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How Coca-Cola's Ruthless Business Tactics Created a Despicable Global Powerhouse

Jill Richardson, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:27:00 -0700

Mark Pendergast's book, "For God, Country, and Coca-Cola" guides readers through decades of shrewd marketing campaigns and the company's ugly history.

For God, Country, and Coca-Cola by Mark Pendergast is the definitive history of the product so many see as a symbol of America itself. This impressive tome – recently released as a third edition with added new material – is not a critique of Coca-Cola, nor is it a fan’s tribute, as Pendergast reveals things the Coca-Cola Company doesn’t want you to know. (Yes, it used to contain cocaine.) He even reveals the drink’s original secret formula (which is less exciting than you might think).

Coca-Cola is not fascinating for what it is – colored sugar water with bubbles – but for what it represents. And that’s a point long known by the company’s marketers, with the exception of when they forgot it during the New Coke fiasco in the 1980s. Today, marketing students in business schools everywhere study that famous gaff.

Despite the decades-old slogan, “Delicious and Refreshing,” people do not drink Coca-Cola for the taste. They drink it because they associate it with positive things like friendship, fun, patriotism, and athleticism. Careful to market the drink to all people, everywhere, without alienating anyone, the ads are often vague. “Coke is It!” What is “it”? It’s whatever you want it to be, just as long as it makes you want to buy more Coke!

The book guides readers through the decades of marketing campaigns that built this image, most significantly during World War II, when Coca-Cola was made available to U.S. soldiers everywhere in the world, often at the government’s expense. When sales slumped, the answer was never changing the flagship product; it was a new ad campaign. Remind consumers that Coke = fun (or simpler times, or hope, or whatever feeling they crave) and they will drink more of it.

Because constant, never-ending growth is seen as essential, the other necessity is finding new channels to facilitate more Coke-drinking than ever before. Today, you can be 50 miles from nowhere in any country except Cuba and North Korea and if you crave an ice-cold Coca-Cola, you can get one. Even in places where few have clean drinking water or electricity, both needed to produce ice-cold Coke, some enterprising entrepreneur will have electricity and a cooler and plenty of Coke. The same cannot be said of nearly any other product.

The New Coke failure punctuates this strange phenomenon – that the world loves and guzzles an unhealthy beverage, but not for its good taste. Pepsi showed that in blind taste tests, more people prefer Pepsi over Coke. New Coke was tastier than both Coke and Pepsi in blind taste tests. Surely consumers would love it. Except, they didn’t. They wanted fun, hope, patriotism, and everything else they associated with good, old-fashioned Coca-Cola, not some new, better-tasting concoction.

Readers seeking the dirt on Coca-Cola’s sordid past with Columbian paramilitaries and Guatemalan death squads will find these episodes covered briefly in this book. But the completeness of the company’s history in this book paints a bigger picture, and Coca-Cola’s tangles with death squads fit in as just one piece.

This is a company devoted to, above all else, making as much money as possible and selling as much Coca-Cola as possible. Period. Nazis get thirsty, too, you know. In almost every case, the company tried to please everyone and sell to everyone, without taking sides, unless it had no choice.

It’s no good that Coca-Cola did business with a Guatemalan bottler who allegedly hired death squads to murder employees trying to unionize. But that is all part of a larger pattern, a larger scandal – although there’s no conspiracy at all. The drive to increase profits and sales and market share at all cost is the company’s story, plain and simple. It took us from a 6.5-ounce drink only available at soda fountains to one available everywhere in sizes as large as 64 ounces.

Coca-Cola told us it wanted to teach the world to sing, but it’s far more likely it is giving the world diabetes. Today, a small Coke at McDonalds is 16 ounces. Pendergast, ever the balanced journalist presenting both sides, fails to definitely state that Coca-Cola is unhealthy. He generously points out that Coca-Cola creates jobs and donates to charity, even though he notes the company’s policy of “strategic philanthropy” – i.e. using “charitable” donations to gain access to valuable markets, particularly children.

The book is a long and somewhat exhausting read, but it’s also a captivating history of the development of America’s consumer culture (and terrible dietary habits) and it contains fascinating profiles of the men (yes, mostly men) behind the company, making readers wonder what a psychologist might have to say about these often tyrannical, driven workaholics.

Here are some answers Pendergast gave about his book and the company he wrote about.

Jill Richardson: Why did you choose the title For God, Country, and Coca-Cola?

Mark Pendergast: Coca-Cola has been a kind of religion to many people, including the inventor, John Pemberton, who died two years after he came up with it, and Asa Candler, who took it over and used to lead the singing of "Onward Christian Soldiers" at his sales meetings.

These were days when the drink was under attack for having cocaine in it and even afterwards for its caffeine content. So they felt like early Christian martyrs in a way, fighting for a just cause. Candler called Coca-Cola "a boon to mankind." Coke employees have always joked that they have Coca-Cola syrup flowing in their veins.

The drink has also become a kind of religion for consumers, a symbol of the American way of life as well. During World War II the drink was deemed an "essential morale booster" for the troops, and it was served in lieu of communion wine during the Battle of the Bulge. When New Coke was introduced in 1985, people wrote anguished letters as if they had killed God. Here is an actual letter I quoted in the book: "There are only two things in my life: God and Coca-Cola. Now you have taken one of those things away from me." I could go on....

JR: Can you explain Coca-Cola's relationship with the two ingredients in its name, coca and kola nuts? How much cocaine was initially in the product and when was it removed?

MP: Coca-Cola was named for its two principal drug ingredients. Coca leaf from Peru contained cocaine. Kola nut from Ghana contained caffeine. Original Coca-Cola had a very small amount of cocaine in a six-ounce drink, about 4.3 milligrams. The company took out all but a minuscule amount of cocaine in 1903 and the final amount in 1928.

JR: You imply in the book that it's attempted to sugarcoat (no pun intended) this part of its past, saying at some points that the product never contained cocaine. Is that true? Can you elaborate?

MP: Every time I go to the World of Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, I ask the guides if Coca-Cola ever contained cocaine. They assure me that it did not. The official company line seems to be that Coca-Cola never contained added cocaine -- i.e., they didn't add white powdered cocaine, which is true. But it did contain fluid extract of coca leaf, which contains cocaine. For years, the company line has also been that the name "Coca-Cola" is just a "euphonious combination of words" -- i.e., it sounds nice. True, but the drink was also named for its two principal drug sources.

JR: How did Coca-Cola use World War II to establish its dominance abroad? And what impact did its role in the war have for their market at home?

Robert Woodruff, the head of Coca-Cola, declared shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor that, "We will see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs our company." Coke was subsequently declared an essential product and Coke men called Technical Observers were sent overseas in army uniforms at government expense to establish 64 bottling plants behind the lines. As a result, Coca-Cola was put in position for global expansion in the postwar world.

American soldiers came home with an overwhelming preference for Coca-Cola. In a 1948 poll of veterans, conducted by American Legion Magazine, 63.67 percent specified Coca-Cola as their preferred soft drink, with Pepsi receiving a lame 7.78 percent of the vote. In the same year, Coke’s gross profit on sales reached a whopping $126 million, as opposed to Pepsi’s $25 million; the contrast in net after-tax income was even more telling, with Coke’s $35.6 million towering over Pepsi’s pathetic $3.2 million.

Soon after the war, when the Army quizzed 650 recruits, 21 had never drunk milk, but only one soldier had never sampled a Coke. As the company’s unpublished history stated, the wartime program “made friends and customers for home consumption of 11,000,000 GIs [and] did [a] sampling and expansion job abroad which would [otherwise] have taken 25 years and millions of dollars.” The war was over, and it appeared, at least for the moment, that Coca-Cola had won it.

JR: The impact when Coca-Cola entered new markets was increased sales for all beverages, not just Coca-Cola -- and less consumption of water and milk. Can you explain that?

Yes. As Coca-Cola and subsequently other competing soda companies increased marketing and other campaigns to out-do one another, that's what expanded the total soda market. When the market for soft drinks expanded, it helped competitors such as Pepsi, and when people are paying attention to the cola wars, they are less focused on water or milk.

JR: Coca-Cola's history practically reads like a marketing textbook. Can you tell us about its revelation of the little girl's Pooh bear? Why do Coke-drinkers love Coke so much?

Archie Lee, who was the ad man behind "The Pause That Refreshes" slogan during the Depression, noticed during a beach vacation, that his four-year-old daughter lavished such attention on her Pooh bear that other children fought over it, though other toys appeared more attractive. Lee took the incident as a parable. “It isn’t what a product is,” he wrote to Robert Woodruff, “but what it does that interests us”—and set out to plant the proper thoughts about Coca-Cola, which he wanted to make as popular and well-loved as the Pooh bear.

Coke lovers care so much about the drink for many reasons -- not least the ubiquitous, effective advertising that associates the drink with youth, energy, happiness. But many people also really do associate the drink with some of the best times in their lives.

JR: How has soda consumption changed in the U.S. from the drink's introduction over a century ago, back when a serving was 6.5 ounces? Was there ever a "turning point" when Americans switched from more modest per capita soda consumption to the amount they drink today, or has it been a gradual change over time?

MP: Amazingly, Coca-Cola was served in 6.5 ounce bottles for a nickel until 1955, when King-Size Coke was finally introduced. (“King-Size” drinks were 10 and 12 ounces, smaller than a McDonald’s small today.) Since then, the sizes grew steadily larger, and PET bottles meant they wouldn't break and weren't too heavy. Super-size me, indeed. But over the last decade, concern over the obesity epidemic has made Coca-Cola back off a bit, and now the company has introduced smaller mini-cans, along with the huge containers.

JR: Over the years, Coca-Cola has dealt with Nazis, dictators, South Africa's apartheid government, and even allegedly Guatemalan death squads. Should consumers hold Coke accountable for this dark part of its history, or is it all water under the bridge? Do you agree with Coke's position that it doesn't play politics, it just sells soda?

MP: Of course, the company, like any other business, should be held accountable for its actions, although as you suggest, many of these episodes are safely in the past. The Guatemalan death squads were in the late 1970s. Paramilitaries in Colombia killed union employees in similar fashion in Coke bottling plants in the 1990s.

Quite recently, human rights violations have once again occurred against Guatemalan bottling employees. The Coca-Cola Company has usually attempted to distance itself from such violence, saying that it doesn't control its bottlers, but that seems disingenuous, since the bottlers rely on Coca-Cola syrup from Big Coke.

On the other hand, let me point out that while Coke did business inside South Africa during the apartheid regime, it left the country for a while and then was very instrumental in helping to ease a peaceful transition to black rule under Nelson Mandela.

JR: The past decade has ushered in an enormous change in Coca-Cola's product portfolio. How has it changed and why? Do you think the day will come when Coca-Cola's flagship product is no longer its top seller?

MP: Coca-Cola has diversified in the face of increased competition from other types of beverages and in response to concern over the obesity epidemic. It purchased Glaceau, maker of Vitaminwater, for $4.1 billion, for instance, in 2007. Today the Coca-Cola Company sells 3,500 beverages worldwide, and about a quarter of them are low- or no-calorie.

The future is hard to predict, but I don't think that Coca-Cola will lose its place as the flagship product in the foreseeable future -- but I do predict that the combined sales of Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Zero will eventually surpass sales of regular sugary Coca-Cola.

Shocker: Republicans Fight Obama Plan to Privatize the Hugely Popular, Cheap Energy Source of the TVA

Gar Alperovitz, Thomas Hanna, AlterNet — Sun, 19 May 2013 16:34:00 -0700

Obama's scheme to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority gets push-back from Tennessee Republicans who know the benefits of a publicly-owned facility.

Buried within the fine print of the 2014 Obama budget is a startling bit of history-changing policy. The government, the administration says, should consider selling off the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the nation’s largest publicly operated—that is, “socialist”—institutions, and the largest public power provider in the country.

The TVA is a non-profi, free-standing public authority established by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression—a very large utility, if you like. It provides 165 billion kilowatt hours of power to 9 million Americans, has $11.2 billion in sales revenue, employs more than 12,500 people, and provides other educational, training and related services (such as navigation and land management, flood control, and economic development) to the people in the states and region around the Tennessee river basin.

Strikingly, it’s the free-market Republicans who object to this proposed privatization. Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who has vehemently opposed government tax credits and subsidies for renewable energy, calls the proposal “one more bad idea in a budget full of bad ideas,” and fears that privatization would lead to higher energy costs for his constituents.

Congressman John L. Duncan, Jr., another Tennessee Republican, says privatization is “something that has been proposed in the past and been determined to be a very bad idea.” Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama (a state also served by the TVA), says he will “carefully study any proposals to restructure TVA” in order to make sure that it won’t result in a price hike. And Tennessee’s other Republican Senator, Bob Corker, is clear: “I doubt this idea gains much traction.”

If we didn’t know better, we might think the administration has decided to call the Republicans’ bluff on the issue of “socialism”—a strategy that, however, seems to be beyond the clever quotient of the Obama political team.

The basic problem is that this “socialist” institution is immensely popular. It has given the people of the region good service for roughly eight decades, and its prices are lower than those of many private corporations. An analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration found that consumers in Alabama and Tennessee pay considerably less for power than the national average. The low rates, former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman suggests, have earned TVA “the ‘mother love’ of a politically conservative region.”

Even among environmental groups—which often criticize the TVA for, among other things, its continued use of coal and nuclear power plants—there is little appetite for privatization. The Tennessee chapter of the Sierra Club holds that privatization would be a mistake, potentially allowing new private corporate owners to “liquidate its assets by selling off TVA’s public lands along the Tennessee River and tributaries.”

So why is the Obama administration pursuing a sell-off? Mainly for short-sighted budget appearances. Privatizing public assets like the TVA will generate some near-term revenue and help pay down a (very) small fraction of the nation’s debt. The White House also claims the TVA will likely have to issue more debt securities in the future in order to raise money to modernize its aging infrastructure, which would—in a purely accounting sense—slightly increase the deficit. This is an odd worry, since the TVA is, and would continue to be, entirely self-funded at no cost to the taxpayer, and the new debt is simply to finance the kind of updating and modernizing any major corporation routinely does.

Most Americans do not realize that public ownership like that involved in the TVA, and a cornerstone of much decried “socialism,” can be found in communities in every state in the nation. For one thing, there are more than 2,000 public electric utilities—many in conservative rural areas—and, like the TVA, they are popular among local residents and politicians. Succesful public ownership of vital transportation facilities (such as roads, ports and airports) is also common. And, of course, roughly a third of the nation’s total land surface (and the minerals beneath and forests above) is owned and managed by the government.

Around the world, there are also thousands of highly successful examples of so-called socialism like the TVA. Public enterprises operate advanced high-speed rail networks in many countries. Public ownership of significant or controlling shares of airlines is also common. More than 200 public and semi-public banks, along with over 80 funding agencies, account for a fifth of all bank assets in the European Union. Faster and more widely available Internet access is provided in many countries where public corporations exist side by side with private companies, and public telecommunications companies are also common around the world.

Most Americans are clearly not nearly as ready as citizens of other countries to think about public ownership at this scale—or even at the scale of the TVA. On the other hand, stranger things have happened. Possibly one day the United States might catch up with the kinds of practical things being done in many parts of the world—or even, for that matter, with what Republicans representing areas served by the Tennessee Valley Authority think makes sense.

Atheists Rising: Wolf Blitzer Learns a Lesson and Arizona Lawmaker Says "Don't Bow Your Heads"

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:05:00 -0700

Watch: Asked if she "thanks the lord," Oklahoma survivor tells Wolf, "actually, I'm an atheist."

You’d think by now CNN would have learned to stop treating their assumptions and as truths. But when Wolf Blitzer made a casual comment Tuesday, it turned out to be a teachable moment both for the newsman and television viewers.

Speaking live to a survivor of the deadly tornado in Moore, Okla., Blitzer declared the woman “blessed,” her husband “blessed,” and her son “blessed.” He then asked, “You’ve gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?”

But as she held her 18-month-old son, Rebecca Vitsmun politely replied, “I’m actually an atheist.” A flummoxed Blitzer quickly lobbed back, “You are. All right. But you made the right call,” and Vitsmun graciously offered him a lifeline. “We are here,” she said, “and I don’t blame anyone for thanking the Lord.” Nicely done, Rebecca Vitsmun.

One in five American adults – and a third of Americans under age 30 — now declare no religious affiliation. We are less religious now than at any other point in our history, and our secularism is rising at a rapid pace. Get used to it, Lord thankers.

