Tomgram: Chip Ward, Occupy Earth
By Chip Ward
Posted on October 27, 2011, Printed on October 29, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175459/
If your child has asthma and it’s getting worse, then news about the White House’s recent retreat on ozone (that is, smog) standards for the air over your city wasn’t exactly cause for cheering. Thank our environmental president for that, but mainly of course the Republicans, who have been out to kneecap the Environmental Protection Agency since the 2010 election results came in. We may be heading for an anything-blows environmental future, even though it couldn’t be more logical to assume that whatever is allowed into the air will sooner or later end up in us.
With a helping hand from that invaluable website Environmental Health News, here’s a little ladleful of examples from the chemical soup that could be not just your air, soil, or water, but you. It's only a few days' worth of news reports on what’s in our environment and so, for better or mostly worse, in us: In Dallas-Ft. Worth, there’s lead in the blood of children, thanks to leaded gasoline, banned decades ago, but still in the soil. In New York’s Hudson River, “one of the largest toxic cleanups in U.S. history” (for PCBs in river sediments) is ongoing. Researchers now suspect that those chemicals, already linked to low birth weight, thyroid disease, and learning, memory, and immune system disorders,” are also associated with to high blood pressure. Then there’s mercury, that “potent neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to the developing brains of fetuses and children.” If allowed, it will enter the environment via a proposed open-pit gold and copper mine to be built in Alaska near “one of the world's premier salmon fisheries.”
And speaking of fish, there is ancient DDT, plus more modern PCBs and spilled oil in ocean sediments off California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula, a toxic superfund site, whose cleanup is now being planned. And don’t forget that uranium mill near Cañon City, Colorado, which “has the state's backing to permanently dispose of radioactive waste in its tailings ponds, despite state and independent reports over a 30-year period showing the ponds' liners leak.” Or consider bisphenol-A, a chemical most of us now carry around in our bodies. It is used in the making of some plastic containers and “may cause behavior and emotional problems in young girls” according to a new study (as older studies indicated that it might affect “the brain development of fetuses and small children”). Or think about the drinking water tested recently by the University of Tennessee Center for Environmental Biotechnology from six of 11 Tennessee utilities statewide that “contained traces of 17 chemicals found in insect repellent, ibuprofen, detergents, a herbicide, hormones, and chemical compounds found in plastics.” And that's just to dip a toe in polluted waters.
Increasingly, with the environment a chemical soup of our industrial processes, so are our bodies. No wonder TomDispatch regular and environmentalist Chip Ward suggests that activists occupying Wall Street should think even bigger. Tom
Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick
Nature Is the 99%, Too
By Chip Ward
What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?
Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.
In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.
Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.
And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.
The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.
Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.
Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.
Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.
If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.
In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.
The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.
First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.
Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.
The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.
Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?
The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.
Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future -- that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.
At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.
Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.
An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.
Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.
Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.
When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.
Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.
After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?
Chip Ward co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. A TomDispatch regular, he wrote about campaigns to make polluters accountable in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and about visionary conservationists in Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.
Copyright 2011 Chip Ward
© 2011 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175459/
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Tomgram: Chip Ward, Occupy Earth
By Chip Ward
Posted on October 27, 2011, Printed on October 29, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175459/
If your child has asthma and it’s getting worse, then news about the White House’s recent retreat on ozone (that is, smog) standards for the air over your city wasn’t exactly cause for cheering. Thank our environmental president for that, but mainly of course the Republicans, who have been out to kneecap the Environmental Protection Agency since the 2010 election results came in. We may be heading for an anything-blows environmental future, even though it couldn’t be more logical to assume that whatever is allowed into the air will sooner or later end up in us.
With a helping hand from that invaluable website Environmental Health News, here’s a little ladleful of examples from the chemical soup that could be not just your air, soil, or water, but you. It's only a few days' worth of news reports on what’s in our environment and so, for better or mostly worse, in us: In Dallas-Ft. Worth, there’s lead in the blood of children, thanks to leaded gasoline, banned decades ago, but still in the soil. In New York’s Hudson River, “one of the largest toxic cleanups in U.S. history” (for PCBs in river sediments) is ongoing. Researchers now suspect that those chemicals, already linked to low birth weight, thyroid disease, and learning, memory, and immune system disorders,” are also associated with to high blood pressure. Then there’s mercury, that “potent neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to the developing brains of fetuses and children.” If allowed, it will enter the environment via a proposed open-pit gold and copper mine to be built in Alaska near “one of the world's premier salmon fisheries.”
And speaking of fish, there is ancient DDT, plus more modern PCBs and spilled oil in ocean sediments off California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula, a toxic superfund site, whose cleanup is now being planned. And don’t forget that uranium mill near Cañon City, Colorado, which “has the state's backing to permanently dispose of radioactive waste in its tailings ponds, despite state and independent reports over a 30-year period showing the ponds' liners leak.” Or consider bisphenol-A, a chemical most of us now carry around in our bodies. It is used in the making of some plastic containers and “may cause behavior and emotional problems in young girls” according to a new study (as older studies indicated that it might affect “the brain development of fetuses and small children”). Or think about the drinking water tested recently by the University of Tennessee Center for Environmental Biotechnology from six of 11 Tennessee utilities statewide that “contained traces of 17 chemicals found in insect repellent, ibuprofen, detergents, a herbicide, hormones, and chemical compounds found in plastics.” And that's just to dip a toe in polluted waters.
Increasingly, with the environment a chemical soup of our industrial processes, so are our bodies. No wonder TomDispatch regular and environmentalist Chip Ward suggests that activists occupying Wall Street should think even bigger. Tom
Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick
Nature Is the 99%, Too
By Chip Ward
What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?
Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.
In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.
Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.
And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.
The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.
Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.
Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.
Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.
If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.
In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.
The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.
First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.
Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.
The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.
Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?
The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.
Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future -- that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.
At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.
Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.
An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.
Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.
Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.
When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.
Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.
After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?
Chip Ward co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. A TomDispatch regular, he wrote about campaigns to make polluters accountable in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and about visionary conservationists in Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.
Copyright 2011 Chip Ward
© 2011 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175459/
By Chip Ward
Posted on October 27, 2011, Printed on October 29, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175459/
If your child has asthma and it’s getting worse, then news about the White House’s recent retreat on ozone (that is, smog) standards for the air over your city wasn’t exactly cause for cheering. Thank our environmental president for that, but mainly of course the Republicans, who have been out to kneecap the Environmental Protection Agency since the 2010 election results came in. We may be heading for an anything-blows environmental future, even though it couldn’t be more logical to assume that whatever is allowed into the air will sooner or later end up in us.
With a helping hand from that invaluable website Environmental Health News, here’s a little ladleful of examples from the chemical soup that could be not just your air, soil, or water, but you. It's only a few days' worth of news reports on what’s in our environment and so, for better or mostly worse, in us: In Dallas-Ft. Worth, there’s lead in the blood of children, thanks to leaded gasoline, banned decades ago, but still in the soil. In New York’s Hudson River, “one of the largest toxic cleanups in U.S. history” (for PCBs in river sediments) is ongoing. Researchers now suspect that those chemicals, already linked to low birth weight, thyroid disease, and learning, memory, and immune system disorders,” are also associated with to high blood pressure. Then there’s mercury, that “potent neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to the developing brains of fetuses and children.” If allowed, it will enter the environment via a proposed open-pit gold and copper mine to be built in Alaska near “one of the world's premier salmon fisheries.”
And speaking of fish, there is ancient DDT, plus more modern PCBs and spilled oil in ocean sediments off California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula, a toxic superfund site, whose cleanup is now being planned. And don’t forget that uranium mill near Cañon City, Colorado, which “has the state's backing to permanently dispose of radioactive waste in its tailings ponds, despite state and independent reports over a 30-year period showing the ponds' liners leak.” Or consider bisphenol-A, a chemical most of us now carry around in our bodies. It is used in the making of some plastic containers and “may cause behavior and emotional problems in young girls” according to a new study (as older studies indicated that it might affect “the brain development of fetuses and small children”). Or think about the drinking water tested recently by the University of Tennessee Center for Environmental Biotechnology from six of 11 Tennessee utilities statewide that “contained traces of 17 chemicals found in insect repellent, ibuprofen, detergents, a herbicide, hormones, and chemical compounds found in plastics.” And that's just to dip a toe in polluted waters.
Increasingly, with the environment a chemical soup of our industrial processes, so are our bodies. No wonder TomDispatch regular and environmentalist Chip Ward suggests that activists occupying Wall Street should think even bigger. Tom
Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick
Nature Is the 99%, Too
By Chip Ward
What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?
Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.
In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.
Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.
And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.
The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.
Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.
Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.
Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.
If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.
In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.
The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.
First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.
Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.
The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.
Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?
The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.
Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future -- that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.
At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.
Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.
An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.
Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.
Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.
When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.
Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.
After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?
Chip Ward co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. A TomDispatch regular, he wrote about campaigns to make polluters accountable in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and about visionary conservationists in Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.
Copyright 2011 Chip Ward
© 2011 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175459/
The Never-Ending Eurofiasco
by MIKE WHITNEY
Imagine if the local fire chief, in the spirit of conservation, decided he’d use no more than 1,000 gallons of water to put out any given house fire. Do you think the citizens would support that policy if their town was burned to the ground? And, yet, this is the same approach that eurozone leaders are using to address the debt crisis. The central bank (ECB) has virtually limitless resources (Think: printing press) to defend the debt of the individual states and to act as lender of last resort, but the eurocrats won’t hear of it. They refuse to use the ECB as every other central bank in the world is used. They’d rather reinvent the wheel by creating a funky, improvised emergency fund (European Financial Stabilization Facility or EFSF) that’s massively leveraged and which only provides a 20 percent “first-loss” guarantee on sovereign bonds. So, for example, if Italy goes belly-up in the next year or so and can’t repay its debts, then Mr. bondholder gets a whopping 20 cents on the dollar. Such a deal!
Can you see how ridiculous this is?
Look; US Treasuries are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States of America. What are Italian bonds backed by? Or Portuguese bonds? Or Irish bonds?
Under this new regime, they’ll be “partially” backed by a dodgy, undercapitalized insurance fund. That ought to shore-up investor confidence.
Is this any way to run a multi-trillion confederation of states?
And the EFSF is only part of this latest Eurofiasco. There’s also a special purpose investment vehicle (SPIV) that will be used to attract foreign investment. (Re: China) EU leaders assume that the Chinese are so yield-crazy that they’ll scarf up hundreds of billions of these (toxic?) EU bonds to stack atop their cache of USTs. Dream on. Apparently, Nicholas Sarkozy has already been on the horn to leaders in China inquiring about future investments. But, so far, no takers. The truth is, investors are exiting Europe as fast as their two feet will carry them, not lining up to get back in.
