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A Psychedelic Spin on "National Security"
The Summer of Surprisingly Political Love
Jun 19, 2017
It's the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. What better place to celebrate than that fabled era's epicenter, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where the DeYoung Museum has mounted a dazzling exhibition, chock full of rock music, light shows, posters, and fashions from the mind-bending summer of 1967?
If you tour the exhibit, you might come away thinking that the political concerns of the time were no more than parenthetical bookends to that summer's real action, its psychedelic counterculture. Only the first and last rooms of the large show are explicitly devoted to political memorabilia. The main body of the exhibit seems devoid of them, which fits well with the story told in so many history books. The hippies of that era, so it's often claimed, paid scant attention to political matters.
Take another moment in the presence of all the artifacts of that psychedelic summer, though, and a powerful (if implicit) political message actually comes through, one that couldn't be more unexpected. The counterculture of that era, it turns out, offered a radical challenge to a basic premise of the Washington worldview, then and now, a premise accepted -- and spoken almost ritualistically -- by every president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt: nothing is more important than our "national security."
And believe me, "national security" should go in those scare quotes as a reminder that it's not a given of our world like Mount Whitney or the buffalo. Think of it as an invented idea, an ideological construct something like "the invisible hand of capitalism" or even "liberty and justice for all." Those other two concepts still remain influences in our public life, but like so much else they have become secondary matters since the early days of World War II, when President Roosevelt declared "national security" the nation's number one concern.
However unintentionally, he planted a seed that has never stopped growing. It's increasingly the political equivalent of the kudzu vine that overruns everything in its path. Since Roosevelt's day, our political life, federal budget, news media, even popular culture have all become obsessively focused on the supposed safety of Americans, no matter what the actual dangers in our world, and so much else has been subordinated to that. The national security state has become a de facto fourth branch of the federal government (though it's nowhere mentioned in the Constitution), a shadow government increasingly looming over the other three.
"The most frightening part of living in a national security state is that the world is transformed into little else but a vast reservoir of potential enemies, all bent on our destruction."
It says much about the road we've traveled since World War II that such developments now appear so sensible, so necessary. After all, our safety is at stake, right? So the politicians and the media tell us. Who wouldn't be worried in a world where the constant "threats to our national security" are given such attention, even if at the highest levels of government no one seems quite sure just which enemies -- ISIS, Iran, Qatar, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Russia, North Korea -- we should fear most. Who suspected, for example, that Qatar, for so long apparently a U.S. ally in the war against ISIS, would suddenly be cast as that enemy's ally and so a menace to us?
To judge from the increasingly dire warnings of politicians and pundits, the only certainty is that, whoever may be out to get us, we need to be constantly on our guard against new threats. That's where our taxpayer money should go. That's why secrecy rules the day in Washington and normal Americans know ever less about what exactly their government is doing in their name to protect them. It's "a matter of safety,"of course. Better safe than sorry, as the saying goes, and even in a democracy better ignorantthan sorry, too.
The most frightening part of living in a national security state is that the world is transformed into little else but a vast reservoir of potential enemies, all bent on our destruction. Immersed in and engulfed by such a culture, it may be hard to remember, or even (for those under 65) to believe, that half a century ago a mass social movement arose that challenged not only our warped notion of security, but the very idea of building national life on the quest for security. Yet that's just what the counterculture of the 1960s did.
The challenge reveals itself most clearly in that culture's psychedelic light shows with their "densely packed, fluid patterning of shapes and fragmented images... [which] literally absorbed audience members into the show," as the DeYoung's website explains. They were events meant to break down all boundaries, even between audience and performers. Posters advertising rock music and lightshows displayed the same features and added "distorted forms and unreadable, meandering lettering," all meant to "create an intense visual effect similar to that experienced by the shows' attendees."
In them, a vision of life and a message about it still shines through, one that gives us a glimpse, half a century later, into the most basic values and cultural assumptions of that moment and that movement.
Tear Down the Wall
Novelist Ken Kesey, impresario of the Trips Festival that presaged the Summer of Love, summed up the message in three memorable words: "Outside is inside." When the Beatles kicked off that season with the first classic psychedelic record album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, George Harrison echoed Kesey's vision in his song "Within You Without You," a haunting meditation:
About the space between us all
And the people
Who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth...
We're all one
And life flows on within you and without you.
What could this possibly have to do with "national security"? Applied to our moment, think of it this way: if we're all one, if outside is indeed inside and within you is without you, then it makes no sense to blame our problems on foreigners and build walls to keep "those people" out of our land and our lives. In Summer of Love terms, it would instead make perfect sense to tear down every wall enclosing our Trumpian world -- walls that are supposed to divide Americans from foreigners, Anglos from Latinos, straights from gays, men from women, elites from the working class, and so on into an endlessly "secure" future.
The Jefferson Airplane, a house band of the Summer of Love, put the message of that moment in an explicitly political context. Presenting themselves as patriotic "Volunteers," they urged Americans to "tear down the walls" so that "we can be together." To be sure, most people remained deaf to such calls. But two summers later, at the Woodstock Festival, a new nation would take an initial step toward creating itself through the revolutionary act of tearing down its own walls and fences. "There was no security," a photographer at Woodstock recalled. "The idea was that it wasn't necessary." By logical extension, today's political borders of all sorts deserve the same treatment because they, too, are unnecessary.
As the hippies came to see it, all the walls and fences we create are more than just unnecessary. They are, as George Harrison sang, illusions born of and built around the fiction of separateness. Recognize that illusion and another one immediately becomes obvious: the fears that spark the obsession with "national security" are largely illusory, too. Yet they are endless because what we are truly trying to fend off is not an external enemy but, in the famed words of President Roosevelt in his first inaugural address, "fear itself."
At about the time Ken Kesey was hosting his Trips Festival, John Lennon of the Beatles discovered The Psychedelic Experience, a book co-authored by LSD gurus Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. It moved him to sing that there really was nothing to be afraid of: "Turn off your mind relax and float down stream; It is not dying, it is not dying."
The psychedelic rock shows, light shows, and posters were all meant to turn life into that single swirling stream, dissolving every imaginable boundary line, and so teaching that reality itself is just such a stream. To quote the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman (as so many did in the Summer of Love), let yourself be "loos'd of limits and imaginary lines" and "you are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes."
The most widely read San Francisco intellectual of that year, Alan Watts, caught the moment (and pushed it yet further) in the very title of his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity. He spelled out what the light shows and posters communicated in a flash: what we think of as separate places, inside and outside, are merely two intertwined parts, two different ways of describing a single reality. Ditto for self and other, friend and enemy, life and death. The pursuit of security, he suggested even then, creates an illusory separation between friend and enemy in an effort to protect the self and life against the other and feared death. It is, he insisted, always doomed to fail, since all those opposites are inseparable. And ironically, the more we fail, the more frightened we become, and so the more frantically we pursue both the walling off of others and the illusion of security. Far wiser and more life-enhancing, Watts concluded, was to accept the inevitability of insecurity, the truth that in the stream of life, the next moment is always as unpredictable as it is uncontrollable.
Why worry about security at all if, as Lennon announced just as the Summer of Love was reaching full swing,
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where
You're meant to be,
It's easy.
All you need is love.
The English language has no word to describe the state where love (if you'll excuse this word) trumps both security and insecurity. The hippies had little interest in finding a new word to describe how life was truly to be experienced, but perhaps, until something better comes along, a term like non-security -- a state of being unconcerned with the whole issue of security -- will do.
The gospel of non-security went forth from Haight-Ashbury (and New York City's East Village) across the land. Hippies everywhere (even in Nebraska, my wife, who comes from there, assures me) assiduously cultivated such a state of mind. It was perhaps the most essential byproduct of their counterculture and it helped underpin a mass movement, seldom considered in the context of national politics, that remains the most radical and powerful challenge yet to Washington's present ruling passion for "national security" and the vast panoply of 17 intelligence outfits, tens of millions of classified documents, a surveillance apparatus that would have stunned the totalitarian states of the twentieth century, and a military into which taxpayer dollars are invested at an unparalleled rate.
When the Counterculture Met the New Left
Fifty years later, the counterculture's thinking on the subject of security may sound like little more than a quaint and spacy fantasy. Even then, non-security was light-years away from the reality of most Americans in a country that would soon elect Richard Nixon president. California, always at the cutting edge, had already made former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan governor and so began to pave the superhighway that has now led Donald Trump to the White House.
President Trump and his minions are visibly eager to take money from people in need and lavish it on what is already the world's largest military budget, larger than those of numerous other major powers combined. They are just as eager to spend money on a wall stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, high, wide, and forbidding (or as the president likes to say, "big, fat, [and] beautiful") enough to keep Spanish-speaking foreigners out of the U.S.A. They would also expand the electronic eavesdropping network that can track our every word. And so -- as novelist Kurt Vonnegut would once have said -- it goes. They justify such plans and so much more in the name of -- yes, you guessed it -- "national security" or (more tellingly yet) "homeland security." With such people in power, the very idea of non-security seems beyond utopian, like a concept from outer space.
