November 2005 Cover (UPC)

October 2011 Cover_November 2005 Cover (UPC) 9/8/11 12:39 AM Page 1
INTERVIEW WITH STEVE EARLE
JIM HIGHTOWER ON RICK PERRY’S TEXAS
October 2011
Inside the ALEC
Dating Service
How corporations hook up
with your state legislators
By Wis. Rep. Mark Pocan
www.progressive.org
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TOC 10.2011_TOC 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:04 AM Page 3
October 
Volume , Number 
19 Cover
4
Editor’s Note
5
No Comment
6
Letters
8
Comment Demand the Impossible
10 On the Line
8
Columns 14 Terry Tempest Williams pays tribute to her mentors, human
and coyote.
16 Ruth Conniff praises Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois.
Cover 19 Inside the ALEC Dating Service Mark Pocan
What I witnessed at the annual lovefest between corporations
and their political lackeys.
Features 22 Chiquita in the Dock Kirk Nielsen
A lawsuit alleges that the banana giant is liable for war crimes in
Colombia.
14
27 Don’t Throw Away the Key Luis J. Rodríguez
Life without parole is not a moral alternative to the death penalty.
1st Person 30 My Gonzo Run for Congress Ian Murphy
Singular
I did everything wrong. But was it wrong enough?
Interview 33 Steve Earle Nick A. Zaino III
“The difference between human beings and animals is not an
opposable thumb,” says the musician and activist. “It’s the fact
that we create and consume art.”
22
Culture 37 Poem Lauren Schmidt
38 Spotlighting the Undocumented Carl Kozlowski
The film A Better Life is perfect for your Anglo friends.
41 Will Durst spots a ruse, a sham . . . Super Congress!
42 Dave Zirin proposes a solution to the NBA lockout.
41
43 Books Amitabh Pal reviews Why Civil Resistance Works: The
Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, by Erica Chenoweth and
Maria J. Stephan.
46 Jim Hightower exposes Rick Perry’s misrule in Texas.
Editors Note 10.2011_Editors Note 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:49 AM Page 4
EDITOR
Editor’s Note Matthew Rothschild
Matthew Rothschild
POLITICAL EDITOR
Ruth Conniff
MANAGING EDITOR
Amitabh Pal
CULTURE EDITOR
Elizabeth DiNovella
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
David Barsamian, Kate Clinton, Anne-Marie Cusac,
Edwidge Danticat, Susan J. Douglas, Will Durst, Barbara
Ehrenreich, Eduardo Galeano, Jim Hightower,
Fred McKissack Jr., John Nichols, Adolph Reed Jr.,
Luis J. Rodríguez, Terry Tempest Williams, Dave Zirin
PROOFREADERS
Diana Cook, Jodi Vander Molen
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Ben H. Bagdikian, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martín Espada,
Richard Falk, Colman McCarthy, Robert W. McChesney,
Jane Slaughter, Urvashi Vaid, Roger Wilkins
ART DIRECTOR
Nick Jehlen
ART ASSOCIATE
Phuong Luu
PUBLISHER
Matthew Rothschild
CIRCULATION DIRECTOR
Maribeth Batcha
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Erin Grunze
CONTROLLER
Carolyn Eschmeyer
MEMBERSHIP DIRECTOR
Jodi Vander Molen
ADVERTISING DIRECTOR
Erika Baer
WEB MASTER
Tamara Tsurkan
WEB ADMINISTRATOR
Scot Vee Gamble
PROGRESSIVE MEDIA PROJECT
Matthew Rothschild and Amitabh Pal, Co-editors
Andrea Potter, Development Director
VOLUNTEERS
Judy Adrian, Pat DiBiase, Carol Lobes, Richard Russell,
Rukmini Vasupuram (Intern), Ian Welsh
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Matthew Rothschild, Chairman.
Gina Carter, Ruth Conniff, James Friedman,
Stacey Herzing, Barb Kneer
This issue of The Progressive, Volume 75, Number 10, went to press on September 7.
Editorial correspondence should be addressed to The Progressive, 409 East Main
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will be returned only if accompanied by sufficient postage.
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www.progressive.org
4
◆
October 2011
Libya No Model
W
ith the rebels in control of
Libya, The New York Times was
quick to report that the intervention
“may, in some important ways,
become a model for how the United
States wields force in other countries
where its interests are threatened.”
I should hope not. Because what
the United States and its European
allies did was “international gangsterism,” as Representative Dennis
Kucinich so colorfully put it.
Kucinich was referring to the fact
that President Obama violated the
Constitution and the War Powers Act
by bombing Libya without Congressional approval when Libya didn’t
pose a threat to the United States.
For their part, the allies flagrantly
violated the U.N. Security Council
resolutions on Libya by providing
huge amounts of weapons to the
rebels when those resolutions had
imposed an arms embargo on all parties. What’s more, the CIA trained the
rebel forces and guided their assaults.
And the rationale that Obama
used, late in the game, for not abiding by the War Powers Act was a classic: The Administration said that
because Libya’s air defenses were
wiped out, U.S. pilots were no longer
in harm’s way, so Congress need not
worry about it.
This is the Obama Doctrine: The
President can go bomb any country he
feels like so long as that country doesn’t have air defenses, or the President
can go destroy a country’s air defenses
and continue to wage war against that
country—all without bothering to get
approval from Congress.
This sets a terrible precedent.
Yes, I’m happy that Qaddafi is no
longer in power. Yes, I’m happy that
the people of Libya have the opportunity to taste freedom. But I’m not
convinced that they couldn’t have
arrived at this point by nonviolent
resistance. Nor am I sanguine about
some of the rebels the United States
has been supporting—and what role
they might have in the future.
Above all, though, I fear that the
“Libya model” is but a recipe for
more international gangsterism in the
years ahead.
B
ack in 2007, we sent Wisconsin
state representative Mark Pocan
to the summit meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council,
which goes by the chummy nickname of ALEC. This sleazy corporate outfit drafts bills for conservative
state legislators. With ALEC becoming more prominent, we decided to
send Pocan back into this house of ill
repute, as you’ll see in our cover story.
I
n the five years that Luis Rodríguez
has been writing for The Progressive, I can think of no essay that he
has written that is more urgent than
the one he offers us this month. It’s
about rethinking and discarding the
policy of sentencing people to life in
prison without the possibility of
parole. If you’re like me, you’ve sometimes argued that such a sentence is a
welcome alternative to the death
penalty. But you also might have had,
as I’ve had, a nagging doubt that
maybe it’s not such a decent alternative after all. Rodríguez tugs at that
doubt and turns it into a conviction.
W
hen Texas Governor Rick
Perry catapulted himself into
the race for the Republican nomination, we immediately turned to Jim
Hightower to give us the inside
skivvy. There once was another guy
out of Texas who strutted around and
was boastfully anti-intellectual. Back
then, Hightower, Molly Ivins, and
Lou DuBose tried to warn the American public about him, too. Maybe
the country ought to take a little
more note this time around. ◆
No Comment 10.2011_No Comment 12.2005 9/8/11 12:40 AM Page 5
No Comment
Friend or Foe?
A Wikileaks cable reveals that Senators Susan Collins,
Joe Lieberman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham
met with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi in August 2009.
McCain, one of the most hawkish Senators on the
Libya war this year, promised to provide arms to
Qaddafi during that visit two years ago.
D.C. Deserved Bigger
Quake
After the earthquake that struck the East
Coast on August 23, Joseph Farah, the editor of WorldNetDaily, wrote: “Washington, D.C., deserves more than the wallop
it got today. It needs a much bigger shaking up than it got.”
KBR Stands for Vindictive
The military contractor KBR, not content to win its
case against the woman who said she was raped while
working for the company in Iraq, is now suing her for
$2 million in court fees.
Hypocrite of the Month
An anti-gay state representative in Indiana, Phillip
Hinkle, allegedly arranged to pay an eighteen-yearold male up to $140 “for a really good time” at an
Indianapolis hotel and, according to The Indianapolis
Star, allegedly exposed himself to the man. “I’m not
gay,” says Hinkle, who has decided not to run for
reelection.
More Wisdom from Ted Nugent
Rightwing rocker Ted Nugent, writing in The Washington Times: “I’m wango-tango giddy for an Obamaversus-Perry Presidential political brawl. . . . That
would be a true left-versus-right political rumpus.”
He also wrote: “I refuse to spend time with whiners,
stinky hippies, and others who sadly are terminally
addicted to the curse of Fedzilla dependency.”
From a Jail in Uganda to a Straw
Poll in Iowa
“The evangelical organizer who helped Michele
Bachmann win the Ames straw poll in Iowa Saturday
was previously charged with terrorism in Uganda
after being arrested for possession of assault rifles and
ammunition in February 2006, just days before
Uganda’s first multiparty elections in twenty years,”
reports The Atlantic. Republican operative Peter E.
Waldron says that he was falsely accused and that he
was tortured during his thirty-seven days behind bars.
Readers are invited to submit No Comment items. Please
send original clippings or photocopies and give name and
date of publication. Submissions cannot be acknowledged or returned.
Back to the Past
Business analyst Gary B. Smith went on Fox News’s
Bulls and Bears on Labor Day weekend to say that we
need “to ditch the minimum wage.” He called it
“nothing more than a form of price control.” It’s
“irresponsible” not to repeal it in this economy, he
added.
Kellogg’s Says It Owns the
Toucan
The Maya Archaeology Initiative, based in San Ramon,
California, uses an image
of a toucan in its logo. So
does Kellogg’s on its Froot
Loops cereal box. Now the
company is demanding that the Maya
Archaeology Initiative remove its toucan image because “it could be confused with Kellogg’s trademarked” one,
according to the Los Angeles Times.
Sensitivity Award
The Republican Party of Pima, Arizona, advertised a
raffle for a new Glock, even though Congresswoman
Gabrielle Giffords was shot allegedly by Jared Lee
Loughner using a Glock, and even though six other
people were killed in that attack. “For just $10, this
gun could be yours,” the notice said.
“Tickets will go quickly for this
firearm!”
Just Like Having Sex
Texas has now legalized barehanded
catfishing. “The thrill of catching a
catfish with your bare hands only
rivals having sex for the first time,”
filmmaker Bradley Beesley told The
Texas Tribune.
STUART GOLDENBERG
The Progressive
◆
5
Letter 10.2011_Letter 12.2005 9/8/11 12:44 AM Page 6
Letters to the Editor
Obama and Black America
I think Kevin Alexander Gray is
expecting a little bit too much
(“Obama and Black America,”
August issue). If I remember correctly, it requires a billion dollars for a
Presidential candidate to get elected.
However, he is right when he
wrote, “It is clear whom Obama is
actually beholden to: Wall Street, corporations, the dirty energy industries,
the Pentagon, and the power elite.”
Then, he charged that his foreign policy is not that much different from
Bush’s: “He continues to keep troops
in Iraq. He’s escalated the war in
Afghanistan. He’s fighting clandestine
wars in Pakistan and Yemen. And he
sent U.S. bombers to pummel Libya.”
This may be why Cornel West
from Princeton rightly called Obama
“a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” Then, he added,
“And now he has become head of the
American killing machine and is
proud of it.”
The money power and the military-industrial complex control the
United States. So, in order to stay in
power, Obama has to become a mascot and a killing machine. That leaves
him little room to do anything to
improve the lives of African Americans. Thus, his “seemingly callous
indifference to African Americans
across the board.”
Richard Low
via e-mail
Kevin Alexander Gray’s lucid commentary on Barack Obama summed
it up. The question of ending the
empire vs. running the empire was
especially salient. Obama is running
the empire, and he follows in the tradition of previous American Presidents. Ethnicity and a Democratic
Party label do not change the facts.
Gray raises the issue of no viable
third party candidate on the horizon.
Third party and independent candi6
◆
October 2011
dates face a number of obstacles. I
suggest that we advocate for instant
runoff voting in general elections, so
as to do away with the “spoiler effect.”
This would clear one major hurdle.
Instant runoff voting is critical.
Until we overcome the “lesser of two
evils” mentality, the Nancy Jefferson
quote Gray shared regarding illusions
sending you to hell will persist, as will
the dismal political reality. It is time
to stop channeling energies into bad
causes. Such is the ultimate in powerlessness.
Bernard Dalsey
Whitewater, Wisconsin
A Parade of Wars
In the Comment “Three More Years
of War” (August issue), Matthew
Rothschild writes that he suspects
Obama will find a reason to maintain
a military presence in Afghanistan
after 2014. He also mentions that we
have a military presence in 150 countries.
You know what I fear? With the
parade of wars—beginning with the
Korean War, the Cold War, then the
War in Vietnam, the initial war in
Afghanistan, the most stupid of all
wars in Iraq, and now the intensifying war in Afghanistan—anyone who
becomes President of our country
will become hopelessly addicted to
his role as commander in chief.
Ed Daub
Madison, Wisconsin
Agreeing with Hedges
I was angry with friends who voted
for Ralph Nader, robbing the
Democrats of needed votes. But the
Obama Administration has me now
agreeing with Chris Hedges (Interview, August issue) that “it’s time to
turn your back on the Democrats.”
Margot Peters
Lake Mills, Wisconsin
After watching the debt-ceiling debacle unfold, can there still be readers of
The Progressive who doubt the need
for a progressive, third party in the
United States? I know that without
the New Democratic Party in Canada, we would also be dealing with
two parties on the right wing of the
political spectrum flogging the same
anti-working class agenda.
Errol Black
Brandon, Manitoba
Canada
Confronting Bias on the Job
Susan Eisenberg’s article, “Caution:
Women at Work” (September issue),
makes you think about the injustice
of bias in the workforce. The key
word is force. Too many times the
attitudes and actions in the workplace become forced or coerced by
peer pressure. Her article brings out
the frustrations and inequities that
exist due to longstanding attitudes
and bias that have largely been
ignored in the workplace. Lip service
will not change the situation.
Enforcement across the board—from
everyday workers and supervisors all
the way up to the Department of
Labor—will get it done. Thanks
again for the article. It was well written.
Brad Smith
via e-mail
Bullies Pick on Special Ed
As a decades-long advocate for special-ed rights, I was delighted to see
Ruth Conniff ’s exposé (“The GOP
Attack on Special Ed,” September
issue) on the right’s continuous
assault on these hard-fought rights.
Her article calls attention to the need
for vigilance.
