Demand Progress is a reasonably right on organization that this time, in its attack on “Hollywood’s Dirty Cash,” is way off.
Demand Progress is an online activist organization that “works to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing, lobbying, and elections in the United States.” They focus on issues of civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform—the first two of which, at least, are issues close to my heart.
Government reform… meh. It’s usually not enough for me, and I feel that many of the aspects of our contemporary society that need “reform” lie outside what is normally thought of as the government. And the “re…” that I really want is not “re-form.” In one sense, each election re-forms the government, and it always comes out looking suspiciously like the old form. No matter who you vote for, you always elect a politician. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
But all that aside, Demand Progress’ current call to arms on “Hollywood’s Dirty Cash” just seems to me… kinda dumb:
Tell Congress: Return Hollywood’s Dirty Cash | Demand Progress:
Motion Picture Association of America President Chris Dodd just threatened to cut off Hollywood campaign contributions to any member of Congress who doesn’t pass his Internet-censorship legislation.
After Congress shelved the controversial PIPA and SOPA bills, Dodd told Fox News:
“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”
This is what corruption looks like in Washington. It’s outrageous that Dodd — himself a former senator — is leveling these threats. Our elected officials must send a signal back to Dodd and the rest of K Street that our nation’s laws can’t be bought.
It’s time that Congress showed that its votes are no longer for sale. Congress must give back the MPAA’s dirty money or give it to charity. Congress must make it clear to the world that it won’t be bullied into supporting censorship.
Sure, Dodd’s statement was a bit outrageous, but compared to the bizarre pronouncements, threats and promises coming out of the Republican primary silly season, it seems a bit paltry. I mean, Newt is promising to ignore the Supreme Court. Audiences are cheering the notion of letting people die. Dobb’s comments are small beer.
And sending back Hollywood’s donations seems to me a pretty stupid idea on the one hand, and also pathetic and misguided on the other. Stupid because the majority of Hollywood’s money seems to go to Democrats and more sensible Republicans—and they are going to need that money to counteract the Koch Brother’s war chest (see here, here or here).
Pathetic and misguided because… Hollywood? Really? THAT’S the industry/lobbying group you want to go after? What about the oil industry, lobbying to overturn industry regulations aimed at preventing massive oil spills? The polluting industries that have been lobbying against improving air quality legislation? The NRA and arms manufacturers? Despotic mideast regimes? Fucking hell, Hollywood has to be one of the least offensive industries with a major lobbying presence in Washington. Cute puppies don’t have lobbyists.
The truth is, Hollywood is just a soft target, low hanging fruit. In the wake of the startling mobilization of opinion against SOPA/PIPA, an email/online petition against the MPAA, one of the main instigators of that legislation, must have seemed to Demand Progress like a no brainer, an easy win.
But it’s not a win worth winning. Demand that Congress return ALL lobbying money, or Demand Progress in genuine reform of lobbying and campaign financing. But Demanding Congress return Hollywood’s money? Bleech.
And while we’re at it… if you want to Demand Progress around some ugly, awful legislation what about NDAA? Or if it’s political spending, what about the outrageous Super PACs? Demand Progress is mostly right on. Mostly. This time, though, they’re way off. There are bigger and better battles to be fought.
A brilliant bit of BUGAUP-style culture jamming – you have to get up real close to see that the brown bands are separate pieces of paper, very cleverly inserted and positioned in this bus shelter wall ad, which is located outside San Francisco General Hospital – “as real as it gets,” and the main health care provider for many of the City’s 100,o00 adults who don’t have any health coverage.
Of course, while “Occupy the Banks” has a visceral appeal, squatting is really the way to go: direct action to address homelessness and inadequate housing, to preserve and maintain homes that have been rendered unoccupied by foreclosure, and to begin the process of reshaping our economic lives.
Even as the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills in the US Congress withered under a sustained barrage of criticism from internet companies, tech executives, free speech advocates and others, the Federal Government’s battle against online piracy and file sharing continued on other fronts.
