The Idea Lobby
May 30, 2011
Rewarding Whistle-blowers For Greater Compliance
In the wake of some spectacular instances of corporate evildoing, the SEC is wondering about offering serious cash to entice people who want to come forward.
By Emily Badger
Recent corporate debacles have the SEC wondering if offering serious cash rewards to entice whistle-blowers will be the panacea they're looking for. Business groups disagree.
When Bad Things Happen to Good Rogues
The Practical Effect of Cultivating Selflessness
Loans Based on Merit, Not Clout
I Gave It a Nudge But It Won’t Budge
Federal Budget Cuts May Cloud Government Transparency Websites
The financial reform bill passed by Congress last year contained a provocative idea: Perhaps the government could entice more corporate whistle-blowers to speak up about the type of abuse that’s become synonymous with Enron, or WorldCom, or Fannie Mae, if it offered a serious bounty. Specifically, Congress had in mind as much as 30 percent of any settlement money the Securities and Exchange Commission recovers from companies in a fraud case.
Business groups and whistle-blower advocates have been sparring over exactly how the SEC should implement the program for the last year. This week, the SEC voted to finalize the rules in a contentious 3-2 decision praised by whistle-blower groups but derided by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
At the heart of the dispute was whether whistle-blowers should first have to alert their companies of allegations before taking them to the feds. Business groups argued that, without such a rule, the government’s initiative would undermine corporate compliance programs. Opponents countered that such a requirement would discourage whistle-blowers from speaking out by forcing them to, in essence, alert corporate criminals before going to the authorities.
The SEC sided with the latter logic, and the new program will now reward whistle-blowers who voluntarily provide “original information” that leads to a penalty of at least $1 million with 10 to 30 percent of the settlement.
If the agency properly administers its whistle-blower office, responded Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center, the program could detect fraud and “create the enforcement hammer needed to make real change in the culture of corruption that fostered fraudsters like Bernie Madoff and led to countless Wall Street debacles, costing innocent investors trillions of dollars.”
In its statement, the Chamber of Commerce offered a different analogy.
“Not informing the company of a potential fraud and waiting for the SEC to act is the equivalent of not calling the firefighters down the street to put out a raging fire and instead calling the lawyers from the next town to sue over the fire instead,” Chamber officials said in a statement.
“The company is in the best position to immediately investigate and mitigate any violations, not the SEC, who will be inundated with thousands of tips it won’t be able to handle.”
The National Whistle-blowers Center last year produced a study suggesting cash rewards would make whistle-blowers no more likely to turn to the government than their own corporate compliance offices and would do little to harm internal compliance. In assessing cases filed under the False Claims Act since 2007, the study found that nearly 90 percent of employees still reported their concerns internally before going to the government (although sometimes the government benefits by setting a rogue to catch a rogue).
A New England Journal of Medicine study published last year reached similar conclusions in analyzing the experiences of whistle-blowers against pharmaceutical companies. Not one of the 26 whistle-blowers involved in litigation who were interviewed for the study said he or she was motivated by a financial bounty. In fact, “The prevailing sentiment was that the payoff had not been worth the personal cost,” the researchers concluded. Generally, the whistle-blowers interviewed also tried to address their concerns internally and only became litigants either accidentally or “as a last resort.”
Such results suggest businesses may be overreacting to the fear that a flood of employees will run to the government in secret to profit off tattling bonuses. But they also suggest something else: If money hasn’t been shown to dramatically motivate whistle-blowers, will the SEC’s program even have its intended effect?
“Almost certainly the quantity of whistleblowing disclosures will increase thanks to this program,” said Tom Devine, the legal director with the Government Accountability Project. But that’s not because whistleblowers are motivated by financial personal gain. “First, the government is putting its money where its mouth is, and that’s a good antidote for the primary reason why whistleblowers remain silent, which is cynicism. With good cause, they think the government’s not really interested in going beyond public relation invitations to provide evidence.”
And the second reason? Devine said the money helps to neutralize the chilling effect from the fear of bankruptcy that can come with lost employment and mounting legal fees.
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Wednesday, June 1, 2011
EducationNews.org
A Global Leading News Source
Home Page
June 1, 2011
Daily EducationNews
Report: CA Schools Don't Meet Physical Education Standards
Although obesity has been identified as a major health issue for California's children, too few teens participate in physical activities in school.
Hall County, Georgia Students Moved to Game NCLB Numbers
Students are coerced into transferring so schools can preserve high graduation rates and better test scores.
Nevada Passes Important Education Reforms Before Budget
Some of Governor Brian Sandoval's proposed reforms will be enacted, but Democrats have reclaimed some funds set to be cut.
NJ District May Ban Homework on Weekends, Holidays
The homework debate has been renewed after interest in the film "Race to Nowhere" and conversations about homework's burden on students and families.
Teacher Who Recorded Disruptive Student Fights Firing
A teacher who recorded awful student behavior was dismissed and is now suing for wrongful termination.
Researchers to Study Effects of Teacher Stress on Classrooms
A pilot study has shown that as many as 3 in 10 middle school teachers experience symptoms of stress that negatively affect their job performance.
Principal Can't Spell or Write, Begs for Tenure Support
Having been denied tenure in the past, principal busted for terrible writing and grammar - and voted 'least trusted' by union - asks for support.
In Illinois, Some Teachers Earn Six-Figure Salaries
Though some schools' teachers make over $100k, the average compensation in Illinois is about $69,000.
Commentaries
DESTRUCTION OF EDUCATION IN AMERICA: Number Of Uneducated U.S. Children Increases
Peter Stern - Is anyone willingly to initiate the long-needed changes to our public education system, which includes providing adequate financing, correcting mismanagement, financial misappropriations, modifying and developing REAL learning outcomes and trimming the "fat" in each district to give every American child a quality education?
EdNews Reports
EDUCATION WILL IMPROVE WHEN WE GET SERIOUS ABOUT TAKING BETTER CARE OF KIDS
Julia Steiny - Jesse James explained that he robbed banks because "that's where the money is." I obsess about schools because that's where the kids are.
The Global Search for Education: More Focus on Finland
C. M. Rubin - "The Finns had a crisis," life-long educator, best-selling author, and Harvard professor Tony Wagner explains as we discuss his new film, The Finnish Phenomenon....
Entrepreneurship along with Career Development Is An Answer Everyday at EducationNews.org dozens of articles, regarding what authors deem important are sent my desk. Many are published for the avid readers who reside in the world of education. I [...]
Higher Education
Over a Third of College Students Need Remedial Help
A report shows that far too many students are graduating high school unready for the academic rigors of college.
Blogs
Public Education Funding Must Focus on Classroom, Instructional Materials
Ken Mercer - ...this year the SBOE provided budget writers with $3 billion of non-tax revenues form the Permanent School Fund. The price tag for the new instructional materials is under $500 million, one sixth of the amount we transferred to legislative budget writers.
Making Memorial Day time to serve *today's* heroes
Joe Nathan - What's the Memorial Day weekend going to mean for your family? Perhaps you'll consider not just the traditional tv, picnics, parades and so on.
International
UK's Fox: Field Trips 'Too Fancy,' Too Frequent
Student trips to Argentina and South Africa are expensive and, to some, unnecessary.
7 Year Olds Play Soldiers, Face Discipline for Pretending
One MP calls the ban on finger-play guns "political correctness gone mad."
A Global Leading News Source
Home Page
June 1, 2011
Daily EducationNews
Report: CA Schools Don't Meet Physical Education Standards
Although obesity has been identified as a major health issue for California's children, too few teens participate in physical activities in school.
Hall County, Georgia Students Moved to Game NCLB Numbers
Students are coerced into transferring so schools can preserve high graduation rates and better test scores.
Nevada Passes Important Education Reforms Before Budget
Some of Governor Brian Sandoval's proposed reforms will be enacted, but Democrats have reclaimed some funds set to be cut.
NJ District May Ban Homework on Weekends, Holidays
The homework debate has been renewed after interest in the film "Race to Nowhere" and conversations about homework's burden on students and families.
Teacher Who Recorded Disruptive Student Fights Firing
A teacher who recorded awful student behavior was dismissed and is now suing for wrongful termination.
Researchers to Study Effects of Teacher Stress on Classrooms
A pilot study has shown that as many as 3 in 10 middle school teachers experience symptoms of stress that negatively affect their job performance.
Principal Can't Spell or Write, Begs for Tenure Support
Having been denied tenure in the past, principal busted for terrible writing and grammar - and voted 'least trusted' by union - asks for support.
In Illinois, Some Teachers Earn Six-Figure Salaries
Though some schools' teachers make over $100k, the average compensation in Illinois is about $69,000.
Commentaries
DESTRUCTION OF EDUCATION IN AMERICA: Number Of Uneducated U.S. Children Increases
Peter Stern - Is anyone willingly to initiate the long-needed changes to our public education system, which includes providing adequate financing, correcting mismanagement, financial misappropriations, modifying and developing REAL learning outcomes and trimming the "fat" in each district to give every American child a quality education?
EdNews Reports
EDUCATION WILL IMPROVE WHEN WE GET SERIOUS ABOUT TAKING BETTER CARE OF KIDS
Julia Steiny - Jesse James explained that he robbed banks because "that's where the money is." I obsess about schools because that's where the kids are.
The Global Search for Education: More Focus on Finland
C. M. Rubin - "The Finns had a crisis," life-long educator, best-selling author, and Harvard professor Tony Wagner explains as we discuss his new film, The Finnish Phenomenon....
Entrepreneurship along with Career Development Is An Answer Everyday at EducationNews.org dozens of articles, regarding what authors deem important are sent my desk. Many are published for the avid readers who reside in the world of education. I [...]
Higher Education
Over a Third of College Students Need Remedial Help
A report shows that far too many students are graduating high school unready for the academic rigors of college.
Blogs
Public Education Funding Must Focus on Classroom, Instructional Materials
Ken Mercer - ...this year the SBOE provided budget writers with $3 billion of non-tax revenues form the Permanent School Fund. The price tag for the new instructional materials is under $500 million, one sixth of the amount we transferred to legislative budget writers.
Making Memorial Day time to serve *today's* heroes
Joe Nathan - What's the Memorial Day weekend going to mean for your family? Perhaps you'll consider not just the traditional tv, picnics, parades and so on.
International
UK's Fox: Field Trips 'Too Fancy,' Too Frequent
Student trips to Argentina and South Africa are expensive and, to some, unnecessary.
7 Year Olds Play Soldiers, Face Discipline for Pretending
One MP calls the ban on finger-play guns "political correctness gone mad."
