Gallup released an interesting finding today: white Americans’ views of the country’s current standing are decidedly gloomy, but people of color are significantly more optimistic. (The usual caveat that one shouldn’t read too much into the findings…
The good news is that President Obama has already partially succeeded in making income inequality the focus of his second term, and definitely his state of the union address. The bad news is that it may not make much of a difference to the people who have it the worst.
His strategically leaked decision to substitute the term "income inequality" with the more euphemistic "ladders of opportunity" has an any-publicity-is-good-publicity quality to it, of course, as Fox News and other conservative outlets/commentators have leapt upon the substitution as an example of Obama's desperation and weaknesses ("shrinkage" in the provacative phrasing of conservative commentator George Will). They consider it a tacit symbol of the White House surrendering to a public that doesn't really *want* to talk about income inequality.
But are a lot of poll results indicate that Obama is onto something. If there's a critique to be had about the "pivot", it's not that he's distracting the public from the administration's other problems, it's that his attention to income inequality has not matched the intensity with which Americans are now thinking about it. Gallup reports that 67% of those polled are dissatisfied (39% "very" dissatisfied) with the distribution of wealth in America and 45% are dissatisfied with "opportunities to get ahead by working hard" – both numbers the highest they've been in a decade. Pew tells us that a stunning 69% believe the government should do something about the divide – and 43% say that it should "a lot" of something.
It is true that the massive and growing gap between the rich and poor is not ordinarily a topic of polite (or cable news) conversation. Fox News' recent batch genuous polling took advantage of our societal reticence on the subject. Their poll asked "How do you feel about the fact that some people make a lot more money than others?". Not surprisingly, they found 62% said, "I'm okay with it – that's how our economy works" and another 21% responded, "It stinks, but the government should not get involved."
"Some people make a lot more money than others" is hardly the problem, both in the sense that the question does not address the scope of "a lot more" nor it does not define what it means to "make" it. Most (53%) of the income "earned" – one has to use the term somewhat loosely here – by the top .1% richest Americans is not salary for job, but the product of money being made out of money.
The Fox poll does get to one honest premise: up to a point, we take inequality for granted. Indeed, Americans are more sanguine about capitalism's separation of winners and losers than the rest of the world. When asked about it a source of national concern (as opposed to general dissatisfaction) just 47% of Americans say it's a problem. Ironically, we consider it less of a problem than the people of other economically-developed countries do – even though we're the ones with the most alarming disparity. The income ratio of our rich to poor is 16.7%, more than double that of the next most divided country (Spain, at 6.8, where, justifiably, 75% say it's a problem), yet the only country less concerned with income inequality is Australia (33%), whose income ratio is a mere 2.7.
The degree to which Americans are "OK" with income inequality probably depends on their experience with it. Historically, Americans are in denial about both what class they belong to and the differences between the classes: income distribution is about twice as unequal as poll respondents say they think it is.
But reality is sinking in. Americans are starting to discover that they themselves, or a friend or a loved one, has been pushed into the social safety net we used to think was there for someone else. Food stamps, once a symbol of desperate neediness allotted to those unable to fend for themselves, now assist a record number of Americans (1 in 7) – and a majority of them are working-age adults. Twenty-eight percent have at least some college education. Foreclosures and unemployment have turned people who had been solidly middle class into sudden homelessness. In the last decade, wages have stagnated for white-collar, college-educated workers at the same rate as blue-collar workers. In fact, fewer Americans than ever now identify (down to 44% from 53% in 2008) as middle class. Self-identification is catching up with reality.
People understand that the economy has not tanked so much as split in two, with the rich scuttled to the security of lifeboats, likely to be rescued, while the poor and middle class cling to the wreckage. If we're going to go with historical analogies for the current crisis, the Titanic is a lot more fitting than the offensive over-reach to Kristalnacht made by venture capitalist Tom Perkins in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend:
Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.'
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall astutely observes that Perkins' grating folly stems from a combination of "socionomic acrophobia" (a "gulf of estrangement of and alienation") and paranoia. Indeed, the very rich cannot seem to take their attention off their bank acounts long enough to notice that the class struggle is not about them, it's about *being poor.* Or being just a few rungs of the ladder away from it.
The poor know all about what it's like to be rich, celebrity gossip magazine and reality television shows have seen to that, but the wealthy seem to know nothing, and can't be bothered to find out, what it's like to poor.
The short version is that it sucks. The longer version is scarier and more precise about outcomes: low-incomes are linked to a lot of rather obvious material and physical outcomes, such as heart disease, diabetes, and asthma.
In fact, in the past 30 years, the US has seen a "life expectancy gap" grow in line with the income gap: the poorest among us today can expect to die at the rates they did before the Civil Rights Era, the richest can expect to live five years longer.
Perhaps more surprising, even to those living in the midst of it, is the impact of poverty on relationships – both to self and others: the poor are three times more likely to suffer from mental illness. Being poor knocks off 13 IQ points in terms of being able to address complex problems). Children in poverty are more likely to have their parents' marriage end in divorceand more likely to suffer abuse).
Some conservatives may grasp onto the subject effects of poverty as a way of justifying their preferred method of addressing income inequality: "return to sender", they deserve it. (Among Republicans, 51% say poverty is due to "lack of effort".) But further studies suggest that almost all of the negative effects of poverty are reversible across generations: if you infuse money into a poor family, their children will succeed and be healthier. They will be less likely to need the assistance that supported the generation before them. This not a hypothetical discussion about "welfare culture" versus "entrepreneurism." This is, to coin a phrase, just how our economy could work.