In New Zealand, local authorities, acting on a US indictment, shut down the website of popular file sharing service MegaUpload on Thursday and arrested its senior staff, “accusing them of racketeering, money laundering and copyright infringement” (via Megaupload shutdown: guns, cars and cash seized in police swoop | guardian.co.uk).
Now another one of the major file sharing services, FileSonic seems to have gone offline:
So if you’ve been holding off on downloading the new Lady Gaga album for some reason, you might want to get it while the getting is still good.
Presumably these services or ones just like them will be up and running again soon, but in the meantime getting certain kinds of materials on the internet may be a bit more difficult than it has been. Other than that, there will be some high profile prosecutions, some reputations will be made, some people will go to jail, some people will get rich (lawyers), some people will get poor (defendants), and… the music and movie industries will still be fucked and clueless.
Terrorists? Drugs or gun dealers? No. These officers kitted out in military-style gear and armed with semi-automatic rifles were going after a small group of Occupy activists who had taken over an abandoned business in downtown Chapel Hill:
CHAPEL HILL — A police tactical team of more than 25 police officers arrested eight demonstrators Sunday afternoon and charged them with breaking and entering for occupying a vacant car dealership on Franklin Street.
Officers brandishing guns and semi-automatic rifles rushed the building at about 4:30 p.m. They pointed weapons at those standing outside, and ordered them to put their faces on the ground. They surrounded the building and cleared out those who were inside… [here]
Here are these dangerous criminals prior to the assault by police… doing what? Cleaning up the long empty eyesore. They wanted to turn it into a community space.
It’s a community if you’re a worker, but if you’re the company, it’s not; it is just a company. If the company tried to take care of the community rather than do whatever was best for its bottom line, regardless of cost to that company, it would open itself to shareholder lawsuits, among other things.
That engineer was naive to think otherwise, to expect Boeing to have any loyalty to the “community” where it had built planes since the 1920s.
So too was the congressman naive who complained about the huge amount of money spent providing Boeing with tax breaks and other incentives for their plant in Wichita. Boeing took the money when it could, and left when it wanted; I can’t believe he expected anything different.
Corporations are not persons, whatever Republicans say. And companies are not communities, and have no loyalty to communities. They are not part of the web of society. As Wichita has found out to its cost, big companies like Boeing are often more like parasites, or predators. #occupy
The San Francisco Bay Guardian‘s cover story this week is “Occupy America!“ — a call to “take back the country.” It concludes:
the important thing is to let this genie out of the bottle, to move Occupy into the next level of politics, to use a convention, rally, and national event to reassert the power of the people to control our political and economic institutions — and to change or abolish them as we see fit.
It is important — vital even, I would say — to continue the discussion and movement that #occupy has begun, but I think that the time has come also for reflection on where that movement is going and where we want it to go. The Occupy movement has always been a big tent, with lots of different groups with differing agendas operating within it, but there have been some clear tendencies. And I don’t agree with all of them by any means.
Occupy Wall Street? It was a great idea, a great slogan and it really got things going, but do we really want to occupy Wall Street? Do we want to retake or reclaim Wall Street – that whole sick and perverse congeries of gamblers, shills and greed-heads that passes itself off as an “industry” – for something, for ourselves? Or do we want to abolish and/or abandon it? I think some of the activities that emerged around banking had the right idea: don’t “occupy” the bad banks and financial institutions with your money; abandon them, taking your money to more positive institutions, local credit unions and the like.
But couldn’t we push that logic further? What about a wholesale abandonment of the whole crappy, corrupt and dehumanizing system. Don’t occupy it, leave it. Leave the banks and stock markets, leave the malls and Wal-Marts, and as much as possible shift your money, your energy, your time, your production and consumption to spaces that embody values of human freedom and social and economic justice, of happiness. Find all the worker-owned collectives in your area and support them. Start your own collective. Start a co-housing community, a squat, a shared multi-generational living situation. If your family sucks, abandon them, too, and create a new family based on freedom, love and justice.
