Bad blogger! Good uprising! Catching up on a year’s worth of events

Dear reader (hello? anyone still there?), I warned you that this would be “slow blogging,” but I never intended for my blog to go dark for more than a year. In the immortal words of Rick Perry, “Oops!”

I feel especially remiss since, in my postings right after the 2010 elections (here, here, & here), I was talking about the need for a progressive populist uprising. Well, 2011 has been the year for progressive populist uprising, and this blog has had nothing to say about it. Oops indeed.

To recap: This year’s uprising began, of course, in the hometown of progressive populism — Madison, Wisc. — when new Governor Scott Walker severely overplayed his hand politically. We can thank Gov. Walker and his far-right cohorts for having awakened a new rebellion among a working/middle-class fed up with indignities and austerity as those who caused the economic crisis got rewarded for their crimes. Well (over)played, sir!

Of course, as Madison heated up, uprisings were busting out all over the world. An unexpected Arab Spring gave way to a perhaps to-be-expected European Summer, as people at the bottom of the political/economic pyramid demanded more democratic control over their own lives. Those at the top who wielded power at the expense of the rest were put on notice — people would no longer tolerate hardship and austerity while those at the top grew richer, more arrogant, and more shameless.

This internationally shared sentiment took root in America for real in September with Occupy Wall Street & various spin-off occupations around the country. I wrote a lengthy essay about this uprising in Eat the State! in mid-October, and also assembled a list of existing organizations that have been already working to solve the problems that the Occupy movement has highlighted. I also put together a list of solutions to remind us that it is not solutions that we lack, but the political power to overcome the political power assembled by the 1% through their various enabling institutions. The power of the left-behind majority is what the Occupy movement is helping to build. (Much of the ETS! material is still timely, I think, if you want to check it out.)

I intend to write soon here about how this movement is morphing & expanding & diversifying tactics in the face of the inevitable backlash by authorities, and especially about how the movement is — and needs to be — so much bigger than the people actually participating in the encampments. When the movement for the 99% truly finds ways to engage most of that 99% in productive actions, then we will be too big to fail. We’re still trying to figure out how to get to that tipping point.

The problem I have with blogging is that I post a lot of stuff elsewhere that might otherwise go into a blog. I’ve reserved this blog mostly for longer essays that I don’t publish elsewhere — big thoughts that coalesce slowly. Not very blog-like, I know, but that’s just how I roll….

In the meantime — if you want to follow me around the interwebs — I’m tweeting, writing occasionally for Eat the State!, & posting a lot in Facebook, where I publicly post maybe 15–20 items per week on the topics I discuss in this blog, mostly links I find particularly interesting. I used to keep my Facebook acct private, but now that Facebook allows for public subscriptions I encourage people to subscribe if interested. (Note: I only respond to “friend” requests from people who are friends in real life. If you think I should make an exception for you, please tell me why. Thanks.)

Sorry this is one of those annoying blog posts more about the blogger than about anything particularly insightful. I’ll do better next time.

Hot buttons of progressive populism

Of course there is a class war, but it’s my class, the rich class, that is waging the war, and we’re winning. —Warren Buffett, third richest man in the world

A couple days after the midterm elections I wrote about reasons to get mad over the growing influence of Big Money in our elections, and a few days after that I wrote about the challenge and opportunity for progressives to mobilize a populist movement to reclaim democracy from Big Money. What are some of the key hot-button issues around which a progressive populist agenda can be built? Let’s begin at the beginning, where most populism begins…

The rich got richer—Three decades of worsening economic inequality: How many Americans understand that just 1% of the population controls 35% of the wealth? Or that the the top 10% controls three-quarters of wealth overall and 83% of financial wealth?

Or that the share of national income taken by the top 1% rose from about 10% in 1980 to almost 25% today (after it had remained fairly steady for the 30 years between 1950-1980)?

Or that income had more than doubled for the bottom half of Americans between 1950-1980, then basically leveled off in the 30 years since? And meanwhile in the past three decades more than 80% of all income increases went to the richest 1%?

Or that in 1980 CEOs earned about 42 times as much as the average worker, but 531 times as much by 2001?

We could go on & on with such appalling statistics, but they all point to the same reality: Over the past 30 years, economic welfare has remained stagnant for the majority (& declined for many) while those at the top have been making out like bandits. American wealth inequalities now exceed any time in our country’s recorded history, exceed any other industrialized nation, and put us in the ranks of the worst banana republics.

In the current great recession, while many of us are losing our jobs and losing our homes, those at the top are doing quite well, thank you, amidst a “jobless recovery.” And much of that is due to a taxpayer bailout of those at the top most responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008 through reckless pursuit of their own greed.

Which brings us to…

Banksters, Inc.—The new financial feudalism: The financial meltdown of 2008 was something of a wake-up call for many, but two years later we have not learned its lessons as a society. The new documentary “Inside Job” tells the story of the rise of financiers over the last three decades as manufacturing jobs (and the American middle class) declined. As regulations and public accountability were systematically dismantled, the financial industry ballooned into a massive casino of unchecked greed, fraud, and reckless, amoral behavior.

As Wall Street grew, so did its control of the government, so that when the whole hyperinflated system came crashing down in 2008, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson was in place as Treasury Secretary to bail out his former Wall Street colleagues at taxpayer’s enormous expense (just before the reins were handed over to Geithner & Summers, who would continue the same Wall-St.-friendly policies in the Obama administration).

Consequently, the biggest financial heist in our lifetimes occurred in plain sight of everybody, and the primary perpetrators were allowed to walk away with their lootings largely intact, while the rest of us pay the costs. Too big to fail means too big to jail means too big, period. Wall Street owns us in more ways than one. And the term “bankster” has become more of an accurate description than quaint hyperbole.

