I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?
The answer to Herbert's question is simple: "Radical" comes from the Greek root "radic", meaning "root." A radical is one who doesn't mess around, but goes right to the root of the problem in seeking to set things right. It's one of the nicest things you can say about anyone, to call them a radical, like Howard Zinn.
One of the best tributes to the late Howard Zinn was heard on Democracy Now with Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein and Anthony Arnove. Before turning to her guests, however, Amy replayed part of an 2005 interview with Zinn, where he talked about his experience as a WWII Air Force bombardier. He went in thinking it was a "good war", but in the end...:
HOWARD ZINN: Well, we thought bombing missions were over. The war was about to come to an end. This was in April of 1945, and remember the war ended in early May 1945. This was a few weeks before the war was going to be over, and everybody knew it was going to be over, and our armies were past France into Germany, but there was a little pocket of German soldiers hanging around this little town of Royan on the Atlantic coast of France, and the Air Force decided to bomb them. Twelve hundred heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm-first use of napalm in the European theater.
And we don't know how many people were killed or how many people were terribly burned as a result of what we did. But I did it like most soldiers do, unthinkingly, mechanically, thinking we're on the right side, they're on the wrong side, and therefore we can do whatever we want, and it's OK. And only afterward, only really after the war when I was reading about Hiroshima from John Hersey and reading the stories of the survivors of Hiroshima and what they went through, only then did I begin to think about the human effects of bombing. Only then did I begin to think about what it meant to human beings on the ground when bombs were dropped on them, because as a bombardier, I was flying at 30,000 feet, six miles high, couldn't hear screams, couldn't see blood. And this is modern warfare.
In modern warfare, soldiers fire, they drop bombs, and they have no notion, really, of what is happening to the human beings that they're firing on. Everything is done at a distance. This enables terrible atrocities to take place. And I think, reflecting back on that bombing raid and thinking of that in Hiroshima and all the other raids on civilian cities and the killing of huge numbers of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the killing of 100,000 people in Tokyo in one night of fire-bombing, all of that made me realize war, even so-called good wars against fascism like World War II, wars don't solve any fundamental problems, and they always poison everybody on both sides. They poison the minds and souls of everybody on both sides. We're seeing that now in Iraq, where the minds of our soldiers are being poisoned by being an occupying army in a land where they are not wanted. And the results are terrible.
Last Friday I was in the Fresh Air Center for bloggers and new media at the COP15 summit in Copenhagen, organized by the TckTckTck campaign, and I got into an argument (you are not surprised, I know,) with Naomi Klein (okay, you are a little surprised, because it's Naomi Klein.)
I went up to Klein, thanked her for the Shock Doctrine and asked, with regard to her use of the term "reparations" in talking about climate aid to developing nations, if she knew what a damaging word that was to use in the US because it specifically called up the idea of reparations for slavery. (The word has become popular in some circles to mean getting wealthy nations to cough up a responsible share of adaptation and mitigation support and to cut emissions, also referred to more neutrally as "climate debt.") In particular, I asked her if she knew that it made it impossible for Obama to agree to do anything referred to in that way.
Really, it would be impossible for any American president. But for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who stopped to think about them at all, you can replace any instance of 'reparations' in any speech or text with 'Barack Obama can't say yes to this, nor can he ever once utter this word.'
In his reaction to Obama's speech in Copenhagen announcing the postponement of any legally binding treaties, climate campaigner Bill McKibben said that Obama "chose the Senate over the UN tonight."
Obama told the world tonight that the US had come to the table "with an ambitious plan to reduce our emissions" but that the US also couldn't "turn on a dime" and so refused to make any commitments that it might not be able to keep. Yet as Naomi Klein said tonight, he could easily have used the stimulus money to jumpstart a clean economy in a way that would have given the US "inspiring emissions cuts" to show the world and chose not to.
Though Obama made comments about wanting to act based on the science and leave a better world for our children and grandchildren, his refusal to commit to a firm target kept the rest of the world from doing so. Now, the agreement will include only voluntary goals from each country that will be added in an appendix to the document.
