As we near the end of 2013, it suddenly seems everyone’s talking about inequality. Earlier this month, Barack Obama spoke of a “relentless decades-long trend” of “dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility.” Around the…
The right to free speech isn't just a fundamental American value; it's enshrined in the first amendment to our constitution. If only the most loud-mouthed among us actually understood what it says. Here's what the First Amendment offers: you can say, write or publish pretty much whatever you want, no matter how offensive (with a few exceptions), and the government can't step in and censor you or put you in jail. Here's what the first amendment doesn't do: allow you to say, write or publish whatever you want, no matter how offensive, and also entitle you to a giant pay check from your starring role on a cable reality TV show.
This isn't exactly Harvard-level legal theory, but many Republicans, Christian organizations and garden-variety tweeters enjoy spouting off about their love of freedom and the Constitution while remaining disturbingly unaware of what the Bill of Rights actually says and means. The right-wing passion for a set of ideals they claim to revere – but remain ignorant of – is not new, but it's news again this week. They're up in arms at the suspension of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson for a series of homophobic and bigoted remarks he made to GQ magazine. Professional consequences for bigoted comments, they say, violate the constitutional right to free speech.
Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said:
Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the State of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with. I don't agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views.
Yes, everyone is entitled to express his or her views. Not everyone is entitled to keep their jobs, though, if they decide to express views that are entirely odious and potentially costly to their employer. Certainly the founders didn't mean "free country" as short-hand for "free to be on the reality show of your choice."
Jindal's argument that liberals are tolerant of everything except intolerance is Tweedle Dumb to the similarly vapid adage "everyone is entitled to their opinion". Everyone has opinions; but why, exactly, are all opinions deserving of the same deference and respect? Especially when they come from people who can't tell the difference between promoting tolerance and respect of all human beings, and objecting when someone makes a comment that demonizes an already marginalized group?
This isn't to say that A&E is entirely innocent here. They created a show based around a group of people who are obvious loose canons with questionable viewpoints. Then they feign shock when those same loose canons express their questionable viewpoints in the media. Crass and mercenary? Absolutely. But violating constitutional precepts? Not even close.
Not one to be outdone when it comes to publicly idiocy, Sarah Palin jumped in with her creative interpretation of the first amendment. She wrote on Facebook:
Free speech is an endangered species. Those "intolerants" hatin' and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.
She would know. By that logic, Palin herself was censored by the American public of "intolerants" when we declined to elect her vice president of the United States, leaving her with only a book deal, speaking engagements and, yes, a reality show to pay the bills.
Robertson's statements were bigoted by any reasonable definition, not just in the opinion of us "hatin' intolerants". The homophobia has been getting the most press, but don't worry, there's racism as well. When it comes to gay people, Robertson said:
It seems like, to me, a vagina – as a man – would be more desirable than a man's anus. That's just me. I'm just thinking: There's more there! She's got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I'm saying? But hey, sin: it's not logical, my man. It's just not logical.
It's probably not news to most folks that as a straight man, Roberts is likely to be more interested in a woman's vagina than a man's anus. How another man's interest in other men's underwear-parts impacts Roberts is beyond me. But apparently it makes other men have more sex with women and also an animal here or there, because sin:
Starts with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men.
Start with a male anus, and next thing you know, you're screwing every woman on the block, and a few particularly attractive neighborhood goats. No one said bigotry was logical. Robertson continued:
Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers – they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right.
Perhaps he should take it as a blessing, then, that his personal greed will no longer be enabled by A&E. Robertson went on to discuss the cotton-field musicals of happy black people in the Jim Crow south:
I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field … they're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, "I tell you what: these doggone white people" – not a word! Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.
Actually, singing the blues is exactly what a lot of black people were doing in the pre-Civil Rights era South, but facts aren't exactly Robertson's strong suit. Neither, you will be shocked to learn, is his understanding of geopolitical history:
All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I'll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero. That's 80 years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups.
If you want to talk about groups that are known for their propensity for killing, you might want to start with Robertson's home state of Louisiana, which boasts the highest murder rate in the country. And Robertson's assertions about where Jesus is and isn't allowed are embarrassingly wrong. But not any more wrong than Bobby Jindal, who – as an elected executive official – one would expect to have at least a tenuous grasp of the bill of rights. Jindal said:
I remember when TV networks believed in the first Amendment. It is a messed-up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.