In some ways that was true in the Summer of Love, too, and not just because, even then, it was so far removed from the reality of a dominant culture that would handily survive its challenge. There was also the brute fact that, when thousands of young people heeded the siren call and traveled to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to experience that season of love in person, it essentially became another crime- and poverty-ridden inner-city slum. Look magazine journalist William Hedgepath, for instance, found the hippies there "working toward an open, loving, tension-free world," but also found himself "spending the night in a filthy, litter-strewn dope fortress."
"Perhaps it's time to take a retrospective look at that Summer of Love moment, half a century ago, and reacquaint ourselves with the two kinds of radicalism of the time, one promoting a more humane idea of security and the other aimed at building a new kind of life that transcended the question of security altogether."
Before we rush to judgment, however, it's important to remember a reality often overlooked in the history books on hippiedom: most people whose countercultural lives were touched by the gospel of non-security were also touched by, and sometimes swept up in, the much larger political movement to end the war in Vietnam. This meant that their largely unspoken challenge to "national security" was woven together with another kind of challenge, one that came from the more overtly political New Left leadership of that antiwar movement.
Unlike the hippies, the New Left had no particular interest in experiencing the unsaid and undefined. They were eager instead to find precise words to make their anti-establishment case. And they first did so in 1962. That year, members of a group that called itself Students for a Democratic Society drafted a manifesto at a United Auto Workers retreat in Port Huron, Michigan. It, too, ran against the security thinking of that moment by proclaiming that "real security cannot be gained by propping up military defenses, but only through the hastening of political stability, economic growth, greater social welfare, improved education."
Nonetheless, the writers of the Port Huron Statement remained worried about security in a sense that any American of the time would have understood instantly. They, too, divided the world into us and them, friends and enemies, good guys and bad guys. "Economic institutions should be in the control of national, not foreign, agencies," they declared, critiquing America's imperial role in the world. "The destiny of any country should be determined by its nationals, not by outsiders." The best their manifesto could foresee in the world arena was "coexistence" between America and its foes, fueled by economic rather than military competition.
In that sense, radical as it was, the statement offered no direct challenge to the bipartisan consensus that security was every American's most important concern. Indeed, its language on security issues might easily be endorsed today by themost progressive voices in the Democratic Party, and on the issue of national sovereignty, eerily enough, by Donald Trump and his supporters.
Still, the New Left was focused on using rational planning to move toward a future of more genuine security and less fear for all. In such a future, everyone would be able to develop his or her potential to the fullest, free from a major source of insecurity seldom mentioned more than half a century later: rampant technology deployed by a rabid capitalism that values profits above people.
The counterculture went further, even if rather incoherently, aiming to create a present in which the whole question of security, if it didn't simply disappear, would at least become a distinctly secondary concern. It would be a present in which, adapting a phrase of that moment, all you needed was love. Charles Perry, the historian of Haight-Ashbury, recalled one hippie who summed up the difference between his tribe and the more political types this way: "They talk about peace. We are peace."
Each of these sixties critiques of "national security" was, in its own way, utopian in terms of the realities of its moment, and most radicals of the time, however unconsciously, did their best to negotiate a path between the two. Non-security -- an escape from the usual Washington concerns -- remained an ideal then, and today it's hard to even remember that anyone ever challenged the idea that "national security" should dominate our lives, our fears, and our dreams.
Half a century later, it should be clear that Washington's presentquest for "national security" can never end. The national security state itself is a machine that constantly fuels the very fears it claims to fight. In doing so, what it actually condemns Americans to is nothing less than a permanent state of insecurity.
The quest for a more balanced (or even unbalanced) approach to security in the 1960s pointed a way toward at least the possibility of an American world of diminished fears. Now, with a man in the Oval Office who sees enemies everywhere and declares that he alone can save us from them, and with nearly 4 in 10 Americans still approving of the way he's trying to "save" us, if only there were a radical critique of "national security" somewhere in our world.
Perhaps it's time to take a retrospective look at that Summer of Love moment, half a century ago, and reacquaint ourselves with the two kinds of radicalism of the time, one promoting a more humane idea of security and the other aimed at building a new kind of life that transcended the question of security altogether. Perhaps between them they might spark some truly new thinking about how to respond to the power and dominance of our national security state and to a way of life that shuts us down, locks us in, ratchets up our terrors, and offers us a vision of more of the same until the end of time.
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MLK's Big Mistake: Love and Strategy in the Age of Trump
With the MLK holiday approaching, I keep thinking of this wisdom from the eminent progressive historian Eric Foner:
"Single-focus organizations, which have proliferated in the last generation, need to recapture the sense of being part of a larger movement for social change that addresses diverse groups and interests."
Jan 11, 2017
With the MLK holiday approaching, I keep thinking of this wisdom from the eminent progressive historian Eric Foner:
"Single-focus organizations, which have proliferated in the last generation, need to recapture the sense of being part of a larger movement for social change that addresses diverse groups and interests."
It's a lesson Dr. king learned in the last years of his life, as he came to see that racism was inseparably linked to the horrors of militarism being inflicted on Vietnam and the evils of capitalist materialism being inflicted on the poor of all races around the world. These "giant triplets," and all the social, political, and economic ills besetting America, were "deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society," he told us--because, at the deepest level, the whole structure of society was rooted in an absence of love.
So the only way to address any single issue was to address them all together: "We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values," King preached, a revolution that would turn America into a "beloved community," where love would be the fundamental value, the new root of all.
"It is time for us to share our experience of a half-century ago with people who are as young now as we were then."
Only in the beloved community could everyone gain genuine freedom, which King defined as "the opportunity to fulfill my total capacity untrammeled by any artificial barrier." Because we are all "tied together in a single garment of destiny," we can each fulfill our own capacity only when we devote ourselves to others, always striving to remove their barriers so that they can fulfill their own highest possibilities. Freedom is the fruit of love.
But what is love? King often explained that the Greeks had three words for love. There was eros--physical love, the selfish kind. There was philia, the love of friends, where we get as much as we give. Highest of all, in his view, was agape--self-sacrificing love, the Christian kind, where we give unstintingly and ask nothing for ourselves in return.
Several million baby-boomers today can still remember what it felt like to agree with King that all the single issues of the day (with the war towering above all) had to be confronted as a single system. We became part of what we called simply "the movement," a tide of radical change that tied together and transcended all the issues.
The movement felt like a true revolution, a total transformation in the structures not just of society but of consciousness, somehow steering us toward the beloved community. Love, we believed more or less firmly, would become the fundamental value of society, the root of every political policy, making genuine freedom readily available to all. On the path to the beloved community, love would guide us every step of the way.
But a life of constant, self-sacrificing agape love was too much to ask of most of us, as young as we were. Indeed it is probably too much to ask of any substantial number of people, whatever their age. That kind of love is likely to remain the province of rare saints, not the foundation of any mass movement. This was King's big mistake: dividing love into three parts and lifting one so high above the others.
In the movement, we discovered that we did not need to choose among different kinds of love, because love could be one single attitude--a feeling, a thought, and more--that united, in lived experience, all its different forms.
The movement of the sixties was built on this unified sense of love as the most potent force driving the revolution of values. This was what the Beatles meant, we assumed, when they gave us the anthem, "All you need is love."
Dr. King himself said that our selfish impulses could be turned to good purposes: "We are in the fortunate position of having our deepest sense of morality coalesce with our self-interest." But the kind of love we were exploring, where the personal became political and vice versa, transcended the division between morality and self-interest, because that division assumed a more fundamental distinction between self and other.
We discovered that in love, on the both interpersonal and societal/political levels, we could feel the difference between self and other blurring, even (in our highest moments) slipping away. We took perhaps more literally than King himself the metaphor of the single garment that binds all people to each other and to their environment.
We read mystics like Alan Watts who taught us that the most advanced physicists now see the whole universe not as a collection of separate objects but as one vast energy field, where seemingly opposite forces were actually dancing with each other in the endless play of life. It was easy enough to feel that unified force-field as the binding power of love.
We read political philosophers like Herbert Marcuse, who told us that in erotic love--not just sexual but sensual experiences of all kinds--and in true friendship we could escape the ego, with its repressive sense of separate individuality; the ego was the true barrier to freedom. He urged us to turn to the selfless erotic experience that Freud called the id, where all seems interconnected in a liberating unity. He asked us to use political action to create a whole society dedicated to expanding freedom by removing unnecessary ego repression.
We read poets like Walt Whitman, who wrote,
My myriad-twining life interweaves with all things.
I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love,
Love, that is pulse of all.
Whitman hoped to be "a fountain, that I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew." We built the movement on the faith that everyone might become such a fountain. And we emphasized the "wherever," extending it from our home towns to Vietnam and all across the globe.
Today these aspirations of the movement may seem like an impossible dream. But when Eric Foner taught a course on America's radical movements, he always highlighted the words of Max Weber: "What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible." It may be helpful to remember these words as we face the challenges of the coming weeks, months, and at least four years ahead.