Which brings us to looking at some of the major ways that wealth exercises power in America…

Corporate campaign donations & “Citizens United”: In January of this year, the US Supreme Court gave Big Money another gift—Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending on independent “electioneering communications” in elections. As if large corporations didn’t already have enough political influence. Subsequently, a record $4 billion was spent on the 2010 midterm election campaigns, much of it coming from “Super-PACs” newly created in the wake of Citizens United. Not only can corporations spend as much as they want, they don’t even have to disclose these donations (this could be changed by the DISCLOSE Act currently being considered in Congress).

Big Money is becoming ever more blatant in its quest for the best government money can buy, but not without opposition. The Citizens United decision has been widely criticized, and polls show public opposition left, right, and center (80% opposed overall). A healthy majority available for aligning with a progressive populist uprising. Many citizen groups are actively opposing it, including Move to Amend, the Coffee Party, and the Backbone Campaign. These groups are planning a national action on the one-year anniversary of Citizens United, Jan. 21, 2011.

Corporate lobbying: As many American industries have been in decline, one industry that has grown greatly in recent decades is corporate lobbying. It’s no secret that Washington, DC, along with most state capitals & city halls, have become “corporate-occupied territory” (e.g., see “Who Owns Congress?” for a federal breakdown). The lobbying industry has more than doubled in the last decade. Health-related lobbying alone accounted for over $500 million of spending during 2009. These lobbyists not only excluded single-payer advocates from the discussion, but successfully prevented a public option. Fossil-fuel lobbyists prevent progress on addressing the climate crisis. Financial lobbyists prevent meaningful reform of their industry. And on and on down the line.

Few regular citizens approve of the corporate takeover of government, but many get confused by political and media talk of “special interests” that seems to equate the “special interests” of private money with the “special” (read: public) interests of social justice & environmental nonprofits and labor unions. Most understand that something smells bad here, but the details remain unclear and the outlets for constructive action even less clear.

Why are these details unclear? Isn’t it the job of the media to clarify important public matters like this? Yes, but…

Big money & big media: Just as financial deregulation enabled growing concentrations of financial wealth, media deregulation has enabled growing concentrations in media, consolidating ownership in the hands of the same type of wealthy, corporate interests we have been discussing here. America’s founders conceived of the media/”free press” as an essential component of democratic governance, the conduit by which citizens would gain the essential public information necessary to make political choices and implement government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”—but it’s clear that modern media moguls lack such noble ambitions and instead see the media as just another profitable investment.

With the rise of FOX “News”—a full-time political operation disguised as news media, seemingly designed to trick its viewers into siding with private interests against public interests—the mainstream corporate media has become even more vacuous and pursuant of ratings-boosting “controversies” (often contrived by right-wing sources) and superficial horse-race politics over any substantive coverage of issues that matter. And is it surprising that we rarely hear anything about the central issues discussed here—who wields power and how—from media organs owned by power-wielders?

Perversely and fittingly, as political campaign spending increases, major media outlets are among the primary beneficiaries as they incessantly bombard us with political advertising. Closing the circle, so to speak.

Fortunately, as media is concentrating at the top, it is diversifying at the bottom, thanks largely to the universal access enabled by the internet. People who want news outside the corporate consensus have a growing array of options, including community-based sources like Democracy Now!, the Real News Network, GRITtv, Huffington Post, and others, as well a few larger network sources like MSNBC, the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, & Bill Maher (the latter three delivering more insight and important information in their “entertainment” format than does most “serious news” of major media).

And what does this all add up to? Robert Reich has called it a “perfect storm“:

An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.

Plutocracy—now there’s a word that needs to be spoken much more often in contemporary political discourse. Or, as Warren Buffet so cogently put it, it’s “class war,” and the class he belongs to is kicking some serious ass these days. The question is: When will the majority of us whose asses are getting kicked start fighting back? Like, for real.

By now it should be clear that the Democratic Party isn’t going to help us. Barack Obama isn’t going to help us. Even much of the public-interest nonprofit infrastructure developed over the last four decades or so seems poorly equipped to help us (as many groups have become increasingly intertwined with wealthy corporate benefactors). But as I’ve tried to note in this essay (esp. the links), lots of people are paying attention and many offer valuable resources. And some have begun organize around these hot-button issues, but more heat is needed.

And more leadership, I think, to bring to the fore this constellation of fundamental issues about who really runs this country, and to organize a majoritarian coalition in favor of government by & for the people instead of by & for the big corporations and wealthy elites. We need to talk less about left vs. right and talk more about bottom vs. top.

Because that’s how we win, it seems to me. Public opinion surveys already show that strong majorities—across the political & economic spectrum—do not approve of the current distribution of wealth, or with the Citizens United decision, or other distortions of the public sphere discussed here. The sentiments are already there, but the leadership needs to be stronger.

And because, unless we win this contest, we don’t win any of the other issues we care about—social justice, environmental, peace, whatever… As long as wealth & power rule, anything that doesn’t serve wealth & power loses. Of course, this has always been the case to greater or lesser degree throughout history, but as wealth’s grip on power tightens amid our current perfect storm, we can no longer ignore it.

As people continue to lose their homes, lose their jobs, lose their public services, and look for who’s responsible for this breakdown in the system, disillusionment and anger grows. Where will that energy be directed? So far, the Tea Party is capturing much of that disgruntlement, and misdirecting it against all the wrong targets. But as new conservative leadership seeks to retain tax cuts for the rich while cutting benefits for unemployment, Social Security, and Medicare, the conservative illusion will be harder to sustain.

As progressives, reality is on our side. Numbers are on our side. As Pogo said, “We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.”

Let’s get busy.