The good ship Eurozone is taking on water from all sides, which is why yesterday’s stock market moonshot was such a surprise. As soon as Wall Street got a whiff of Europe’s “breakthrough agreement” on Thursday, the Dow went through the roof, over 300 points on the day. Less than 24 hours later, however, the mood is notably more somber. The details on all the critical points–(Haircuts on Greek debt, bank recapitalisation, EFSF etc)– remain sketchy, while skepticism abounds. Here’s a clip from Bloomberg on Friday:
“U.S. stocks fell, trimming the longest weekly rally since January in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, as scrutiny deepens on Europe’s latest measures to contain the region’s sovereign debt crisis….
“The devil is in the details,” Don Wordell, a fund manager for Atlanta-based RidgeWorth Capital Management, which oversees about $47 billion, said in a telephone interview. “Europe is trying to do anything to solve its problems. Still, there are lots of questions on how the plan is going to work and how they are going to fix their debt issues.” (Bloomberg)
Ah, yes, “the details”. One of the details that’s been clarified is the fact that the credit markets are not “on board”, in fact, credit spreads have shrugged off the happy talk and continue to widen. This is from Reuters:
“Italy’s borrowing costs jumped to record levels on Friday, underlining its vulnerability at the heart of the euro zone debt crisis and scepticism about whether the struggling government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi can deliver vital reforms.
The 6.06 percent yield paid at an auction of 10-year bonds was the highest since the launch of the euro and not far from the level reached just before the European Central Bank intervened in August to cap Rome’s borrowing costs by buying Italian paper.
Italy, the euro zone’s third largest economy, is once more at the centre of the debt crisis, with fears growing that its borrowing costs could rise to levels that overwhelm the capacity of the bloc to provide support amid chronic political instability in Rome.” (Reuters)
So bondholders haven’t been duped by all the “breakthrough” hype. Yields are climbing higher which means it will be harder for Prime Minister Bunga-bunga to fund the Italian government. After all, what good is an insurance policy (EFSF) if you can’t get funding; that’s the question? Unfortunately, their are fewer buyers. Why? Because investors have lost faith in the Eurocrats ability to fix the situation. No one gives a hoot about the EZ’s big pile of money.(The EFSF will be $1.4 trillion) What they want is the “full faith and credit” of some institution that can underwrite the whole mess. Is that hard to understand? That’s what central banks do. This is from Bloomberg:
“The rate at which London-based banks say they can borrow for three months in dollars (Libor) rose for the 35th day, the longest run of increases since November 2005…
The dollar Libor-OIS spread, a gauge of banks’ reluctance to lend, widened to 34.66 basis points …the highest closing level since July 3, 2009.
The TED spread, or the difference between what lenders and the U.S. government pay to borrow for three months, widened to 41.79 basis points from 41.46 basis points yesterday, heading for the highest closing level since June 23, 2010.” (Bloomberg)
Okay. So the credit gauges are blinking again and yesterday’s announcement provided no relief at all. Banks are still reluctant to lend and credit conditions continue to tighten. And now that EU banks will be forced to increase their capital cushion, you can bet there will be another debilitating credit crunch. Take a look at this from Bloomberg:
“European banks say they have to cut assets to help satisfy a government push to boost capital faster than planned to insulate them against the sovereign debt crisis. That may trigger a credit crunch for companies and consumers throughout the 17-nation euro zone, helping to push its economy into recession, say Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG analysts.
Leaders meet today in Brussels to approve a plan to increase lenders’ capital by about 100 billion euros ($139 billion). Banks say they will more likely achieve the new requirements by shrinking rather than raising cash from shareholders, a scenario they want to avoid partly because their share prices have fallen 30 percent this year….
“History shows that bank recapitalizations provide the catalyst for the credit crunch,” he said in an Oct. 20 note. “Japan learned this in 1998, and the U.S. and the U.K. in 2008. Continental Europe’s lesson starts now.”
Banks across Europe have announced they will trim more than 775 billion euros from their balance sheets in the next two years to reduce short-term funding needs and achieve the 9 percent in regulatory capital required by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision ahead of schedule, according to data compiled by Bloomberg….
“The banks need to deleverage, but if they choose to deleverage by cutting assets not by raising equity then it will have negative consequences for the economy,” Simon Maughan, head of sales at MF Global Holdings Ltd. in London.” (“European Banks Warn of Credit Drought”, Bloomberg)
So, EZ leaders–after having already triggered a mini-Depression in the PIIGS with no end in sight–are on course to intensify the downturn by forcing the banks to dump hundreds of billions of dollars of assets onto the market thus pushing down prices and increasing financial market distress. Sounds like a plan. The alternative to this would be that the individual governments recapitalize the banks at their own expense which would mean higher taxes, diverting revenue from public services, and (here’s the corker) a steep downgrade by the ratings agencies. So, it’s a lose-lose-lose situation.
And what about those “overnight deposits” that banks have been squirreling away at the ECB because they’re afraid to leave their money in other banks? That must have improved now that a “comprehensive” deal has been worked out, right? This is from Bloomberg:
“The European Central Bank said banks increased overnight deposits to the most in more than two weeks.
Euro-area banks parked 218.1 billion euros ($308.8 billion) with the ECB overnight, up from 204.4 billion euros the previous day and the most since Oct. 10. They borrowed 2.7 billion euros in emergency overnight funds at the marginal rate of 2.25 percent, up from 1.8 billion euros a day earlier.” (Bloomberg)
Everything is worse. The Eurozone is imploding, and it’s imploding because the policies they’re implementing are, well, stupid, which is to say, they won’t work. And investors know they won’t work which is why they keep fleeing Europe en masse.
Can you blame them?
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com
by MIKE WHITNEY
Imagine if the local fire chief, in the spirit of conservation, decided he’d use no more than 1,000 gallons of water to put out any given house fire. Do you think the citizens would support that policy if their town was burned to the ground? And, yet, this is the same approach that eurozone leaders are using to address the debt crisis. The central bank (ECB) has virtually limitless resources (Think: printing press) to defend the debt of the individual states and to act as lender of last resort, but the eurocrats won’t hear of it. They refuse to use the ECB as every other central bank in the world is used. They’d rather reinvent the wheel by creating a funky, improvised emergency fund (European Financial Stabilization Facility or EFSF) that’s massively leveraged and which only provides a 20 percent “first-loss” guarantee on sovereign bonds. So, for example, if Italy goes belly-up in the next year or so and can’t repay its debts, then Mr. bondholder gets a whopping 20 cents on the dollar. Such a deal!
Can you see how ridiculous this is?
Look; US Treasuries are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States of America. What are Italian bonds backed by? Or Portuguese bonds? Or Irish bonds?
Under this new regime, they’ll be “partially” backed by a dodgy, undercapitalized insurance fund. That ought to shore-up investor confidence.
Is this any way to run a multi-trillion confederation of states?
And the EFSF is only part of this latest Eurofiasco. There’s also a special purpose investment vehicle (SPIV) that will be used to attract foreign investment. (Re: China) EU leaders assume that the Chinese are so yield-crazy that they’ll scarf up hundreds of billions of these (toxic?) EU bonds to stack atop their cache of USTs. Dream on. Apparently, Nicholas Sarkozy has already been on the horn to leaders in China inquiring about future investments. But, so far, no takers. The truth is, investors are exiting Europe as fast as their two feet will carry them, not lining up to get back in.
The good ship Eurozone is taking on water from all sides, which is why yesterday’s stock market moonshot was such a surprise. As soon as Wall Street got a whiff of Europe’s “breakthrough agreement” on Thursday, the Dow went through the roof, over 300 points on the day. Less than 24 hours later, however, the mood is notably more somber. The details on all the critical points–(Haircuts on Greek debt, bank recapitalisation, EFSF etc)– remain sketchy, while skepticism abounds. Here’s a clip from Bloomberg on Friday:
“U.S. stocks fell, trimming the longest weekly rally since January in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, as scrutiny deepens on Europe’s latest measures to contain the region’s sovereign debt crisis….
“The devil is in the details,” Don Wordell, a fund manager for Atlanta-based RidgeWorth Capital Management, which oversees about $47 billion, said in a telephone interview. “Europe is trying to do anything to solve its problems. Still, there are lots of questions on how the plan is going to work and how they are going to fix their debt issues.” (Bloomberg)
Ah, yes, “the details”. One of the details that’s been clarified is the fact that the credit markets are not “on board”, in fact, credit spreads have shrugged off the happy talk and continue to widen. This is from Reuters:
“Italy’s borrowing costs jumped to record levels on Friday, underlining its vulnerability at the heart of the euro zone debt crisis and scepticism about whether the struggling government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi can deliver vital reforms.
The 6.06 percent yield paid at an auction of 10-year bonds was the highest since the launch of the euro and not far from the level reached just before the European Central Bank intervened in August to cap Rome’s borrowing costs by buying Italian paper.
Italy, the euro zone’s third largest economy, is once more at the centre of the debt crisis, with fears growing that its borrowing costs could rise to levels that overwhelm the capacity of the bloc to provide support amid chronic political instability in Rome.” (Reuters)
So bondholders haven’t been duped by all the “breakthrough” hype. Yields are climbing higher which means it will be harder for Prime Minister Bunga-bunga to fund the Italian government. After all, what good is an insurance policy (EFSF) if you can’t get funding; that’s the question? Unfortunately, their are fewer buyers. Why? Because investors have lost faith in the Eurocrats ability to fix the situation. No one gives a hoot about the EZ’s big pile of money.(The EFSF will be $1.4 trillion) What they want is the “full faith and credit” of some institution that can underwrite the whole mess. Is that hard to understand? That’s what central banks do. This is from Bloomberg:
“The rate at which London-based banks say they can borrow for three months in dollars (Libor) rose for the 35th day, the longest run of increases since November 2005…
The dollar Libor-OIS spread, a gauge of banks’ reluctance to lend, widened to 34.66 basis points …the highest closing level since July 3, 2009.
The TED spread, or the difference between what lenders and the U.S. government pay to borrow for three months, widened to 41.79 basis points from 41.46 basis points yesterday, heading for the highest closing level since June 23, 2010.” (Bloomberg)
Okay. So the credit gauges are blinking again and yesterday’s announcement provided no relief at all. Banks are still reluctant to lend and credit conditions continue to tighten. And now that EU banks will be forced to increase their capital cushion, you can bet there will be another debilitating credit crunch. Take a look at this from Bloomberg:
“European banks say they have to cut assets to help satisfy a government push to boost capital faster than planned to insulate them against the sovereign debt crisis. That may trigger a credit crunch for companies and consumers throughout the 17-nation euro zone, helping to push its economy into recession, say Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG analysts.
Leaders meet today in Brussels to approve a plan to increase lenders’ capital by about 100 billion euros ($139 billion). Banks say they will more likely achieve the new requirements by shrinking rather than raising cash from shareholders, a scenario they want to avoid partly because their share prices have fallen 30 percent this year….