To be sure, we have learned the hard way that love is not really all you need. A good dose of common sense and shrewd political strategy are essential too. But several million of us know deep down that love, in all its forms, as political as it was personal, was once for us a very real experience at the heart of the movement.
More than ever, it is time for us to share our experience of a half-century ago with people who are as young now as we were then. For they are the ones who must take up the torch and make the next steps toward revolution. Perhaps we can impart to them some sense of what it meant to us to go beyond single issues and be part of a unified movement creating a revolution of love.
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The Federal Poverty Line is Too Damn Low
The U.S. Census Bureau's announcement today that the number of Americans living below the poverty line fell between 2014 and 2015 is good news. But before we get too excited, it is worth noting that the federal poverty line was a meager $12,000 for a single person living alone in 2015 (and only about $24,000 for a married couple living with two children).
Sep 14, 2016
The U.S. Census Bureau's announcement today that the number of Americans living below the poverty line fell between 2014 and 2015 is good news. But before we get too excited, it is worth noting that the federal poverty line was a meager $12,000 for a single person living alone in 2015 (and only about $24,000 for a married couple living with two children).
If your initial reaction to that is "whoa, that's waaay too low for a person to lead a minimally decent life on in the USA," then you're in good company. In a recent survey conducted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Los Angeles Times, Americans were asked, "[What is the] highest annual income a family of four can have and still be considered poor by the federal government." The average response was $32,293--an amount 34 percent higher than the current federal poverty measure.
In short, conservatives did a poll on how much income it takes to avoid poverty, and the answer they got back was more than $8,000 above the federal poverty line.
The wonks reading this might be thinking "well, if the federal government says a married couple with their two kids only needs $24,000 to live a minimally decent life, then they must have good reasons to think this is enough." I'm a bit wonkish myself and generally trust official government statistics--but the federal poverty measure is a big exception.
The main reason I don't trust this approach to measuring poverty is shown in the figure below. In 1963, the poverty line for a family of four was 50% below median family income--or one-half of the income of the typical four-person family in America. Today, however, the poverty line for a family of four is nearly 75% below median family income.
That means to be officially counted as poor today, a family has to be much poorer compared to the typical American family than it had to be in 1963. In fact, if the federal poverty line today was set at the same place relative to median income as it was in 1963 it would be about $33,000, rather than $24,000.
The AEI survey results are not a fluke. We know from decades of evidence that the public's understanding of the income needed to avoid poverty increases over time at a rate faster than inflation, and closer to the increases in mainstream incomes and living standards.
So why hasn't the official poverty line been adjusted over time in a way that reflects the public's more accurate understanding?
The reasons for this are largely political.
In the early 1960s--around the time when the Beatles were just becoming famous here--Mollie Orshansky, an employee in the Social Security Administration (SSA), developed working estimates of what it meant to be poor at that time.
The data available to Orshansky wasn't particularly sophisticated, or even timely. For example, she based her estimates in part on a food consumption survey conducted in 1955. When the federal government started using her calculation of the poverty line in the mid-1960s, Orshansky and federal officials understood that it would need to be adjusted over the long-term for increases in mainstream living standards. The SSA "made a tentative decision early in 1968 to adjust the poverty thresholds for the higher general standard of living."
But then two things happened that year. First, officials in the Johnson administration prohibited the SSA from making this kind of adjustment, likely in part due to concern that the updated figures would show an increase in poverty. Second, Richard Nixon was elected President. After he took office, his budget office issued a directive making the Orshansky thresholds the "official" poverty measure, and specifying that they would be adjusted for inflation only.
There have been repeated recommendations to reform the poverty measure
In 1970, Orshansky said this decision would likely "freeze the poverty line despite changes in buying habits and changes in acceptable living standards." There have been repeated recommendations to reform the poverty measure since then, but no President has been willing to revise the Nixon directive.
The Census Bureau has an alternative measure of poverty, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which improves the current federal poverty measure in many respects. But even this approach puts the poverty line at about $25,000 to $26,000 for a family of four--and that's still too low.
Here's a better approach: dump the current official poverty measure and replace it with two different measures. One measure would be anchored to half of the typical (median) American family's income in 2016 and then adjusted for inflation over time; the other would be set at the same level initially, but adjusted annually using the median income over a 5-year period. This way, the poverty line won't drift away from mainstream living standards of living over time.
It's 2016: We need a poverty measure that reflects what the public thinks is required to meet basic needs in Beyonce America. But instead we're stuck in Beatlemania America--and that needs to change.
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Brexit Protests Build as Voters Hope Unity is Still Possible
Thousands gathered in London to protest Brexit even after organizers called off the event
Jun 29, 2016
As the Brexit backlash continues to grow, thousands gathered in London's Trafalgar Square on Tuesday to protest the UK's vote to leave the European Union--even as organizers called off the event after an extraordinary 50,000 people said they would attend.
As the dust settles from last week's referendum, UK voters are now contemplating their options as they face leaving the EU, with some wondering if the decision could possibly be reversed.
While some argue that such an act would be a refutation of democracy, others say that the vote was won largely because of an extensive misinformation campaign and that UK voters would be better served by knowing the terms of such an exit first before they vote.
Diplomatic experts note that a walk-back of the result is actually possible--though, as the Guardian's Patrick Wintour explains, "many forces would have to align" in order for that to happen.
Wintour writes:
Few UK politicians - fearful of challenging the verdict of an already angry electorate - will articulate such an argument in public. But Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has boldly made the case for a second referendum or another general election on the negotiated terms of exit. Robin Butler, the former head of the civil service, has suggested the same.
[....] For the sake of simplicity, three scenarios could then follow. In the first, Johnson wins the election, negotiates the terms of the UK's departure, puts them to a referendum and they are endorsed. Some form of access to the single market and some deal on free movement - the two central issues - are agreed. It is a bespoke British deal. Britain remains outside the EU but only just.
Still, Tuesday's protest and another planned for Saturday make clear where many Brits stand on the issue. The thousands who gathered in Trafalgar Square despite the event's cancellation, including Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, demonstrated peacefully amid dreary weather, singing The Beatles' "Hey Jude" and holding signs with pro-EU messages and symbols.
Another 32,000 people have said they will attend a protest Saturday outside Parliament that was organized when the first was cancelled. The Facebook page for that event, titled Anti Brexit March, states, "We can prevent Brexit by refusing to accept the referendum as the final say and take our finger off the self-destruct button."
"It is the responsibility of parliament to consider our democracy more carefully and call for a vote before they all accept the UK's decline," the event page states. "Let's not leave the next generation adrift. We can provide the ammunition parliament needs to reason their way through this mess and reconsider Brexit, if we make a stand!"
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Did The Beatles Help Fuel The Reagan Revolution?
Overcrowded classrooms. Crumbling bridges. Shuttered libraries. These have become our everyday realities after over a generation of tax-cutting political bravado.
A shrinking middle class. Rising dead-end poverty. The splurges of a new super rich. These have also become the markers of our time.
Is it all the Beatles' fault?
Did the lads from Liverpool pave the way for the "Reagan Revolution" and the rise of the 1 percent?
Do today's billionaires owe the Fab Four some gesture of eternal gratitude?
Apr 26, 2016
Overcrowded classrooms. Crumbling bridges. Shuttered libraries. These have become our everyday realities after over a generation of tax-cutting political bravado.
A shrinking middle class. Rising dead-end poverty. The splurges of a new super rich. These have also become the markers of our time.
Is it all the Beatles' fault?
Did the lads from Liverpool pave the way for the "Reagan Revolution" and the rise of the 1 percent?
Do today's billionaires owe the Fab Four some gesture of eternal gratitude?
At first take, questions like these all seem ridiculous. How can we possibly consider the Beatles enablers for Ronald Reagan and his fellow tax-cutting conservatives? Back in the 1960s, after all, conservatives saw the Beatles and their rocking brethren as a threat to the American way of life. In the culture wars of those years, no one ever saw Ronald Reagan and the Beatles on the same side.
But Ronnie and Ringo, John, Paul, and George did share something in common. They all couldn't stand the steeply graduated progressive income tax rates of the decades right after World War II. For most of that time, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, income in the highest tax bracket - income over what would be about $3 million in today's dollars - faced tax rates that hit over 90 percent.
Tax rates on America's rich first reached that lofty level during World War II, and Ronald Reagan, then a budding Hollywood star, took that tax bite personally. High taxes on high incomes turned Reagan from a New Deal-loving actors union president into a tax-hating corporate shill for General Electric.
In the mid-20th century, that tax-hating zeal kept Ronald Reagan on the margins of American political life. Most Americans supported the nation's progressive tax rates. High taxes on high incomes, Republicans like President Dwight Eisenhower agreed, keep income and wealth from concentrating dangerously in the pockets of a few - and help finance the public services a decent society demands.
The high taxes the rich paid throughout the Eisenhower years also helped average Americans feel better about the more modest tax bills they themselves were paying. Yes, taxes could pinch, average Americans felt, but we all had to do our part. And we all were doing our part, even the rich and powerful.