I could go on in this vein, and hopefully will, in greater detail, but for now let me leave you with some thoughts on another aspect of the Occupy movement…
on the Port Blockades
I was really pleased to see the Occupy movement expanding out from the Wall Street locus to address issues of globalization, and root itself or rhizomatically connect itself with the ongoing alter globalization movement.
But the port blockades were a bad idea.
Sure, the ports are a logistical choke point in globalization’s long supply chain, where a bit of work can cause a lot of disruption and economic losses for the entities involved.
But it’s a distraction and it hurts people we don’t — or shouldn’t — want to hurt.
Occupy Wall Street worked because it was such a powerful symbolic statement. Blocking the doors of local bank branches would not have been as effective, and would have brought a much more immediate police response. Now that the Occupy movement has captured a lot of attention, taking the struggle to the headquarters of offending Wall Street entities will work fine, but going after local branches still seems to me to be offer a small payout for a lot of stress, and to inconvenience average people in a way little to turn potential allies into probably opponents. (Just as some of the stupider acts of vandalism around Occupy Oakland did with downtown Oakland residents and merchants.)
“Occupying” the ports pissed off some members of trade unions that have historically been important supporters of progressive struggles — against US imperialism in Central America, for instance, on in the general strikes of the 1930s. Port workers, longshoremen and their ilk were some of the most radical activists in the Bay Area in the first half of the Twentieth Century. It’s stupid to piss them off, or to get into their turf without working with them. And the port “occupations” hurt local economies that were already hurting, probably more than they hurt the big nasty corporate entities we’d like to see suffer.
More than that, though, the ports are simply not where it’s at in any real sense. If you want to “Occupy” globalization, you need to go after the headquarters, the brain and heart of it; the ports are like the feet or the fingers, or maybe the lower intestine, pipes that things pass through that are making any real choices.
And there are plenty of big, fat, juicy targets in the Bay Area. Lots of corporate headquarters for companies that are big players in globalization. Levi Strauss no longer makes jeans in the United States. They moved all that overseas. Apple doesn’t make any of its cool, fancy gadgets, so popular with hipsters and radicals alike around here. And both have been implicated in some really bad shit with their workers overseas. What about Chevron, right down there on Market St.?
If you want to move on globalization — and you should — don’t get distracted. Go for the commanding heights. And that isn’t the ports. It’s public perception, media support — and corporate hqs. All of which the port blockades miss.
You say you want a revolution? Well, we need to be smart about it.
Cananda’s natural resources minister Joe Oliver has issued a public letter, which an article in the Guardian calls “an extraordinary rant,” attacking opponents of the tar sands pipelines, including Keystone XL, saying they have a “radical ideological agenda” and “dangerous allies.”
“They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources,” he said.
Oliver would know all about ideological agendas and dangerous allies. His background is in investment banking and securities–you know, the folks who brought you the global financial crisis:
Prior to his election to Parliament, Mr. Oliver had a career in the investment banking industry. He began his investment banking career at Merrill Lynch, and served in senior positions at other investment dealers and as Executive Director of the Ontario Securities Commission. He was then appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of the Investment Dealers Association of Canada. (via Meet Joe « Joe Oliver.)
Clearly, based on their sterling role shepherding the global economy, investment bankers are the best choice for overseeing natural resources. Seriously, though, if you appoint someone with this background as natural resources minister, your take on things is pretty clear: nature is a pile of economic resources to be exploited for profit. So it’s hardly surprising that Oliver is apoplectic about resistance to his money-spinning plans for pipelines running across the continent and oil shipping in sensitive waters.
As for his comment about the carbon footprint of those “jet-setting celebrities” who have opposed the Keystone XL project and other tar sands exploitation projects, I’ve written to his office and requested that he provide details on his carbon footprint, both in his role as minister and also personally, for himself and his family, as well as for any businesses in which he might hold a controlling interest. In the interests of full disclosure and a “fair and balanced” assessment of his attack. In this day and age, it really makes sense to request ecological as well as economic transparency and accountability from government officials.
