to maintain an image of himself as the patriarchal "head of his household." The bottom-line analysis is that abuse is caused by abusers; no matter what's going through anyone's head or heart, the person inflicting pain makes the choice to do harm.

But it is true that economic stress can cut to the core of masculinity. Losing a job, or even fearing that you might lose it, is guaranteed to make you feel exactly the opposite of in control, powerful, successful and invulnerable. You're not in control, you have no power, you've "failed." Someone who already believes that violence is power, and that men have to be powerful, could very easily become more violent in response.

He would harm both himself and his partner by so doing, because abuse causes financial harm. And the downward spiral would continue. With all of these forces intersecting, solutions aren't simple. Encouraging women to prioritize work and education could have a direct affect on domestic violence by making them more likely to resist economic abuse. Dismantling traditional ideas of masculinity as tied to dominance and "success" could help, too. Providing jobs and a reliable safety net for the poor and the out-of-work gives victims more power to leave and could cut down on the stress that pushes volatile relationships to the breaking point.

But, most important, perhaps, is that members of struggling families understand the connection between poverty and abuse. Crossing the line and hurting a partner will not take away the fear of losing everything; it will make the fears come true.

In Search of Stripper Solidarity

Rachel Aimee — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:00:58 +0000

The last time I danced at a strip club in Manhattan, I paid an $80 "house fee" to work. I was shouted at for slouching in my seat and for eating my lunch at the wrong time, and I went home with $40 less than I'd arrived with. After working in this exploitative industry for many years, I wanted to organize to improve working conditions for strippers. But when I reached out to other activists who had been involved in campaigns to protect dancers' rights, the overwhelming response I got was: "Don't do it!"

They had a point.

When dancers at the Lusty Lady, a San Francisco peepshow, successfully unionized in 1997, they put strippers' labor rights on the map. Third-wave feminists across the world rushed to hold up the Lusty Lady as proof that sex work doesn't have to be exploitative. The unionization drive and subsequent transition of the club into a worker-owned cooperative was seen by many as the start of a movement in which strippers would put a stop to the discriminatory practices that plague the industry.

Fifteen years later, the Lusty Lady remains the only unionized stripping venue in the country, and working conditions in most clubs have gotten worse, with dancers paying up to $300 a shift to work and often going home in debt to their employers. Meanwhile, dancers at the Lusty Lady have contracts and receive a standard wage instead of having to compete for tips. But rather than looking to the Lusty Lady as a beacon of progress, most strippers balk at the thought of working for an hourly wage instead of hustling for tips.

"I have never met anyone who lap-dances for any reason other than to make as much money in as little time as possible," says Tempest, a dancer who was involved in the Lusty Lady union drive and now believes the effort may have been counterproductive. She poses a question that strippers can't afford to ignore: "Is unionizing strip clubs conducive to making a profit?"

For most of my stripping career, I worked at a club in Queens, N.Y., that didn't charge house fees. In 2008, when a new manager instituted a house fee, my coworkers and I wrote a letter asking management to stop charging the fee. Most of the dancers at the club signed it, so we figured we'd be safe -- they couldn't fire all of us, right? Of course, the owner turned out to be smarter than we'd thought: He retaliated by banning us from selling lap-dances, thus taking away our primary means of making money.

War broke out between the dancers who had signed the letter and those who hadn't, with the latter accusing us of being bad at our jobs and ruining the club for the girls who knew how to make money. Many dancers, including those who had signed the letter, left to work at clubs that charged higher house fees but offered the freedom to hustle and sell dances. "If you didn't want to pay the house fee, get another job!" one dancer screamed at me.

She didn't need to yell for long. A few weeks later, the owner fired me and another dancer, whom he took to be the instigators, and re-introduced the house fee. I was left feeling that those who had warned me against organizing in strip clubs were right: Most strippers are willing to tolerate labor violations in exchange for the relative freedom to pursue quick cash in an unregulated environment.

Who wants to be an employee?