These concrete consequences and results are why Obama's project is not just urgent but eminently practical. We can do something about the income gap. Indeed, many argue that we already have: without what's already been done, the situation today could be even worse. Government intervention practical for another reason as well: if nothing is done to slow down and ultimately reverse the growing gap between rich and poor, Perkins' siege mentality may become less ludicrous – for exactly the reasons he suspects! Doubling down on his Wall Street Journal comments, on Monday he emailed Bloomberg News further thoughts on the state of class struggle in America: "In the Nazi era it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization."
Class has indeed overtaken race as the signature fault in our wealth divide. Researcher Robert Putnam warns:
The class gap over the last 20 years in unmarried births, controlling for race, has doubled, and the racial gap, controlling for class, has been cut in half. Twenty years ago the racial gap was the dominant gap in unmarried births – and now the class gap is by far.
You can see this fault line in still-pitifully pointless war on drugs as well, as working-class non-violent white drug offenders find themselves swept into the same grinding system of punishment, continued addiction, and recidivism – or, just as tragically, they enter the parallel economy of the drug trade. Conservatives are, in this regard, completely correct about capitalism as a tool of economic advancement; a successful drug dealer is as much an entrepreneur as any other "maker" in America. We just are more aware of the social costs of their business – unlike our stubborn inattention to the costs of a more generalized form of chemical distribution, as in, say, West Virginia.
In other words, the class war could get more radicalized. Imagine the GOP without its southern strategy. Imagine a world where the leader of a new block of activist voters isn't representative of racial equality but of class solidarity. Imagine a free market allowed to run truly free (and the drug laws stay the same). If that time comes, Perkins and his cohort can only wish that it was the Obama government doing the intervention.
If America has in the past had trouble bringing its own attention to the problem of income inequality, it's because people assume that it is not as bad as it is.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Here’s how bad it is out there: Last year, household income in the middle of the economic pile was still 8.2 percent below what it was in 2007, before the Great Recession began. The recovery has been rocky for many Americans; according to a study…
Here we go again: sexist tropes being used against a high-profile female political candidate.
A recent article in the Dallas Morning News by the paper's senior political writer Wayne Slater purported to correct the biography of Wendy Davis, the democratic candidate for Texas governor. Davis made headlines last summer for her pink-tennis-shoe wearing filibuster against a severely restrictive anti-abortion bill. In his piece, Slater charged that he was telling a fuller version of Davis' life story because "some facts have been blurred" in the version she and her campaign have been telling.
Davis has portrayed herself as a tough single mother who made it through Harvard Law School and went from living in a trailer park to working her way up to a Texas state senate seat. Since Slater's article was published last weekend, conservative media has jumped on it as evidence that Davis is not the (American) dream candidate.
Most of the attacks against Davis are sexist. As a columnist for Breibart.com tweeted: "Wendy Davis: My story of attending Harvard Law on my husband's dime while he took care of the kids is a story every woman can relate to." Talking Points Memo has a plethora of examples of the full-force sexist attacks. And Twitter exploded earlier this week with the #MoreFakeThanWendyDavis hashtag, making fun of Davis for being a liar.
The problem is that the Dallas Morning News article that caused this backlash is questionable at best, and is undeniably sexist in its telling of Davis' story. Slater implies that Davis was a negligent mother in order to pursue her education and political career, and that she used her husband for his money. He quotes an "anonymous source" that claims that "Wendy [Davis] is tremendously ambitious. She's not going to let family or raising children or anything else to get in her way."
The "blurred facts", according to Slater, were that Davis says she divorced at 19, when in fact she had only separated from his first husband at 19, with the divorce being finalized when she was 21. Slater says that Davis overstates her time living as a single mother in a trailer, explaining that "she lived only a few months in a family mobile home while separated from her husband before moving into an apartment".
Davis' bio on her website states that she paid for her tuition at Texas Christian University and Harvard Law School through "academic scholarships, student loans, and state and federal grants," Slater's piece says that Jeff Davis, Wendy's second husband, "paid for her final two years at TCU". He also says that after Davis was accepted to Harvard, "Jeff Davis cashed in his 401k account and eventually took out a loan to pay for her final year there." (Jeff Davis has given a statement to CNN clarifying all the reasons behind his decision to cash out his 401k).
Slater goes on to fill in holes of Davis' background that are, in his and his editor's judgment, relevant to her run at Texas governor. When Davis was attending Harvard Law School, her daughters "then 8 and 2, remained with Jeff Davis in Fort Worth". Slater also described in detail that in 2003, when Wendy and Jeff Davis divorced, Jeff "was awarded parental custody. Wendy Davis was ordered to pay $1,200 a month in child support". He then quotes Jeff who claims Wendy said to him, "While I've been a good mother, it's not a good time for me right now."
And in regards to the loans incurred from Davis' time at TCU and Harvard, Slater writes, "In November 2003, Wendy Davis moved out. Jeff Davis said that was right around the time that their final payment on the Harvard School loan was due. 'It was ironic,' he said. 'I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.'" Slater is not-too-carefully hinting here that there is a direct connection between the final payment of her loan and her choice to leave her husband, the implication being that she remained with him for his money.
According to Name It. Change It (NICI), a non-partisan project that is trying to eradicate sexism in political campaigns, sexism is subtly coded so that it may appear innocuous but, in fact, is damaging to the female candidate. NICI has "Pyramid of Egregiousness" and under the section titled "Really Damn Sexist", they list "bad mother" and "gold-digger" as two common characterizations of female candidates that are often used to undermine them. Slater's article deploys both against Davis.