(I’d love to hear a wider discussion about these matters, so please share any thoughts, critiques, resources, etc. in the comments section.)

Post-election: The challenge for progressive populism

The elections of last Tuesday were reportedly very bad for progressives. And in many ways they were. But in some ways, they could serve as a catalyst for something great. The question is: Which way forward from here?

After a major progressive mobilization helped bring Obama into the White House & give Democrats a large majority in both houses of Congress, too many progressives seemed to think they could just sit back and watch the inevitable progress occur. Instead, progressive perspectives were shut out of the health care debate, economic & financial policy debates, climate & energy policy debates, & foreign policy debates, to name just a few of many progressive disappointments.

And why expect anything different? For most of two decades, Democratic leadership has clung to a strategy of corporate-friendly centrism while Republicans have marched ever rightward. Progressives have constituted a loyal Democratic base that can be mobilized to turn out votes, then promptly ignored when it comes time to make policy. This second-class status has been accepted in favor of a “lesser-evil” calculation that rightly recognizes the increasingly greater evil represented by the Republicans in recent years. But a compliant base that makes no demands gets no results, as progressives have seen.

Meanwhile, the right-wing minority mobilized furiously during the last two years, channeling popular discontent into a misguided & overhyped Tea Party movement. While the Dems were silencing their progressive edge in the name of centrism and moderation, Republicans abandoned any pretense of moderation and amplified their fringe voices to fire up their base.

And look where it got them.

Now, I’m not saying that the Tea Party is a great role model for progressives. I’m well aware that TP success has been largely due to wealthy benefactors and the giant corporate right-wing megaphone of the FOX Noise machine. Tea Party leaders pander to prejudice, fear, and ignorance to build a base, and misdirect legitimate grievances toward an agenda that serves interests often contrary to those of their aggrieved followers.

But the Tea Party has gotten some things right:

1) Appeal to populist sentiments. The diversity of political opinion is too often depicted as a simple spectrum from left to right (& supposedly election results prove the country is moving back to the right). But just as important is the spectrum from bottom to top. These days many at the bottom of the political-economic pyramid know deep down that something is seriously wrong at the top. Those on the right misidentify the source of the problem as “big government.” Those on the left understand that unaccountable private institutions pose a greater danger than public ones, and that many of the problems with government can be traced to the distortions by powerful private interests which control both government and major media, the two institutions essential to a functional democracy.

The Democratic Party, having become so dependent on corporate campaign money, has abandoned populism in word and deed, which is what opened up the field for the Tea Party to channel a lot of the legitimate anger & disgruntlement on the ground. If a progressive populist movement is going to arise, it won’t come from the Democratic Party.

2) Build a movement that retains autonomy even while collaborating with one of the major parties. Progressives have been much too wedded to the Democratic Party in a way that allows us to be taken for granted and disempowered. For a while, the Green Party offered a vehicle for those of us who wanted to build political power entirely independent of the Dems, but for various reasons that vehicle mostly broke down after 2004. At this juncture, I can see the wisdom of building a progressive populist movement independent from the Democratic Party, but which still collaborates with the Democratic Party. When collaboration makes sense. And be independent when independence makes sense.

3) Appeal to emotions & passions as well as intellect. Too often Dems and liberals in general seem to expect superior policy wonkery to carry the day. But we humans are more often motivated by our emotions. For the last two years, conservatives have been fired up while liberals & progressives have been either wonky, sleepy, or distracted. Of course, conservatives appeal to a narrow range of emotions – mostly just fear and anger. For progressives, while there are plenty of reasons to be fearful and angry, we also have a much broader emotional range to engage. But the key point is to engage how people feel as well as what we think.

4) Appeal to a genuinely American patriotism. Many progressives have understandably mixed feelings about America’s founding fathers and founding documents (colonial conquest, genocide, slavery, etc. are not matters to be taken lightly), but it’s a mistake to allow the Right any special claim on patriotism, the founders, or the Constitution. A nation ruled by “we the people,” in a “government of the people, by the people, & for the people,” in pursuit of “liberty & justice for all” — that’s an ideal we can agree is worth fighting for, yes? Jefferson and Paine were two of the great political thinkers of their time, and are worth quoting. (Jefferson: ““I hope we shall [...] crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”; Paine: “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”) And though the founders may have excluded the majority of actual people in their original conception of “we the people,” they also included a process for amendment of their original document, in pursuit of a “more perfect union.” The hard-won progress of the next two centuries is also something to take pride in.

5) Some solutions are actually pretty simple. We may live in a complex world, but that doesn’t mean solutions to problems always have to be complicated. “Medicare for all” is a simpler and better solution for health care reform than the overly complicated, gazillion-page bill that eventually passed through Congress like a kidney stone; a carbon fee returned to the public is a simpler & better solution to the climate crisis than setting up an elaborate cap-&-trade regulated market; public financing of elections is a simpler & better solution to the influence of big money in politics than playing a kind of regulatory whack-a-mole constantly trying to anticipate where corporate influence will next rear its ugly head. Simple doesn’t always mean simplistic. And it’s way easier to explain.

This has gotten long, so my suggested list of progressive populist strategies & talking points will have to wait for another day.

Posts elsewhere (w/ great links!)

I’ve neglected my own blog a bit as I’ve been posting to the Eat the State! blog lately. As we wait to see how deeply The Crazy has infected the American electorate, here are a couple things I posted at ETS! in October with a few awesome video links reflecting on the ways that The Crazy is insinuating itself into American culture.

Early in the month, I posted this, calling attention to the brilliant Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck cartoon video, & offering some thoughts on the challenges for progressive populism.