Exceptions, of course, did exist. The big oilmen of Texas had "depletion allowances" that kept their tax rates at a fraction of what other rich Americans were paying. These oilmen also had enough strategically placed lawmakers in their pockets to block repeated attempts to repeal the oil depletion allowance loophole.
But America's mid-20th century rich as a whole, even with the free pass for oilmen, were shelling out on average well over twice as much of their income in federal income taxes as today's wealthiest. Ronnie Reagan could only fume.
Over in the UK, the newly rich Beatles could do more than fume. They could write incredibly cool songs. In 1966 George Harrison wrote a doozy, "a contagious blast of angry guitar rock," as one musical analyst notes, that would open the riveting Beatles "Revolver" album.
The "Taxman" track that the Beatles recorded 50 years ago this April savaged the British tax system. Besieged British taxpayers, the lyric would imply, were paying almost all their income in taxes.
"Should five per cent appear too small," went the song's most memorable couplet, "be thankful I don't take it all."
In effect, George Harrison's musical triumph of a song was putting to a magical beat all the rants against progressive taxes that angry wealthy taxpayers had been making for the previous half-century. Over the next few years, millions of listeners - on both sides of the Atlantic - would nod their heads to that beat and mindlessly sing along.
Did "Taxman" turn young people into rabid Reagan tax-cutters? Songs seldom have anywhere near that sort of transformative power. But "Taxman" did help shift the transatlantic cultural vibes and legitimize the conservative take on taxation and tax collectors. "Taxman," in effect, helped make tax hate hip.
In 1978, a dozen years after "Taxman," California voters would adopt a statewide tax-cut ballot initiative that launched a wave of similar measures across the United States. In the UK, voters gave tax-cut champion Margaret Thatcher her first parliamentary majority in 1979. Ronald Reagan won the White House the next year.
By 1986, the tax rate on income in America's highest income bracket would be down to 28 percent. The formal top rate on high incomes has bounced a bit up since then. But the actual tax rate America's richest pay, after loopholes, has sunk even lower. In 2013, Americans with the nation's 400 highest reported incomes paid, after taking advantage of every loophole they could find, less than 23 percent of those incomes in federal income tax.
Back in 1955, the nation's 400 highest incomes paid, after exploiting all available loopholes, over 51 percent of their incomes in federal income taxes.
The top 400 in 2013, by the way, averaged $265 million each in income. The top 400 back in Dwight Eisenhower's 1955 averaged, by contrast, only $14.3 million, after adjusting for inflation. Decades of tax cuts at the top, in other words, have helped our rich today become fantastically richer.
Our society, in the meantime, has become fantastically unfriendlier to young men and women and their hopes and dreams. If George Harrison were still alive today, would he appreciate the irony?
Back in the high-tax 1950s, the young George Harrison had plenty of opportunity. Those years, as the famed 83-year-old British film director John Boorman observed in an interview last year, saw a huge expansion of health, education, and other public services. Every young person in the UK finally had a chance to attend a modern secondary school.
"For the first time, every kid was taught some element of music and art," remembers Boorman, the director of Deliverance. "And the kids who were going to these schools grew up to be the Beatles and the Rolling Stones."
Mr. Taxman deserved to be thanked for all that, not skewered.
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Minimum Wage, Minimum Chance: On Being Nickel and Dimed in 2016
When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about?
Whether they know it or not, it's something like this.
My Working Life Then
Feb 16, 2016
When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about?
Whether they know it or not, it's something like this.
My Working Life Then
A few years ago, I wrote about my experience enmeshed in the minimum-wage economy, chronicling the collapse of good people who could not earn enough money, often working 60-plus hours a week at multiple jobs, to feed their families. I saw that, in this country, people trying to make ends meet in such a fashion still had to resort to food benefit programs and charity. I saw an employee fired for stealing lunches from the break room refrigerator to feed himself. I watched as a co-worker secretly brought her two kids into the store and left them to wander alone for hours because she couldn't afford childcare. (As it happens, 29% of low-wage employees are single parents.)
At that point, having worked at the State Department for 24 years, I had been booted out for being a whistleblower. I wasn't sure what would happen to me next and so took a series of minimum wage jobs. Finding myself plunged into the low-wage economy was a sobering, even frightening, experience that made me realize just how ignorant I had been about the lives of the people who rang me up at stores or served me food in restaurants. Though millions of adults work for minimum wage, until I did it myself I knew nothing about what that involved, which meant I knew next to nothing about twenty-first-century America.
I was lucky. I didn't become one of those millions of people trapped as the "working poor." I made it out. But with all the election talk about the economy, I decided it was time to go back and take another look at where I had been, and where too many others still are.
My Working Life Now
I found things were pretty much the same in 2016 as they were in 2012, which meant -- because there was no real improvement -- that things were actually worse.
This time around, I worked for a month and a half at a national retail chain in New York City. While mine was hardly a scientific experiment, I'd be willing to bet an hour of my minimum-wage salary ($9 before taxes) that what follows is pretty typical of the New Economy.
Just getting hired wasn't easy for this 56-year-old guy. To become a sales clerk, peddling items that were generally well under $50 a pop, I needed two previous employment references and I had to pass a credit check. Unlike some low-wage jobs, a mandatory drug test wasn't part of the process, but there was a criminal background check and I was told drug offenses would disqualify me. I was given an exam twice, by two different managers, designed to see how I'd respond to various customer situations. In other words, anyone without some education, good English, a decent work history, and a clean record wouldn't even qualify for minimum-wage money at this chain.
And believe me, I earned that money. Any shift under six hours involved only a 15-minute break (which cost the company just $2.25). Trust me, at my age, after hours standing, I needed that break and I wasn't even the oldest or least fit employee. After six hours, you did get a 45-minute break, but were only paid for 15 minutes of it.
The hardest part of the job remained dealing with... well, some of you. Customers felt entitled to raise their voices, use profanity, and commit Trumpian acts of rudeness toward my fellow employees and me. Most of our "valued guests" would never act that way in other public situations or with their own coworkers, no less friends. But inside that store, shoppers seemed to interpret "the customer is always right" to mean that they could do any damn thing they wished. It often felt as if we were penned animals who could be poked with a stick for sport, and without penalty. No matter what was said or done, store management tolerated no response from us other than a smile and a "Yes, sir" (or ma'am).
The store showed no more mercy in its treatment of workers than did the customers. My schedule, for instance, changed constantly. There was simply no way to plan things more than a week in advance. (Forget accepting a party invitation. I'm talking about childcare and medical appointments.) If you were on the closing shift, you stayed until the manager agreed that the store was clean enough for you to go home. You never quite knew when work was going to be over and no cell phone calls were allowed to alert babysitters of any delay.
And keep in mind that I was lucky. I was holding down only one job in one store. Most of my fellow workers were trying to juggle two or three jobs, each with constantly changing schedules, in order to stitch together something like a half-decent paycheck.
In New York City, that store was required to give us sick leave only after we'd worked there for a full year -- and that was generous compared to practices in many other locales. Until then, you either went to work sick or stayed home unpaid. Unlike New York, most states do not require such a store to offer any sick leave, ever, to employees who work less than 40 hours a week. Think about that the next time your waitress coughs.
Minimum Wages and Minimum Hours
Much is said these days about raising the minimum wage (and it should be raised), and indeed, on January 1, 2016, 13 states did raise theirs. But what sounds like good news is unlikely to have much effect on the working poor.
In New York, for instance, the minimum went from $8.75 an hour to the $9.00 I was making. New York is relatively generous. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 and 21 states require only that federal standard. Presumably to prove some grim point or other, Georgia and Wyoming officially mandate an even lower minimum wage and then unofficially require the payment of $7.25 to avoid Department of Labor penalties. Some Southern states set no basement figure, presumably for similar reasons.
Don't forget: any minimum wage figure mentioned is before taxes. Brackets vary, but let's knock an even 10% off that hourly wage just as a reasonable guess about what is taken out of a minimum-wage worker's salary. And there are expenses to consider, too. My round-trip bus fare every day, for instance, was $5.50. That meant I worked most of my first hour for bus fare and taxes. Keep in mind that some workers have to pay for childcare as well, which means that it's not impossible to imagine a scenario in which someone could actually come close to losing money by going to work for short shifts at minimum wage.
In addition to the fundamental problem of simply not paying people enough, there's the additional problem of not giving them enough hours to work. The two unfortunately go together, which means that raising the minimum rate is only part of any solution to improving life in the low-wage world.
At the store where I worked for minimum wage a few years ago, for instance, hours were capped at 39 a week. The company did that as a way to avoid providing the benefits that would kick in once one became a "full time" employee. Things have changed since 2012 -- and not for the better.
Four years later, the hours of most minimum-wage workers are capped at 29. That's the threshold after which most companies with 50 or more employees are required to pay into the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) fund on behalf of their workers. Of course, some minimum wage workers get fewer than 29 hours for reasons specific to the businesses they work for.
It's Math Time
While a lot of numbers follow, remember that they all add up to a picture of how people around us are living every day.