But she committed an often-made
error, I believe unintentional, that
there are two distinct sets of parents:
special-ed versus non-disabled. In
reality, most special-ed parents are
also parents of non-disabled children,
too. What they want is the best possible educational outcomes for each
Letter 10.2011_Letter 12.2005 9/8/11 12:44 AM Page 7
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of their children. They want to know
that the “free, appropriate, public
education” promised by federal law is
met for each child.
By the way, the word “free” has
always been problematic. It has a welfare kind of ring when, in fact, parents
of previous and current generations
have paid for this education through
taxes. Congress has failed to ever allo-
cate its share of the excess costs that
local districts may need above the
average cost of a non-special-ed student. That is an issue that advocates
have made little headway on. Sadly,
the economy right now works against
the voiceless. And bullies like to pick
on the weak and voiceless.
Dr. Joseph Panza
Via e-mail
This month on progressive.org
■
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Progressive Radio: Interviews with John Nichols on his book about socialism and Tom Hayden on the
’60s and today.
Video: Watch Matt Rothschild’s daily 90-second commentaries, Monday through Friday.
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◆
7
Comment 10.2011_Comment 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:37 AM Page 8
Comment
Demand the Impossible
T
he brazenness of the ruling class is a sight to
behold. The people who run this country—
the Wall Street tycoons and the CEOs of
America’s largest corporations—are not content with
the extraordinary amount of lucre they’ve grabbed
already. They’re insatiable. And they don’t give a
damn about anyone else.
Their Republican servants in Congress, and their
contract employees among the Democrats, have so
rigged the legislative process that the vast majority of
the American people can’t get what they desperately
want and need. And the plight of the sixteen million
Americans without work right now does not get the
attention it deserves—or the remedy. Instead,
Congress protects the prerogatives of those at the top.
Meanwhile, President Obama readies the public
for cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare.
In the midst of an agonizing economy, Republicans in Congress slammed the door on any serious
proposal to generate jobs. They concocted the debtceiling crisis, and then used it as a way to extort massive cuts to social programs, which will only make the
unemployment picture more dire. And even after
Hurricane Irene took its toll on the East Coast, they
were in no mood to approve government spending
for devastated areas like Vermont.
Through it all, they made sure that no rich person
or corporation would have to pay a dime more in
taxes. Their priorities could not be
clearer. In the August debate of the
The U.S. business Republican Presidential candidates,
class is “highly
they all said that even a budget deal that
class conscious,”
included ten dollars in cuts for every
and its members
dollar in tax increases would not be
“have long seen
acceptable. They’ve made the moneythemselves as
grab by the rich a matter of the highest
fighting a bitter
principle.
class war, except
And what a money-grab it’s been.
they don’t want
“After remaining relatively constant
anybody else to
for much of the postwar era, the share
know about it.”
of total income accrued by the wealthi—Noam Chomsky est 10 percent of households jumped
8
◆
October 2011
from 34.6 percent in 1980 to 48.2 percent in 2008,”
according to a report last year by the Joint Economic
Committee of Congress. “Much of the spike was
driven by the share of total income accrued by the
richest 1 percent of households. Between 1980 and
2008, their share rose from 10.0 percent to 21.0 percent, making the United States one of the most
unequal countries in the world.”
It’s even worse when you look at wealth, not
income, as the top 1 percent now accounts for 40
percent of the nation’s wealth, up from 33 percent in
the 1980s.
“All the growth in recent decades—and more—has
gone to those at the top,” Nobel Prize-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in Vanity Fair earlier
this year in an article entitled “Of the 1 percent, By
the 1 percent, For the 1 percent.” He went on to
explain how this growth in inequality leads directly to
an unwillingness by the powerful to address common
needs.
“The rich don’t need to rely on government for
parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves,” he
noted. “In the process, they become more distant
from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they
may once have had. They also worry about strong
government: one that could use its powers to adjust
the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it
for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked
to redistribute, too divided to do anything but lower
taxes.”
And when government wasn’t too gridlocked or
too divided, that is, when President Obama had both
houses of Congress and enormous popularity in the
first months of his term, he failed to come forward
with a sufficient jobs program and he backed off his
effort to make the rich pay a little more in taxes.
Not only do the rich not have empathy for those
below them, many U.S. multinationals no longer rely
on U.S. consumers for the bulk of their profits. They
Comment 10.2011_Comment 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:37 AM Page 9
can find buyers now all over the world, especially in
booming markets like India and China. They don’t
need us anymore.
We’re peons now.
W
hat to do? An old slogan of the surrealists
applies here: “Be Realistic: Demand the
Impossible.” It was a slogan that the
French students adopted in their uprising in 1968.
We should adopt it again today.
Instead of going along with the neoliberal acquiescence that so typifies the Obama Administration, we
should put forward robust demands that will lead us
toward the kind of society we want to build and
inhabit.
Instead of letting Obama and the Republicans
raise the retirement age for Social Security, we should
demand lowering the retirement age to fifty-five.
Instead of going along with crimping Social Security benefits, we should raise them, as the labor writer Thomas Geoghegan recommends, from their current level of, on average, 39 percent of pre-retirement
earnings to 50 percent.
Instead of defending the minimum wage of $7.25,
we should insist on a living wage of at least $10 an
hour and then peg that to the inflation rate, as Ralph
Nader has proposed.
Instead of allowing the unemployment rate to
hover around 9 percent, we should demand that the
government directly employ people until everyone
who wants a job can get one.
Instead of working longer and longer hours,
including forced overtime, we should insist on a
shorter workweek of thirty hours.
Instead of being coerced back into the workplace
shortly after we have a kid, we should demand oneyear paid family leave, as they have in Europe.
Instead of letting the rightwing cut back on school
funding so that class sizes, K-12, exceed thirty pupils
in many places, we should limit them to a maximum
of twenty.
Instead of accepting the loan burden for students
going to college, we should demand—as students are
doing in Chile—free quality college education for all.
Instead of allowing a child poverty rate of 21 percent, we should demand that no child live in poverty.
Instead of accepting the role of the private healthinsurance industry, we should demand Medicare for all.
None of this is too much to ask. Nor is an economy freed from fossil and nuclear fuels.
“We can’t afford it,” people will say.
I refuse to believe this. Whenever a President
wants to go wage a war somewhere, he can always
find $3 trillion to do it. Whenever the banks need
bailing out, suddenly trillions more become available.
JOY KOLITSKY
So don’t tell me we can’t afford it.
There are ways to get it done.
Yes, redistribute the wealth. Yes, increase the top
marginal income tax rates. Yes, increase the estate tax.
Yes, increase the capital gains tax so it at least equals
that on earned income. Yes, make corporations pay
their fair share. And yes, cut way back on Pentagon
spending.
If this is the society we want, then this is the society we’re going to have to fight for.
I’m heartened by the fighting spirit I’ve witnessed
all year in Madison, Wisconsin, and seen elsewhere in
Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio, among other
places.
I’m heartened by the massive civil disobedience at
the White House recently over the tar sands pipeline.
And I’m heartened by the plans for more civil disobedience in Washington on October 6 to protest the
tenth anniversary of the Afghanistan War and to
demand, as the organizers say, “that America’s
resources be invested in human needs
and environmental protection instead
“One big part of
of war and exploitation.”
The impossible always seems unre- the reason we have
alistic until people start going for it. It’s so much inequalilike a tennis ball that seems unreach- ty is that the top 1
able until you hustle. Let us start going percent wants it
◆ that way.”
for it now.
—Matthew Rothschild
—Joseph Stiglitz
The Progressive
◆
9
OTL 10.2011_OTL 12.2005 9/8/11 1:01 AM Page 10
On the Line
Flashing a Light on BoA and Peabody
St. Louis
From August 12 to 15 in St. Louis, activists protested against Bank of
America and Peabody Coal. A coalition called Midwest Rising, which consists of some fifty labor, climate, and community groups, organized the
demonstrations. It highlighted Bank of America’s financial support of
Peabody and the coal company’s destructive environmental practices. It
also drew attention to Bank of America’s foreclosures on the homes of lowincome people and urged community members to pull their money out of
the bank and invest it instead in local banks and credit unions.
For more information, go to convergence2011.org.
Washington, D.C.
On July 30, supporters of public education marched from the Ellipse to the
White House to demand equitable funding for all public school communities
and an end to high-stakes testing. The goal, organizers said, was to “reclaim
schools as places of learning, joy, and democracy.” Matt Damon participated,
and public school advocates such as Jonathan Kozol addressed the crowd.
For more information, go to saveourschools.org.
PHOTOS © RICK REINHARD 2011
10
◆
October 2011
SOS for Schools
PHOTOS MIDWEST RISING
OTL 10.2011_OTL 12.2005 9/8/11 1:01 AM Page 11
BRETT BANDITELLI/THE RICK SMITH SHOW
On the Line
Hershey, Pennsylvania
n August 18, more than
100 foreign students
protested their working
conditions at a Hershey’s warehouse. They had come to the
United States under the guise of a
cultural exchange sponsored by
the State Department, but they
ended up working at a Hershey’s
warehouse run by Exel, Inc. A nonprofit, the
Council for Educational Travel, U.S.A., based in
California, hired the students, who say the council deducted so much for rent that they didn’t
have enough money to cover their expenses.
They also say they were forced to work the night
shift, continuously lifting fifty-pound boxes of
candy. The Labor Department is looking into
allegations of wage and hours violations.
Meanwhile, this summer, a coalition of three
labor groups launched a campaign entitled “We
Want More from Our S’mores.” Global RAISE THE BAR HERSHEY CAMPAIGN
Exchange, Green America, and the International Labor Rights Forum are
urging people to make their marshmallow treats with fair-trade chocolate.
They allege that Hershey’s is engaging in child labor and forced labor practices, and they urge it to use fair-trade cocoa.
O
BRETT BANDITELLI/THE RICK SMITH SHOW
Giving
Hershey’s
the Kiss-Off
For more information, go to guestworkeralliance.org and laborrights.org.
RAISE THE BAR HERSHEY CAMPAIGN
The Progressive
◆
11
OTL 10.2011_OTL 12.2005 9/8/11 1:01 AM Page 12
On the Line
High-Spirited Protest
Hits Walmart
Washington, D.C.
On August 5, hundreds of demonstrators
rallied outside Walmart’s lobbying offices in
Washington to demand decent working
conditions in four new stores the company
plans for the District. In an action called by
Jobs With Justice, protesters also insisted
that the company not retaliate against
union organizers and that it sign a community-benefits agreement. Chanting “Sí, se
puede” and “What do we want? Good jobs!
When do we want them? Now,” demonstrators shut down traffic outside the
Walmart office and forced it to close early.
For more information, go to jwj.org.
PHOTOS © RICK REINHARD 2011
Opposing U.S.Colombia Trade Pact
Washington, D.C.
In mid-July, labor and human rights
activists from Colombia and around the
United States went to Washington,
D.C., to denounce the proposed U.S.Colombia free trade agreement, which
President Obama is now pushing as a
jobs program. That agreement, critics
say, does not do enough to safeguard
unionists. More unionists get gunned
down in Colombia than in any other
country in the world. Critics also charge
that the agreement would be to the
advantage of multinational corporations, not workers in either country.
For more information, go to usleap.org.
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/GETTY IMAGESZUMA PRESS/NEWSCOM
12
◆
October 2011
OTL 10.2011_OTL 12.2005 9/8/11 1:01 AM Page 13
On the Line
ANITA SARKEESIAN
Phoenix
Members of the Ruckus Society
hung a banner off a construction crane in Phoenix on July
28 to protest Arizona’s antiimmigrant laws.
For more information, go to
ruckus.org.
Dangling Against Bigotry
© RICK REINHARD 2011
Tar Sands
Rebellion
Washington, D.C.
For two weeks in late August and early
September, protesters
massed in front of the
White House to protest
the proposed pipeline
from Canada’s tar sands
to U.S. refineries on the
Gulf of Mexico. More
than 1,000 people were
arrested, including Bill
McKibben of 350.org
and James Hansen, the
NASA scientist who
was one of the first to
ring the alarm about
global warming.
For more information, go
to 350.org.
MILAN IINYCKYJ
MILAN IINYCKYJ
The Progressive
◆
13
Williams 10.2011_Conniff 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:02 AM Page 14
Open Space Terry Tempest Williams
Ode to My Mentors
E
ach of us has our
mentors, the individuals who showed us
at an early age not only
a different way of seeing the world, but a
different way of being in the world. I
found my mentor at the Teton Science School in Jackson
Hole, Wyoming. His
name was Ted Major. He
was the first Democrat I
had ever met. I was eighteen years old.
Today, Ted is ninetyone years old, and still as
contemporary as anyone
I know. He tends his
fruit trees in Victor,
Idaho, with his wife,
Joan, of more than sixty
years, and four generations of Majors living on
their homestead. I am
still learning from him.
Ted and Joan started a
small summer field
school
in
Wilson,
Wyoming, in 1968 with
the support of friends
that included biologist
Frank Craighead, geologist David Love, and
conservationist Mardy
Murie. It was radical for
its time, evolving into
one of the first environmental education centers in America. I
responded to an ad in the Utah
Audubon newsletter about a weekend
ecology course in the Tetons led by
Florence Krall, a professor in educaTerry Tempest Williams is the author of
“The Open Space of Democracy” and,
most recently, “Finding Beauty in a
Broken World.” She is the recipient of
the 2010 David R. Brower Conservation Award for activism.
14
◆
October 2011
tion at the University of Utah.
I remember driving up to Jackson
Hole and seeing flocks of sandhill
cranes dancing in the fields outside
Cokeville. I was certain this was a
new phenomenon seen for the first
time and immediately called my
ornithology professor at the Universi-
cation, as did Flo. The lodgepole
pines I had seen as red and dying
were now part of the story of fire
ecology, with pine bark beetles entering the cambium layer of the tree,
killing it, and preparing it for fire.
The flames rise with the heat and
split open the cones, dropping seeds
for the lodgepole’s regeneration.
“Serotinus cones,” Ted
said.
Being a young Mormon woman, I heard
“resurrection.”
W
JEFFREY ALAN LOVE
ty of Utah, William H. Behle, from a
phone booth.
“How sweet of you to call,” I
remember him saying graciously after
my euphoria over this discovery.
“Actually, Terry, the cranes have been
doing their mating dance for close to
nine million years.” He paused and
cleared his throat. “But it is no less
thrilling.”