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Ed. Note: The School to Prison Pipeline exists because there is no due process for our youth and low-socio-economic sector families. Special Education Due Process is a FARCE. Legal Abuse Syndrome, here we are! kps
The Importance of Due Process in American Schools
May 31, 2011 2:10 am
Author: Matthew Lynch contributor EducationNews.org Matthew Lynch - The underlying idea behind practicing and attaching appropriate importance to procedural due process is to ensure that individual students, as well as teachers, are not unnecessarily burdened with arbitrary actions against them by any institution or individual
Due process in education means that fairness should be rendered in all areas, and that the teacher’s or student’s rights as individuals should under no circumstances be violated. Due process is important in the sense that most court decisions regarding teachers, education, and ethical teaching pertain to the fundamental issue of fairness. All protections and rights pertaining to due process actually emerge from 2 amendments of the U.S constitution, listed below:
The Fifth Amendment, which states that “no person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”; and
The Fourteenth Amendment, which asserts that “the equal protection of the law” ought not to be denied to any individual and “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Typically, due process that is appropriated in the judging of the fairness of an action can be classified under two broad headings, namely:
Substantive due process that deals with the issue per se.
Procedural due process which delves into the fairness of the process that is appropriated in delivering justice.
For instance, if a teacher was dismissed from his or her duties for treating a child in a particular manner that the child’s parents were not pleased about, an issue of substantive due process is raised. The court’s decision will be based on whether or not the teacher’s actions fell within the lawful bounds of ethical teaching.
Procedural due process, on the other hand, would involve the circumstances and the manner in which the case was handled. Issues such as whether or not the teacher received a fair chance to present his or her side of the story in defense, and given an opportunity to question the evidence provided against him or her come into play here. Procedural due process is actually a broader term and its meaning changes from state to state, depending upon the region-specific laws and regulations. To understand this concept, let’s have a look at the court verdict in Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), which included the following account of the minimum procedural safeguards demanded by basic due process:
The provision of an opportunity to be heard, and the date and time for which this opportunity should be provided to the concerned individual well ahead of time.
A full detailed account of the reasons for the proposed suspension must be furnished well in advance.
The opportunity for the accused employee to defend him or herself, and to question the evidence provided against him or her ought to be provided.
He or she must, under no circumstance, be deprived of the opportunity to retain an attorney.
A chance has to be given to the individual to cross-examine the witnesses present.
It is compulsory that the decision reached must strictly rest on legal rules and laws and on the evidence presented at the hearing.
The decision making body must be impartial and unbiased (Cambron-McCabe et al., 2004).
The underlying idea behind practicing and attaching appropriate importance to procedural due process is to ensure that individual students, as well as teachers, are not unnecessarily burdened with arbitrary actions against them by any institution or individual.
Matthew Lynch is an Assistant Professor of Education at Widener University.
He may be contacted at mlynch@mail.widener.edu
The Importance of Due Process in American Schools
May 31, 2011 2:10 am
Author: Matthew Lynch contributor EducationNews.org Matthew Lynch - The underlying idea behind practicing and attaching appropriate importance to procedural due process is to ensure that individual students, as well as teachers, are not unnecessarily burdened with arbitrary actions against them by any institution or individual
Due process in education means that fairness should be rendered in all areas, and that the teacher’s or student’s rights as individuals should under no circumstances be violated. Due process is important in the sense that most court decisions regarding teachers, education, and ethical teaching pertain to the fundamental issue of fairness. All protections and rights pertaining to due process actually emerge from 2 amendments of the U.S constitution, listed below:
The Fifth Amendment, which states that “no person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”; and
The Fourteenth Amendment, which asserts that “the equal protection of the law” ought not to be denied to any individual and “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Typically, due process that is appropriated in the judging of the fairness of an action can be classified under two broad headings, namely:
Substantive due process that deals with the issue per se.
Procedural due process which delves into the fairness of the process that is appropriated in delivering justice.
For instance, if a teacher was dismissed from his or her duties for treating a child in a particular manner that the child’s parents were not pleased about, an issue of substantive due process is raised. The court’s decision will be based on whether or not the teacher’s actions fell within the lawful bounds of ethical teaching.
Procedural due process, on the other hand, would involve the circumstances and the manner in which the case was handled. Issues such as whether or not the teacher received a fair chance to present his or her side of the story in defense, and given an opportunity to question the evidence provided against him or her come into play here. Procedural due process is actually a broader term and its meaning changes from state to state, depending upon the region-specific laws and regulations. To understand this concept, let’s have a look at the court verdict in Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), which included the following account of the minimum procedural safeguards demanded by basic due process:
The provision of an opportunity to be heard, and the date and time for which this opportunity should be provided to the concerned individual well ahead of time.
A full detailed account of the reasons for the proposed suspension must be furnished well in advance.
The opportunity for the accused employee to defend him or herself, and to question the evidence provided against him or her ought to be provided.
He or she must, under no circumstance, be deprived of the opportunity to retain an attorney.
A chance has to be given to the individual to cross-examine the witnesses present.
It is compulsory that the decision reached must strictly rest on legal rules and laws and on the evidence presented at the hearing.
The decision making body must be impartial and unbiased (Cambron-McCabe et al., 2004).
The underlying idea behind practicing and attaching appropriate importance to procedural due process is to ensure that individual students, as well as teachers, are not unnecessarily burdened with arbitrary actions against them by any institution or individual.
Matthew Lynch is an Assistant Professor of Education at Widener University.
He may be contacted at mlynch@mail.widener.edu
Are We Living in Post-Legal America? by Tom Engelhardt
Are We Living in Post-Legal America?
By Tom Engelhardt
At least in terms of what used to be called "foreign policy," and more recently "national security," the United States is now a post-legal society.
May 30, 2011 |
� Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. Or does it?
Now, you couldn’t call me a legal scholar. I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court). Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions.
My answer is this: they are irrelevant. Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don't begin to come to grips with twenty-first century American realities. In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as a reflection of nostalgia for, or sentimentality about, a long-lost republic. At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society. (And you could certainly include in this mix the too-big-to-jail financial and corporate elite.)
It’s easy enough to explain what I mean. if, in a country theoretically organized under the rule of law, wrongdoers are never brought to justice and nobody is held accountable for possibly serious crimes, then you don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to know that its citizens actually exist in a post-legal state. If so, “Is it legal?” is the wrong question to be asking, even if we have yet to discover the right one.
Pretzeled Definitions of Torture
Of course, when it came to a range of potential Bush-era crimes -- the use of torture, the running of offshore “black sites,” the extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects to lands where they would be tortured, illegal domestic spying and wiretapping, and the launching of wars of aggression -- it’s hardly news that no one of the slightest significance has ever been brought to justice. On taking office, President Obama offered a clear formula for dealing with this issue. He insisted that Americans should “look forward, not backward” and turn the page on the whole period, and then set his Justice Department to work on other matters. But honestly, did anyone anywhere ever doubt that no Bush-era official would be brought to trial here for such potential crimes?
Everyone knows that in the United States if you’re a robber caught breaking into someone’s house, you’ll be brought to trial, but if you’re caught breaking into someone else’s country, you’ll be free to take to the lecture circuit, write your memoirs, or become a university professor.
Of all the “debates” over legality in the Bush and Obama years, the torture debate has perhaps been the most interesting, and in some ways, the most realistic. After 9/11, the Bush administration quickly turned to a crew of hand-picked Justice Department lawyers to create the necessary rationale for what its officials most wanted to do -- in their quaint phrase, “take the gloves off.” And those lawyers responded with a set of pseudo-legalisms that put various methods of “information extraction” beyond the powers of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N.’s Convention Against Torture (signed by President Ronald Reagan and ratified by the Senate), and domestic anti-torture legislation, including the War Crimes Act of 1996 (passed by a Republican Congress).
In the process, they created infamously pretzled new definitions for acts previously accepted as torture. Among other things, they essentially left the definition of whether an act was torture or not to the torturer (that is, to what he believed he was doing at the time). In the process, acts that had historically been considered torture became “enhanced interrogation techniques.” An example would be waterboarding, which had once been bluntly known as “the water torture” or “the water cure” and whose perpetrators had, in the past, been successfully prosecuted in American military and civil courts. Such techniques were signed off on after first reportedly being “demonstrated” in the White House to an array of top officials, including the vice-president, the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state.
In the U.S. (and here was the realism of the debate that followed), the very issue of legality fell away almost instantly. Newspapers rapidly replaced the word “torture” -- when applied to what American interrogators did -- with the term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which was widely accepted as less controversial and more objective. At the same time, the issue of the legality of such techniques was superseded by a fierce national debate over their efficacy. It has lasted to this day and returned with a bang with the bin Laden killing.
Nothing better illustrates the nature of our post-legal society. Anti-torture laws were on the books in this country. If legality had truly mattered, it would have been beside the point whether torture was an effective way to produce “actionable intelligence” and so prepare the way for the killing of a bin Laden.
By analogy, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that robbing banks can be a successful and profitable way to make a living, but who would agree that a successful bank robber hadn’t committed an act as worthy of prosecution as an unsuccessful one caught on the spot? Efficacy wouldn’t matter in a society whose central value was the rule of law. In a post-legal society in which the ultimate value espoused is the safety and protection a national security state can offer you, it means the world.
As if to make the point, the Supreme Court recently offered a post-legal ruling for our moment: it declined to review a lower court ruling that blocked a case in which five men, who had experienced extraordinary rendition (a fancy globalized version of kidnapping) and been turned over to torturing regimes elsewhere by the CIA, tried to get their day in court. No such luck. The Obama administration claimed (as had the Bush administration before it) that simply bringing such a case to court would imperil national security (that is, state secrets) -- and won. As Ben Wizner, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued the case, summed matters up, "To date, every victim of the Bush administration's torture regime has been denied his day in court."
To put it another way, every CIA torturer, all those involved in acts of rendition, and all the officials who okayed such acts, as well as the lawyers who put their stamp of approval on them, are free to continue their lives untouched. Recently, the Obama administration even went to court to “prevent a lawyer for a former CIA officer convicted in Italy in the kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric from privately sharing classified information about the case with a Federal District Court judge.” (Yes, Virginia, elsewhere in the world a few Americans have been tried in absentia for Bush-era crimes.) In response, wrote Scott Shane of the New York Times, the judge “pronounced herself ‘literally speechless.’”
The realities of our moment are simple enough: other than abusers too low-level (see England, Lynndie and Graner, Charles) to matter to our national security state, no one in the CIA, and certainly no official of any sort, is going to be prosecuted for the possible crimes Americans committed in the Bush years in pursuit of the Global War on Terror.
On Not Blowing Whistles
It’s beyond symbolic, then, that only one figure from the national security world seems to remain in the “legal” crosshairs: the whistle-blower. If, as the president of the United States, you sign off on a system of warrantless surveillance of Americans -- the sort that not so long ago was against the law in this country -- or if you happen to run a giant telecom company and go along with that system by opening your facilities to government snoops, or if you run the National Security Agency or are an official in it overseeing the kind of data mining and intelligence gathering that goes with such a program, then -- as recent years have made clear -- you are above the law.
