In These Times

We Are What We Trade and How We Trade It

David Sirota — 2009-11-07T10:00:41+00:00

Trade and globalization--when not referencing blockbuster sports transactions or raucous street protests, debates over these abstract terms can give Ambien and Jack Daniels a run for their money as a cure for insomnia. Of course, that's the problem--the rules governing what we buy and sell are now playing such a decisive role in almost every major policy that we're falling asleep at our peril. Most are familiar with trade and globalization, if at all, through the prism of heavy manufacturing in the so-called "old economy." We know, for instance, how NAFTA-style pacts helped destroy our factory job base. The economics were unabashed and straightforward: By eliminating the tariffs we charged for goods made in countries with negligible wage and human rights laws, Washington removed disincentives for mass offshoring. With "free trade," our government effectively encouraged corporations to transfer production facilities abroad so as to cut costs via the cheap labor, slave working conditions and rampant union busting that flourishes in the developing world. No surprise--two decades into this allegedly glorious "free trade" era, an ever-bigger swath of Flyover America looks just as flicks like "Roger and Me" predicted: rusted, abandoned, boarded up, and/or otherwise resembling a nuclear test site. Even…

Harm Reduction: The Anti-Drug

Melinda Tuhus — 2009-11-06T09:59:41+00:00

A mother from suburban Hartford, Conn., had a life-saving drug on hand when she truly needed it. One evening last spring, she found her son, who had recently returned from an addiction treatment pro-gram, unconscious in his bedroom. He had relapsed and overdosed on heroin. "He was not breathing, and he was gray," says the woman, who requests anonymity to protect her son's privacy. "That's when I called 911 and went running around the house trying to find my Narcan. We gave him two injections to get him breathing again before the ambulance got to our house." Narcan is the trade name for naloxone, a drug that's been used by emergency medical personnel for decades to reverse accidental drug overdoses from opioids, including heroin, methadone and prescription pain medications like oxycodones. This mother had received her supply through a Connecticut program that trains individuals to administer it in their home. A physician involved in the program says the drug is so safe that if it's given to a person who's not overdosing on an opioid, it will have no effect--so it has no street value. In June, Rep. Donna F. Edwards (D-Md.) introduced the Drug Overdose Reduction Act in 2009.…

War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel

Noam Chomsky — 2009-11-05T10:00:45+00:00

The hopes and prospects for peace aren't well aligned--not even close. The task is to bring them nearer. Presumably that was the intent of the Nobel Peace Prize committee in choosing President Barack Obama. The prize "seemed a kind of prayer and encouragement by the Nobel committee for future endeavor and more consensual American leadership," Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in The New York Times. The nature of the Bush-Obama transition bears directly on the likelihood that the prayers and encouragement might lead to progress. The Nobel committee's concerns were valid. They singled out Obama's rhetoric on reducing nuclear weapons. Right now Iran's nuclear ambitions dominate the headlines. The warnings are that Iran may be concealing something from the International Atomic Energy Agency and violating U.N. Security Council Resolution 1887, passed last month and hailed as a victory for Obama's efforts to contain Iran. Meanwhile, a debate continues on whether Obama's recent decision to reconfigure missile-defense systems in Europe is a capitulation to the Russians or a pragmatic step to defend the West from Iranian nuclear attack. Silence is often more eloquent than loud clamor, so let us attend to what is unspoken. Amid the furor over Iranian…

The Dark Side of the Bright Side

Anis Shivani — 2009-11-04T10:00:15+00:00

In her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan/Holt, October 2009), Barbara Ehrenreich traces the origins of contemporary optimism from nineteenth-century healers to twentieth-century pushers of consumerism. She explores how that culture of optimism prevents us from holding to account both corporate heads and elected officials. Manufactured optimism has become a method to make the poor feel guilty for their poverty, the ill for their lack of health and the victims of corporate layoffs for their inability to find worthwhile jobs. Megachurches preach the "gospel of prosperity," exhorting poor people to visualize financial success. Corporations have abandoned rational decision-making in favor of charismatic leadership. This mania for looking on the bright side has given us the present financial collapse; optimistic business leaders--assisted by rosy-eyed policymakers--made very bad decisions. In These Times recently spoke with her about our penchant for foolish optimism. Is promoting optimism a mechanism of social control to keep the system in balance? If you want to have a compliant populace, what could be better than to say that everyone has to think positively and accept that anything that goes wrong in their lives is their own fault because they haven't…

Consolidation Station: News ‘Sharing’ Erodes Journalism

Megan Tady — 2009-11-03T10:00:48+00:00

Television broadcasters in the Aloha State have been quietly embarking on an underhanded media merger for more than a year. In August, the CBS, NBC and MyNetwork affiliates in Honolulu announced that they were folding into one of the "largest television news operations" in Hawaii, combining the stations' staff and newsrooms. The three news stations will now be housed in the same place, sharing reporters and editorial ideas, but they will broadcast from separate channels, appearing as distinct entities to viewers. Nearly 70 employees from the stations will lose their jobs. The consolidated operation will be controlled by one company: Raycom Media. Raycom is among the nation's largest broadcasters, with 46 television stations in 36 markets and 18 states. The company has been careful not to call the deal "media consolidation," instead referring to it as an innocuous "Shared Services Agreement." Raycom says the arrangement will save struggling news stations. But one public interest organization in Hawaii isn't buying Raycom's PR spin. In September, the nonprofit group Media Council Hawaii, represented by Georgetown University's Institute for Public Representation, filed an official complaint (PDF link) with the Federal Communications Commission. The complaint alleges that because Raycom will effectively control the local…

Can the Rich Really Save Us?