A few days ago I posted this round up of video clips looking at the rightward march of the Republican Party & its vanguard, the Tea Party — & the frightening prospect of a Tea Change in American politics. This features Keith Olberman’s litany of right-wing candidate lunacies, an Xtra Normal animation called “Hi, I’m a Tea-Partier,”  & political satirist-songwriter Roy Zimmerman’s “Vote Republican.” (For balance, I had to add The Onion’s assessment of the Democrat electoral strategy of  running away from any of their achievements in government from the past two years.)

Don’t Be a Sucker! Viralize this!

I don’t often recommend “educational films” made by the US military. But this one — “Don’t Be a Sucker,” from 1947 — is brilliant, and essential viewing for all Americans in 2010. (And it’s only 17 minutes long!) Its purpose was to warn Americans against falling prey to simplistic appeals to prejudice.

Having just defeated fascism in Europe, the US government wanted to warn its citizens how to identify deceptive, proto-fascist propaganda tactics as they might appear in America. The primary strategy consists of dividing a country into various minority groups for purposes of vilification and creating hatred and conflict.

Hmmm… Sound at all familiar?

Many of us are inclined to dismiss the superheated vitriol of Beck, Palin, the Teabaggers, et al., as merely the idiot ravings of fringe fanatics.

But as this lunatic fringe increasingly becomes the mainstream of a re-ascendant Republican Party, we would do well to heed the words of the Hungarian-immigrant-turned-American-citizen in this film who once worked as a professor in Berlin in the 1930s:

[As a professor in Berlin] I heard the same words we have heard today [from a soapbox speaker denouncing various minorities in America]. But I was a fool then. I thought Nazis were crazy people — stupid fanatics.

But unfortunately, it was not so. You see, they knew they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation.

As citizens of a nation increasingly crippled by prejudice and division, maybe it’s time to stand up and take notice?

I have this recurring fantasy that one day all the common folk duped by the retrograde rhetoric of right-wing demagogues will discover how they’ve been conned, and then take all the anger they had once directed toward Muslims, immigrants, gays, socialists, and other enemies du jour and redirect that anger toward the con-men who appeal to those prejudices to further their own interests. Nobody likes getting conned. Imagine if many of the duped masses came to realize that the people duping them were a much greater threat to their well-being than those they’d been fooled into hating. Hell hath no fury…! (Hey, a fella can dream, right?)

Again, it’s instructive to listen to the words of our film’s wise professor:

We human beings are not born with prejudices. Always they are made for us — made by someone who wants something.

Remember that when you hear this kind of talk. Somebody’s going to get something out of it, and it isn’t going to be you.

Demagogic rhetoric takes hold when people are frightened and insecure, as many Americans are today in this difficult and rapidly shifting economy. An increasing number of Americans seem to be getting “suckered” by (neo)con-men (and women — I’m looking at you Sarah! And you, Ann! And Gretchen, and Michelle …).

I’m surprised that amid the escalating hatefest being fomented by the right-fringe lately, this video has not already gone viral. Let’s fix that. Let’s make it the talk of the town, the talk of the nation.

I especially encourage everyone to share this instructive film with your friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers who may be getting suckered by FOX Noise, the Teabaggers, and other demagogues. Perhaps the impeccably patriotic pedigree of this film can get their attention. Don’t let them be suckered.

It’s for their own good. And for the good of us all.

“Peak Oil”: Framing problem?

Someone forwarded a link to this movie tonight: “A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash.”

Looks interesting, & I’ll check it out, but I’ve gotta say that the trailer contains some questionable assumptions. Seems to follow typical “peak oil” framing: Oil is running out & that nothing can quite replace what oil does, so that’s a big problem for civilization. (Hopefully there’s more to the message of the actual movie…)

I’d frame it differently: Abundant & cheap oil has enabled us to create excessively wasteful lifestyles, which are now overheating the planet & threatening life on earth with a climate crisis. Instead of worrying about how we’re going to replace oil, we oughta be thinking about how to design our society so it’s much less wasteful, which is really not that hard to do, even with what we already know right now. If our way of life were more sensible & efficient, it’s not hard to imagine comfortable lives using a tiny fraction of the energy we use now.

At that level of energy use, there are many clean, renewable energy sources that can meet our needs. And avoid cooking the planet to death. For the win!

I hope the movie gets into that.

I think that the real problem with “peak oil” is not that we’re running out of oil, but that we’re not running out soon enough. What do you think?

Eat the State! ends an era, begins another

(Self-referential alert!: I mostly avoid talking about myself in this blog, which is about larger societal issues, but the passing of the print version of Eat the State!, the feisty independent paper I’ve worked on for almost 14 yrs, seemed worthy of note. Here is my personal reflection on ETS! history and my own history surrounding it.)

Yesterday we published the final regularly scheduled print issue of Eat the State!, the “shamelessly biased political journal” that I co-founded with Geov Parrish on Sept. 10, 1996, bringing straight-talking and incisive political commentary with a healthy dose of satire and humor to readers around Seattle and beyond. (We’ve had subscribers on five continents!) We continue publishing online at eatthestate.org, but the end of the print edition is definitely the end of an era.

What Came Before

During the 1980s & early ’90s I had worked on several independent newspapers and magazines: RAIN magazine, the Portland Alliance, the Seattle Community Catalyst, and Communities magazine. While working at the Community Catalyst, a monthly, activist newspaper I founded and published from 1990–1993, I met Geov Parrish. Originally we met at meetings for the Seattle Coalition for Peace In the Middle East, which had formed in the fall of 1990, to try to prevent the first war against Iraq by the first President Bush. Geov became a contributor to the Catalyst, and later a friend and housemate in a co-op house in Seattle’s Montlake neighborhood.