[Update: Still haven't heard from him.]
If you want to write to him yourself, the email address for his Ottawa office is: joe.oliver@parl.gc.ca
Finally, in the current climate of the war on terrorism, and after the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act with its provision for indefinite detention, language about “dangerous allies” and “radical ideology” should sound alarm bells. In the UK, we’ve seen recently the extent of government infiltration of radical environmental and peace groups. It doesn’t seem a huge leap to imagine groups such as those, groups branded as dangerous and as having a “radical ideology,” in the UK, the United States and Canada, getting identified as “terrorist” and subject to the full power of the endless war, anti-terrorist surveillance state that the US is fast become.
The Occupy meme, kicked off by Kalle Lasn and the crew at Adbusters, has spread perhaps faster and further than they could have dreamed in the short months since they launched it. Some of the “Occupy” spin-offs have a sensible and organic link to the original “Occupy Wall Street,” like the current #OCCUPYXMAS meme (and Twitter hashtag). Some have been parodic but pointed – Occupy Sesame Street being the obvious example:
Some of the mutations of the Occupy meme speak to its power and pervasiveness, such as people joking during the Thanksgiving holiday about “occupying the dinner table.” Some of these mutations though have been distorted and distorting, like the CBS radio spot, mentioned in a recent New York Times article, that ‘invited viewers to “occupy your couch.”‘ This seems very far from, even antithetical to, the motives, dreams and outrage that underlie Occupy Wall Street.
Occupy occupations/encampments/protests continue to get shut down, often violently across the country, despite the efforts of groups like the National Lawyers Guild (see here). And the Occupy meme’s spread also involves a certain amount of dissipation of its original force and focus. So I’ve been thinking of what we might “occupy” now that we’ve been kicked out of the original occupations – and have left the Thanksgiving tables and refuse to sit in our couches to be passively entertained by corporate media (except when The Big Bang Theoryis on). Something that has some real connection with the aims, dreams and desires of the Occupy movement, of the Occupiers.
Of course, as so many of the mainstream responses have pointed out, it is not that easy to pin down or to speak to those aims and desires. One of the more articulate – though also highly academic, and deeply engaged with contemporary cultural theory – discussions of this problem is in a current opinion piece in The Guardian. As Bernard Harcourt notes in his analysis of “Occupy’s new grammar of political disobedience,” the Occupy movement is motivated by a response to the current situation in America (and elsewhere, I would argue):
this situation that so many perceive as intolerable – a condition of continuously increasing inequality where, today, “the 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.” That, I take it, is the guiding Jacobin spirit of this new form of political disobedience
Banks and financial institutions hare played a key role in creating the current situation of economic inequality in the United States, and more notoriously and obviously were central causes of the economic crisis that even when it hasn’t left them jobless and homeless has left many Americans feeling – correctly – profoundly vulnerable, and with an acute awareness that the “American dream” is a fantasy for most people, and the world of our parents, the world where it was natural to assume that your children would be better off than you, that world is gone.
Not precisely gone. Stolen. And in part what the Occupy movement has been “occupying” is the space, the void created by that lost world. The post-war prosperity in the United States was built, to a large degree, on a consensus between Big Business, Big Government and Big Labor. That consensus is gone. Labor is gone. Big Government is not so big anymore and if the Republicans have their way will get drastically smaller. But Big Business is bigger than ever, and it is not just limited to Wall Street.
During the early days of the current economic crisis, there was another meme making the rounds, “Wall Street vs Main Street” – the bailout of the financial institutions being contrasted with the struggles of “small businesses.” But that meme, that juxtaposition, relied on a hyper-idealized image of “Main Street.” The Main St. of Gene Kelly signing to Vera-Ellen in On the Town (one of the greatest of musicals, directed by Stanley Donen):
Let me tell you about my hometown, San Francisco… Well, that would take a long time – there’s a lot going on here, some of it good, lots of it bad – so let’s just talk about the “Main Street” here, Market Street, and more generally the downtown shopping district around Union Square.