So it is no surprise that there has a been a lot of uproar about the not-so-subtle sexism in Slater's piece (some examples are here, here, and here). A fellow female colleague from Davis' days serving on the Fort Worth City Council, Becky Haskins, a Republican, has even publicly stated that the description of Davis as a mother is unfair:
If this involved a man running for office, none of this would ever come up.
Laura Bassett noted that the publication of this Davis piece follows closely on the heels of the news that Davis had raised more money in the last six months of 2013 than her Republican competitor, Greg Abbott. Carl Lindemann has pointed out that if we are going to scrutinize Davis' life in this way, the same must be done with Abbott.
For its part, the Dallas Morning News has responded multiple times to the criticism but only to defend the piece. They have not apologized, nor have they admitted that how Slater told Davis' story was incomplete and dependent on sexist tropes about female political candidates. Slater himself responded to the criticism and defended his piece, charging that a person's interpretation of his piece depends on your political beliefs.
On Monday, two days after Slater's piece ran, Davis released an open letter in which she said that "our opponents have gotten more and more desperate" and are now stooping "to a new low by attacking my family, my education, and my personal story". She says that her story of "resiliency, and sacrifice, and perseverance. And you're damn right it's a true story."
Damn right. As a woman, a mother, and a person whose partner has helped me financially to secure a good education, I am disappointed in seeing the first female democratic candidate for Texas governor in a long while – a woman who came to international fame for fighting for access to full, comprehensive reproductive healthcare – being painted as a poor mother or a money-grubbing schemer.
I hope someday that it will not be remarkable to have two women (Davis' running mate is Leticia Van De Putte) at the top of the ticket. In order to make that happen, we have to keep holding the media accountable for how they talk about male and female candidates differently and we have to continue to advocate for gender-neutral reporting.
The major meltdowns in contemporary showbiz would have been the events of a single quiet night in for most of the rock stars of the 1970s. In fact, to say it was the stories that got small doesn't even begin to cover it. All the things that are supposed to bring fans closer to their idols – cameraphones, social media, rolling entertainment news – have ended up limiting the transgressive horizons of those idols (and by extension, those fans) to such a bore-tastic degree that mainstream pop is now unquestioningly covered as a morality tale. In fact, it's regarded as irresponsible to treat it as anything but.
And so to child star incarnate Justin Bieber, whose arrest in Miami on Thursday for driving under the influence is by consensus the logical next step in a narrative sequence that has seen the 19-year-old swear at a photo of Bill Clinton, neglect to have the correct travel documents for a monkey, and throw some eggs at a neighbouring mansion in the middle-aged gated community in which he has set up home. Hey – we get the bad boys we deserve.
Or rather: "What defines us is how well we rise after falling." Not my words – or even the imagined words of the puppy in that poster threatening to peel off your dentist's wall – but the words of Scooter Braun, manager to Justin, who seems to have harvested them from the critically misunderstood J-Lo movie Maid in Manhattan and posted them on Instagram on Thursday. As the chap who discovered the devoutly Christian Justin in his early teens and has since monetised him beyond the dreams of even the more criminally insane TV evangelists, Scooter is clearly mindful of the intense pressure on him to be seen to be doing something about this matter.
That drink-driving is wrong and reprehensible is something on which we can hopefully all agree, with many of us touched personally by its tragedies. But then, we can agree on that whoever's doing it.
What ought to be far more open to question is that bizarre orthodoxy of modern showbiz: the idea that with a young and impressionable fanbase, someone like Justin Bieber has infinitely more responsibility to behave with apple-pie decorum than anyone else. Has he? And if so, why has he? I'm afraid the dementedly anarchic, Bieber-esque dissident in me wonders where people get off contracting out any aspect of their parenting to a 19-year-old, whom even the stupider among them must be able to see is hardly up to the job. How very far down the rabbit hole we must have tumbled if we regard even one chapter of little Jemima's moral education as a matter for Justin Bieber, as opposed to her parents, or her teachers, or any authority figure capable wearing trousers at anything other than quarter-mast.
Since teenagers were invented (current estimates place that moment as the 1940s), kids have looked up to all sorts of idiots – though of course, none so horrifyingly idiotic as the ones their parents have looked up to, or voted for, or cheerfully permitted to screw up the world in one way or another.
In fact, it would be nice to think that it's precisely because kids can smell the total absurdity of what is expected of this silly little prick from smalltown Ontario that they mulishly act as though they've elevated Bieber beyond all previous teen idols, ever. With his 48 million Beliebers, Justin has passed into a realm somewhere beyond mere celebrity – a place where no misdemeanour, however transparently wrong, could dent the unquestioning devotion of the Beliebers. That the hashtag #freejustin was trending on Twitter within hours of his arrest is hardly a surprise. Justin occupies the sort of psychiatric space usually taken up by cult leaders or deities, for whose most glaring sins or cock-ups or hypocrisies some contorted explanation can always be contrived.
So we simply do not know what the Beliebers will do when pushed to the sort of limit these DUI charges appear to signify. They have seen their hero sent cordial letters by the German quarantine authorities, and they didn't take kindly to that. They have seen his super-rich nextdoor neighbour claim that a few eggs caused $20,000 of damage to his mansion, and – like the naive children they are – they questioned how in the name of sanity that was possible. But the US criminal justice system is new territory for them all. Will they now literally rise up in his defence, and transform themselves from an online army into some sort of avenging force in the physical sphere? It's an intriguing possibility, even if one ten-thousandth of a per cent of them were able to get their after-school curfew extended to do so.
Indeed, the sheer volume of threats to kill and maim in Justin's name – made countless times daily by adorable little tykes who police every minuscule perceived slight against his personage – suggest you would not necessarily want to be the Miami prosecutor on this DUI case. The lawyer in question may well ask the DA to move them on to something less fraught with danger, such as going after the mafia, or one of the city's Mexican-linked drug import cartels. As for Justin, are we not due a public interjection from his mother? Perhaps something along the lines of: "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!"