Ted continued my ecological edu-
hat I loved about
Ted was that he
cared more about the
questions and less about
the answers.
After watching a pair
of trumpeter swans at the
OxBow Bend on the
Snake River and learning
they were still on the
endangered list, I asked
Ted how the species had
reinhabited the Greater
Yellowstone region after
almost becoming extinct.
“There were a few breeding pairs on Red Rock
Lakes in the Centennial
Valley in Montana, but
let’s think about this,” he
answered.
Each creature became
a point of inquiry, a form
for dynamic pedagogy in the field.
Whether he knew the answer or not,
he invited us to explore relational
thinking. I couldn’t count the times
Ted said, “I don’t know.” This
inspired me. I found myself participating in a language previously
unknown to me. I didn’t want to
leave. The birds I loved, such as
cranes and swans, were now part of a
larger story, and I was desperate to
Williams 10.2011_Conniff 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:02 AM Page 15
know more. I met my own hunger;
my curiosity was insatiable.
Before I left, Ted asked if I would
take a packet of materials back to a
friend of his at the university. His
name was David Raskin, a professor
of psychology and a leading expert in
polygraphs. He had tested Patty
Hearst, the publishing mogul
William Hearst’s granddaughter, who
was kidnapped and joined the Symbionese Liberation Army in the
1970s.
The next day, I knocked on
Raskin’s door. A short, black-bearded, very intense man opened the
door, someone who didn’t want to be
bothered. I quickly introduced
myself and told him I had just
returned from the Teton Science
School, and that Ted Major had
asked me to deliver this.
“How was it?” he asked.
I burst into tears.
“That bad?”
“No, that good,” I managed to say.
“Please come in.”
A friendly errand turned into an
hour-long conversation or perhaps,
more to the point, a therapy session.
No lie-detector test was needed. By
the end of the hour, Raskin sat back
in his chair with his hands clasped
behind his head.
“It just so happens there is a scholarship in environmental studies in
our department, and it just so happens that the deadline is today,” he
said. “And it just so happens no one
has applied.”
In the next fifteen minutes, I
applied and was accepted, and we
designed a summer project for me to
conduct through the Teton Science
School. I would study tourist behavior in Grand Teton National Park.
The scholarship was for $500.
With a quick phone call from Raskin,
Grand Teton National Park agreed to
pay me $3 a day and I went back to
the Science School as their first official intern. I was also asked to conduct Saturday morning bird walks as
a naturalist. My parents were both
happy and worried for me.
“You said Major is a Democrat?”
my father asked one more time. My
entire family drove me up to the Science School, where I would be living
for the summer. Ted and my father
got along well. They both liked to
argue. My mother was charming,
softening the edges of both, and
Joan missed nothing. Hands were
shaken. My family left, and I walked
to my own cabin to unpack my
Levis, hiking boots, a few cowboy
shirts, and books.
T
oward the end of the summer,
Ted and Joan and the students
enrolled in the high school field
I still think about the
man who skinned the
coyote and the man who
cut it off the beam, both
using the same weapon.
course went on a seven-day backpacking trip in the Wind River range.
I was invited to join them. High in
the Titcomb Basin, Wyoming’s highest peak was in view: Gannett. We
watched a coyote run up the snow
field very near to its summit, stop, sit
and look out at the view. In that
moment, any boundaries I felt as a
human being toward other creatures
dissolved.
When we returned home, a
skinned coyote was hanging by its
neck from the crossbars of the ranch
as we entered the school. Ted was
driving the bus.
He stopped, got out, cut the rope
with the buck knife always on his
belt. The coyote was released into his
arms. We all got out of the bus and
circled around him.
“This used to be the Elbo Ranch,”
he said. “Some of the old-timers don’t
like what we’re doing.”
I wrote my grandmother a letter
about this encounter. She wrote me
back, enclosing an article by René
Dubos titled “Mankind Does
Become Better.” She underlined this
passage: “Stability, comfort, and even
high refinements are not enough to
nourish human nature; the body survives but the spirit loses its vitality
unless stimulated by new models created by imagination. Working out
solutions for problems which have no
transcendental
meaning
soon
becomes boring. To keep really alive,
men must raise their sights to some
high purpose, best perhaps to one
divorced from the satisfactions of animal appetites. Human life, like all
other forms of life, is not concerned
only with perpetuating itself and satisfying itself. It must surpass itself;
otherwise, it becomes just a waiting
for death.”
My grandmother wrote, “We
evolve as human beings through our
imagination and will. However hard
it must have been for you to see this
act of cruelty, view it as an insight
into those who wielded the knife.”
Ted Major mentored me. Coyotes
continue to mentor me. I still think
about the man who skinned the coyote and the man who cut it off the
beam, both using the same weapon,
both equally powerful gestures. If
one can mark a moment, this was
mine. I became part of “the Coyote
Clan.” I made a vow to the coyote
who climbed Gannett Peak and the
coyote who was murdered and martyred that I would not remain silent.
◆
I would speak.
The Progressive
◆
15
Conniff 10.2011_Conniff 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:52 AM Page 16
Political Eye Ruth Conniff
Jan Schakowsky, Fighter
A
nother day in the
life of a conservative pundit in Washington, D.C.: Leaving the
air-conditioned confines of your think
tank, you push through a crowd of
day laborers looking for work on the
corner outside the TV studio, chat
with the makeup artist who, while
putting on your lipstick, mentions
she can’t afford health insurance and
owes tens of thousands of
dollars for a recent emergency surgery. Finally, you
go on the air and argue that
we must wean Americans
from the “nanny state.”
“Only a liberal would
argue that the government
should pay for people’s
health care and retirement,”
one such pundit told me
pointedly. Sticking to the
script, she added that we
must cut taxes on high
earners (now at their lowest
rate in eighty years) and
took a jab at teachers’
unions, arguing that private
school vouchers should
replace the public schools.
Perhaps people have
grown numb to these arguments in Washington,
where white privilege regularly brushes past black
and brown poverty, the
crumbling infrastructure is notorious, and the stark separation of our
society into the haves and have-nots
has been visible for some time.
But visiting D.C. from Wisconsin,
I’m stunned by how Republicans can
keep selling trickle-down economics
and privatizing public services, even
as the jobs picture darkens, the stock
Ruth Conniff is the political editor of
The Progressive.
16
◆
October 2011
market does the loop-de-loop, the
middle class shrinks, and the United
States looks more like the Third
World every day.
It’s pretty clear by now where we
are going.
Not that Wisconsin is blameless.
In fact, the Dairy State is directly
responsible for emboldening the
right. Representative Paul Ryan,
Republican of Wisconsin, made it
safe to talk about balancing the bud-
CAITLIN KUHWALD
get by cutting Social Security and
Medicare while keeping taxes very,
very low for the rich and corporations (the “job creators”).
Add to that Wisconsin Governor
Scott Walker’s pitch to non-union,
private sector workers (like that
makeup artist) that if they don’t have
benefits, teachers and public sector
workers shouldn’t have them, either.
Now we have a race to the bottom
that won’t end until the country has
no safety net, no public sphere, and
no more middle class—just the
super-rich and the desperately poor.
I
n times like these, it’s a relief to hear
outspoken progressive Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of
Illinois, defend an alternative vision.
Schakowsky has been in Congress
since 1998, where she distinguished
herself for her opposition to President Bush’s misguided policies,
including the grossly
inequitable tax structure
and his invasion of Iraq.
More recently, she
crossed the border from
Illinois to Wisconsin to
help the recall campaigns
against Republican state
senators who sided with
Walker, and to defend state
Democrats who faced
Republican-led recalls.
I caught up with her in
Kenosha, where she came to
the local union hall to
pump up volunteers for Bob
Wirch, one of the
Democrats who fled to Illinois to slow down Walker’s
effort to take away bargaining rights from public sector
unions. Paul Ryan was in
town, too—at a nearby
country club, raising money
for Wirch’s opponent. A few
days later, Wirch won his
seat back, and the Democrats gained
two more seats in the state Senate—
incremental progress in the fight-back
over the rightwing takeover of our
once-progressive state.
“I was so inspired to see ordinary,
working people pushing back,”
Schakowsky said, by way of explaining all the time she had been spending in Wisconsin lately. “I see a lot of
despair,” she added. At the foreclosure workshops she co-sponsors for
Conniff 10.2011_Conniff 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:52 AM Page 17
Which Phone Company Gave the Most
To Wisconsin Governor
SCOTT WALKER
Answer: AT&T
AT&T Gave $22,000
to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker¹
Conniff 10.2011_Conniff 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:52 AM Page 18
her constituents, she said, “People
feel the American Dream slipping
through their fingers.”
“The American people are beginning to understand that they’re being
sold snake oil,” said Schakowsky.
“They don’t support the direction that
Paul Ryan wants to take the country.”
She took aim at Ryan’s plan to
trash Medicare.
“He can call it sortacare or maybecare or I-don’t-care, but it’s not Medicare,” she said. “The guarantee of
Medicare is gone for seniors and the
disabled and they are thrown on the
not so tender mercies of the insurance
companies. That’s who the Republicans are representing—corporations,
the wealthiest Americans, Wall Street,
the insurance companies—those are
their constituents. Ours are the disappearing middle class.”
Rummaging in her purse,
Schakowsky pulled out a chart she
said she carries everywhere. Holding
it up, she pointed to a bar graph of
increasing income for different
brackets since 1970. The line for the
top 1 percent of earners ran off the
top of the page, while low and moderate earners’ wages were stagnant.
The decline of private sector
unions has everything to do with that
inequity, she pointed out to a crowd
of nodding heads—mostly retirees in
union T-shirts—at the union hall.
“That’s why they’re going after
public sector unions now. And I thank
you, Wisconsin, for putting a face on
union workers,” Schakowsky said.
S
chakowsky herself taught in the
public schools and has a degree in
elementary education. Recently, she
introduced a jobs bill that takes an
opposite approach from Ryan’s corporate tax breaks for so-called job creators.
“It’s based on a simple idea: if we
want to create jobs, let’s create them,”
she said. The plan aims to create about
2.2 million jobs through programs
like a School Improvement Corps for
construction and maintenance jobs, a
Parks Improvement Corps for sixteento twenty-five-year-olds, and a Neighborhood Heroes Corps for teachers,
police, and firefighters.
“It’s not the whole solution,” she
says, “but it’s a significant and important start. And it’s saying we’re not
helpless. There are answers. If it’s about
jobs, let’s go directly at it. What businesses need now are customers, not tax
breaks. Let’s put money in people’s
pockets by putting them to work.”
As for the Ryan/Walker claim that
cutting taxes on the very rich is the
path to job creation—Schakowsky
has heard it all before.
“The very idea of calling the rich
and corporations ‘job creators’ is
ridiculous,” she says. “During the
Bush Administration, there were
exactly zero jobs created in the private sector during the time that we
had historic tax cuts for the rich.
There’s not a shred of evidence supporting the idea that the Paul Ryan,
trickle-down approach works.”
Even when she served on the business-friendly National Commission
on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,
chaired by Alan Simpson and Erskine
Bowles, she points out, there was a
consensus that “we should not cut
until we are out of a recession.”
“Asking senior citizens to contribute to debt reduction is not only
immoral, it makes no economic
sense,” says Schakowsky.
Winding up a passionate speech,
she told her audience in Kenosha,
“This is my fight, too. This is America’s fight. This is the American middle class we’re fighting for. This is for
seniors. This is for families.”
In fact, the fight is for everyone
who lives in the real world. Everyone,
that is, but a tiny elite and the corporate-financed shills, who are paid to
ignore the effects of their theories on
◆
the people around them.
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Pocan 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:06 AM Page 19
By Mark Pocan
Illustration by Red Nose Studio
Inside the ALEC
Dating Service
How corporations hook up
with your state legislators
I
REALLY THOUGHT IT WOULD
take more than five minutes in New
Orleans before I realized the conservative movement had landed there.
But it didn’t.
As I was waiting for my bags at the airport, I heard
a mid-thirties woman talking on the phone. “Yeah,
I’m down in New Orleans for the American Legislative Exchange Council meeting. We write legislation,
and they pass our ideas. It’s the free market.”
I could have taken the next flight home, as that
pretty much summed up what I would experience
over the next three days at the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC) annual convention.
On ALEC’s website, the organization states its
mission is “to advance the Jeffersonian principles of
free markets, limited government, federalism, and
individual liberty, through a nonpartisan public-private partnership.”
In reality, ALEC is a corporate-funded and -domMark Pocan is a Democratic member of the Wisconsin
State Assembly. This report was produced as part of a collaborative investigative effort to expose the influence of
corporate money on the political process by members of
The Media Consortium, in partnership with the We the
People Campaign. To read more stories from this series,
visit www.themediaconsortium.org.
The Progressive
◆
19
Pocan 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:06 AM Page 20
inated group that operates much like
a dating service, only between legislators and special interests. It matches
them up, builds relationships, culminates with the birth of special interest
legislation, and ends happily ever
after. That’s happy for the special corporate interests, that is. Call it corporatematch.com.
Corporations and conservative
interests are in charge; after all, they
fund the organization. They call the
shots. They write the legislation. They
vote on the legislation. And they give
advice on how to pass their bills.
At a workshop I attended, one
Texas legislator, who moderated the
forum, went as far as to say that we are
a big football team. The legislators are
the football players and the corporate
lobbyists and special interest group
presenters are “our” coaches.
Half of the organization is made
up of legislators, mostly conservative
Republicans. There is a smattering of
conservative Democrats, a handful of
people of color, and, well, me. The
other half is comprised of corporate
special interests. They pay big bucks
to put their logos, lobbyists, and legislation in front of the objects of their
affection: state legislators.
Legislators can join for $100. For
corporations or other organizations,
make that thousands of dollars to join.
I’ve followed ALEC for a while,
including crashing its winter meeting
three and a half years ago. I wrote a
piece for The Progressive at the time.
But with all the renewed attention on
conservative legislation passing in
states recently—especially in Wisconsin—this seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up.
T
his year, about 2,000 people
showed up—40-50 percent
legislators, 50-60 percent corporate and rightwing interests.
The convention consisted of big
name speakers—Louisiana Governor
Bobby Jindal, former Congressman
and tea party impresario Dick Armey,
economist Art Laffer—as well as
workshops and task force meetings.