Once a vibrant and diverse commercial district, Market St. has fallen on hard times in recent years. Many of the independent businesses have gone, to be replaced by corporate chain stores, or left as bordered up spaces. A few spaces get taken up by seedy operations selling convenience food and junk products that come and go, and are in any case interchangeable and equally awful. The sidewalks are dirty. Many of the city’s too homeless make their homes down there, where they are stepped over – figuratively and sometimes even literally – by shoppers on their way to Armani or The Gap, lawyers, financial analysts and tourists.
Partly what has hit Market St. is the same thing that his hit downtowns across the USA and Canada: malls, which suck too much of the money away from downtown to the periphery and leave nothing behind but liquor stores and shops selling cheap junk or bongs. But it’s not just that: one of the most successful malls in the country is right there, at the heart of Market St., at the intersection with Powell – the Westfield San Francisco Centre (owned by an Australian-based multinational). The malls don’t just suck money away from downtowns, though, they suck it away from locally-owned, independent businesses to the chains and franchises that seem to do best in the carefully controlled spaces of malls. The surveilled spaces. The private spaces.
So maybe what we need is an Occupy Westfield. An attempt to reclaim those parts of daily life which are increasingly being taken out of the public realm and put into the private, where they can be more fully controlled and policed. But even if some sort of magical inside-out operation could be effected and all the stores inside the Westfield San Francisco Centre were poured back onto the public street, onto Market Street, into those empty storefronts… I still wouldn’t want to shop at them. They are part of the problem.
It’s not just banks and financial institutions that created the inequality in the United States. Big Business and corporate capitalism have played their part as well. Wal-mart is the 18th largest public corporation in the world, the largest grocery store in the country and the largest private employer. But lots of those Wal-Mart employees still need welfare or second jobs to afford those groceries, as Wal-Mart is a notoriously bad employer. And notoriously anti-labor. Fortunately, there isn’t a Wal-Mart on Market Street, nor anywhere else in San Francisco. The nearest one is across the Bay in Oakland, near the Oracle Arena – named for the Oracle Corporation, whose co-founder Larry Ellison is one of the three wealthiest individuals in the USA, and the highest paid CEO in the world. The 1% indeed. And all of that started just a few miles away.
There is a Gap store, though, a huge one, right across the street from the San Francisco Centre. Just down the block from is a big Old Navy outlet. A couple of blocks away, off Market Street on Grant, near Union Square, is the flagship Banana Republic. All three of these clothing chains are owned by The Gap, Inc. – the country’s biggest specialty apparel retailer, and only recently slipped from #1 to #2 in the world, another mega-business that started right here. The store locations, appearances and contents give a very graphic lesson in market segmentation: from Old Navy at the bottom end to Banana Republic at the top. I feel particularly aggrieved by these stores since I can remember shopping at them when they were stores, nice little local stores, and not part of some huge corporate machine. Banana Republican was a quaint joint up a staircase in Marin that sold weird suplus from around the world, like British Army shorts from the WWII North Africa campaign that had been sitting in a warehouse over there for decades. The Gap was where I got my back-to-school clothes when I was little. I haven’t set foot in one for years. I’ve looked in from the outside, though. The one in the mall near my dad’s house in Canada looks like the one in San Francisco which looks like the one in Sydney, and the one in London, and the one in Singapore and the one in Hong Kong.
Across the street from that Gap, back in the San Francisco Centre, there’s a Godiva Chocolatier store. It too looks just like the one in Hong Kong, in London, in Toronto. Who needs it? These corporate chains are impoverishing us both culturally and economically. The malls and these mall stores, regardless of where they are located, don’t just suck the life out of our downtowns, they suck the money out of our communities, and in doing so contribute to the inequalities we see now, the vast inequalities that corporate capitalism is driving, growing fat on.