In New York, under the old minimum wage system, $8.75 multiplied by 39 hours equaled $341.25 a week before taxes. Under the new minimum wage, $9.00 times 29 hours equals $261 a week. At a cap of 29 hours, the minimum wage would have to be raised to $11.77 just to get many workers back to the same level of take-home pay that I got in 2012, given the drop in hours due to the Affordable Care Act. Health insurance is important, but so is food.
In other words, a rise in the minimum wage is only half the battle; employees need enough hours of work to make a living.
About food: if a minimum wage worker in New York manages to work two jobs (to reach 40 hours a week) without missing any days due to illness, his or her yearly salary would be $18,720. In other words, it would fall well below the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. That's food stamp territory. To get above the poverty line with a 40-hour week, the minimum wage would need to go above $10. At 29 hours a week, it would need to make it to $15 an hour. Right now, the highest minimum wage at a state level is in the District of Columbia at $11.50. As of now, no state is slated to go higher than that before 2018. (Some cities do set their own higher minimum wages.)
So add it up: The idea of raising the minimum wage ("the fight for $15") is great, but even with that $15 in such hours-restrictive circumstances, you can't make a loaf of bread out of a small handful of crumbs. In short, no matter how you do the math, it's nearly impossible to feed yourself, never mind a family, on the minimum wage. It's like being trapped on an M.C. Escher staircase.
The federal minimum wage hit its high point in 1968 at $8.54 in today's dollars and while this country has been a paradise in the ensuing decades for what we now call the "One Percent," it's been downhill for low-wage workers ever since. In fact, since it was last raised in 2009 at the federal level to $7.25 per hour, the minimum has lost about 8.1% of its purchasing power to inflation. In other words, minimum-wage workers actually make less now than they did in 1968, when most of them were probably kids earning pocket money and not adults feeding their own children.
In adjusted dollars, the minimum wage peaked when the Beatles were still together and the Vietnam War raged.
Who Pays?
Many of the arguments against raising the minimum wage focus on the possibility that doing so would put small businesses in the red. This is disingenuous indeed, since 20 mega-companies dominate the minimum-wage world. Walmart alone employs 1.4 million minimum-wage workers; Yum Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) is in second place; and McDonald's takes third. Overall, 60% of minimum-wage workers are employed by businesses not officially considered "small" by government standards, and of course carve-outs for really small businesses are possible, as was done with Obamacare.
Keep in mind that not raising wages costs you money.
Those minimum wage workers who can't make enough and need to go on food assistance? Well, Walmart isn't paying for those food stamps (now called SNAP), you are. The annual bill that states and the federal government foot for working families making poverty-level wages is $153 billion. A single Walmart Supercenter costs taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year in public assistance money, and Walmart employees account for 18% of all food stamps issued. In other words, those everyday low prices at the chain are, in part, subsidized by your tax money.
If the minimum wage goes up, will spending on food benefits programs go down? Almost certainly. But won't stores raise prices to compensate for the extra money they will be shelling out for wages? Possibly. But don't worry -- raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would mean a Big Mac would cost all of 17 cents more.
Time Theft
My retail job ended a little earlier than I had planned, because I committed time theft.
You probably don't even know what time theft is. It may sound like something from a sci-fi novel, but minimum-wage employers take time theft seriously. The basic idea is simple enough: if they're paying you, you'd better be working. While the concept is not invalid per se, the way it's used by the mega-companies reveals much about how the lowest wage workers are seen by their employers in 2016.
The problem at my chain store was that its in-store cafe was a lot closer to my work area than the time clock where I had to punch out whenever I was going on a scheduled break. One day, when break time on my shift came around, I only had 15 minutes. So I decided to walk over to that cafe, order a cup of coffee, and then head for the place where I could punch out and sit down (on a different floor at the other end of the store).
We're talking an extra minute or two, no more, but in such operations every minute is tabulated and accounted for. As it happened, a manager saw me and stepped in to tell the cafe clerk to cancel my order. Then, in front of whoever happened to be around, she accused me of committing time theft -- that is, of ordering on the clock. We're talking about the time it takes to say, "Grande, milk, no sugar, please." But no matter, and getting chastised on company time was considered part of the job, so the five minutes we stood there counted as paid work.
At $9 an hour, my per-minute pay rate was 15 cents, which meant that I had time-stolen perhaps 30 cents. I was, that is, being nickel and dimed to death.
Economics Is About People
It seems wrong in a society as wealthy as ours that a person working full-time can't get above the poverty line. It seems no less wrong that someone who is willing to work for the lowest wage legally payable must also give up so much of his or her self-respect and dignity as a kind of tariff. Holding a job should not be a test of how to manage life as one of the working poor.
I didn't actually get fired for my time theft. Instead, I quit on the spot. Whatever the price is for my sense of self-worth, it isn't 30 cents. Unlike most of this country's working poor, I could afford to make such a decision. My life didn't depend on it. When the manager told a handful of my coworkers watching the scene to get back to work, they did. They couldn't afford not to.
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Albert Maysles, RIP
A word about documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, who died last week. He was, as New Yorker film journalist and essayist Richard Brody aptly wrote, "one of the crucial artists of modern documentary filmmaking -- or, simply, one of the most important filmmakers of the past half-century."
I didn't know him well, but well enough to call him Al. We had not seen one another very often in the past few years, yet decades ago, he played a crucial role in my transition to independence and adulthood.
Mar 09, 2015
A word about documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles, who died last week. He was, as New Yorker film journalist and essayist Richard Brody aptly wrote, "one of the crucial artists of modern documentary filmmaking -- or, simply, one of the most important filmmakers of the past half-century."
I didn't know him well, but well enough to call him Al. We had not seen one another very often in the past few years, yet decades ago, he played a crucial role in my transition to independence and adulthood.
As a high school senior in my hometown, Canandaigua, NY, in the Finger Lakes, I was itching to finish, get out of town and start college. The school had gotten some sort of small grant - perhaps from the New York State Council on the Arts - to have an artist-in-residence for a day or two. The artist we got was Al and I was assigned to be his guide, getting him from place to place and screening to screening.
I actually knew who he was. He and his brother David had just premiered Salesman, a new cinema verite documentary that was getting a lot of attention, the story of four sad, desperate Willy Lomans selling Bibles door-to-door to the poor and guileless in Massachusetts and Opa-Locka, Florida.
During his visit, Al showed Salesman, and several other films he and his brother had made: What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA, a chronicle of that first insane American trip when the band appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show; Showman, a portrait of movie distribution mogul Joseph Levine; and Meet Marlon Brando, a revealing look at the actor told solely through a series of media interviews promoting one of his lesser efforts, the movie Morituri.
Understand, this was 1969; decades before home video, video on demand and Netflix would make such films more readily available beyond a few urban, independent movie houses and college film societies. To have a chance to see such treasures in my small town was a rare opportunity and to be able to spend time with the actual filmmaker even more extraordinary. I was at his elbow the entire time, asking questions and listening to his stories. He was beyond gracious.
One story I especially remember: Maysles had been in Moscow filming. He was on the subway, bringing roses to the hostess at a dinner he was attending. Riding up on one of the system's death-defyingly tall escalators, he saw a beautiful young woman on the down escalator. As they passed, he silently handed her the roses. End of story. Hokey, maybe, but as Cyrano de Bergerac would say, "What a gesture!" At least this callow youth thought it was the height of romance and sophistication.
Al's visit was revelatory. Not that it instantly made me want to run away and become a filmmaker - at the time, I was too obsessed with politics to be steered away from that crooked path - but it made me realize that there was a world of possibilities far beyond my so far limited experience. The fact that someone could make a living - albeit often a precarious one - telling stories with a camera, meeting interesting people and going behind-the-scenes of fascinating places was mindbending. And I truly believe it changed my life, making me open to experience and the not-so-novel notion that chance favors the prepared mind.
He showed me at an impressionable age that there were myriad opportunities in the world, and one of them was to be a storyteller, a purveyor of truth.
We stayed in contact while I was in college; I'd drop into his office on Broadway on the rare times I was in New York, and when Gimme Shelter, their controversial Rolling Stones documentary came out, David Maysles invited me to a screening in Washington and lunch afterwards.
But then we lost touch. Al and David made the remarkable Grey Gardens, about the eccentric Edith Bouvier and her even balmier daughter Edie Bouvier Beale; and beautiful films about the work of installation artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude. David died in 1987 but Al carried on. His documentary Iris was shown last year at the New York Film Festival.
In the 1990s, a mutual friend with whom I was working got me back in contact with Al and for a while we were able, in part at least, to pick up where we had left off. His stories remained a fascination, his advice invaluable.
At his website, Al left this mini-manifesto:
As a documentarian I happily place my fate and faith in reality. It is my caretaker, the provider of subjects, themes, experiences - all endowed with the power of truth and the romance of discovery. And the closer I adhere to reality the more honest and authentic my tales. After all, the knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another. It's my way of making the world a better place.
He showed me at an impressionable age that there were myriad opportunities in the world, and one of them was to be a storyteller, a purveyor of truth.
So thanks, Al Maysles. For everything.
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Sex and Interior Decorating
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three. . .
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
-- Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis [1974]
Feb 14, 2015
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three. . .
