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…
Revelations that the Clintons keep a spreadsheet updated with everyone who has ever wronged them led us to ask writers and politicians whether they hold a grudge with the same conviction – and impressive organizational skills
If Hillary Clinton is still favourite to become the next president of the US, there may be a few worried Democrats who vote Republican in 2016. The Clintons have long memories, you see, and, according to a new book, they keep a spreadsheet listing everybody who has helped or betrayed them during their time in politics. The scale of the traitors' offences are said to be graded from one to seven, like a kind of Divine Comedy rewritten for Microsoft Excel. For instance, if the book is right, Hillary's election would be the end of the line for the secretary of state, John Kerry, who gets a place in the seventh circle of infamy for preferring Barack Obama.
Keeping a "shitlist", it must be said, is not associated with history's most lovable characters. Senator Joseph McCarthy made himself famous in 1950 by holding up what he claimed was a list of all the spies and communists then employed in the State Department. The list was never published in full, and McCarthy may well have been wrong anyway, but it helped to fuel the Red Scare, which ruined many careers. Richard Nixon was also discovered to have an "enemies list" in 1973. He may never have seen it personally, but it was drawn up by his aides with the express aim of trying to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies".
More recently, the Church of Scientology was reported to keep one. Indeed the concept of the "suppressive person" who sees enemies all around is, somewhat appropriately, written into the religion's demonology.
Just last year the National Rifle Association, for reasons that are hard to fathom, even published an extremely detailed list of its opponents, including many obvious names, such as Michael Moore, along with quite a large number of surprises, such as the ever-villainous Dick Van Dyke.
Keeping a shitlist may not add warmth to one's reputation, in short, but it sure sends out a message. You are implacable, it says. You are going to be methodical about getting your revenge, serve it cold, and then take just a line of ink through someone's name as a digestif.
The idea of the list says so much, in fact, that you don't even need the list. At the beginning of the 2012-13 season, when he was still new in the Liverpool manager's job, Brendan Rogers told all his players – and the TV crew following them – that he had written down the names of three people who would at some point let the team down.
In the middle of a very successful second season, he now admits that the envelopes were empty. It was a trick he says he learned from Alex Ferguson, a man whose real enemies list would fill a book, and has.
Tom Watson
When I was a young activist, I had a shitlist as long as your arm. Yet middle age has taught me an important lesson in life: your shitlist owns you. It gnaws away at your soul and does you more harm than the list's members.
So these days there is only one person I would like to park in a three-hour traffic jam: Jeremy Clarkson. I do not have to describe to Guardian readers why, with his ruddy face and greying clumps of curly hair held together with Copydex, Clarkson is on the list, because he's probably on theirs, too. My only sadness is that he will revel in such notoriety. And the BBC will continue to pay him to be like this. It's almost worth siding with Murdoch to ditch the licence fee over.
He's on my shitlist because he's been bragging about running against Chris Bryant as an MP. I hope the BBC give Chris his own show to even up the coverage. He'd probably beat Clarkson in one of those ridiculous road races they do on Top Gear.
I'd gladly amend the law to free this Tory clown from the onerous red tape of wearing a seatbelt. Then it's just a matter of probability working its magic as he lives his celebrity life in the fast lane.
Marina Hyde
Very boringly – or perhaps very lazily, I can't even be bothered to analyse it – I prefer to go by that old adage that the best revenge is a happy life. In fact, I have frequently been known to express sympathy for someone in the business who is publicly going through a tough time, only for a friend who is far better at keeping track of such things to remind me that the person was once a shitehawk to me in one way or another. I once even sent a long letter of commiseration to someone who I had completely forgotten had done me quite a significant disservice, which – entirely accidentally – must have made me look very gracious. Or maybe outrageously sarcastic. Again, I have no idea.