20
◆
October 2011
The convention booklet was a “who’s
who” of corporate partners: British
Petroleum, Walmart, the Walton
Family Foundation, Chevron,
ExxonMobil, PhRMA, Bayer, VISA,
Shell, Koch Industries, Inc., and
State Farm Insurance, for starters.
And there were dozens more.
Each workshop generally focuses
on a single topic, with corporate presenters promoting their positions on
issues, along with model legislation.
The task force meetings are where
they actually create model legislation.
Every task force (such as Tax and Fiscal Policy or Health and Human Ser-
Corporations write the
legislation. They vote on
the legislation. And they
give advice on how to pass
their bills.
vices) is made up of two equal parts.
Half is the public sector part (state
legislators), and half is the private
sector part (corporations). In order
for model legislation to move forward, each task force must garner a
majority of votes from each half. For
example, if the legislator half likes an
idea, but the corporate half doesn’t,
the bill does not move forward. I saw
that happen.
The corporate-sponsored workshops dealt with a variety of topics,
from education to environmental
regulations to Medicaid and more.
Just like the last time I was there,
the standard “no-tax” message was a
constant theme, as was the “free market” promotion.
But it seemed this convention
focused much more on specific
advice and legislation to give every
tool possible to conservative legisla-
tors on how to bring about change in
their states.
Take, for example, education.
Although ALEC offered a couple of
different workshops on K-12 education, they were very similar in content and focus.
Florida, Indiana, and New Jersey
seem to be model states when it
comes to conservative policies in education. Each was discussed, with similar themes in what was accomplished
and how it was accomplished. ALEC
repeatedly warned against introducing single pieces of legislation, as
opposition can mount to kill your
bill. Instead, it advised, follow the
lead of states like Florida, where legislators introduced a fourteen-point
plan, diverting opposition from
focusing on any one piece.
On Medicaid, the corporate presenters were focused on convincing
legislators to provide vouchers and
block grants to avoid government-run
health care. They were also insistent
that states should provide the minimum possible for the federally mandated health insurance exchanges.
The tea party types went a bit ballistic that anyone would suggest following the federal mandate, instead
saying they should hold off to see if
the courts throw out the requirement
or some other act comes along to end
the mandate. This was a serious fight
between the more practical corporate
types looking to keep some market
share and the fervent tea partiers. One
legislator referred to the national
health care plan as “Obamacareless.”
At a meeting on tax policy, speakers presented warmed over Taxpayer
Bill of Rights legislation with a new
name and description, because they
are having problems getting the old
version passed in blue states. They
admitted the name change was simply an attempt to get it passed. Watch
for bills with names that include
“Pension Protection Act.”
One of the most interesting workshops was on the benefit of increased
levels of CO2. The “scientist,” Sherwood Idso, referred to those worried
Pocan 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:06 AM Page 21
about global warming as “climate
alarmists.” After all, Idso co-authored
a book about fifty-five reasons why
increased CO2 is good for you. That’s
right: Good for you.
The “evidence” provided ranged
from the benefits to earthworms to
pictures of forests that have more
vegetation over the last 100 years due
to increased CO2. My favorite argument of all was human longevity.
Since there are increased amounts of
CO2 in the last 100 years, and
human longevity has increased over
the last 100 years, therefore increased
CO2 is good for increased longevity.
Yes, Idso said he was a scientist.
But the most shocking statement
Idso made was that if there was a
three-inch sea level change, “you
should just step back or you deserve
to drown.” Honestly, I couldn’t make
this stuff up.
W
ikipedia defines a “secret
society” as “a club or organization whose activities
and inner functioning are concealed
from non-members. The society may
or may not attempt to conceal its
existence. The term usually excludes
covert groups, such as intelligence
agencies or guerrilla insurgencies,
which hide their activities and memberships but maintain a public presence. . . . and might involve the
retention and transmission of secret
knowledge, denial of membership in
or knowledge of the group, the creation of personal bonds between
members of the organization, and the
use of secret rites or rituals which
solidify members of the group.”
After spending three days at the
ALEC annual convention, I found
this definition extremely apt.
Its membership lists are kept
secret. We don’t know who is a member, legislative or corporate. We don’t
know how much money the organization gets from these corporations.
The public is kept in the dark about
who ALEC really is.
The level of paranoia at the convention by ALEC staff members was
intense. They had added security to
keep outsiders away. People who tried
to register for the convention from
groups like the Center for Media and
Democracy were kicked out. When
two people from the Center for
American Progress were ejected,
ALEC staffers even had altercations
with them.
No video cameras were allowed.
Staff members nervously paced the
hallways at all levels looking for suspicious characters. When you went to
one of the task force meetings where
the corporate model legislation was
actually approved, only task force
members could even get a copy of
what was presented.
At night, there were more secretive
events and parties not listed on the
agenda, all sponsored by corporations
and conservative special interests. But
unless you were “invited” (supposedly an ALEC membership would suffice), you wouldn’t even know about
them. I received only one such invite
that must have mistakenly got to me,
because when I showed up, I was
kicked out by an ALEC staff member.
As I entered the apparently “invitation only” party, servers walked
around the room with cigars on silver
platters. I took a cigar and walked
into the room, only to run into a legislator from Wisconsin. Within a
minute, a staff person from ALEC
came up to ask me if I had an invite.
Even after I said I did, he asked if I
showed it at the door. Clearly, he
somehow knew I wasn’t supposed to
be invited to this exclusive “only certain” members party. Interestingly,
the party was actually a corporate
event. The fact that ALEC staff
worked it only showed the interweaving of corporate control and the organization.
I doubt I’ll be going back to
another ALEC convention any time
soon. But if you are a single, somewhat unattractive corporation
(maybe you have a chemical dumping problem or something) and you
need a little love only a state legisla-
ture can give, ALEC is for you. It will
match you up with eligible “free market” legislators who’ve been waiting
all their lives for a corporation just as
special as you are.
Of course, this will cost you a few
bucks, but ah, the happiness.
You’ll share a drink or two at a
reception (Note: Only corporations
are allowed to pay on this first date).
And eventually, that romance will
blossom into something real.
Like special interest legislation.
All brought to you by the corpora◆
tions that fund ALEC.
The Progressive
◆
21
Neilsen 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:41 AM Page 22
By Kirk Nielsen
Illustration by Sako Shahinian
Chiquita in
the Dock
A
t 1 a.m. on May 17, 2001, approximately fifty
heavily armed paramilitaries, some wearing
AUC uniforms, surrounded Pablo Perez 1’s
home, broke down the door, and proceeded to savagely
beat members of his family. The paramilitaries attempted to rape Juana Perez 1 but were ordered to stop by an
unidentified paramilitary leader. After an hour had
passed, the paramilitaries took Pablo Perez 1 prisoner,
taking him away with at least ten other victims they
had captured that night elsewhere. Pablo Perez 1 was
never found.
The above account appears in a lawsuit filed by
attorneys representing approximately 4,000 people
whose family members were killed by the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). But the lawsuit isn’t
against that brutal paramilitary group, which worked
closely with Colombia’s military. It’s against Chiquita
Brands International for allegedly colluding with the
paramilitary group to suppress labor unrest from
1997 to 2004.
“Pablo Perez 1” and “Juana Perez 1” are
pseudonyms. There are hundreds of other Pablo
Perezes and Juana Perezes.
Here’s what happened to Pablo Perez 50, according
to the lawsuit:
In the early morning hours of November 1, 1997, a
Kirk Nielsen is a journalist and writer based in Miami
Beach.
22
◆
October 2011
Neilsen 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:41 AM Page 23
group of heavily armed paramilitaries
dressed in camouflaged uniforms
stormed Pablo Perez’s home in the village of Guacamayal, in the banana
zone of Magdalena, while he was sleeping. The paramilitaries broke down the
door to the home, found and seized
him, tied him up, and forced him to
accompany them at gunpoint, beating
him as they kidnapped him. His corpse
was found the following morning with
signs of torture and two gunshots, one to
the head and one to the body.
The lawsuit, In Re: Chiquita
Brands International, Inc., Alien Tort
Statute and Shareholders Derivative
Litigation, alleges that the banana
corporation has “secondary liability”
for the paramilitary group’s involvement in these, and many other, acts.
The Alien Tort Statute dates to
1789 and allows foreigners to file suit
in U.S. courts for violations of “the
law of nations.” The plaintiffs are also
relying on the Torture Victim Protection Act, which President George H.
W. Bush signed in 1992.
On June 3 of this year, Judge Kenneth Marra, of the district court in
West Palm Beach, Florida, ruled on
the company’s motion to dismiss all
charges. The judge dismissed some of
the claims against Chiquita but
allowed the plaintiffs to go forward
against the company for its alleged
involvement in “torture, extrajudicial
killing, war crimes, and crimes
against humanity.”
Chiquita disputes all the allegations, calling them “outrageous”
and “false” and “meritless.” Chiquita spokesman Ed Loyd said in a statement. “To be clear, there is no allegation that Chiquita itself committed
any of the crimes perpetrated by the
Colombian terrorist groups,” he
added. “The only allegation is that
Chiquita should be held responsible
for these crimes by virtue of the
money that it was forced to pay.”
Actually, the plaintiffs are alleging
that Chiquita did much more than
simply pay the paramilitary group.
According to the complaint, in
2001 a ship left Nicaragua carrying
3,000 AK-47 assault rifles and five
million rounds of ammunition, and
instead of docking in its official destination, Panama, dropped off the
weaponry at a port facility run by
Chiquita’s wholly owned subsidiary
Banadex, in Turbo, Colombia. Port
employees stored the guns and ammo
for two days, then loaded them onto
AUC vehicles. In an interview with
Colombia’s newspaper, El Tiempo,
“When individual banana
workers became ‘security
problems,’ Chiquita notified
the AUC, which responded
to the company’s
instructions by executing
the individual,” according
to the lawsuit.
AUC founder Carlos Castaño called
the procurement “the greatest
achievement by the AUC so far,” and
claimed there had actually been five
shipments totaling 13,000 rifles.
The complaint also alleges that the
payments by Chiquita were not made
under duress but were intended to
serve the company’s financial purposes: “Castaño informed Chiquita’s
executives that the AUC would use
money it received from Chiquita to
finance paramilitary terrorism tactics
that would be used to drive the leftist
guerrillas out of the Santa Marta and
Uraba banana-growing regions; protect the company, its executives,
employees, and infrastructure from
future attacks by leftist guerrillas; and
create a business and work environment that would enable Chiquita’s
Colombian banana-growing operations to thrive.”
The cooperation was close and
lethal, the lawsuit alleges.
“Chiquita also used the AUC to
resolve complaints and problems
with banana workers and labor
unions,” the suit says. “Among other
things, when individual banana
workers became ‘security problems,’
Chiquita notified the AUC, which
responded to the company’s instructions by executing the individual.
According to AUC leaders, a large
number of people were executed on
Chiquita’s instructions in the Santa
Marta region.”
Chiquita had been operating in
Colombia since the early 1960s
through Banadex. “In 2003, Banadex
was Chiquita’s most profitable
banana-producing operation in the
world,” Judge Marra wrote, adding in
a footnote that “Chiquita sold
Banadex in June 2004 and no longer
owns a Colombian subsidiary.”
Chiquita’s lawyers had urged
Judge Marra to dismiss the entire case
on a variety of grounds he found
unpersuasive.
On the essential point concerning
the connection between Chiquita
and the AUC’s horrific crimes, the
judge again ruled for the plaintiffs.
He said they submitted “detailed and
voluminous allegations” that “sufficiently plead that Chiquita provided
assistance to the AUC for the purpose of furthering the AUC’s torture
and extrajudicial killing in the
banana-growing regions.”
Chiquita strongly disputes that.
“The court’s ruling makes it clear
that for these claims to succeed,
plaintiffs will have to prove that
Chiquita shared the murderous aims
of the AUC—not merely that Chiquita knew the AUC was a violent
group,” company spokesman Loyd
asserted. “The plaintiffs will never be
able to prove this, because it is not
true. These were extortion payments
The Progressive
◆
23
Neilsen 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:41 AM Page 24
made to protect the lives of Chiquita’s employees.”
Amusingly, given the Supreme
Court’s Citizens United decision that
said corporations are persons, Chiquita also tried to argue that it couldn’t be prosecuted under the Torture
Victim Protection Act because that
statute refers to “an individual” who
engages in torture, and therefore “it
only covers human beings, and not
corporations.” Judge Marra cited a
precedent prior to Citizens United
that concluded that the Torture Victim Protection Act applied to “corporate defendants,” as well as flesh-andblood individuals.
suggesting the banana company consider taking immediate corrective
action, including selling its operations in Colombia.
Sensing they were in big trouble,
senior executives from Chiquita then
sought a meeting with Justice
Department officials and basically
confessed to breaking the federal
antiterrorism statute. At an April 24,
2003, meeting Justice Department
T
“Imagine a group of
workers here in the United
States of America, and a
foreign corporation comes
in and pays vigilantes to kill
them because they are
exercising their labor rights.
It would cause a national
uproar!”
he massive civil litigation is
fallout from a March 2007
criminal indictment, in which
the U.S. Attorney for the District of
Columbia Jeffrey Taylor charged
Chiquita with “engaging in transactions with a specially designated terrorist organization,” namely, the
AUC. Secretary of State Colin Powell
had declared the paramilitary group a
foreign terrorist organization in
2001, thus prohibiting “any United
States person” from providing the
group with material support or
resources, including any kind of
money or weapons. The indictment
didn’t charge individuals even though
it stated that nine Chiquita employees, including five high-ranking corporate officers, had played roles in
approving or delivering $1.7 million
to the group from 1997 to 2004, in
100 installments. Nearly half of that
sum went to the AUC after its 2001
terrorist designation.
According to the indictment, in
March 2003 high-ranking Chiquita
executives ignored the advice of “outside counsel” that the company
“must stop” paying the group. Prosecutors also documented a Chiquita
board of directors meeting in April of
that year during which two executives revealed to their colleagues that
the corporation had been funding a
foreign terrorist organization. An
alarmed board member responded by
24
◆
October 2011
attorneys warned the executives that
the payments must stop. But Chiquita continued to authorize payments
to the paramilitary group. Investigators documented an internal Chiquita conversation in which senior executives advocated a strategy of
continuing to fund the AUC and
forcing the Justice Department to
“come after us.” Four years later,
prosecutors did.
In a deal negotiated with the help
of future Attorney General Eric
Holder, who was then one of Chi-
quita’s lead lawyers in the case, the
banana firm pleaded guilty to making payments to a designated terrorist organization.