As Vitsmun pointed out, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a statement of gratitude or even an acknowledgment of spirituality. I recently had someone tell me that she felt very “blessed” – right before adding that she was agnostic. Where Blitzer was insensitive — and just plain unthinking — was in his no-doubt well-intentioned demand that his interviewee cough up a Praise the Lord moment for edification of CNN viewers.

And Blitzer was not the only person this week who got his expectations rocked. When Tempe, Ariz., State Rep. Juan Mendez was asked Tuesday to deliver the opening prayer for the afternoon’s session of the House of Representatives, he delivered something different.

“Most prayers in this room begin with a request to bow your heads,” the Democratic official said. “I would like to ask that you not bow your heads. I would like to ask that you take a moment to look around the room at all of the men and women here, in this moment, sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people in our state.”

He went on to say, “This is a room in which there are many challenging debates, many moments of tension, of ideological division, of frustration. But this is also a room where, as my secular humanist tradition stresses, by the very fact of being human, we have much more in common than we have differences.”

It was a call to love and empathy that stands right up there next to any prayer in the book, and one that offered bonus inclusion and humanity. Afterward, he said, “I hope today marks the beginning of a new era in which Arizona’s non-believers can feel as welcome and valued here as believers.” And if the conservative state of Arizona can make it happen, there’s hope yet for the other 49, people.

In a nation in which the divide between believers and non-believers can be great and truly ugly – one of “militant atheism” on one side and unbearably ignorant religious conservatismon the other, with just a few words, Rebecca Vitsmun and Juan Mendez showed that the ideals of being respectful and compassionate belong to all of us. Whatever our personal views, we can give others space to have theirs and to express them with dignity. We can challenge assumptions, but we can conduct ourselves with kindness. Because what matters most in life isn’t what we believe in our hearts, it’s how we practice those beliefs with each other.

How Racism Turned an Interracial Family's Trip to Walmart into a Kidnapping Investigation

Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:54:00 -0700

'They don't fit' is the phrase that apparently prompted concern.

A Virginia father's trip to Walmart last week took an unexpected turn when he was accused of kidnapping his three young daughters because their skin color did not match his. Joseph, a white father in an interracial marriage who does not want his family name revealed, has three daughters, a 4-year-old and 2-year-old twins. According to Fox News in DC, Joseph took them to Walmart in Potomac Mills in Woolbridge to cash a check, then was "shocked" to find a Prince William County police officer waiting for them at home.

"He asks us very sincerely, ‘Hey, I was sent here by Walmart security. I just need to make sure that the children that you have are your own,’” Joseph told Fox.

"I was dumbfounded," his wife, Keana, told Fox, "I sat there for a minute and I thought, ‘Did he just ask us if these were our kids knowing what we went through to have our children?’

"He took my ID and asked my 4-year-old to point out who her mother and father were."

Joseph told Fox an officer explained that a Walmart security guard "reported seeing him in the parking lot with the girls and thought it was strange." After the cop left, Keana called Walmart and was transferred to a Walmart security officer who blamed a customer for the incredibly false alarm.

Keana says the security oficer told her, "Well, the customer was concerned because they saw the children with your husband and he didn't think that they fit. And I said, ‘What do you mean by they don't fit?’ And I was trying to get her to say it. And she says, ‘Well, they just don't match up.’”

Walmart issued a statement claiming, "There's still a lot of unknowns at this time and we're currently looking into the situation." Joseph and Keana will never shop at Walmart again, and are hoping they can make good of the incident by raising awareness about racism and love's ability to transcend skin color.

PSA: Multiracial families do not imply kidnapping.

NYPD Stops of (Mostly) People of Color Wrong 90 Percent of the Time: 'High Error Rate,' Judge Says

Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:00:00 -0700

Closing arguments have been made in the trial over the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk tactic. What now?

On Monday, the major class-action lawsuit Floyd v. the City of New York challenging the NYPD's "stop-and-frisk" policy wrapped up after more than two months of testimony. Plaintiffs allege that the NYPD has routinely and systematically violated the 4th and 14th Amendment rights of New Yorkers stopped and sometimes frisked because of their race. "They laid siege to black and Latino neighborhoods over the last eight years ... making people of color afraid to leave their homes," Gretchen Hoff Varner, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said Monday.

Reasonable suspicion that a person is about to, or has committed a crime is the legal prerequisite for a stop. But nine-tenths of stops have not resulted in any further law enforcement enforcement activity, like an arrest or a summons. “What troubles me is the fact that the suspicion seems to be wrong 90 percent of the time,” presiding judge Shira Scheindlin said during closing arguments. “That’s a high error rate.”

In addition, 85% of people stopped are black or Latino, which plaintiffs say is further evidence of racial motivation. They also allege that quotas the NYPD has described as "performance standards" for "proactive policing" encourage officers to make unconstitutional stops based on race.

Earlier in the trial, NYPD officers Pedro Serrano and Adhyl Polanco testified that they were forced to meet numerical quotas for stops or face punishment. Their secretly recorded tapes reveal supervisors commanding officers to make "20-and 1" (20 summonses and 1 arrest), as well as "five 250s," or street stops, per month.

Serrano also recorded 40th Precinct’s commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack, telling him to stop “the right people at the right time, the right location" adding that the "problem" was "male blacks 14 to 20, 21."

The description was echoed by others throughout the trial, who testified that those deemed suspects are young men of color. The defense categorically denies racial profiling. Rather, they said, they are simply going after the people responsible for committing crimes, who tend to be young men of color.

City attorney Heidi Grossman said during closing arguments that, "The right people are the right people about whom there is information directly connected to known crime conditions." The problem with that logic, plaintiffs said, is that a suspect description for a black youth in a "high-crime" area (which could be as large as Queens) could make any black teen in that neighborhood susceptible to a stop.

While the plaintiffs argued in summation that race has become a "proxy" for reasonable suspicion, the city claimed the race of people stopped was highly correlated with suspect descriptions.

During closing arguments, Judge Scheindlin challenged what she called the city's "circular argument."

"The fact that the stops reflect a similar percentage as the crime suspect data may show that the officers are influenced by the fact that they know in a certain area most crimes are committed by blacks," Scheindlin said. "So you may worry that they're adding race in as a reasonable suspicion factor."

Quotas

The plaintiffs alleged that a top-down policy that included the implementation of quotas or "performance standards" put pressure on police officers to make unconstitutional stops. The city argued that those speaking out against quotas are just lazy.

The defense claimed during summations that allegations of punishable quotas, which are forbidden under New York State Labor Law are a "sideshow." Heidi Grossman said that the plaintiffs presented not evidence of a city-wide quota policy, but "longstanding struggles" about "getting work done." Throughout the trial, the defense has also repeatedly invoked the language of NYPD Operations Order 52, which says that, "Department managers can and must set performance goals."

On Monday, plaintiffs attorney Jonathan Moore (with the Center for Constitutional Rights) said the trial is not just about quotas, but "pressure." A survey on the "numbers game" conducted by John Eterno of Molloy College and Eli B. Silverman of John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that retired police officers reported a four-fold increase in pressure on officers to do stops in the Bloomberg and Kelly era. During closings, Moore noted a simultaneous decrease in pressure to follow the Constitution, which he called a "lethal combination."

"More importantly this pressure does not exist we believe in a vacuum," said Moore. "The police feel pressure to get numbers in the context of an admitted strategy that targets young black and Hispanic males."

Moore referenced Sen. Eric Adams' "unrebutted" testimony that NYPD Commisioner Ray Kelly once told him he targeted young men of color "because he wanted to instill fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be stopped by police." Moore also questioned Commissioner Ray Kelly's refusal to walk across the street from One Police Plaza and testify.

Heads in the Sand

Plaintiffs have accused the city and NYPD of adopting a "head in the sand" approach to stop-and-frisk. During closing, they cited as evidence their lack of concern with a one-tenth hit rate for stops, disparate stops for people of color, and denial of racial profiling complaints. Multiple NYPD witnesses, including former Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, had testified that they never heard complaints of racial profiling from the communities targeted by stop-and-frisk.

"To suggest that no one has complained about racial profiling or bad stops is disingenuous, in and of itself evidence of a deliberate indifference," Moore said during summation.

Helen McAleer, the commanding officer of Investigation Review for the NYPD, testified earlier in the trial that her office received very few racial profiling complaints, but also said that neither racial profiling nor stop-and-frisk complaints were matched to a code in their system. Rather, both are categorized under “general dissatisfaction.”

Plaintiffs attorney Darius Charney testified in closing arguments that, "We believe the fact that the police department does not consider something racial profiling, unless somebody uses explicitly the words 'race' or 'racial bias,' we think is a head-in-the-sand approach."

Plaintiffs also allege that constitutional violations stemming from stop-and-frisk are part of a top-down policy starting with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Under his and Kelly's leadership, the NYPD conducted 4.4 million stops, more than a 600% increase since Bloomberg took office. The defense say the increase came from an increased focus on paperwork.

Relief

Should the judge rule in their favor, plaintiffs are calling for sweeping changes that would dramatically alter how NYPD officers are trained, supervised, and held accountable for stop-and-frisk. They requested better documentation of stops and more supervision of officers, as well as the revocation of Operations Order 52, which allows performance goals. They are also calling for an "independent monitor" to assist communication between the NYPD and the communities most affected by policing.

During closing arguments, Judge Scheindlin asked questions about the possibility of a "body-worn" camera to ensure that police officers are, indeed, following the law. She is expected to rule on Floyd, and possibly make recommendations for relief, in the next couple of months. Plaintiffs will not receive any monetary compensation.

Here's What a Real Political Cover-up Looks Like -- Orchestrated by the Right-Wingers Who Know It Best

Robert Parry, Consortium News — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:35:00 -0700

Many lessons can be drawn from the failed October Surprise investigation of two decades ago.

Exclusive:Republicans won’t let go of their conspiracy theory about some nefarious “cover-up” in “talking points” for Ambassador Susan Rice’s TV interviews on the Benghazi attack. But they should at least have better skills for detecting a real cover-up, since they’ve had direct experience, as Robert Parry documents.

There have been nine public hearings and countless hours of commentary about the so-called Benghazi “cover-up” – really some bureaucratic back-and-forth about “talking points” for a second-tier official’s appearance on TV. But none of the outraged members of Congress or the news media seems to have any idea what a real cover-up looks like.

In 2011, I gained access to files at the George H.W. Bush library in College Station, Texas, showing how Bush’s White House reacted to allegations in 1991 that he had joined in an operation in 1980 to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

What those files revealed was how to run a cover-up! Its framework was set on Nov. 6, 1991, by White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, who explained to an inter-agency strategy session how to contain and frustrate a congressional investigation into the so-called October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to insure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.

Gray’s strategy session followed by two days the White House receiving evidence from the State Department that a key fact in the October Surprise allegations had been verified. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign director, William Casey, indeed had traveled on a mysterious trip to Madrid, just as one of the central witnesses had claimed.

The confirmation was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson, who said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.” Associate White House counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. Beach noted Williamson’s information in a “memorandum for record” dated Nov. 4, 1991.

Two days later, on Nov. 6, Gray summoned his subordinates to a meeting that laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. Up to that point, Iran-Contra had focused on illicit arms-for-hostage sales to Iran that President Reagan authorized in 1985-86.

As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it, the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.” To achieve that result, the Republicans coordinated the counter-offensive through Gray’s office under the supervision of associate counsel Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

The Stakes

Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns – and be of special interest to the President,” Gray declared, according to minutes. [Emphasis in original.]

Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings.

“Alleged facts have to do with 1979-80 – no apparent reason for jurisdiction/subpoena power to extend beyond,”the document said. “There is no sunset provision – this could drag on like Walsh!” – a reference to Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.

However, the key to understanding the October Surprise case was that it appeared to be a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal, part of the same narrative. The story started with the 1980 crisis over 52 American hostages held in Iran, continuing through their release immediately after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, then followed by mysterious U.S. government approval of secret arms shipments to Iran via Israel in 1981, and ultimately morphing into the Iran-Contra Affair of more arms-for-hostage deals with Iran until that scandal exploded in 1986.

The documents, which I obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that Reagan-Bush loyalists were determined to thwart any sustained investigation that might link the two scandals. The GOP counterattack included:

–Delaying the production of documents;

–Having a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena;

–Neutralizing an aggressive Democratic investigator;

–Pressuring a Republican senator to become more obstructive;

–Tightly restricting access to classified information;

–Narrowing the inquiry as it applied to alleged Reagan-Bush wrongdoing while simultaneously widening the probe to include Carter’s efforts to free the hostages;

–Mounting a public relations campaign attacking the investigation’s costs; and

–Encouraging friendly journalists to denounce the story.

Highly Effective

Ultimately, the GOP cover-up strategy proved highly effective, as Democrats grew timid and neoconservative journalists – then emerging as a powerful force in the Washington media – took the lead in decrying the October Surprise allegations as a “myth.”

The Republicans benefited, too, from a Washington press corps, which had grown weary of the complex Iran-Contra scandal. Careerist reporters in the mainstream press had learned that the route to advancement lay more in “debunking” such complicated national security scandals than in pursuing them.

It would take nearly two decades for the October Surprise cover-up to crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed, that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored, and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

In the near term, however, Republicans succeeded in their well-organized cover-up. They were aided immensely by Newsweek and The New Republic, which published matching stories on their covers in mid-November 1991 claiming to have debunked the October Surprise allegations by proving that Casey could not have made the trip to Madrid in 1980.

Though Bush’s White House already had the State Department’s information contradicting the smug self-certainty of the two magazines, the administration made no effort to correct the record. Yet, even without Beach’s memorandum, there was solid evidence at the time disproving the Newsweek/New Republic debunking articles.

Both magazines had sloppily misread attendance records at a London historical conference that Casey had attended on July 28, 1980, the time frame when Iranian businessman (and CIA agent) Jamshid Hashemi had placed Casey in Madrid for a secret meeting with Iranian emissary Mehdi Karrubi.

The two magazines insisted that the attendance records showed Casey in London for a morning session of the conference, thus negating the possibility that he could have made a side trip to Madrid. However, the magazines had failed to do the necessary follow-up interviews, which would have revealed that Casey was not at the morning session on July 28. He didn’t arrive until that afternoon, leaving the “window” open for Hashemi’s account.

At PBS “Frontline,” where I was involved in the October Surprise investigation, we talked to Americans and others who had participated in the London conference. Most significantly, we interviewed historian Robert Dallek who gave that morning’s presentation to a small gathering of attendees sitting in a conference room at the British Imperial War Museum.

Dallek said he had been excited to learn that Casey, who was running Reagan’s presidential campaign, would be there. So, Dallek looked for Casey, only to be disappointed that Casey was a no-show. Other Americans also recalled Casey arriving later and the records actually indicate Casey showing up for the afternoon session.

In other words, the high-profile Newsweek-New Republic debunking of the October Surprise story had itself been debunked. However, typical of the arrogance of those publications – and our inability to draw attention to their major screw-up – the magazines never acknowledged their gross error.

Worse Than Sloppiness

I later learned that the journalistic malfeasance at Newsweek was even worse than sloppiness. Journalist Craig Unger, who had been hired by Newsweek to work on the October Surprise story, told me that he had spotted the misreading of the attendance records before Newsweek published its article and alerted the investigative team, which was personally headed by executive editor Maynard Parker.

“They told me, essentially, to fuck off,” Unger said.

During my years at Newsweek, from 1987-90, Parker had been my chief nemesis. He was considered close to prominent neocons, including Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams, and to Establishment Republicans, such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Parker also was a member of banker David Rockefeller’s Council on Foreign Relations — and viewed the Iran-Contra scandal as something best shut down quickly.

Jumping to a false conclusion that would protect his influential friends would fit perfectly with what I knew of Parker. [To this day, neither Newsweek nor The New Republic has published a correction for their errors, despite the historical damage done.]

The false articles in Newsweek and The New Republic gave the White House cover-up a key advantage: Washington’s conventional wisdom crowd now assumed that the October Surprise allegations were bogus. All that was necessary was to make sure no conclusive evidence to the contrary reached the congressional investigation.

Coordination was crucial. For instance, on May 14, 1992, a CIA official ran proposed language past associate White House counsel Janet Rehnquist from then-CIA Director Robert Gates regarding the agency’s level of cooperation with Congress. By that point, the CIA, under Gates, was already months into a pattern of foot-dragging on congressional document requests.

Bush had put Gates, who was also implicated in the October Surprise case, at the CIA’s helm in fall 1991, meaning that Gates was well-positioned to stymie congressional requests for sensitive information about secret initiatives involving Bush, Gates and Donald Gregg, another CIA veteran who was linked to the scandal.