In what golden age of television did networks believe in the first amendment, apparently letting people say whatever they wanted regardless of their network affiliation? Because last time I checked, the major networks won't even broadcast the word "blowjob" in primetime, let alone open their airways to anything and everything (can you even say "anus" on TV?).
The right to freely speak your mind without government interference is crucial. But few of us are permitted in the course of our employment to say whatever we want without consequence from our employer. Being on a reality show is Robertson's job. He disgraced his employer and made comments so offensive that A&E would almost surely have seen an audience and advertiser backlash had they not reacted swiftly. Declining to continue filming someone for a reality television show after they let loose a series of asinine and bigoted remarks in a magazine interview is not "discrimination", no matter how much Christian organizations insist it is. It is not an indication that A&E refuses to treat faith-based consumers' views "with equality and respect". It does not mean A&E "excludes the views of faith-driven consumers and effectively censors a legitimate viewpoint held by the majority of Americans".
Unless by not featuring me on a reality show, A&E is censoring me and my legitimately-held viewpoints. Where's Bobby Jindal when I need him?
These are the same folks, by the way, who cry foul, demand apologies and insist companies pull their ads from major networks whenever Britney Spears moves her butt in a way that stirs their shorts. Gyrating hips? Time for a sex panic. A tirade of ignorance about gay people, African-Americans, Muslims, Shintos and vast swaths of Eastern and Central Europe? Just another day in a GOP where the leading argument against Obamacare this week is, "That pajama dude in the ad looks like a fag".
Robertson is still entitled to say whatever he wants to GQ, Bobby Jindal or anyone else who will listen. He is entitled to do so without fearing imprisonment, arrest, government censure or any other punishment from the police or the courts. Americans are fortunate to live in a country that offers us such openness. Robertson, like any of us, is entitled to the full enjoyment of that freedom.
What he's not entitled to is a reality show.
Ah, Upworthy: an online beacon of earnestness and hope, a place where gentle souls find refuge against the casual horrors and bleak humor of the larger Web, a destination for anyone—no, please, come in, all are welcome—who wants to absorb bit of…
There are many reasons to feel disgust over a judge in a juvenile court in Fort Worth, Texas, sentencing 16-year-old Ethan Couch to 10 years of probation for killing four pedestrians and paralyzing his friend while driving drunk this summer.
Leading up to the tragedy that killed Breanna Mitchell (aged 24), Hollie Boyles (42) and Shelby Boyles (21) and Brian Jennings (43), Couch and a group of friends stole alcohol from a Walmart nearby. At the time of the crash, he was driving a pickup owned by Cleburne Sheet Metal, his father's company. Couch had seven passengers in his truck and a blood-alcohol content of 0.24, three times the legal limit in Texas. He also had valium in his system. Two of his passengers were severely injured, including Sergio Molina, who suffered brain damage that has left him with blinking as his only form of communication.
Couch has never denied that he was driving drunk that night, nor that he killed those people. Instead, the defense argued that Couch grew up in a family that was dysfunctional, in part because of its wealth, and that he deserved therapy, not incarceration.
During the court trial, the defense called psychologist G Dick Miller as main witness. He gave now-infamous testimony. Miller diagnosed Couch as suffering from "affluenza" where his parents' wealth fixed problems in their lives. Miller explained it this way:
The teen never learned to say that you're sorry if you hurt someone. If you hurt someone, you sent him money.
He said that Couch had an emotional age of 12 and that both of Couch's parents failed him. Miller continued:
He never learned that sometimes you don't get your way. He had the cars and he had the money. He had freedoms that no young man would be able to handle.
According to Miller, Couch was left to raise himself in a consequence-free environment. Miller advocated for Couch to receive therapy and cease contact with his parents.