“Funding a terrorist organization
can never be treated as a cost of doing
business,” stated U.S. Attorney Taylor.
“The payments made by the company were always motivated by our
good-faith concern for the safety of
our employees,” the company said in
a press release the day the plea was
announced. “Nevertheless, we recognized—and acted upon—our legal
obligation to inform the DOJ of this
admittedly difficult situation. The
agreement with the DOJ today is in
the best interests of the company.”
Chiquita agreed to pay a $25 million fine. That’s a small fraction of
the company’s annual revenues,
which Chiquita has reported to be
about $4 billion in recent years.
I
f the civil lawsuit now proceeding
in Florida were to succeed, it
would vastly eclipse that criminal
fine. Plaintiffs’ lawyers are not specifying how much they might seek. But
if jurors were to award just $5 million
per client—which would be at the
low end of the spectrum of U.S. jury
awards for wrongful death cases
nowadays—damages would exceed
$20 billion. Back in 2002, a federal
jury in Florida awarded $54 million
to Juan Romagoza, Carlos Mauricio,
and Neris Gonzalez, three abduction
and torture victims in El Salvador in
the 1980s who held Salvadoran generals Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Vides Casanova responsible for
those crimes.
“I think we can prove our case,”
says James K. Green, lead lawyer for
one group of plaintiffs in the Chiquita action, two of whom are torture
survivors. Green was the attorney for
the Salvadoran abduction and torture
victims, and in that trial he also used
the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act.
Chiquita is calling the plaintiffs’
lawyers extortionists. “Sadly, this case
has been brought by plaintiffs’ attor-
Neilsen 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:41 AM Page 25
neys whose main interest is to extort
legal fees from companies, rather
than addressing the violence we all
condemn,” said Chiquita’s Loyd.
Outlines of the firm’s defensive
strategy were already evident in the
public relations message it put out
soon after the company pled guilty in
2007 (and which Loyd recently forwarded to me). In a statement published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in April of that year, Chiquita
CEO Fernando Aguirre gave this
rationale for funding the AUC:
“During the 1990s, it became
increasingly difficult to protect our
workforce. Among the hundreds of
documented attacks by left- and
right-wing paramilitaries were the
1995 massacre of twenty-eight innocent Chiquita employees who were
ambushed on a bus on their way to
work, and the 1998 assassination of
two more of our workers on a farm
while their colleagues were forced to
watch.” Aguirre added that AUC
commander Castaño had “sent an
unspoken, but clear message that failure to make the payments could
result in physical harm” to Chiquita
employees.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers will tell a much
different story. “Imagine a group of
workers here in the United States of
America, and a foreign corporation
comes in and pays vigilantes to kill
them because they are exercising their
labor rights. It would cause a national uproar!” says John De León, a
lawyer for eight of the plaintiffs.
Hanging in his Miami office is a portrait of Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected leftist president of
Guatemala who was deposed in a
1954 coup backed by Chiquita’s forebear, United Fruit. He notes the
banana trees in the background
behind Arbenz.
Once again, De León says, we
have “a foreign national company
going into a country to do business
and conspiring with locals to silence
and sometimes kill people who are
not helpful to their business or financial interests.”
Ironically, one large group of
prospective plaintiffs refused to join
the civil suit because of the possibility of an out-of-court settlement.
“They saw that the legal strategy
wouldn’t satisfy their rights to truth
and justice,” says Dora Lucy Arias
Giraldo, a lawyer who works with
war crimes survivors in the village of
San Jose de Apartado. She says residents are demanding an international tribunal: “The community believes
that the most important thing is that
the executives are declared responsible for having promoted violence
against them.” People there, she says,
want “not just a check” but an
acknowledgment of wrongdoing, a
public airing of the company’s complicity, and punishment for all guilty
corporate executives. Such an international tribunal, she conceded, is
just a dream at this point.
So, too, is the prospect of Chiquita shelling out billions to victims’
◆
families any time soon.
The Progressive
◆
25
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Rodriquez 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:05 AM Page 27
By Luis J. Rodríguez
Illustration by Christopher Serra
Don’t Throw
Away the Key
Why Life Without Parole Is
Cruel and Unusual
M
ANY BELIEVE THAT THE DEATH
penalty is the worst of a judicial system,
but there is a fate worse than death. It’s
known as the other death penalty—life without the
possibility of parole. How can life be worse than
death? Imagine living a life without a point, a reason, or a direction, breathing but never living. . . .
It is my testimony that being sentenced to life without the possibility of parole is even more cruel and
unusual than the death penalty.
These words were in an essay written by a prisoner in Connecticut who participated in a writing contest sponsored by “The Other Death Penalty Project.” This project invited prisoners and
non-prisoners alike to address ending life without the
possibility of parole, a sentence meted out to people
who commit murders and other violent acts. It’s a
sentence often given in lieu of the death penalty,
sometimes even to juveniles tried as adults.
This spring, I was the final judge for this contest.
I read essays, poems, and fiction pieces by finalists,
including prisoners incarcerated in California, Con-
Luis J. Rodríguez’s latest book is “It Calls You Back: An
Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and
Healing,” by Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster.
A forthcoming book on life without the possibility of
parole, “Too Cruel, Not Unusual Enough,” edited by
Kenneth E. Hartman, will be published by the Other
Death Penalty Project.
The Progressive
◆
27
Rodriquez 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:05 AM Page 28
necticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas,
Missouri, Nevada, and Tennessee.
What I read while judging the
contest proved to be moving and
insightful. The thoughts expressed in
these works challenge the thinking of
most anti-death penalty advocates,
who for years have pushed life without the possibility of parole as the
alternative to executions.
I was asked to participate by fellow
writer Kenneth E. Hartman, whose
book about being raised by the California foster care, juvenile, and correctional systems is a must-read (Mother
California: A Story of Redemption
Behind Bars). Hartman has been in
prison since 1980, when he was sentenced to life without the possibility of
parole for the murder of a homeless
man he beat to death as a teenager. I
met Hartman last year when I spent
ten Sundays, for eight hours a day,
facilitating a writing program at a
maximum-security unit of the California State Prison in Lancaster.
“I am a lot older, to be sure, and I
am so far removed from the reality of
the free world,” Hartman wrote in a
2009 issue of Journal of Prisoners on
Prison. “Truthfully, though I accept
full responsibility for my predicament, and feel a crushing sense of
remorse and guilt, I can barely
remember the details of that terrible
night all those years ago. Years that
have moved on, stained by tears dried
up in the hot wasteland of a life misspent. My own family abandoned me
early on, perhaps sensing the torment
that lay ahead. Both of my parents
have passed, and with them my hope
of reconciliation. I have watched the
world change so radically as to be
unrecognizable. I have also watched,
and suffered, as the prison system
turned the screws on life without
parole prisoners, gradually and inexorably squeezing us into a corner—
not simply denying us release, but
annihilating possibility itself.”
As Hartman and others have written, there is only one way to leave
prison when one is sentenced either to
life without the possibility of parole or
28
◆
October 2011
to the death penalty: in a coffin.
I talked to one anti-death penalty
person—a writer and former prisoner—who argued that the first step in
stopping state-sponsored executions
is life without the possibility of
parole. He felt that without this, ending the death penalty would be a
harder hill to climb.
“This was always a strategy, not a
principle,” he said.
But with more and more convicts
getting life without the possibility of
parole in the United States—life
without parole sentences have more
than tripled since 1992—it’s time to
revisit this strategy.
Look at how many people are living out their lives under this sentence. In California, the number is
now close to 3,700; in Louisiana, it’s
4,200; Pennsylvania, 4,500; and
Florida, 6,500.
You can see how life without the
possibility of parole can appear to be
the right tool in ending the death
penalty. Public fears—fomented by
politicians and the media, of convicted murderers being let out early—
may not allow another answer for a
long time to come. But we must still
hear these voices:
I do not want to end like this; I do
not want to die in here; I do not want
to die alone.
A California prisoner’s lament.
As I was writing this, prisoners in
a third of the state’s correctional facilities were refusing state-issued meals
in solidarity with maximum-security
inmates at Pelican Bay, home to one
of California’s most notorious security housing units, supposedly containing the “worst of the worst.” Some of
these prisoners were in for life.
The Pelican Bay hunger strike
began on July 1 when prisoners
refused meals “in protest of conditions that they contend are cruel and
inhumane,” according to Sam
Quinones of the Los Angeles Times.
L
ike many anti-death penalty
adherents, I once thought that life
without the possibility of parole
was a good alternative to the death
penalty. . . . All too many of those working to end the death penalty share the
misconceptions and faulty reasoning I
once used. They are in support of an
abstract idea, not the people who suffer
the ideas of others. . . . If you lock up a
sizable number of young men for life,
someday you are going to have a whole
lot of middle-aged and older men who
are no longer a threat to anyone, and it’s
going to cost a fortune to continue incarceration until death. And we will have
cheated ourselves out of the potential
contributions of all those who could well
have been released after a fair sentence.
Here non-prisoner and contest
writer Joan Leslie Taylor posed an
interesting proposition: that violent
felons, including murderers, can still
make positive and meaningful contributions to society. What if rehabilitation and recovery and post-release
support could be part and parcel of
any sentencing? What if communities welcome back those who have
wronged us by establishing an environment where they won’t hurt others or themselves, but instead,
through a properly initiated and
renewed life, can help give back and
enhance community?
The United States already has 25
percent of the world’s prison population, although we are only 5 percent
of the world’s population. In the past
three decades, an estimated $60 billion a year has been spent to keep
people behind bars for longer and
longer periods of time, with little-tono resources to help prisoners come
out balanced, healthy, and crime free.
T
here always has been crime; there
always will be crime. It is a part
of some people as breathing is,
and even any form of death penalty will
not deter them. Read your Bible—Jesus
was crucified with two thieves. We still
have thieves today. The Romans left crucified bodies hanging, as a warning of
Roman strength, power, and the law.
Today we use our jam-packed to overflowing prisons and life without the possibility of parole the same way. It didn’t
Rodriquez 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:05 AM Page 29
work then, and it doesn’t work today.
Our elected leaders need to realize that
crime is inherent to society, and that
there should be punishment, but not
such punishment that it makes punishment useless. Life without the possibility
of parole has become useless punishment.
These were the insights of a
Kansas prisoner. Punishment with no
aim of healing for the person and the
community only makes things
untenable for everyone.
“Truth be told, there is no scientific foundation to America’s sentencing
patterns,” wrote Dortell Williams, a
California prisoner who took first
place in the writing contest. “In reality, it isn’t necessarily how much time
an offender does, but the quality of his
incarceration that can determine if he
is redeemable or not. This fact is frequently lost in the fog of demagoguery
that competes to see who can be
tougher on crime in lieu of being
smarter, wasting valuable prison space
and scarce financial resources.”
We need to ask ourselves: What
kind of society might accept change,
redemption, and restoration among
its most violent citizens?
Williams in his essay made the
case that life without the possibility
of parole is unheard of in many other
countries that do not allow sentences
to exceed thirty years. Williams also
cited an address earlier this year by
Supreme Court Justice Anthony M.
Kennedy who claimed U.S. sentences
in general are eight times longer than
in European courts.
“It’s true that a death sentence is
unique in its severity and irrevocability, yet life without the possibility of
parole sentences share some common
characteristics with death that are
shared by no other sentence,”
Williams quoted Kennedy. Life without the possibility of parole “deprives
the convict of the most basic liberties
without giving hope.”
W
e live without the possibility
of parole women are no
more incorrigible than those
serving a fraction of our time. In fact,
the prison depends on old lifers to guide
and calm the rest. We are the stable,
nonviolent mothers in camp—women
who have been heaved into the landfill
of incarceration to rot, not worth the
time or trouble to recycle.
Society judges women with a hard
eye. If a judge or jury decides we are
beyond redemption, there is no reason
to look back. So here I exist at sixty,
grandmother of ten, still struggling to
get the truth out, that the sentence of
life without the possibility of parole is a
cruel and unnecessary punishment.
A female convict in Missouri
Can we envision a seed of
good?
wrote this. Life without the possibility of parole has struck male and
female, the young and the old, the
guilty and innocent, the reformed
and the ones still too young to feel
the weight of what they’ve done. It’s
the same answer given to a myriad of
problems, an answer that cares nothing for root causes or unfair trials or
the possibility of rehabilitation. It’s
an answer that says only: “It doesn’t
matter what’s possible with them; it’s
what they’ve already done that must
forever seal their fate.”
Unfortunately, many of those being
thrown away are young—there are
2,500 juvenile offenders serving life
without parole sentences in the United States. There are none in the rest of
the world. More than half of those
juveniles are African Americans. In
fact, African American youths are ten
times more likely to be sentenced to
life without parole than white youths.
The disparities and irrationalities
make life without parole sentences
contemptible, which is why the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child expressly prohibits such sentences for youths.
Only two countries have refused to
ratify this document—Somalia and
the United States.
T
here is another way of seeing.
Human beings are a cauldron
of possibilities, abundant
with creativity, hope, transformative
energies, and transcendence. Most
people won’t have to confront their
worse selves, their worst moments of
rage or addiction or depravity. But
when someone does, can we envision
a seed of good, of positive, in all that
bad? The Earth regenerates itself
after natural disasters—it’s a law of
nature. Even dogs and horses that
have been abused can be brought
back to health and reconnection.
And humans have qualities of intelligence and inventiveness that most
animals don’t possess.
We need to align with nature’s tendency to be bountiful, beautiful, and
revitalizing despite some ugly and
terrible acts, inactions, decisions, and
indecisions.
W
hen you’re serving life without the possibility of parole,
it’s as if you’re experiencing
the broken heart of knowing you’ll
never love or be loved again in any normal sense of the word, while simultaneously mourning the death of the man
you could have been and should have
been. The difference is that you never
recover, and can move on from neither
the heartbreak nor the death because
the pain is renewed each morning you
wake up to realize that you’re still here,
sentenced to life without the possibility
of parole.
It’s a fresh day of utter despair, lived
over and over for an entire lifetime.
These were the words of an inmate
in a “supermax” prison in Illinois. As
a society, we’re good at coming up
with ways to discard people, to stop
their growth, to push them—and
perhaps our own unreconciled depths
of pains, sorrows, and rages—behind
fences, borders, or razor wire. The
price for this, I submit, is more
crime, more fear, more of the same,
costing us billions without remedy.