The Community Catalyst, I must say, was pretty much my life dream project made manifest. In many ways, it was based on a formula I had learned at my stint with the Portland Alliance in previous years: Create a convergence hub for activists across many issues and many philosophies to tell their stories, and for readers to discuss, discover, and get involved in making change. The Catalyst tagline was “Making connections for making change,” and we believed that in making these connections we could build a community of change-agents that could be stronger than the sum of its parts. In addition to publishing the monthly newspaper, we maintained a community resource center with a lending library and meeting space for activists.

It was a noble effort (and very important work, I still believe). We attracted many volunteers, had lots of community support, and relatively wide circulation in the community (around 10,000 papers in free street distribution plus a few hundred subscribers). But it was a constant struggle to pay the printer and keep the doors open, and after a little more than three years, we published our final issue and shut down the whole operation.

The demise of the Catalyst was a colossal disappointment for me at that time. I’d always felt that it could have been sustained if only I’d found another partner or two equally committed to the project as I was. Although a great many volunteers helped out over our history, I still personally coordinated the business end of things (such as it was), sold and coordinated our ad accounts, designed the paper and coordinated layout, did a large share of the feature writing, and did the overall editing. If only I’d found someone to take over at least one of the larger areas of coordination (business, layout, or editorial), I believed we could have sustained the project beyond its 37-month existence.

After the Catalyst, I went to work for Communities magazine, which covered the stories and lessons learned from intentional communities all around North America. It was a great gig, but I came to miss doing journalism for and about the community where I lived, the politically aware community in the Seattle area.

Launching Eat the State!

So when Geov approached me in the summer of 1996 about starting up a weekly political newsjournal, I was easily persuaded. He had the vision, had chosen a catchy and provocative name, and had worked out most of the basic concepts for it. From his introduction to our first issue (which he had written the previous year and shared with me when he first approached me):

“Welcome to this, an initial issue of what we intend to be a weekly, four-page forum for—like the masthead says—anti-authoritarian political opinion, research, news, and humor.

“While Seattle already has lots of forest-eating print publications, including some very good ones, it doesn’t have one that is explicitly anti-statist (by which we mean both governments and corporations, which these days are essentially the same); explicitly activist; or published frequently enough to respond to breaking events, decode the news, and publicize activist initiatives. … We also think being clearly biased in our approach is not only more honest than so-called “objective” corporate media, but lots more fun to read.”

Furthermore, he promised that the paper would “avoid rhetoric, make the issues of the day relevant to our daily lives, get the word out, inspire, have fun, and encourage each other to think for ourselves and look beyond what self-interested corporations and governments hand to us.”

Sounded good to me. Then of course there was the mission statement:

“Missions were used by the Spanish to colonize Mexican California in the 18th century. Their establishment was instrumental in the genocide of California’s native peoples. We oppose them.”

Though there was much to like about the project, Geov’s editorial approach was in marked contrast to my own at the Catalyst. I had been committed to focusing on how people were responding to problems rather than merely criticizing the problems themselves. I believed that critiques without solutions simply bred cynicism, so I avoided them at the Catalyst, especially critiques on national issues, which I figured were well covered by larger lefty publications. Yet Eat the State! would be primarily an extended rant against how fucked up things are. (One of my favorite magazines, Yes!, which focuses on positive actions for a better world, was also launched in 1996. I often joked that ETS! was its counterpart, and could have been called No!—or better yet, Fuck No!, since we were fond of dropping the f-bomb in print…) What redeemed it in my view was the quality of Geov’s straight-talking, vernacular writing and the healthy dose of humor he brought to otherwise serious subject matter. It was unique, it was fresh, and it was definitely worth a try.

I committed myself to being the kind of partner I wished I’d had at the Catalyst. With Geov handling all the editorial duties (he did all the writing himself for the first half year) I focused on the design and layout (and later, selecting the political cartoons, hustling advertising once we went from 8.5×11 photocopied newsletter format to tabloid offset printing, and other assorted responsibilities).

Volume 1, Number 1

The initial release was pretty modest: four pages of two-column layout (designed for easy weekly production), no graphics, 500 photocopies distributed wherever we thought we might find interested readers. The lead headline was “Why the US bombing of Iraq was stupid, pointless, and illegal.” (Remember, this is the Clinton administration we’re talking about. Interesting how one thing the last four presidents have had in common was bombing Iraq—and how in each case it’s been “stupid, pointless, and illegal”…)

On the strength of Geov’s writing, ETS! quickly gained a following, bringing new volunteers, donors, contributors, and readers. We soon expanded the number of copies, then doubled the number of pages, then expanded to tabloid newsprint before the end of our second year. A bootstrap operation that started out with less than one full bootstrap…

One of our earliest volunteers was Eddie Tews (“ever-ready Eddie,” as I would come to think of him). Eddie is the kind of volunteer essential to the success of many grassroots organizations, who comes in, finds a niche (usually handling the grunt-work that nobody else really wants to do), and just quietly sticks with it, week after week, year after year. Most people don’t get involved in alternative publications because they want to do photocopying, assemble mailings, manage databases and bank accounts, and other organizational details. That’s what Eddie did, for more than 13 years. It’s hard to imagine Eat the State!‘s successful run without him.

Another critical piece of the puzzle came when Maria Tomchick showed up at one our weekly issue-assembly-&-mailing parties in the summer of ’97. She had previously been part of a publication on international affairs, and possessed strong and detailed knowledge about that topic and about economics. She became co-editor with Geov, and also joined him on Eat the Airwaves!, the ETS! spinoff radio show Saturday mornings on KEXP. The core team of Geov, Maria, Eddie, and I would carry ETS! through most of its 13+ years (though Maria ended her co-editor stint years ago, she remains an occasional—and ever popular—contributor to the paper, and partner in the radio show). Other long-term co-editors have included Troy Skeels early on, and Jeff Stevens, current co-editor who came on in late 2005, bringing expertise in student activism, cultural politics, and local activist history.