The prosecutors had asked for Couch to receive 20 years in prison. Instead and as a result of the defense's argument, Judge Jean Boyd ordered Couch to a long-term, in-patient facility for therapy, no contact with his parents, and 10-years probation. His attorneys have stated that his parents have offered to pay for him to do his in-patient therapy at a center in Southern California that costs $450,000 a year. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Judge Boyd said that "she is familiar with programs available in the Texas juvenile justice system and is aware that he might not get the kind of intensive therapy in a state-run program that he could receive at the California facility suggested by his attorneys. Boyd said she had sentenced other teens to state programs but they never actually got into those programs."
Ethan Couch, therefore, will spend no time behind bars for killing four people and paralyzing another despite admitting guilt and despite the fact that the diagnosis the defense centered their case around – that of "affluenza" – is not even recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as an actual mental illness. On top of it, it appears that the judge found therapy and probation to be valid because his parents could pay for an expensive center and that he would not have to rely on the state programs. In summary, Couch got off because he comes from a wealthy family.
But there is something else going on here. It matters that Judge Boyd saw Couch as someone that not only could be rehabilitated but whom it was worth it to rehabilitate. The vast majority of kids in the juvenile justice facilities are youth of color, with only 18% of the population described as "anglo" (compare that to the fact that 44% of Texas' population of 26 million is "white" according to the latest census; Couch is white). Only 14% have parents who are still married, 52% need treatment for a capital or seriously violent crime, 48% for mental illness, and 78% for drug and/or alcohol abuse. Other than being wealthy and white, Couch and his crime match the majority of offenders in juvenile justice facilities in Texas.
There is also the point that Judge Boyd believed that Couch's chance of good rehabilitation would be at a wealthy, private, out-of-state facility.This is especially striking in Texas, a state known much more for its ever-growing privatized prison-industrial complex than its compassion for prisoners. Just this year, the Texas legislature slashed the budget of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department by $23m (despite the state having a surplus of funds). There is also an on-going battle over the possible closure of one of its health facilities for mentally ill juvenile offenders, both because of years of violence and abuse as well as being far from treatment providers. The juvenile criminal system is bad enough that one writer at the Dallas Observer asked in response to this case, "Because we condemn everybody else's kid to violent prisons, does that mean it's unjust to let any one kid go?"
Many of these problems in treating the mental health of criminals are mirrored in the adult criminal population in Texas. A 2009 report from the University of Texas showed that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) had a total of 112 facilities, only four of which were for the psychiatric care of the prisoners. According to the TDCJ's 2012 statistical report, of the 152,000 prisoners "on hand", only 3,400 were in SAFPF, or a Substance Abuse Felony Punishment Facility which has an "intensive six-month therapeutic community program (nine-month program for offenders with special needs)". Of the 2,600 men in those facilities, 42% are white (pdf) despite accounting for just 30% (pdf) of the overall prison population.
And Texas is just a microcosm of a larger problem throughout the US. Private prisons are growing, earning more and more money, and lobbying politicians to call for even more private prisons. Mass incarceration, of which the US is the global leader (pdf), is leading to more and more mentally ill people entering prison. It appears that only criminals like Couch – those who can afford to pay their way through expensive, private rehabilitation and therapy programs – have access to a system that has a chance of working in their favor. If judges know how poor the system is for the mentally ill, as Judge Boyd implies in her remarks regarding Texas, does that mean that they see the wealthy as more likely to be worthy of attempting true rehabilitation? Worse, does that mean even more lenient sentences for the rich?
Judge Boyd has now participated in the very cycle that she wants to break: instead of Couch having to face the tough consequences of the horrific crime he committed, his wealth has once again padded his way. She has reinforced the fact that being very wealthy and throwing money at a problem will allow you to avoid the punishments that your peers who do not have the same resources as you cannot.
Wealth literally bought this kid's way out of prison and into a facility that can help him. The tragedy this case highlights is all the children who cannot do that and will instead enter an ever-growing, ever-problematic US criminal system that will most likely fail them – and us.