This is a powerful enough reason to
stop life without the possibility of
◆
parole for anyone.
The Progressive
◆
29
Murphy 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:42 AM Page 30
By Ian Murphy
Illustration by Andrea Wicklund
My Gonzo Run
for Congress
I
DID EVERYTHING WRONG. MY CAMPAIGN WEBSITE FEATURED A
banner with my head Photoshopped onto the shirtless, flexing torso of “Craigslist
Congressman” Chris Lee, whose abandoned seat I was vying to fill. During my first
televised interview, I was disheveled, uncommunicative, and high on hillbilly heroin. I
rented a colonial-era costume and crashed a tea party jamboree. I told New York magazine that I’m a “militant atheist” and that Buffalo, New York, “fucking sucks.” I
demanded that my opponents produce their birth certificates—the long forms. I even
volunteered for a rival’s campaign. But was it wrong enough?
I should really start from the beginning. In the
wise words of Michele Bachmann, “A cell became a
blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became
a cat, which became a donkey, which became a
human being.” Fast-forward 6,000 years—give or
take—and I get a text message while sitting in the
Newark airport, which Continental Airlines would
have me believe is somewhere between Madison,
Wisconsin, and Buffalo. The members of the New
York State Green Party had voted unanimously to
place me on the ballot in New York State’s 26th District special Congressional election.
What the hell were they thinking?
In a press release, New York State Green Party cochair Peter LaVenia said, “Ian Murphy has been portrayed by the media as the nation’s most famous
prank caller, but his call to [Wisconsin] Governor
[Scott] Walker was done to point out how entwined
the Democrats and Republicans are with the corporate elite.”
What the hell was I thinking?
The purportedly liberal media, which adored the
Walker jape, suddenly lost my number. With few
exceptions, I was either ridiculed or ignored by the
press. The unspoken narrative was that I was scum, a
30
◆
October 2011
megalomaniac, a spoiler, Ralph Nader—but paranoid, stupid, and fat!
N
Y-26 has been, historically, redder than a
baboon’s ass. And the Republican nominee,
Jane Corwin, a state assemblywoman and
telephone book fortune heiress, was the presumptive,
platinum-haired multimillionaire for the job. Her
Democratic opponent, Kathy Hochul, was Corwin
lite, sans the robotic charm. In her successful bid for
county clerk, Hochul had secured the New York State
Conservative Party endorsement. She was part of the
problem, part of the triangulating disease—the madness.
In the first half of the race, Hochul’s platform consisted solely of business-friendly platitudes, forced
smiles, and shameless pandering. Here’s an excerpt
from one of her press releases: “Now that the regular
season is officially over . . . I now call on [my opponents] to immediately join me in rooting on the
Sabres in their run for the Stanley Cup!”
I called Hochul up one day.
Ian Murphy is the editor of buffalobeast.com. He is not
old enough to run for President.
Murphy 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:42 AM Page 31
“So . . . did you see
janecorwin.org?” I said, stifling a
laugh. Corwin had failed to purchase
her website’s corresponding .org registration; I did not.
CBS had already broken the story
in the national press about my satirical replica of Corwin’s site. This was
my favorite part of the CBS report:
“Asked if the inclusion of the words
‘heil Jane Corwin’ were meant to suggest Corwin is a Nazi, Murphy said
no, responding that he ‘just thought
that was how Republicans spoke.’ ”
The site soon received half a million visitors. Team Hochul was no
doubt aware of her opponent’s blunder and rushed to register kathyhochul.org. Too late.
In the end, I published a tepid
shot across Hochul’s bow, an “under
construction” landing page at kathyhochul.org depicting the candidate
wielding a circular saw with a note
that assured her supporters that it was
definitely her site and signed off with
“Local Sports and Values or something.”
the alias Steve Smith—an underemployed pet psychic from Oakland,
California.
“Um, Bob?” I beckoned the supervisor.
“Yeah, Steve, what is it?”
“Some of these people are saying
that Jane is going to end Medicare.
What should I tell them—should I
lie?”
“Hmm . . . ” Bob pondered.
endorsed by the Western New York
chapter of the Progressive Democrats
of America. The only candidate
whose platform made any sort of
sense—halve the military budget, tax
the rich, close corporate loopholes,
Medicare-for-all . . . me.
The Democratic Party—with a
few notable exceptions—is the
Republican Party redux. The Republicans are now completely mad. And
“They’ve been asking about Medicare?”
“Yeah.” And they were.
“Shit,” he mumbled under his
breath. “Don’t lie. Tell them that, if
they’re fifty-five or over, Jane’s plan
won’t change their Medicare. And if
they’re fifty-four or under, tell them
that Jane’s plan will . . . um . . . make
things . . . better.”
He walked away.
the Democrats continue to cede
ground. Madness and money are better represented than people. President Obama urged Dems to accept
cuts to Medicare and Social Security
to mollify the party of madness during the debt ceiling negotiations.
Mollifying madness is madness.
Hochul won because cuts to social
programs are a loser. The special election in NY-26 offered this issue to the
Democratic Party in a silver Tupperware®, yet it lost its freshness very
quickly. Hochul herself said during
the election, “Everything should be
on the table—entitlements, defense
spending, but also revenues.”
Everything is on the table—your
livelihood, your money, your pursuit
of happiness, and that potato salad
you really like.
◆
Go Sabres!
T
he Green Party was, like the
homeopathic remedies it tacitly supports in its hippie/altmed platform, 100 percent ineffective. Although my name graced a
party fundraising letter, I was offered
no financial or logistical support, save
for its routine attempts to harsh my
buzz. Party officials wanted me to
take it all very seriously, but it was
supposed to be for the lulz—for the
wild, naked hell of it.
Regardless, it was an Ayn Randhumping (sorry for that imagery)
Republican from Wisconsin who
made me take this race seriously.
On April 15th, Corwin said she’d
have voted for Congressman Paul
Ryan’s Medicare-decimating budget.
Old people vote; Hochul had an in,
as even the old tea party coots started
looking to Hochul to protect their
Medicare.
So, I spent about three hours volunteering, in my way, at Jane Corwin
HQ, phoning potential voters, under
S
o on election night I’m just sitting in the darkness, physically
picking at myself, stoned, drunk,
and tortured over whether or not I’d
have even the slightest role in denying
future seniors their health care.
A few hours before was the first
time I ever voted in my life. I’m not
proud of that. But I am proud that I
voted for the only candidate who was
The Progressive
◆
31
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Interview 10.2011_Interview 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:36 AM Page 33
T H E P R O G R E S S I V E I N T E RV I E W
by Nick A. Zaino III
Steve Earle
S
teve Earle has been accused of a lot of things, but being shy
isn’t one of them. He learned the craft of songwriting from
Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, not exactly shrinking violets themselves. Most everything he works on—including his
new album and new novel, both titled I’ll Never Get Out of This
World Alive, and even the TV series Treme—makes a political
statement in one way or another.
Earle has been an ardent anti-death penalty advocate, and he recently donated the proceeds of the sale of his digital single of “Harlan Man” and “The Mountain” to the America Votes Labor Unity Fund to promote fair labor-management
relations.
Nick A. Zaino III is a freelance writer and musician working in Boston. He has covered arts and entertainment for The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, Blurt, and
several other publications.
The Progressive
◆
33
Interview 10.2011_Interview 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:36 AM Page 34
I spoke with Earle by phone as he juggled his yearold son and his Australian cattle dog on his tour bus.
Earle was warm and talkative, and tended to answer
more than one question at once. We covered a lot of
ground about his early life, career, and politics.
Q:
Do you feel like your writing has gotten more
politically pointed as time goes on? Or have
you been writing these kinds of things all
along?
Steve Earle: I made two really overtly political
records. Jerusalem was my reaction to September 11,
and The Revolution Starts Now was me just trying to
get certain things I wanted said before the 2004 election cycle was over with. The record came out that
September. A lot of us worked really hard to keep
Bush from winning a second term. I left for Europe
the day after the election. It was good to be out of the
country [laughs]. Then I came back almost two
months later and began the U.S. part of the tour, and
we became sort of a recovery room for people who
had gotten their asses kicked. I was OK with that.
Politically, I’m pretty much a socialist. I cut my
teeth on Marx and Emma Goldman. I’ve probably
changed less politically than I have in any other
respect. I’ve been an active addict and a recovering
addict. And I’ve been married a bunch of times. The
one area where I’ve changed radically politically is the
Second Amendment. Just because of growing up in
Texas, I didn’t see anything incongruous about having
a bunch of guns and being basically a peacenik. I really sort of believed I had them for hunting and for
recreation and maybe to protect myself and my family. It took a long time to come around to where I’m
at now. I don’t have guns anymore. I’m pretty antigun, and it’s because of personal stuff in my life.
Q: What stuff?
Earle: I got out of jail, got clean, and was handed an
out-of-control fourteen-year-old son. I didn’t know
what I was supposed to do with him. I was just a little over a year clean and barely being able to take care
of myself. One of the first things he did is he stole the
loaded pistol that I kept under my mattress. He
wouldn’t admit that he had it. I searched the room
and could not find the gun. Finally, me and my
brother wrestled him into a car and hauled him out
to a wilderness camp in Hickman County and just
wrote him a check and dropped him off. It was January. About three o’clock in the morning, sleeping in
a tent, he had them take him to a phone. He called
me and told me where the fucking gun was. And I
haven’t had a gun in my house since. It just took
34
◆
October 2011
something to touch me personally. That could have
been a disaster. He didn’t know anything about guns.
He could have very, very easily hurt somebody else or
himself accidentally. It was terrifying.
Q: Was there a particular event that pushed you
toward your advocacy against the death penalty?
Earle: It was a lot of things. It was growing up in
Texas. It was, believe it or not, seeing the film In Cold
Blood and then backtracking and reading the book.
Whatever Truman Capote’s intentions were in writing that book, it does create this horrific depiction of
man’s inhumanity towards man: from the way that
the people who committed the murders treated their
victims right down to the way we nonchalantly tried
to deal with it.
Most execution protocols are about trying to
lessen the damage to the psyche of the people that
actually have to commit the murder. It’s an inherently toxic event for human beings to take another life.
I’ve stood there while it was going on, and it’s numbing. It’s the biggest event in my life, having experienced that. It had a bigger impression on me than my
children being born. I hate to say this but it’s true. It’s
just a big deal when you stand that close to death, to
violence. And it is violence. What I saw was violence.
It was a lethal injection, but it was violent. And it was
us being violent; it was me being violent. I still
haven’t fully recovered from the one execution that I
witnessed, and that was in 1998.
And I really believe a country that didn’t have the
death penalty would have never attacked Iraq in the
first place. A country that didn’t execute its own citizens, that didn’t institutionalize retribution, would
have never felt the need to attack another that just
looks sort of like the people we thought had attacked
us, which is what we did. We destroyed that place.
And hundreds of thousands of people died. People
are still dying. We’ve got to collectively live with that.
Our children are going to be living with that—the
cost of it, on every level.
Q: Why release “Little Emperor” so long after
Bush has been out of office?
Earle: I think you’re missing the last line of “Little
Emperor.” It’s mostly about Bush, but the last line’s
about Obama. It’s about empire—no matter who’s
running it. Especially in a democracy. We are, on a
cellular level, a fucking empire, and maybe that’s
what we need to change. Sometimes I think you have
to get back down and just be a hippie about it and
just say, “You know what? We’re doing bad shit, and
bad shit’s coming back on us. Maybe we ought to just
Interview 10.2011_Interview 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:36 AM Page 35
stop.” That seems naïve, and it seems like that’ll never
happen. Well, you know what? It can happen. It may
end up being that we just run out of money and we’re
no longer the most powerful country in the world.
We’ll continue to decline, and then we’ll become a
more peaceful country. The big difference between
Western Europe and us is, almost every country there
has been the most powerful country in the world for
at least thirty seconds. Even Holland was the most
powerful country in the world for a moment. And
Spain was, Portugal was. They all know there’s life
after that, and we just don’t yet.
Q: It’s safe to say you won’t have anyone in this
election cycle trying to steal your songs, or trying
to use “Little Emperor” in a campaign.
Earle: I do understand that the best thing I can do for
a candidate I want to see elected in this system is stay
as far the fuck away as possible. I’m really disappointed now in Obama, but I’ll vote for him again. If I can
vote for fucking Bill Clinton twice I can vote for
Obama twice. I don’t know who the Republicans are
going to run. I’m afraid you’re going to see Rick Perry,
which would be like seeing another George W. Bush.
With Perry, we’re totally capable of falling for it again.
Q: When you write something like “Gulf of Mexico,” are you writing about what interests you, or
are you using the folk tradition of telling other
people’s stories?
Earle: Well, I know what I’m doing. I had really good
teachers. I had a real old-fashioned apprenticeship
with really, really good writers. I know who Woody
Guthrie was. I knew Utah Phillips. Billy Bragg is a
friend and a contemporary of mine. I know what this
can do. For “Gulf of Mexico,” I was in New Orleans
shooting Treme, and there was a moment there where
it was arguable about whether New Orleans as we
knew it was going to cease to exist. The plan was that
New Orleans was going to become fucking Disneyland. The only reason it didn’t is because the money
to buy up all that fucking property dried up when all
the other money dried up in the country. We dodged
a bullet there. Imagine a New Orleans where poor
people—and a lot of the native musicians have come
out of that community—can’t afford to live. Imagine
a New Orleans where weirdo drifters from outside,
like my character from Treme, can’t afford to come
there and live. That’s part of what New Orleans is,
too. If you don’t have that, I wouldn’t want to go to
New Orleans anymore. Maybe there’s some people
who want to go to McNew Orleans, but I don’t.
JOHANNA GOODMAN
“I’m pretty much a
socialist. I cut my teeth
on Marx and Emma
Goldman.”
The Progressive
◆
35
Interview 10.2011_Interview 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:36 AM Page 36
Q: Do you ever look back at your life, politically
or philosophically, and think, man, I was so naïve
then?