If, however, you happen to be an NSA employee who feels that the agency has overstepped the bounds of legality in its dealings with Americans, that it is moving in Orwellian directions, and that it should be exposed, and if you offer even unclassified information to a newspaper reporter, as was the case with Thomas Drake, be afraid, be very afraid. You may be prosecuted by the Bush and then Obama Justice Departments, and threatened with 35 years in prison under the Espionage Act (not for “espionage,” but for having divulged the most minor of low-grade state secrets in a world in which, increasingly, everything having to do with the state is becoming a secret).
If you are a CIA employee who tortured no one but may have given information damaging to the reputation of the national security state -- in this case about a botched effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program -- to a journalist, watch out. You are likely, as in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, to find yourself in a court of law. And if you happen to be a journalist like James Risen who may have received that information, you are likely to be hit by a Justice Department subpoena attempting to force you to reveal your source, under threat of imprisonment for contempt of court.
If you are a private in the U.S. military with access to a computer with low-level classified material from the Pentagon’s wars and the State Department’s activities on it, if you’ve seen something of the grim reality of what the national security state looks like when superimposed on Iraq, and if you decide to shine some light on that world, as Bradley Manning did, they’ll toss you into prison and throw away the key. You’ll be accused of having “blood on your hands” and tried, again under the Espionage Act, by those who actually have blood on their hands and are beyond all accountability.
When it comes to acts of state today, there is only one law: don’t pull up the curtain on the doings of any aspect of our spreading National Security Complex or the imperial executive that goes with it. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put it in addressing his employees over leaks about the operation to kill bin Laden, “Disclosure of classified information to anyone not cleared for it -- reporters, friends, colleagues in the private sector or other agencies, former Agency officers -- does tremendous damage to our work. At worst, leaks endanger lives... Unauthorized disclosure of those details not only violates the law, it seriously undermines our capability to do our job."
And when someone in Congress actually moves to preserve some aspect of older notions of American privacy (versus American secrecy), as Senator Rand Paul did recently in reference to the Patriot Act, he is promptly smeared as potentially “giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected."
Enhanced Legal Techniques
Here is the reality of post-legal America: since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Security Complex has engorged itself on American fears and grown at a remarkable pace. According to Top Secret America, a Washington Post series written in mid-2010, 854,000 people have “top secret” security clearances, “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001... 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks... [and] some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”
Just stop a moment to take that in. And then let this sink in as well: whatever any one of those employees does inside that national security world, no matter how “illegal” the act, it’s a double-your-money bet that he or she will never be prosecuted for it (unless it happens to involve letting Americans know something about just how they are being “protected”).
Consider what it means to have a U.S. Intelligence Community (as it likes to call itself) made up of 17 different agencies and organizations, a total that doesn’t even include all the smaller intelligence offices in the National Security Complex, which for almost 10 years proved incapable of locating its global enemy number one. Yet, as everyone now agrees, that man was living in something like plain sight, exchanging messages with and seeing colleagues in a military and resort town near Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. And what does it mean that, when he was finally killed, it was celebrated as a vast intelligence victory?
The Intelligence Community with its $80 billion-plus budget, the National Security Complex, including the Pentagon and that post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security, with its $1.2 trillion-plus budget, and the imperial executive have thrived in these years. They have all expanded their powers and prerogatives based largely on the claim that they are protecting the American people from potential harm from terrorists out to destroy our world.
Above all, however, they seem to have honed a single skill: the ability to protect themselves, as well as the lobbyists and corporate entities that feed off them. They have increased their funds and powers, even as they enveloped their institutions in a penumbra of secrecy. The power of this complex of institutions is still on the rise, even as the power and wealth of the country it protects is visibly in decline.
Now, consider again the question “Is it legal?” When it comes to any act of the National Security Complex, it’s obviously inapplicable in a land where the rule of law no longer applies to everyone. If you are a ordinary citizen, of course, it applies to you, but not if you are part of the state apparatus that officially protects you. The institutional momentum behind this development is simple enough to demonstrate: it hardly mattered that, after George W. Bush took off those gloves, the next president elected was a former constitutional law professor.
Think of the National Security Complex as the King George of the present moment. In the areas that matter to that complex, Congress has ever less power and, as in the case of the war in Libya or the Patriot Act, is ever more ready to cede what power it has left.
So democracy? The people’s representatives? How quaint in a world in which our real rulers are unelected, shielded by secrecy, and supported by a carefully nurtured, almost religious attitude toward security and the U.S. military.
The National Security Complex has access to us, to our lives and communications, though we have next to no access to it. It has, in reserve, those enhanced interrogation techniques and when trouble looms, a set of what might be called enhanced legal techniques as well. It has the ability to make war at will (or whim). It has a growing post-9/11 secret army cocooned inside the military: 20,000 or more troops in special operations outfits like the SEAL team that took down bin Laden, also enveloped in secrecy. In addition, it has the CIA and a fleet of armed drone aircraft ready to conduct its wars and operations globally in semi-secrecy and without the permission or oversight of the American people or their representatives.
And war, of course, is the ultimate aphrodisiac for the powerful.
Theoretically, the National Security Complex exists only to protect you. Its every act is done in the name of making you safer, even if the idea of safety and protection doesn’t extend to your job, your foreclosed home, or aid in disastrous times.
Welcome to post-legal America. It's time to stop wondering whether its acts are illegal and start asking: Do you really want to be this “safe”?
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.
Sign up to receive the latest updates fromTomDispatch.com here.
By Tom Engelhardt
At least in terms of what used to be called "foreign policy," and more recently "national security," the United States is now a post-legal society.
May 30, 2011 |
� Is the Libyan war legal? Was Bin Laden’s killing legal? Is it legal for the president of the United States to target an American citizen for assassination? Were those “enhanced interrogation techniques” legal? These are all questions raised in recent weeks. Each seems to call out for debate, for answers. Or does it?
Now, you couldn’t call me a legal scholar. I’ve never set foot inside a law school, and in 66 years only made it onto a single jury (dismissed before trial when the civil suit was settled out of court). Still, I feel at least as capable as any constitutional law professor of answering such questions.
My answer is this: they are irrelevant. Think of them as twentieth-century questions that don't begin to come to grips with twenty-first century American realities. In fact, think of them, and the very idea of a nation based on the rule of law, as a reflection of nostalgia for, or sentimentality about, a long-lost republic. At least in terms of what used to be called “foreign policy,” and more recently “national security,” the United States is now a post-legal society. (And you could certainly include in this mix the too-big-to-jail financial and corporate elite.)
It’s easy enough to explain what I mean. if, in a country theoretically organized under the rule of law, wrongdoers are never brought to justice and nobody is held accountable for possibly serious crimes, then you don’t have to be a constitutional law professor to know that its citizens actually exist in a post-legal state. If so, “Is it legal?” is the wrong question to be asking, even if we have yet to discover the right one.
Pretzeled Definitions of Torture
Of course, when it came to a range of potential Bush-era crimes -- the use of torture, the running of offshore “black sites,” the extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects to lands where they would be tortured, illegal domestic spying and wiretapping, and the launching of wars of aggression -- it’s hardly news that no one of the slightest significance has ever been brought to justice. On taking office, President Obama offered a clear formula for dealing with this issue. He insisted that Americans should “look forward, not backward” and turn the page on the whole period, and then set his Justice Department to work on other matters. But honestly, did anyone anywhere ever doubt that no Bush-era official would be brought to trial here for such potential crimes?
Everyone knows that in the United States if you’re a robber caught breaking into someone’s house, you’ll be brought to trial, but if you’re caught breaking into someone else’s country, you’ll be free to take to the lecture circuit, write your memoirs, or become a university professor.
Of all the “debates” over legality in the Bush and Obama years, the torture debate has perhaps been the most interesting, and in some ways, the most realistic. After 9/11, the Bush administration quickly turned to a crew of hand-picked Justice Department lawyers to create the necessary rationale for what its officials most wanted to do -- in their quaint phrase, “take the gloves off.” And those lawyers responded with a set of pseudo-legalisms that put various methods of “information extraction” beyond the powers of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N.’s Convention Against Torture (signed by President Ronald Reagan and ratified by the Senate), and domestic anti-torture legislation, including the War Crimes Act of 1996 (passed by a Republican Congress).
In the process, they created infamously pretzled new definitions for acts previously accepted as torture. Among other things, they essentially left the definition of whether an act was torture or not to the torturer (that is, to what he believed he was doing at the time). In the process, acts that had historically been considered torture became “enhanced interrogation techniques.” An example would be waterboarding, which had once been bluntly known as “the water torture” or “the water cure” and whose perpetrators had, in the past, been successfully prosecuted in American military and civil courts. Such techniques were signed off on after first reportedly being “demonstrated” in the White House to an array of top officials, including the vice-president, the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state.
In the U.S. (and here was the realism of the debate that followed), the very issue of legality fell away almost instantly. Newspapers rapidly replaced the word “torture” -- when applied to what American interrogators did -- with the term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which was widely accepted as less controversial and more objective. At the same time, the issue of the legality of such techniques was superseded by a fierce national debate over their efficacy. It has lasted to this day and returned with a bang with the bin Laden killing.
Nothing better illustrates the nature of our post-legal society. Anti-torture laws were on the books in this country. If legality had truly mattered, it would have been beside the point whether torture was an effective way to produce “actionable intelligence” and so prepare the way for the killing of a bin Laden.
By analogy, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that robbing banks can be a successful and profitable way to make a living, but who would agree that a successful bank robber hadn’t committed an act as worthy of prosecution as an unsuccessful one caught on the spot? Efficacy wouldn’t matter in a society whose central value was the rule of law. In a post-legal society in which the ultimate value espoused is the safety and protection a national security state can offer you, it means the world.
As if to make the point, the Supreme Court recently offered a post-legal ruling for our moment: it declined to review a lower court ruling that blocked a case in which five men, who had experienced extraordinary rendition (a fancy globalized version of kidnapping) and been turned over to torturing regimes elsewhere by the CIA, tried to get their day in court. No such luck. The Obama administration claimed (as had the Bush administration before it) that simply bringing such a case to court would imperil national security (that is, state secrets) -- and won. As Ben Wizner, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued the case, summed matters up, "To date, every victim of the Bush administration's torture regime has been denied his day in court."
To put it another way, every CIA torturer, all those involved in acts of rendition, and all the officials who okayed such acts, as well as the lawyers who put their stamp of approval on them, are free to continue their lives untouched. Recently, the Obama administration even went to court to “prevent a lawyer for a former CIA officer convicted in Italy in the kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric from privately sharing classified information about the case with a Federal District Court judge.” (Yes, Virginia, elsewhere in the world a few Americans have been tried in absentia for Bush-era crimes.) In response, wrote Scott Shane of the New York Times, the judge “pronounced herself ‘literally speechless.’”