Pete Redington — 2009-11-02T22:04:07+00:00

BOSTON--After hearing Ralph Nader discuss his new book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, at an event here Friday night, a man expressed the concern many Nader supporters felt upon reading the book's title. Only the rich? A book about billionaires giving their time and money to charity? From "America's first citizen"? Has Ralph Nader lost his faith in grassroots organizing and activism? Not at all, the perennial third-party presidential candidate replied. Only the Super-Rich Can Save Usis a utopian fantasy, not an ideological surrender. Its characters are real-life people (usually billionaires) like Warren Buffett, Bill Cosby, George Soros, Yoko Ono and Ted Turner, who are powerful enough to enact large-scale social change. Nader imagines them acting on behalf of the American people, and wonders what would happen if society's wealthiest were "not just interested in charity, but real change." It is, in essence, Nader's dream. A dream where the "super-rich" realize they want more than multi-million dollar mansions and private yachts. Or well-endowed foundations memorializing their deaths. "Nothing fails like success," Nader suggests. His billionaires want more, they want the deeply human satisfaction of civic responsibility. "They want to look their grandchildren in the eye proudly," he writes. And…

Free Speech Radical

Don Lazere — 2009-11-02T11:00:41+00:00

Mario Savio's place in American history is defined by the climax of the speech he gave as a 21-year-old student in December 1964, on the steps of the University of California administration building, at a key moment in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. The movement was a protest against the university's clampdown on political speechmaking and recruiting for civil rights activism on campus. President Clark Kerr and various bureaucratic intermediaries disdained the movement as a disruption of the modern "multiversity" (Kerr's own term) as a smooth-running, quasi-corporate knowledge factory. When punitive action was taken against Savio and other leaders, Savio responded: If this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something--the faculty are the workers, and we're the raw materials. But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to have any process on us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor--be they anyone. We're human beings! There's a time when the operation of…

TARP on Steroids

David Sirota — 2009-10-31T10:00:22+00:00

I recall that September day like it was yesterday--the explosion so stunning, so memorable. It wasn't 9/11/01, it was 9/29/08--a moment when a rare blast of populist democracy briefly singed the economic terrorists who hold the Capitol hostage. It had been a dark and stormy month of financial collapse, culminating in an attempted power grab. Pushed by his fellow Wall Street Ponzi schemers, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson--a former Goldman Sachs CEO--was threatening Armageddon unless Congress ratified his pamphlet-sized decree for a no-strings-attached bank bailout. The straightforward proposal, backed by President George W. Bush and President-to-be Barack Obama, would have turned Paulson into King Henry--a despot allowed to autonomously dole out $700 billion to any of his business cronies. This was too outrageous even for a rubber-stamp Congress that had long been ceding power to both the executive branch and the corporate boardroom. And so rank-and-file House Democrats and Republicans, backed by an angry public, overrode their leaders and voted down the measure. Admittedly, the conflagration was brief. After a few days of industry lobbying, the House ultimately passed the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) bailout--but one with at least some mild restrictions. For a time, 9/29's fleeting blast of defiance…

The Pillage People

Roger Bybee — 2009-10-30T10:00:07+00:00

It's as if last year's meltdown--causing a $16 trillion bailout of the financial industry, the doubling of America's unemployment rate and the loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in 2008--had never taken place. Two of the five biggest investment banks, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, have bitten the dust, but the survivors intend to party on, federal dollars in hand. The Obama administration's passive attitude creates despair for observers like Wall Street veteran Nomi Prins, a former managing director of Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs and author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (John Wiley & Sons, September). Whereas "the New Deal meshed government rescue with economic restructuring," Prins sees few signs that the Obama team is going to insist that the big bailout be coupled with serious re-regulation of the financial sector. "I think we are less stable now," Prins told In These Times. "There are fewer banks and they are more concentrated and more influential than before. We might not have a crisis on subprime loans in five years, but it might turn out to be the financial sector not fully paying back their loans that causes…

On Public Option, MSM Gets It Wrong

Robert Parry — 2009-10-29T20:39:32+00:00

The American mainstream media is in another snit, having misjudged the prospects for the public option on health care almost as completely as big-time journalists bungled the reporting on the Iraq War and a host of other important stories during George W. Bush’s presidency. Indeed, if you had listened to all the supposedly knowledgeable journalists covering the health-care debate on Capitol Hill, you might have been shocked to learn Monday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was putting a version of the public option in the bill that he is bringing to the Senate floor. For instance, CNN’s Dana Bash has told listeners to her “no bias” news network that the only piece of legislation that mattered was the one emerging from the Senate Finance Committee, a position shared by nearly all the other “smart” journalists and pundits. That’s why, they said, they were devoting so much time to covering every twist and turn of the committee’s negotiations. That devotion wasn’t shaken even by the strange legislative concoction that emerged from the Finance Committee. Since it didn’t include the public option, the insider thinking was that the idea was effectively dead, though a public option was included in the four…