Earle: I don’t think I’ve been naïve. But I’m fiercely
defensive of my naïveté. I believe that music can
change the world. I don’t believe that things have to
be like this. I don’t believe there’s any use in anyone
going hungry in the richest country in the world. I
don’t believe that this country is the purest specimen
of democracy there is in the world. I don’t believe that
it’s perfect. I believe that it’s a good country, that we’re
good people at our core. You know why I believe the
United States of America exists? I think it existed initially because the second and third sons of landed
families in Europe wanted to have a shot at their fortunes with slavery rather than without slavery. That’s
a lot of the reason why we became as powerful as we
did as fast as we did. I don’t go out and slit my wrists
for one reason: I’ve never believed that this was a
country established by a revolution of working people
for working people. That’s not what it was. It was a
revolution of rich farmers who didn’t want to pay
their fucking taxes.
Q: Do you think growing up in the South made
you a different kind of songwriter, or made you
pay attention to different things?
Earle: Yeah, probably. But in 1970 or ’71, I was
hitchhiking around Texas, with my hair down to the
middle of my back and my cowboy boots. Willie
Nelson had just moved back, and I was hanging out
in Luckenbach, and I thought Texas was going to
turn out to be Southern California on steroids. I
really did. No way I saw this coming, this idea of the
South completely and totally losing touch with
where its economic interests lie. Today so many people in the South are working people that don’t have
jobs. The South has always been sort of an attached
Third World country where we do things cheaper.
It’s now becoming totally that. It’s become a place to
avoid having to deal with trade unions, and now
your trade unions are being done away with all
throughout the country for the most part. We’ve
been working on that for a long time in this country. I went and talked to some postal workers in
Canada a few days ago, and they just got fucked,
too. This disease that we suffer from down here is
contagious. It is spreading to other parts of the
world.
Q: How do you decide what organizations you
work with and work for? I think the most recent
would be America Votes Labor.
36
◆
October 2011
Earle: That decision was made because I didn’t go to
Madison. A lot was going on in my life. I thought
about it. It was really hard for me to get there. I talked
to Tom Morello on the phone. He went; I didn’t. I
regret it to some extent. I wish I had been there. But
I felt like I wanted to do something and I was asked:
That particular organization got to me first at that
time. We do this stuff out of guilt to some degree. It’s
like, not guilt in a bad way, but it’s our conscience,
you know. That’s part of what having a conscience is.
That’s how not-for-profits raise money. It’s how it all
works.
Q: Do you think people will be surprised when
they see so much religion in your book or when
they hear “God Is God” on the new album?
Earle: Some people might be. But I’m a twelve-step
person. I’m dependent on that to sort of stay alive.
That’s what works for me. That’s what got me clean.
Q: How does the artistic process help you deal
with an issue in a song or in a book?
Earle: It’s cathartic. And nine times out of ten, what
I’m doing is letting somebody else know that they’re
not alone. That maybe they keep going, and maybe
they don’t change their minds, or maybe they don’t
shut up because they know there’s somebody else out
there. People tell me that music can’t change anything, but I lost count years ago of the number of
people who have come up to me and told me that
something I wrote changed their mind about the
death penalty. I’m part of a community and I want to
be part of a community. And I want to have an effect
on my community. The idea that human beings can
or want to be or ever are OK as freestanding entities
is kind of a lie.
Q: What do the arts contribute to the economy?
Earle: You know what? The difference between
human beings and animals is not an opposable
thumb. It’s the fact that we create and consume art.
Making art is an inherently political thing, especially
in this country. You’re swimming upstream automatically as soon as you decide you’re going to do anything but shove ones and zeros around in the ether
and profit from it.
Creating and consuming art is not an elective. We
treat these things in school as electives. They’re not
fucking electives. They’re absolutely sustenance to
human beings. We need them every bit as much as we
need water or food. And probably more than we need
◆
a fucking army.
Poem 10.2011_Poem 12.2005 9/8/11 12:06 AM Page 37
Poem
Far from Butter
I scrub my hands clean three times.
Antiseptic soap stings my fingers;
its stink burns my eyes and they water.
to churn that butter, or the hands to give it its texture.
It is only in feeling a bar begin to melt beneath
my warm grip, like a muscle grown weak,
I stand behind the waist-high table
in the kitchen with offerings of butter,
half-frozen sticks of must-be-used today
that I realize how far I am from butter, the work
it takes to make that butter. The kind of work
that is holy like butter. Not water-into-wine work,
but real work, hard work, work we can be grateful exists
butter, stacked sticks of unfit-for-sale butter.
This evening, I must cut them into even pats,
each the width of a nickel, one pat per visitor.
The butter is so cold that I must lean
my weight on the spine of a meat cleaver
to force the blade through until it touches
the table. A deep ridge forms across my palms
like a lash mark. Looking at my hands,
pink and swollen, it is clear that I lack the strength
if for no other reason than the joy that comes
when it’s done. I want to taste that holiness,
so I pull a pat of nickel-thick butter stuck to the flat edge
of the blade and drop it on my tongue.
I push it to the roof of my mouth at the seam
of teeth and gum, and wait for it to melt
to tell me that I know nothing of how to suffer.
—Lauren Schmidt
to cut through this wealth of refrigerated butter,
much less the strength to make it. I lack the patience
to wait for milk and cream to pull their bodies
apart from their emulsive embrace so the cream
can rest on top. I lack the precision it takes
to skim that thick collection at the hem where
cream and milk meet. My forearms are too slight
to press into the belly of that wad of fat
for it to release its milk. I don’t have the shoulders
Lauren Schmidt teaches writing at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, Rattle, Nimrod, Fifth Wednesday Journal,
PANK, and other journals. Her poems were selected as finalists for the 2008 and 2009 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize,
the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and the Dancing Girl Press Chapbook Contest. Her first full-length collection,
“Psalms of the Dining Room” (Wipf & Stock), is forthcoming.
The Progressive
◆
37
Kozlowski 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:45 AM Page 38
By Carl Kozlowski
Illustration by Lisel Ashlock
Spotlighting the
Undocumented
T
HE MAGIC OF BIG-BUDGET
Hollywood blockbusters lies in
their ability to transport viewers to
other worlds. But in films that actually
seek to impact society, the magic lies in
the filmmakers’ ability to see our daily
reality in a whole new light. From the
director of teen vampire blockbuster Twilight: New Moon comes a deeply personal
movie that sheds light on the families who
live in the shadows.
A Better Life looks at the life of an undocumented
landscaper named Carlos, the single parent of Luis, a
teenager who’s tempted by the false lure of brotherhood in street gangs. The film is a heartbreaking and
revelatory examination of the racial and class divides
of present-day Los Angeles, where it was shot.
In the film’s main plot, Luis casts aside the distant
attitude he constantly shoves at his father when CarCarl Kozlowski is the arts writer and film critic for
Pasadena Weekly and the co-host of the politically
charged and comedic weekly podcast “Grand Theft
Audio,” which can be found at www.grandtheftaudioradio.com/. He lives in Los Angeles.
38
◆
October 2011
Kozlowski 10.2011_FeatureD 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:45 AM Page 39
los comes home uncharacteristically
drunk one night. Carlos had just borrowed $12,000 from his sister to purchase the pickup truck and landscaping equipment of his retiring boss in
the hopes of building a better life for
himself and Luis.
But when another undocumented
worker suddenly steals the truck on
Carlos’s first day of ownership, he is
rendered hopeless by the fact that he
can’t even ask the police for help
without risking instant deportation.
So Luis teams up with his father in
the quest to attain private justice and
recover the truck.
This sets off a chain of events that
will enlighten viewers about how
tragically difficult life can be for the
estimated eleven million people who
live in hiding here in the United
States, the people who do most of
the nation’s backbreaking work on
farms, in factories, and in restaurants.
A Better Life had a better chance
than most social-issue films these
days, which are all too rare and
mostly released at the end of the year
when films scramble for award nominations. It had a $10 million budget and Summit, a major studio,
released it.
I
ts original writer and its director
proved to be its most surprising
champions.
“I’m totally down with the film,
and the hero is a very good man,
almost saintly. A man like that
deserves amnesty,” says Roger L.
Simon, a prominent conservative
blogger who wrote the film’s first
drafts two decades ago when he was a
progressive. He still endorses the
film, though. “We have to give people like this a break,” says Simon. “It’s
beyond politics—if you can’t give a
man like this a break, who can you
give it to?”
That message resonated with the
film’s equally unlikely director, Chris
Weitz. Weitz fought hard to make the
film as a personal project following a
decade of success with such diverse
yet mainstream films as American Pie,
About a Boy, and New Moon.
Weitz is married to a Latina, Mercedes Martinez, and his grandmother
was Mexican silent-movie star Lupita
Tovar, so the film presented him with
a chance to acknowledge that culture’s impact on his own life while
hoping to help stir the national
immigration debate toward a
humane solution.
“Everyone loves the way the movie
didn’t demonize anybody, not even
gang members,” says Weitz. “That
was also the key to getting Father
Gregory Boyle and Homeboy Industries involved and helping us win the
trust of the communities we were
filming in.”
Indeed, the film couldn’t have
offered such a rich and vibrant depiction of barrio life without the participation of Homeboy, a highly successful life-rehabilitation program for
gang members who want to break
free from their past criminal activities.
Founded by a Catholic priest
named Father Gregory Boyle in the
late 1980s, Homeboy provides a
range of opportunities to thousands
of mostly minority, mostly male individuals, encompassing everything
from GED programs to job training,
from psychological counseling to tattoo removals.
“We’re the beacon of hope for
those coming out of jails who want to
stop gangbanging, but have tats on
their faces and live in a horrible
neighborhood,” says Hector Verdugo, a former gang member who
rose through the ranks of Homeboy
from program participant to being
Boyle’s right-hand man.
“You can’t make anybody do anything; they have to want it. This is for
the guys who don’t have a place to
go,” Verdugo continues. “Even successful people self-sabotage. There’s a
lot of mental issues and family issues
for people to deal with to succeed
long-term, but we’re here first to help
the guys who’ve been in prison so
they don’t go back.”
U
ltimately, it’s the film’s lead—
Demian Bichir, a Mexican
movie star making his
strongest move yet into American
films with his portrayal of Carlos—
who gives the most cogent analysis of
why A Better Life matters. His powerful performance has already drawn
much-deserved Oscar buzz.
“I have a lot of Anglo friends
who’ve seen the film, and in two
hours their whole perspective toward
this particular community changed,”
says Bichir. “Part of the problem is
the misinformation that goes around,
from politicians who are out to make
you uncomfortable and afraid of
‘these people, who are taking everything from us!’ Misinformation plus
fear equals hate, and this film has the
power to change this point of view.”◆
Leave a legacy
Help perpetuate your commitment to peace and social justice. Include The Progressive in
your will. Bequests and life
insurance proceeds to The
Progressive are tax-deductible.
Any gift, large or small, helps
us remain independent and
not for profit. For more information on including The Progressive in your will or life
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us that The Progressive is
already mentioned in your
will, please contact us.
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The Progressive, Inc.
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◆
39
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Durst 10.2011_Durst 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:49 AM Page 41
Off the Map Will Durst
The Twerpy Twelve
C
an’t understand
why folks are so
mad at Obama. After
all, he hasn’t done anything. Except collapse
faster than an overused
supply tunnel in a Chilean coal mine.
The difference is that nobody’s organizing any rescue parties.
The President is so damn determined to govern from the middle, it’s a
wonder he’s not sporting a double yellow line down the center of his forehead. Democrats
may desert him,
but he’ll always be
king of the Road
Kill Party. His aides
hailed his straddle
on the debt-ceiling
debacle as a compromise.
Yeah.
Same kind of compromise the Titanic
arranged with that
iceberg.
The tea party
held the government hostage, and
Barack fell victim
to a wicked case of
Stockholm syndrome, bonding
with his captors,
until finally convincing them to accept more than
they originally asked for. The professional
obstructionists
cleverly
eschewed all the usual rationales and
instead adopted the key negotiating
skills of a four-year-old. “No. No.
No. No. No. No. No.” It was like trying to reason with set cement.
Now both Congress and the President are treating the pact like a dead
The New York Times says Emmy-nominated comedian and writer Will Durst
“is quite possibly the best political
satirist working in the country today.”
horsefly floating in their cut-glass
tumbler of twenty-five-year-old
Scotch. You’d find more enthusiasm
from the contestants of a beach volleyball tournament surveying a sand
court littered with scorpions.
Speaking of arachnids, included in
the agreement was a provision forming a committee responsible for
future deficit reduction. Twelve
members appointed by party leaders
from both House and Senate. Whose
mission, should they accept it, is to
PAUL CORIO
find $1.5 trillion over a ten-year period by digging past the bare bones,
down into the marrow, and finishing
by Thanksgiving Eve or risk triggering automatic cuts.
Doomsday cuts.
Cuts designed to frighten politicians from the most stable of districts.
That’s right: These cuts would
include large slashes to the military.
A majority of the committee,
equally split between Republicans
and Democrats, must agree on the
proposal in order to send it to the
whole of Congress, which will vote
either up or down with no amendments or filibusters allowed. This
means one member has to cross party
lines, which is as likely as pimentoflavored Velveeta taking first place in
the 2012 World Championship Artisan Cheese Contest.
T
his group has been called many
things. The Twerpy Twelve. A
Dozen Punters. The Craven Caucus.
Esteemed Assembly of the IllAdvisable. League
of the Unexceptionally Pontificating Pool of
Party Hacks. But
most commonly,
it is sarcastically
referred to as:
“Super Congress.”
“Slower than a
slug on Thorazine,
less powerful than
a soggy Kleenex,
unable to compromise in a million
years. Look! Up in
that
swiveling
leather club seat of
that private jet. It’s
a ruse, it’s a sham,
it’s . . . Super Congress. Yes, Super
Congress.”
And once their capes are discarded
and utility belts are put back in storage, we’ll inevitably move onto the
next level of logical disassociation
and behold the wonders of the Super
Duper Congress.
Then . . . Son of Super Duper
Congress, and we call in the Justice
League or reconvene the Watchmen
or that guy who talks backwards and
doesn’t make any sense. Mr.
Mxyzptlk. You may know him as
Rick Perry. More scorpions, please. ◆
The Progressive
◆
41
Zirin 10.2011_Conniff 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:01 AM Page 42
Edge of Sports Dave Zirin
NBA Lockout Blues
M
iami Heat hoops
demigod LeBron
James, with his uncanny mix of size and
speed, stands alone on
the court. He also
stands alone when it comes to his
assessment of the NBA lockout.
“I’m optimistic that we will have a
season this year,” James says. “Very
optimistic.”
LeBron is also optimistic that the
U.S. economy will turn around, and
that he will develop a postgame.