A multitude of other volunteers have played critical roles in the success of the paper over the years—some going to extraordinary lengths to get the paper out on the streets into people’s hands, some pulling together fundraising events that everyone agreed were necessary but no one else wanted to actually organize, and many others performing critical functions vital to a volunteer-based print publication.

In addition, we were blessed with many talented contributors donating their work to ETS!. Cartoonists have included John Jonik, Tom Tomorrow, Roberta Gregory, Ted Rall, Stephanie McMillan, Jim Siergey, and Abell Smith. Writers have included Alexander Cockburn, Robert Weissman, Steven Hill, Paul Loeb, Starhawk, and Thom Hartmann. People who make their living at their craft, donating their work to us for free simply because they believed in what we were doing.

Doing Much with Little

In many ways, it’s remarkable how much we were able to do with so little. I don’t think ETS!‘s annual budget ever topped $25,000. Although we technically had an office (always a small room shared with other activist organizations) no one actually worked there (except Eddie for a few hours a month, entering data into our one ancient computer and printing out mailing labels)—we just used it as place to drop off and pick up the papers, store some stuff, and have our meetings. Everyone just did their ETS! work in their spare time on top of day jobs. One of our editors doesn’t even have internet access at home. We’ve had little actual organization, with things continually falling through the cracks through inattention or lack of anyone wanting to deal with them. Looking back it seems a miracle that we never missed a printer deadline.

And yet… Despite its strong anti-establishment attitude, Eat the State! was being read in City Hall (including getting letters from city councilmembers defending themselves against criticisms we’d printed). Our election endorsements became very popular and carried much influence among many voters. The large corporate dailies would pick up on stories that ETS! first brought to public attention. Our activist calendar and organization directory helped a great many readers to get involved in causes they’d otherwise be unaware of. And we used to chuckle at the resumes sent to us by recently minted journalism school graduates seeking jobs—if we could fool them into thinking we were an operation with a a real office and paid employees, we must have been doing something right.

The paper also led to greater success for Geov personally. Just months launching ETS!, Geov was offered a position as political columnist at The Stranger, and later the Seattle Weekly, and became a contributor to several alternative publications. These opportunities came not because he sought them out, but because they sought him out—a situation that would be the envy of any aspiring writer. Consequently, his incisive critiques of society’s power elite found a much wider audience. The attention was well-deserved—I believe Geov is one of the best political writers I’ve read. I’ve often compared his style to the late, great Molly Ivins in his ability to distill complex issues into their essence, and deliver that essence with passion, straight talk, and humor. And despite his many scathing criticisms of many political and business leaders, he’s hardly ever written anything requiring correction or retraction. Remarkable. We can only imagine what he could accomplish if he enjoyed the same health most of us do. (Geov required a double-organ transplant just prior to ETS! start-up—in fact much of ETS! development occurred while he was convalescing from the surgery. He has lived with a severely compromised immune system ever since, leading to frequent visits to the hospital and day-to-day challenges most of us can’t imagine. I’m in awe of what he does with what he has.)

Eat the State! has been an equal-opportunity critic, skewering liberals and conservatives alike. It was started mid-way through the Clinton administration, and was particularly harsh in pointing out the abominations committed under the guise of liberalism (and I’m not talking about sex scandals, which ETS! viewed rightly as a ridiculous sideshow). Throughout the Bush administration, of course, ETS! was hardly alone in its criticisms, but again parted ways with much of the liberal media with the arrival of Obama. Yes, we’re still bombing Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan), yes, it’s still “stupid, pointless, and illegal,” yes, US government is still in the pocket of big corporations, yes, our culture is still drenched in oil despite all the warning signs… The faces and players may change, but the game remains the same. Somebody’s gotta tell that truth—it’s a vital function in any system that calls itself a democracy.

Goodbye Print, Hello Internet

It’s been a great ride, but I must confess that after 13+ years, I’m personally a little burned out on the whole print enterprise. Maintaining the print edition in the end just became too much of a struggle. A bad economy coupled with a mass migration of readers from print to the web means it’s been tough for print all over. But hey, we outlasted the Seattle P-I! Who would have predicted that in September of 1996? Not me.

Eat the State! continues our rabble-rousing online at eatthestate.org. We’ve had a website all along, but it hasn’t been upgraded in about a decade (which is like a century in internet time). Now that we’ve belatedly stumbled into the 21st century, we have all the modern conveniences—reader comments on articles, a blog that’s updated several times a week, images (previous site was text-only), colors other than black & white, type that doesn’t involve stone tablets, etc. We hope this will make for a more interactive community of readers. Come join the conversation!

PS- Now that I’ve developed some basic skills in website design and online publishing (thanks partly to helping develop the new ETS! site), I’m hoping to launch an online version of Seattle Community Catalyst sometime in the next year. You heard it here first. Let me know if you are interested in helping.

The Rules Are No Game: Time to End Corporate Rule

Anthony Wilden, with whom I studied communication theory and systems theory in college, wrote a book called The Rules Are No Game. The phrase has long stuck with me as a terse encapsulation of the idea that all systems—from computer operating systems to sporting events to political systems—operate according to certain underlying rules. Those rules determine what’s possible and what’s not possible within the system and shape which outcomes are more likely or less likely.

The rules that shape our political and economic systems—favoring some interests while ignoring others, influencing who wins and who loses, who lives and who dies—those rules are certainly no game. We ignore them at our peril. When we simply try to change political outcomes without changing the rules, we put ourselves at a disadvantage. So, often, we lose.