“We don’t believe the NSA has come near our data… We have a tremendous amount of thought and procedures and security around customer data.” – Devin Wenig, president, eBay Marketplace “Unlike other e-commerce…
I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation and — in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular — the defense of a free press.;
[Image credit: Hungry children in refugee camp, distribution of humanitarian food via Shutterstock.com]
In many of the tributes paid in recent days to Nelson Mandela, it has been observed, approvingly, that he was no saint. Most know what it means, in ordinary language, to say of somebody with affection that he or she was not a saint. It suggests that…
[Image credit: Renata Sedmakova / Shutterstock.com]
Taking kids to the art museum can be a bit like offering kids a nutritious snack. You can sell the outing as good news/bad news. The good news is we’re leaving the house today. The bad news is we’re not going to the mall. (And as a parent you want to avoid the mall – and any other place – that has multiple branded items for sale.);
America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.
There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.
I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.
I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.
You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?
And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.
It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.
After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.
Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.
It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.
Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.
That we've gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state's journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we've descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.
Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have "some", it doesn't mean that everybody's going to get the same amount. It doesn't mean there aren't going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It's not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don't get left behind. And there isn't a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.
Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don't.
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.
And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour's a cost. And if labour is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.
From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.
Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox if you're trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn't want to go forward at this point without it. But it's not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.
The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?
If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: "Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I'm going to pay to keep other people healthy? That's socialism you know. HMO [health-maintenance organisation] contract. Motherfucker."
What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, "Do you have group health insurance where you …?" "Oh yeah, I get …" you know, "my law firm …" So when you get sick you're able to afford the treatment.
The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you're able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you're relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go "Brother, that's socialism. You know it is."
And ... you know when you say, OK, we're going to do what we're doing for your law firm but we're going to do it for 300 million Americans and we're going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you're going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don't want to hear it. It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.
So I'm astonished that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.
And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.
That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.
And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?
So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.
We're either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.
The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.
The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.
So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.
David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.
[Screencap of Simon at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas via YouTube]
Reports trumpeting basic differences between male and female brains are biological determinism at its most trivial, says the science writer of the year
As hardy perennials go, there is little to beat that science hacks' favourite: the hard-wiring of male and female brains. For more than 30 years, I have seen a stream of tales about gender differences in brain structure under headlines that assure me that from birth men are innately more rational and better at map-reading than women, who are emotional, empathetic multi-taskers, useless at telling jokes. I am from Mars, apparently, while the ladies in my life are from Venus.
And there are no signs that this flow is drying up, with last week witnessing publication of a particularly lurid example of the genre. Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia revealed they had used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to show that the neurons in men's brains are connected to each other in a very different way from neurons in women's brains.
This point was even illustrated by the team, led by Professor Ragini Verma, with a helpful diagram. A male brain was depicted with its main connections – coloured blue, needless to say – running from the front to the back. Connections within cranial hemispheres were strong, but connections between the two hemispheres were weak. By contrast, the female brain had thick connections running from side to side with strong links between the two hemispheres.
"These maps show us a stark difference in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks and women at others," said Verma.
The response of the press was predictable. Once again scientists had "proved" that from birth men have brains which are hardwired to give us better spatial skills, to leave us bereft of empathy for others, and to make us run, like mascara, at the first hint of emotion. Equally, the team had provided an explanation for the "fact" that women cannot use corkscrews or park cars but can remember names and faces better than males. It is all written in our neurons at birth.
As I have said, I have read this sort of thing before. I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now. It is biological determinism at its silly, trivial worst. Yes, men and women probably do have differently wired brains, but there is little convincing evidence to suggest these variations are caused by anything other than cultural factors. Males develop improved spatial skills not because of an innate superiority but because they are expected and encouraged to be strong at sport, which requires expertise at catching and throwing. Similarly, it is anticipated that girls will be more emotional and talkative, and so their verbal skills are emphasised by teachers and parents. As the years pass, these different lifestyles produce variations in brain wiring – which is a lot more plastic than most biological determinists realise. This possibility was simply not addressed by Verma and her team.
Equally, when gender differences are uncovered by researchers they are frequently found to be trivial, a point made by Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioural genetics at London's Institute of Psychiatry, whose studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children's verbal development is due to their gender. "If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls, you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild."
I should make it clear that Plomin made that remark three years ago when I last wrote about the issue of gender and brain wiring. It was not my first incursion, I should stress. Indeed, I have returned to the subject – which is an intriguing, important one – on a number of occasions over the years as neurological studies have been hyped in the media, often by the scientists who carried them out. It has taken a great deal of effort by other researchers to put the issue in proper perspective.