Twitter: @MarinaHyde
The most surprising thing about President Obama asserting in a recent New Yorker interview, "there's some folks who just really dislike me because they don't like the idea of a black president" is that he said it. Surely, the assertion itself is almost mundane. The pool of Americans who don't like the idea of a black president is large enough to have its own t-shirt market. And that market is larger than you'd think: about 1.5 million Americans openly admit to pollsters that they will not vote for a black president.
It's the "openly" that's a problem, of course. That, and the strong possibility that Obama was not referring to just those 1.5 million, but to some larger percentage of the 51% of Americans who disapprove of the job he's doing – a group that, statistically speaking, can't just consist of avowed racists. But who was he talking about?
One thing is for sure: none of the people he's talking about will change their minds now; even more distressing, they probably don't know that their minds need changing.
White critics don't question Obama's role as a racial ambassador when he poses as the disappointed elder. His has critiqued black men repeatedly, for years, especially young black fathers, for participating in a culture of resentment and insolence. In his commencement address to the all-male, historically black Morehouse College, he put it bluntly:
[W]hatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured – and overcame.
He also has made a connection between gun violence and absent fathers that would not sound out of place coming from Glenn Beck, or the National Rifle Association's frontman Wayne LaPierre:
When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child's heart that government can't fill. Only community and parents and teachers and clergy can fill that hole.
In general, Obama has been so critical of the black community that many progressive black columnists and pundits find it a troubling pattern. "Historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences," wrote Ta-Nahisi Coates at The Atlantic, and "they will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same".
Of course, when it's deemed fit to accuse Obama of "race-baiting", or when the virtues of his domestic policy agenda are criticized as "give-aways" or "reparations", those moments where he offered his own most searing criticism are conveniently forgotten.
That is probably way he has rarely talked about racism in an explicitly personal way; off the top of my head, I can think of only three occasions: at a Democratic primary debate in 2007, he made a joke about hailing cabs in New York City. It was in a response to a question about being "authentically black". Remember when that was a thing we worried about?
And last year, in his most memorable revelation, he made the disquieting observation, "Trayvon Martin could have been me." Few seemed prepared to question his authentic blackness then. But that was almost beside the point. Obama meant to call attention to Trayvon Martin's unknowable potential (how many future presidents, future Nobel prize winners, future mothers and fathers have we lost to pointless racial violence?) and to his own good fortune. Instead, critics treated it as an ego move, as if it were Obama that injected politics into the Zimmerman trial, and not another kind of politics that kept Zimmerman from being arrested promptly in the first place.
In another example I'm thinking of, the racism originated with Obama's family: "my own white grandmother". His 2008 post-Reverend Wright controversy "race speech" (sometimes known as the "more perfect union" speech)included her as a counterexample to the radical black triumphalism of Wright. She "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street," he confided, "and … on more than one occasion … uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
It felt like a stretch to hold up poor Madelyn Dunham's kitchen-table confidences as the equivalent of Wright's bombastic sermons. Obama just drafted Madelyn in the service of making his rhetoric more palatable: "See, we all make mistakes!" But he wasn't scraping the bottom of the anecdotal barrel for Grandma Dunham's subtle aspersions, he was actually making a representative claim: much as Reverend Wright is an appropriate spokesman for a certain strain of black racism, Madelyn Dunham is the face for that of most whites. Now, which is more difficult to address? Which is more difficult to stamp out? When a black preacher makes sweeping pronouncements about whites, that's clearly racism; when your relative whispers about a stereotype whose roots go back as far as the preacher's rage, well, that's just grandma.
The degree to which white racism has been driven into whispers, and, worse, habit, is evident when Americans are polled about racism: more people, black and white, say that "most blacks are racist" than "most whites are racist". Among all Americans, 37% say that "most blacks are racist", 15% say that "most whites" are. Split by race, there's only a seven-point difference in the percentage that describes "most blacks" as racist: 38% of whites, 31% of blacks.
I don't think this is because black people are truly more racist; I just think they're more candid about it – and they are able to recognize it. History has taught them to. They know the way they talk amongst themselves, they know their Rev Wrights and they know their grudge-filled relatives, and when those people say things that are racist, everyone knows that's racism. What's more, when white people hear about those comments, they recognize it as racism.
What's startling is the breakdown for white racism. Among blacks, 15% say most whites are racist. Among whites, 10% say most whites are racist. In that context, Obama's remarks seem even less controversial, and perhaps even disturbingly blasé.
But even taking those findings at face value, I think black America might be giving the rest of us a pass: I think of all of the statistics that show the dismal chances of a black child breaking out of the cycle of poverty. I think of how our schools are more segregated today than they were 30 years ago. I think of the disproportionate casualties of the drug war. I think of the health outcome studies that show such shocking statistics as black children having a 500% higher death rate from asthma than white children, and that in general black infants are twice as likely to die than white infants.
Black America, may blame white America for its troubles in some generalized way, but, concretely, a lot of African Americans seem to realize that whatever is happening to their people, it's not because white people are explicitly racist in their everyday affairs, even though some of us, maybe even 10%, are. But we are less racist than we used to be; polls show that over and over. Black people's struggles continue anyway, because of a terrible history with lingering consequences, and an imperfect system of redress that requires constant vigilance and hard work to be kept from slipping back into devastating inequality. Sometimes someone needs to remind the rest of us of that. I wish that the president could it more often.