The records at the Bush library revealed that Gates and Gregg, indeed, were targets of the congressional October Surprise probe. On May 26, 1992, Rep. Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Task Force, wrote to the CIA asking for records regarding the whereabouts of Gregg and Gates from Jan. 1, 1980, through Jan. 31, 1981, including travel plans and leaves of absence.

Withholding Documents

The persistent document-production delays finally drew a complaint from Lawrence Barcella, chief counsel to the House Task Force who wrote to the CIA on June 9, 1992, that the agency had not been responsive to three requests on Sept. 20, 1991; April 20, 1992; and May 26, 1992.

Gregg and Gates also were implicated in the broader the Iran-Contra scandal. Both were suspected of lying about their knowledge of secret sales of military hardware to Iran and clandestine delivery of weapons to Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

A ex-CIA director himself, Bush also had been caught lying in the Iran-Contra scandal when he insisted that a plane shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 while dropping weapons to the Contras had no connection to the U.S. government (when the weapons delivery had been organized by operatives close to Bush’s vice presidential office where Gregg served as national security adviser).

And, Bush falsely claimed that he was out of the “loop” on Iran-Contra decisions when later evidence showed that he was a major participant in the policy discussions. From the Bush library documents, it was apparent that the October Surprise cover-up was essentially an extension of the broader effort to contain the Iran-Contra scandal, with Bush personally involved in orchestrating both efforts.

For instance, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh discovered in December 1992 that Bush’s White House counsel’s office, under Boyden Gray, also had delayed production of Bush’s personal notes about the arms shipments to Iran in the 1985-86 time frame.

Though Gray’s office insisted that the delay was unintentional, Walsh didn’t buy it. After all, one of Bush’s s Iran-Contra diary entries, dated July 20, 1987, described then-Secretary of State George Shultz’s detailed notes on meetings with Reagan. In the Iran-Contra report, Walsh wrote that Bush’s phrasing about Shultz’s notes suggested that the withholding of Bush’s own documents was willful.

“I found this almost inconceivable,” Bush wrote about Shultz. “Not only that he kept the notes, but that he’d turned them all over to Congress. … I would never do it. I would never surrender such documents.” Following those sentiments, Bush’s White House sought to frustrate not just Iran-Contra investigators but those assigned to examine the October Surprise issue.

Cat-and-Mouse Game

Rather than any commitment to openness regarding the October Surprise case, the documents reveal a cat-and-mouse game designed to block pursuit of the truth. Beyond dragging its heels on producing documents, the Bush administration maneuvered to keep key witnesses out of timely reach of the investigators. For instance, Gregg used his stationing as U.S. Ambassador to South Korea in 1992 to evade a congressional subpoena.

Like Gates and Bush, Gregg had been linked to secret meetings with Iranians during the 1980 campaign. When asked about those allegations by FBI polygraph operators working for Iran-Contra prosecutor Walsh, Gregg was judged to be deceptive in his denials. [See Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, Vol. I, p. 501]

And, when it came to answering questions from Congress about the October Surprise matter, Gregg found excuses not to accept service of a subpoena.

In a June 18, 1992, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Seoul to the State Department in Washington, Gregg wrote that he had learned that Senate investigators had “attempted to subpoena me to appear on 24 June in connection with their so-called ‘October Surprise’ investigation. The subpoena was sent to my lawyer, Judah Best, who returned it to the committee since he had no authority to accept service of a subpoena. …

“If the October Surprise investigation contacts the [State] Department, I request that you tell them of my intention to cooperate fully when I return to the States, probably in September. Any other inquiries should be referred to my lawyer, Judah Best. Mr. Best asks that I specifically request you not to accept service of a subpoena if the committee attempts to deliver one to you.”

That way Gregg ensured that he was not legally compelled to testify while running out the clock on the Senate inquiry and leaving little time for the House Task Force. His strategy of delay was endorsed by Janet Rehnquist after a meeting with Best and a State Department lawyer.

In a June 24, 1992, letter to Gray, Rehnquist wrote that “at your direction, I have looked into whether Don Gregg should return to Washington to testify before the Senate Subcommittee hearings next week. … I believe we shouldNOT request that Gregg testify next week.”

The failure to effect service of the subpoena gave the Bush team an advantage, Rehnquist noted, because the Senate investigators then relented and merely “submitted written questions to Gregg, through counsel, in lieu of an appearance. …. This development provides us an opportunity to manage Gregg’s participation in October Surprise long distance.”

Rehnquist added hopefully that by the end of September 1992 “the issue may, by that time, even be dead for all practical purposes.”

Delaying Tactics

Beyond pushing the investigation later into 1992, the Republican delaying tactics also ensured that an interim House report, scheduled for the end of June, would not break any new ground that might torpedo Bush’s reelection hopes. The GOP made it a top goal to have the interim report clear Bush of allegations that he had joined a secret trip to Paris in mid-October 1980 to meet with Iranian representatives, the released documents show.

On June 24, 1992, Rehnquist prepared “talking points” for a Boyden Gray phone call with Republican Sens. Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Richard Lugar of Indiana stressing that “it must be said clearly for the record” that Bush was not in Paris. “We cannot let something this important left hanging,” Rehnquist wrote.

The key to that success was to prevent the congressional investigators from thoroughly examining Bush’s supposed alibis for the date of Oct. 19, 1980, when his account had him returning to his Washington home for a day off but when some October Surprise witnesses alleged he snuck off for a quick overnight flight to Paris to meet with Iranians.

The released records reveal that the White House had a hand in limiting what the Secret Service showed to the investigators regarding Bush’s supposed activities during the day of Oct. 19. The partially redacted Secret Service records, which were given to Congress, showed a morning trip to the Chevy Chase Country Club and an afternoon visit to a private residence.

But the redactions impeded efforts by congressional investigators to corroborate that those supposed movements by Bush actually took place. Under questioning, only one of the Secret Service agents, supervisor Leonard Tanis, had any memory of Bush’s supposed trip to the Chevy Chase Country Club. Tanis claimed that George and Barbara Bush attended a brunch with Supreme Court Justice and Mrs. Potter Stewart.

However, Barbara Bush’s records showed her going somewhere else that morning and, when questioned, Mrs. Stewart said she and her late husband did not have brunch with the Bushes. No one at the Chevy Chase club recalled the supposed brunch either. Tanis, a Bush favorite among the Secret Service detail, soon backed off his account.

With the Chevy Chase trip having verification problems, attention turned to the afternoon visit to a private residence. However, the Secret Service refused to release the name and address of the person visited, claiming that to do so would somehow endanger the agency’s protective strategies. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Withholding a Name

What the records from the Bush library revealed, however, was that the White House was involved in keeping the name of the person secret — and that a Republican senator involved in the October Surprise inquiry was under intense pressure from the GOP to act more aggressively in Bush’s defense.

On June 24, 1992, Rehnquist wrote a memo for the file describing a meeting that she and Gray had with Sen. Terry Sanford, D-North Carolina, chairman of the subcommittee in charge of the Senate’s October Surprise inquiry, and Jeffords, the ranking Republican who was viewed as not on the GOP’s cover-up team.

The senators complained about the “GOP thrashing Jeffords,” Rehnquist wrote. “The Senators urged that we seek to stop the GOP from criticizing Sen. Jeffords’ handling of the minority interests in the investigation. They said that they were irritated by the continued GOP bashing and that it wasn’t doing any good.”

But the pummeling appears to have softened Jeffords’s readiness to ask tough questions of his fellow Republicans. Rehnquist wrote, with apparent relief, that there was “discussion concerning whether the investigators needed to see the names and addresses of private individuals whom the VP visited on a particular occasion” and the two senators “were not interested in the names and addresses of private individuals whom the VP may have visited on a particular day.”

So, the White House was spared publicly having to identify Bush’s alibi witness for the afternoon of Oct. 19, 1980.

In summer 1992, Republicans were suggesting that they wanted to protect the host’s name because Bush may have been visiting a woman friend and that the Democrats might have been hoping to stir up a sex scandal to counter some of the salacious rumors about their own nominee, Bill Clinton.

However, when Secret Service records for Barbara Bush were released they showed her going to the same unidentified residence, deflating suggestions of a sexual liaison involving her husband. The question that remained was whether George H.W. Bush actually was part of the afternoon visit or whether his wife’s day trip was used as a cover for his absence from Washington.

Without questioning the afternoon host, it was impossible to verify Bush’s alibi. Yet, in a strange alibi deal, the House Task Force agreed to clear Bush of taking a secret trip to Paris in exchange for the White House privately giving the name of Bush’s host to a small number of the congressional investigators. But they were barred from interviewing the alibi witness or releasing the name.

The peculiar arrangement – being told the name of an alibi witness but never questioning the witness – was typical of Bush’s White House imposing bizarre rules on the inquiry and the badgered investigators acquiescing. [It was not until September 2011 that I was able to pry loose the name of the “alibi witness,” Richard A. Moore, a former legal adviser to President Richard Nixon. However, by then, Moore had died.]

Contrary Evidence

The House Task Force stuck with its decision to clear Bush regarding the alleged Paris trip despite subsequent evidence suggesting that Bush, indeed, had flown to Paris and had created a false record to conceal the trip.

For instance, I informed the Task Force about contemporaneous knowledge of the Bush-to-Paris trip provided by Chicago Tribune reporter John Maclean, son of author Norman Maclean who wrote A River Runs Through It. John Maclean said a well-placed Republican source told him in mid-October 1980 about Bush taking a secret trip to Paris to meet with Iranians on the U.S. hostage issue.

After hearing this news in 1980, Maclean passed on the information to David Henderson, a State Department Foreign Service officer. Henderson recalled the date as Oct. 18, 1980, when the two met at Henderson’s Washington home to discuss another matter. (Maclean never used the information for a story, but he confirmed his knowledge after Henderson remembered the conversation when the October Surprise allegations surfaced a decade later.)

And, there was other support for the allegations of a Republican-Iranian meeting in Paris. David Andelman, the biographer for Count Alexandre deMarenches, head of France’s Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE), testified to the House Task Force that deMarenches told him that he had helped the Reagan-Bush campaign arrange meetings with Iranians on the hostage issue in summer and fall of 1980, with one meeting in Paris in October.

Andelman said deMarenches insisted that the secret meetings be kept out of his memoir because the story could otherwise damage the reputations of his friends, William Casey and George H.W. Bush.

The allegations of a Paris meeting also received support from several other sources, including pilot Heinrich Rupp, who said he flew Casey from Washington’s National Airport to Paris on a flight that left very late on a rainy night in mid-October 1980. Rupp said that after arriving at LeBourget airport outside Paris, he saw a man resembling Bush on the tarmac.

The night of Oct. 18 indeed was rainy in the Washington area. And, sign-in sheets at the Reagan-Bush headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, placed Casey within a five-minute drive of National Airport late that evening.

A well-connected French investigative reporter Claude Angeli said his sources inside the French secret service confirmed that the service provided “cover” for a meeting between Republicans and Iranians in France on the weekend of October 18-19. German journalist Martin Kilian had received a similar account from a top aide to intelligence chief deMarenches.

As early as 1987, Iran’s ex-President Bani-Sadr had made claims about such a Paris meeting, and Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe claimed to have been present outside the meeting and saw Bush, Casey, Gates and Gregg in attendance.

Russian Report

Finally, the Russian government sent a report to the House Task Force, saying that Soviet-era intelligence files contained information about Republicans holding a series of meetings with Iranians in Europe, including one in Paris in October 1980. “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” the Russian Report said. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”

At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part,” the report said. “The representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran.”

The Russian Report was kept hidden by the House Task Force until I discovered it by gaining access to the Task Force’s raw files. Though the report was addressed to Hamilton, he told me in 2010 that he had never seen the report until I sent him a copy shortly before our interview. Barcella then acknowledged to me that he might not have shown Hamilton the report and may have simply filed it away in boxes of Task Force records.

The documents from the Bush library also shed light on how far the Republicans were prepared to go to protect Bush on the issue of his whereabouts on Oct. 19, 1980. The GOP members of the Task Force insisted that the one Democratic investigator who had the strongest doubts about Bush’s alibi be barred from the inquiry altogether.

The suspicions of the investigator, House Foreign Affairs Committee chief counsel Spencer Oliver, had been piqued by the false account from Secret Service supervisor Tanis. In a six-page memo, Oliver urged a closer look at Bush’s whereabouts and questioned why the Secret Service was concealing the alibi witness’ name.

“Why did the Secret Service refuse to cooperate on a matter which could have conclusively cleared George Bush of these serious allegations?” Oliver asked. “Was the White House involved in this refusal? Did they order it?”

Oliver also noted Bush’s odd behavior in raising the October Surprise issue on his own at two news conferences. “It can be fairly said that President Bush’s recent outbursts about the October Surprise inquiries and [about] his whereabouts in mid-October of 1980 are disingenuous at best,” wrote Oliver, “since the administration has refused to make available the documents and the witnesses that could finally and conclusively clear Mr. Bush.”

Well-Founded Suspicions

From Janet Rehnquist’s memo on the meeting with Jeffords and Sanford, it appears that Oliver’s suspicion was well-founded about the involvement of Bush’s White House in the decision to conceal the name of the supposed afternoon host.

Another released documents reflected how angry the Republicans were about Oliver, who also had been a dogged investigator during the congressional Iran-Contra probe in 1987. Thomas Smeeton, a former CIA officer who served as Republican staff director for the House Intelligence Committee and had been Rep. Dick Cheney’s appointee to the congressional Iran-Contra committee, sent Rehnquist a memorandum prepared for Republican members regarding Oliver.

Entitled “October Surprise – The Ubiquitous Spencer Oliver,” the memo said Republicans had “been told repeatedly that Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman [Dante] Fascell does not want his Chief Counsel, Spencer Oliver, to participate in the ‘October Surprise’ probe. Yet, we continue to get reports that he’s as active as ever. For example, the GAO [General Accounting Office], in congressional testimony last year [1991] indicated that he attended an October Surprise meeting with Senator Terry Sanford.”

Keeping Oliver off the October Surprise investigation became a high priority for the Republicans. At a midway point in the inquiry when some Democratic Task Force members asked the knowledgeable Oliver to represent them as a staff investigator, Republicans threatened a boycott unless Oliver was barred.

In a gesture of bipartisanship, Rep. Hamilton gave the Republicans the power to veto Oliver’s participation. Denied one of the few Democratic investigators with both the savvy and courage to pursue a serious investigation, the Democratic members of the Task Force retreated further into passivity.

Meanwhile, Bush’s White House kept up the pressure, restricting congressional access to key documents pertinent to the investigation. In a “top secret” memo dated June 26, 1992, to the State Department about cooperation with the October Surprise probe, National Security Council executive secretary William F. Sittmann demanded “special treatment” for NSC documents related to presidential deliberations.

Regarding the House Task Force, Sittmann recommended that only Republican counsel Richard Leon and Democratic counsel Barcella be “permitted to read relevant portions of the documents and to take notes, but that the State Department retain custody of the documents and the notes at all times.”

Though Republicans kept insisting that the October Surprise allegations were a myth, the Bush administration was going to extraordinary lengths to control the evidence.

Questioning the Cost

As early as November 1991 at White House counsel Gray’s inter-agency meeting, Gray instructed administration officials to keep track of the costs for document searches so the inquiry could be challenged as a waste of money. Again and again, the documents reveal a near obsession with the estimated costs of the probe as well as the close collaboration between Rehnquist’s office and Republican congressional staff, especially John Mackey, the minority staff director on the October Surprise Task Force.

When another Bush legal adviser, Lee Liberman, helped coordinate a P.R. attack on the cost of the October Surprise investigation, Mackey sent his business card with the note, “Lee: FYI How to hit back! Best, John”

Bush’s White House also kept close track of press stories, especially those attacking the credibility of anyone who made October Surprise allegations. That was especially true about Carter’s former NSC aide Gary Sick, whose New York Times op-ed in April 1991 had given important impetus to the long-held suspicions regarding a GOP-Iranian deal in 1980.

On May 21, 1991, President Bush dashed off a personal note to conservative columnist William Rusher, thanking him for “rallying ‘round in that article challenging Gary Sick to apologize.”

However, at least one White House official privately held a different view of Sick’s book, October Surprise. On June 23, 1992, after reading it, Ash Jain wrote a memo to Janet Rehnquist, noting that “Sick presents a seemingly compelling account of [William] Casey’s participation in secret meetings with the Iranian Government.”