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
-- Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis [1974]
I do not ordinarily cover the newest fads. This week, however, I am making an exception because the newest fads are inspired by a movie that will be released the day before Valentine's Day and the timing of this column is such that readers who are inspired by it can rush off to their nearest Target stores and present their purchases to their Valentines on the day itself.
The movie that is being released is called "Fifty Shades of Grey." Just as Erica Jong's erotic novel of several years back called "Fear of Flying" had nothing to do with phobias and airplanes, "Fifty Shades of Grey" does not attempt to instruct the interior decorator on the interesting effects that can be achieved by taking advantage of the subtle differences between different shades of grey or explaining why the chandelier looks better if it is not hung over the center of the table. Fifty Shades of Grey is a trilogy and is all about sex. The author, E.L. James (not her real name) can explain why she sought to mislead those who bought the books hoping to get tips on interior decorating. Those going to the movie may get new ideas about things of considerable interest to them but none of them will improve the decor around the house.
The movie (whose advent has been eagerly awaited by members of both sexes although reportedly, more by the fair sex than the other one) tells a story of a young woman's introduction into the world of sexual bondage. I'll not say more about that since (a) I've not seen the movie nor read the books and (b) even if I had, I'd not want to spoil the movie for my readers or reduce the number of viewers it would have attracted had I not written a spoiler. Many viewers will find the sorts of things that go on in the movie intriguing and will wonder where the artifacts that were used by the actors to enhance the activities displayed on the silver screen can be obtained. A quick search of the Internet discloses that a company known as "Lovehoney" is, as its website proclaims "The Official Pleasure Collection." E.L. James is quoted on the home page of Lovehoney as saying: "I'm so excited that the toys I described in the books have come to life." She is, of course, not speaking literally since none of the toys being sold have a life of any kind so long as they sit on the shelf. But readers may wonder how they can help bring the toys to life. Herewith the answer.
Although Lovehoney is the "go to" source for the toys, there are some who will be reluctant to order those toys on line because of fears their order may be disclosed in unexpected places on the internet. For them the destination store will be a Target store near their homes even though the product selection may be more limited than what is available from Lovehoney's website. The fact that the selection is limited is offset by the fact that the buyer can acquire the sought after items more discretely than may be possible over the Internet. In one Target store, for example, the Lovehoney items were put on display right next to the Captain America toothbrushes. That is helpful to the sensitive type who, when buying a Lovehoney product can, if another shopper is standing nearby, pretend to be interested in the Captain America toothbrushes rather than the Lovehoney product.
It is impossible in a column such as this, to describe all the products that can be found on Lovehoney's website and, to a lesser extent, at your local Target store. A few of them do, however, deserve mention. Among them are"his and hers No Peeking Soft Twin Blindfolds" for $14.95, and "Yours and Mine Vibrating Silicone Love Ring" that also costs $14.95 (and almost certainly comes with instructions.) For $12.95 a "Tease Feather Tickler" can be purchased and for another $11.99 a "Spanking Ruler." (If you are shopping at Target that can probably be found in the school supplies section as well.) For the partner of the purchaser of the ruler, for $16.99 a "Soothe Me After Spanking Cream" can be purchased.
There is one benefit to shopping on line rather than at Target. According to the Lovehoney website, anyone spending $60 on "The Official Pleasure Collection" gets a FREE Charlie Tango. Not everyone will know what to do with a Charlie Tango but I am sure it will come with a book of instructions. The lucky person who gets this bonus should read the book before bringing Charlie to the evening's activities. Have fun.
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What Makes Nonviolent Movements Explode?
Dec 11, 2014
Why are some protests ignored and forgotten while others explode, dominating the news cycle for weeks and becoming touchstones in political life?
For all of those seeking to promote change, this is a critical question. And it was a particularly pressing concern after the financial meltdown of 2008.
In the years following the crash, America entered into its worst economic crisis in three quarters of a century. The unemployment rate reached into double digits, something that had not happened in the lifetimes of more than a third of all Americans. State governments reported record demand for food stamps. And yet, debate in Washington, D.C. -- influenced by the activism of the insurgent Tea Party -- revolved around cutting the budget and trimming social programs. "We were basically having an insane national discussion," remarked economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
It took an outburst of popular action to change this. And that outburst came in an unexpected form.
By the fall of 2011, three years after the economic downturn had begun, political observers such as Krugman had long wondered when worsening conditions would result in public demonstrations against joblessness and foreclosures. Labor unions and major nonprofit organizations had attempted to build mass movement energy around these very issues. In the fall of 2010, the "One Nation Working Together" march -- initiated primarily by the AFL-CIO and the NAACP -- drew more than 175,000 people to Washington, D.C., with demands to combat runaway inequality. The next year, long-time organizer and charismatic former White House staffer Van Jones launched Rebuild the Dream, a major drive to form a progressive alternative to the Tea Party.
According to the rules of conventional organizing, these efforts did everything right. They rallied significant resources, they drew on the strength of organizations with robust membership bases, they came up with sophisticated policy demands, and they forged impressive coalitions. And yet, they made little headway. Even their largest mobilizations attracted only modest press attention and quickly faded from popular political memory.
What worked was something different. "A group of people started camping out in Zuccotti Park," Krugman explained just weeks after Occupy burst into the national consciousness, "and all of a sudden the conversation has changed significantly towards being about the right things."
"It's kind of a miracle," he added.
For those who study the use of strategic nonviolent conflict, the abrupt rise of Occupy Wall Street was certainly impressive, but its emergence was not a product of miraculous, otherworldly intervention. Instead, it was an example of two powerful forces working in tandem: namely, disruption and sacrifice.
The haphazard assembly of activists who came together under the Occupy banner did not follow the time-honored rules of community organizing. But they were willing to risk actions that were highly disruptive, and they put on display a high level of sacrifice among participants. Each of these contributed momentum to their escalating drive, allowing a loose and underfunded collection of protesters to alter the terms of national debate in ways that those with far greater organizational might had been unable to manage.
Time and again, in uprisings that steal the spotlight and shine light on injustices that are otherwise ignored, we see these two elements -- disruption and sacrifice -- combining in forceful ways. Examining their strange alchemy yields many intriguing lessons.
The power of disruption
The amount of momentum that a movement generates can consistently be linked to the level of disruption its actions cause. The more that a protest directly affects members of the public, and the more it interferes with an adversary's ability to do business, the more likely it is to draw widespread attention. Snarling traffic, interrupting a public event, shutting down a convention, stopping a construction project, making a scene at the mall, or impeding operations at a factory -- all of these reflect varying degrees of disruption.
San Francisco housing organizer Randy Shaw quotes former Washington Post reporter and Berkeley journalism dean Ben Bagdikian, who explains that, in the corporate-driven media, the disenfranchised and their social movements are seldom able to break into the mainstream news cycle at all, and even more rarely on favorable terms. "[S]ince World War I hardly a mainstream American news medium has failed to grant its most favored treatment to corporate life," Bagdikian writes. Meanwhile, "large classes of people are ignored in the news, are reported as exotic fads, or appear only at their worst -- minorities, blue-collar workers, the lower middle class, the poor. They become publicized mainly when they are in spectacular accidents, go on strike, or are arrested."
As the mention of strikes and arrests suggests, moments of unusual unrest provide opportunities for those without money or influence to break through attitudes of indifference -- and to highlight social and political injustices. "Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable," argued prominent civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin. "The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places, so wheels don't turn."
A variety of scholars have echoed Rustin's insight and elaborated on the dynamics of disruption.
For Frances Fox Piven, the eminent sociologist and social movement theorist, "protest movements are significant because they mobilize disruptive power." Piven has specifically been interested in the type of disruption that occurs when people are willing to "break the rules" of social decorum and step out of conventional roles. In their classic 1977 volume, "Poor People's Movements," Piven and co-author Richard Cloward explain, "Factories are shut down when workers walk out or sit down; welfare bureaucracies are thrown into chaos when crowds demand relief; landlords may be bankrupted when tenants refuse to pay rent. In each of these cases, people cease to conform to accustomed institutional roles; they withhold their accustomed cooperation, and by doing so, cause institutional disruptions."
Piven has forcefully argued that such unrest is the engine of social change. In her 2006 book, "Challenging Authority," she contends that the "great moments of equalizing reform in American political history" have been responses to periods when disruptive power was most widely deployed.
Gene Sharp, the godfather of the field devoted to studying "civil resistance," has emphasized similar aspects of noncompliance and disruption. When he devised his now-famous list of "198 methods of nonviolent action," Sharp divided the tactics into three categories.
The first encompasses methods of "protest and persuasion," including public assemblies, processions, displays of banners and formal statements by organizations. These make up the bulk of routine protest actions in the United States, and they tend to involve minimal disruption.
Sharp's other two categories, however, involve increasingly confrontational measures.
His second grouping, "methods of noncooperation," encompasses economic boycotts, student walkouts and workplace strikes. Meanwhile, his third category, "nonviolent intervention," includes sit-ins, land seizures and civil disobedience.