The Ancient Greeks had the Plague of Athens, the Tudors had English sweating sickness, and the black death has popped up at regular intervals throughout history. Now it seems we are experiencing the demise of what some medical professionals have identified as a social sickness that has ravaged great swaths of society over the last decade.
According to a new Princeton study that likens Facebook to an infectious disease, the platform will lose 80% of its users by 2017. It's estimated that soon the only signs of life left on Facebook will be toothpaste brands wondering why nobody likes them, and Nick Clegg.
There has been some scepticism about the application of disease dynamics on to a social network. The Princeton researchers make their case via epidemiological modelling, acronyms, and lots of formulae where the γI terms in equations 1b and 1c are multiplied by R/N to give equations 3b and 3c. Quite frankly, this means the sum total of F/U+C*K all to me. Nevertheless, I don't think it is a stretch to compare Facebook to a disease, as this highly scientific medical reference guide demonstrates:
Facebook fever
Causes: An enthusiastic recommendation from an infected peer is the predominant cause of sickness. A virulent species of Harvardus aluminus (H.), parasites generating from Massachusetts, were the initial cause of the virus spreading, however the disease now has many carriers. The best course of action is to suspect that everyone may be a potential carrier, even your mother.
Initial warning signs: The first indication of infection is signing up to Facebook. OK, you think, I will happily hand over all my personal data to this well-designed website, because it will facilitate my ability to share seamlessly with social connections. This is a perfectly healthy thing to do and may not lead to further complications. However, a large proportion of users then go on to develop more serious problems.
Common symptoms: A tendency to spontaneously overshare; an inability to believe you are in a meaningful relationship until you are "Facebook official"; waking up frequently throughout the night to check how many "likes" your status update has had and self-loathing when you find that the only one is from your annoying friend Emma, who you can't remember how you know anyway; the breakdown of your meaningful relationship after you find their ex is still tagging them in pictures; a compulsion to Facebook-stalk your ex that sends you down a "research" wormhole from which you emerge bewildered, confused, and a little bit ashamed.
Variation in symptoms: Those most afflicted by Facebook fever can be classed into a small but statistically significant subset commonly described as "social media experts" (SMEs). These are grown adults whose job it is to tell other grown adults how to use Facebook to sell things and influence people. SMEs will often experience delusions of grandeur and refer to themselves in terms such as "social media ninja" or "digital prophet". Avoid these people at all costs so as to not worsen in condition.
Cure: According to the Princeton study, Facebook fever resolves organically over time as we gradually become immune to its attractions. The authors claim that: "Ideas are spread through communicative contact between different people who share ideas with each other. Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of 'immunity' to the idea." Which is a very long way of saying: "Facebook got boring and uncool." Thanks, science.
NB: all symptoms cited come from external observation and have nothing to do with me whatsoever.
Historically, economic and geographic mobility have been intertwined. Studies have shown that the number one reason that people pick up and move to another community is for work: Americans move out to move up. But something has happened. In the 1980s…
Over the last year, a mass of shocking evidence has emerged on the close ties between Western government spy agencies and giant energy companies, and their mutual interests in criminalising anti-fracking activists.
Activists tarred with the same brush
In late 2013, official documents obtained under freedom of information showed that Canada's domestic spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), had ramped up its surveillance of activists opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline project on 'national security' grounds. The CSIS also routinely passed information about such groups to the project's corporate architect, Calgary-based energy company, Enbridge.
The Northern Gateway is an $8 billion project to transport oil from the Alberta tar sands to the British Columbia coast, where it can be shipped to global markets. According to the documents a Canadian federal agency, the National Energy Board, worked with CSIS and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to coordinate with Enbridge, TransCanada, and other energy corporations in gathering intelligence on anti-fracking activists - despite senior police privately admitting they "could not detect a direct or specific criminal threat."
Now it has emerged that former cabinet minister Chuck Strahl - the man appointed by Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper to head up the CSIS' civilian oversight panel, the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) - has been lobbying for Enbridge since 2011.
But that's not all. According to CBC News, only one member of Strahl's spy watchdog committee "has no ties to either the current government or the oil industry." For instance, SIRC member Denis Losier sits on the board of directors of Enbridge-subsidiary, Enbridge NB, while Yves Fortier, is a former board member of TransCanada, the company behind the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
Counter-insurgency in the homeland
Investigative journalist Steve Horn reports that TransCanada has also worked closely with American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in attempting to criminalise US citizens opposed to the pipeline. Files obtained under freedom of information last summer showed that in training documents for the FBI and US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), TransCanada suggested that non-violent Keystone XL protestors could be deterred using criminal and anti-terror statutes:
"... the language in some of the documents is so vague that it could also ensnare journalists, researchers and academics, as well."
According to the Earth Island Journal, official documents show that TransCanada "has established close ties with state and federal law enforcement agencies along the proposed pipeline route." But TransCanada is only one example of "the revolving door between state law enforcement agencies and the private sector, especially in areas where fracking and pipeline construction have become big business."
This has had a tangible impact. In March last year, US law enforcement officials had infiltrated and spied on environmentalists attending a tar sands resistance camp in Oklahoma, leading to the successful pre-emptive disruption of their protest action.
Just last December, other activists in Oklahoma faced terror charges for draping an anti-fracking banner in the lobby of the offices housing US oil and gas company, Devon Energy. The two protestors were charged with carrying out a "terrorism hoax" for using gold glitter on their banner, some of which happened to scatter to the floor of the building - depicted by a police spokesman as a potentially "dangerous or toxic" substance in the form of a "black powder," causing a panic.