“History is written by the winners,” it is often said. To which we must add: “The rules are written by the winners.” That’s how they keep winning. Those of us on the losing end of political contests need to pay more attention to the rules.

In the United States, the rules are supposed to enable “we the people” to govern ourselves. That’s the American Ideal, an ideal for which many people have been willing to die to protect.

In practice, the reality is quite different. This is no secret. Especially in the last three decades (since the “Reagan revolution” of 1980), the rules have been changed increasingly in favor of powerful private interests at the expense of public interests. Consequently, in 2010, such urgent matters as meaningful health care reform, energy reform, or financial reform are simply not within the realm of “political possibility,” even with President Hope&Change in the White House and a wide Democratic majority in Congress.

Put simply, powerful private interests will not allow public interests to prevail. Not if it diminishes their power or profit in any way. The rules allow them to rule.

The result is that well-organized efforts by progressives to make—well—progress on individual issues of great importance repeatedly seem to fail. Or else, beginning with the premise that “half a loaf is better than none,” political professionals proclaim in the end that a single crumb is success (as with the current health care reform “victory”).

We the people deserve better than that. We’re supposed to rule. Not settle for crumbs.

A small number of progressives have been sounding the alarm for many years on the need to change the rules (see below for examples) that enable so much corporate control over our political system. Their numbers have been growing recently due to the Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Will this decision be the final nail in the coffin of US democracy or a clarion call that creates a popular movement strong enough to seriously limit corporate power in US politics? We’re seeing some encouraging signs of the latter, but much more is needed.

One of the more significant efforts right now is Move to Amend, which seeks to amend the US Constitution to “firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.” Move to Amend brings together many groups that have been working against corporate personhood for many years, including Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD), Reclaim Democracy, Democracy Unlimited, and others. You can sign the petition here.

Many new efforts are popping up in response to the Supreme Court ruling as well. More than 30 groups have been created on Facebook to address the problem. These are gathered together by a coalition called We the People, which is also engaged in regional coordination to encourage on-the-ground organizing in each state and local community.

Another worthy effort is the New Rules Project, created by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an organization that has been doing excellent community-level work for decades. Prolific author and radio host Thom Hartmann has also been sounding the alarm about corporate control for many years. His book, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, helped to bring the whole issue into popular consciousness. And of course, many other worthy efforts exist.

That’s a good thing, and it’s important to keep these efforts growing and building momentum. Corporate power in politics may be the single most important issue of our times, because it affects our ability to make progress on almost every other issue. It can be hard to maintain focus and motivation around because it can seem a little abstract. It’s easier for people to focus on what seem like more immediate and pressing matters—health care, the climate crisis, housing the homeless, and what have you. But unless we build a people’s movement that is large, broad-based, passionate, and strategically smart enough to successfully curb corporate power in politics, we will see all of our other efforts fail or fall far short. If we win on this one, progress on all our other issues will become much easier.

Let’s not kid ourselves: Amending the Constitution is an enormous undertaking and will take a lot of work. But it’s too important to fail.

The Supreme Court may have inadvertently lit the fire that impels people into action to reclaim our power against corporate rule. Gnawing discontent is turning into full-fledged outrage among those on the left, right, and center. Let’s organize that outrage to regain our power as We the People once and for all.

Looking back at 2009

Some things just got weirder in 2009. Tom Tomorrow looks back at the year in crazy.

Although the wingnuts are easy to laugh at, they should not be taken lightly. They are poisoning public discourse and encouraging misinformed and unstable people to greater misplaced anger and extremism. Many of those people, let’s remember, are armed and potentially dangerous. Let’s hope that 2010 does not bring deeper, darker, and entirely unfunny developments in this craziness.

Something Rotten in Denmark? Looking Back at Copenhagen & Looking Forward to the Future

How you assess the outcome of the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference (UNCCC), held in Copenhagen Dec. 7-18, depends on whether you see the glass 95 percent empty or 5 percent full. And how you feel about that extremely modest progress in relation to the planet-wide urgency of the climate crisis. And what you believed was possible for an agreement among all nations of the world at this particular time regarding this enormously complicated and conflict-ridden challenge.

The good news: China and the US came a little closer to resolving their climate relationship tiff and, together with three other major emitters (India, Brazil, and South Africa), cobbled together a last-minute deal that commits to limiting average global temperature rise to 2ºC (3.6ºF) and agrees to systems for verifying carbon-reduction efforts (a major US priority, resisted by China).

Significantly, this is the first time that developing countries have agreed to verifiable emissions reductions, which weren’t required of such countries under the Kyoto Protocol, and represents a small step forward in bridging the difficult divide between “developed” and “developing” nations in addressing the climate crisis. The agreement also provides $100 billion in funds to help poorer countries to cope with climate instability and to find development pathways not based on fossil fuels. And the United States, after shunning Kyoto, then spending the last decade ignoring and obstructing climate-change negotiations, is at least back in the game.

If you believe that “something is better than nothing,” that’s pretty much the extent of the “something” that came out of Copenhagen. Not insignificant, but nowhere near what’s needed.

The bad news (summarized for space reasons): Although the final-day agreement was hashed out by some of the biggest carbon emitting nations, those negotiations excluded all the other nations that had come to Copenhagen with differing agendas and priorities. The limit of 2ºC average temperature rise was not fleshed out with specific binding commitments, and was greater than the 1.5ºC limit that many African and island nations had called for as a matter of survival.

Even worse, a study that came out at Copenhagen showed that even if all the nations met the specific emissions-reductions targets they brought to the summit, it would not in fact limit average global temperature rise to 2ºC, but would actually approach 3ºC (and much higher in some regions), an increase scientists have said would be catastrophic, especially for some of the more vulnerable nations of the world.