This last category involves not only a refusal to participate in political or economic structures, but also intent to actively interrupt normal daily activity. Such interventions, Sharp writes, pose a "direct and immediate challenge." A lunch counter sit-in, after all, is more urgently troublesome for a storeowner than a more removed consumer boycott. And, Sharp contends, since "the disruptive effects of the intervention are harder to withstand for a considerable period of time," these actions can produce results more swiftly and dramatically than other approaches to nonviolent conflict.
Occupy everywhere
The scenario for confrontation offered by Occupy Wall Street fell into Sharp's third category, and owing to this, it possessed a different tenor than the marches and rallies that had come before. Because the "One Nation Working Together" march had taken place on a weekend, and because it was viewed as a standard-issue march in Washington, D.C. -- one of several major rallies that took place within just a few months in the nation's capital -- it could be easily overlooked, even through it brought out more than 175,000 people.
In the long run, the breadth of participation in a protest movement matters; but in the short term, a sense of drama and momentum can trump numbers. Occupy Wall Street involved a much smaller number of people, particularly at its beginning. Yet it set out to generate a much greater level of disruption. Activists intended to go to the investment banks in the heart of Manhattan's financial district and erect an encampment on their doorstep, impeding the daily business of those most responsible for the economic crisis.
Although the police ultimately pushed protesters into a location several blocks from Wall Street itself, the occupation at Zuccotti Park effectively posed a dilemma for those in power. They could allow activists to hold the space indefinitely, permitting a staging ground for continual protests against the area's financial institutions. Or police could act on behalf of the country's wealthiest 1 percent and shut down dissent, a move that would perfectly illustrate the protesters' claims about what American democracy had become. It was a no-win situation for the state.
While authorities pondered these unattractive options, the question of "how long will the occupation hold?" fostered a growing sense of dramatic tension for the public.
The tactic of occupation had other advantages as well. One was that it could be replicated. Somewhat jokingly, a few weeks in to the mobilization, organizers unveiled the slogan "Occupy Everywhere!" Much to their surprise, it actually happened: the disruptive impact of Occupy grew as encampments sprung up in cities throughout the country. They even sprouted internationally, as with Occupy London, which set up shop directly outside of the London Stock Exchange.
As Occupy progressed, protesters staged sit-ins at banks and marches that blocked streets and bridges. By the end of the year, Occupy-related actions had resulted in an estimated 5,500 arrests in dozens of cities, big and small -- from Fresno, Calif., to Mobile, Ala., from Boston to Anchorage, Alaska, from Colorado Springs to Honolulu.
Such actions propelled Occupy forward. However, like all exercises in disruption, they also posed risks.
While tactics that interrupt business as usual are the most likely to draw attention, this attention is not necessarily positive. Because these actions inconvenience people and create disorder, they risk inviting a negative response -- backlash that can reinforce status quo injustices. Therefore, the use of disruption places activists in a precarious position. In crafting scenarios for political conflict, they must carefully cultivate sympathy, working to ensure that observers recognize the legitimacy of their cause. Strategic judgment is needed to maximize the disruption's transformative potential, while at the same time minimizing backlash from the public.
The use of sacrifice
It is precisely for this reason that disruption pairs well with a second key factor that works as kindling for mass uprisings: personal sacrifice. Movements are primed to flare up when participants demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment. One main way of doing this is through showing a willingness to endure hardship and inconvenience, to face arrest, or even to risk physical harm in dramatizing an injustice.
The ways in which strategies of nonviolent escalation make use of personal sacrifice are often counter-intuitive and commonly misunderstood.
Unlike some forms of moral pacifism, strategic nonviolence does not seek to avoid conflict. On the contrary, it uses methods of unarmed protest to produce highly visible confrontations. Going back to Gandhi's experiments in mass mobilization, commentators have noted that such nonviolence has little to do with passivity; in fact, it can more accurately be considered as a form of asymmetric warfare.
In "War Without Violence," an early study of Gandhian strategies published in 1939, Krishnalal Shridharani notes that both war and satyagraha -- Gandhi's approach to nonviolent resistance -- recognize suffering as a core source of power. In the case of war, this notion is straightforward: "By inflicting suffering on the enemy, the warriors seek to break the former's will, to make him surrender, to annihilate him, to destroy him, and with him all opposition," Shridharani writes. "Suffering thus becomes a source of social power which compels and coerces."
The main twist with nonviolent action, of course, is that participants do not seek to impose physical suffering, but are willing to face it themselves. "Gandhi's whole theory is based on the concept of suffering as a source of ... social force," Shridharani explains. "In Satyagraha, it is by inviting suffering from the opponent and not after inflicting suffering upon him that the resultant power is produced. The basic formula is the same, but its application is about-face. It almost amounts to putting the energy in reverse gear."
Contrary to the stereotype of nonviolent adherents being starry-eyed and naive, Gandhi was startlingly frank about the potential consequences of this form of political conflict. In his drive for Indian self-rule, he argued, "No country has ever risen without being purified through the fire of suffering."
There is a strong spiritual component in Gandhi's explanation of how this works. This aspect of his thinking has historically been appealing to religious-minded interpreters and sometimes off-putting to more secular-minded readers. Gandhi invokes ideas ranging from the Hindu concept of ascetic renunciation, tapasya, to the Christian emphasis on the redemptive suffering of Jesus -- pointing to how forms of self-suffering have motivated religious movements for centuries, often with history-shaping consequences.
The modern tradition of civil resistance, which is interested in the strategic use of nonviolent conflict rather than the moral demands of pacifism, has adopted a different emphasis. It has drawn out the more practical side of Gandhi's thinking. Even those not inclined toward spiritual considerations can find impressive results in the empirical record of protests in which participants have been willing to put their bodies on the line.
Nonviolent actions involving the risk of arrest, reprisal or physical trauma allow those who undertake them to display courage and resolve. When participants must ask themselves how much they are willing to sacrifice for a cause, it clarifies their values and strengthens their commitment. It can become a moment of personal transformation. Within successful social movements, organizers constantly ask members to make sacrifices -- to make contributions of time, energy and resources; to risk tension with neighbors or family members who prefer to avoid controversial issues; or even to endanger their livelihood by standing up on the job or coming out as a whistleblower. Nonviolent confrontations often involve making such sacrifices visible, creating scenarios in which those involved can publicly convey their seriousness of purpose.
Personal acts of sacrifice thus have public repercussions. They both draw attention and invite empathy: A bus boycotter willing to walk five miles to work rather than to ride on segregated public transportation; a teacher going on hunger strike against school budget cuts; an environmentalist who commits to sitting in an old-growth tree for weeks to prevent it from being cut down; or an indigenous rights advocate who chains herself to a bulldozer to prevent construction on a sacred site. Gandhi contended that these displays could effectively activate public opinion, serving to "quicken the dead conscience into life" and "make people think and act." When bystanders see someone in front of them suffering, it is difficult for them to remain detached and uninvolved. The scene compels them to pick a side.
A common misconception about nonviolent action is that it is necessarily focused on touching the heart of the opponent and leading to a conversion. In fact, the impact of sacrifice can have little to do with changing the views of one's adversaries -- and much more to do with affecting one's friends. When someone decides to risk their safety or to face arrest, their decision has the effect of mobilizing the communities of people closest to them. During the civil rights movement, the students who organized sit-ins at lunch counters in cities such as Nashville, Tenn., experienced this phenomenon. They soon found that their parents, their ministers, and their classmates -- many of whom had previously been reluctant to speak out -- were drawn in by their actions.
As the documentary "Eyes on the Prize" explains of the 1960 Nashville protests: "The local black community began to unite behind the students. Black merchants supplied food to those in jail. Homeowners put up property for bail money. Z. Alexander Looby, the city's leading black lawyer, headed the defense." Family members were especially galvanized. "Parents worried that arrest records could hurt their children's future, and they feared for the safety of their children." In response, they "turned to the power of their own pocketbook," launching an economic boycott in support of the sit-ins.
A powerful combination
Independently, sacrifice and disruption can each produce forceful results. But together, they form an unusually effective pairing. Sacrifice helps to address two of the great problems of disruptive protest: the risk of backlash and the danger of swift and severe repression. First, by invoking an empathetic response in the public, sacrifice dampens negative reactions and allows for mobilizations to attempt more profound ruptures of business as usual. Second, sacrifice can take the crackdowns that often accompany disruptive protests and turn them into unexpected assets.
Such was the case with Occupy, where sacrifice complemented disruption in critical ways. From the start, protesters signaled an intention to endure significant hardship in order to voice an ongoing objection to Wall Street's misdeeds. One of the first images associated with the movement, a publicity poster released in advance by the Canadian magazine Adbusters, featured a ballerina atop Wall Street's infamous charging bull. The dancer posed serenely while police in gas masks amassed in the background. The text of below the bull read simply, "#OccupyWallStreet. September 17th. Bring tent."