But Suzanne Goldenberg reports a different account:
"After a few uneventful minutes, [the activists] Stephenson and Warner took down the banner and left the building – apologising to the janitor who came hurrying over with a broom. A few people, clutching coffee cups, wandered around in the lobby below, according to Stephenson. But she did not detect much of a response to the banner. There wasn't even that much mess, she said. The pair had used just four small tubes of glitter on their two banners."
The criminalisation of peaceful activism under the rubric of 'anti-terrorism' is an escalating trend linked directly to corporate co-optation of the national security apparatus. In one egregious example, thousands of pages of government records confirm how local US police departments, the FBI and the DHS monitored Occupy activists nationwide as part of public-private intelligence sharing with banks and corporations.
Anti-fracking activists in particular have come under increased FBI surveillance in recent years under an expanded definition of 'eco-terrorism', although the FBI concedes that eco-terrorism is on the decline. This is consistent with US defence planning documents over the last decade which increasingly highlight the danger of domestic "insurgencies" due to the potential collapse of public order under various environmental, energy or economic crises.
Manufacturing "consensus"
In the UK, Scotland Yard's National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit (which started life as the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit and later became the National Domestic Extremism Unit), has had a long record of equating the spectre of "domestic extremism" with "single-issue protests, such as animal rights, anti-war, anti-globalisation and anti-GM crops." Apart from animal rights, these movements have been "overwhelmingly peaceful" points out George Monbiot.
This has not prevented the police unit from monitoring almost 9,000 Britons deemed to hold "radical political views," ranging from "anti-capitalists" to "anti-war demonstrators." Increasingly though, according to a Guardian investigation, the unit "is known to have focused its resources on spying on environmental campaigners, particularly those engaged in direct action and civil disobedience to protest against climate change." Most recently, British police have gone so far as to conduct surveillance of Cambridge University students involved in social campaigns like anti-fracking, education, anti-fascism, and opposition to austerity, despite a lack of reason to suspect criminal activity.
This is no accident. Yesterday, senior Tory and ex-Cabinet minister Lord Deben, chairman of the UK government-sponsored Committee on Climate Change, characterised anyone suggesting that fracking is "devastatingly damaging" as a far-left "extremist," holding "nonsensical" views associated with "Trotskyite" dogma. In contrast, he described "moderate" environmentalists as situated safely in the legitimate spectrum of a "broad range of consensus" across "all political parties."
In other words, if you are disillusioned with the existing party political system and its approach to environmental issues, you are an extremist.
Deben's comments demonstrate the regressive mindset behind the British government's private collaboration with shale gas industry executives to "manage the British public's hostility to fracking," as revealed in official emails analysed by Damien Carrington.
The emails exposed the alarming extent to which government is "acting as an arm of the gas industry," compounding earlier revelations that Department of Energy and Climate Change employees involved in drafting UK energy policy have been seconded from UK gas corporations.
Public opinion is the enemy
The latest polling data shows that some 47% of Britons "would not be happy for a gas well site using fracking to open within 10 miles of their home," with just 14% saying they would be happy. By implication, the government views nearly half of the British public as potential extremists merely for being sceptical of shale gas.
This illustrates precisely why the trend-line of mass surveillance exemplified in the Snowden disclosures has escalated across the Western world. From North America to Europe, the twin spectres of "terrorism" and "extremism" are being disingenuously deployed by an ever more centralised nexus of corporate, state and intelligence power, to suppress widening public opposition to that very process of unaccountable centralisation.
But then, what's new? Back in 1975, the Trilateral Commission - a network of some 300 American, European and Japanese elites drawn from business, banking, government, academia and media founded by Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockerfeller - published an influential study called The Crisis of Democracy.
The report concluded that the problems of governance "stem from an excess of democracy" which makes government "less powerful and more active" due to being "overloaded with participants and demands." This democratic excess at the time consisted of:
"... a marked upswing in other forms of citizen participation, in the form of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and 'cause' organizations... [including] markedly higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women... [and] a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private... People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents."
The solution, therefore, is "to restore the prestige and authority of central government institutions," including "hegemonic power" in the world. This requires the government to somehow "reinforce tendencies towards political passivity" and to instill "a greater degree of moderation in democracy." This is because:
"... the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups... In itself, this marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled democracy to function effectively."
Today, such official sentiments live on in the form of covert psychological operations targeted against Western publics by the CIA, Pentagon and MI6, invariably designed to exaggerate threats to manipulate public opinion in favour of government policy.
As the global economy continues to suffocate itself, and as publics increasingly lose faith in prevailing institutions, the spectre of 'terror' is increasingly convenient tool to attempt to restore authority by whipping populations into panic-induced subordination.
Evidently, however, what the nexus of corporate, state and intelligence power fears the most is simply an "excess of democracy": the unpalatable prospect of citizens rising up and taking power back.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed
First ladies give up their careers, salary and security, as the humiliating case of Valérie Trierweiler shows. Is it time for the role to be scrapped.
The fortunes of Michelle Obama and Valérie Trierweiler, arguably the world's most high-profile first ladies, contrasted sharply last weekend. While the grandly abbreviated Flotus (first lady of the United States) celebrated her 50th birthday with a White House party, France's de facto première dame checked out of hospital. She had spent eight nights under medical supervision after learning that her partner, President François Hollande, was having an affair with an actor.
The relative attractiveness of any job is best measured when times are bad, and right now times are very bad indeed for Trierweiler. As Michelle Obama enjoys fluffy tributes from the great and good of American society for her support of Barack Obama, her French counterpart is effectively pleading to stay with Hollande.