Klein said that while the Obama administration was trying to make much of his having brought China, India, Brazil and South Africa along on an agreement, it had been their position from the beginning that they didn't want to be spoilers and would agree to binding cuts if the US was willing to do so.
Klein pointed out that in spite of Obama's claim not to want to move things backwards, the world went from having a legally binding agreement signed by most countries to a non-binding agreement signed by four countries. Obama may not have wanted to create "frustration and cynicism", but McKibben added that there wasn't even a numerical target in the new document and that he doubted George Bush could have gotten away with so forcefully brushing aside the UN.
While complaining about logjams and looking backwards, Obama said that the world needed more time to build trust and that the "US was coming to this with ... a clean slate." And at that point, there was a shocking sense for me of campaign deja vu, where women and the LGBT community and social justice advocates were told to look forward and forget old divisions. Then once he got into office, all that talk of hope was replaced with using fine words to smooth over the continuing sell out of the poor to the powerful. wash, rinse, repeat. At least he's consistent.
Phil Bloomer of Oxfam commented earlier today that rich countries' governments were captured entirely by "massive, vested interests" and that wealthy countries "care more about their banks than ... our shared destiny." Rarely has this been more on display than in this president, tonight, who acted, as Avaaz' Ben Wikler said today that the US often did, to lower our national ambitions based on the power of the coal and oil industries.
Obama said tonight that, "climate change threatens us all." Yet he seemed frankly more afraid of letting anyone in the US think he'd signed up to an international treaty, closing by very awkwardly noting that there was a question of whether there even could be a signature on a document that wasn't legally binding.
The Mulch: 10 Million Strong, and Growing
By Alison Hamm, Media Consortium Blogger
It's one of the largest petitions in history-and the biggest climate-related petition ever delivered. Organized by the TckTckTck campaign, 10 million people called for leaders to sign a fair, ambitious, and legally binding climate treaty at the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (Cop15).
After the opening press conference on Monday, young people from around the globe handed the petition to Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations agency organizing Cop15, and Connie Hedegaard, Danish Climate Minister and President of Cop15. More than 220 leading civil society organizations from environmental, development, labor, and health fields came together for the campaign.
Richard Graves of Yes! Magazine reports on the event: "Although the number of people that had signed the petition is a staggering figure, what really captivated the crowd was the short speech by Leah Wickham, 24, of Fiji, who spoke about the 'hopes and dreams' of the ten million people that had signed the petition. Her heartfelt talk silenced the room. Small island nations like her own, she said, are on the front line of climate change."
According to Wickham, the Copenhagen climate treaty "'represents our hopes and dreams for all the generations that will be ... Fifty years from now, my children will be raising their own families and it is my biggest hope that they will still be able to call our islands home. ... In the end, climate change will not discriminate.'"
Yvo de Boer promised to deliver, saying, "This is not just about U.N. decisions and treaties, this is about people, culture, and countries' survival. The talking needs to stop and the action needs to begin."
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also added incentive for a deal. On Monday, the EPA announced that greenhouse gases endanger human health and the environment and must be regulated. As Marjorie Childress reports for the New Mexico Independent, the endangerment finding means that the EPA can set stronger emissions requirements in the future.
In Grist, David Roberts debunks a leaked draft agreement that has caused a media flurry. He writes: "It's now become clear that the supposedly new draft is one of several old drafts that have been floating around for weeks. For the most part [the drafts] are boring and practical, though the anti-World Bank crowd is pissed. Regardless, the draft is of no particular significance in and of itself; it reflects longstanding points of tension between rich and poor countries but did not cause them."
People want a climate deal, now. In an interview with the Uptake's Jacob Wheeler (video below), Naomi Klein of The Nation warns against the idea of "Hopenhagen," saying, "There's no point in hoping for something that is not on the negotiating table." Instead, she discusses what we can realistically expect from the climate talks.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
A funny thing happened on the way to today. I wrote a diary yesterday, "Crossing & double-crossing the authoritarian/non-authoritarian divide ", asking folks how we make the most of liberal strengths, and promising to integrate the results of the discussion into a diary about the new book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. But a couple of comments in the diary really reached out and refocused my attention in a way that I need to reflect on first. In fact, they have very much to do with the core of liberal strength, as I'll describe below, but they suggested a different constellation of connections than I had originally been thinking about.