Tempest says that the Lusty Lady unionization drive made things worse for dancers on a wider scale by discouraging club owners from classifying dancers as employees. "In a sense, what we said to club owners when we organized was 'If you make us employees, empower us, and give us better working conditions, we can -- and probably will -- use it against you.' To potential club owners, what happened at the Lusty Lady could easily be seen as an example of what not to do."

Whether or not the industry-wide shift toward classifying dancers as independent contractors was a result of fear of Lusty Lady-style unionization, it has certainly made it more difficult for dancers to organize for labor rights. By law, independent contractors are unable to unionize. More insidiously, dancers' endless competition for tips undermines the worker solidarity necessary for any sort of workplace organizing.

But while independent contractor status has delivered a major setback to the strippers' rights movement, dancers have not given up -- they have merely shifted the battle site to courts. Ever since club owners figured out they could make more money by classifying dancers as independent contractors and charging them house fees, dancers across the country have been challenging the legality of this practice by filing lawsuits against individual clubs, claiming that they are employees, not independent contractors, and as such should not be paying to work. Results of these lawsuits vary, but in the majority of cases, courts rule in favor of dancers, who are awarded compensation for the house fees they've paid out over the years, as well as the back wages to which they are entitled as employees.

As yet, these lawsuits haven't led to widespread change in the strip club industry, but the cumulative effect may be beginning to force club owners to pay attention. In July 2009, a Massachusetts state court ruled in favor of a dancer named Lucienne Chaves, who filed a class action lawsuit against King Arthur's Lounge in Chelsea, Mass., leading to a slew of dancers across the state filing similar lawsuits against other strip clubs. Clubs across the state then began voluntarily switching over to classifying strippers as employees in an attempt to limit potential damages.

But not all Massachusetts dancers are happy with the change. Writing in The Daily Caller, Pussy Per Se, a stripper who has danced in clubs across New England, says: "I was an independent contractor, working at half a dozen clubs, making good money. It was a perfect job for a single mom. I could arrange my schedule around my son's, ... I might work a single club for weeks, .... [o]r I might take a break to go on a road trip with another dancer, reaping the benefit of being 'new girls' at a distant club." But as an employee, she writes, she has lost this freedom in exchange for the security of being a "wage slave."

Pussy Per Se has a point, but she's missing part of the picture. The last time I worked in a Manhattan club, I was not the only one regularly going home in debt; I was not even in the minority. Friends working in clubs across the city report similar stories of building up debt to the point that, when they finally have a good night, they end up paying most of it back to the club in the form of back-house fees.

You could argue that dancers couldn't be making that little or they would have quit already, but getting a day job is not an option for everyone. Many strippers are undocumented immigrants; others have no formal qualifications or experience outside of the sex industry. For these women, losing money to the club three nights a week and then landing a decent customer and going home with $250 on the fourth night is better than nothing. Meanwhile, clubs collect their house fees from dancers and win every time.

Learning from the Lusty Lady

So, what to do with an industry in which none of us want to give up our independence, but the cost of independence is bleeding us dry? There may be a third way between unionization drives and lawsuits brought by individual strippers. I recently heard about a club in California that seems to be striking a balance between freedom and fair labor practices. Unsurprisingly, it is owned and run by two former dancers. Dancers at Ruby's (club name changed at the request of sources) pay house fees like independent contractors. What makes them different from dancers at most clubs is that they are actually treated like independent contractors, which essentially means no schedules.

The idea of running a strip club where dancers can come and go as they please may sound like a logistical nightmare, but Ruby's appears to be making it work. "Management comes up with incentives to encourage dancers to work at certain times," says Megan, a dancer at Ruby's. "If you schedule yourself ahead of time you pay $20 instead of $30. If they see there aren't enough girls working, they text dancers to try to get more to come in." Dancers and managers negotiate these rules together at regular meetings.