A major problem is the lack of consistent work in the field, a point stressed to me in 2005 – during an earlier outbreak of brain-gender difference stories – by Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London, and author of Y: The Descent of Men. "Researching my book, I discovered there was no consensus at all about the science [of gender and brain structure]," he told me. "There were studies that said completely contradictory things about male and female brains. That means you can pick whatever study you like and build a thesis around it. The whole field is like that. It is very subjective. That doesn't mean there are no differences between the brains of the sexes, but we should take care not to exaggerate them."
Needless to say that is not what has happened over the years. Indeed, this has become a topic whose coverage has been typified mainly by flaky claims, wild hyperbole and sexism. It is all very depressing. The question is: why has this happened? Why is there such divergence in explanations for the differences in mental abilities that we observe in men and women? And why do so many people want to exaggerate them so badly?
The first issue is the easier to answer. The field suffers because it is bedevilled by its extraordinary complexity. The human brain is a vast, convoluted edifice and scientists are only now beginning to develop adequate tools to explore it. The use of diffusion tensor imaging by Verma's team was an important breakthrough, it should be noted. The trouble is, once more, those involved were rash in their interpretations of their own work.
"This study contains some important data but it has been badly overhyped and the authors must take some of the blame," says Professor Dorothy Bishop, of Oxford University. "They talk as if there is a typical male and a typical female brain – they even provide a diagram – but they ignore the fact that there is a great deal of variation within the sexes in terms of brain structure. You simply cannot say there is a male brain and a female brain."
Even more critical is Marco Catani, of London's Institute of Psychiatry. "The study's main conclusions about possible cognitive differences between males and females are not supported by the findings of the study. A link between anatomical differences and cognitive functions should be demonstrated and the authors have not done so. They simply have no idea of how these differences in anatomy translate into cognitive attitudes. So the main conclusion of the study is purely speculative."
The study is also unclear how differences in brain architecture between the sexes arose in the first place, a point raised by Michael Bloomfield of the MRC's Clinical Science Centre. "An obvious possibility is that male hormones like testosterone and female hormones like oestrogen have different effects on the brain. A more subtle possibility is that bringing a child up in a particular gender could affect how our brains are wired."
In fact, Verma's results showed that the neuronal connectivity differences between the sexes increased with the age of her subjects. Such a finding is entirely consistent with the idea that cultural factors are driving changes in the brain's wiring. The longer we live, the more our intellectual biases are exaggerated and intensified by our culture, with cumulative effects on our neurons. In other words, the intellectual differences we observe between the sexes are not the result of different genetic birthrights but are a consequence of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.
Why so many people should be so desperate to ignore or obscure this fact is a very different issue. In the end, I suspect it depends on whether you believe our fates are sealed at birth or if you think that it is a key part of human nature to be able to display a plasticity in behaviour and in ways of thinking in the face of altered circumstance. My money is very much on the latter.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image credit: Couple fighting and dressed for a night out via Shutterstock.com]
Research shows female stars are paid less, have fewer lines and spend more time with their clothes off than men
By Monday morning, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the sci-fi adventure thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence, will have taken close to half a billion dollars in global ticket sales. A female-led blockbuster is rare in any year, and all the more so in one marked by box-office disappointments and industry turmoil.
Nevertheless the film's success is likely to intensify rather than diminish calls for greater sexual equality in film. For despite the success of women-led films such as The Hunger Games and Cate Blanchett's Oscar-tipped performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, or directors like Kathryn Bigelow and writers such as Lena Dunham – and most recently the taboo-busting French lesbian romance Blue Is the Warmest Colour – Hollywood remains stubbornly set in its ways regarding sexual equality.
The New York Film Academy has published a remarkably comprehensive study that demonstrates just that: enduring disparities are revealed in the number of speaking parts given to men and women; the relative number of roles requiring full or partial nudity also shows a stark difference; and the sexual divide in offscreen jobs and the gulf in earnings between male and female actors is laid bare.