It seems to me that the problem with our side isn't necessarily fighting. It is faith. Not in a religious sense, but in the sense of believing in your ideals even when things look darkest. Too many on our side doubt too quickly. They give up because they start thinking too much about how things could possibly go wrong. We forget too readily that possible is not probable. What I saw as a hopeful sign last year was that many in the Democratic party decided to finally believe that things we believe in can win. That's why Obama's win was so powerful. Not necessarily because he's the first black president, but because of the months that preceded it. All of our history and all of the pundits kept reiterating with such uninformed self-evidence that a black man couldn't win. We decided to believe that he could and it happened, even in spite of all the obstacles thrown in the way. That didn't happen in 2004. We decided to follow Kerry based on calculations that he could win, not because we believed in him. We "brilliantly" calculated that a Vietnam War Vet would be able to take down the Pretender in Chief. But we didn't believe in him. We could have gone with Dean because we believed in his message but were too afraid he wouldn't win. And that's what is destroying us right now. Our leadership could choose to believe in the Public Option or even Single Payer and fight for it all the way, but they keep choosing to follow the path they think is "smarter" and "more achievable," but which is really more cowardly. We need to have more courage of faith.
I tend to think of this in terms of authenticity, which was the way Jean Paul Sartre framed it, or rather the larger issue which includes it. In order to be authentically human, we must openly act as what we really are, and all of our actions, including our political behavior, must be true to the part of what we are which we choose to affirm. Otherwise our activity will be self-defeating, because our actions will not carry the self-investment and conscious efficacy which those which express our aspirational selves can.
If we want our economy to be strong and stable, we have to start thinking about it as a product of community-not a get rich quick scheme. As unemployment escalates and the housing crisis deepens, ordinary people are feeling the economic pinch. In the meantime, corporate executives and shareholders are coasting above the storm. If we want to tear down the useless casino that is Wall Street, our wealthiest citizens will have to pitch in when times get tough.
Salon carries an excellent three-part email exchange between Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund, and John Talbott, a reformed Goldman Sachs investment banker. Taken together, the emails constitute a thorough, in-depth analysis of the causes of the economic crisis, needed reforms and political hurdles to making policy changes. Johnson's basic argument is as frightening as it is accurate: Bankers line our elected representatives' pocketbooks, convincing them to re-write regulations that made big bonuses for bankers and a catastrophe for everyone else.
Some of Talbott's most interesting observations concern Wall Street's epic transformaiton. Over the past three decades, our financial sector has morphed from a kind of economic rebar to a wrecking ball. Once upon a time, the financial industry provided loansto businesses and entrepreneurs and funded constructive enterprises. Today, almost all of this activity has been replaced by hedge fund speculation. As a result of excessive deregulation, a wild array of complex transactions called derivatives have developed on Wall Street. Many derivatives, including the credit default swaps that brought down AIG, are intended to provide insurance against losses.
But this readily available "insurance" has removed any sense of risk from the minds of U.S. financiers. All kinds of casino experiments have come in play over the last several years because traders could insure any bet, however crazy, against losses. The whole point of a financial sector is to make sure that good ideas get funding. Instead, we've guaranteed that risky ideas gets funding, even when the idea is socially destructive and financially unsound, like, say, subprime lending.
As David Sirota emphasizes in Truthdig, this financial recklessness has only deepened existing economic inequality. The wealthiest 1% of U.S. citizens have the greatest share of the nation's income since 1929, the onset year of the Great Depression. That's not just a coincidence. When economic inequality is out of control, the economy itself becomes unstable. If everybody is broke, no one has enough to buy the stuff that makes the economy go-round.
There's a paradox buried in all the instability. Even though outrageous inequality is bad for business, it's not necessarily bad for businessmen (Yes, businessmen. Women are still largely excluded from the top tier of corporate decision-making). When the whole economy pays the price for executive excess, the executives themselves don't actually take the hit. Even when elites lose their jobs, they stay rich. When people who depend on their paychecks for survival get the axe, it's a life-altering, often devastating, experience.