Unlike the Lusty Lady, the democratic style of management at Ruby's is motivated by practicality, rather than idealism. The owners know that if they're going to classify dancers as independent contractors, they need to treat them like independent contractors or risk getting sued. At one point, there was a threat of trouble when the management wanted dancers to work longer hours. "We said, 'If you do that, we're not going to come in at all,' " Megan says. Eventually they negotiated a deal so that dancers who work the whole shift pay a lower house fee. "The easiest way to get strippers to follow the rules is to have strippers make the rules," Megan says.

After learning about Ruby's, I began to wonder if dancers across the country should go to court to be treated as independent contractors, rather than suing to be paid like employees. It could be a compromise that is better for everyone. Then again, it's hard to imagine the suits who run corporate chains like Penthouse sitting down with hundreds of dancers to collectively negotiate the rules on a regular basis.

When the Lusty Ladies got the stripper labor rights movement rolling in 1997, they had a vision of how things were going to go. Today, most dancers aren't psyched for unionization, but they sure as hell aren't psyched to maintain the status quo, either. Given the number of lawsuits that are popping up across the country, strip club owners would do well to take steps to address rampant levels of exploitation. If they don't, they could find themselves being forced to change the way they do business -- in ways that may not actually benefit the majority of dancers.

Let’s Intervene in Elections

Joel Bleifuss — Sat, 05 May 2012 09:59:18 +0000

Adbusters' Kalle Lasn, who initiated the call to "occupy" Wall Street, says that by working in the Republican Party, Tea Partiers are "blind" to how change actually happens. He believes the New "Occupy" Left would be better off starting a third party.

Were In These Times Founding Editor & Publisher James Weinstein alive, he would say, as he did in an August 2000 article: "The Left should begin thinking seriously about how to intervene successfully in our political system." Amen.

Weinstein wrote: "The issue here is not whether we need a second force in American politics. There's no dispute on this. But for us to realize this goal, we have to understand the structural nature of our political system and how to use it. ... [W]e do not have a system in which the members of an elected parliament select the prime minister as head of the government; nor do we have a system of proportional representation for electing legislators. ... [I]n a system like ours, where the president is elected directly and Congress is elected in single-member majority districts, the system moves inexorably toward two parties."

In 2012, as we enter the general election, we have a foreboding that the Tea Partiers--and their right-wing funders--are laughing all the way to the ballot box. Here in Illinois, where this magazine is headquartered, we are encircled by states beset by insurgent Tea Partiers. Our one Midwestern hope is Wisconsin's anti-Tea Party recall elections -- what Weinstein would call a serious political "intervention."

Some occupiers appreciate electoral strategy, like the In These Times contributor who is running in Northern California's 2nd Congressional District. In one of his first reports for In These Times, Norman Solomon wrote: "Occupiers swiftly unpacked their camping gear, and settled in to make themselves comfortable. The main gate's sign stating 'Private Property -- No Trespassing' was quickly covered with one saying 'The People's Property.' "

That was on August 8, 1977, when Solomon and his fellow protesters occupied the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant northwest of Portland, Ore. Solomon, one of 82 demonstrators arrested, wrote the article from jail.

This insurgent Democrat is going up against two establishment liberals for the seat of retiring Rep. Lynn Woolsey, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. In California's new post-partisan election system, the top two vote getters in the June 5 primary (Democratic, Republican or Green) will go head-to-head in the general election. In the 2nd Congressional District, both candidates will be Democrats. Solomon is campaigning for the opportunity to challenge the current frontrunner, State Assemblyman Jared Huffman, who, after having taken campaign donations from Walmart and Pacific Gas & Electric, has fashioned himself as a pro-union and environmentalist Dem.

As the weather warms up and the Occupiers adapt their strategies, they shouldn't lose sight of important struggles being fought in the electoral arena by committed progressives like Solomon. While electoral politics cannot be the sole emphasis of Occupy, it would be a terrible mistake for this new progressive movement to simply cede the levers of the state to our enemies.