The realities of our moment are simple enough: other than abusers too low-level (see England, Lynndie and Graner, Charles) to matter to our national security state, no one in the CIA, and certainly no official of any sort, is going to be prosecuted for the possible crimes Americans committed in the Bush years in pursuit of the Global War on Terror.
On Not Blowing Whistles
It’s beyond symbolic, then, that only one figure from the national security world seems to remain in the “legal” crosshairs: the whistle-blower. If, as the president of the United States, you sign off on a system of warrantless surveillance of Americans -- the sort that not so long ago was against the law in this country -- or if you happen to run a giant telecom company and go along with that system by opening your facilities to government snoops, or if you run the National Security Agency or are an official in it overseeing the kind of data mining and intelligence gathering that goes with such a program, then -- as recent years have made clear -- you are above the law.
If, however, you happen to be an NSA employee who feels that the agency has overstepped the bounds of legality in its dealings with Americans, that it is moving in Orwellian directions, and that it should be exposed, and if you offer even unclassified information to a newspaper reporter, as was the case with Thomas Drake, be afraid, be very afraid. You may be prosecuted by the Bush and then Obama Justice Departments, and threatened with 35 years in prison under the Espionage Act (not for “espionage,” but for having divulged the most minor of low-grade state secrets in a world in which, increasingly, everything having to do with the state is becoming a secret).
If you are a CIA employee who tortured no one but may have given information damaging to the reputation of the national security state -- in this case about a botched effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program -- to a journalist, watch out. You are likely, as in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, to find yourself in a court of law. And if you happen to be a journalist like James Risen who may have received that information, you are likely to be hit by a Justice Department subpoena attempting to force you to reveal your source, under threat of imprisonment for contempt of court.
If you are a private in the U.S. military with access to a computer with low-level classified material from the Pentagon’s wars and the State Department’s activities on it, if you’ve seen something of the grim reality of what the national security state looks like when superimposed on Iraq, and if you decide to shine some light on that world, as Bradley Manning did, they’ll toss you into prison and throw away the key. You’ll be accused of having “blood on your hands” and tried, again under the Espionage Act, by those who actually have blood on their hands and are beyond all accountability.
When it comes to acts of state today, there is only one law: don’t pull up the curtain on the doings of any aspect of our spreading National Security Complex or the imperial executive that goes with it. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put it in addressing his employees over leaks about the operation to kill bin Laden, “Disclosure of classified information to anyone not cleared for it -- reporters, friends, colleagues in the private sector or other agencies, former Agency officers -- does tremendous damage to our work. At worst, leaks endanger lives... Unauthorized disclosure of those details not only violates the law, it seriously undermines our capability to do our job."
And when someone in Congress actually moves to preserve some aspect of older notions of American privacy (versus American secrecy), as Senator Rand Paul did recently in reference to the Patriot Act, he is promptly smeared as potentially “giving terrorists the opportunity to plot attacks against our country, undetected."
Enhanced Legal Techniques
Here is the reality of post-legal America: since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Security Complex has engorged itself on American fears and grown at a remarkable pace. According to Top Secret America, a Washington Post series written in mid-2010, 854,000 people have “top secret” security clearances, “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001... 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks... [and] some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”
Just stop a moment to take that in. And then let this sink in as well: whatever any one of those employees does inside that national security world, no matter how “illegal” the act, it’s a double-your-money bet that he or she will never be prosecuted for it (unless it happens to involve letting Americans know something about just how they are being “protected”).
Consider what it means to have a U.S. Intelligence Community (as it likes to call itself) made up of 17 different agencies and organizations, a total that doesn’t even include all the smaller intelligence offices in the National Security Complex, which for almost 10 years proved incapable of locating its global enemy number one. Yet, as everyone now agrees, that man was living in something like plain sight, exchanging messages with and seeing colleagues in a military and resort town near Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. And what does it mean that, when he was finally killed, it was celebrated as a vast intelligence victory?
The Intelligence Community with its $80 billion-plus budget, the National Security Complex, including the Pentagon and that post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security, with its $1.2 trillion-plus budget, and the imperial executive have thrived in these years. They have all expanded their powers and prerogatives based largely on the claim that they are protecting the American people from potential harm from terrorists out to destroy our world.
Above all, however, they seem to have honed a single skill: the ability to protect themselves, as well as the lobbyists and corporate entities that feed off them. They have increased their funds and powers, even as they enveloped their institutions in a penumbra of secrecy. The power of this complex of institutions is still on the rise, even as the power and wealth of the country it protects is visibly in decline.
Now, consider again the question “Is it legal?” When it comes to any act of the National Security Complex, it’s obviously inapplicable in a land where the rule of law no longer applies to everyone. If you are a ordinary citizen, of course, it applies to you, but not if you are part of the state apparatus that officially protects you. The institutional momentum behind this development is simple enough to demonstrate: it hardly mattered that, after George W. Bush took off those gloves, the next president elected was a former constitutional law professor.
Think of the National Security Complex as the King George of the present moment. In the areas that matter to that complex, Congress has ever less power and, as in the case of the war in Libya or the Patriot Act, is ever more ready to cede what power it has left.
So democracy? The people’s representatives? How quaint in a world in which our real rulers are unelected, shielded by secrecy, and supported by a carefully nurtured, almost religious attitude toward security and the U.S. military.
The National Security Complex has access to us, to our lives and communications, though we have next to no access to it. It has, in reserve, those enhanced interrogation techniques and when trouble looms, a set of what might be called enhanced legal techniques as well. It has the ability to make war at will (or whim). It has a growing post-9/11 secret army cocooned inside the military: 20,000 or more troops in special operations outfits like the SEAL team that took down bin Laden, also enveloped in secrecy. In addition, it has the CIA and a fleet of armed drone aircraft ready to conduct its wars and operations globally in semi-secrecy and without the permission or oversight of the American people or their representatives.
And war, of course, is the ultimate aphrodisiac for the powerful.
Theoretically, the National Security Complex exists only to protect you. Its every act is done in the name of making you safer, even if the idea of safety and protection doesn’t extend to your job, your foreclosed home, or aid in disastrous times.
Welcome to post-legal America. It's time to stop wondering whether its acts are illegal and start asking: Do you really want to be this “safe”?
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.
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Sunday, May 29, 2011
k8longstory and "The Rat of EPIC Proportions"
By now, you've heard that SB County Superintendent Bill Cirone is retiring and SBSD Superintendent Brian Sarvis is taking his place so that he will run as an incumbent in 2012.
By now, you've heard that I was falsely arrested for trespassing, (daring to show up at a duly noticed SBSD Special Board Meeting at Griffth and
Thornburgh, where Craig Price pulls in $$$$$$$$$ for assisting Bill Cirone and His Cronies to manage the School to Prison Pipeline and the Education-Politico-Industrial Complex).
I am a Sacred Activist, dedicated to Gandhi's Satyagraha, (NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION with injustice). Obviously, the Santa Barbara Police have not been apprised of my activism, ADA protections, and safe ways to move non-resisting protesters. My shoulders and arms were injured; the x-ray technician said I was lucky that I wasn't more seriously hurt).
My last Small Claims Court claim will be against Bill Cirone and His Cronies for false arrest, Brown Act violations, collusion, conspiracy, and cover-up of wrong-doing. Oh, and denial of rights under color of law, and a dozen more causes of action.
I will be in court on June 10, 2011, Superior Court, Department 5 at 10 am. Katherine Anne Smith vs. SB County Counsel Dennis Marshall and Steve Underwood (#1380118). False Arrest, and violations of Americans with Disabilities Act, intentional inflicton of emotional distress, etc.
The restraining orders were a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) and were orchestrated by Bill Cirone and His Cronies.
Got subpoenas?
Namaste,
k8longstory4sbschooltalk.com
P.S. This year, I Madonnari is dedicated to Bill Cirone---"For all that he does for our children." Uh, the event is sponsored by the SB County Office of Education. The chalk picture of Cirone is nauseating...oy!
By now, you've heard that I was falsely arrested for trespassing, (daring to show up at a duly noticed SBSD Special Board Meeting at Griffth and
Thornburgh, where Craig Price pulls in $$$$$$$$$ for assisting Bill Cirone and His Cronies to manage the School to Prison Pipeline and the Education-Politico-Industrial Complex).
I am a Sacred Activist, dedicated to Gandhi's Satyagraha, (NON-VIOLENT NON-COOPERATION with injustice). Obviously, the Santa Barbara Police have not been apprised of my activism, ADA protections, and safe ways to move non-resisting protesters. My shoulders and arms were injured; the x-ray technician said I was lucky that I wasn't more seriously hurt).
My last Small Claims Court claim will be against Bill Cirone and His Cronies for false arrest, Brown Act violations, collusion, conspiracy, and cover-up of wrong-doing. Oh, and denial of rights under color of law, and a dozen more causes of action.
I will be in court on June 10, 2011, Superior Court, Department 5 at 10 am. Katherine Anne Smith vs. SB County Counsel Dennis Marshall and Steve Underwood (#1380118). False Arrest, and violations of Americans with Disabilities Act, intentional inflicton of emotional distress, etc.
The restraining orders were a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) and were orchestrated by Bill Cirone and His Cronies.
Got subpoenas?
Namaste,
k8longstory4sbschooltalk.com
P.S. This year, I Madonnari is dedicated to Bill Cirone---"For all that he does for our children." Uh, the event is sponsored by the SB County Office of Education. The chalk picture of Cirone is nauseating...oy!
Saturday, May 28, 2011
BUILDING A NEW ECONOMY by Gar Alperovitz
The Old Economy’s Not Coming Back. So What’s Next?
Meet the people and ideas on the cutting edge of the movement for a new economy.
by Gar Alperovitz
posted May 26, 2011
Editor's Note: When our friends at The Nation asked us to share this article with you, we were excited. We're big admirers of the author, Gar Alperovitz, a visionary thinker on economic possibilities and a former YES! Magazine board member. This article comes at an especially good time—the YES! editorial team is in the midst of work on the fall issue of YES!, which will assemble some of the most promising innovations for solving the jobs crisis. We believe that we aren't going back to the old economy—we can't, and we really don't want to. As Gar describes, we're witnessing the birth of something better: a new economy where livelihoods that are just, sustainable, and meaningful will be available to all.
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The idea that we need a “new economy”—that the entire economic system must be radically restructured if critical social and environmental goals are to be met—runs directly counter to the American creed that capitalism as we know it is the best, and only possible, option. Over the past few decades, however, a deepening sense of the profound ecological challenges facing the planet and growing despair at the inability of traditional politics to address economic failings have fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders. Most of the projects, ideas and research efforts have gained traction slowly and with little notice. But in the wake of the financial crisis, they have proliferated and earned a surprising amount of support—and not only among the usual suspects on the left. As the threat of a global climate crisis grows increasingly dire and the nation sinks deeper into an economic slump for which conventional wisdom offers no adequate remedies, more and more Americans are coming to realize that it is time to begin defining, demanding and organizing to build a new-economy movement.