In the end, the Republican “delay/filibuster strategy” proved successful. The impact of the October Surprise scandal on Campaign 1992 was minimized, although Bush still failed to win reelection. It wasn’t until December 1992 – a month after Bush lost to Bill Clinton – that the floodgates on October Surprise evidence finally began to open.

Years later, Task Force chief counsel Barcella told me that so much new evidence poured in that final month implicating the Republicans that he asked Hamilton to extend the investigation three more months. But Hamilton, recognizing how nasty the Republican reaction would be, turned down the extension request, Barcella said.

For his part, Hamilton told me that he had no recollection of Barcella’s request. Hamilton also said he had no memory of Barcella ever showing him the Russian Report which arrived in January 1993 and corroborated allegations of meetings between Iranians and Republicans in Europe, including Bush, Gates and Casey in Paris.

Despite all the evidence of Republican guilt, Hamilton and his Task Force simply signed off on a finding of Republican innocence.

Though many lessons can be drawn from the failed October Surprise investigation of two decades ago, one point that is relevant today is to understand what a real government cover-up looks like.

Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Energy Is Putting Power Back in the Hands of the People

Heeten Kalan, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:44:00 -0700

Sungevity founder Danny Kennedy talks about his book and how solar power is transforming communities and creating jobs.

Rarely do we switch on an appliance or flick on the lights and consider the source of energy. Yet, in the past few years, we have become more conscious about the mountains being blown up in Appalachia to extract coal or the massive onslaught of gas drilling and fracking on new shale formations. Danny Kennedy’s new book, Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Power Can Save Our Economy -- and Our Planet, turns our endless search to keep looking down for future energy sources and simply asks us to look up for it. The sun, he argues, is waiting to be tapped for clean, cheap energy if we can get our heads out of the sand.

Danny Kennedy, Greenpeace activist, Project Underground founder and long-time campaigner, decided to apply his organizing skills to harness the sun’s energy. Choosing to do something about our energy crisis and climate change, he founded Sungevity with a small group of trusted friends in 2007. Now, Sungevity is one the world’s leading residential solar-energy companies and is the exclusive residential solar partner for Lowe’s.

I sat down with Kennedy to learn more about his vision and reasons for writing this book.

Heeten Kalan: Your book is titled Rooftop Revolution. Why do you think solar power is a revolution in the making?

Danny Kennedy: Solar power represents a change in electricity that has a potentially disruptive impact on power in both the literal sense (meaning how we get electricity) and in the figurative sense of how we distribute wealth and power in our society. Fossil fuels have led to the concentration of power whereas solar’s potential is really to give power over to the hands of people. This shift has huge community benefits while releasing our dependency on the centralized, monopolized capital of the fossil fuel industry. So it’s revolutionary in the technological and political sense.

Sungevity’s mission is to build power based on sunshine as well as build a great business. Each time a solar panel is installed we gain supporters and voters. A family or business that uses solar panels ends up lending their voice to demonstrate solar’s potential for new energy, new jobs and a healthier economy. This is a revolution – using our rooftops, we can make the difference.

HK: In your book you talk about solar power being local and decentralized. This is almost the antithesis of what we currently have. While that is an appealing concept, what do you think gets in the way of realizing solar’s potential?

DK: What gets in the way is all the wealth and politics that benefit from "King CONG." I identify the collective interests of coal, oil, nukes, and gas as the major obstacles to alternative energy sources and have dubbed those interests King CONG. We have regulated monopolies in the U.S. that basically amount to the government saying to the fossil fuel industry/big energy that if you keep the lights on in Chicago and New York we’ll give you control over that market and let you grow your business by certain regulated standards.

Yet there’s been no innovation in that industry and no motivation to innovate. They’re using the same turbines for a century now. We’re suffering because the big energy companies are motivated by self-interests. Just like cell phones threatened landlines in the telephone business, solar power is seen as threatening big fossil fuel-derived energy. What we need is a social will and political pressure to break down that monopoly and we need entrepreneurs who will deliver a more modular, flexible and affordable solution.

HK: You also write about King CONG’s role as one of the primary obstacles in making this shift. Describe King CONG and how you see a way forward.

DK: As I mentioned, the collective interests of coal, oil, nukes and gas is the giant King CONG. King CONG is the problem, they are contaminating our political sense (through huge spending to promote CONG) and the environment (by digging up the earth). How we get around this formidable force is by being better, smarter and cheaper. Sungevity provides solar electricity service in nine states now and it’s cheaper than what customers get out of the grid. That is one way to get around this obstacle.

Solar energy can be that solution for Americans and the world. Just like the developing world has jumped over establishing landline telephone networks to cellphones, with solar power you see similar leapfrogging. I describe in the book places in Africa that refuse to be bogged down by King CONG; they just go straight to a more distributive energy system.

That future is what we have to create by solar citizenship and solar entrepreneurs. At the same time, we have to make friends with businesses that have grown up in the era of King CONG because we can’t dismiss their concerns and the work they have put into this industry, as well as the many people they employ. Going forward, utilities will have to become more flexible and move towards a sharing economy of electricity, or the “sunshine mesh,” as I call it.

HK: We’re bombarded through media by the notion of how fast China is installing coal power plants. You take a different view on China, saying that they are instead playing catch-up in solar production technology at a very fast pace. What are the implications and how did they do it?

DK: The implications for the planet are good. The fact that China is going solar at such a fast rate should be encouraging for anyone who knows about energy issues. For more than a decade we were decrying the industrialization of China and its economic and environmental effects for the world, even though we didn’t want to deny them the electrification that we benefit from.

More and more people are gaining access to electricity in China, and a lot through coal. Some of that is being slowed and even though they are still using more coal than solar they have decided to encourage solar. For instance, if you can build a clean technology business in China, you are supported by the government in a variety of ways. That rapid development and production of solar technologies has benefited consumers in the U.S. with lower cost solar panels. More importantly, the newly-developed clean technologies are cheap enough to be used in China.

China caught up to the U.S. in five years to have the same installed solar capacity, and that level is expected to be surpassed soon. In 2015 they will be many gigawatts ahead of us. So China is a good example of a superpower nation that is not building a dependency on King CONG.

Two years before I started Sungevity, I did work with Greenpeace in China and there was none of this. Less than a decade later, they are the center of the solar universe. That economic driver is a really good force for the planet. The irony is that we -- the USA -- are now seeing that as a threat and engaging in trade war and trade politics, even when we all know we should be supporting these industries across the board. Whereas the Chinese are now developing and using clean energy and clean technology en masse, we are trying to punish them for it.

HK: Some people argue that Chinese businesses get the leg up via state subsidies, and in this country that question becomes very controversial. Can you demystify government subsidies around energy? What subsidies are already in play in the energy sector and how could we deploy them differently?

DK: The whole energy industry is subsidized. For over a century, the U.S. has chosen fossil fuels as the beneficiaries of the federal budget and federal subsidies. Already in 1916 coal and oil benefited from tax subsidies, and now that has become a given. By contrast, the solar industry has benefited for only the last decade and all solar power subsidies are temporary or time stamped. The tax credit you can claim for installing solar panels expires in 2016. As an industry, during that time we have to make the best of it. Not to mention that this is still a fraction of what fossil fuels get; they receive benefits to the tune of 20 to 1.

The real question to ask is not whether to have government subsidies, but rather to think about what the subsidies are for and who they are given to. We -- as a part of our communities -- pay taxes. We have government for a reason: to support things we like. Most people can agree that it’s good to promote clean energy. Now the Chinese are doing the right thing, doubling down on the future energy we need for our earth. And yet here in the U.S., Exxon Mobil, the most profitable corporation in history, continues to receive subsidies.

Why is anyone’s guess. Their prices have gone up and they’ve been shedding jobs. By comparison, solar industry jobs have gone from 0 to 120,000 – that’s more people than the coal mining industry employs in this country. Prices for solar-generated electricity have plummeted during this period and we’re not rogue profiteering companies that “spill and kill” like the oil and coal guys.

HK: We don’t seem to focus on the positives of job creation presented by the solar industry. Those job numbers as a comparison between solar and coal are really interesting. It seems that if we increased subsidies we could jumpstart the industry and jumpstart job creation.

DK: Exactly. I know from my personal experience that solar has great job-creating potential. Sungevity’s model of solar leasing makes it very affordable for customers. We’ve grown from a small startup in 2007 to 250 employees in California and we employ contractors in eight other states across the country. No one knows that, no one hears that good-news story.

At the same time, oil is shedding jobs, coal mining is only employing 60 to 80,000 and shedding jobs by the thousands. Yet coal provides one third of our national electricity supply. If the US were to support solar energy with policy, incentives and subsidies we could really begin to grow renewable energy from its current market share. There is a real opportunity now to invest more in the solar industry to create good-news stories like Sungevity’s across the country.

Sungevity’s business model leverages existing contractors – roofers, carpenters and electricians – to get out and do the work of installing solar systems on roofs. We think this is important because it brings the mainstream trades into the solar economy and helps them see there is good work to be had spreading solar.

As a business, subcontracting the final mile or boots-on-the-roof stage of going solar is a clear advantage and we can focus on making the process of going solar, including all the permitting and bureaucracy stuff simpler as well as innovate with new finance products, like the Solar Lease. This lets folks go solar for no-money-down and pay through time for their solar electricity.

HK: We talked about how individuals can put solar on their rooftops and also the role of government, but how about the private sector? I just read that Massachusetts is one of the leading states for massive rooftop solar projects. What is the role of the private sector here?

DK: The role is to make this easy and affordable for people to spread it across America’s rooftops. In my book I write about “solar citizens” and social business and entrepreneurs, who have to be savvy and good business people.

The reason why REI, IKEA and others are installing solar is to save on energy costs. It’s cheaper to take it free from the sky than taking it from the grid. What the private sector can do is work to make this more and more affordable with financing. The key innovation has been the solar lease for residential customers and the PPA for commercial customers.

It works like this: since these customers do not want to purchase the infrastructure and would rather only pay for the electricity, they want to sign a power purchase agreement. These financing structures are innovation that the private sector alone will deliver.

My broad answer is that the private sector is going to provide the entrepreneurs and innovation that allow solar power to achieve its potential. It depends on many more businesses growing and succeeding to fill this niche. We need businesses to provide easy solar for box stores, schools, churches, and we need innovations for building materials and construction. All those businesses will be born out of the classic American entrepreneurial spirit. Ninety percent of new jobs in the U.S. economy are created by small businesses getting bigger. This is one way Sungevity leads by example, and it is what we think will be the future of the revolution.

HK: Detractors of solar technology like to think of it as marginal and “boutiquey,” as if solar panels are quaint on some hippie’s roof but cannot handle the baseload of our large-scale economy and manufacturing/production needs. What’s your response?

DK: Those are the words of pundits who aren’t reading the writing on the wall. It’s like the IBM people who said there wouldn’t be more than five computers in the world. Or Bell Atlantic saying that cell phones aren’t as good as landlines. Now the rest of the world is jumping to cell-based infrastructure. “Baseload” is a figment of the fossil fuel industry that is now being undercut in countries where they are bypassing that argument altogether.

Germany has 30 gigawatts of solar on rooftops, enough for the giant company E.ON to announce that they will no longer build coal or oil power plants and will instead run increasingly sustainable power plants. Developments like these completely throw “baseload” on its head – the assumption that you oversupply the demand in order to ensure up-time to ensure service. With solar, you dispatch just enough energy and in the case where you can’t provide enough then you can rely on the old forms.

HK: In the last year we’ve also seen a big rush in the U.S. and other parts of the world to move to natural gas, which is viewed as abundant, clean and cheap. Does this focus on the availability of gas (as a U.S.-based energy source) and the ensuing messes of fracking turn us away from environmental work and the growth of solar?

DK: Gas is not cheap; the costs are shouldered by the communities from whom it is extracted. Don’t believe the hype –there’s been a lot of “supply side” hyperbole, which is something we’ve heard from the gas guys before in order to increase service. There have also been economic busts led by the gas industry claiming more value than they created.

We should be wary. The reality is that America does have a lot of gas. However, we have to use this moment as a quick bridge to a broader renewable future. We will need a lower-cost supply of energy, particularly solar, so as a nation we have to weather this major energy industry shift and invest in solar. Most consumers aren’t falling for the natural gas solution because they get that it’s just as dirty as coal and oil, and that we have to move away from digging into the ground in order to boil water.

HK: The book charts out your own trajectory from working with Greenpeace and Project Underground to your current role in the rooftop revolution. You talk compellingly about realizing that protest without solutions won’t get us where we want to go, and neither will quick technological solutions without advocacy. You’ve been in both worlds, why are solutions without justice inadequate?

DK: I’m not naïve enough to believe that solar panels are going to fix power relations in our country. Whatever we do we should also be redressing the injustices that have been perpetuated by energy industries since they were created. Energy policy has become a social policy, where we choose to extract energy from indigenous and poor communities in Appalachia or Nigeria.

The energy industry’s implications are huge for the environment, inequitable wealth accumulation, and people’s health. In simple terms, we now have dirty coal burning plants giving asthma to poorer people. When we promote solar energy, it must be done in a way that empowers people by creating businesses, building jobs, and cleaning up the environment. That is its potential but the implementation from dream to reality has to be very intentional. So I am very conscious of that intention, of being part of a “solar social movement” that maintains that dream while building businesses like Sungevity.

An increasing number of Americans are aware that it’s possible to go solar. It is saving money for people in places like the mid-Atlantic. We are showing that you can give people the option and make it clear that it is possible to go solar with a solar lease. Do something! Get involved!

Not only is there an enormous growth potential for solar energy, but there is also work to be done to show what the solar industry already has changed. Look at the jobs story – 120,000 strong, yet who knows that in America? And the solar industry provides jobs that can’t be off-shored, for manufacturing, selling, installing and maintaining solar panels. The industry employs at least four more people than fossil fuels per unit of energy. Where’s the media coverage on the solar industry’s growth trajectory in our current economic recession -- how many industries have been growing at that rate in recent years? Solar is not marginal, it’s all over the place.

Heeten Kalan is a Senior Program Officer at the New World Foundation. In his spare time he enjoys carving wooden spoons and helping people plan their self-guided safaris in South Africa.

The Internet Is Slaying the Middle Class

Scott Timberg, Salon — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:53:00 -0700

In "Who Owns the Future?" Jaron Lanier examines how the Web eliminates employment and job security, along with revenues that give the economic middle stability.

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as ‘visionary,’ ” Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, “a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills.”

Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future?,” which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways. (How is a pirated music file like a 21st century mortgage?) Lanier argues that there is little essential difference between Facebook and a digital trading company, or Amazon and an enormous bank. (“Stanford sometimes seems like one of the Silicon Valley companies.”)

Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”

“Future” also looks at the way the creative class – especially musicians, journalists and photographers — has borne the brunt of disruptive technology.

The new book – which has drawn a rave in the New York Times — has already received a serious challenge from Evgeny Morozov in the Washington Post. The Internet-skeptic author of “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism” challenges Lanier’s proposed solution that regular people be rewarded in micropayments when their data enriches a digital network.

But more important than Lanier’s hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, “Future” is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and Lanier’s own“You Are Not a Gadget.”

We spoke to the dreadlocked, Berkeley-based author from the road, where he’s on a massive book tour.

You talk early in “Who Owns the Future?” about Kodak — about thousand of jobs being destroyed, and Instagram picking up the slack — but with almost no jobs produced. So give us a sense of how that happens and what the result is. It seems like the seed of your book in a way.

Right. Well, I think what’s been happening is a shift from the formal to the informal economy for most people. So that’s to say if you use Instagram to show pictures to your friends and relatives, or whatever service it is, there are a couple of things that are still the same as they were in the times of Kodak. One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same. Instagram wouldn’t work if there weren’t many millions of people using it. And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable. People have to, there’s a constant tending that’s done on a volunteer basis so that people can find each other and whatnot.

So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.

So instead of somebody paying money to get their photo developed, and somebody getting a part of a job, a little fragment of a job, at least, and retirement and all the other things that we’re accustomed to, it works informally now, and intangibly.

Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.

And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world. And then meanwhile this loss, or this shift in the line from what’s formal to what’s informal, doesn’t mean that we’re abandoning what’s formal. I mean, if it was uniform, and we were all entering a socialist utopia or something, that would be one thing, but the formal benefits are accruing at this fantastic rate, at this global record rate to the people who own the biggest computer that’s connecting all the people.

So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.

Right, and also I think part of what you’re saying too is that it’s still in most ways a formal economy in that the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.