America’s Real Death Panels

Diana Novak — 2009-10-28T11:00:16+00:00

Next spring, Texas will decide whether or not to become the first state to admit it executed an innocent man. Cameron Willingham was put to death in February 2004, 12 years after being convicted of killing his three infant children in a fire at their Corsicana, Texas, home. In August, the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) released a report that concluded none of the evidence from the fire indicated it was set intentionally and that the state fire marshal who testified the fire was arson lacked "any realistic understanding of fires." The IAFSS was asked to investigate the case by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which was created in 2005 to re-examine questionable forensic evidence. The TFSC plans to continue its examination of the fire, but admits the report is a "major step" toward exonerating all that is left of Willingham: his name. As in any jury trial in the United States, Willingham, who maintained his innocence to the end, was convicted by a group of his peers--12 men and women who supposedly represented the community in which he lived. However, the prosecution in his case sought the death penalty, and that automatically changed the pool of people…

The Lonesome Death of Pedro Munoz

Jeremy Kryt — 2009-10-27T10:00:53+00:00

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS--Despite the intense repression that has plagued Honduras since the military-backed coup in June--including random beatings and sexual assaults by cops and soldiers, and the gassing and shooting of peaceful demonstrators–there is still one case that stands out above the rest, unique in its grisly details and implications. For many in the pacifist, anti-coup resistance movement, the story of the detention, torture and killing of a young protester named Pedro Munoz in July has become a powerful inspiration to continue the struggle. For others, it is a grim reminder of the lengths the coup regime will go to as it struggles for hegemony. "The police put this man through agony before they killed him--that was done to send a message, about the price of involvement in the Resistance," said Mery Agurcia, the human rights case worker in charge of the ongoing investigation into Munoz's death, when we spoke in her office. "But, of course, nothing can be proven against those who did it. Since the coup, there's no longer any kind of transparency in the government." The turmoil in Honduras began last June 28, when democratically-elected President Mel Zelaya was forcibly sequestered and exiled by the military, which traditionally…

Restless Vagina Syndrome

Terry J. Allen — 2009-10-27T10:00:18+00:00

It's not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner's), that you don't orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the libido of a 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help. You are among the "43 percent of American women [who] experience some degree of impaired sexual function," according to a Journal of the American Medical Association article. The FDA's evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties--but only if the woman feels "personal distress" about it. So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them. By promoting the belief that "normal" women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch the disease. However, the FDA has yet to approve a treatment for women who fall short. Until then, they could try the Orgasmatron: a dial-a-delight spinal implant that rarely works--and risks infection and paralysis. Or, for $60/month, pop LexaFem pills--containing (how-could-it-not-work) "horny goat weed extract" in order to "feel like a real woman today." Its website…

A Party With No Punch

David Sirota — 2009-10-26T11:00:06+00:00

A parable is defined as "a short allegorical story designed to illustrate or teach some truth, religious principle, or moral lesson." In a world of fine shading, it is difficult to find the broad strokes that paint such enduring tales. That's particularly true in politics--many legislative and electoral moves are part of a bigger game, where seeming capitulation could be part of a grander, more complex plan of assault, and where purportedly bold stands are often the first step of a full-scale retreat. So when potent political parables present themselves as clearly as they recently have, we should take heed. In the last month, three unrelated events revealed the nature of the modern Democratic Party more powerfully than any Ralph Nader treatise, Michael Moore documentary or Saturday Night Live sketch. #1: Movement Activists Need Not Apply Van Jones is, by any measure, one of the nation's leading experts on energy and environmental policies--and their real-world ramifications. A bestselling author and founder of the non-profit Green For All, his appointment to the White House Council on Environmental Quality was arguably a step down for him. Despite the position's media billing as a "green jobs czar," it was housed in an advisory…

A Tale of Two Supermen

David Sirota — 2009-10-24T10:00:40+00:00

For better or worse, our American Idiocracy has come to rely on athletes as national pedagogues. Michael Jordan educated the country about commitment and just doing it. A.C. Green lectured us about sexual caution. Serena Williams and John McEnroe taught us what sportsmanship is--and is not. And Charles Barkley outlined how society should define role models. So when a single week like this one sees both the Justice Department back states' medical marijuana laws, and a Gallup poll show record-level support for pot legalization, we can look to two superjocks--Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps--for the key lesson about our absurd drug policy. This Tale of Two Supermen began in February when Phelps, the gold-medal swimmer, was plastered all over national newspapers in a photo that showed him hitting a marijuana bong. Though he was smoking in private, the image ignited a public firestorm. USA Swimming suspended Phelps, Kellogg pulled its endorsement deal and the Associated Press sensationalized the incident as a national decision about whether heroes should "be perfect or flawed." The alleged imperfection was Phelps' decision to quietly consume a substance that "poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol," as a redacted…