The new economy movement seeks an economy that is increasingly green and socially responsible, and one that is based on rethinking the nature of ownership and the growth paradigm that guides conventional policies.That the term “new economy” has begun to explode into public use in diverse areas may be an indication that the movement has reached a critical stage of development—and a sign that the domination of traditional thinking may be starting to weaken. Although precisely what “changing the system” means is a matter of considerable debate, certain key points are clear: the movement seeks an economy that is increasingly green and socially responsible, and one that is based on rethinking the nature of ownership and the growth paradigm that guides conventional policies.
Democratizing Ownership
This, in turn, leads to an emphasis on institutions whose priorities are broader than those that typically flow from the corporate emphasis on the bottom line. At the cutting edge of experimentation are the growing number of egalitarian, and often green, worker-owned cooperatives. Hundreds of “social enterprises” that use profits for environmental, social or community-serving goals are also expanding rapidly. In many communities urban agricultural efforts have made common cause with groups concerned about healthy nonprocessed food. And all this is to say nothing of 1.6 million nonprofit corporations that often cross over into economic activity.
For-profits have developed alternatives as well. There are, for example, more than 11,000 companies owned entirely or in significant part by some 13.6 million employees. Most have adopted Employee Stock Ownership Plans; these so-called ESOPs democratize ownership, though only some of them involve participatory management. W.L. Gore, maker of Gore-Tex and many other products, is a leading example: the company has some 9,000 employee-owners at forty-five locations worldwide and generates annual sales of $2.5 billion. Litecontrol, which manufactures high-efficiency, high-performance architectural lighting fixtures, operates as a less typical ESOP; the Massachusetts-based company is entirely owned by roughly 200 employees and fully unionized with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
A different large-scale corporation, Seventh Generation—the nation’s leader in “green” detergents, dishwashing soap, baby wipes, tissues, paper towels and other household products—has internal policies requiring that no one be paid more than fourteen times the lowest base pay or five times higher than the average employee.
In certain states, companies that want to brandish their new-economy values can now also register as B Corporations. B Corp registration (the “B” stands for “benefit”) allows a company to subordinate profits to social and environmental goals. Without this legal authorization, a CEO could in theory be sued by stockholders if profit-making is not his sole objective. Such status ensures that specific goals are met by different companies (manufacturers have different requirements from retail stores). It also helps with social marketing and branding. Thus, King Arthur Flour, a highly successful Vermont-based, 100 percent employee-owned ESOP, can be explicit, stating that “making money in itself is not our highest priority.” Four states—Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey and Virginia—have passed legislation that permits B Corp chartering, with many others likely to follow.
New Economy, New Ways to Work
Cooperatives may not be a new idea—with at least 130 million members (more than one in three Americans), co-ops have broad political and cultural support—but they are becoming increasingly important in new-economy efforts. A widely discussed strategy in Cleveland suggests a possible next stage of development: the Evergreen Cooperatives are linked through a nonprofit corporation, a revolving loan fund and the common goal of rebuilding the economically devastated Greater University Circle neighborhoods. A thoroughly green industrial-scale laundry, a solar installation company and a soon-to-be-opened large-scale commercial greenhouse (capable of producing about 5 million heads of lettuce a year) make up the first of a group of linked co-ops projected to expand in years to come. The effort is unique in that Evergreen is building on the purchasing power of the area’s large hospital, university and other anchor institutions, which buy some $3 billion of goods and services a year—virtually none of which, until recently, had come from local business. Senator Sherrod Brown is expected to introduce national legislation aimed at developing Evergreen-style models in other cities. (Full disclosure: the Democracy Collaborative of the University of Maryland, which I co-founded, has played an important role in Evergreen’s development.)
Leading Thinkers and Organizations
Along with the rapid expansion of small and medium-size businesses committed to building the new economy has come a sense of community and shared mission. Staff, managers and owners at many of these companies are finding more opportunities to share ideas and pool resources with like-minded professionals. The American Sustainable Business Council, a growing alliance of 150,000 business professionals and thirty business organizations, has emerged as a leading venue for such activity. Most members are “triple bottom line” companies and social enterprises committed to the environment and social outcomes as well as profits.
In many ways the council operates like any advocacy group attempting to lobby, educate and promote legislation and strategies. Thirty-five leaders recently met with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, for instance, to make clear that the US Chamber of Commerce does not speak for all American business, to seek her help with specific projects and issues, and to fill her in on a range of environmentally and socially concerned economic efforts that definitely do not do business as usual. The names of some of the council’s constituent organizations offer a sense of what this means: Green America, Business for Shared Prosperity, Social Enterprise Alliance, Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, California Association for Microenterprise Opportunity. Although ecological concerns are at the top, the council’s agenda is highly supportive of other progressive social and economic goals. A recent blog by Jeffrey Hollender, chair of the council’s advisory board (and former CEO of Seventh Generation), attacked the US Chamber of Commerce for “fighting democracy and destroying America’s economic future.”
Growing Local: Interview with Michelle Long
Michelle Long helped make Bellingham, Washington a national leader in urban sustainability. With BALLE, she's taking her vision to cities around North America.
The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), made up of more than 22,000 small businesses, is another rapidly growing organization that works to strengthen new-economy networks. BALLE brings together locally owned efforts dedicated to building ecologically sustainable “living economies,” with the ambitious long-term goal of developing a global system of interconnected local communities that function in harmony with their ecosystems. The group’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Hub, the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, recognizes area businesses that “demonstrate a strong social and environmental impact while also making a profit.” A recent example is GreenLine Paper, a company that produces green products and works to preserve forests and prevent climate change. By participating in the network, GreenLine Paper gains brand recognition and promotion, as well as marketing, policy support, technical assistance and access to a like-minded coalition of businesses.
“Our most important role has been to help create a larger sense of shared common direction in a time of crisis—a sense that the new-economy movement is much greater than the sum of its diverse parts.”Sarah Stranahan, a longtime board member at the Needmor Fund, recalls having a sense in late 2009 that large numbers of Americans were beginning to understand that something is profoundly wrong with the economy. Bearing this in mind, with a small group of other activists she brought leaders of diverse organizations together in early September of that year to explore ways to build a larger movement.
The New Economy Network (NEN), a loosely organized umbrella effort comprising roughly 200 to 250 new-economy leaders and organizations, was the low-budget product of their meeting. NEN acts primarily as a clearinghouse for information and research produced by member organizations. “However, our most important role,” says Stranahan, who serves as the network coordinator, “has been to help create a larger sense of shared common direction in a time of crisis—a sense that the new-economy movement is much greater than the sum of its diverse parts.”
Several initiatives have begun to deal systematically with fundamental problems of vision, theory and longer-term strategy. The New Economics Institute (NEI), which is in formation, is a joint venture that brings together the former E.F. Schumacher Society and the New Economics Foundation, in Britain. Among the environmentalists and economists involved are Gus Speth, David Orr, Richard Norgaard, Bill McKibben, Neva Goodwin, John Fullerton and Peter Victor.
“For the most part, advocates for change have worked within the current system of political economy,” says Speth, a former adviser to Presidents Carter and Clinton, onetime administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and the recently retired dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, who has emerged as one of the new-economy movement’s leading figures. “But in the end,” Speth declares, “this approach will not succeed when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself.”
NEI is teaming up with other organizations, like the progressive think tank Demos, on several projects. One shared effort is attempting to develop detailed indicators of sustainable economic activity. As many scholars have demonstrated, the gross national product indicator is profoundly misleading: for instance, both work that generates pollution and work that cleans it up are registered as positive in the GNP, although the net real-world economic gain is zero, and there is a huge waste of labor on both sides of the effort. Precisely how to develop a “dashboard” of indicators that measure genuine economic gain, environmental destruction, even human happiness is one of NEI’s high priorities. Another is a detailed econometric model of how a very large economic system can move away from growth as its central objective. Related to both are earlier and ongoing Great Transition studies by the Tellus Institute, a think tank concerned with sustainability.
A less academic effort concerned with vision and long-term institutional and policy reform is the New Economy Working Group, a joint venture of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and YES! Magazine. Among other things, the working group (which includes people, like Speth, who are concurrently involved in other initiatives) is attempting to create detailed designs for state and local banks in support of new-economy institutional development. (The longstanding Bank of North Dakota is one important precedent.) The larger goal of the Working Group is to advance a coherent vision of an economy organized around sustainable local community economies. John Cavanagh, on leave as director of IPS, and his wife, Robin Broad, a professor of international development at American University, emphasize the importance to developing nations of communities that provide economic, social and environmental “rootedness” in an “age of vulnerability.” David Korten, board chair of YES! Magazine and author of Agenda for a New Economy, stresses a radically decentralized domestic free-market vision of “self-organizing” communities that rely almost entirely on local resources. He envisions a trajectory of cultural change that could not only reduce conventionally defined economic growth but even reverse it—in part to make up for past ecological and resource destruction, and also to deal with global warming.
Challenges in the Near-Term ... and Beyond
It is possible, even likely, that the explosion and ongoing development of institutional forms, along with new and more aggressive advocacy, will continue to gather substantial momentum as economic and ecological conditions worsen.It is possible, even likely, that the explosion and ongoing development of institutional forms, along with new and more aggressive advocacy, will continue to gather substantial momentum as economic and ecological conditions worsen. It is by no means obvious, however, how even a very expansive vision of such trends would lead to “systemic” or “transformative” change. Moreover, different new-economy advocates are clearly divided on matters of vision and strategy.
Speth, for instance, sees far-reaching change as essential if the massive threat posed by climate change is ever to be dealt with; he views the various experiments as one vector of development that may help lay groundwork for more profound systemic change that challenges fundamental corporate priorities. Others, like David Levine, executive director of the American Sustainable Business Council, emphasize more immediate reforms and stress the need for a progressive business voice in near-term policy battles. What to do about the power of large private or public corporations in the long term is an unresolved question facing all parties.
Obviously, any movement that urges changing the system faces major challenges. Apart from the central issue of how political power might be built over time, three in particular are clearly daunting: first, many new-economy advocates concerned about global warming and resource limits hold that conventionally defined economic growth must be slowed or even reversed. In theory an economic model that redistributes employment, consumption, and investment in a zero- or reduced-growth system is feasible, but it is a very hard sell in times of unemployment, and it is a direct challenge to the central operating principle of the economic system. It is also a challenge to the priorities of most elements of the progressive coalition that has long based its economic hopes on Keynesian strategies aimed at increasing growth.
A pro-union protester in Madison, Wisconsin on February 18, 2011. David Korten points out that America's once strong middle class came out of New Deal legislation, including strong support of labor unions.