Yeah, well, people will say you can find a place to crash. People who tour right now will find a couch to crash on. But, you know, this is the difference … I’m not saying that there aren’t ever benefits, like yeah, sometimes you can find a couch. But as I put it in the book, you have to sing for your supper for every meal. The informal way of getting by doesn’t tide you over when you’re sick and it doesn’t let you raise kids and it doesn’t let you grow old. It’s not biologically real.

Actually, can we stick with photography for a second? If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way. One of my favorite stories, which might be apocryphal — I can’t tell you for sure that this is so, although photographers traded this story for many years. But the way the piece of folklore goes is that during the Civil War era, and a little after, the very earliest photographers would go around with a collection of photographs of people who matched a certain archetype. So they would find the photograph that most closely matched your loved one and you’d buy that because at least there would be representation a little like the person, even if it was the wrong person. And that sounds just incredibly weird to us.

And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot. So the thing is, why not just paint the real person, because painting was really a lot of work. It takes a long time to paint a portrait. And you have to carry around all the paints and all that, and you could just create a stack of photos and sell them. So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that’s less hassle than the previous thing, there’s still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that’s easier?

People often say, well, in Rochester, N.Y. — which is a town that kind of lived on the photography business — they had a buggy whip factory that closed down with the advent of the automobile. The thing is, it’s a lot easier to deal with a car than to deal with horses. I love horses, but you know, you have to feed them, and they poop a lot, and you have to deal with their hooves. It’s a whole thing. And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don’t get paid, because, after all, it’s fun to drive. And it is. And they’re magical.

And so there could really easily be, somebody could easily have asserted that photography is so much easier than painting and driving cars is so much easier than horses that the people who do those things — or support it –shouldn’t be paid. Working in a nice environment — if you go to Sweden and you visit the Saab factory, it’s really nice. Why should you even be paid to do anything?

We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?

Right. Well, until about the year 2000 or so, some jobs had been destroyed by new technology. This goes back to the industrial revolution and earlier. But more jobs were created than those destroyed. So what changed?

Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible.

So it wasn’t inherent in the technology. In other words, there’s nothing inherently different about digital technology or the Internet than there is with factory technology or the assembly line or these other technological shifts that have developed?

Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.

But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don’t have that you can’t really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn’t a broad distribution of wealth.

And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, if you’re an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can only function if there are customers and customers can only come if there’s a middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth. So there’s no reason technically for any technology to ever create a job. In other words, we could have had motor vehicles, and we could have had film cameras, we could have had all these technologies without any formal jobs. We just had a social contract in which we decided that we’d allow formal jobs in factories and in drivers and in users of cameras and creators of cameras and film.

It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it’s a kind of capitalism that’s totally self-defeating because it’s so narrow. It’s a winner-take-all capitalism that’s not sustaining.

Well, a lot of your book is about the survival of the middle class in the digital age, the importance of a broad middle class as we move forward. You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two as the digital world has grown?

Well, there’s a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that in a market society, a middle class has always required some little artificial help to keep going. There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.

In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.

Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.

One of the things that really annoys me is the acceptance of lies that’s so common in the current orthodoxy. I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there’s this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media. And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote “Gadget” I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that’s where it happens the most right now.

So when we’re talking about the whole of the business – and these are not 50 people who are doing great. Or here’s another example. Do you know who Jenna Marbles is? She’s a super-successful YouTube star. She’s the queen of self-help videos for young women. She’s kind of a cross between Snooki and Martha Stewart or something. And she’s cool. I mean, she kind of helps girls with how to do makeup, and she’s irreverent. She’s had a billion views.

The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, “Oh, what an incredible life. She’s this incredibly lucky person who’s worked really hard.” And that’s all true. She’s in her 20s, and it’s great that she’s found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that’s worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success. And that’s good for a 20-year-old, but she’s at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life. And I don’t want to dismiss that. That’s great for a 20-year-old, although in truth, in my world of engineers that wouldn’t be much. But for someone who’s out there, a star with a billion views, that’s a crazy low expectation. She’s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they’re not even making it into the 1 percent.

The issue is if we’re going to have a middle class anymore, and if that’s our expectation, we won’t. And then we won’t have democracy.

You mentioned a minute ago that there’s about 50 in hip-hop. What kind of estimate did you come up with for music in general?

I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It’s really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it’s just not a way you can build a society.

The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you’re living in the slum or something, so you’re desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That’s what’s called development. But this is the opposite of that. It’s taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.

You say early in the book, “As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive only if we destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, photographers.” I guess what you seem to be saying here is the creative classis sort of the canary in the digital coal mine.

Yes. That’s precisely my point. So when people say, “Why are musicians so special? Everybody has to struggle.” And the thing is, I do think we are looking at a [sustainable] model.

We don’t realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest on the stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird belief that everybody’s this abstract robot that won’t ever get sick or have kids or get old. It’s like everybody’s this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and can self-fund until they find their magic moment or something.

The way society actually works is there’s some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That’s the thing we’re destroying, and that’s really the thing I’m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.

It wasn’t too long ago that it was unskilled people on assembly lines who answered phones or bank tellers and it’s just crept up in the decades since. You’ve mentioned a few times this sort of digital utopianism that still emanates from Silicon Valley. Where does that kind of thinking come from and why does it exist despite all the evidence to the contrary?

Well, it’s an orthodoxy now. I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians. It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.

Speaking of politics, your concerns are often those of the political left. You’re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don’t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?

I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.

The problem I have with socialist utopias is there’s some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people’s lives. So in a spiritual sense there’s some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. So it has to be moderated.

I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them. It just doesn’t work. So my own take on it is, actually another way I’ve been thinking about it lately is a balance of magisteria. “Magisteria” was the term that Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion. And I’ve been thinking that way about money and politics, or computers and politics, or computers and ethics. All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.

Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn’t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they’ll see it’s not true.

My cyber-friends think if you can just come up with a perfect scheme, that some perfect digital scheme will solve all the problems. My belief is that if we deal with all of these things, they can balance out each other to prevent the worst dysfunctions of each one from happening. And at minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn’t run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe. And that’s the minimum requirement. Maybe not the ideal.

So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria. And that is doesn’t concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we’ll really be fine. I’m actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I’m the most modest person in the conversation. I’m just trying to avoid total dysfunction.

Let’s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars? Military research and labs at public universities. And many of the people whom the Internet has enriched have become libertarians who earnestly tell you that they are “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” and resist progressive taxation because of it.

Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.

Near the end of the book you talk about the changes in the book business. It doesn’t sound pretty. What’s going on there and what have you learned as someone who has now written several books?

I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.

To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.

I’m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they’re reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you’re listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you’re listening to, but in truth it’s hard to get to those services.

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

So in practice you don’t know who the musician is. And I think that’s what could happen with writers. And this is what we celebrate in Wikipedia is pretending that there’s some absolute truth that can be spoken that people can approximate and that the speaker doesn’t matter. And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.

I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.

Let’s close with music then. You’re a longtime musician and composer. You’re a collector of obscure and archaic instruments. How does your interest in music and especially pre-modern acoustic music shape your thinking and your life as well?

Well, the original way I got into it is very personal. It’s just that my mother died when I was young, and she was a musician. My connection to her. I got involved in more and more unusual music because I didn’t want that connection to become something that was too static. It had to be constantly changing or it would become a cliché. So that’s how I got into it.

But as far as the connection to computers, the thing to me is that I’ve always been intrigued with music interface. Musical interfaces are such profoundly better user interfaces than anything we’ve done with a digital computer. They have better acuity. They create more opportunities for virtuosity. They work with the human body more profoundly, the nervous system. I mean good musical instruments. And I’ve just been intrigued by them. It made me realize that just because something is the latest, newest thing that seems like the cleverest thing we can do at the moment doesn’t make it better.

So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.

Did your life as a musician show you some of the things that you ended up excavating in “Gadget” and the new book?

Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that’s now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.

I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn’t actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.

The Inside Story of a Harvard Dissertation Too Racist for the Heritage Foundation

Zack Beauchamp, Think Progress — Wed, 22 May 2013 06:40:00 -0700

How Jason Richwine finally found a place to explore his absurd theories linking IQ to race at the elite university.

The idea that some racial groups are, on average, smarter than others is without a doubt among the most discussed (and debunked) “taboos” in American intellectual history. It is an argument that has been advanced since the days of slavery, one that helped push through the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, and one that set off a scientific firestorm in the late 60s that’s hardly flagged since.

Yet every time the race and IQ hypothesis reclaims the public spotlight, we are caught slackjaw, always returning to the same basic debates on the same basic concepts.

The recent fracas sparked by Dr. Jason Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is a case in point. The paper is a dry thing, written for an academic audience, yet its core claim, that Latino immigrants to the United States are and will likely remain less intelligent than “native whites,” has proved proper tinder for a public firestorm. The Heritage Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst in Empirical Studies is now a former Senior Policy Analyst — Heritage could not risk further tainting an immigration report it hoped would be influential by outright defending its scholar’s meditations on the possibly genetic intellectual inferiority of immigrants from Latin America.

It might seem like the book is closed on l’affaire Richwine: he’s left his job, Heritage is left with a black eye, and not a single mind has been changed about the value of research into race and IQ. But there’s still one major unanswered question.

If the dissertation was bad enough to get him fired from the Heritage Foundation, how did it earn him a degree from Harvard?

A popular answer among Richwine’s defenders is that, quite simply, it was exemplary work. Richwine’s dissertation committee was made up, by all accounts, of three eminent scholars, each widely respected in their respective fields. And it is Harvard.

But dozens of interviews with subject matter experts, Harvard graduates in Richwine’s program who overlapped with him, and members of the committee itself paint a somewhat more textured picture. Richwine’s dissertation was sloppy scholarship, relying on statistical sophistication to hide some serious conceptual errors. Yet internal accounts of Richwine’s time at Harvard suggests the august university, for the most part, let serious problems in Richwine’s research fall through the cracks.

Richwine Goes To Harvard

By his own account, Jason Richwine came to the Harvard Kennedy School deeply fascinated with the link between race and IQ. Richwine told The Washington Examiner’s Byron York that, as an undergraduate at American University, he fell in love with Charles Murray’s work on the topic. Murray, who will became an important player in Richwine’s story later on, is one of the authors of the infamous The Bell Curve, the 1994 book whose claims about the genetic roots of the black/white IQ gap set off the most famous public food fight over race and IQ. Richwine describes Murray as “my childhood hero.”

People that knew Richwine at Harvard describe him as an introverted, but kind, man. “He was a quiet and thoughtful person,” said Anh Ngoc Tran, a contemporary of Richwine’s at Harvard who now teaches at Indiana University. “[Richwine] was friendlier to international students,” Tran said. Another contemporary of Richwine’s echoed Tran, saying Richwine was “not really all that outgoing. Always a really nice guy.”

Tran took pain to distance Richwine from accusations of racism. “I don’t think he is racist,” Tran told me. “His wife is an immigrant.”

After the first two years of coursework, PhD candidates in Public Policy at the Kennedy School move away from group classes toward individual research. That means taking comprehensive exams (“comps,” in grad student lingo) to show you’ve mastered the course material. After comps, you start work on a dissertation, a piece of original scholarship that’s supposed to demonstrate the candidate’s ability to produce research at the level expected of an expert in the field. Dissertation topics are determined in conjunction with a primary advisor, who goes on to become the “chair” of a three-person committee that determines the candidate’s fate. The topic is finalized in a formal “prospectus” outlining the research agenda.

Richwine’s chair, as listed in his dissertation, was Professor George Borjas, a prominent, if controversial, economist. A Cuban immigrant himself, Borjas was a natural fit for Richwine’s dour assessment of mass Latino immigration: he’s the nation’s leading academic immigration skeptic, famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for arguing that immigrants to the United States are likely to be unskilled drags on the US economy. One of his most influential articles, a1987 paper called “Self-Selection and the Earnings of Immigrants,” argued that countries with more income inequality than the United States are likely to send over “low quality” immigrants— meaning people lacking the skills to march up the economic latter — as unskilled laborers lead a more prosperous life here than in their home countries.

However much Borjas emphasized the skills, or lack thereof, of Latino immigrants in his own work, he knew and cared little about their IQs. “I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don’t really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration,” he toldSlate’s Dave Weigel. “In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I’ve long believed this, I don’t find the IQ academic work all that interesting.”

It’s then perhaps odd that Borjas put up little resistance to Richwine’s proposed line of inquiry. “Jason had the topic fully formed in his mind before he talked to me,” he wrote via email. “I played no role in topic selection or forming the research agenda.”

This line raised eyebrows among some scholars familiar with social science dissertations. Dan Drezner is a Professor of International Politics at Tufts’ Fletcher School, an institution that’s somewhat similar to Harvard’s Kennedy School in character, who’s been following the Richwine case closely. “If I’m an advisor, and I have a student that comes to me,” Drezner said, “the last thing I would do is say ‘write this.’” They key issue is “how well formed was Richwine’s argument when he came to Borjas?” Students should come up with their own dissertation topics, Drezner said, but if an advisor didn’t sufficiently challenge them on whether it was a good, well-thought out program, that could be a problem.

What’s a “Hispanic?”

Some experts in the fields Richwine’s dissertation covered, judging from the final product, had harsh answers to Drezner’s question. “The committee was wrong to approve [Richwine's dissertation] and to accept the prospectus,” wrote Diego A. von Vacano. Von Vacano is a professor at Texas A&M University whose research focuses on Hispanic identity. After he wrote aharsh review of Richwine’s work on the academic blog The Monkey Cage, I got in touch with him to see if he could clarify the nature of his objections.

Von Vacano’s basic critique centers on Richwine’s definitions, or lack thereof, of the terms “Hispanic,” “white,” and “race.” The most grevious of Richwine’s errors lies in his account of the first: the lack of a meaningful definition of “Hispanic” dooms the dissertation’s ability to draw rigorous conclusions about the people he’s chosen to study.

There’s enormous debate about just what “Hispanic” means and who counts as one in any meaningful sense. Richwine’s third chapter, titled “Hispanic IQ,” treats this debate in the most cursory of fashions. This is the chapter’s full definition of the term Hispanic and defense of its use:

Over 56% of immigrants living in the U.S. in 2006 were Hispanic — that is, born in either Mexico (32% of total immigrants), Central American [sic] and the Caribbean (17%), or South America (7%)…Hispanics are not a monolithic group either ethnically or culturally, but the category still has real meaning. Hispanics can be of any race, but they are most often “Mestizo” — a mixture of European and Amerindian background. Mexico, for example, is 60% Mestizo (LV 2006, 241). Hispanics also share ethno-cultural tendencies that are different from the majority Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States (Huntington 2004, 253-255). Most come from Spanish-speaking nations with cultures heavily influence by Catholicism. And many Hispanics choose to identify themselves as such, as the existence of groups like the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the National Council of La Raza (“the race” or “the people”), and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus readily demonstrates.

Von Vacano sees this as fatally inadequate. “Any serious work at the doctoral level on these issues (even if mainly quantitative or policy-oriented),” he told me, “requires a substantive component of analysis from the qualitative, historical, cultural, normative, and theoretical perspectives (at least one or two dissertation chapters).”

These are not merely scholarly niceties: what Richwine means by “Hispanic” is critical to the success of both of his two core arguments. First, to prove that “from the perspective of Americans alive today, the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent,” he needs to show that one can speak meaningfully about“Hispanic” IQ. Richwine needs this claim to be true for the entire third section of his dissertation, the one that spells out the dangers of low IQ Hispanic immigration, to succeed. Establishing the negative consequences of Hispanic immigration means first establishing there’s such a thing as “Hispanic immigration” in a scientifically useful sense.

Because Hispanic identity is so hotly contested among scholars of race and ethnicity, that means both providing a clear account of why people from an arbitrary set of geographic locations are homogenous enough for generalizations about them are meaningful, controlled social science. Richwine fails to do so.

First, Richwine asserts Hispanics are mostly some “Mestizo” mix of Native American and European, making them genetically similar. But in the unnerving world of race and IQ research, what mix they are matters. Richwine believes that “socioeconomic hierarchies correlate consistently with race all across the world” because some races are biologically smarter; “there are no countries,” he writes, “in which ethnic Chinese are less successful than Amerindians.” It stands to reason, on his theory, that “mixed” Hispanics with more European or Asian DNA will be concomitantly smarter, on average, than more heavily Amerindian or African ones. But Richwine doesn’t attempt to show that the mix of racial DNA inside any one “Hispanic” subgroup is consistent enough for generalization, let alone the category as a whole.