Aides to the Socialist president have indicated that he wants to make his lover Julie Gayet the new first lady. Hollande said he will "clarify" his position before a trip to Washington DC to stay with the Obamas in February. He spent just half an hour with Trierweiler during her entire stay at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and is said to be "managing" her unhappiness as a political, rather than emotional, problem.
Beyond Hollande's capacity for cruelty, the crisis in the French presidency says everything about the abject feebleness of the first lady concept. At a time when a glowing media image has never been more important for world leaders, many of their unelected consorts still knock about the corridors of power, and indeed the international stage, with an alarming lack of direction.
Even Michelle Obama, who trained as a lawyer, had no hope of practising on taking up the role. Now her main job is as "hostess of the White House", allowing her to invite stars such as Beyoncé to her bashes, as she did last Saturday. Yes, Flotus has an office and a press secretary, but she has no salary and the majority of her tasks are decidedly shallow. As throughout history, first ladies around the world are largely required to be presentable escorts when called upon, and to make their husbands look good.
Michelle Obama has tried to make a difference, mainly through campaigns about obesity and other social ills. But it is as a winner of "best dressed" and "most inspiring" awards that she remains well-known. In this sense, popular perceptions of what a modern first lady does are sexist and trite. Michelle dances, she sings, she cries in appropriate situations and she is a close confidante of Oprah Winfrey. Thus highly educated, talented women such as her are effectively told to suspend their careers to become state-sponsored ladies who lunch.
David Cameron's wife, Samantha, is not an official first lady – British heads of state are royals – but when her husband became prime minister, she left her job as a creative designer to adopt part-time roles, mainly for charities and fashion organisations. As far as Mrs Cameron's potential influence as a dynamic prime ministerial partner is concerned, forget it. It is getting to the stage where people do not even know what her voice sounds like. The once much-vaunted "Sam Cam" brand has never taken off, leaving Mrs Cameron as a bizarrely hollow public figure.
In this respect, she has become a female version of German chancellor Angela Merkel's husband, the scientist Joachim Sauer, who is known as the "phantom" because of his ghostly lack of presence (on the subject of pervading sexism, it is noticeable that Sauer is never referred to as the "first man"). He stayed at home to watch Merkel's inauguration on TV. Because of his gender, he is not expected to entertain or smile sweetly. Germany's actual first lady, presidential partner Daniela Schadt, is by no means a household name either.
Schadt is, like Trierweiler, unmarried. While many social conservatives point to this single status as being a huge disadvantage in itself, in France it merely highlights the pervading misogyny of the political establishment. Gallic leaders since Napoleon have traditionally kept lovers hovering in antechambers, to the extent that they are interchangeable with spouses. François Mitterrand, France's most famously monarchical socialist president, kept a family hidden at the taxpayers' expense.
Even now, Hollande is using disingenuous references to "privacy" to cover up what looks like a callous treatment of his girlfriends. These have included not just Trierwiler but also Ségolène Royal, the mother of his four children who was dumped while running to become head of state herself in 2007. Gayet will certainly not come out of the quasi-feudal presidential courting system unscathed either.
Trierweiler always claimed that she would not become a presidential "wallflower". If, as expected, she is kicked out of the Élysée in the coming days, she will get no compensation. The role of première dame comes with five clerical staff costing around £17,000 a month, but everything else is down to the bon vouloir of the president. Pointedly, Hollande stressed last week that the role was an "unofficial one" with "more to do with tradition" than anything else. Senior colleagues even called for it to be scrapped.
First ladies have no financial security, nor guaranteed tenure. Their ill-defined, awkward job may be temporarily perk-rich, but it ultimately leaves the incumbent in a fragile position. Trierweiler's slow exit from presidential life has been brutally humiliating. The sole consolation for a female journalist who has held on to her job at Paris Match might be a tell-all autobiography. It will be grim, but it will at least make clear that the job of ex-first lady is invariably more fulfilling and lucrative than the real thing.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Liberals, as any conservative will tell you, are the real racists, so it's no surprise that right-leaning news outlets would use the holiday honoring the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. to remind everyone of that fact.
'The Twitchy Team is the most explicit, asking "Who are the racists again?" The answer, of course, is "the ones who trade in identity politics and who focus solely on color, not character." And if anyone had forgotten that things should be the other way around, neurologist and tea party favorite Dr. Ben Carson was there to remind everyone.
The Daily Caller takes pains to remind its readers that, unlike liberals, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian: "As we observe the birthday of Dr. King, it would do us well to also remember Rev. King."
Kevin Jackson at The American Thinker agrees, right down to the italics, asking "why is Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, now referred to as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr?" The answer, he claims, is simply that "[t]he Left wants no remnants of the Christian revolution that changed this country."
Also, because Monday is a day that ends in "y," the answer is "Obama": "Referring to King as 'Dr. King' implies that the Civil Rights movement was led by an academic, that academia brought us 'change we can believe in.'"
Today should be a celebration of conservative values, Jackson concludes, because "[i]t was a black Republican Christian who changed America."
Which makes perfect sense, because as Walter Hudson at Pajamas Media argues, King's legacy is firmly in the hands of conservatives: "Who among those laying claim to King’s legacy sound like him today? Who among the organized Left advocates for objective freedom and true justice? Who rejects hatred and fosters the healing of racial divides? Al Sharpton? Jesse Jackson? Van Jones? Barack Obama? Who?"
None of them, that's who. Conservatives have taken to heart MLK's message about judging people by the content of their character, which is why almost every single conservative site has chosen to celebrate the national holiday in his honor by having a panic attack about an angry black man on their TV sets.