Photo by Rob Chandanais.
A related problem concerns the labor movement. Many new-economy advocates hold progressive views on most issues of concern to labor. In a recent letter supporting progressives in Wisconsin, for instance, the American Sustainable Business Council wrote that “eliminating collective bargaining is misguided, unsustainable and the wrong approach to solving deeper, more systemic economic issues”—hardly the standard Chamber of Commerce point of view! Still, the ultimate goal of reducing growth is incompatible with the interests of most labor leaders.
Although there have been tentative off-the-record explorations of how to narrow differences among groups, no direction for agreement has emerged. That some cooperation is possible is clear, however, from common efforts in support of “green jobs,” such as the Apollo Alliance (which aims to create 5 million “high-quality, green-collar jobs” over the coming ten years) and the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of major labor and environmental groups dedicated to expanding the quality and availability of green jobs. IPS director Cavanagh is working with a small group of theorists and activists on a plan for green jobs that attempts to integrate new-economy concerns with those of labor and other progressive groups, and to link the expanding local efforts with traditional national strategies.
A further line of possible long-term convergence is new interest by the United Steelworkers in alternative forms of economic enterprise—and, importantly, larger-scale efforts. The Steelworkers signed an agreement with the Mondragon Corporation in 2009 to collaborate in establishing unionized cooperatives based on the Mondragon model in manufacturing here and in Canada. (Mondragon, based in the Basque region of Spain, has nearly 100,000 workers and is one of the largest and most successful cooperative enterprises in the world.)
A third and very different challenge is presented by traditional environmental organizations. Speth, a board member of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has found very little willingness among his fellow board members to discuss system-changing strategies, even if understood as long-term developmental efforts. The traditional organizations spend most of their time trying to put out fires in Washington, he notes, and have little capacity to stand back and consider deeper strategic issues—particularly if they involve movement building and challenges to the current orthodoxy.
As citizen uprisings from Tunisia to Madison, Wisconsin, remind us, judgments that serious change cannot take place often miss the quiet buildup of potentially explosive underlying forces of change.For all the difficulties and despite the challenges facing progressive politics, there are reasons to think that new-economy efforts have the capacity to gather momentum as time goes on. The first is obvious: as citizen uprisings from Tunisia to Madison, Wisconsin, remind us, judgments that serious change cannot take place often miss the quiet buildup of potentially explosive underlying forces of change. Nor were the eruptions of many other powerful movements—from late-nineteenth-century populism to civil rights to feminism and gay rights—predicted by those who viewed politics only through the narrow prism of the current moment.
Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance to Build a New Economy
Many years ago, I was legislative director to Senator Gaylord Nelson, known today as the founder of Earth Day. No one in the months and years leading up to Earth Day predicted the extraordinary wave of environmental activism that would follow—especially since environmental demands are largely focused on morally informed, society-wide concerns, unlike those of the labor, civil rights and feminist movements, all of which involve specific gains important to specific people.
In my judgment, new-economy efforts will ultimately pose much more radical systemic challenges than many have contemplated. Nonetheless, new-economy advocates are beginning to tap into sources of moral concern similar to those of the early environmental movement. As the economy continues to falter, the possibility that these advocates—along with many other Americans who share their broader concerns—will help define a viable path toward long-term systemic change is not to be easily dismissed. In fact, it would be in keeping with many earlier chapters of this nation’s history.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative, and the author of Unjust Deserts. He wrote this article for the June 13, 2011 edition of The Nation.
Copyright © 2011 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global.
Interested?
The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Are Subverting an Unfair Economy
All around you are everyday heroes who refuse to be complicit in the economic mistreatment of other people.
Why we can’t go back to the old economy
Five reasons why the old economy isn't working.
10 Common Sense Principles for a New Economy
David Korten: How we can declare our independence from an economy that values profits over people
Meet the people and ideas on the cutting edge of the movement for a new economy.
by Gar Alperovitz
posted May 26, 2011
Editor's Note: When our friends at The Nation asked us to share this article with you, we were excited. We're big admirers of the author, Gar Alperovitz, a visionary thinker on economic possibilities and a former YES! Magazine board member. This article comes at an especially good time—the YES! editorial team is in the midst of work on the fall issue of YES!, which will assemble some of the most promising innovations for solving the jobs crisis. We believe that we aren't going back to the old economy—we can't, and we really don't want to. As Gar describes, we're witnessing the birth of something better: a new economy where livelihoods that are just, sustainable, and meaningful will be available to all.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The idea that we need a “new economy”—that the entire economic system must be radically restructured if critical social and environmental goals are to be met—runs directly counter to the American creed that capitalism as we know it is the best, and only possible, option. Over the past few decades, however, a deepening sense of the profound ecological challenges facing the planet and growing despair at the inability of traditional politics to address economic failings have fueled an extraordinary amount of experimentation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders. Most of the projects, ideas and research efforts have gained traction slowly and with little notice. But in the wake of the financial crisis, they have proliferated and earned a surprising amount of support—and not only among the usual suspects on the left. As the threat of a global climate crisis grows increasingly dire and the nation sinks deeper into an economic slump for which conventional wisdom offers no adequate remedies, more and more Americans are coming to realize that it is time to begin defining, demanding and organizing to build a new-economy movement.
The new economy movement seeks an economy that is increasingly green and socially responsible, and one that is based on rethinking the nature of ownership and the growth paradigm that guides conventional policies.That the term “new economy” has begun to explode into public use in diverse areas may be an indication that the movement has reached a critical stage of development—and a sign that the domination of traditional thinking may be starting to weaken. Although precisely what “changing the system” means is a matter of considerable debate, certain key points are clear: the movement seeks an economy that is increasingly green and socially responsible, and one that is based on rethinking the nature of ownership and the growth paradigm that guides conventional policies.
Democratizing Ownership
This, in turn, leads to an emphasis on institutions whose priorities are broader than those that typically flow from the corporate emphasis on the bottom line. At the cutting edge of experimentation are the growing number of egalitarian, and often green, worker-owned cooperatives. Hundreds of “social enterprises” that use profits for environmental, social or community-serving goals are also expanding rapidly. In many communities urban agricultural efforts have made common cause with groups concerned about healthy nonprocessed food. And all this is to say nothing of 1.6 million nonprofit corporations that often cross over into economic activity.
For-profits have developed alternatives as well. There are, for example, more than 11,000 companies owned entirely or in significant part by some 13.6 million employees. Most have adopted Employee Stock Ownership Plans; these so-called ESOPs democratize ownership, though only some of them involve participatory management. W.L. Gore, maker of Gore-Tex and many other products, is a leading example: the company has some 9,000 employee-owners at forty-five locations worldwide and generates annual sales of $2.5 billion. Litecontrol, which manufactures high-efficiency, high-performance architectural lighting fixtures, operates as a less typical ESOP; the Massachusetts-based company is entirely owned by roughly 200 employees and fully unionized with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
A different large-scale corporation, Seventh Generation—the nation’s leader in “green” detergents, dishwashing soap, baby wipes, tissues, paper towels and other household products—has internal policies requiring that no one be paid more than fourteen times the lowest base pay or five times higher than the average employee.
In certain states, companies that want to brandish their new-economy values can now also register as B Corporations. B Corp registration (the “B” stands for “benefit”) allows a company to subordinate profits to social and environmental goals. Without this legal authorization, a CEO could in theory be sued by stockholders if profit-making is not his sole objective. Such status ensures that specific goals are met by different companies (manufacturers have different requirements from retail stores). It also helps with social marketing and branding. Thus, King Arthur Flour, a highly successful Vermont-based, 100 percent employee-owned ESOP, can be explicit, stating that “making money in itself is not our highest priority.” Four states—Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey and Virginia—have passed legislation that permits B Corp chartering, with many others likely to follow.
New Economy, New Ways to Work
Cooperatives may not be a new idea—with at least 130 million members (more than one in three Americans), co-ops have broad political and cultural support—but they are becoming increasingly important in new-economy efforts. A widely discussed strategy in Cleveland suggests a possible next stage of development: the Evergreen Cooperatives are linked through a nonprofit corporation, a revolving loan fund and the common goal of rebuilding the economically devastated Greater University Circle neighborhoods. A thoroughly green industrial-scale laundry, a solar installation company and a soon-to-be-opened large-scale commercial greenhouse (capable of producing about 5 million heads of lettuce a year) make up the first of a group of linked co-ops projected to expand in years to come. The effort is unique in that Evergreen is building on the purchasing power of the area’s large hospital, university and other anchor institutions, which buy some $3 billion of goods and services a year—virtually none of which, until recently, had come from local business. Senator Sherrod Brown is expected to introduce national legislation aimed at developing Evergreen-style models in other cities. (Full disclosure: the Democracy Collaborative of the University of Maryland, which I co-founded, has played an important role in Evergreen’s development.)
Leading Thinkers and Organizations
Along with the rapid expansion of small and medium-size businesses committed to building the new economy has come a sense of community and shared mission. Staff, managers and owners at many of these companies are finding more opportunities to share ideas and pool resources with like-minded professionals. The American Sustainable Business Council, a growing alliance of 150,000 business professionals and thirty business organizations, has emerged as a leading venue for such activity. Most members are “triple bottom line” companies and social enterprises committed to the environment and social outcomes as well as profits.
In many ways the council operates like any advocacy group attempting to lobby, educate and promote legislation and strategies. Thirty-five leaders recently met with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, for instance, to make clear that the US Chamber of Commerce does not speak for all American business, to seek her help with specific projects and issues, and to fill her in on a range of environmentally and socially concerned economic efforts that definitely do not do business as usual. The names of some of the council’s constituent organizations offer a sense of what this means: Green America, Business for Shared Prosperity, Social Enterprise Alliance, Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, California Association for Microenterprise Opportunity. Although ecological concerns are at the top, the council’s agenda is highly supportive of other progressive social and economic goals. A recent blog by Jeffrey Hollender, chair of the council’s advisory board (and former CEO of Seventh Generation), attacked the US Chamber of Commerce for “fighting democracy and destroying America’s economic future.”
Growing Local: Interview with Michelle Long
Michelle Long helped make Bellingham, Washington a national leader in urban sustainability. With BALLE, she's taking her vision to cities around North America.
The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), made up of more than 22,000 small businesses, is another rapidly growing organization that works to strengthen new-economy networks. BALLE brings together locally owned efforts dedicated to building ecologically sustainable “living economies,” with the ambitious long-term goal of developing a global system of interconnected local communities that function in harmony with their ecosystems. The group’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Hub, the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, recognizes area businesses that “demonstrate a strong social and environmental impact while also making a profit.” A recent example is GreenLine Paper, a company that produces green products and works to preserve forests and prevent climate change. By participating in the network, GreenLine Paper gains brand recognition and promotion, as well as marketing, policy support, technical assistance and access to a like-minded coalition of businesses.