“History shows that bank recapitalizations provide the catalyst for the credit crunch,” he said in an Oct. 20 note. “Japan learned this in 1998, and the U.S. and the U.K. in 2008. Continental Europe’s lesson starts now.”
Banks across Europe have announced they will trim more than 775 billion euros from their balance sheets in the next two years to reduce short-term funding needs and achieve the 9 percent in regulatory capital required by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision ahead of schedule, according to data compiled by Bloomberg….
“The banks need to deleverage, but if they choose to deleverage by cutting assets not by raising equity then it will have negative consequences for the economy,” Simon Maughan, head of sales at MF Global Holdings Ltd. in London.” (“European Banks Warn of Credit Drought”, Bloomberg)
So, EZ leaders–after having already triggered a mini-Depression in the PIIGS with no end in sight–are on course to intensify the downturn by forcing the banks to dump hundreds of billions of dollars of assets onto the market thus pushing down prices and increasing financial market distress. Sounds like a plan. The alternative to this would be that the individual governments recapitalize the banks at their own expense which would mean higher taxes, diverting revenue from public services, and (here’s the corker) a steep downgrade by the ratings agencies. So, it’s a lose-lose-lose situation.
And what about those “overnight deposits” that banks have been squirreling away at the ECB because they’re afraid to leave their money in other banks? That must have improved now that a “comprehensive” deal has been worked out, right? This is from Bloomberg:
“The European Central Bank said banks increased overnight deposits to the most in more than two weeks.
Euro-area banks parked 218.1 billion euros ($308.8 billion) with the ECB overnight, up from 204.4 billion euros the previous day and the most since Oct. 10. They borrowed 2.7 billion euros in emergency overnight funds at the marginal rate of 2.25 percent, up from 1.8 billion euros a day earlier.” (Bloomberg)
Everything is worse. The Eurozone is imploding, and it’s imploding because the policies they’re implementing are, well, stupid, which is to say, they won’t work. And investors know they won’t work which is why they keep fleeing Europe en masse.
Can you blame them?
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com
A Wind Storm is Coming
Quo Vadis, OWS?
by RALPH NADER
The question confronting the Occupy Wall Street encampments and their offshoots in scores of cities and towns around the country is quo vadis? Where is it going?
This decentralized, leaderless civic initiative has attracted the persistent attention of the mass media in the past five weeks. Television cameras from all over the world are parked down at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street.
But the mass media is a hungry beast. It needs to be fed regularly. Apart from the daily pressures of making sure the encampments are clean, that food and shelter are available, that relations with the police are quiet, that provocateurs are identified; the campers must anticipate possible police crackdowns, such as that which has just occurred in Oakland, and find ways to rebound.
There are enough national polls showing broader support for the Occupy people than for the Tea Party people. Additional communities are installing their own Occupy sites right down to small towns like Niles, Michigan (pop. 12,000) and Bethel, Alaska where Diane McEachern is occupying the tundra. But, there is trouble ahead.
First, police departments in other cities will be observing the nature and reaction of mass arrests in places like Denver, Chicago and Atlanta. The plutocrats’ first response is always to push police power against the people. The recidivist violations of the ruling class are rarely pursued, yet the rumbles of the lower class are often stifled. With the onset of colder weather and looming police pressure, the protestors need new venues for their demonstrations
Activists need to vary their tactics. I suggest citizens surround the local offices of their Senators and Representatives. The number of Americans fed up with a gridlocked Congress, beset by craven or cowardly, both marinated in corporate campaign cash, can motivate an endless pool of activists who want their voices to be heard.
We know that the Occupy people want to keep their opposition on a general level of informed outrage and not get to the specific policy level. Fine. The 535 people in Congress, who put their shoes on every day like we do, are quite susceptible to a fast rising rumble from the people. They don’t need specifics. They know all about the savagely avaricious corporate paymasters and their swarming lobbyists on Capitol Hill wanting ever more varieties of goodies and less corporate law enforcement. What they need to know is that you’ve got their number and that people are fed up and on the move.
More members of Congress than one might expect, with their finger to the wind, start readjusting their antennas when they sense voter agitation. It is just that for years, there has been nary a breeze from that crucial source, while the corporatists have had their party year after year with their governmental toadies on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Make no mistake; support for the power shift espoused by the 99 percent movement is now only a breeze but a windstorm is coming. The protesters are feeling their way – demonstrating before big banks and closing out their accounts in favor of smaller community banks. Protests in front of the Manhattan mansions of the superrich from the big media and the big hedge funds also make sense.
Each new protest gives the protesters new insights. The protestors are learning how to challenge controlling processes. They are assembling and using their little libraries on site. They are learning the techniques of open, non-violent civil disobedience and building personal stamina. They are learning not to be provoked and thereby win the moral authority struggle which encourages more and more people to join their ranks.
In the Arab Spring of Cairo, Egypt earlier this year, it was said that a million people in Tahrir Square lost their fear of the dictatorship. It can be said that in this “American Autumn,” some 150,000 people have discovered their power and rejected apathy. They have come far in so little time because the soil for their pushback is so fertile, nourished by the revulsion of millions of their countrypersons moving toward standing up and showing up themselves.
This vanguard of larger protests to come is building on the personal stories of desperate but failed attempts to find work; stories of heart-breaking inability to pay for healthcare for themselves or their families’; stories of being defrauded of their pensions, their tax dollars, their savings and their rights. They demand accountability for the culprits who lied, stole and got away with it destroying the economy. And they want Congress to never bailout the Wall Street crooks, swindlers and speculators with taxpayer dollars.
Shining the light of the 99 percenters on the operations base of the corporate supremacists and their Congressional minions in one location after another both empowers and further informs those Americans who are seeing that showing up is half of democracy.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!
Quo Vadis, OWS?
by RALPH NADER
The question confronting the Occupy Wall Street encampments and their offshoots in scores of cities and towns around the country is quo vadis? Where is it going?
This decentralized, leaderless civic initiative has attracted the persistent attention of the mass media in the past five weeks. Television cameras from all over the world are parked down at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street.
But the mass media is a hungry beast. It needs to be fed regularly. Apart from the daily pressures of making sure the encampments are clean, that food and shelter are available, that relations with the police are quiet, that provocateurs are identified; the campers must anticipate possible police crackdowns, such as that which has just occurred in Oakland, and find ways to rebound.
There are enough national polls showing broader support for the Occupy people than for the Tea Party people. Additional communities are installing their own Occupy sites right down to small towns like Niles, Michigan (pop. 12,000) and Bethel, Alaska where Diane McEachern is occupying the tundra. But, there is trouble ahead.
First, police departments in other cities will be observing the nature and reaction of mass arrests in places like Denver, Chicago and Atlanta. The plutocrats’ first response is always to push police power against the people. The recidivist violations of the ruling class are rarely pursued, yet the rumbles of the lower class are often stifled. With the onset of colder weather and looming police pressure, the protestors need new venues for their demonstrations
Activists need to vary their tactics. I suggest citizens surround the local offices of their Senators and Representatives. The number of Americans fed up with a gridlocked Congress, beset by craven or cowardly, both marinated in corporate campaign cash, can motivate an endless pool of activists who want their voices to be heard.
We know that the Occupy people want to keep their opposition on a general level of informed outrage and not get to the specific policy level. Fine. The 535 people in Congress, who put their shoes on every day like we do, are quite susceptible to a fast rising rumble from the people. They don’t need specifics. They know all about the savagely avaricious corporate paymasters and their swarming lobbyists on Capitol Hill wanting ever more varieties of goodies and less corporate law enforcement. What they need to know is that you’ve got their number and that people are fed up and on the move.
More members of Congress than one might expect, with their finger to the wind, start readjusting their antennas when they sense voter agitation. It is just that for years, there has been nary a breeze from that crucial source, while the corporatists have had their party year after year with their governmental toadies on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Make no mistake; support for the power shift espoused by the 99 percent movement is now only a breeze but a windstorm is coming. The protesters are feeling their way – demonstrating before big banks and closing out their accounts in favor of smaller community banks. Protests in front of the Manhattan mansions of the superrich from the big media and the big hedge funds also make sense.
Each new protest gives the protesters new insights. The protestors are learning how to challenge controlling processes. They are assembling and using their little libraries on site. They are learning the techniques of open, non-violent civil disobedience and building personal stamina. They are learning not to be provoked and thereby win the moral authority struggle which encourages more and more people to join their ranks.
In the Arab Spring of Cairo, Egypt earlier this year, it was said that a million people in Tahrir Square lost their fear of the dictatorship. It can be said that in this “American Autumn,” some 150,000 people have discovered their power and rejected apathy. They have come far in so little time because the soil for their pushback is so fertile, nourished by the revulsion of millions of their countrypersons moving toward standing up and showing up themselves.
This vanguard of larger protests to come is building on the personal stories of desperate but failed attempts to find work; stories of heart-breaking inability to pay for healthcare for themselves or their families’; stories of being defrauded of their pensions, their tax dollars, their savings and their rights. They demand accountability for the culprits who lied, stole and got away with it destroying the economy. And they want Congress to never bailout the Wall Street crooks, swindlers and speculators with taxpayer dollars.
Shining the light of the 99 percenters on the operations base of the corporate supremacists and their Congressional minions in one location after another both empowers and further informs those Americans who are seeing that showing up is half of democracy.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!
Weekend Edition October 28-30, 2011
8An Interview With Anthony DiMaggio
The Rise of the Tea Party
by SCOTT BORCHERT
Scott Borchert: Your primary focus as a scholar is on media and communications — so why a book on the Tea Party?
Anthony DiMaggio: I’ve also researched and participated in social movements and interest group politics consistently for the last ten years, although much of my research does focus on media and public opinion. My participation and study of these movements spans the anti-corporate globalization movement, the anti-Iraq movement, the anti-nuke movement, and the pro-labor Madison and OWS movements. This book project actually brought all three areas of my research – media, public opinion, and movements – together, examining the Tea Party as a conglomeration of interest groups, and measuring how they have influenced media coverage and public opinion. As someone who has taken part in and studied social movements for my entire adult life, I felt I was in a unique position, scholarly and in terms of practical experience, to make a unique contribution in these areas. I also focus quite closely in my popular writings on current events, so the Tea Party seemed like an appropriate area to focus on in light of the massive political and media attention it has received.
Borchert: Do you consider the Tea Party to be a real grassroots movement or purely orchestrated by elite institutions? Or a little of both?