In publishing the survey, the academy called for a discussion about why, when women comprise half of ticket-buyers and nearly half of directors entered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, their numbers fall away dramatically at the top end of the industry. "By shedding light on gender inequality in film, we hope to start a discussion about what can be done to increase women's exposure and power in big-budget films," its publishers state.
Examining the top 500 films from 2007 to 2012, the survey found one third of speaking parts are filled by women and only 10% of films are equally balanced in terms of roles. The average ratio of male to female actors is 2.25 to 1.
"Like in any big industry, change takes time," points out Dr Martha M Lauzen, executive director, Centre for the Study of Women in Television, Film & New Media at San Diego state university, California, whose research forms the basis of the academy study. "The film industry doesn't exist in a bubble. It's part of a larger society that tends to have biases and prejudices."
According to Lauzen, women comprised 18% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinema- tographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2012 – an improvement of only 1% since 1998. Counting directors alone, women accounted for only 9% – the same figure as in 1998. Lauzen says it is relevant to compare the number of women in positions of power in film, onscreen or off, to the number of women in leadership positions in Fortune 500 companies. "All of these are highly coveted, high-status positions – and when you're talking about those kinds of positions, they remain dominated by men."
The most surprising thing, Lauzen says, is the apparent lack of change. "A filmgoer might reference Hunger Games and think things must be OK. It's easy to be misled by a few high-profile cases. But you have to do the count; and the numbers show we're not seeing any change." According to Forbes, the 10 highest-paid actresses made a collective $181m (£110m) versus $465m made by the top 10 male actors. At last year's Academy Awards, 140 men were nominated compared with 35 women. There were no female nominees in directing, cinematography, writing or in several other categories.
When it comes to the silver screen itself the results of Lauzen's research are even more stark: 29% of women in the top 500 films wore sexually revealing clothes compared with only 7% of men; 26% of actresses appear partially naked, compared with 9% of men, and the percentage of teenage females depicted with some nudity has risen by a third since 2007. While those figures may be skewed by one film alone (Harmony Korine's hit teenage skin celebration Spring Breakers) the overall pattern of sex bias is unmistakable.
The casting of 50 Shades of Grey has been dogged by the reluctance among a series of potential male leads (including British hunk Charlie Hunnam, who accepted the part before dropping out over "scheduling conflicts") to get their kit off in a three-movie deal. At the same time, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, the stars of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, who were jointly awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, have spoken of their embarrassment at the excessive attention paid to the 20 minutes of sex in the three-hour movie. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis likened director Abdellatif Kechiche's filming to pornography. "Women tend be younger and are still expected to adhere to a higher standard of appearance," says Lauzen, whose studies have found filmgoers are more likely to know the marital status of a female character and occupation of a male. All of this feeds into stereotypes about the important parts of identity. For women, that is to be very young and look a certain way."
In her acceptance speech for an award for excellence in film, at Women in Film LA's annual Crystal+Lucy awards in June, actress Laura Linney witheringly described the overwhelmingly male ambience in the US film industry. When she first started, she said, she was astonished at the "enormous amount of time" men spent discussing the colour of her hair – a process that became "absurd and a complete waste of time".
"I soon realised that for the most part I was surrounded by men. As an actress in film, it is very easy to become isolated just due to the ratio of gender inequality that exists. Rarely do you have a scene with other women, very few women are on the crew, and what few female executives arrive tend to keep to themselves."
The success of individual women in film, whether Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games, Cate Blanchett or Kathryn Bigelow, is often treated as a sign of progress, when, according to Lauzen and other critics, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. "The Hunger Games is just one film," says Lauzen. "The same thing happened when Bridesmaids came out, or when Kathryn Bigelow won her Oscar. People start talking about a 'Bridesmaids effect' or a 'Bigelow effect' – that these high-profile successes would radiate an effect to other women in the business."
But, she says, that's not the case. "Kathryn Bigelow's success may have helped her, but it didn't change the world because attitudes about gender or race or age are held on a very deep level. Old habits die hard. One of the reasons we haven't seen much change, is that it's not seen as a problem by people in positions of power – even by some women. Unless you perceive something as a problem you're not going to fix it."
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