That’s because it’s not. Even a cursory examination of research on Latin American genetics uncovers an impossibly complex genetic admixture, one that varies widely from country to country or even region to region. To take one simple example, the average percentage of identifiably African, Native American, and European DNA among Brazilians varies widely by region(although some definitions of “Hispanic” would exclude Portuguese-speaking Brazil, Richwine’s includes it). Hispanic immigrants to the United States come from a bewildering array of countries, each with its own particular internal diversity. As von Vacano puts it, “there is no literature that can meaningfully support the idea that ‘Hispanic’ is a genetic category,” let alone one that can be equated with the colonially-superimposed “Mestizo” identifier.

Second, Richwine asserts that Hispanics share a similar culture that’s distinct from so-called “Anglo” culture. Richwine’s only support for this claim is a citation of Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, a book that warns of a wave of Hispanic immigration irrevocably altering American culture for the worse. Huntington’s claims about Hispanic inability to assimilate have been subjected to serious quantitative challenge, but more to the point, citing a polemic tract about immigration does not constitute explaining what the purportedly unified Hispanic culture is and why the fact that it involves a lot of Spanish-speaking and Catholicism might be seen as allowing one to make generalized claims about the group.

This is especially egregious when the scholarly consensus is that there is no obvious unified Hispanic or Latino culture. As the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture puts it, “as all the chapters [in this book] reveal, any search for a communal ‘Latin American’ culture has remained an elusive, somewhat quixotic idea.” This, again, is because Latin American countries vary widely — compare Mexico to Brazil to Costa Rica to Argentina and find extraordinary differences in wealth, social norms, political systems, and ethnic backgrounds. Indeed, the vast diversity among “Hispanic” societies should be obvious even to someone whose only experience of these cultures involves dining out: Mexican chile rellenos are not Cubano sandwiches, which definitely are not Argentine steak platters.

Finally, Richwine notes that Hispanic immigrants to the United States have a sense of shared identity, but, again, it’s not explained why that allows one to make generalizations about group IQ, let alone the genetic component thereof. It’s just simply asserted, without any explanation of who shares the shared identity — Cuban-Americans, for example, have a different view of their American experience than Salvadoreans — and why that’s relevant.

Why do defintions matter if Richwine succeeds in showing a deep, persistent difference between so-called “Hispanics” and “whites?” Aside from the fact that it makes it impossible to figure out the scope of the dissertation (are Mexicans of largely European descent likely to have low IQs? What about African-descendent Brazilians?), consider a simple analogy. Suppose I test people who like to wear red hats and people who like to wear blue hats, and find the red-hatters have consistently higher IQ scores than blue-hatters. It’s highly unlikely that hat preference itself explains the gap; more likely, it’s something else that’s correlated with being a red-hatter or a blue-hatter or potentially a statistical artifact — a consequence of a few really smart red-hatters or some spectacularly dumb blue-hatters.

Substitute “white” and “Hispanic” and the point becomes clear. Without a proper definition of what he means when he says Hispanic, we have no way of evaluating the role that immigrants’ “Hispanicness” — whether that means shared genes, culture, or national background — plays in determining their IQ. Put differently, in order to know whether and how being Hispanic matters for IQ, we need to know what it means to be Hispanic. That, in turn, makes it impossible to evaluate how meaningful Richwine’s conclusions about the persistence of the IQ gap are or how they apply to any particular group of immigrants.

Someone may disagree with these arguments. But, according to von Vacano, they require a response. Richwine simply pretends they do not exist.

Harvard On The Potomac

After setting off down his research path, Richwine needed to assemble a committee to evaluate his work. Dissertation committees are best thought of as a sort of Venn diagram of expertise. A dissertation is supposed to be original scholarship, work that, once completed, makes its author a leading expert on a very specific topic. No one professor is likely to know as much about every subfield used to get to the candidate’s very specific conclusion, so committee members are supposed to fill in each others’ expertise gaps.

Borjas, as we’ve seen, filled the largest part of the Venn Diagram given his expertise on the economics of Latino immigration. The second committee member, Richard Zeckhauser, is an economic polymath who’s published on an impressively bewildering array of public policy topics. The thread that ties them together is his interest in sophisticated quantitative, economic analysis of public policy issues, making him ideally suited to check Richwine’s complex econometric and statistical work.

There was a consensus among academics I spoke to that the analysis of immigrant IQ test data and other aptitude metrics, as well as his economic model of the effects of low IQ immigration — the quantitative work, essentially — were the best parts of Richwine’s dissertation.

“Jason’s empirical work was careful,” Zeckhauser wrote. “Moreover, my view is that none of his advisors would have accepted his thesis had he thought that his empirical work was tilted or in error. However, Richwine was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy.” Borjas has made similar remarks, suggesting “none of the members of the committee would have signed off on it if they thought that it was shoddy empirical work.”

With Borjas and Zeckhauser on board, at least one critical area of Richwine’s Venn diagram remained unfilled: race and IQ. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s where the story gets complicated.

Richwine did not do his dissertation research at Harvard. That’s actually fairly common in the Public Policy PhD program. One source familiar with the program told me that students often only have university-provided stipends for the first two and a half years of the program; after that, they work as teaching assistants or find external grants or scholarships to make up the money gap.

That’s when Richwine went off to study at with his “childhood hero” Murray at the American Enterprise Institute. The mechanics of how Richwine ended up with a fellowship at the prestigious conservative think tank aren’t quite clear; Richwine remembers a meeting with Murray in Cambridge leading to his eventual post at AEI, but Murray told me he doesn’t quite recall the process by which Richwine made it to Washington. It doesn’t surprise him, though, that Richwine was thrilled to be at AEI. “I’m Charles Murray,” he said. “I’m sure that Jason wanted to work with me.”

“I mean, come on.”

Murray’s work, particularly The Bell Curve, features prominently in Richwine’s dissertation. Richwine calls Murray “my primary advisor,” noting that “no one was more influential than Charles Murray” on the final product. Steven Durlauf, an economic methodologist at the University of Wisconsin familiar with IQ research, reads this as an acknowledgement that Murray “was de factothe main advisor” in place of Borjas. But even then, Murray didn’t see Richwine in person all that frequently. “I don’t have an office [at AEI]. They pay my salary,” but he generally works remotely.

Murray certainly had more of an influence on Richwine than the student’s third formal advisor, Christopher “Sandy” Jencks. A longtime veteran of the race and IQ wars, Jencks’ position in the controversy is quite different from Murray’s. Unlike Murray, a “hereditarian” who believes genes explain a great deal of the demonstrated gap in IQ scores between black and white students, Jencks is an “environmentalist” who believes circumstances, not genetics, basically explain the score gap.

“My views about both test scores and politics are very different from [Richwine's],” Jencks told me archly.

Jencks was a “late addition” to the committee, meaning, he clarified, that he didn’t start working on Richwine’s dissertation till after he left for Washington. “He was at AEI at the time,” Jencks said, “so I did not see much of him.” The professor’s role was also fairly limited: “I was asked to serve as a third reader, read a draft, and made extensive comments about what should be done to improve it.” But, as Jencks remembers it, Richwine didn’t heed all of his advice: “He made some of the changes but not others.”

Depending on the importance of these criticisms, this could be a serious problem. “If you’re on the dissertation committee, and you say ‘you’ve gotta change this, this, and this,’ and the student doesn’t do it,” Professor Drezner told me, “then that is a red flag.”

Jencks didn’t clarify exactly what his criticisms were. But independent review of the section on race and IQ suggested some serious problems with Richwine’s approach.

IQ Isn’t Everything (Or Even Close)

“No academic institution would hire him based on this,” said Professor Warigia Bowman.

Bowman graduated from the Kennedy School Public Policy PhD program in the same year that Richwine did. She knew all of his advisors, some quite well: she was Borjas’ teaching fellow in an introductory economics course, studied analytic methods with Zeckhauser, and had encountered Jencks in passing. Bowman has the utmost respect for all of them.

“They’re extremely generous people, they’ve always been kind to me…they’re known internationally as academic scholars.”

But she thinks that, in this case, they missed some serious errors. “I can only imagine that they were so dazzled by the empirics that they overlooked many of the flaws in the text.” Essentially, the quality of mathematical and statistical analysis in Richwine’s work hid some major conceptual shortcomings in his treatment of IQ.

Bowman, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service who specializes in African Science and Technology policy, is close to this debate. An attorney as well as a scholar, she worked on immigration law before becoming an academic. She’s also, in her words, “an African-American woman who’s the child of an immigrant of African descent.”

Her basic point is that Richwine’s treatment of his opponents, particularly critics of Murray’s work, is “selective, narrow, and cherry-picked.” For instance, she notes, Richwine cites a 1996 American Psychological Association (APA) report called Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns as representative of a “general consensus” about the “fundamentals” of IQ, but fails to cite or respond to subsequent criticism of the APA report by relevant experts.

This is a particularly troubling omission. Professor Diane F. Halpern is the only person to have coauthored both the 1996 report and a 2012 paper attempting to revise its conclusions to reflect the last 15 years of research on intelligence. Halpern isn’t a stranger to taking controversial positions on genes and intelligence: in her book “Sex Differences and Cognitive Abilities,” shewrote that there is “good evidence that biological sex differences play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences.”

Yet recent research has swayed her in the opposite direction on the biology of intelligence. “It seems safe to conclude that low socioeconomic status limits genetic contributions to intelligence, which means that poor children do not develop their full genetic potential,” she wrote, “a finding that took me some time to accept and understand.”

Some of the most persuasive research supporting this new consensus comes from Professor Eric Turkheimer. Turkheimer and his colleagues conducted several analyses of data on twins, perhaps most famously in a 2003 study that analyzed twin performance on IQ tests using a model that separated out genetic and environmental differences inside and between pairs and then mapped the results onto the soci-economic status of the children. Turkheimer and company found that among poor twins, virtually no variation in IQ could be attributed to inherited traits, but among wealthier ones, a significant portion was. This suggests that poverty and material deprivation uniquely overwhelm any genetic component to IQ, artificially depressing IQ among disadvantaged children. Turkheimer’s research is supported by a wealth of direct evidence about the way in which stress and pollution in early childhood can stunt brain development.

Richwine doesn’t cite Turkheimer’s research. Though he’s forced to concede that similar work has demonstrated “environmental factors significantly affect IQ development when the environment is dire,” he dismisses this potentially damning critique of his persistent IQ gap — after all, most Hispanic immigrants to the United States are from far poorer countries — by saying there’s nothing you can do to fix a damaged IQ. Citing Murray and several other “hereditarian scholars, he suggests that all interventions to raise IQ have been proven to have no meaningful long term effects.

“That’s mistaken,” says Professor Richard Nisbett.

Nisbett is one of the world’s leading experts on intelligence. A co-author of the “new consensus” paper with Halpern, he’s well positioned to comment on the academic appropriateness of Richwine’s omissions (Richwine wrote a strident, but genial, critique of Nisbett’s 2009 book. Nisbett appeared unaware of this review until I mentioned it after our substantive conversation).

Nisbett believes the evidence amassed in recent years that IQ can be improved is overwhelming. “There are lots of interventions for very young children that increase IQ enormously,” he says. Though “the gains [in IQ test results] typically fade,” as Richwine suggests, “the very best interventions [to improve IQ] have colossal effects” for the rest of a child’s life.

He rattled off an impressive list of findings: these interventions “reduce by half the likelihood of being put back a grade in school…they increase the likelihood of graduating high school by about 20 percent, and they increase the likelihood of four year college by a factor of three. They increase the likelihood of making over two thousand dollars a month by a factor of four and they reduce by half the likelihood of being on welfare as an adult.” So even if the scores on IQ tests don’t change all that much down the line, the benefit of raising IQ scores at the right time in a child’s life appears to be enormous.

So a deep body of work since 1995 suggests IQ either is being raised permanently by these interventions in a way that isn’t showing up on tests, or IQ doesn’t matter nearly as much as Richwine thinks. But instead of grappling with this work, which obviously presents a serious challenge to his core thesis that “new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children,” Richwine is mostly content to outsource his conclusion to Charles Murray’s view circa 1994.

But what about Richwine’s dire warnings about an America plagued by an influx of low-IQ people? Richwine blames low IQ for everything from high crime rates among young “Hispanics” to increased rates of social distrust between Americans to labor market disruptions. In one particularly cringe inducing section, he posits that the reason for Hispanic “underclass” poverty is a combination of welfare-induced laziness (a point he takes as given, citing only Murray in support and no dissenting views) and low IQ.

Showing that that low IQ immigration would be likely to have any one of those consequences would be a difficult scholarly accomplishment, but Richwine’s seeming ambition to make a comprehensive case against mass immigration proved his undoing. In prioritizing breadth over depth, Richwine skated over a wealth of research throwing up a significant roadblock for his conclusions: the question of how much IQ matters for life outcomes.

On the basis of several relatively crude correlations, Richwine treats a person’s IQ as an almost-perfect guide to someone’s prospects for success in life, relying heavily, once again, on Murray’s work in The Bell Curve. While it’s clear that the sort of intelligence IQ measures matters, particularly when you’re comparing two people from similar backgrounds (the higher IQ sibling in a pair, for example, is likely to do better), there’s simply no reason to think IQ matters enough to provide the juice for sweeping theories about the life prospects of entire groups of immigrants.

“There was no excuse for saying that kind of thing in 2009,” Nisbett said.

James Heckman would likely agree. Professor Heckman, an eminent economist at the University of Chicago who worked with Borjas when he was a post-doctoral fellow there, is an expert on the role that intelligence and other traits play in helping people succeed. He wrote a paper with Tim Kautz last year called, “Hard Evidence of Soft Skills,” reviewing the last several decades of research on the topic. As you might guess from the title, it’s not good for Richwine.

Experts generally think that, roughly, a “Big Five” set of psychological traits — Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — are key predictors of how well someone will do in life in terms of income, college graduation and so on. These traits can matter as much or more than IQ on some measures: a 2006 paper by Heckman and others found that personality tests were, statistically speaking, better predictors of career choice, criminality, and teen pregnancy (among other important things) than “cognitive” metrics like IQ scores.

These findings make intuitive sense. No matter how good your brain is at crunching numbers, you can still make bad choices if you’re lazy, anti-social, or overly neurotic. Conversely, people who work hard and well with others don’t have to be cognitive geniuses to succeed. As Nisbett told me, “there are prominent people with IQs in the 90s.”

The research on personality helps explain a puzzle I raised earlier: why do early childhood interventions, as Nisbett says, appear to improve children’s chances in life over the long term while only providing a temporary boost in IQ scores? As it turns out, you can teach kids to work harder or get along better with others. Heckman summarizes a number of studies to make this point, but perhaps the clearest were two studies where children were tasked with accomplishing a series of attention-heavy computer tests. They found higher conscientiousness scores among the kids who were given these tasks than a control group. Once again, more advantaged, better educated kids have a huge leg up.

On the basis of this research, Heckman finds Richwine’s attempt to use IQ to predict the consequences of Hispanic immigration beyond outdated. “Hispanics have an amazing work ethic…and they are achievement oriented,” Heckman wrote, in a statement that admittedly smacks of some stereotyping of its own. Richwine’s argument “sounds like a worn out restatement of eugenics from 100 years ago.”

Heckman’s view is and has been the dominant one for quite some time. “IQ fundamentalists,” a term Nisbett steals from Malcolm Gladwell, just are “not well informed” about what most economists and psychologists think about habits of mind and personality that make people succeed. They operate out of “a silo,” the same one from which Jason Richwine took the grain he used to make his meal.

These critiques hardly exhaust the criticisms one could level at Richwine’s treatment of Hispanics and IQ. We could get into the fact that Richwine posits a partially-genetically lower Hispanic IQ despite the fact that there’s not a single study of the role genes play in “Hispanic” IQ scores, let alone one that supports Richwine’s theory. We could get into the fact that his samples of Hispanic immigrants are rather small, leading him to supplement with national-level estimations of Hispanic IQ — principally from Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen — that rely on small, outdated, andculturally biased datasets that oftentimes aren’t even from the relevant country, divined instead from the “known IQs” of a country’s “racial groups.” And even that terrible data, according to The American Conservative publisher Ron Unz, doesn’t itself support the idea that Hispanics have lower IQs.

But the point is clear enough. Whether or not you think Richwine’s conclusions about Hispanics and IQ are defensible — and the relevant research suggests that they are not — it’s clear that he didn’t defend them well enough.

Beyond Richwine

Richwine finished his dissertation in his fourth year at Harvard, while he was working out of AEI. That’s not unheard of, but it’s faster than the Kennedy School average. “It can be done with some sacrifice to quality or depth,” one Kennedy School alum told me.