DiMaggio: I think the rage driving the Tea Party – at least with regard to the 25 percent of Americans who claim to sympathize with it – is quite real and very understandable. The Tea Party is largely comprised of white, over 40-50, middle to upper income Americans who have generally done pretty well for themselves over the years, but are being pressured by the neoliberal attack on working Americans. They’re rightly angry at being excluded from the tremendous economic prosperity that has taken place over the last three decades. As corporations have grown enormously more profitable, and worker productivity and the size of the economy have grown dramatically, the median family wage has stagnated. This stagnation actually translates into a reduction in wages, since the number of dual income families has increased significantly. Whereas in decades past the median income was driven more by single income-earning males, now families earn a similar income with two earners. In short, the American middle class has been getting squeezed for decades, and the Tea Party “rebellion” (on some level) is a manifestation of real public anger at this phenomenon. That anger is understandable, even predictable.
The problem with the “movement” is that its members’ anger gets manipulated by a small group of partisan and media elites who are essentially Republican Party operatives. This is the dirty little secret of the Tea Party; it’s not really a social movement, but a cluster of elitist interest groups operating locally and nationally, which is quite lacking in participatory elements, and largely driven by a top-down approach, determined and dictated by Republican partisan officials and business elites of the Koch variety.
My books on the Tea Party are devoted to exploring the failure of Tea Party chapters to systematically organize at the local and national level. In short, I find that there is very little organization under the Tea Party banner going on throughout communities across the country. Very few people actually turn out for rallies and planning meetings, compared to the large number of people who claim to be participating in these events according to national polling data. A close examination of the various national Tea Party groups finds that they are all lacking in participatory aspects, with active membership extremely sparse, and the leaders of these groups coming from the highest levels of local and national Republican Party chapters and the business system. A close look in my most recent book –The Rise of the Tea Party- finds that the alleged Tea Party “insurgents” who have led the Tea Party “revolution” in Congress are extremely elitist in their policy positions and in terms of their economic backgrounds. They don’t look any different than past political leaders in terms of their support from wealthy business interests, or in terms of their personal affluence, with regard to their past support for the very deregulatory legislation (of the banking industry) that helped destroy the American economy, or in terms of their voting records, which are identical to non-Tea Party Republican members of Congress.
Borchert: How would you describe the ideological outlook of the Tea Party?
DiMaggio: It’s the same group of Americans – the 20-25 percent of the public – who are essentially Bush dead-enders. Ideologically speaking, I describe the Tea Partiers as packaging old wine into new bottles. On one level, there is an extremely strong overlap between the Tea Party and the traditional religious right that emerged in the 1980s; on a second level, the Tea Party is representative of the same extreme economic right that has long supported deregulation and an assault on the social welfare state. There is nothing controversial about these claims, as public opinion polling (and analysis of these polls) demonstrates these points very clearly. I document these basic patterns in more detail in my first Tea Party book: Crashing the Tea Party – co-authored with progressive Historian Paul Street.
A major problem with the Tea Party, in terms of “building a bridge” between its members and Occupy Wall Street, is that very few Tea Partiers (only 15%) even blame Wall Street for the current problems we are facing today. While their rage at the stagnation of American prosperity is very legitimate, their attribution of responsibility for this stagnation is so childishly naïve, staggeringly ignorant, and disturbingly proto-fascistic that it makes working with them difficult, if not impossible. How do you work with people that think Obama is a Nazi, socialist, Kenyan Muslim terrorist? Pick your pejorative adjective as applied to Obama, and Tea Partiers likely agree with it. The above descriptions are so often lumped together in Tea Party rhetoric to the point where political ideologies such as Islamic fundamentalism, socialism, and Nazism, etc. are absurdly lumped together, as if these philosophies have anything in common. One wouldn’t know that there are fundamental differences between these ideologies by talking to Tea Partiers, however, as I learned the hard way in my observations of the group throughout Midwestern chapters and nationally. I’m no Obama supporter, but what we need now are legitimate criticisms of the bi-partisan, pro-business system, not fantastic propaganda that actively misinforms and confuses the public. Tea Party supporters increasingly cling to romantic and ignorant notions that if we could somehow return to the “good old days” of “free market,” deregulatory capitalism, we would put ourselves back on the path to prosperity. They seem totally unwilling or unable to recognize that it was this very deregulation, and the corresponding assault on the welfare state, that put us on the path to economic ruin. They want the Republican Party to move further to the right, failing to recognize that this right-ward drift is the primary cause of America’s problems, not the solution to them.
Borchert: There have been a handful of books written on this subject, but how is your analytical approach unique?
DiMaggio: Just about all the other research on the Tea Party was rushed and lacking in any empirical rigor. The widely read Tea Party books released prior to my and Paul Street’s books were released either at the time of the April 15, 2010 national rallies (some even before the rallies), to no later than the fall of 2010. There is no way that any of these authors could have engaged in a serious intellectual or academic analysis of the Tea Party, wrote out their analysis, and had it published at the exact time of the April 15th rallies (or before), or even so shortly after. Academically speaking, serious analyses of issues (current events related) necessitate a longer research timeframe. The writing and production schedules are significantly longer for serious works to get out, as my books were not released until summer 2011 (Crashing the Tea Party) and November 2011 (The Rise of the Tea Party). Such relatively short production schedules are really the least amount of time it takes for any respectable academic or intellectual analysis to be undertaken, written, and printed. Even I felt quite a bit rushed with my relatively longer time frame compared to the production periods for earlier Tea Party books.
A brief look at the earlier books on the subject suggests that none were very rigorous or serious in terms of their analyses. A New American Tea Party, written by Tea Partier John O’Hara was nothing more than a partisan prop for the Tea Party, repeating tired Republican talking points and propaganda. The same was true of other Tea Party promotional books, including Rand Paul’s The Tea Party Goes to Washington and Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe’s Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, among others.
There were a few other books that attempted to take a journalistic or academic analysis, including Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes, Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen’s Mad as Hell, and Kate Zernike’s Boiling Mad. The problem with these books is that they appear at first glance to be serious analyses of the Tea Party, although that impression falls apart upon closer inspection. Lepore’s book is quite thin when you look at it in terms of page length and in her analysis, and although it’s decent in terms of dissecting the Tea Party’s fundamentalist ideology, Lepore actually engages in no original analysis of the Tea Party in terms of making use of primary data (even little secondary data is used, since the book is largely conversational in tone). Zernike’s book repeats many of the worst stereotypes and misconceptions of the Tea Party, particularly the erroneous claim that it is a “social movement.” As a reporter for the New York Times, she takes for granted that the group is a non-partisan rebellion against the Washington establishment, conveniently ignoring the critical evidence I explore in my recent books which suggest the exact opposite. Finally, Rasmussen and Schoen (both are partisan pollsters who work for the political-media establishment) wrote a book, Mad as Hell, which is the worst kind of “analysis,” in that it relies on polling questions that would be condemned as propagandistic by any semi-competent public opinion scholar. Rasmussen Reports (a polling firm run by Scott Rasmussen) is to polling what Fox News is to “news.” It’s nothing to be take even remotely seriously in terms of its content, as Rasmussen ritually overestimates the conservatism of the public by using loaded (biased) question wording that clearly favors Republican-conservative positions over more neutral question framing. In short, there has been little-to-no original, quality research on the Tea Party up until this point.
Borchert: How do you apply the “propaganda model” first developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent?
DiMaggio: On the most basic level, I document how the mass media have been instrumental in manufacturing dissent against potentially progressive health care reforms, via their sympathetic reporting of the “Tea Party revolution” and their heavily reported criticisms of reform efforts. I document these relationships empirically, exposing specific pro-conservative, pro-Tea Party themes that dominated the news in mid to late 2009 and early 2010. I then show how these patterns correlated with growing opposition to progressive health care reforms (and even the mildly progressive reforms promoted by Obama) among those paying closest attention to the media-political debate on health care. I use standard political science statistical analysis and modeling to accomplish this goal, although readers will need to look to The Rise of the Tea Party for more details. In other words, I apply Chomsky and Herman’s idea of manufacturing consent in favor of official narratives, and show how it also relates to fostering opposition to any positive progressive agenda that may be fulfilled by the state. I also examine how thought control works in a democratic society. In a country where you can’t use the stick of military coercion and terror to implement policy, more subtle methods of manipulation of the American mind are needed. I examine how hegemonic factors such as partisanship, ideological orientation, political attentiveness, and media consumption (much more so than socio-demographic variables such as race, sex, income, and other factors) play an instrumental role in influencing the public’s formation of policy attitudes.
Borchert: You spent some time attending Tea Party meetings in the Chicago area –what were your first-hand impressions of the people there and their motivations?
DiMaggio: The Tea Party organizers were largely autocratic, only interested in directing the agenda from the top down, with the help of local “Tea Party” candidates, who were really just Republicans running for office. This is radically different from the participatory principle stressed by OWS chapters. Local (Tea Party) leaders were quite open with me that their primary goal was returning a largely discredited and extremely unpopular Republican Party to power, contrary to the public rhetoric of the Tea Party that the “movement” had “nothing to do” with partisan politics. Most interesting was the revelation that I quickly stumbled upon that this “movement” is for all intents and purposes a mile wide and an inch deep. There were virtually no local chapters throughout the Chicago area, a disturbing revelation considering that Illinois had the largest number of Tea Partiers elected in the 2010 midterms of any state, and considering that the vast majority of them were elected in the Chicago area. The few local chapters that existed throughout Chicago and its suburbs rarely saw much attendance or participation from members who did bother to show up. This pattern was repeated nationally, with just 8 percent of cities claiming a Tea Party rally on April 15th 2010 actually displaying evidence through their local website or the national Tea Party Patriots’ website of any sort of regular, monthly meetings.
Local Tea Party organizers did from time to time get a sizable (albeit relatively small) number of people to show up at rallies. These organizers were very honest about how they managed to accomplish this considering that they had meager to non-existent participation at the local level across the city and its suburbs. They made use of what they called the “email blast” strategy: send out of massive number of emails to people who have visited local Tea Party sites; get people to show up for their yearly (or sometimes twice yearly) protest and photo-op in celebration of the Tea Party “revolution.” This strategy was actually quite effective in getting a larger number of people (relative to anemic meeting turnout) to occasionally attend rallies, but there was literally nothing behind it in terms of building a movement, and it showed at rallies. No institutions or Tea Party organizations were present in terms of tabling or leafleting at the April 15th, 2010 Chicago rally, nor could they be, considering there is virtually no organizing to begin with. At other rallies, I occasionally found some evidence of local organizing, but it was almost entirely booths and tabling for local Republicans running for office and engaging in promotional public relations efforts. This is hardly the stuff of social movements, as anyone familiar with movements knows all too well. In short, the Tea Party revealed itself through my observations to be largely a partisan, top-down, elitist affair.
Borchert: Do you think Tea Party supporters are motivated by genuine grievances?