Poor and working Americans, particularly immigrants, have endured terrible hardships at the hands of Tea Party legislatures and governors.

Elections matter.

Property Rights in the Cloud

David Sirota — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:00:34 +0000

When you hear the phrase "property rights," you probably think of farmers fighting environmental regulators and homeowners arguing with oil drillers. But in the Information Age, you should also be thinking about your computer--and asking, how much of you is really yours? It's not a navel-gazing rumination from a college Intro to Existentialism class--it's an increasingly pressing question in the brave new world of social networking and cloud computing.

Last week's big technology announcement spotlighted the thorny issue. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Google's announcement of its "Google Drive" came with the promise that users will "retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content." But when you save files to Google's new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google "a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content" as the company sees fit.

When asked about this, Google argued that its provisions merely "enable us to give you the services you want--so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can."

As reassuring as that seems, though, it's not that simple when considered in a larger context.

In the last few years, major technology companies have become integral to interpersonal communication and information management. At the same time, many of these firms have tweaked user agreements in exactly the way Google has, helping the industry legally position itself for a mass intellectual property grab. That means whether you are using a photo-sharing site or a web-based email account, you may have signed off on letting one of these corporations do whatever it wants with your data. As evidence of that reality, Facebook in 2009 let advertisers employ users' uploaded photos to market products without users' explicit approval.

Such a use unto itself may not offend you, but remember--that's only what you can see. Indeed, nobody has any comprehensive idea of how tech companies are using these provisions in their secret business-to-business dealings. If they are already using your photos, what else are they doing behind their firewall? Are they selling your data? Are they mining your cloud files looking to preemptively appropriate the next great innovations? Nobody knows...well, except the tech companies themselves.

It's easy to ignore such concerns by believing that the scope of a mass data mining operation is prohibitively large. But that's not true. With the government already mining data from millions of Americans' phone records in the name of fighting terrorism, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that multibillion-dollar corporations can do the same.

Of course, companies providing these services assert that intellectual property is a substitute currency for cash. As the logic goes, even though online services cost money to create and maintain, you the user don't have to pay actual cash for them because you are already paying in information about yourself, which technology companies then monetize.

That may seem at first like a good deal. But amid companies' ever-intensifying pursuit of profit, the monetization process opens up the possibility for serious shenanigans. And here's the worst part: if a company ultimately pilfers inventions or trade secrets or anything else from users, it will already be too late. Because we so quickly hit "agree" when we originally opened our accounts, we will have signed away any claim to what we believed to be ours and ours alone.

Out of the Margins, Into the Fray

Steve Early — Thu, 03 May 2012 10:00:58 +0000

In this presidential election year, millions of voters find themselves caught, once again, between a Republican rock and a Democratic hard place. Because of the primacy of the two-party system, only major party candidates have the funding, organization and media visibility to be competitive in most federal, state and local elections. As a result, Greens or other minor party standard bearers are almost never elected to public office. (A hundred years ago, things were different when thousands of Socialists successfully ran for municipal office.)

One state where left-leaning voters do have greater choice today -- and their own political voice -- is Vermont. Thanks to several decades of persistent organizing, the Vermont Progressive Party (VPP) now boasts seven members in the legislature -- two senators (out of 30) and five representatives (out of 150) in the House (some of whom affiliate with the Democratic Party as well). Since Vermonters sent the first "Prog" to Montpelier in 1990, 16 have served a total of 48 legislative terms in the state capitol. Progressives have introduced legislation, served on key committees and played a catalytic role in public policy formation.

Despite the VPP's recent loss of Burlington City Hall, where a Democrat was just elected mayor for the first time since the late 1970s, the party retains three city council seats (out of 14) in Vermont's largest municipality. Over the years, more than 29 VPP members have served as part of the Progressive bloc on the council. One newly-elected member is Burlington Department of Public Works commissioner Max Tracy, a 25-year-old former student activist at the University of Vermont, long involved in organizing campus workers. He won in the city's Old North End section by campaigning for living wage jobs, affordable housing, a sustainable transportation system and support for local farmers and gardeners.