So what would it be to “Occupy Market St.”? Well, it would be the exact opposite, in a way, of “Occupy Wall Street.” It might be better called “Abandon Market St. and the Mall.” In short, shop local. Not just in your local neighbor, but at locally owned stores. And as much as possible for goods that do not come out of the same corporate capitalist machine.
Things will cost more. Good. We buy too much stuff already. It’s part of why our carbon footprint is stamping out the life of the planet.
There isn’t all that nice, free parking like at the mall. Again, good, and for roughly the same reasons.
Here is where the Occupy movement and the Green movement and the Slow Food / locavore movement and lots of other movements come together. The anger at Wall Street is more properly anger at a whole system which has risen up – call it corporate capitalism, or maybe, as Kim Stanley Robinson does, Götterdämmerung capitalism (see here for a start), creating vast fortunes for the few while immiserating the many, privatising more and more of the world, surveilling more and more of daily life to feed those profits, gutting civil liberties when they get in the way, gutting healthcare, and health, burning up the planet.
Obama Endorses Decision to Limit Morning-After Pill: President Obama, who took office pledging to put science ahead of politics, averted a skirmish with conservatives in the nation’s culture wars on Thursday by endorsing his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of an after-sex contraceptive pill to girls under age 17. (via NYTimes.com.)
That’s the lead in a recent article in the New York Times on the decision by Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, to overrule the FDA and block wider OTC availability of the “morning-after pill,” the first time ever an FDA decision has been overruled by an HHS secretary.
There’s a lot that could be said about this. When Obama was voted in, it was on a tide of hope, as that ubiquitous and arresting poster so abundantly made clear. Hope for change— in politics, in the economy, in foreign policy (particularly those pesky wars). Those hopes have met with a lot of frustration and disappointment in the years since.
This most recent move was typical of the “pragmatic” and “bipartisan” Obama of whom we’ve seen far too much lately: willing to sacrifice (what we think are) his principles, and the expectations and needs of his believers, his base, for support from Republicans or evangelicals or one of the other groups that opposes — and even hates and reviles — him, people who by and large will not vote for him no matter what he does. If there is anything worse than sacrificing principle to expediency and pandering for votes, it is sacrificing and pandering for nothing.
But stepping back and looking at the wider picture, I was struck by this invocation of the “culture war” meme, which has been around a long time now, and deserves close critical scrutiny.
Culture war: The culture war (or culture wars) in American usage is a metaphor used to claim that political conflict is based on sets of conflicting cultural values. The term frequently implies a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal. The “culture war” is sometimes traced to the 1960s and has taken various forms since then. (via Wikipedia.)
While it may indeed be traced by some back to the 1960s, it really assumed the form it now has in the 1990s, and what is really going on in this “culture war” was made abundantly clear by Pat Buchanan in his speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention:
“There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself…. The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat — that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.“
An ideological struggle, like the Cold War, but also crucially a “religious war.” A crusade, in fact, of the righteous Christians against the godless and strayed, a war for the soul of America between those who stand for “God’s country” and those whom their opponents now sometimes refer to as “secular socialists.”
But what is it really, this “war”? It is a war against women and homosexuals. It is also a war against the poor and persons of color, particularly poor women of color, in that restrictions on things like birth control services, Planned Parenthood, etc., disproportionately affect them. A war of mostly white men of power and privilege against mostly women, the poor, and people of color. For the soul of America.
When people talk about “class war” it is, by and large, the same thing, or part of the same thing. But notice how the people who have called for a culture war are the same ones freaking out and attacking what they see as a politics of class war coming from the other side. Their culture war is good; our class war is bad.