Indeed, the whole UN process for addressing climate change seemed strained to the breaking point as the rhetorical rift between climate-crisis perpetrators and climate-crisis victims seemed to deepen at Copenhagen. (This was the real fault line at the UNCCC, more so than the US-China conflict focused on by most US media.) Nations bearing the brunt of climate instability cite the scientific evidence that their very survival hinges on drastic emissions cuts by the major emitters, as well as payment of some sort of “climate debt” to mitigate for damage done and to afford developing nations a way forward that doesn’t make the problem worse.

Meanwhile, nations most responsible for the problem (especially the US) offer modest reductions that come nowhere close to what scientists say is necessary. The concept of climate debt was “categorically” rejected by US negotiator Todd Stern. Although Copenhagen’s goal of $100 billion in aid to impacted developing countries marks a modest step forward, like the rest of the agreement, there are no specific commitments about how—or even if—that goal will be achieved.

In short, the accord emerging from Copenhagen excludes the concerns of most nations, falls far short of what scientists say is necessary to avert disaster, and leaves plenty of wiggle room even within those weak parameters. Consequently, many observers proclaimed the outcome an utter failure. It’s not hard to look at the best available evidence and conclude: We are so fucked.

Our challenge: We’re not talking here about your typical international accord aimed at your ordinary global crisis. Generally, if such agreements languish for years while details are being hashed out, it’s not the end of the world. This time, well, it could be. For real. It sounds melodramatic, but it’s hard to overstate the urgency here. Drastic changes are needed to avert worldwide catastrophe. And soon.

With those kinds of stakes, it’s easy to be cynical, if not panicked, about the slow pace of progress in addressing the crisis. But Copenhagen, if anything, should be a wakeup call and a reminder that if we rely on those at the top to get it done, we’re pretty much fucked. There’s lots of work to do to avert climate catastrophe, which will need to take place at every level of society, everywhere, by as many people as possible. Neither cynicism nor panic will help us get there. We need to be realistic, about both the science and the politics involved. Let’s not underestimate either the urgency or the difficulty of the project.

Scientists are becoming increasingly clear about the urgency, telling us that we don’t have much time left to transition away from fossil fuels: Our current trajectory is heading directly toward some crucial tipping points, which could create runaway changes in the global climate system, leading to destruction of human and natural habitats, hundreds of millions of climate refugees, species extinctions, massive crop failures and starvation, escalating conflicts over resources, disease epidemics, and on and on.

Contrast that urgency with the difficulty of making major changes within our current political systems. The climate crisis presents humanity with a challenge of unprecedented scale and complexity.

First of all, it is inescapably global, requiring a higher level of international cooperation than any challenge humanity has ever faced. That’s why negotiations like the UNCCC are absolutely essential, despite all current flaws and shortcomings. Bringing together 192 nations—each with their own cultures, histories, and agendas—to agree about anything, much less something as fraught with conflict as energy use and climate impacts, is not easy. Add in the fact that the climate crisis requires addressing not only a global environmental crisis, but also redressing historical social injustices internationally, and, well, yeah, maybe we are totally fucked.

Then there’s the fact that countries with the greatest ability to solve the problem are the ones most thoroughly addicted to fossil fuels. Strong leadership from the United States, the nation most responsible for the climate crisis thus far, would be enormously beneficial, but realistically, that’s kind of like expecting arsonists to put out their own fires. Fossil fuels have been the lifeblood of industrial development for the last two centuries, nowhere more so than in the US. The trafficking (so to speak) of those fossil fuels has brought enormous wealth, power, and influence to certain sectors of society, and those interests now control much of the political apparatus, nationally and internationally, that currently decides the fate of humanity.

Anyone who expects that political apparatus to suddenly opt for a massive transition away from fossil fuels just because it will avert disaster for future generations is simply delusional.

Many blame Obama, citing his lack of real leadership in Copenhagen as just another of the many disappointments of his first year in office. But let’s get real: Obama has to work with the country he presides over, which includes the aforementioned power-brokers hell-bent on obstructing progress, a very loud constituency who still believe the climate crisis is some kind of hoax, and a US Senate that just gave away health care reform to powerful special interests, and threatens to do the same with climate and energy reform in the months to come. Obama went to Copenhagen with a mission to secure an international agreement that he believed could give some incentive for intransigent US political forces to move forward on this urgent issue. Time will tell if this modest mission meets with any kind of success.

Just to be clear, while these political difficulties are huge, they should not be confused with technical obstacles to addressing the climate crisis. Conceptually, we know what needs to be done, and technically, it’s quite achievable. We could get much of the way there with current, off-the-shelf technologies; and with research-and-development and international aid investments on a par with what gets spent on bank bailouts or the military, we could probably make the technical transition within a decade.

So we have the solutions; what’s lacking is the political will. Which brings us to the one major part of the Copenhagen story unmentioned so far. While delegates inside the Bella Center (where the negotiations took place) were bickering over wholly inadequate, incremental policy changes, members of civil society—NGOs and fired-up activists from around the world—massed outside, pressuring for meaningful commitments and reminding the delegates inside that real solutions do exist. They brought proposals for international climate justice, proposals for protecting the rainforests, proposals for making a rapid transition to clean energy, proposals to revive the economy with the green jobs that such a transition would bring.

They brought solutions and they brought numbers–by most accounts, numbers much greater than the number of people gathered in Seattle to protest the WTO a decade ago. This movement is large, it is sophisticated, and it is … still inadequate.

It all boils down to this: Despite all the complexity involved in solving the climate crisis, the formula for success is fairly simple and familiar. If we can create a popular movement large enough and strategically smart enough to overcome the vested interests currently gripping the levers of political power, we can win. If we don’t … we are so fucked.

Happy new year!