In similar fashion, Progressives running in nonpartisan races in small towns serve on local school committees, select boards and community planning bodies. Plus, they turn out on Town Meeting Day to help pass resolutions in favor of issues like tax reform and overturning the Supreme Court's pro-corporate decision in Citizens United -- both the subject of town meeting action in 70 Vermont communities in March. While never formally aligned with the party himself, Vermont's socialist U.S. senator, Bernie Sanders, has backed some VPP candidates for state and local office, while VPP activists have, in turn, been his most ardent supporters in past statewide races.

Taking a leaf from Sanders' singular 30-year career -- as Burlington mayor, then Vermont's lone congressman, and now junior senator, the Progressives have distinguished themselves from their Democratic competitors by focusing, in populist fashion, on economic issues. In areas of the state where working-class voters might otherwise be swayed by cultural conservatism or residual rural Republicanism, the VPP has, like Sanders, won elections by campaigning for labor rights, fair taxes and single-payer healthcare far more consistently than the Democrats. The party's statement of principles has a distinct tinge of Occupy. "Democracy," it declares, "requires empowering people not only in government but also in the workplace, schools, and in the overall economy. Society's wealth should not be concentrated in the hands of a few, and a wealthy minority should not control the conditions under which we live."

Healthy competition

One measure of the Progressive impact on public policy is the preliminary steps that Vermont took last year to create a first-in-the-nation single-payer healthcare system -- though this achievement may still be thwarted, due to business opposition during a complicated multi-year implementation process or any intervening loss of Democratic Party control over the legislature or governor's office.

In coordination with a strong grassroots movement, both Sanders and the VPP continued to make single-payer a central political issue, keeping the pressure on local Democrats. Current Gov. Peter Shumlin's previous bid for statewide office -- a run for lieutenant governor in 2002 -- ended in defeat when Progressive Anthony Pollina, a strong single-payer advocate and now a state senator, received 25 percent of the vote.

Determined to avoid that fate again, Shumlin, a millionaire businessman and former Senate president, tacked left on healthcare reform in the 2010 Democratic gubernatorial primary and the general election. He narrowly won the five-way primary and then, with no Prog in the race, defeated Republican Brian Dubie by a 2-percent margin after getting much-needed help from Sanders with last-minute working-class voter turnout. With a Democratic-Progressive majority in both houses of the legislature, Shumlin followed through on his campaign pledge to introduce a single-payer plan and make its passage a top priority of his administration last year.

"We have a homeopathic role in the Vermont body politic," says Ellen David-Friedman, a former organizer for the Vermont-National Education Association (NEA) and longtime Progressive Party activist. "We've managed to create enough of an electoral pole outside of the Democrats to constantly pull them to the left on policy issues, by dispensing an alternative brand of medicine that's become increasingly popular."

To maintain its "major party" status under Vermont law, the VPP must field a candidate every two years who garners at least 5 percent of the statewide vote. Progressives rarely perform better in statewide races than Martha Abbott, a tax accountant from Underhill, who received 12 percent in her 2008 campaign for state auditor. To boost its win rate, the party has lately focused on recruiting and supporting viable contenders for legislative seats. "Our strategy of both challenging and working with Democrats ... makes us somewhat unique," says Abbott, who was re-elected VPP chair at a lively party conference in Montpelier in November 2011.

Small is beautiful

With a population of 626,000 people, Vermont has electoral constituencies small enough for people with progressive ideas to canvass door-to-door, meet nearly every voter and drum up enough campaign contributions to be competitive. House member Chris Pearson, who specializes in tax and budget issues for the VPP, represents one of the state's larger multi-seat districts; he only had to raise $12,000 for his last election campaign.