In (imperfect) memory, I have twice ventured toward what I suppose would be deemed faintly retributive action. The first time was when a colleague plagiarised some lines from my columns in their book, and after offering them the chance to cough to it privately, and being disappointed, I eventually mentioned it in pointed amusement to our mutual line manager. Nothing whatsoever was done about it, equally amusingly, and it doesn't seem to have affected their career progression, so I don't really count it as a dedicated takedown. The second time was during some journalism seminar, in which I was on the panel with the editor of a website who once claimed something personal and false about me that I thought damaging. I am afraid I interrupted their keynote address on the state of the trade or whatever it was to remind them of this unapologised-for error, and they seemed so shaken by being called on it in such a forum that I felt rather mean and regretful about it later, and am sure it only made me look like a complete twat.
Both were years ago, happily – and such infinitesimally minuscule slights, in the great scheme of things, that writing them out just now I can't believe I even bothered to the quarter-arsed degree I did. In the interim, thank goodness, I have absolutely cemented the idea in my mind that even an ice-cold dish of revenge is far, far too much trouble to serve.
Zoe Williams
Here's the thing: in order to have a huge feud with someone, you have to either a) have a huge relationship, as good as married or a very, very close friendship, or b) be engaged in a huge project – take, as a wild for-instance, running for president. In a big undertaking, people can betray each other in big ways even when they don't know each other very well; whereas, on a normal-sized tapestry, you really have to be at the foreground of somebody's life in order to stab them.
As a complete aside, I think this is why Damian McBride and all those end-of-the-era New Labour types make such a big deal about how betrayed they all were, because it lends grandeur to the entire project. Except it doesn't. It makes them all look like idiots (1).
I'm not in the business of holding grudges against people I'm very close to (2), and obviously I don't have a huge project, so there's nobody against whom I nurse an implacable hatred (3). But I will say that any moderately well-lived life will contain some accidental giving of offence, most often by me, and after that I will nurse a grudge against somebody pre-emptively, on the assumption that they already hold one against me and if I were to meet them without acknowledging it, they would then have the opportunity to snub me. Imagine.
Then, if some panel event comes up that they will be at, I will passive-aggressively say to the organiser, "but X (4) hates me, would you check that he's OK with me chairing?", appearing both open and humble, so that even if X wasn't even aware of hating me, X just has to forgive me or he'll look bad (5).
One time, when I'd just met my fella, we were introduced to a journalist at a party, and he asked her what she did, and she put her head in her hands and said: "Oh God, really?" And he said if any other journalists were as obnoxious as that, it was definitely over between us. And I have had to keep my fingers crossed all this time (6). But otherwise, no. No shitlist. Nothing like that.
1 Damian McBride is actually on my shitlist, for a reason too petty to go into, although I will say that it involves LBC presenter Iain Dale.1A Iain Dale is not on my shitlist.2 I just remembered I haven't spoken to my half-sister for 10 years.3 Apart from Orlando Bloom. 4 Oliver James.5 This Thursday. 6 I really want everyone to ask me who this was, but I'll have to shake my head sadly and say I can't tell you.
Jenny Colgan
The problem with having a list (everyone has a list. Anyone who says they don't have a list is telling porky pies, or Pope Francis; mine has a disproportionate number of people called Sadie on it and I am now troubled if I meet someone new called Sadie) is that unless you expressly publish it in a ledger, a la Clinton, the person involved probably has absolutely no idea they're on it. I ran into a (highly successful theatre producer) aquaintance recently for the first time in an age, who said: "Oh my God, I have never forgotten that ferocious review of my play you wrote in 1992. I nearly gave up the game altogether. God, it was something else."
He mentioned this several times during the course of a short conversation.
"I am so sorry," I said. I genuinely was and am sorry. Before doing stuff other people reviewed, I thought reviewing was an hilarious lark, taking other people's hard graft and writing show-off-y takedowns of it. Ah, being young. "What was the show?"
"You don't remember the SHOW???!!"
I didn't. I didn't remember the play, the production, the year, or writing a review of anything. Although if the way young callow wannabes review things is anything to go by, I deserved rather more than being on someone's hitlist; I deserved a hitman.