“Our most important role has been to help create a larger sense of shared common direction in a time of crisis—a sense that the new-economy movement is much greater than the sum of its diverse parts.”Sarah Stranahan, a longtime board member at the Needmor Fund, recalls having a sense in late 2009 that large numbers of Americans were beginning to understand that something is profoundly wrong with the economy. Bearing this in mind, with a small group of other activists she brought leaders of diverse organizations together in early September of that year to explore ways to build a larger movement.
The New Economy Network (NEN), a loosely organized umbrella effort comprising roughly 200 to 250 new-economy leaders and organizations, was the low-budget product of their meeting. NEN acts primarily as a clearinghouse for information and research produced by member organizations. “However, our most important role,” says Stranahan, who serves as the network coordinator, “has been to help create a larger sense of shared common direction in a time of crisis—a sense that the new-economy movement is much greater than the sum of its diverse parts.”
Several initiatives have begun to deal systematically with fundamental problems of vision, theory and longer-term strategy. The New Economics Institute (NEI), which is in formation, is a joint venture that brings together the former E.F. Schumacher Society and the New Economics Foundation, in Britain. Among the environmentalists and economists involved are Gus Speth, David Orr, Richard Norgaard, Bill McKibben, Neva Goodwin, John Fullerton and Peter Victor.
“For the most part, advocates for change have worked within the current system of political economy,” says Speth, a former adviser to Presidents Carter and Clinton, onetime administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and the recently retired dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, who has emerged as one of the new-economy movement’s leading figures. “But in the end,” Speth declares, “this approach will not succeed when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself.”
NEI is teaming up with other organizations, like the progressive think tank Demos, on several projects. One shared effort is attempting to develop detailed indicators of sustainable economic activity. As many scholars have demonstrated, the gross national product indicator is profoundly misleading: for instance, both work that generates pollution and work that cleans it up are registered as positive in the GNP, although the net real-world economic gain is zero, and there is a huge waste of labor on both sides of the effort. Precisely how to develop a “dashboard” of indicators that measure genuine economic gain, environmental destruction, even human happiness is one of NEI’s high priorities. Another is a detailed econometric model of how a very large economic system can move away from growth as its central objective. Related to both are earlier and ongoing Great Transition studies by the Tellus Institute, a think tank concerned with sustainability.
A less academic effort concerned with vision and long-term institutional and policy reform is the New Economy Working Group, a joint venture of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and YES! Magazine. Among other things, the working group (which includes people, like Speth, who are concurrently involved in other initiatives) is attempting to create detailed designs for state and local banks in support of new-economy institutional development. (The longstanding Bank of North Dakota is one important precedent.) The larger goal of the Working Group is to advance a coherent vision of an economy organized around sustainable local community economies. John Cavanagh, on leave as director of IPS, and his wife, Robin Broad, a professor of international development at American University, emphasize the importance to developing nations of communities that provide economic, social and environmental “rootedness” in an “age of vulnerability.” David Korten, board chair of YES! Magazine and author of Agenda for a New Economy, stresses a radically decentralized domestic free-market vision of “self-organizing” communities that rely almost entirely on local resources. He envisions a trajectory of cultural change that could not only reduce conventionally defined economic growth but even reverse it—in part to make up for past ecological and resource destruction, and also to deal with global warming.
Challenges in the Near-Term ... and Beyond
It is possible, even likely, that the explosion and ongoing development of institutional forms, along with new and more aggressive advocacy, will continue to gather substantial momentum as economic and ecological conditions worsen.It is possible, even likely, that the explosion and ongoing development of institutional forms, along with new and more aggressive advocacy, will continue to gather substantial momentum as economic and ecological conditions worsen. It is by no means obvious, however, how even a very expansive vision of such trends would lead to “systemic” or “transformative” change. Moreover, different new-economy advocates are clearly divided on matters of vision and strategy.
Speth, for instance, sees far-reaching change as essential if the massive threat posed by climate change is ever to be dealt with; he views the various experiments as one vector of development that may help lay groundwork for more profound systemic change that challenges fundamental corporate priorities. Others, like David Levine, executive director of the American Sustainable Business Council, emphasize more immediate reforms and stress the need for a progressive business voice in near-term policy battles. What to do about the power of large private or public corporations in the long term is an unresolved question facing all parties.
Obviously, any movement that urges changing the system faces major challenges. Apart from the central issue of how political power might be built over time, three in particular are clearly daunting: first, many new-economy advocates concerned about global warming and resource limits hold that conventionally defined economic growth must be slowed or even reversed. In theory an economic model that redistributes employment, consumption, and investment in a zero- or reduced-growth system is feasible, but it is a very hard sell in times of unemployment, and it is a direct challenge to the central operating principle of the economic system. It is also a challenge to the priorities of most elements of the progressive coalition that has long based its economic hopes on Keynesian strategies aimed at increasing growth.
A pro-union protester in Madison, Wisconsin on February 18, 2011. David Korten points out that America's once strong middle class came out of New Deal legislation, including strong support of labor unions.
Photo by Rob Chandanais.
A related problem concerns the labor movement. Many new-economy advocates hold progressive views on most issues of concern to labor. In a recent letter supporting progressives in Wisconsin, for instance, the American Sustainable Business Council wrote that “eliminating collective bargaining is misguided, unsustainable and the wrong approach to solving deeper, more systemic economic issues”—hardly the standard Chamber of Commerce point of view! Still, the ultimate goal of reducing growth is incompatible with the interests of most labor leaders.
Although there have been tentative off-the-record explorations of how to narrow differences among groups, no direction for agreement has emerged. That some cooperation is possible is clear, however, from common efforts in support of “green jobs,” such as the Apollo Alliance (which aims to create 5 million “high-quality, green-collar jobs” over the coming ten years) and the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of major labor and environmental groups dedicated to expanding the quality and availability of green jobs. IPS director Cavanagh is working with a small group of theorists and activists on a plan for green jobs that attempts to integrate new-economy concerns with those of labor and other progressive groups, and to link the expanding local efforts with traditional national strategies.
A further line of possible long-term convergence is new interest by the United Steelworkers in alternative forms of economic enterprise—and, importantly, larger-scale efforts. The Steelworkers signed an agreement with the Mondragon Corporation in 2009 to collaborate in establishing unionized cooperatives based on the Mondragon model in manufacturing here and in Canada. (Mondragon, based in the Basque region of Spain, has nearly 100,000 workers and is one of the largest and most successful cooperative enterprises in the world.)
A third and very different challenge is presented by traditional environmental organizations. Speth, a board member of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has found very little willingness among his fellow board members to discuss system-changing strategies, even if understood as long-term developmental efforts. The traditional organizations spend most of their time trying to put out fires in Washington, he notes, and have little capacity to stand back and consider deeper strategic issues—particularly if they involve movement building and challenges to the current orthodoxy.
As citizen uprisings from Tunisia to Madison, Wisconsin, remind us, judgments that serious change cannot take place often miss the quiet buildup of potentially explosive underlying forces of change.For all the difficulties and despite the challenges facing progressive politics, there are reasons to think that new-economy efforts have the capacity to gather momentum as time goes on. The first is obvious: as citizen uprisings from Tunisia to Madison, Wisconsin, remind us, judgments that serious change cannot take place often miss the quiet buildup of potentially explosive underlying forces of change. Nor were the eruptions of many other powerful movements—from late-nineteenth-century populism to civil rights to feminism and gay rights—predicted by those who viewed politics only through the narrow prism of the current moment.
Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance to Build a New Economy
Many years ago, I was legislative director to Senator Gaylord Nelson, known today as the founder of Earth Day. No one in the months and years leading up to Earth Day predicted the extraordinary wave of environmental activism that would follow—especially since environmental demands are largely focused on morally informed, society-wide concerns, unlike those of the labor, civil rights and feminist movements, all of which involve specific gains important to specific people.
In my judgment, new-economy efforts will ultimately pose much more radical systemic challenges than many have contemplated. Nonetheless, new-economy advocates are beginning to tap into sources of moral concern similar to those of the early environmental movement. As the economy continues to falter, the possibility that these advocates—along with many other Americans who share their broader concerns—will help define a viable path toward long-term systemic change is not to be easily dismissed. In fact, it would be in keeping with many earlier chapters of this nation’s history.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative, and the author of Unjust Deserts. He wrote this article for the June 13, 2011 edition of The Nation.
Copyright © 2011 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global.
Interested?
The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Are Subverting an Unfair Economy
All around you are everyday heroes who refuse to be complicit in the economic mistreatment of other people.
Why we can’t go back to the old economy
Five reasons why the old economy isn't working.
10 Common Sense Principles for a New Economy
David Korten: How we can declare our independence from an economy that values profits over people
Friday, May 27, 2011
The Spanish Revolution
Spain's Enormous, Inspiring Protests Are Rooted in Restoring Democracy and Decent Life in an Era of Turbocapitalism
What we are seeing in Spain goes way beyond a student revolt. It's a revolt that lays bare a profound ethical crisis convulsing a whole society.
by Pepe Escobar of Asia Times
May 24, 2011 |
� "No one expects the #spanishrevolution." That's one of the signs in Madrid's iconic - and occupied - Puerta del Sol Square; Monty Python revised for the age of Twitter.
"I was in Paris in May '68 and I'm very emotional. I'm 72 years old." That's one of the signs in Barcelona's iconic - and occupied - Plaza Catalunya. The barricades revised as a Gandhian sit-in.
The exhilarating northern African winds of the great 2011 Arab revolt/spring have crossed the Mediterranean and hit Iberia with a vengeance. In an unprecedented social rebellion, the Generation Y in Spain is forcefully protesting - among other things - the stinging economic crisis; mass unemployment at a staggering 45% among less than 30-year-olds and th e ossified Spanish political system that treats the citizen as a mere consumer.
This citizens' movement is issuing petitions that get five signatures per second; it can be followed on Twitter (#spanishrevolution); streaming live from Puerta del Sol at Soltv.tv; to see its reach, click here. Reverberations are being felt all across Spain and word-wide - from Los Angeles to Sydney. A mini-French revolution started at the Bastille in Paris. Italians are planning their revolutions from Rome and Milan to Florence and Bari.
Outraged of the world, unite
They call themselves los indignados - "the outraged". Puerta del Sol is their Tahrir Square, a self-sufficient village complete with working groups, mobile first-aid clinic, and volunteers taking care of everything from cleaning to keeping an Internet signal. The May 15 movement - or 15-M, as it's known in Spain - was born as a demonstration by university students which spontaneously morphed into an open-ended sit-in meant to "contaminate" Spain via Facebook and Twitter and thus turn it into a crucial social bridge between Northern Africa and Europe.