There's something we can do about this, Sirota notes. We need to treat the rich like members of a community, rather than an isolated special interest whose demands must be balanced against other special interests. When a community needs to pay for something, the people who can afford to pay pony up. We have real problems right now. There's nothing wrong with taxing the wealthy to fund them.
But why worry? The bailout is working, and banks on the mend, right? Maybe not so much. The Real News explains how bank profits don't always equal economic progress. Wells Fargo just booked a massive second-quarter profit, but the numbers are largely divorced from any economically useful activity.
Foreclosures are soaring, and bank lending is way down. Even though the banks are booking big profits, they aren't putting much money into the economy. How is this possible? Well, banking basically involves two steps. First, the bank borrows money at a low interest rate. Then, it makes a loan at a higher interest rate. The difference is the profit. Right now financing costs for banks are next to nothing, thanks to a host of government programs. Even if you don't make many loans, it's hard to lose money when you can borrow it for free.
As Steve Benen emphasizes for The Washington Monthly, using the stock market as as measure of economic vitality has proven pretty silly over the past few years. Back in February, just about every conservative pundit was screaming that the decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average was purely a result of President Barack Obama's economic policies.
Obama's economic record is not perfect. He has continued the Bush administration's bank bailouts, and his stimulus package wasn't nearly big enough to fight this recession. But some of Obama's reform ideas have been very good, and he actually got a stimulus package through a very reluctant Congress. Now that the Dow is back on the ascent, are any of those conservative talking heads cheering Obama's proposal to create a new financial regulator focused on protecting consumers? Well, no. As it turns out, the stock market is pretty fickle. Its daily and weekly movements can rarely be attributed to individual economic policies. The things that make stocks advance don't necessarily create new jobs.
That new consumer regulator is by far the best part of Obama's financial regulatory overhaul. Harvard Professor and bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren explains why in this video, available at AlterNet. They've also published a piece I wrote on the bank lobby's insane assault on the plan.
But even if the entire crazy bailout actually does work, the solution won't last without other major economic reforms. In The Progressive, Naomi Klein argues that the surreal boom-and-bust cycle of U.S. capitalism is an awful lot like a Sarah Palin fairy tale, a world in which the most outrageous structural imbalances never result in problems for ordinary people because a new dose of market magic swoops in at the last minute to save the day.
"What Palin was saying is what is built into the very DNA of capitalism: the idea that the world has no limits. She was saying that there is no such thing as consequences, or real-world deficits. Because there will always be another frontier, another Alaska, another bubble. Just move on and discover it. Tomorrow will never come," Klein writes.
If we want to get away from this predatory cycle, we have to give ordinary citizens more influence over the legislative process. As Talbott noted in Salon, that means demanding our due.
I have been horrified at all the stories on the bailout, the lack of transparency, the utter corruption, the insider dealing, the contempt for the public, but I haven't been able to bring it all into a package to tell the story of what's going on. Naomi Klein describes it in a must-read Rolling Stone article called 'The New Trough'. The bailout hasn't forced banks to lend and it's not clear what the ultimate outcome is, but just one factoid is remarkable enough.
Party leaders on Capitol Hill were supposed to name a special oversight commission to check how the bailout was using its legal authorities, according to the law. But over a month has passed without a single name put forward. "There have been some beginnings of internal discussions," a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said late last week. "Still working on names," said a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "No," said a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., when asked if her office had been talking with others about the panel. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did not respond to requests for comment.
There was never any reason to trust these people, and there still isn't. Klein offers a real way for Obama to fix the bailout package, and hopefully, he'll do that.
Part One: Deja Voo Doo is Doo Doo (crossposted at montanamaven.com)
In "The Shock Doctrine", Naomi Klein writes a chapter on the East Asian financial crisis of 10 years ago. As opposed to a Tom Friedman or Fareed Zakaria, she interviews the real losers of that financial debacle, regular working people.