DiMaggio: I would add, in addition to what I already said, that these are the same individuals (Tea Party supporters) who have spent decades deriding progressives and anyone on the left who bemoaned the growing inequality throughout the country, largely a product of the class war that has been declared by big business against American workers. Now we are told on the left that these are precisely the kind of people we need to work with in order to build a movement. I simply don’t buy this. If these individuals want to consider in an open minded way the possibility that corporate America may be engaging in behavior that is very destructive to the fabric of American society, than I will be happy to make an effort to work with them in the future. Tea Partiers (particularly the active core group) are totally unwilling, from what I have seen, to consider such points of view. In fact, acknowledging class war runs so strongly contrary to their world view that it would require them to acknowledge that everything they’ve come to believe with regard to the inherent virtues of “free market,” “libertarian capitalism” is propagandistic fiction. There may be some hope for the members of the general public, however, who claim to be sympathetic to the Tea Party, but are not part of the dedicated cadre of inner circle, true believers, who are largely repeating Republican Party talking points and pushing an extreme right-wing, pro-corporate agenda. There may be a group of people in the general public who share some sympathy for the Tea Party, while also remaining open to progressive issues. These individuals, if willing to support a progressive-left agenda, should be courted when building a democratic social movement for the future. Whether this group really constitutes a significant portion of Tea Party America remains to be seen. I can say that I haven’t seen this (supposed) part of the Tea Party stand up and vocally support the OWS movement or the Madison protestors. This does not bode well for the “work with the Tea Party” advocates on the left.
Borchert: Is OWS the answer to the Tea Party? Can they even be compared?
DiMaggio: I think OWS is the polar opposite of the Tea Party. I’ve participated in the OWS movement in Illinois, in the capitol where I live (Springfield), and spoken with a number of others involved in the movement in New York and other Midwestern states. From what I’ve seen so far there are few similarities. While the Tea Party stresses the virtues of “free market” capitalism and favors of business deregulation, elimination of the social welfare state, and ever decreasing tax cuts for the rich, the OWS movement is the opposite in its politics. While still quite vague in many of its demands, the movement has at least refocused attention toward the real culprits in this economic crisis: Wall Street and the government officials who enable them. OWS looks for greater transparency in the political process, and expects political officials to make a serious effort to promote the common interests of American public over expansive corporate power. This is the first vital step needed for the left if we are to move in a new direction in which Americans redirect their rage in more productive ways. I think OWS, or a possible successor to OWS, will need to develop a far more specific agenda with regard to how we will move forward in promoting a more democratic future. General rage as directed against the political and economic establishments is a good start, but it also won’t get you very far in the mid to long term. It will inevitably result (if the movement continues to gain steam) in a systematic effort from the Democratic Party to co-opt the movement, while granting minimum concessions. This has already happened to a significant degree, and will continue into the future if nothing is done to challenge this development. OWS will need to establish a set of demands that are separate from the corporatism being offered by the Democrats if it wants to represent an alternative path to the mainstream “liberalism.”
There are some very small similarities between OWS and the Tea Party. Whereas Tea Partiers share a very general (albeit misdirected) rage against the political establishment, OWS also expresses general distrust of the political-economic system. This, in my mind, is where the similarities end. On another level, the decentralized, leaderless orientation of the OWS is dramatically different from the largely centralized, heavily leader oriented Tea Party phenomenon, which relies on pundits and political officials such as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the Tea Party Caucuses in the House and Senate in order to set the Tea Party agenda nationally. This is a dramatic difference between OWS and the Tea Party.
Borchert: What is the state of the Tea Party today, and what can we expect from them in the coming years?
DiMaggio: The Tea Party hit a plateau as of mid to late 2011. As of October 2011, about one quarter of Americans consider themselves to be Tea Party supporters. This number has barely changed over the last year. Opposition, however, has increased by somewhere between 10 to 25 percentage points among the general public within the same period. This is because there were many undecideds in early 2010 who didn’t know what the Tea Party was, but since then, and since the ugly summer 2011 debt ceiling debate, have come to see the Tea Party “revolution” as yet another ugly manifestation of partisan establishment politics in Washington. Much of the public (most actually) are not too fond of the group’s demands to gut popular social welfare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or of their demands to balance budgets on the backs of the working and middle class (and the poor), while refusing to cut America’s bloated, imperialist military apparatus. Most also are disgusted at the Tea Party-Republican effort to give the rich a free pass (via the extension of the Bush tax cuts). In other words, the Tea Party has had its day in the sun, now it will likely continue at least through the 2012 elections (perhaps further), greatly mobilizing and energizing the conservative base. It is unlikely to do much else, however, since its support base is no longer growing, and public opposition has increased significantly.
Still, the Tea Party has been an incredibly important phenomenon for a few reasons: 1. It was instrumental in derailing what could have been historic health care reforms in the form of a public option (or even universal health care); 2. It has demonstrated that the only way the Republican Party can get back into power is through the manufacturing of false populism from the top down. The Republican Party is so unpopular today that it can only gain power by default, fostering anger against the Democratic Party, and sitting back and falling into electoral victories due to growing public disenfranchisement with the Democrats. I expect the Tea Party will serve as a lesson for the future. Expect plenty of other false populist narratives and “movements” to emerge on the right in coming years, in line with the predictions of progressive William Greider, who warned of the ever growing “rancid populism” of the right which now seems to be standard fare in American political discourse.
8An Interview With Anthony DiMaggio
The Rise of the Tea Party
by SCOTT BORCHERT
Scott Borchert: Your primary focus as a scholar is on media and communications — so why a book on the Tea Party?
Anthony DiMaggio: I’ve also researched and participated in social movements and interest group politics consistently for the last ten years, although much of my research does focus on media and public opinion. My participation and study of these movements spans the anti-corporate globalization movement, the anti-Iraq movement, the anti-nuke movement, and the pro-labor Madison and OWS movements. This book project actually brought all three areas of my research – media, public opinion, and movements – together, examining the Tea Party as a conglomeration of interest groups, and measuring how they have influenced media coverage and public opinion. As someone who has taken part in and studied social movements for my entire adult life, I felt I was in a unique position, scholarly and in terms of practical experience, to make a unique contribution in these areas. I also focus quite closely in my popular writings on current events, so the Tea Party seemed like an appropriate area to focus on in light of the massive political and media attention it has received.
Borchert: Do you consider the Tea Party to be a real grassroots movement or purely orchestrated by elite institutions? Or a little of both?
DiMaggio: I think the rage driving the Tea Party – at least with regard to the 25 percent of Americans who claim to sympathize with it – is quite real and very understandable. The Tea Party is largely comprised of white, over 40-50, middle to upper income Americans who have generally done pretty well for themselves over the years, but are being pressured by the neoliberal attack on working Americans. They’re rightly angry at being excluded from the tremendous economic prosperity that has taken place over the last three decades. As corporations have grown enormously more profitable, and worker productivity and the size of the economy have grown dramatically, the median family wage has stagnated. This stagnation actually translates into a reduction in wages, since the number of dual income families has increased significantly. Whereas in decades past the median income was driven more by single income-earning males, now families earn a similar income with two earners. In short, the American middle class has been getting squeezed for decades, and the Tea Party “rebellion” (on some level) is a manifestation of real public anger at this phenomenon. That anger is understandable, even predictable.
The problem with the “movement” is that its members’ anger gets manipulated by a small group of partisan and media elites who are essentially Republican Party operatives. This is the dirty little secret of the Tea Party; it’s not really a social movement, but a cluster of elitist interest groups operating locally and nationally, which is quite lacking in participatory elements, and largely driven by a top-down approach, determined and dictated by Republican partisan officials and business elites of the Koch variety.
My books on the Tea Party are devoted to exploring the failure of Tea Party chapters to systematically organize at the local and national level. In short, I find that there is very little organization under the Tea Party banner going on throughout communities across the country. Very few people actually turn out for rallies and planning meetings, compared to the large number of people who claim to be participating in these events according to national polling data. A close examination of the various national Tea Party groups finds that they are all lacking in participatory aspects, with active membership extremely sparse, and the leaders of these groups coming from the highest levels of local and national Republican Party chapters and the business system. A close look in my most recent book –The Rise of the Tea Party- finds that the alleged Tea Party “insurgents” who have led the Tea Party “revolution” in Congress are extremely elitist in their policy positions and in terms of their economic backgrounds. They don’t look any different than past political leaders in terms of their support from wealthy business interests, or in terms of their personal affluence, with regard to their past support for the very deregulatory legislation (of the banking industry) that helped destroy the American economy, or in terms of their voting records, which are identical to non-Tea Party Republican members of Congress.
Borchert: How would you describe the ideological outlook of the Tea Party?
DiMaggio: It’s the same group of Americans – the 20-25 percent of the public – who are essentially Bush dead-enders. Ideologically speaking, I describe the Tea Partiers as packaging old wine into new bottles. On one level, there is an extremely strong overlap between the Tea Party and the traditional religious right that emerged in the 1980s; on a second level, the Tea Party is representative of the same extreme economic right that has long supported deregulation and an assault on the social welfare state. There is nothing controversial about these claims, as public opinion polling (and analysis of these polls) demonstrates these points very clearly. I document these basic patterns in more detail in my first Tea Party book: Crashing the Tea Party – co-authored with progressive Historian Paul Street.
A major problem with the Tea Party, in terms of “building a bridge” between its members and Occupy Wall Street, is that very few Tea Partiers (only 15%) even blame Wall Street for the current problems we are facing today. While their rage at the stagnation of American prosperity is very legitimate, their attribution of responsibility for this stagnation is so childishly naïve, staggeringly ignorant, and disturbingly proto-fascistic that it makes working with them difficult, if not impossible. How do you work with people that think Obama is a Nazi, socialist, Kenyan Muslim terrorist? Pick your pejorative adjective as applied to Obama, and Tea Partiers likely agree with it. The above descriptions are so often lumped together in Tea Party rhetoric to the point where political ideologies such as Islamic fundamentalism, socialism, and Nazism, etc. are absurdly lumped together, as if these philosophies have anything in common. One wouldn’t know that there are fundamental differences between these ideologies by talking to Tea Partiers, however, as I learned the hard way in my observations of the group throughout Midwestern chapters and nationally. I’m no Obama supporter, but what we need now are legitimate criticisms of the bi-partisan, pro-business system, not fantastic propaganda that actively misinforms and confuses the public. Tea Party supporters increasingly cling to romantic and ignorant notions that if we could somehow return to the “good old days” of “free market,” deregulatory capitalism, we would put ourselves back on the path to prosperity. They seem totally unwilling or unable to recognize that it was this very deregulation, and the corresponding assault on the welfare state, that put us on the path to economic ruin. They want the Republican Party to move further to the right, failing to recognize that this right-ward drift is the primary cause of America’s problems, not the solution to them.
Borchert: There have been a handful of books written on this subject, but how is your analytical approach unique?