There were ample opportunities to revise his conclusions, beyond the normal give-and-take advising process Borjas described when we corresponded about Richwine. All Kennedy School Public Policy PhD students are given a chance to revise a full draft of the dissertation before final approval; in some instances, one source familiar with the process told me, they get “sent back to the drawing board.”

It’s unclear what happened at this stage. Richwine could not be reached for comment, and his professors won’t say. “I feel extremely uncomfortable disclosing personal and critical advice that I gave Jason or any other student in the privacy of my office,” Borjas said.

But here’s what we do know. Jason Richwine received a PhD from Harvard University for sub-standard research, work that makes strong assertions on a charged topic based on poorly defined concepts, incomplete and misleading summaries of opposing arguments, and bald analytic overreaches.

Is this enough to say Harvard was wrong to award him his dissertation? While some, like von Vacano, say yes, others urge more caution. Professor Durlauf, for one, says “the dissertation committee members should be presumed to have acted in good faith.”

There’s no reason to believe they didn’t. Every independent expert who wanted to speak on the topic praised the program. “Harvard’s Kennedy School is a very serious place and has trained some outstanding scholars,” said Professor Dan Black at the University of Chicago. “I hold their Ph.D. program in very high regard.”

The same went for his committee members. Even those harshly critical of Richwine’s dissertation agreed they were kind people and highly-regarded scholars.

And as for Richwine, the overwhelming sense you get from reading his work and speaking to his acquaintances is that he was, as odd as this sounds, a well-intentioned naïf. We’ve all met the type: someone so airily focused on their own passions and interests (in Richwine’s case, Murray-style hereditarian work on race and IQ) that they miss the broader social forest for the trees.

“I think what happened was that he tried to make an academic argument but did not foresee this [racism] problem,” his friend, Professor Tran, told me.

Whatever one thinks about Harvard or Richwine, the real lesson here goes beyond both of them.

Even if Richwine’s dissertation, despite all of its errors and omissions, was “good enough” to earn a passing mark, it’s emphatically not “good enough” to make a real contribution to our knowledge about the intersection between race and IQ. The scholarly errors in his research are too pervasive and severe.

Beyond the failure of craft, however, is the serious harm that can result from quasi-eugenic works masquerading as serious research. Alleging that, as a group, an enormous percentage of Americans are and always will be dumber than their fellow citizens isn’t just normal academic inquiry. Richwine bemoans the lack of “social trust” purportedly created by American diversity, but few things could undermine the shared bonds of citizenship more than widespread belief among one “race” that others are so unintelligent that more of them can be let into the country.

This isn’t a theoretical point. Throughout American history, the so-called science of race and IQ has been used by the powerful to demarcate “good” citizens and separate them from the “dangerous” ones. Minorities and minority immigrants in particular have borne the brunt of these attacks, as Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates by simply quoting the words of anti-immigrant advocates against themselves. Much as Richwine may sound like a disinterested scholar, his work does not occur in a political or social vacuum. His own policy recommendations to limit immigration to high-IQ individuals proves it.

It is the case that, on some tests of intelligence, there are demonstrated gaps between different groups of Americans, particularly ones identified as “black” and “white.” As we’ve seen, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests these broad groups have little do with “race” simpliciter and much more to do with the environments people of certain races find themselves in. These findings underscore that careful scholarship on the sources of this gap, like Richard Nisbett’s or Christopher Jencks’, is legitimate academic inquiry and should be vigorously protected as such.

But this field is no place for dilettantes. The costs of being wrong are too high, the fearful forces fueled too powerful for race and IQ research to be judged like normal work. There needs to be a premium on conceptual precision and empirical accuracy over and above standard operating procedure, even (or perhaps especially) at a place as esteemed as Harvard. Anyone who wants to work in this area should be set to a higher standard, asked to explain what “race” means and whether it’s really what matters when we talk about IQ. It’s a bar Jason Richwine’s simplistic research never would have cleared.

Sometimes, “good enough” isn’t good enough.

Austerity Kills: Crippling Economic Policies Causing Global Health Crisis

Amy Goodman, David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu , Democracy Now! — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:26:00 -0700

Economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the globe in their new book.

The following is reprinted from the Democracy Now! interview,"Why Austerity Kills: From Greece to U.S., Crippling Economic Policies Causing Global Health Crisis."

In their new book, "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills," economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. For example, in Greece, where spending on public health has been slashed by 40 percent, HIV rates have jumped 200 percent, and the country has seen its first malaria outbreak since the 1970s. An economist and public health specialist, Stuckler is a senior research leader at Oxford University. Dr. Basu is a physician and epidemiologist who teaches at Stanford University. "Had austerity been organized like a clinical trial, it would’ve been discontinued given evidence of its deadly side effects," Stuckler says. "There is an alternative choice that we found in the historical data and through the present recessions: When we place people and their health at the center of economic recovery, it can help get our economy back on track faster and yield lasting dividends to our society."

Amy Goodman: "Early last month, a triple suicide was reported in the seaside town of Civitanova Marche, Italy. A married couple, Anna Maria Sopranzi, who was 68, and Romeo Dionisi, [who was] 62, had been struggling to live on her monthly pension of around 500 euros [around $650 a month], and had fallen behind on rent.

"Because the Italian government’s austerity budget had raised the retirement age, Mr. Dionisi, a former construction worker, became one of Italy’s esodati (exiled ones)—older workers plunged into poverty without a safety net. On April 5, he and his wife left a note on a neighbor’s car asking for forgiveness, then hanged themselves in a storage closet at home. When Ms. Sopranzi’s brother, Giuseppe [Sopranzi, who was] 73, heard the news, he drowned himself in the Adriatic."

Those are the opening lines to a startling recent article in The New York Times headlined "How Austerity Kills." The authors of the piece, David Stuckler and Dr. Sanjay Basu, have just published a new book looking at the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. In Greece, where spending on public health has been slashed by 40 percent, HIV rates have jumped 200 percent, and Greece has seen its first outbreak in malaria since the 1970s.

David Stuckler is an economist and public health specialist. He’s a senior research leader at Oxford University. Dr. Sanjay Basu is a physician and epidemiologist. He teaches at Stanford University. Together, they’ve written this new book, out today, called The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I’m glad you could both be together in one place, being at Stanford and being at Oxford. David, let’s begin with you. Lay out the thesis of this book.

David Stuckler: We’ve been studying how recessions affect people’s health over the past decade, looking at the Great Depression through the East Asian financial crisis, right through to the present Great Recession. And what we found is that recessions hurt. Unemployment, job loss, foreclosure, unpayable debt are risks to health. But what ultimately matters is how politicians respond. And when they make large cuts to social supports, social protections, they can turn recessions into severe epidemics.

Amy Goodman: So, explain. Give us examples in countries. I mean, this horrific story I just described of this triple suicide, the couple and then her brother. Talk about what people—what happens when policies go one way or the other.

David Stuckler: Greece is in the middle of a public health disaster, as you mentioned. To meet budget deficit reduction targets set by the so-called troika—the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and European Commission—Greece has cut its health sector by more than 40 percent. At a time when homelessness is escalating and austerity has further driven up youth unemployment, we’ve seen HIV infections jump, concentrated in injection drug users. The malaria outbreak was linked to the cut in mosquito-spraying prevention programs, creating an outbreak that’s much more costly to control than the short-term money saved by reducing the budget. Healthcare access has declined substantially. The majority of people who have lost access are pensioners who have contributed to the system their entire lives. And these are just a few of the many health effects seen in Greece, mirrored in Spain, Italy and, to some extent, the U.K. and the U.S.

Amy Goodman: We were just talking before the show about one of the suicides in Spain that became very well known. I wanted to turn to a clip. At the time, we were talking to a formerDemocracy Now! producer, María Carrión, about this case that occurred in Spain. The woman, David, was named?

David Stuckler: Amaia Egaña. It was a case of Spain’s eviction suicides. Spain has a system where when people’s homes are foreclosed, even if they default on their home, they’re still liable to pay back the debt. So people are plunged into poverty and arrears at the same time, without support. We’ve seen this trigger large rises in suicides. Spain, Italy and Greece are at the high end of increases in economic suicides.

Amy Goodman: So, Amaia Egaña was 53 years old. She jumped from a balcony to her death as she was about to be evicted. María Carrión appeared on the show to talk about Amaia’s suicide.

María Carrión: Amaia is a former city council member in a town—the town of Barakaldo in the Basque Country. And her case is especially tragic because she actually didn’t share just how bad off the situation was even with her husband. So, most people had no idea that there was a whole—there had been a repossession and an eviction process. She was so desperate and so ashamed of the situation that she jumped out of her balcony, her fourth floor apartment, as court employees came to evict her. This comes two weeks after police found a man dead in his apartment as they went in to evict him from his home after repossession.

And—but, you know, the movement to stop these evictions and repossessions has been working very hard on this for almost two years, and this is just the watershed. This has been the one situation that has actually forced government and the opposition and banks to come to the table and talk about real reform. Before this, you had these evictions taking place—500 orders every single day—silently. And thanks to the 15M movement—this is—was the Occupy movement in Spain just over a year ago—the platform against evictions was incredibly energized. And so, they have been able to stop hundreds of evictions.

But those are evictions of people who come to them and who say, you know, "My home is being repossessed. I’m facing eviction. Can you help me?" There are a lot of people like Amaia who did not do this, out of perhaps a sense of guilt or embarrassment. And so, her case is really representative and emblematic of what has gone wrong in Spain with, you know, thousands of people being left homeless after repossession and eviction.

Amy Goodman: David Stuckler, you were in Spain when Amaia killed herself.

David Stuckler: I was at a conference with the Barcelona Public Health Agency. The meeting got cut short as protests erupted onto the streets of Barcelona. People were outraged at the eviction-suicide of Amaia, at the hardship perpetuated by deep budget cuts under the Rajoy government in Spain.

Amy Goodman: On April 4, 2012, a 77-year-old retired Greek pharmacist named Dimitris Christoulas shot and killed himself near the Greek Parliament after writing a note that blamed his suicide on the economic crisis. His daughter Emi spoke at his funeral and said his act had been deeply political.

Emi Christoulas: [translated] You found it unacceptable that they were killing our freedom, our democracy, our dignity. You found it unacceptable as they tightened the harsh noose of economic austerity and apartheid around us, to the unacceptable act of surrendering our independence and the keys to the country. It was unacceptable to you that Greece did not acknowledge its children and its children did not recognize their own country. You found the bestiality of capitalism unacceptable, that it infiltrated our lives and no one tried to stop it. Then, you made your decision to become the fear, the death, the memory, the sorrow of our ruined lives.

Amy Goodman: Sanjay Basu, you have found more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States. Since when? How did you come up with these figures?

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Right. One of the major questions we asked here: Is this inevitable during a recession? Recessions are bad times. Could this just be the recession’s effects as opposed to austerity’s effects? And so, what we did is used so-called natural experiments. We compared regions and countries since the beginning of the recession, and even beforehand, to control for people’s pre-existing conditions, pre-existing mental health and alcoholism and so forth, and also compared areas that faced the same economic shock but had different policy responses. And looking at those as comparative cases, we could find that, in fact, during recessions, inevitably suicides or alcoholism didn’t increase, but rather, it was after austerity, in particular. And controlling for other factors that could statistically explain this, austerity consistently came up as a key trigger not just for suicides, but for alcohol, stress-related heart attacks and other major causes of death.

Amy Goodman: Now, this is the key point here, is the difference—I mean, people can say, "Well, hard times lead to, you know, very painful decisions that people make."

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Mm-hmm.

Amy Goodman: But that you’re saying that even in equally difficult situations, when countries opt for another solution, the public health of that community changes.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Correct. We can look, for example, at Iceland as a contrast. Now, Greece and Iceland are very different socially, politically and economically, but Iceland serves as a nice case in point right now. They had faced a debt at 800 percent of GDP, the largest banking crisis in history compared to the size of the economy.

Amy Goodman: When their banks failed, their three top banks failed.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Correct, all three major banks failed. And they had invested, of course, in U.S. mortgage-backed securities. After this, the Iceland politicians decided to do something truly unique as compared to the rest of Europe. They actually put the austerity plan to a public vote. And the public voted that instead of paying off bankers’ debts immediately through public cuts, they would instead do it gradually. They would still bail out their banks, but over the course of time and with great pace towards preserving their social safety net. And indeed what Iceland ended up doing was maintaining some of the healthiest standards in the world and the highest level of happiness.

Amy Goodman: We were just joined by the Icelandic Parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir onDemocracy Now! here in New York—she had just come in from Iceland—talking about how Iceland recovered from the collapse of its banking system. A part of what the country did, as you said, was to preserve its universal healthcare system.

Birgitta Jonsdottir: Actually, everybody has the same access to health and education. So even I, as an MP, ended up in a hospital in November, and I got exactly the same treatment as the woman working in the factory or in McDonald’s or Domino’s. And I like that. I love that. I think that is so important. And so, we pay just about the same amount of taxes as U.S. taxpayers. We don’t have to live in this insurance jungle. So we just, you know—and that was actually one of the first things they wanted to slash down, the IMF—no surprise.

Amy Goodman: They preserve their healthcare system.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Mm-hmm. And indeed she highlights one of the key issues here, which is that there’s a great misunderstanding around debts and deficits. When we face a liquidities crisis, meaning that there’s a collapse in demand in the system, we actually find, quite robustly, through peer-reviewed journals and consistent with those of our colleagues, that stimulus early on does not actually produce higher, longer-term debts, but it generates the revenue and the building of the economic cycle that allows us to pay off those longer-term debts. By contrast, these short-term cuts end up so slowing the economic cycle that we find both economic and public health devastation as a result.

Amy Goodman: After break, I want to talk about the U.S., but, David Stuckler, you said you looked at the labor policies of places like Sweden and Finland in times of recession.

David Stuckler: It’s a remarkable case study. It alludes to what Sanjay mentioned earlier. Sweden faced a large banking crisis. Unemployment jumped by more than 10 percentage points. And yet suicides fell steadily. What we learned is that when politicians managed the consequences of unemployment well, they were able to prevent a mental health crisis. The specific programs we found are called active labor market programs. These help the newly unemployed link to caseworkers, develop an action plan and return into jobs. They treat unemployment like the pandemic it is. It not only saves money on healthcare bills, but even pays for itself by helping spur economic recovery.

Amy Goodman: We’re going to talk about what choices the United States is making, with David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu. Their book is called The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. Stay with us.

[break]

Amy Goodman: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently revealed the suicide rate in people aged 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent over the past decade, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000. The biggest increase was seen for men in their fifties, where the suicide rate increased 50 percent. Overall, suicides are now a greater cause of death in the United States than car accidents.CDC Director Thomas Frieden recently spoke to PBS NewsHour.

Dr. Thomas Frieden: We don’t know what specifically is causing it, but the trend has been consistent. And, if anything, our numbers would underestimate the gravity of the problem. And, of course, even one death from suicide is a terrible tragedy, and many of them are preventable. We know that in times of financial stress, there is generally an increase in suicides. We also know that this is a generation that grew up at a time when they expected more than some have been able to achieve in their lives, and also that they’re stressed with what their kids are going through and what their parents are going through. So it’s, in some ways, the sandwich generation.

Amy Goodman: That’s CDC Director Thomas Frieden on PBS. We’re joined by David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu. They are authors of The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. David Stuckler is a senior research leader at Oxford University, and Sanjay Basu is an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiologist at Stanford University. If you could respond, Dr. Basu, to Dr. Frieden’s comment?

Dr. Sanjay Basu:Yeah, I certainly agree with Dr. Frieden’s comment. And what we have found in our research is that these suicide rate spikes seem to correspond quite closely to state-level unemployment rates. And in particular, when we do these long-term studies that track individuals before the recession, during the recession and after, we can control for their pre-existing mental health statistically, and we find that it’s the new unemployment that seems to trigger new onset of depression and suicide, particularly among our most vulnerable, adults over 50, who, when they lose a job, are often discriminated against or have a very hard time finding new work. There’s a great deal of shame, and also it’s quite hard for our healthcare system to access those individuals, given the degree of barriers that they have, social barriers, to accessing mental healthcare.

Amy Goodman: I mean, the point for people to understand in this country is, what’s unusual for us, compared to other countries, is that when we lose our jobs, we lose our health insurance.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Absolutely. And we do have some safety nets in the form of Medicaid, Medicare, but it’s quite true that there are some large holes in that system, as has been repeated time and time again.

Amy Goodman: During an interview on Fox News in February, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested slashing healthcare to stop scheduled sequester cuts from, quote, "destroying the military."