They were only 40 people at the beginning. Now there are tens of thousands in over 50 Spanish cities - and counting. Soon there could be millions. Crucially, this is without the support of any political party or institution, trade union or mass media (in Spain, totally exposed to ridicule by political power). That's extraordinary in a country not exactly known by its tradition of dissent or the power of citizen organization.
The outraged are pacifists, apolitical and altruists. This is not only about the unemployed, "no future" youth - but an inter-generational phenomenon, with a middle-class crossover. This full stop to Spanish inertia - as in the sign "the French and the Greek fight while the Spanish win on soccer" - implies a profound rejection of the enormous abyss between the political class and the population, just like in the rest of Europe (Greek and Icelandic flags are seen side-by-side with the Egyptian flag.)
The outraged want citizens to regain their voices - as in a participative democracy embodied by neighborhood associations, and in favor of the right to vote for immigrants. Practically, they want a reform of the Spanish electoral law; more popular say on public budgets; political and fiscal reform; increased taxes for higher incomes; a higher minimum wage; and more control over big banking and financial capitalism.
Early this year, students in London protested en-masse against the rise in university tuition costs. The potential for protest is huge all across Europe. In Mediterranean Europe, the lack of prospects is absolutely bleak - from Generation Y to unemployed thirty-somethings stacked with diplomas. Even though the context is markedly different - in Northern Africa the fight is against dictatorships - the Arab Spring has shown young Europeans that mobilized citizens are able to fight for more social justice.
The Spanish left has tried to co-opt the movement. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodroriguez Zapatero - badly bruised by these past Sunday elections, obviously boycotted by 15-M - said they must be listened to. The right, predictably, privileges a Hosni Mubarak approach, even asking the Ministry of Interior to go Medieval, as the former Egyptian president did. Right-wing media accuse the outraged of being communists, anti-system, urban guerrillas and having relations with the Basque separatists from ETA. The only thing missing was an al-Qaeda connection.
The outraged respond they are not anti-system; "it's the system that it's against us." Their original manifesto condemned the Spanish political class as a whole, plus corporate media, as allies to financial capital; those that have caused and are benefiting from the economic crisis. The outraged J'accuse includes the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, financial risk agencies and the World Bank.
The Spanish economy is in fact being controlled by the IMF. Whether or not he was a reformer, the IMF under disgraced Dominique Strauss-Kahn's unleashed major social devastation over Spain, Greece and Portugal. It's not only the unemployment rate of 45% for under-30-year-olds in Spain; it's pensions and wages reduced by 15%. The IMF is leading the way for the economies of southern Europe to, in a nutshell, regress.
It's as if the 15-M movement had been electrified by that famous dictum by Polish Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg - according to which capitalism is unredeemable in its antagonism to true democracy. The record shows that's exactly what's happening in the industrialized North as well as in the global South.
The new 1968
So this goes way beyond a student revolt. It's a revolt that lays bare a profound ethical crisis convulsing a whole society. And it goes way beyond the economy; this is a movement seriously inquiring over the place of human beings in turbo-capitalist society.
No wonder baby boomers - the parents of Generation Y - cannot but be reminded of the late, great German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Compared with this breath of fresh air amid the asphyxiating social and economic landscape in Spain and great swathes of Europe, how not be reminded of Marcuse in a conference in Vancouver in 1969, talking about a worldwide student rebellion.
Marcuse then evoked how French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was asked the same question - why these rebellions everywhere? Sartre said the answer was very simple - no sophisticated reasoning necessary. Young people were rebelling because they were asphyxiated. Marcuse always maintained this was the best explanation for this rebel yell denouncing a structural crisis of capitalism.
Marcuse was an ultra-sharp analyst of the degrading of culture as a form of repression, and the necessity of a critical elite capable of smashing the totalitarian opium of consumer culture (the outraged are also performing this role).
Marcuse identified the French and the American 1968 as a total protest against specific ills, but at the same time a protest against a total system of values, a total system of objectives. Young people didn't want to keep enduring the culture of established society; they refuted not only economic conditions and political institutions but also a rotten, global system of values. In 1968, they were realists; they were demanding the impossible. Today, one of their signs read, "If you don't let us dream, we won't let you sleep."
Bob Dylan turns 70 this Tuesday. In Bob We Trust; he won't tell us, but deep in his heart and mind he knows where los indignados are coming from. If, as he wrote in Absolutely Sweet Marie, to live outside the law you must be honest, los indignados couldn't be more honest themselves, because they refuse to live under this law that is in fact killing them as well as most of us.
That's why it feels so great to be stuck inside of Madrid with the Cairo blues again.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
What we are seeing in Spain goes way beyond a student revolt. It's a revolt that lays bare a profound ethical crisis convulsing a whole society.
by Pepe Escobar of Asia Times
May 24, 2011 |
� "No one expects the #spanishrevolution." That's one of the signs in Madrid's iconic - and occupied - Puerta del Sol Square; Monty Python revised for the age of Twitter.
"I was in Paris in May '68 and I'm very emotional. I'm 72 years old." That's one of the signs in Barcelona's iconic - and occupied - Plaza Catalunya. The barricades revised as a Gandhian sit-in.
The exhilarating northern African winds of the great 2011 Arab revolt/spring have crossed the Mediterranean and hit Iberia with a vengeance. In an unprecedented social rebellion, the Generation Y in Spain is forcefully protesting - among other things - the stinging economic crisis; mass unemployment at a staggering 45% among less than 30-year-olds and th e ossified Spanish political system that treats the citizen as a mere consumer.
This citizens' movement is issuing petitions that get five signatures per second; it can be followed on Twitter (#spanishrevolution); streaming live from Puerta del Sol at Soltv.tv; to see its reach, click here. Reverberations are being felt all across Spain and word-wide - from Los Angeles to Sydney. A mini-French revolution started at the Bastille in Paris. Italians are planning their revolutions from Rome and Milan to Florence and Bari.
Outraged of the world, unite
They call themselves los indignados - "the outraged". Puerta del Sol is their Tahrir Square, a self-sufficient village complete with working groups, mobile first-aid clinic, and volunteers taking care of everything from cleaning to keeping an Internet signal. The May 15 movement - or 15-M, as it's known in Spain - was born as a demonstration by university students which spontaneously morphed into an open-ended sit-in meant to "contaminate" Spain via Facebook and Twitter and thus turn it into a crucial social bridge between Northern Africa and Europe.
They were only 40 people at the beginning. Now there are tens of thousands in over 50 Spanish cities - and counting. Soon there could be millions. Crucially, this is without the support of any political party or institution, trade union or mass media (in Spain, totally exposed to ridicule by political power). That's extraordinary in a country not exactly known by its tradition of dissent or the power of citizen organization.
The outraged are pacifists, apolitical and altruists. This is not only about the unemployed, "no future" youth - but an inter-generational phenomenon, with a middle-class crossover. This full stop to Spanish inertia - as in the sign "the French and the Greek fight while the Spanish win on soccer" - implies a profound rejection of the enormous abyss between the political class and the population, just like in the rest of Europe (Greek and Icelandic flags are seen side-by-side with the Egyptian flag.)
The outraged want citizens to regain their voices - as in a participative democracy embodied by neighborhood associations, and in favor of the right to vote for immigrants. Practically, they want a reform of the Spanish electoral law; more popular say on public budgets; political and fiscal reform; increased taxes for higher incomes; a higher minimum wage; and more control over big banking and financial capitalism.
Early this year, students in London protested en-masse against the rise in university tuition costs. The potential for protest is huge all across Europe. In Mediterranean Europe, the lack of prospects is absolutely bleak - from Generation Y to unemployed thirty-somethings stacked with diplomas. Even though the context is markedly different - in Northern Africa the fight is against dictatorships - the Arab Spring has shown young Europeans that mobilized citizens are able to fight for more social justice.
The Spanish left has tried to co-opt the movement. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodroriguez Zapatero - badly bruised by these past Sunday elections, obviously boycotted by 15-M - said they must be listened to. The right, predictably, privileges a Hosni Mubarak approach, even asking the Ministry of Interior to go Medieval, as the former Egyptian president did. Right-wing media accuse the outraged of being communists, anti-system, urban guerrillas and having relations with the Basque separatists from ETA. The only thing missing was an al-Qaeda connection.
The outraged respond they are not anti-system; "it's the system that it's against us." Their original manifesto condemned the Spanish political class as a whole, plus corporate media, as allies to financial capital; those that have caused and are benefiting from the economic crisis. The outraged J'accuse includes the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, financial risk agencies and the World Bank.
The Spanish economy is in fact being controlled by the IMF. Whether or not he was a reformer, the IMF under disgraced Dominique Strauss-Kahn's unleashed major social devastation over Spain, Greece and Portugal. It's not only the unemployment rate of 45% for under-30-year-olds in Spain; it's pensions and wages reduced by 15%. The IMF is leading the way for the economies of southern Europe to, in a nutshell, regress.
It's as if the 15-M movement had been electrified by that famous dictum by Polish Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg - according to which capitalism is unredeemable in its antagonism to true democracy. The record shows that's exactly what's happening in the industrialized North as well as in the global South.
The new 1968
So this goes way beyond a student revolt. It's a revolt that lays bare a profound ethical crisis convulsing a whole society. And it goes way beyond the economy; this is a movement seriously inquiring over the place of human beings in turbo-capitalist society.
No wonder baby boomers - the parents of Generation Y - cannot but be reminded of the late, great German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Compared with this breath of fresh air amid the asphyxiating social and economic landscape in Spain and great swathes of Europe, how not be reminded of Marcuse in a conference in Vancouver in 1969, talking about a worldwide student rebellion.
Marcuse then evoked how French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was asked the same question - why these rebellions everywhere? Sartre said the answer was very simple - no sophisticated reasoning necessary. Young people were rebelling because they were asphyxiated. Marcuse always maintained this was the best explanation for this rebel yell denouncing a structural crisis of capitalism.
Marcuse was an ultra-sharp analyst of the degrading of culture as a form of repression, and the necessity of a critical elite capable of smashing the totalitarian opium of consumer culture (the outraged are also performing this role).
Marcuse identified the French and the American 1968 as a total protest against specific ills, but at the same time a protest against a total system of values, a total system of objectives. Young people didn't want to keep enduring the culture of established society; they refuted not only economic conditions and political institutions but also a rotten, global system of values. In 1968, they were realists; they were demanding the impossible. Today, one of their signs read, "If you don't let us dream, we won't let you sleep."
Bob Dylan turns 70 this Tuesday. In Bob We Trust; he won't tell us, but deep in his heart and mind he knows where los indignados are coming from. If, as he wrote in Absolutely Sweet Marie, to live outside the law you must be honest, los indignados couldn't be more honest themselves, because they refuse to live under this law that is in fact killing them as well as most of us.
That's why it feels so great to be stuck inside of Madrid with the Cairo blues again.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
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