The poster's suggestion that camping gear would be required for the mobilization -- and that police reprisal would be a looming danger -- immediately set the action apart from countless other demonstrations, in which participants might show up for an afternoon with a sign, chant for an hour or two in a permitted area, and then call it a day and go home. As Occupy commenced, media and participants alike were drawn to the spectacle of protesters ready to sleep on slabs of concrete in lower Manhattan's sterile financial district in order to bring populist discontent to the doors of those who presided over the financial crisis.
Interest did not build immediately, however. As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann noted, "After five straight days of sit-ins, marches and shouting, and some arrests, actual North American newspaper coverage of this -- even by those who have thought it farce or failure -- has been limited to one blurb in a free newspaper in Manhattan and a column in the Toronto Star."
It took two further developments to break through the de facto blackout of the protest. Each would involve even greater personal suffering, and each would ignite outrage about police suppression of free speech.
When repression fuels resistance
The first pivotal event occurred on September 24, a hot day that marked the one-week anniversary of the occupation. On that occasion, protesters hiked two-and-a-half miles to Union Square, then turned around to return to Zuccotti. But before they made it back, the NYPD penned in groups of marchers and started to make arrests. In total, 80 people were taken into custody.
The arrests themselves were significant, but the most consequential product of the day's activity would be a video of a police officer later identified as Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. The video showed two women who had been penned in to orange police netting standing and talking calmly. Unprovoked, Bologna walks up to them, pulls out a can of pepper spray, and lifts it towards their faces. Then he sprays them at virtually point-blank range. Grainy cell phone footage captured the scene of the women dropping to their knees in pain, crying out in agony, and cupping their eyes.
Video of the malicious attack went viral, accumulating over a million views within four days. It became the incident that put Occupy Wall Street on the map nationally, spurring a new flood of articles about the mobilization. Rather than deterring participants wary of facing violence, as one might expect, the video fueled public outrage. It motivated new occupiers to join the assembly in Zuccotti, and it prompted many who lived further away to start encampments in their own cities.
A second important development occurred exactly a week later, at a larger march marking two weeks of occupation. For this procession, protesters made their way toward the Brooklyn Bridge. As they approached, the NYPD directed marchers onto the bridge's main roadway. There, they promptly surrounded the assembly and methodically arrested some 700 people, binding their wrists with plastic zip-tie cuffs. Several activists on the pedestrian walkway above live-streamed video of the arrests, making the event an Internet sensation even as it was still taking place.
The roundup involved the most arrests by far for Occupy to that date -- and represented one of the largest mass arrests in the New York City's history. Yet, like the previous week's video, footage of the police action on the Brooklyn Bridge did not dampen dissent. Instead, it conveyed a sense of escalating momentum and attracted fresh participants. Just a few days later, on October 5, Occupy held its largest march yet, bringing out 15,000 people, including delegations from the city's most prominent labor unions.
The idea that repression can actually help a movement, rather than hurt it, is a notion that stands a conventional understanding of power on its head. And yet, the ability of nonviolent demonstrators to benefit from the zealousness of authorities is a well-studied occurrence within the field of civil resistance. This phenomenon is commonly described as "political jiu-jitsu."
Dictatorial security states and heavily armed police forces are well prepared to deal with violent outbursts, which conveniently serve to justify heavy-handed repression and legitimate a trend toward militarization. The corporate media is all too willing to play along, with local news stations fixating on acts they perceive as violent and valorizing attempts to restore order. What confounds and destabilizes authorities is a different type of militancy. Gene Sharp writes, "Nonviolent struggle against violent repression creates a special, asymmetrical conflict situation," in which the use of force by those in power can rebound against them and embolden opposition.
There is a parallel here to the martial art of jiu-jitsu, where practitioners use the momentum of an opponent's blow to throw him off balance. "Harsh repression against nonviolent resisters may be perceived as unreasonable, distasteful, inhuman, or harmful to... the society," Sharp explains. Therefore, it turns the public against the attackers, provokes sympathetic onlookers to join the demonstrations, and encourages defections even within those groups that might regularly be opposed to protests.
No greater friend than its enemy
As Occupy progressed, this dynamic continued to fuel the mobilization at critical moments. One highly publicized incident involved demonstrators at the University of California-Davis. On November 18, 2011, police arrived on the Davis campus in full riot gear and began to remove tents that students had erected. A group of perhaps two dozen students sat down along a walkway, linking arms, to try to stop the eviction.
Within minutes, campus police officer John Pike approached with military grade pepper spray and began dousing the students. Video showed Pike casually strolling down the line of protesters, spraying toxic fluid, while those seated on the walkway doubled over and attempted to shield their eyes. Once again, footage of the attack began circulating almost immediately. In the aftermath of the soon-notorious incident, outraged students and faculty called for the resignation of UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. Nationally, the event helped keep Occupy in the headlines -- and turned Lt. Pike into an unlikely Internet celebrity. Popular memes on Facebook and Twitter featured photoshopped images of Pike "casually" pepper spraying everyone from the Mona Lisa, to the Beatles, to the founding fathers.
Occupy is hardly unique as a mobilization that grew stronger as a result of efforts to quash protests. While too many factors are at play in a given protest to ensure that the gains of enduring abuse will be worth the cost, there is a rich history of repression serving as a turning point for movements promoting change.
Certainly this was the case in the push for civil rights in the segregated South. As Rep. Emmanuel Sellers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, remarked in 1966, "There are times when the civil rights movement has no greater friend than its enemy. It is the enemy of civil rights who again and again produces the evidence ... that we cannot afford to stand still." Likewise, Saul Alinsky argued, "A Bull Connor with his police dogs and fire hoses down in Birmingham did more to advance civil rights than the civil rights fighters themselves."
Alinsky gives the civil rights protesters too little credit, just as Occupy activists often receive slight acknowledgement for what they did right in propelling inequality to the fore of national discussion. The truth is that, despite the demonstrated power of sacrifice and disruption, it is rare that groups risk either in significant measure -- and even rarer that the two are combined in thoughtful and creative ways. Yet if we want to predict which movements are most likely to explode in the future, we would do well to seek out those committed to conducting new experiments with this potent and combustible mixture.
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Secret Tape Exposes Fracking Industry Playing Dirty
Right-wing public relations consultant/astroturf king Richard Berman probably wasn't very happy when he saw yesterday's New York Times. Like the now infamous American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Berman's success depends in large part on anonymity.
Oct 31, 2014
Right-wing public relations consultant/astroturf king Richard Berman probably wasn't very happy when he saw yesterday's New York Times. Like the now infamous American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Berman's success depends in large part on anonymity. He is known for his use of what's called "astroturf" groups--organizations that appear to be community or citizen advocacy groups with names like "Center for Consumer Freedom" but are really shell groups for untraceable corporate donations--to attack labor unions, environmental laws, attempts to regulate the food industry and anti-smoking measures. Lately, he's been a conduit for fossil fuel interests with his Big Green Radicals campaign, based on the mockery and personal destruction of those who advocate for the environment.
At the secretly taped presentation, Richard Berman and Jack Hubbard laid out their strategy of playing dirty, saying "You can win ugly or lose pretty." Photo credit: Environmental Community / Environmental Working Group
But one industry executive had enough. The anonymous executive leaked a tape to the New York Times of a June event in Colorado Springs at which Berman and Jack Hubbard, a vice president at Berman & Company, were soliciting money from oil and gas executives for the Big Green Radicals effort, telling them that they needed to exploit fear, greed and anger, and to stoke resentment against environmentally-minded celebrities. The executive told the New York Times the presentation left a bad taste in his mouth.
Last spring, that campaign placed billboards in a pair of states where the explosive growth of fracking has raised community opposition and demands for more regulation or banning the process altogether--Pennsylvania and Colorado. They mocked celebrities who had records of environmental advocacy such as Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono and Robert Redford. "Demands green living. Flies on private jets," said the Redford Billboard." "Would you take energy advice from a woman who wears a meat dress?" said the Lady Gaga billboard. The head-scratching billboard featuring Yoko Ono said, "Would you take energy advice from a woman who broke up the Beatles?"
At the secretly taped presentation, Berman and Hubbard laid out their strategy of playing dirty, saying "You can win ugly or lose pretty."
Winning ugly is what he specializes in. The BigGreenRadicals website attacks big environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Food & Water Watch and the Natural Resources Defense Council, saying these organizations "have morphed into multi-million dollar lobbying machines that use questionable tactics to scare the American public and policymakers into supporting unnecessary and unreasonable policies."
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Even Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. chimed in on this one:
And Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement:
"You know climate deniers and big polluters are desperate when they turn to the tired old tactics of the tobacco industry to try and save themselves. Whether it's cigarettes or dirty fuels, toxic products are on their way out, and their proponents are left scraping the bottom of the barrel. Its not going to work--dirty tricks won't save dirty fuels."
Berman told the executives at the June meeting that he had researched the personal histories of board members of these groups, looking for information that could be used to embarrass and discredit them. He emphasized to them how they could operate anonymously through his company, shoveling six-figure donations to his front groups without their involvement being revealed.
"People always ask me one question all the time: 'How do I know that I won't be found out as a supporter of what you're doing?'" Berman said. "We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don't know who supports us."
They're starting to learn, and that probably won't work to Berman's benefit.
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