LaborFest is happy to present our 18th annual labor cultural arts festival in Northern California. This year in addition to commemorating the 1934 San Francisco general strike, we will commemorate and have events around the 150th anniversary of the US civil war and the role of slavery in California, the 125th anniversary of May Day and the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Fire In New York where 146 mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian garment workers perished in a fire. We will also be having our Film Works United festival, theatrical and musical performances, our annual BookFair and labor history cultural walks and presentations.
In her current op-ed column in the Times, Maureen Dowd points to the moment when Sarah Palin and the Tea Party got some traction in the health care debate with their ridiculous claims about “death panels.”
It never occurred to [Obama] that such wildness and gullibility would trump lofty rationality. (NYTimes.com)
That seems to be the problem with this election in a nutshell. Wildness and gullibility trumping rationality. Stupendously misleading claims trumping facts. False fears, fostered by Fox, trumping real needs and interests.
Footnote: Have you noticed that an anagram of Palin is plain? Unfortunately, she really isn’t plain in so many ways, not plain in all the wrong ways about all the wrong things. Equally unfortunate, “plain” no doubt seems like a good thing to much of her base.
Over the weekend, I ran across a disturbing new trend in internet advertising – and a sign of just how big an advertising push Meg Whitman is making in her bid to get elected governor of California.
Anyone who has spent any real time on the internet in the past few years will know what a “captcha” is – one of those distorted images of words, which you are required to type in correctly to verify that you are, in fact, a human rather than some spambot trying to download something or register on some site or whatever.
Yesterday, for the first time ever, I saw a “captcha” that was also an advertisement, with the text one was required to type in being some of the text from the ad. In this case, the ad was from Meg Whitman’s political campaign:
It’s easy to see how this will catch on. I assume that many if not most or all of the websites that currently use “captcha” technology to screen users pay some sort of fee for the widget. The company behind this ad captcha widget probably provides it free of charge, and makes its money selling that space for advertising. So websites will be greatly tempted to use these ad captchas in place of the old ad-free ones.
This is not the only insidious newer form of internet advertising in which Meg Whitman popped up recently. I use an RSS/net news reader (NetNewsWire for the Mac) to monitor syndication feeds from a large number of websites – from major commercial sites like The New York Times to smaller special interest blogs such as La Vida Locavore. Many of these sites I read almost exclusively in this way, via their feeds – only visiting the actual website when a post grabs my attention and clearly has content that has not been included in the feed, or when I want to post a comment.
One such site that I follow is the progressive environmental site, Grist (“A beacon in the smog”). Perversely, last week Grist’s RSS feed regularly and apparently exclusively featured ads for Meg Whitman – whom I doubt many people at Grist support. It’s like opening your copy of The Nation and finding an ad for the NRA – something that would never happen in the “real world,” but is surprisingly common with online advertising, even with contextual advertising.
But if the pairing of Grist and Meg Whitman seems improbable and unfortunate, it is nothing compared to what I saw in their RSS feed today – ads touting the benefits of clean coal:
The mind reels…
Of course, Grist almost certainly has no control over which ads appear in their feed. The ads are served up by a company (Pheedo) with no input from them. But what the perversity of the recent ads appearing in Grist’s feed demonstrates is how problematic such input-free advertising can be. I doubt I’m the only one who was seriously put off by these ads – more than I would have been seeing them elsewhere.
Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley – but he’s also a former US secretary of labor, so it’s not so easy to dismiss him as another looney Berkeley lefty or an ivory tower intellectual.
So maybe people will actually pay attention to the alarm call he issues at the end of the article:
We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.
The headline positions this article as about the increasing influence of the wealthy over the US electoral process – a very pressing topic in this election season, when you have some many extremely wealthy individuals trying to use that wealth to buy their way into high office. It’s a real problem in California, where two tech sector businesswoman are trying to step straight from Silicon Valley into the halls of power: Carly Fiorina, former head of computer maker Hp, running for congress against Barbara Boxer; and Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, as Republican candidate for governor of California.
One of Reich’s key concerns is with the increasing lack of transparency and openness in campaign financing:
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates – without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Malek, whom you might remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed “Creep” in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a third.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm election, 97 percent disclosed….