Mark Borkowski
I do have a shitlist, but I'd be a pretty poor PR man to out the names on it. It's a single sheet of yellowing paper, nestling inside my wallet. Thankfully it's a very short list, however each name is tattooed on to my very soul because of a litany of sins.
My dad offered me the best piece of advice for dealing with the vicissitudes of PR life. I didn't realise the power of his aphorism until the heat of battle. Cherish this, he said: "Lord protect me from my friends – I can take care of my enemies." He claimed it was an old Polish proverb. Many years later I was told the quotation is attributable to Maréchal Villars when taking leave of King Louis XIV: "Defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies."
In work, I need to be surrounded by people with good souls. It's important that the people across the divide share the same values of honesty. So when I experience a less-than-honest dealing from a journalist or client or employee, I notch it up. There is no point in harbouring feelings of paranoia when creating an atmosphere of certainty and reliance is critical. The best contacts are full of heart, and share a sense of responsibility for a relationship. Those on my list are the ugly ones, whose best conduct is enacted behind my back. These are filed in a bin marked "toxic".
It's a matter of being resolute – if we lose heart and a sense of proportion we are likely to be consumed by a craven process. Sometimes PR needs to bare its teeth and just tell the truth.
Although it is good to be merciful, for some, anger, hatred and evil will is everlasting. The shitlist is like a voodoo doll, which I occasionally stick pins in while cursing. It's very therapeutic! Succumb to anger, then expect to slip into a dark spiral of despair. Ensure your own shitlist is small like mine, and then remember the greatest revenge is enormous success.
Stuart Heritage
I wish I had a shitlist. I wish I had the capacity for that level of vengeance. I've seen entire careers get destroyed by shitlists – by people who overheard perceived slights long ago, then spent years waiting for the perfect opportunity to fatally crush the perpetrator – and I'm jealous. I want to be that person. I want to be that shadowy puppetmaster. I want to hurl someone's entire future against a spiked wall because they looked at my shoes disparagingly at a party once. I want to be Kevin Spacey from House of Cards.
But I'm not. The point of a shitlist is to exact painful revenge when the subject expects it least. But by the time the subject expects it least, I've invariably moved on. If revenge is a dish best served cold, I'm the guy who took my revenge out of the oven, put it on a windowsill to cool down, got distracted by a shiny piece of paper on the floor, and let a hungry dog run off with it.
That said, in the brief window between being offended and completely forgetting about it, my shitlist has an incredibly low bar of entry. If you have ever remained stationary on an airport travelator, know that I have temporarily sworn violent retribution against you. If you don't let people off trains before getting on, I'll transiently assume that you're the worst person who ever lived. If you've taken even a millisecond longer at a cash machine than I've arbitrarily decided that you needed, I will have definitely entertained the idea of finding out where you live and torching your house. If you're the builder standing outside my window as I write this, drilling holes in things because it's your job, then oh my bloody God you're going to get it.
Or at least you would get it if my organisational skills were better. I think the problem is that I'm surrounded by such a constant stream of annoyances that I literally don't have the time to commit any of them to memory. By the time I've decided to add, say, Jeremy Kyle to my list, I'll accidentally glimpse a mug with an ironic moustache on it and immediately start daydreaming about tracking down and killing the man who invented mugs. That's no way to live. Perhaps it'd be healthier to keep a shitlist. If that's the case, that builder had better look out.