Last night, an attractive white female stood next to what looked like an angry black man, and conservative sites couldn't believe how "insane" and "classless" he was:
Put aside, for the moment, that Richard Sherman had just made the game-winning play that sent his Seahawks to the Super Bowl, as well as the fact that Erin Andrews is an experienced side-line reporter who's spent years in NFL locker rooms, because what matters here is that Sherman went "nuts," as FOX Nation put it.
According to Daniel J. Flynn at Breitbart Sports, Sherman "does not know how to behave." It's like he doesn't even notice he's standing next to an attractive white woman! Or that he's scaring her! As Andrews spoke to this athletic black man, Flynn writes, "her quaking voice add[ed] to the interview's awkwardness[.]"
Which isn't to say that Flynn subscribes to antebellum beliefs about black men lusting after white women. It just means, as Twitchy approvingly linked to, that:
Richard Sherman may be the best cb in the league but is still an IDIOT and still a classless piece of crap.
— Mica Schneider (@schneider_mica) January 20, 2014Missouri Representative Ann Wagner saw this black man frightening a white woman, too:
Richard Sherman's actions at the end of the game were classless, especially with so many children watching the game.
— Ann Wagner (@RepAnnWagner) January 20, 2014Yes, what will the children think of the Game of Thrones-quoting, Stanford-graduating, WWE-emulating black man? Maybe she answers this question in the very next Tweet she sends:
Today we honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day and remember his legacy of love, freedom, and service. pic.twitter.com/U3Zk05dJsW
— Ann Wagner (@RepAnnWagner) January 20, 2014Funny how she's all about celebrating the legacy of angry black men, so long as she doesn't have to ever actually see one.
[Martin Luther King photo from the New York World-Telegram Public Domain]
Obama is draping the banner of change over the NSA status quo. The bulk surveillance that caused such outrage will remain in place
In response to political scandal and public outrage, official Washington repeatedly uses the same well-worn tactic. It is the one that has been hauled over decades in response to many of America's most significant political scandals. Predictably, it is the same one that shaped President Obama's much-heralded Friday speech to announce his proposals for "reforming" the National Security Agency in the wake of seven months of intense worldwide controversy.
The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are "serious questions that have been raised". They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic "reforms" so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.
This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary "safeguards": a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.
But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government's requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government's lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.
Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee's heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees "more often treat … senior intelligence officials like matinee idols".
As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA's in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms.
The same thing happened after the New York Times, in 2005, revealed that the NSA under Bush had been eavesdropping on Americans for years without the warrants required by criminal law. The US political class loudly claimed that they would resolve the problems that led to that scandal. Instead, they did the opposite: in 2008, a bipartisan Congress, with the support of then-Senator Barack Obama, enacted a new Fisa law that legalized the bulk of the once-illegal Bush program, including allowing warrantless eavesdropping on hundreds of millions of foreign nationals and large numbers of Americans as well.
This was also the same tactic used in the wake of the 2008 financial crises. Politicians dutifully read from the script that blamed unregulated Wall Street excesses and angrily vowed to reign them in. They then enacted legislation that left the bankers almost entirely unscathed, and which made the "too-big-to-fail" problem that spawned the crises worse than ever.
And now we have the spectacle of President Obama reciting paeans to the values of individual privacy and the pressing need for NSA safeguards. "Individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress," he gushed with an impressively straight face. "One thing I'm certain of, this debate will make us stronger," he pronounced, while still seeking to imprison for decades the whistleblower who enabled that debate. The bottom line, he said, is this: "I believe we need a new approach."
But those pretty rhetorical flourishes were accompanied by a series of plainly cosmetic "reforms". By design, those proposals will do little more than maintain rigidly in place the very bulk surveillance systems that have sparked such controversy and anger.
To be sure, there were several proposals from Obama that are positive steps. A public advocate in the Fisa court, a loosening of "gag orders" for national security letters, removing metadata control from the NSA, stricter standards for accessing metadata, and narrower authorizations for spying on friendly foreign leaders (but not, of course, their populations) can all have some marginal benefits. But even there, Obama's speech was so bereft of specifics – what will the new standards be? who will now control Americans' metadata? – that they are more like slogans than serious proposals.
Ultimately, the radical essence of the NSA – a system of suspicion-less spying aimed at hundreds of millions of people in the US and around the world – will fully endure even if all of Obama's proposals are adopted. That's because Obama never hid the real purpose of this process. It is, he and his officials repeatedly acknowledged, "to restore public confidence" in the NSA. In other words, the goal isn't to truly reform the agency; it is deceive people into believing it has been so that they no longer fear it or are angry about it.
As the ACLU's executive director Anthony Romero said after the speech:
The president should end – not mend – the government's collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans' data. When the government collects and stores every American's phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an 'unreasonable search' that violates the constitution.
That, in general, has long been Obama's primary role in our political system and his premiere, defining value to the permanent power factions that run Washington. He prettifies the ugly; he drapes the banner of change over systematic status quo perpetuation; he makes Americans feel better about policies they find repellent without the need to change any of them in meaningful ways. He's not an agent of change but the soothing branding packaging for it.
As is always the case, those who want genuine changes should not look to politicians, and certainly not to Barack Obama, to wait for it to be gifted. Obama was forced to give this speech by rising public pressure, increasingly scared US tech giants, and surprisingly strong resistance from the international community to the out-of-control American surveillance state.
Today's speech should be seen as the first step, not the last, on the road to restoring privacy. The causes that drove Obama to give this speech need to be, and will be, stoked and nurtured further until it becomes clear to official Washington that, this time around, cosmetic gestures are plainly inadequate.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
In the words of Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves in the movie Network, “Woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!” And, as Beale would shout, we should be mad as hell. Issuing a decision that triggered dismay and anger among supporters…
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