Sen. Lindsey Graham: The commander-in-chief thought—came up with the idea of sequestration, destroying the military and putting a lot of good programs at risk. Here’s my belief. Let’s take "Obamacare" and put it on the table. You can make $86,000 a year in income and still get a government subsidy under "Obamacare." "Obamacare" is destroying healthcare in this country. People are leaving the private sector because their companies can’t afford to offer "Obamacare." If you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, let’s look at "Obamacare." Let’s don’t destroy the military and just cut blindly across the board.

Amy Goodman: David Stuckler, can you respond to Senator Graham?

David Stuckler: Austerity in health is a false economy. The cliché, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, is really true. New York City officials learned this the hard way in the early 1990s, when they cut TB prevention programs by $120 million but ended up with a drug-resistant TB outbreak that cost more than $1.2 billion to control. What we found is that smart investments in public health can have a return on investment, for each dollar, of up to $3.

Amy Goodman: So, talk about the healthcare system, Dr. Sanjay Basu, how sequester fits in, and also just what Lindsey Graham was talking about, "Obamacare."

Dr. Sanjay Basu: So, I’m not a politician and—but I do analyze data. And I think, in looking comparatively among OECD countries, you see a lot of false claims about the U.S. health system. Why is it that we cost so much more and seem to be getting less? I think comparing our country to other OECD stations provides some sense of what—

Amy Goodman: You’re talking about European countries?

Dr. Sanjay Basu: European, as well as Japan, Australia and so forth. And you can see a lot of the myths by just looking at the data. So, what are the theories? The theory is, for example, maybe it’s just American obesity. Well, actually, the costs started well before American obesity and doesn’t seem to correspond actually statistically to obesity. Maybe it’s that we have an older population, but not so. Switzerland actually pays more in nursing home care. Japan has an older population, yet they still pay less while getting more in terms of health. Maybe it’s just technology. We do a lot of research and development. But, in fact, if you look at the Securities and Exchange Commission data, the R&D pharmaceutical industry, while making—

Amy Goodman: Research and development of the pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Sure. While they make a higher percent profit as a percentage of revenue than any other Fortune 500 industry at the moment, they actually spend almost double on marketing as compared to research and development. And while we do use more technology and we do tend to have some higher costs from technology, it doesn’t actually explain the majority of the bundle.

What you do see, on the other hand, if you just look at the raw data, is that we get more—we get more incentives in order to test the people who are covered, in order to bill more. And there’s a lot of companies making quite a bit of money on that margin. You can go to one hospital across town and be charged double or more of what another hospital has on a different side of town. But it’s not like a consumer market. If I’m in a car accident, I can’t say to the surgeon, "Hold my hand there for a moment before sewing it back on. I’m just going to go across town and compare prices for a minute."

So healthcare is a different kind of industry, in which we have what is classically called "market failure" by the Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow back in the ’60s, but people ignored his work. I think what we really have is a system where we confuse inequality with choice. The majority of our costs come from common conditions in a small number of patients who have complications of diabetes, heart failure, hypertension. And we need more primary care prevention rather than paying for the ICU care.

Amy Goodman: I wanted to go back, and this is a theme you follow in The Body Economic, to the Depression. Going back to the Great Depression and the New Deal, this is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking in 1933.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt:It is three months, my friends, since I have talked with the people of this country about our national problems. But during this period, many things have happened. And I am glad to say that the major part of them have greatly helped the well-being of the average citizen.

In the short space of these few months, I am convinced that at least four million have been given employment, or saying it another way, 40 percent of those seeking work have found it. That does not mean, my friends, that I am satisfied or that you are satisfied that our work has ended. We have a long way to go, but we are on the way.

We come to the relief, for a moment, of those who are in danger of losing their farms or their homes. I have publicly asked that the foreclosure on farms and cattles and homes be delayed until every mortgagor in the country has had full opportunity to take advantage of federal credit. And I make the further request that if there is any family in the United States about to lose its home or its farm, that family should telegraph at once, either to the Farm Credit Administration or the Home Loan Corporation in Washington, requesting their help.

Amy Goodman: That was President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. I think this is going to be very interesting for a lot of people listening and watching this today. David Stuckler, the choices made then and the choices being made today?

David Stuckler: Completely different. Roosevelt took bold steps, at a time when debt was 180 percent of GDP, to boost financial relief to the newly unemployed, to save Americans from homelessness. And we’ve studied the effects of his landmark program, the New Deal, on health. And what we found is that, comparing the states, the red and blue states, that pushed it to different degrees—the blue states tended to go further with the New Deal than the red states—led to a polarization in public health outcomes across the U.S. The greater relief spending implemented under the New Deal helped reduce suicides, reduced tuberculosis and pneumonias, and was in fact the biggest and one of the most effective public health programs on U.S. soil.

Amy Goodman: When you hear politicians today saying, "We’ve got to cut 'Obamacare.' We’ve got to cut healthcare in this country," talk about what you found, what it means for the economy to invest in public health.

David Stuckler: Investing in public health is a wise choice in good times and an urgent necessity in the worst of times. Had austerity been organized like a clinical trial, it would have been discontinued, given evidence of its deadly side effects. There is an alternative choice that we found in the historical data and through the present recessions, that when we place people and their health at the center of economic recovery, it can help get our economy back on track faster and yield lasting dividends to our society.

Amy Goodman: The issue of the West Nile outbreak, can you talk about that?

Dr. Sanjay Basu: Mm-hmm. Down in Bakersfield in California, there was a suspicion about why crows were dropping from the sky and people were also showing up in hospitals. A variety of theories were posited, ranging from polio to heat stroke, but in fact it amounted to a West Nile outbreak that, through a number of our colleagues’ research, it was found that the abandoned and foreclosed homes had stagnant water in old swimming pools and in other locations that were breeding mosquitoes. And this led to a rather large West Nile outbreak. Indeed, the reason why it was discovered was something called the California Encephalitis Project, a group of public system laboratories that work in concert with the CDC. And ironically, after helping to control that outbreak, they were closed due to budget cuts.

Amy Goodman: I want to turn to the issue of drug abuse. A recent film by Vice has brought renewed attention to the drug crisis in Greece, particularly the use of the new drug called sisa. This is Haralampos Poulopoulos, head of KETHEA, the main anti-drug center in Greece.

Dr. Haralampos Poulopoulos: Sisa is a form of crystal methamphetamine. They use amphetamines and some other liquids, sometimes battery liquids, to produce this drug. It’s very dangerous for the health of the users. I think the main reason for the increase of sisa is the changes of the attitudes of drug users during the crisis. They are more self-destructive. We have 27 percent unemployment, 62 percent the young people under 25. We didn’t finish yet with the crisis. We are in the middle of the crisis.

Amy Goodman: Haralampos Poulopoulos, head of the main anti-drug center in Greece. David Stuckler, talk about that, and also relate it to here, as we wrap up.

David Stuckler: This is a devastating situation we’re seeing in Greece with a drug crisis escalating at a time when drug prevention budgets are being cut. With gaping holes in social safety nets from austerity, people are becoming desperate, turning to the means of self-harm. We’ve seen drug use and infected needles spread HIV, creating rise of more than 200 percent, leading to an epicenter of HIV/AIDS spread in Europe.

What we can learn from these mistakes, and areas where we see successes in policy, is that recessions can hurt, but austerity kills. When politicians make smart choices to protect people during hard times, it doesn’t happen at expense of recovery but can help put our societies back on track to a happier, healthier future.

Amy Goodman: And here in the United States, how that translates into policy?

David Stuckler: Currently, we’re facing and implementing a large sequester in the U.S. While it’s too early to see the full health consequences, what we are seeing is the Women, Infants, Children’s health program, which provides nutritional subsidies to women, will be forced to reduce those subsidies from 600,000 pregnant women. And that program has been linked to reducing infant mortality. We’re also seeing large cuts to public housing budgets at a time when 1.4 million homes are still in foreclosure. We are concerned that, if done rapidly and indiscriminately, that budget cuts in the U.S. could create a repeat of the disasters that we’re seeing in Europe.

Amy Goodman: Final comment, what most shocked you in writing The Body [Economic], Sanjay Basu?

Dr. Sanjay Basu: You know, coming from the public health field, we have something called the "precautionary principle," which is that when a idea or policy is controversial, we should first do whatever protects people the most. And what we’re doing is entirely the opposite. We’ve essentially had a massive untested experiment. That experiment has failed, and it sounds like it’s quite deadly, given all the data through history.

Amy Goodman: I want to thank you both for being with us. Sanjay Basu is an epidemiologist at Stanford University. David Stuckler, Oxford University. Their new book, out today, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death.

Reprinted with permission from Democracy Now!.

Obama Shows He's Serious About Fixing Our Screwed-Up Election System

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:07:00 -0700

The President's election reform panel is filled with good people; let's hope Congress listens to them.

President Obama’s newly appointed election reform commission is filled with election officials who have a record of supporting progressive election reforms—even though some of them are known for working in red states under conservative Republicans.

Whether Congress listens to this panel’s suggestions is another matter. Half of the 10-member panel are election state and local officials who have participated in numerous retreats sponsored by the Pew Center on the States where they have endorsed voter registration modernization that would be a vast improvement over what’s widely in practice in election administration today. Regardless of political party, they generally agreed that voter registration—which is the gateway to the process—could be made more accurate, cost-effective and efficient. As important, they all don’t think very highly of politicizing the voting process. Their fundamental commitment is making sure eligible voters can cast ballots.

The backbone of their recommendations at Pew in 2010 was creating a system where states use a mix of government databases to draw up lists of eligible voters. Then states are left to decide how they will contact those voters and what people must do to activate their registrations before casting a ballot. This centrist compromise doesn’t entirely please progressives, who want states to universally register everyone. And it doesn’t please conservatives either, who want to make voter registration and the process of voting more difficult, in order to maintain GOP political power in states with increasingly diverse populations.

But, if Obama’s blue ribbon committee draws on the thinking that’s been done by these same people, what’s likely to emerge is a system where the government draws up eligible voter lists, attempts to contact new voters and people who move, and has better voter information databases and tracking ability on Election Day to ensure that anyone who wants to vote has an easier time crossing the finish line and casting a ballot. One impact of this more modernized approach—which would appeal to Republicans—is that a larger state role in enrolling voters would lessen the need for registration drives that have been attacked as unprofessional, such as by ACORN in 2008. However, the fact that states might rely on government data to identify people as eligible voters also would put GOP "voter integrity groups" out of business, because the government would be using data gathered under penalty of perjury.

Obama’s panel is headed by two of the country’s top election lawyers—Democrat Bob Bauer and Republican Benjamin Ginsberg—who are known for using any tactic to win and then saying there’s nothing wrong with the process because their side won. The panel also has people whose professional lives are in corporate America and not in running elections. Both these lawyers and executives are likely to defer to the real experts—people who have run elections for years.

In that latter category is former Tennessee Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson; Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas), Registrar Larry Lomax; former Texas Director of Elections Ann McGeehan; Maricopa County, Arizona, (Phoenix) longtime election official Tammy Patrick, and Michigan Director of Elections Christopher Thomas. These officials know exactly what does and doesn't work in elections. They may get mixed reveiws from some progressive groups, but many of them have improved voting in their state, though that hasn't gotten press attention.

For example, in Michigan, under a Republican Secretary of State, Christopher Thomas instituted an Election Day affidavit that a person who said she had registered—but wasn’t on the polling place list—could sign, under penalty of perjury, to get a ballot and vote. A handful of states have this option, which gives the benefit of the doubt to voters.

Whatever this panel may suggest could easily be disregarded by Congress, especially because they are likely to take a less confrontational tone than many Republicans who have talked up so-called voter fraud might prefer. However, it seems inexorable that advances in data management will be applied to the voting process, as they are everywhere else in society. And with that comes the promise of making voting more accurate, cost-effective and efficient—and easier and more inclusive. That is, if Congress wants to make voting that way.

(Full disclosure: In 2009-2010 the author worked with Pew and many of these state and local election directors to write a report on voter registration modernization in which half these officials took part.)

"As a Black Man Like You": Six Words That Enraged White Right-Wingers in Obama's Speech at Historic Black College

Chauncey DeVega, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:40:00 -0700

Barack Obama, the United States' first black president, rarely talks about race or racism. Moreover, he is weak on policy prescriptions or targeted assistance for communities of color (and black folks in particular)--even though they are a key demographic in his electoral coalition.

Obama's election may not have been the Mount Everest of black politics and the Black Freedom Struggle. But, President Obama did to go to Morehouse College, one of the country's leading historically black institutions of higher learning, where he delivered the commencement speech on Sunday.

There he offered up a very conservative brand of life advice for the graduating class, suggestions that pivot on "personal responsibility" and not "excuse-making" for the lived realities of day-to-day and structural discrimination.

As reported by The Washington Post:

Obama said that too many young black men make “bad choices.”

“Growing up, I made quite a few myself,” Obama said. “Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.”

But, the president implored, “we’ve got no time for excuses.”

“In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil, many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did, all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned,” he said. “Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.”

“Moreover,” Obama continued, “you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too.”

Republicans and the Tea Party Right should be very pleased by President Obama's suggestions to the Morehouse graduating class. We know they will not be. Why? Because the White Right, as they have been since his election in 2008, cannot evolve past their herrenvolk bigotry and white supremacist habits. They are drugs in the American body politic to which conservatives are uniquely addicted.

President Obama uttered six little words at Morehouse on Sunday, words that will be twisted, lied about, spun, and processed by a pathologically reactionary conservative White Racial Frame. At Morehouse, Obama committed the ultimate move of poor taste in "post racial" colorblind America: he said, "as a black man like you."

Ultimately, President Obama dared to remind the public that he too is a black man in America.

It would seem that to Drudge and The Weekly Standard this is poor taste, a point of controversy, and worth particular emphasis on their respective websites. To point. Drudge has as its lede following Obama's Morehouse address "I am a Black Man" under the President's photo. The Weekly Standard chose to place in bold for emphasis what they see as an impolitic and provocative phrase--"as a black man like you"--in their quoting of Obama's speech at Morehouse.

The President apparently did not learn from the public whipping he suffered by the Right-wing media when he committed a similar misstep in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

Let the complaints and predictable howls begin. The Tea Party GOP and their echo chamber will cry that "if a white president said 'as a white man like you'" that there would be charges of racism. The most dim bloviators on the Right will assert that "historically black colleges" are bastions of "hate" that discriminate against white people.

Never mind the fact that historically black colleges actually offer scholarships and special funding for white students because of a belief in the merits of racial diversity.

Thus, Obama must be a "black racist" who "hates white people" as Right-wing cheerleader Glenn Beck and others have suggested.

Since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, racial attitudes have worsened in the United States. In particular, white racial resentment and anti-black sentiments have hardened and increased among Republicans. This is not Barack Obama's fault.

From his "celebrated" "A More Perfect Union" speech on race in 2008 which signaled Obama's full separation from any sense that Black Americans have a unique set of justice claims that remain unfulfilled and largely ignored in this country, to his two terms in office, where he has supported a set of neoliberal, center-Right policy positions, the president has been largely agnostic on the race question. Instead, Barack Obama has relied on the symbolic power of his presence in the White House to be a stand-in and substitute for any significant progress against the inequalities and injustices which remain along the colorline.

As I suggested on Ring of Fire Radio in the days before the 2012 election, if the White Right hates Barack Obama that much, what do their rank and file think of everyday black and brown folks? What hate and contempt looms in their collective heart, either as overt bigotry under the banner of the Confederacy, the slogan of "we want our country back!" or in subconscious and implicit prejudice and bias?

The United States was designed and intended as a White Republic. Black folks, our presence and humanity, have long been viewed, and written into law, as being incompatible with "American." The citizenship and belonging of Black Americans--and other people of color--is contingent and permanent. It formed the basis against which Whiteness and the imagined fraternity of white men was created during the Founding and through to the middle part of the twentieth century when Jim and Jane Crow was demolished by the Civil Rights Movement.

The inclusion of non-whites as full partners in the American democratic project is still a work in progress. Obama's election represents a symbolic victory in that battle--although not a strategic one. Even such symbolic concessions are too much to accept for those who will follow the white identity politics Pied Pipers in the Right-wing echo chamber who will lead their lemmings in feigned upset and complaint that Obama dared to remind people that he is black (again).

Appeals to white victimology and "black racism" should be obsolete. They lost the Republican Party two elections. Nevertheless, the Southern Strategy and the ghosts of the Confederacy in Red State America and the Tea Party GOP continue to demand their offerings.

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