Ken Livingstone
I never had a hitlist – it sounds like an American thing to me. In British politics, nothing is permanent – people aren't friends or enemies. They will work with you one year, and the next year they will work against you. Just look at the relationship between Blair, Brown and Mandelson, which moved from love to devotion to hatred. There were people I came up against, such as Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch. I'm sure I was on a few hitlists myself – when I was leader of the GLC the editor of the Mail, David English, instructed his reporters to file six stories a day about me. But it tended to be media, rather than politicians, who targeted me, and even then I don't bear a grudge. In a sense, there's a feeling of vindication in knowing that someone like Dacre thinks you're worth targeting.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
America’s unrivaled inequality will be center stage in our political discourse this year, as lawmakers debate raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion leading…
Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood in the 1960s. It's been replaced by a subtler, still ugly version
A week after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I walked into my old hometown bar in central Florida to hear, "Well if a nigger can be president, then I can have another drink. Give me a whiskey straight up."
Only one day in the town and I thought, "Damn the south."
I had returned home to bury my father, who had spent much of the 1950s and '60s fighting for civil rights in the south. Consequently, my childhood was defined by race. It was why our car was shot at, why threats were made to burn our down, why some neighbors forbid me to play on their lawn, why I was taunted at school as a "nigger lover".
It was nothing compared to what the blacks in town had to endure. I was just residing in the seam of something much uglier.
It is also why I left as soon as I could, exercising an option few others had. I eventually moved to New York City to work on Wall Street.
In the next 15 years I thought less about race. It is possible to live in the northeast as a white liberal and think little about it, to convince yourself that most of the crude past is behind. Outward signs suggest things are different now: I live in an integrated neighborhood, my kids have friends of all colors, and my old office is diverse compared to what I grew up with. As many point out, America even has a black man (technically bi-racial) as president.
Soon after my father passed away, I started to venture beyond my Wall Street life, to explore parts of New York that I had only previously passed through on the way to airports. I did this with my camera, initially as a hobby. I ended up spending three years documenting addiction in the New York's Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point. There I was slapped in the face by the past.
In my Florida hometown, there is a train track that splits the town into two colors. When we passed into the black section of town, even if I were lying in the back of the station wagon, I knew it. The gravel roads would wake me, and I could basically smell poverty through the windows.
Crossing into Hunts Point in New York is the same, complete with a train track. The roads are paved, but feel unpaved. The stench of poverty has not changed much (industrial waste rather than uncollected garbage), nor has its clamor or its destructive power.
Neither has the color of its residents: the poor side of town in New York is still almost entirely dark skinned.
It took me a few months of slow recognition, fighting a thought I did not want to believe: we are still a deeply racist country. The laws on the books claim otherwise, but in Hunts Point (and similar neighborhoods across the country), those laws seem like far away idyllic words that clash with the daily reality: everything is stacked against those who are born black or brown.
We as a nation applaud ourselves for having moved beyond race. We find one or two self-made blacks or Hispanics who succeeded against terrible odds, and we elevate their stories to a higher position, and then we tell them over and over, so we can say, "See, we really are a color blind nation."
We tell their stories so we can forget about the others, the ones who couldn't overcome the long odds, the ones born into neighborhoods locked down by the absurd war on drugs, the ones born with almost even odds that their fathers will at some point be in jail, the ones born into neighborhoods that few want to teach in, neighborhoods scarce of resources.
We tell the stories of success and say: see anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, further denigrating those who can't escape poverty. It plays into the false and pernicious narrative that poverty is somehow a fault of desire, a fault of intelligence, a fault of skills. No, poverty is not a failing of the residents of Hunts Point who are just as decent and talented as anyone else. Rather it is a failing our broader society.
It took me seeing one black teen thrown against a bodega wall by cops, for no reason, to erase much of the image of seeing Obama elected. It took the unsolved murder of a 15-year-old Hunts Point girl, a girl my middle daughter's age, to make me viscerally understand how lucky my children are. It took watching as one smart child grew from dreaming of college to dealing drugs to viscerally understand how lucky everyone in my old office is.
The barriers between Hunts Point and the rest of New York are not as high as they were between the white and black section of my hometown in the 1960s. People can freely pass over them. Practically, however, they are almost insurmountable.
Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood. It has been replaced by a subtler version.
It is a racism that is easier to ignore, easier to deny, and consequently almost as dangerous.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
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