DiMaggio: Just about all the other research on the Tea Party was rushed and lacking in any empirical rigor. The widely read Tea Party books released prior to my and Paul Street’s books were released either at the time of the April 15, 2010 national rallies (some even before the rallies), to no later than the fall of 2010. There is no way that any of these authors could have engaged in a serious intellectual or academic analysis of the Tea Party, wrote out their analysis, and had it published at the exact time of the April 15th rallies (or before), or even so shortly after. Academically speaking, serious analyses of issues (current events related) necessitate a longer research timeframe. The writing and production schedules are significantly longer for serious works to get out, as my books were not released until summer 2011 (Crashing the Tea Party) and November 2011 (The Rise of the Tea Party). Such relatively short production schedules are really the least amount of time it takes for any respectable academic or intellectual analysis to be undertaken, written, and printed. Even I felt quite a bit rushed with my relatively longer time frame compared to the production periods for earlier Tea Party books.
A brief look at the earlier books on the subject suggests that none were very rigorous or serious in terms of their analyses. A New American Tea Party, written by Tea Partier John O’Hara was nothing more than a partisan prop for the Tea Party, repeating tired Republican talking points and propaganda. The same was true of other Tea Party promotional books, including Rand Paul’s The Tea Party Goes to Washington and Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe’s Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, among others.
There were a few other books that attempted to take a journalistic or academic analysis, including Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes, Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen’s Mad as Hell, and Kate Zernike’s Boiling Mad. The problem with these books is that they appear at first glance to be serious analyses of the Tea Party, although that impression falls apart upon closer inspection. Lepore’s book is quite thin when you look at it in terms of page length and in her analysis, and although it’s decent in terms of dissecting the Tea Party’s fundamentalist ideology, Lepore actually engages in no original analysis of the Tea Party in terms of making use of primary data (even little secondary data is used, since the book is largely conversational in tone). Zernike’s book repeats many of the worst stereotypes and misconceptions of the Tea Party, particularly the erroneous claim that it is a “social movement.” As a reporter for the New York Times, she takes for granted that the group is a non-partisan rebellion against the Washington establishment, conveniently ignoring the critical evidence I explore in my recent books which suggest the exact opposite. Finally, Rasmussen and Schoen (both are partisan pollsters who work for the political-media establishment) wrote a book, Mad as Hell, which is the worst kind of “analysis,” in that it relies on polling questions that would be condemned as propagandistic by any semi-competent public opinion scholar. Rasmussen Reports (a polling firm run by Scott Rasmussen) is to polling what Fox News is to “news.” It’s nothing to be take even remotely seriously in terms of its content, as Rasmussen ritually overestimates the conservatism of the public by using loaded (biased) question wording that clearly favors Republican-conservative positions over more neutral question framing. In short, there has been little-to-no original, quality research on the Tea Party up until this point.
Borchert: How do you apply the “propaganda model” first developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent?
DiMaggio: On the most basic level, I document how the mass media have been instrumental in manufacturing dissent against potentially progressive health care reforms, via their sympathetic reporting of the “Tea Party revolution” and their heavily reported criticisms of reform efforts. I document these relationships empirically, exposing specific pro-conservative, pro-Tea Party themes that dominated the news in mid to late 2009 and early 2010. I then show how these patterns correlated with growing opposition to progressive health care reforms (and even the mildly progressive reforms promoted by Obama) among those paying closest attention to the media-political debate on health care. I use standard political science statistical analysis and modeling to accomplish this goal, although readers will need to look to The Rise of the Tea Party for more details. In other words, I apply Chomsky and Herman’s idea of manufacturing consent in favor of official narratives, and show how it also relates to fostering opposition to any positive progressive agenda that may be fulfilled by the state. I also examine how thought control works in a democratic society. In a country where you can’t use the stick of military coercion and terror to implement policy, more subtle methods of manipulation of the American mind are needed. I examine how hegemonic factors such as partisanship, ideological orientation, political attentiveness, and media consumption (much more so than socio-demographic variables such as race, sex, income, and other factors) play an instrumental role in influencing the public’s formation of policy attitudes.
Borchert: You spent some time attending Tea Party meetings in the Chicago area –what were your first-hand impressions of the people there and their motivations?
DiMaggio: The Tea Party organizers were largely autocratic, only interested in directing the agenda from the top down, with the help of local “Tea Party” candidates, who were really just Republicans running for office. This is radically different from the participatory principle stressed by OWS chapters. Local (Tea Party) leaders were quite open with me that their primary goal was returning a largely discredited and extremely unpopular Republican Party to power, contrary to the public rhetoric of the Tea Party that the “movement” had “nothing to do” with partisan politics. Most interesting was the revelation that I quickly stumbled upon that this “movement” is for all intents and purposes a mile wide and an inch deep. There were virtually no local chapters throughout the Chicago area, a disturbing revelation considering that Illinois had the largest number of Tea Partiers elected in the 2010 midterms of any state, and considering that the vast majority of them were elected in the Chicago area. The few local chapters that existed throughout Chicago and its suburbs rarely saw much attendance or participation from members who did bother to show up. This pattern was repeated nationally, with just 8 percent of cities claiming a Tea Party rally on April 15th 2010 actually displaying evidence through their local website or the national Tea Party Patriots’ website of any sort of regular, monthly meetings.
Local Tea Party organizers did from time to time get a sizable (albeit relatively small) number of people to show up at rallies. These organizers were very honest about how they managed to accomplish this considering that they had meager to non-existent participation at the local level across the city and its suburbs. They made use of what they called the “email blast” strategy: send out of massive number of emails to people who have visited local Tea Party sites; get people to show up for their yearly (or sometimes twice yearly) protest and photo-op in celebration of the Tea Party “revolution.” This strategy was actually quite effective in getting a larger number of people (relative to anemic meeting turnout) to occasionally attend rallies, but there was literally nothing behind it in terms of building a movement, and it showed at rallies. No institutions or Tea Party organizations were present in terms of tabling or leafleting at the April 15th, 2010 Chicago rally, nor could they be, considering there is virtually no organizing to begin with. At other rallies, I occasionally found some evidence of local organizing, but it was almost entirely booths and tabling for local Republicans running for office and engaging in promotional public relations efforts. This is hardly the stuff of social movements, as anyone familiar with movements knows all too well. In short, the Tea Party revealed itself through my observations to be largely a partisan, top-down, elitist affair.
Borchert: Do you think Tea Party supporters are motivated by genuine grievances?
DiMaggio: I would add, in addition to what I already said, that these are the same individuals (Tea Party supporters) who have spent decades deriding progressives and anyone on the left who bemoaned the growing inequality throughout the country, largely a product of the class war that has been declared by big business against American workers. Now we are told on the left that these are precisely the kind of people we need to work with in order to build a movement. I simply don’t buy this. If these individuals want to consider in an open minded way the possibility that corporate America may be engaging in behavior that is very destructive to the fabric of American society, than I will be happy to make an effort to work with them in the future. Tea Partiers (particularly the active core group) are totally unwilling, from what I have seen, to consider such points of view. In fact, acknowledging class war runs so strongly contrary to their world view that it would require them to acknowledge that everything they’ve come to believe with regard to the inherent virtues of “free market,” “libertarian capitalism” is propagandistic fiction. There may be some hope for the members of the general public, however, who claim to be sympathetic to the Tea Party, but are not part of the dedicated cadre of inner circle, true believers, who are largely repeating Republican Party talking points and pushing an extreme right-wing, pro-corporate agenda. There may be a group of people in the general public who share some sympathy for the Tea Party, while also remaining open to progressive issues. These individuals, if willing to support a progressive-left agenda, should be courted when building a democratic social movement for the future. Whether this group really constitutes a significant portion of Tea Party America remains to be seen. I can say that I haven’t seen this (supposed) part of the Tea Party stand up and vocally support the OWS movement or the Madison protestors. This does not bode well for the “work with the Tea Party” advocates on the left.
Borchert: Is OWS the answer to the Tea Party? Can they even be compared?
DiMaggio: I think OWS is the polar opposite of the Tea Party. I’ve participated in the OWS movement in Illinois, in the capitol where I live (Springfield), and spoken with a number of others involved in the movement in New York and other Midwestern states. From what I’ve seen so far there are few similarities. While the Tea Party stresses the virtues of “free market” capitalism and favors of business deregulation, elimination of the social welfare state, and ever decreasing tax cuts for the rich, the OWS movement is the opposite in its politics. While still quite vague in many of its demands, the movement has at least refocused attention toward the real culprits in this economic crisis: Wall Street and the government officials who enable them. OWS looks for greater transparency in the political process, and expects political officials to make a serious effort to promote the common interests of American public over expansive corporate power. This is the first vital step needed for the left if we are to move in a new direction in which Americans redirect their rage in more productive ways. I think OWS, or a possible successor to OWS, will need to develop a far more specific agenda with regard to how we will move forward in promoting a more democratic future. General rage as directed against the political and economic establishments is a good start, but it also won’t get you very far in the mid to long term. It will inevitably result (if the movement continues to gain steam) in a systematic effort from the Democratic Party to co-opt the movement, while granting minimum concessions. This has already happened to a significant degree, and will continue into the future if nothing is done to challenge this development. OWS will need to establish a set of demands that are separate from the corporatism being offered by the Democrats if it wants to represent an alternative path to the mainstream “liberalism.”
There are some very small similarities between OWS and the Tea Party. Whereas Tea Partiers share a very general (albeit misdirected) rage against the political establishment, OWS also expresses general distrust of the political-economic system. This, in my mind, is where the similarities end. On another level, the decentralized, leaderless orientation of the OWS is dramatically different from the largely centralized, heavily leader oriented Tea Party phenomenon, which relies on pundits and political officials such as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the Tea Party Caucuses in the House and Senate in order to set the Tea Party agenda nationally. This is a dramatic difference between OWS and the Tea Party.
Borchert: What is the state of the Tea Party today, and what can we expect from them in the coming years?
DiMaggio: The Tea Party hit a plateau as of mid to late 2011. As of October 2011, about one quarter of Americans consider themselves to be Tea Party supporters. This number has barely changed over the last year. Opposition, however, has increased by somewhere between 10 to 25 percentage points among the general public within the same period. This is because there were many undecideds in early 2010 who didn’t know what the Tea Party was, but since then, and since the ugly summer 2011 debt ceiling debate, have come to see the Tea Party “revolution” as yet another ugly manifestation of partisan establishment politics in Washington. Much of the public (most actually) are not too fond of the group’s demands to gut popular social welfare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or of their demands to balance budgets on the backs of the working and middle class (and the poor), while refusing to cut America’s bloated, imperialist military apparatus. Most also are disgusted at the Tea Party-Republican effort to give the rich a free pass (via the extension of the Bush tax cuts). In other words, the Tea Party has had its day in the sun, now it will likely continue at least through the 2012 elections (perhaps further), greatly mobilizing and energizing the conservative base. It is unlikely to do much else, however, since its support base is no longer growing, and public opposition has increased significantly.