"A few months ago, " a seventeen-year-old worker who sewed Gap clothing near Manila explained, "I used to have enough money to send a little bit home to my family every month, but now I don't even make enough to buy food for myself."
This was the summer of 1997. The Asian Tigers crumbled in months. There was a wave of suicides. Klein reports that in South Korea, the suicide rate went up 50%. And the U.S. Treasury did not rush in to ease the pain. And American finance gamblers were happy to see the Tigers fall. That's because the Asian Tigers had kept out the investment banks and multinational firms. They built up their own industries. They kept control of their energy and their transportation. They protected their nation and its people. In other words, they refused to follow the Washington Consensus aka neo-liberalism aka Friedmanreaganrubinomics aka Free Market Flim Flam. And the big boys, the Chicago boys hated them for it.
What we are seeing right now today might well be what the Free Market Flim Flammers did in East Asian in 1997. It's the "Shock Doctrine". For example, the IMF refused to release the money to help South Korean financial markets unless the four main candidates for president "would stick to the new rules if they won".
It seems like after an initial period of uncertainty by those of us who are not consummate economic experts (and even some who are, like Phd economists Duncan "Atrios" Black and Paul Krugman), the zeitgeist of the netroots has turned against the current direction of the bailout, and is coming to see it as a gigantic plunder. I agree.
Mainly my scepticism is based on having absolutely no faith in any of the chief actors responsible for making the decisions on how to resolve this. These are the disaster capitalists that Naomi Klein wrote about, and more specifically, this is the Bush White House where politics always dictates policy. The only questions I have is how they will take advantage of this crisis and then how to stop them.
Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in US history? We asked two dozen writers, thinkers, and historians to answer that question; read their responses below.
I think the most interesting thing about the answers is the degree to which just about everyone sounds ambivalent or confused. It's a very odd array of answers from people who are immersed in politics and history and who should be able to rattle off a compelling rationale for the candidate without any problem, even if they disagree with the notion that it's a movement on par with civil rights or the labor movement.
There are plenty of other things Digby says in this post that I agree with, but there are two things wrong with this part. (1) I think it's clear that the vast majority of folks know the campaign is no movement, and say so in a variety of informative ways. They are neither ambivilent nor confused, though they may disagree with one another somewhat. (2) I don't think any of them saw it as their job to "rattle off a compelling rationale for" Obama, so what's the big deal that they didn't? This isn't an indication of confusion, much less anything else, aside from the question they were trying to answer.
What's more, some of their answers were well worth thinking about--or at least worth reading for some small sense of not being alone. And most surprisingly for me, arguably the best answer came from a somewhat surprising source--one-time "black conservative" Glenn Loury (he once held a very high position in the Reagan Administration), who has had a some fairly dramatic struggles and changes of direction in his life. In contrast, a couple of progressive voices make some rather mundane points, albeit with a flourish. Execrpts and comments, also covering Naomi Klein, Garry Wills and Michael Kazin.
I've been reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, as I mentioned the other day. It's the most horrifying book I've ever read and I'm not even done with it yet. But essentially, the point is that economists of the Milton Friedman school working hand in hand with the US State Department have been engaged in what Klein describes as extraordinarily violent armed robberies all over the globe since the 1970s. From early on, their economic programs have been referred to as aiming for shock and awe.
For all that it happens on paper and in banking transactions, economic shock and awe isn't that different from the kind Bush perpetrated against Iraq in the early days of the invasion. And it's exactly what the Coalition Provisional Authority enacted once they got hold of that country's accounts and law books.
Love it or hate it, MoveOn's BetrayUs ad caught people's attention. It took a stand. It said something deeply contradictory to the conventional wisdom. Powerful reversals of conventional wisdom are absolutely vital for brining about a political realignment.
Here's another powerful example-a short film (just under 7 minutes) summarizing the argument in Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, Klein argues that "free market" ideology is so wildly unpopular that it has only been possible to impose it by force, when the political will to resist is disabled by shock. She draws a direct parallel to the development of shock treatment, and its exploration by the CIA as a tool for brainwashing and reprogramming.
The Shock Doctrine Short Film
A Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein, directed by Jonás Cuarón.