Some VPP legislative candidates have, like Pollina, campaigned with the "D/P" label -- a form of de facto cross endorsement achieved after running successfully in a Democratic primary. (Six of the seven Progs in the state legislature are D/Ps.) Where possible, other Progressives have also sought Sanders-like accommodations with Democrats in races where a strong general election showing by two left-of-center candidates would guarantee Republican victory. Several VPP legislators, including state Rep. Susan Hatch Davis, actually represent districts where their main competition comes from GOP nominees; local Democrats are, in effect, the "third party."

The VPP's politically savvy and flexible approach has helped it struggle against what Executive Director Morgan Daybell calls "the negative perception of third parties in general." In contrast, local Greens and what's left of the Liberty Union Party in Vermont -- Bernie Sanders' original political home in the 1970s -- have not suffered the fate of most left-wing parties elsewhere (i.e. being presentable but marginal at best, ideologically pure, or just plain eccentric, with little to show, organizationally, for any single-digit share of the vote they garner).

The Progressive Caucus at work

On a recent visit to Montpelier I found Pollina making his presence felt under the gilded dome of the state capitol building. A longtime advocate for farmers, tax justice and campaign finance reform, Pollina joined Sen. Tim Ashe (D/P) in the state Senate two years ago. In the current legislative session, Pollina has been promoting the idea of a state bank, a bill requiring Vermont to "hire and buy local" (when contracting for state services) and a budget-related survey of poverty and income inequality.

Elsewhere in the same building, Rep. Pearson huddled with Reps. Mollie Burke and Sarah Edwards at the weekly meeting where VPP members of the House gather to share information and coordinate legislative strategy. Burke and Edwards are both from the Brattleboro area and are engaged with environmental and public health issues related to decommissioning the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in their corner of the state.

On this particular mid-March day, Vermont unions, strongly supported by the VPP, were working to overcome Democratic reluctance to grant collective bargaining rights to publicly-funded "early childhood educators" who provide home day care. Hoping to win further organizational endorsements, donations and support -- from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Vermont-NEA and Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA) unions, along with the AFL-CIO -- the VPP has strongly supported the AFT's child-care organizing campaign. Progressives have also defended VSEA members against public criticism by Gov. Shumlin during a dispute about state worker contract enforcement last year.

In White River Junction and other communities, Windsor County Party Chair Liz Blum and several elected local VPP officials are now working with the Vermont Workers Center and local Occupy activists to fight contraction of the U.S. Postal Service, which would eliminate several hundred union jobs and adversely affect mail delivery in the state.

As Blum explains, these "cuts would be devastating for elderly, rural and low-income Vermonters who depend on the reliability and affordability of the mail, and for whom the post office functions as a social link. It's often the place where people interact with neighbors, petition for ballot measures and swap news, the kind of space that's made small-town Vermont so famously democratic." Such nonelectoral activity on behalf of a key labor and community cause barely registers on the radar screen of Vermont Democrats.

Vermont State Labor Council Secretary-Treasurer Traven Leyshon, who also serves on the VPP's state coordinating committee, says, "Local labor leaders are now willing to support Progressive candidates over Democrats -- when they're credible -- because of such pro-labor stances." In some cases, he said, rank-and-filers have had to overrule the safer, more conservative candidate endorsements favored by their own union lobbyists and political directors.

This small insurgency from below, in Vermont's public sector-oriented labor movement, mirrors the VPP's own trajectory in state politics. In a fashion that one hopes will not be the exception, Progressives have moved from the margins to Montpelier, from also-ran status to an influential role in state and local government. If there were more Left partying like that in other states, at least one of the two major parties might feel greater pressure to behave better.

Cartagena Beyond the Secret Service Scandal

Noam Chomsky — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:03:48 +0000

Though sidelined by the Secret Service scandal, last month's Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, was an event of considerable significance. There are three major reasons: Cuba, the drug war and the isolation of the United States.

A headline in the Jamaica Observer read, "Summit shows how much Yanqui influence had waned." The story reports that "the big items on the agenda were the lucrative and destructive drug trade and how the countries of the entire region could meet while excluding one country--Cuba."