Still, the Tea Party has been an incredibly important phenomenon for a few reasons: 1. It was instrumental in derailing what could have been historic health care reforms in the form of a public option (or even universal health care); 2. It has demonstrated that the only way the Republican Party can get back into power is through the manufacturing of false populism from the top down. The Republican Party is so unpopular today that it can only gain power by default, fostering anger against the Democratic Party, and sitting back and falling into electoral victories due to growing public disenfranchisement with the Democrats. I expect the Tea Party will serve as a lesson for the future. Expect plenty of other false populist narratives and “movements” to emerge on the right in coming years, in line with the predictions of progressive William Greider, who warned of the ever growing “rancid populism” of the right which now seems to be standard fare in American political discourse.
Anthony DiMaggio is the author of numerous books, The Rise of the Tea Party, due out in November 2011 from Monthly Review Press, and other works such as Crashing the Tea Party (2011); When Media Goes to War (2010); and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He has taught American politics and International Relations in Political Science at a number of colleges and universities, and can be reached at: adimag2@uic.edu.
Weekend Edition October 28-30, 2011
8An Interview With Anthony DiMaggio
The Rise of the Tea Party
by SCOTT BORCHERT
Scott Borchert: Your primary focus as a scholar is on media and communications — so why a book on the Tea Party?
Anthony DiMaggio: I’ve also researched and participated in social movements and interest group politics consistently for the last ten years, although much of my research does focus on media and public opinion. My participation and study of these movements spans the anti-corporate globalization movement, the anti-Iraq movement, the anti-nuke movement, and the pro-labor Madison and OWS movements. This book project actually brought all three areas of my research – media, public opinion, and movements – together, examining the Tea Party as a conglomeration of interest groups, and measuring how they have influenced media coverage and public opinion. As someone who has taken part in and studied social movements for my entire adult life, I felt I was in a unique position, scholarly and in terms of practical experience, to make a unique contribution in these areas. I also focus quite closely in my popular writings on current events, so the Tea Party seemed like an appropriate area to focus on in light of the massive political and media attention it has received.
Borchert: Do you consider the Tea Party to be a real grassroots movement or purely orchestrated by elite institutions? Or a little of both?
DiMaggio: I think the rage driving the Tea Party – at least with regard to the 25 percent of Americans who claim to sympathize with it – is quite real and very understandable. The Tea Party is largely comprised of white, over 40-50, middle to upper income Americans who have generally done pretty well for themselves over the years, but are being pressured by the neoliberal attack on working Americans. They’re rightly angry at being excluded from the tremendous economic prosperity that has taken place over the last three decades. As corporations have grown enormously more profitable, and worker productivity and the size of the economy have grown dramatically, the median family wage has stagnated. This stagnation actually translates into a reduction in wages, since the number of dual income families has increased significantly. Whereas in decades past the median income was driven more by single income-earning males, now families earn a similar income with two earners. In short, the American middle class has been getting squeezed for decades, and the Tea Party “rebellion” (on some level) is a manifestation of real public anger at this phenomenon. That anger is understandable, even predictable.
The problem with the “movement” is that its members’ anger gets manipulated by a small group of partisan and media elites who are essentially Republican Party operatives. This is the dirty little secret of the Tea Party; it’s not really a social movement, but a cluster of elitist interest groups operating locally and nationally, which is quite lacking in participatory elements, and largely driven by a top-down approach, determined and dictated by Republican partisan officials and business elites of the Koch variety.
My books on the Tea Party are devoted to exploring the failure of Tea Party chapters to systematically organize at the local and national level. In short, I find that there is very little organization under the Tea Party banner going on throughout communities across the country. Very few people actually turn out for rallies and planning meetings, compared to the large number of people who claim to be participating in these events according to national polling data. A close examination of the various national Tea Party groups finds that they are all lacking in participatory aspects, with active membership extremely sparse, and the leaders of these groups coming from the highest levels of local and national Republican Party chapters and the business system. A close look in my most recent book –The Rise of the Tea Party- finds that the alleged Tea Party “insurgents” who have led the Tea Party “revolution” in Congress are extremely elitist in their policy positions and in terms of their economic backgrounds. They don’t look any different than past political leaders in terms of their support from wealthy business interests, or in terms of their personal affluence, with regard to their past support for the very deregulatory legislation (of the banking industry) that helped destroy the American economy, or in terms of their voting records, which are identical to non-Tea Party Republican members of Congress.
Borchert: How would you describe the ideological outlook of the Tea Party?
DiMaggio: It’s the same group of Americans – the 20-25 percent of the public – who are essentially Bush dead-enders. Ideologically speaking, I describe the Tea Partiers as packaging old wine into new bottles. On one level, there is an extremely strong overlap between the Tea Party and the traditional religious right that emerged in the 1980s; on a second level, the Tea Party is representative of the same extreme economic right that has long supported deregulation and an assault on the social welfare state. There is nothing controversial about these claims, as public opinion polling (and analysis of these polls) demonstrates these points very clearly. I document these basic patterns in more detail in my first Tea Party book: Crashing the Tea Party – co-authored with progressive Historian Paul Street.
A major problem with the Tea Party, in terms of “building a bridge” between its members and Occupy Wall Street, is that very few Tea Partiers (only 15%) even blame Wall Street for the current problems we are facing today. While their rage at the stagnation of American prosperity is very legitimate, their attribution of responsibility for this stagnation is so childishly naïve, staggeringly ignorant, and disturbingly proto-fascistic that it makes working with them difficult, if not impossible. How do you work with people that think Obama is a Nazi, socialist, Kenyan Muslim terrorist? Pick your pejorative adjective as applied to Obama, and Tea Partiers likely agree with it. The above descriptions are so often lumped together in Tea Party rhetoric to the point where political ideologies such as Islamic fundamentalism, socialism, and Nazism, etc. are absurdly lumped together, as if these philosophies have anything in common. One wouldn’t know that there are fundamental differences between these ideologies by talking to Tea Partiers, however, as I learned the hard way in my observations of the group throughout Midwestern chapters and nationally. I’m no Obama supporter, but what we need now are legitimate criticisms of the bi-partisan, pro-business system, not fantastic propaganda that actively misinforms and confuses the public. Tea Party supporters increasingly cling to romantic and ignorant notions that if we could somehow return to the “good old days” of “free market,” deregulatory capitalism, we would put ourselves back on the path to prosperity. They seem totally unwilling or unable to recognize that it was this very deregulation, and the corresponding assault on the welfare state, that put us on the path to economic ruin. They want the Republican Party to move further to the right, failing to recognize that this right-ward drift is the primary cause of America’s problems, not the solution to them.
Borchert: There have been a handful of books written on this subject, but how is your analytical approach unique?
DiMaggio: Just about all the other research on the Tea Party was rushed and lacking in any empirical rigor. The widely read Tea Party books released prior to my and Paul Street’s books were released either at the time of the April 15, 2010 national rallies (some even before the rallies), to no later than the fall of 2010. There is no way that any of these authors could have engaged in a serious intellectual or academic analysis of the Tea Party, wrote out their analysis, and had it published at the exact time of the April 15th rallies (or before), or even so shortly after. Academically speaking, serious analyses of issues (current events related) necessitate a longer research timeframe. The writing and production schedules are significantly longer for serious works to get out, as my books were not released until summer 2011 (Crashing the Tea Party) and November 2011 (The Rise of the Tea Party). Such relatively short production schedules are really the least amount of time it takes for any respectable academic or intellectual analysis to be undertaken, written, and printed. Even I felt quite a bit rushed with my relatively longer time frame compared to the production periods for earlier Tea Party books.
A brief look at the earlier books on the subject suggests that none were very rigorous or serious in terms of their analyses. A New American Tea Party, written by Tea Partier John O’Hara was nothing more than a partisan prop for the Tea Party, repeating tired Republican talking points and propaganda. The same was true of other Tea Party promotional books, including Rand Paul’s The Tea Party Goes to Washington and Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe’s Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, among others.
There were a few other books that attempted to take a journalistic or academic analysis, including Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes, Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen’s Mad as Hell, and Kate Zernike’s Boiling Mad. The problem with these books is that they appear at first glance to be serious analyses of the Tea Party, although that impression falls apart upon closer inspection. Lepore’s book is quite thin when you look at it in terms of page length and in her analysis, and although it’s decent in terms of dissecting the Tea Party’s fundamentalist ideology, Lepore actually engages in no original analysis of the Tea Party in terms of making use of primary data (even little secondary data is used, since the book is largely conversational in tone). Zernike’s book repeats many of the worst stereotypes and misconceptions of the Tea Party, particularly the erroneous claim that it is a “social movement.” As a reporter for the New York Times, she takes for granted that the group is a non-partisan rebellion against the Washington establishment, conveniently ignoring the critical evidence I explore in my recent books which suggest the exact opposite. Finally, Rasmussen and Schoen (both are partisan pollsters who work for the political-media establishment) wrote a book, Mad as Hell, which is the worst kind of “analysis,” in that it relies on polling questions that would be condemned as propagandistic by any semi-competent public opinion scholar. Rasmussen Reports (a polling firm run by Scott Rasmussen) is to polling what Fox News is to “news.” It’s nothing to be take even remotely seriously in terms of its content, as Rasmussen ritually overestimates the conservatism of the public by using loaded (biased) question wording that clearly favors Republican-conservative positions over more neutral question framing. In short, there has been little-to-no original, quality research on the Tea Party up until this point.
Borchert: How do you apply the “propaganda model” first developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent?
DiMaggio: On the most basic level, I document how the mass media have been instrumental in manufacturing dissent against potentially progressive health care reforms, via their sympathetic reporting of the “Tea Party revolution” and their heavily reported criticisms of reform efforts. I document these relationships empirically, exposing specific pro-conservative, pro-Tea Party themes that dominated the news in mid to late 2009 and early 2010. I then show how these patterns correlated with growing opposition to progressive health care reforms (and even the mildly progressive reforms promoted by Obama) among those paying closest attention to the media-political debate on health care. I use standard political science statistical analysis and modeling to accomplish this goal, although readers will need to look to The Rise of the Tea Party for more details. In other words, I apply Chomsky and Herman’s idea of manufacturing consent in favor of official narratives, and show how it also relates to fostering opposition to any positive progressive agenda that may be fulfilled by the state. I also examine how thought control works in a democratic society. In a country where you can’t use the stick of military coercion and terror to implement policy, more subtle methods of manipulation of the American mind are needed. I examine how hegemonic factors such as partisanship, ideological orientation, political attentiveness, and media consumption (much more so than socio-demographic variables such as race, sex, income, and other factors) play an instrumental role in influencing the public’s formation of policy attitudes.
Borchert: You spent some time attending Tea Party meetings in the Chicago area –what were your first-hand impressions of the people there and their motivations?