No one else on Earth holds
optimism that the lockout will
end. NBA Commissioner
David Stern himself said after
an August negotiating session,
“I don’t feel optimistic. I don’t
feel optimistic about the players’ willingness to engage in a
serious way.” He accused the
players of negotiating in bad
faith.
I’m sure by now many NBA
fans are pulling out their hair in
meaty clumps. How can a league
coming off a season in which it
earned an all-time revenue high
of 4.3 billion bucks—with the
fifth-highest attendance ever and
record playoff ratings—be in
such a crisis? Why is this golden
goose being plucked, deep fried,
and sold like McNuggets? Are
fans powerless to do nothing but
get excited about hockey?
First things first. We need to wipe
away the spin and tell the hard truth
about the “financial crisis” gripping
Sport in Society and the Northeastern
University School of Journalism have
selected Dave Zirin as the winner of
this year’s Excellence in Sports Journalism in Print/Online Media. His newest
book, in collaboration with John Carlos, is “The John Carlos Story,” from
Haymarket Books.
42
◆
October 2011
the NBA. Yes, it’s true that perhaps as
many as twenty-three teams lost
money last year. But what isn’t true is
that the league lost money on the
whole. If you factor in the massive
television deals of big-market teams
such as the Los Angeles Lakers, the
New York Knicks, and the Chicago
Bulls, the coffers runneth over. The
problem is that while the big markets
are flush with television cash, the
small markets are dying a slow death.
It takes Portland ten years to earn the
PATRICK MARTINEZ
television money that the Lakers
make in one.
The answer is not, therefore, shutting down most or all of the season—
as David Stern seems intent upon
doing—but sharing television revenue. The NFL does this, and as a
result, the Green Bay Packers feel like
they have a chance every year.
Revenue sharing would set up
small-market teams with intriguing
talent—such as Sacramento and
Memphis—to compete every year.
Stern speaks often about “guaranteeing profitability” for every franchise,
but he’s taking the easy route—going
after players’ salaries—instead of
actually waging an argument with
owners James Dolan, Jerry Buss, and
Jerry Reinsdorf that they need to
divvy up their cash.
The players can do something
about this. They should speak to the
reality that if they’re locked out, the
fans, the team employees, the
stadium workers get locked out
as well. They should follow the
model of Kobe Bryant and Luke
Walton, who donated thousands
of dollars to the families of Laker
team employees suffering from
the lockout. A little public relations, especially in tough economic times, goes a long way.
As for fans, we can’t be passive
in the face of what’s happening.
If someone came into your house
and took your television, you’d
do something. Well, considering
that on weekdays, the NBA is on
my TV more than every other
possible show combined, David
Stern might as well have jimmied
open my door and absconded
with my set. We are the people
who pay for the tickets, pay for
the NBA TV, and—whether
we’re fans or not—pay for the
stadiums. Our voices won’t be
heard unless we organize.
I’ve joined a group called the Sports
Fans Coalition (sportsfans.org) to
pressure Stern and the NBA brass
until they come back to the negotiating table and get to work. Joining
costs nothing except some time to
actually do some organizing to get the
league back on the court. I welcome
all Progressive readers to do the same.
Silence is not an option, if we want to
see basketball in the coming season.◆
Books 10.2011_Books 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:54 AM Page 43
Books
How Nonviolence Succeeds
Why Civil Resistance Works: The
Strategic Logic of Nonviolent
Conflict
By Erica Chenoweth and Maria J.
Stephan
Columbia University Press. 296 pages.
$29.
By Amitabh Pal
T
he Arab Spring has made even
more urgent the question of
whether nonviolence can
work against repressive regimes. The
events of this year—breathtaking in
their momentousness—have been
maddeningly complicated. In two
countries (Egypt and Tunisia), mainly nonviolent mass movements have
succeeded in toppling autocracies. In
another (Libya), the uprising had to
arm itself—and be aided by outside
intervention—before it ousted the
country’s dictator. In yet others (such
as Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain), the
rebellions—varying combinations of
peaceful protest and violence—have
been stymied for now, at least.
So, what works better, nonviolent
resistance or violent revolution? A new
book by two scholars, Erica
Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan,
attempts to answer this once and for all.
They analyzed an astonishing 323
campaigns over the past century. The
book is an expansion of a paper that
the authors wrote for the journal
International Security in 2008 that
caught the attention of many, since it
was the first definitive study of its
kind. (I cited the article in my book
on Islam and nonviolence.)
“The most striking finding is that
between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent
resistance campaigns were nearly
twice as likely to achieve full or partial
success as their violent counterparts,”
the authors write in their book.
Nonviolent resistance doesn’t have
to manifest itself as people coming
out in the streets in massive numbers.
Rather, it “is just as likely to take the
form of stay-aways, sit-ins, occupations, economic boycotts, and so
forth,” the authors write. In their survey, Chenoweth and Stephan found
that “the average nonviolent campaign has over 200,000 members—
about 150,000 more active participants than the average violent
campaign.” Of the twenty-five largest
campaigns, twenty have been nonvi-
olent, and of these a full 70 percent
have been successes.
“When large numbers of people in
key sectors of society stop obeying and
engage in prolonged acts of social,
political, and economic disruption,
they may fundamentally alter the relationship between ruler and ruled,”
they write. “If mass participation is
associated with campaign success,
then nonviolent campaigns have an
advantage over violent ones.”
The reasons they give are many
and convincing.
For one thing, “the moral, physical,
informational, and commitment barriers to participation are much lower for
nonviolent resistance than for violent
insurgency,” they write. The low
ALEX NABAUM
Amitabh Pal, the managing editor of
The Progressive, is the author of the
new book “ ‘Islam’ Means Peace:
Understanding the Muslim Principle
of Nonviolence Today” (Praeger).
The Progressive
◆
43
Books 10.2011_Books 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:54 AM Page 44
propensity of people to take part in an
armed uprising is not surprising, since
“actively joining a violent campaign
may require physical skills such as
agility and endurance, willingness to
train, ability to handle and use
weapons, and often isolation from
society at large.”
For another, “loyalty shifts involving the opponent’s erstwhile supporters, including the security forces,” are
more likely to occur during nonviolent upheavals, the authors argue.
“There is less room for negotiation, compromise, and power-sharing when regime members fear that
even small losses of power will translate into rolling heads,” they write.
“Campaigns that divide the adversary
from its key pillars of support are in a
better position to succeed. Nonviolent campaigns have a strategic
advantage in this regard.”
International sanctions become
part of the support system here,
much more likely to be imposed in
support of a nonviolent movement
and much less available when revolutionaries are blowing up people. “A
nonviolent campaign is 70 percent
likelier to receive diplomatic support
through sanctions than a violent
campaign,” they calculate.
The advantages of nonviolence
extend even after the change of
regime, Chenoweth and Stephan
contend, with groups that have come
to power nonviolently being much
more likely to respect democracy and
civil liberties than violent uprisings.
“Victorious violent insurgencies
often feel compelled to reestablish
the monopoly on the use of force and
therefore seek to purge any remaining
elements of the state,” they write.
“Because the insurgents used violent
methods to succeed in gaining power,
there will be fewer inhibitions against
the use of violent methods to maintain power. Indeed, the capacity to do
so may only increase.”
I
n some sense, the authors have
subjected to statistical analysis the
theories of Gene Sharp, an influen-
44
◆
October 2011
tial Boston-based proponent of nonviolent change, someone they cite a
number of times. In his work, Sharp
stresses the practical utility of nonviolence, deemphasizing the moral
aspects of it. He asserts that for Gandhi, nonviolence was more of a pragmatic tool than a matter of principle,
painting a picture that’s at variance
with much of Gandhian scholarship.
Gandhi’s use of nonviolence “was
pure pragmatism,” Sharp told me in an
interview in 2006. “At the end of his
life, he defends himself. He was
accused of holding on to nonviolent
means because of his religious belief.
He says no. He says, ‘I presented this as
a political means of action, and that’s
what I’m saying today. And it’s a misrepresentation to say that I presented
this as a purely religious approach.’ He
was very upset about that.”
But what if nonviolence were
shown not to work very well? Should
the world abandon it as a strategy?
You can argue on principle that what
Chenoweth and Stephan prove is
irrelevant. When people are weighing
options about what route to take in
battling oppression and injustice,
however, surely they are thinking
about
the
likely
outcome.
Chenoweth and Stephan’s findings
will help them choose the right path.
T
he book has the shortcomings
of a work derived from an academic paper. The first many
chapters of the book are written in
academese, and a reader’s appreciation
of this portion will be directly correlated with his or her tolerance for this
style. The book also includes a plethora of graphs and charts, many involving high-level statistical analysis, and
many impenetrable sentences. (“A
‘negative radical flank effect,’ or spoiler effect, occurs when another party’s
violence decreases the leverage of a
challenge group,” goes one.)
The second half of the book is
much more readable. It consists of
detailed studies of four mass protests:
the 1979 anti-Shah revolt in Iran, the
First Intifada in Palestine, the move-
ment in the Philippines that overthrew Marcos in 1986, and the failed
pro-democracy uprising in Burma.
Chenoweth and Stephan trace the
genesis of these rebellions, their
unfolding, the tactics used, and their
eventual outcomes. There are interesting tidbits here. For instance, a Shah
government official called Ayatollah
Khomeini’s audio tapes “stronger
than fighter planes.” And “over 97
percent of campaign activities reported by the Israeli Defense Force [in the
First Intifada] were nonviolent.”
Here, Chenoweth and Stephan also
attempt to answer difficult questions.
For instance, why did a mostly
nonviolent mass movement in Iran
give rise to a repressive fundamentalist regime? (The centering of the
protests on the charismatic figure of
Khomeini was the cause, they say.)
Why were the Palestinians unable
to sustain a largely nonviolent uprising in the First Intifada? (The lack of
strategic coherence and internal divisions within the movement doomed
it, they assert.)
And, heartbreakingly, why has the
Burmese opposition so far been unable
to topple the ruling junta? (The failure
to build large decentralized networks
of protesters and to attract significant
defections from the ruling clique are
the reasons, they reply.)
Remarkably, the authors manage
in the epilogue to incorporate the
happenings in Egypt and Tunisia,
which serve to further validate their
point. “If these last several months
have taught us anything, it is that
nonviolent resistance can be a nearunstoppable force for change in our
world, even in the most unlikely circumstances,” they state. Plus, the fact
that Egypt has had a nonviolent transition means that it has a 30 percent
possibility of becoming a functioning
democracy, as compared with the
“much closer to zero” chance it would
have had if there had been a violent
insurrection.
All of us dedicated to peaceful
protest as a way to change the world
◆
can take heart from this book.
Classified 10.2011_Classified 12.2005 9/8/11 12:53 AM Page 45
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The Progressive
◆
45
Hightower 10.2011_Durst 12.2005x 9/8/11 12:45 AM Page 46
Vox Populist Jim Hightower
Perry’s Texas
T
he corporate media
is going gaga over
yet another small-minded, rightwing Texas governor.
When Rick Perry
launched his candidacy at a Prayer-APalooza in Houston, the fawning
reporters should have instead slipped
away to the city’s convention center.
There, 100,000 Houstonians had
gathered in bleak testimony to his
gubernatorial leadership. They were
some of Houston’s many low-income
children and parents who are
struggling to make ends meet
in Perry’s Texas.
These needy families had
come to a back-to-school
event where school supplies,
uniforms, haircut vouchers,
immunizations, and bags of
food were being provided.
Officials had expected 25,000
people to show up, but four
times that number came.
Some families had camped
out for hours before the doors
opened, and many were
turned away, as supplies were
exhausted by 10 a.m. “It
shows the need,” observed a
solemn school spokesman.
Perry is known in Texas as
“Governor Supercuts,” not
only for his spiffy hairdo, but also for
cutting the budgets of schools and
poverty programs and holding down
wages. In his ten-year tenure, Perry’s
Texas has created more minimum
wage jobs—really nothing more than
jobettes—than any other state, and his
super-rich state now has more families
in poverty and without health cover-
Jim Hightower produces The Hightower Lowdown newsletter and is the
author, with Susan DeMarco, of
“Swim Against the Current: Even a
Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow.”
46
◆
October 2011
age than any other.
The Miracle Man has dug Texas
into one of the deepest budget holes
in the country: $27 billion short of
the money needed to cover the same
miserly level of state services Texans
now get. This is the guy who vows to
bring his “Texas Miracle” to the
nation as President Supercuts.
W
ith Perry, you get the two basic
strands of today’s Republican
Party in one suit. On the one hand,
he has carefully situated himself on
JEM SULLIVAN
the farthest rim of the tea party.
Think Michele Bachmann with better hair.
Perry called the BP oil disaster an
“act of God.”
His response to the drought that’s
devastating Texas was to pray for rain
(God did not oblige).
He’s a “tenther” who angrily
asserts state’s rights to nullify
Obama’s “socialist” schemes (until he
needed federal cash to fix his state’s
bankrupt unemployment fund).
He hates government-financed
health care (except for himself and
his family).
He loudly decries Big Government intrusion into people’s lives,
but enacted a law this year to require
any woman considering an abortion
to have a grossly invasive probe up
her uterus to make her see a sonogram of the embryo.
He would scuttle Social Security,
Medicaid, and the federal income
tax.
All this, he warns, or else Texas
might secede from the Union, an idea
lustily applauded by the other fortynine states.
On the other hand, Perry
is an exuberant corporate
Republican,
unabashedly
hugging any big business lobbyist bearing a campaign
check and a wish list.
Although he dresses alluringly for the rightwing extremists, the corporate powers are
his true love, and vice versa.
Even though he entered the
GOP primary late, The New
York Times notes that Perry
has “a vast network of
wealthy supporters eager to
bankroll his Presidential
ambitions.”
Why? Because he’s already
proven to be a trusted peer of
the corporate-political establishment. Among the 204 donors
who’ve invested $100,000-and-up in
Perry’s give-and-get governorship are
AT&T, Walmart, the Koch brothers,
Dell Inc., Clear Channel, T. Boone
Pickens, Time Warner Cable, TRT
Holdings (Omni hotels, Gold’s Gym,
etc.), Friends of Phil Gramm (who
knew he had any!), Bank of America,
Valero Energy, Burlington Northern,
Freeport-McMoRan, Union Pacific
Railroad, and ExxonMobil.
When Perry promises to do for
America what he’s done for Texas,
pay attention. It’s no idle threat. ◆
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