The meetings ended with no agreement because of U.S. opposition on those items--a drug-decriminalization policy and the Cuba ban. Continued U.S. obstructionism may well lead to the displacement of the Organization of American States by the newly-formed Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, from which the United States and Canada are excluded.

Cuba had agreed not to attend the summit because otherwise Washington would have boycotted it. But the meetings made clear that U.S. intransigence would not be long tolerated. The U.S. and Canada were alone in barring Cuban participation, on grounds of Cuba's violations of democratic principles and human rights.

Latin Americans can evaluate these charges from ample experience. They are familiar with the U.S. record on human rights. Cuba especially has suffered from U.S. terrorist attacks and economic strangulation as punishment for its independence -- its "successful defiance" of U.S. policies tracing back to the Monroe Doctrine.

Latin Americans don't have to read U.S. scholarship to recognize that Washington supports democracy if, and only if, it conforms to strategic and economic objectives, and even when it does, favors "limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied--[in] quite undemocratic societies," as neo-Reaganite scholar Thomas Carothers points out.

At the Cartagena summit, the drug war became a key issue at the initiative of newly-elected Guatemalan President Gen. Perez Molina, whom no one would mistake for a soft-hearted liberal. He was joined by the summit host, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, and by others.

The concern is nothing new. Three years ago the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy published a report on the drug war by ex-Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia calling for decriminalizing marijuana and treating drug use as a public-health problem.

Much research, including a widely quoted Rand Corporation study of 1994, has shown that prevention and treatment are considerably more cost-effective than the coercive measures that receive the bulk of funding. Such nonpunitive measures are also of course far more humane.

Experience conforms to these conclusions. By far the most lethal substance is tobacco, which also kills nonusers at a high rate (passive smoking). Usage has sharply declined among more educated sectors, not by criminalization but as a result of lifestyle changes.

One country, Portugal, decriminalized all drugs in 2001--meaning that they remain technically illegal but are considered administrative violations, removed from the criminal domain. A Cato Institute study by Glenn Greenwald found the results to be "a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world."

In dramatic contrast, the coercive procedures of the 40-year U.S. drug war have had virtually no effect on use or price of drugs in the United States, while creating havoc through the continent. The problem is primarily in the United States: both demand (for drugs) and supply (of arms). Latin Americans are the immediate victims, suffering appalling levels of violence and corruption, with addiction spreading through the transit routes.

When policies are pursued for many years with unremitting dedication though they are known to fail in terms of proclaimed objectives, and alternatives that are likely to be far more effective are systematically ignored, questions naturally arise about motives. One rational procedure is to explore predictable consequences. These have never been obscure.

In Colombia, the drug war has been a thin cover for counterinsurgency. Fumigation--a form of chemical warfare--has destroyed crops and rich biodiversity, and contributes to driving millions of poor peasants into urban slums, opening vast territories for mining, agribusiness, ranches and other benefits to the powerful.

Other drug-war beneficiaries are banks laundering massive amounts of money. In Mexico, the major drug cartels are involved in 80 percent of the productive sectors of the economy, according to academic researchers. Similar developments are occurring elsewhere.

In the U.S., the primary victims have been African-American males, increasingly also women and Hispanics--in short, those rendered superfluous by the economic changes instituted in the 1970s, shifting the economy toward financialization and offshoring of production.

Thanks largely to the highly selective drug war, minorities are dispatched to prison -- the major factor in the radical rise of incarceration since the 1980s that has become an international scandal. The process resembles "social cleansing" in U.S. client states in Latin America, which gets rid of "undesirables."

The isolation of the U.S. at Cartagena carries forward other turning-point developments of the past decade, as Latin America has at last begun to extricate itself from the control of the great powers, and even to address its shocking internal problems.

Latin America has long had a tradition of liberal jurisprudence and rebellion against imposed authority. The New Deal drew from that tradition. Latin Americans may yet again inspire progress in human rights in the United States.