We’re back to the late 19th century, when lackeys of robber barons literally deposited cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.
But while the influence of wealth on the political process is a key concern of Reich’s, the facts and figures he lays out in the article speak to a larger notion of plutocracy and to a fundamental shift in American socity:
income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it has been in 80 years
The top one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.
The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it has been in 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (whom no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent…. Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway – subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modes. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.
We have to pause there to consider that: an average of $1 billion in annual income. What is the average annual income of everyone you know? For that matter, what is the COMBINED income of everyone you know? Now, how many times would you have to multiply that to get to $1 billion?
Or what about that 17 percent tax – how much income tax did you pay last year? Those billionaires pay much less in income tax than you do – and these are the guys (almost always male) who gave us the global financial crisis.
But don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying you paid too much, but rather that they paid too little. I don’t like some of the things the government does with my tax dollars – but then I take the bus, or go to the library or a park, or use my public school education and I remember what other things taxes get used for. And then I look at how bad the public transit and public schools and public parks and public hospitals are getting and I worry. Unlike those hedge-fund managers, I can’t afford private health care, private schools, private parks, and even private transit is perilous these days.
And as he points out, all this enormous shift in the distribution of wealth and massive increase in wealth at the top is coming at a time when “[most] Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings and even homes are on the line.”
You can check out what else Reich has to say on his blog at www.robertreich.org. His book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, is currently riding high on nonfiction bestseller lists.
A footnote: It’s not strictly true that no one would have accused Eisenhower of being a radical. In a recent New Yorker article on Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement, the founder of the right wing John Birch Society is quoted attacking President Dwight D. Eisenhower as “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” who had been serving the plot “all of his adult life.” See: Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and the Republicans : The New Yorker.
Update:
Persuant to Reich’s concern with stealth campaign funding:
Media Debates Anonymous Donors, Ignores Deceptive Ads: “care2.com – By Aaron Pendell – Oct. 24 (News Analysis) – The secret financing of thousands of television ads and other media by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, and other 501(c)(4) PACs will be debated long after Nov. 2 has come and gone, but there is a related matter of supreme and immediate importance that is going largely unnoticed: The content of the ads range from deceptive to objectively false.” (via NewsTrust.)
U.S. Believes Arab States Won’t Scuttle Mideast Talks: “The Obama administration believes it has persuaded Arab states not to scuttle the fledgling Middle East peace negotiations, officials said Thursday, despite the Israeli government’s refusal to freeze Jewish settlements and a vow by the Palestinians to walk away if Israel did not… (via NYTimes.com.)
I know I’ve said this a few times before, but it really does seem a bit surreal to me that for pretty much my entire conscious life the struggles in the Middle East and Northern Ireland have been going on. And a formative event of my childhood was another oil spill – very minor, esp. compared to this most recent one, but right on my doorstep. I’d think nothing had really changed if it weren’t for the fact that I no longer worry about global thermonuclear war, and I do worry about my own housing, health care and employment in a way I never would have thought possible, and – oh yeah – a global climate disaster… Okay, a lot has changed. But not those two iconic struggles… As the saying goes, “I can’t believe we still have to protest this shit.”
Thank the goddess that the election of Obama means we no longer have to worry about racism or the policies of the Bush/Cheney years or any of that…
Another world is not only possible, she's on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe. ~ Arundhati Roy
Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.
My father before me fought for wage increases.
Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.
Yet my whole life has been a drag.
Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them. ~ messages from the walls, Paris, mai 1968
No, I am not a reasonable being, nor do I consider our scheme reasonable. Who the hell wants to be reasonable? ~ Emma Goldman
Be reasonable - demand the impossible.
What I’m on About
Rants and ruminations about radical social change, broadly conceived, with particular attention to globalization, corporate capitalism, popular culture, social history, and climate change - Götterdämmerung capitalism, and the revolution in everyday life.