DiMaggio: The Tea Party organizers were largely autocratic, only interested in directing the agenda from the top down, with the help of local “Tea Party” candidates, who were really just Republicans running for office. This is radically different from the participatory principle stressed by OWS chapters. Local (Tea Party) leaders were quite open with me that their primary goal was returning a largely discredited and extremely unpopular Republican Party to power, contrary to the public rhetoric of the Tea Party that the “movement” had “nothing to do” with partisan politics. Most interesting was the revelation that I quickly stumbled upon that this “movement” is for all intents and purposes a mile wide and an inch deep. There were virtually no local chapters throughout the Chicago area, a disturbing revelation considering that Illinois had the largest number of Tea Partiers elected in the 2010 midterms of any state, and considering that the vast majority of them were elected in the Chicago area. The few local chapters that existed throughout Chicago and its suburbs rarely saw much attendance or participation from members who did bother to show up. This pattern was repeated nationally, with just 8 percent of cities claiming a Tea Party rally on April 15th 2010 actually displaying evidence through their local website or the national Tea Party Patriots’ website of any sort of regular, monthly meetings.
Local Tea Party organizers did from time to time get a sizable (albeit relatively small) number of people to show up at rallies. These organizers were very honest about how they managed to accomplish this considering that they had meager to non-existent participation at the local level across the city and its suburbs. They made use of what they called the “email blast” strategy: send out of massive number of emails to people who have visited local Tea Party sites; get people to show up for their yearly (or sometimes twice yearly) protest and photo-op in celebration of the Tea Party “revolution.” This strategy was actually quite effective in getting a larger number of people (relative to anemic meeting turnout) to occasionally attend rallies, but there was literally nothing behind it in terms of building a movement, and it showed at rallies. No institutions or Tea Party organizations were present in terms of tabling or leafleting at the April 15th, 2010 Chicago rally, nor could they be, considering there is virtually no organizing to begin with. At other rallies, I occasionally found some evidence of local organizing, but it was almost entirely booths and tabling for local Republicans running for office and engaging in promotional public relations efforts. This is hardly the stuff of social movements, as anyone familiar with movements knows all too well. In short, the Tea Party revealed itself through my observations to be largely a partisan, top-down, elitist affair.
Borchert: Do you think Tea Party supporters are motivated by genuine grievances?
DiMaggio: I would add, in addition to what I already said, that these are the same individuals (Tea Party supporters) who have spent decades deriding progressives and anyone on the left who bemoaned the growing inequality throughout the country, largely a product of the class war that has been declared by big business against American workers. Now we are told on the left that these are precisely the kind of people we need to work with in order to build a movement. I simply don’t buy this. If these individuals want to consider in an open minded way the possibility that corporate America may be engaging in behavior that is very destructive to the fabric of American society, than I will be happy to make an effort to work with them in the future. Tea Partiers (particularly the active core group) are totally unwilling, from what I have seen, to consider such points of view. In fact, acknowledging class war runs so strongly contrary to their world view that it would require them to acknowledge that everything they’ve come to believe with regard to the inherent virtues of “free market,” “libertarian capitalism” is propagandistic fiction. There may be some hope for the members of the general public, however, who claim to be sympathetic to the Tea Party, but are not part of the dedicated cadre of inner circle, true believers, who are largely repeating Republican Party talking points and pushing an extreme right-wing, pro-corporate agenda. There may be a group of people in the general public who share some sympathy for the Tea Party, while also remaining open to progressive issues. These individuals, if willing to support a progressive-left agenda, should be courted when building a democratic social movement for the future. Whether this group really constitutes a significant portion of Tea Party America remains to be seen. I can say that I haven’t seen this (supposed) part of the Tea Party stand up and vocally support the OWS movement or the Madison protestors. This does not bode well for the “work with the Tea Party” advocates on the left.
Borchert: Is OWS the answer to the Tea Party? Can they even be compared?
DiMaggio: I think OWS is the polar opposite of the Tea Party. I’ve participated in the OWS movement in Illinois, in the capitol where I live (Springfield), and spoken with a number of others involved in the movement in New York and other Midwestern states. From what I’ve seen so far there are few similarities. While the Tea Party stresses the virtues of “free market” capitalism and favors of business deregulation, elimination of the social welfare state, and ever decreasing tax cuts for the rich, the OWS movement is the opposite in its politics. While still quite vague in many of its demands, the movement has at least refocused attention toward the real culprits in this economic crisis: Wall Street and the government officials who enable them. OWS looks for greater transparency in the political process, and expects political officials to make a serious effort to promote the common interests of American public over expansive corporate power. This is the first vital step needed for the left if we are to move in a new direction in which Americans redirect their rage in more productive ways. I think OWS, or a possible successor to OWS, will need to develop a far more specific agenda with regard to how we will move forward in promoting a more democratic future. General rage as directed against the political and economic establishments is a good start, but it also won’t get you very far in the mid to long term. It will inevitably result (if the movement continues to gain steam) in a systematic effort from the Democratic Party to co-opt the movement, while granting minimum concessions. This has already happened to a significant degree, and will continue into the future if nothing is done to challenge this development. OWS will need to establish a set of demands that are separate from the corporatism being offered by the Democrats if it wants to represent an alternative path to the mainstream “liberalism.”
There are some very small similarities between OWS and the Tea Party. Whereas Tea Partiers share a very general (albeit misdirected) rage against the political establishment, OWS also expresses general distrust of the political-economic system. This, in my mind, is where the similarities end. On another level, the decentralized, leaderless orientation of the OWS is dramatically different from the largely centralized, heavily leader oriented Tea Party phenomenon, which relies on pundits and political officials such as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the Tea Party Caucuses in the House and Senate in order to set the Tea Party agenda nationally. This is a dramatic difference between OWS and the Tea Party.
Borchert: What is the state of the Tea Party today, and what can we expect from them in the coming years?
DiMaggio: The Tea Party hit a plateau as of mid to late 2011. As of October 2011, about one quarter of Americans consider themselves to be Tea Party supporters. This number has barely changed over the last year. Opposition, however, has increased by somewhere between 10 to 25 percentage points among the general public within the same period. This is because there were many undecideds in early 2010 who didn’t know what the Tea Party was, but since then, and since the ugly summer 2011 debt ceiling debate, have come to see the Tea Party “revolution” as yet another ugly manifestation of partisan establishment politics in Washington. Much of the public (most actually) are not too fond of the group’s demands to gut popular social welfare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or of their demands to balance budgets on the backs of the working and middle class (and the poor), while refusing to cut America’s bloated, imperialist military apparatus. Most also are disgusted at the Tea Party-Republican effort to give the rich a free pass (via the extension of the Bush tax cuts). In other words, the Tea Party has had its day in the sun, now it will likely continue at least through the 2012 elections (perhaps further), greatly mobilizing and energizing the conservative base. It is unlikely to do much else, however, since its support base is no longer growing, and public opposition has increased significantly.
Still, the Tea Party has been an incredibly important phenomenon for a few reasons: 1. It was instrumental in derailing what could have been historic health care reforms in the form of a public option (or even universal health care); 2. It has demonstrated that the only way the Republican Party can get back into power is through the manufacturing of false populism from the top down. The Republican Party is so unpopular today that it can only gain power by default, fostering anger against the Democratic Party, and sitting back and falling into electoral victories due to growing public disenfranchisement with the Democrats. I expect the Tea Party will serve as a lesson for the future. Expect plenty of other false populist narratives and “movements” to emerge on the right in coming years, in line with the predictions of progressive William Greider, who warned of the ever growing “rancid populism” of the right which now seems to be standard fare in American political discourse.
8An Interview With Anthony DiMaggio
The Rise of the Tea Party
by SCOTT BORCHERT
Scott Borchert: Your primary focus as a scholar is on media and communications — so why a book on the Tea Party?
Anthony DiMaggio: I’ve also researched and participated in social movements and interest group politics consistently for the last ten years, although much of my research does focus on media and public opinion. My participation and study of these movements spans the anti-corporate globalization movement, the anti-Iraq movement, the anti-nuke movement, and the pro-labor Madison and OWS movements. This book project actually brought all three areas of my research – media, public opinion, and movements – together, examining the Tea Party as a conglomeration of interest groups, and measuring how they have influenced media coverage and public opinion. As someone who has taken part in and studied social movements for my entire adult life, I felt I was in a unique position, scholarly and in terms of practical experience, to make a unique contribution in these areas. I also focus quite closely in my popular writings on current events, so the Tea Party seemed like an appropriate area to focus on in light of the massive political and media attention it has received.
Borchert: Do you consider the Tea Party to be a real grassroots movement or purely orchestrated by elite institutions? Or a little of both?
DiMaggio: I think the rage driving the Tea Party – at least with regard to the 25 percent of Americans who claim to sympathize with it – is quite real and very understandable. The Tea Party is largely comprised of white, over 40-50, middle to upper income Americans who have generally done pretty well for themselves over the years, but are being pressured by the neoliberal attack on working Americans. They’re rightly angry at being excluded from the tremendous economic prosperity that has taken place over the last three decades. As corporations have grown enormously more profitable, and worker productivity and the size of the economy have grown dramatically, the median family wage has stagnated. This stagnation actually translates into a reduction in wages, since the number of dual income families has increased significantly. Whereas in decades past the median income was driven more by single income-earning males, now families earn a similar income with two earners. In short, the American middle class has been getting squeezed for decades, and the Tea Party “rebellion” (on some level) is a manifestation of real public anger at this phenomenon. That anger is understandable, even predictable.
The problem with the “movement” is that its members’ anger gets manipulated by a small group of partisan and media elites who are essentially Republican Party operatives. This is the dirty little secret of the Tea Party; it’s not really a social movement, but a cluster of elitist interest groups operating locally and nationally, which is quite lacking in participatory elements, and largely driven by a top-down approach, determined and dictated by Republican partisan officials and business elites of the Koch variety.
My books on the Tea Party are devoted to exploring the failure of Tea Party chapters to systematically organize at the local and national level. In short, I find that there is very little organization under the Tea Party banner going on throughout communities across the country. Very few people actually turn out for rallies and planning meetings, compared to the large number of people who claim to be participating in these events according to national polling data. A close examination of the various national Tea Party groups finds that they are all lacking in participatory aspects, with active membership extremely sparse, and the leaders of these groups coming from the highest levels of local and national Republican Party chapters and the business system. A close look in my most recent book –The Rise of the Tea Party- finds that the alleged Tea Party “insurgents” who have led the Tea Party “revolution” in Congress are extremely elitist in their policy positions and in terms of their economic backgrounds. They don’t look any different than past political leaders in terms of their support from wealthy business interests, or in terms of their personal affluence, with regard to their past support for the very deregulatory legislation (of the banking industry) that helped destroy the American economy, or in terms of their voting records, which are identical to non-Tea Party Republican members of Congress.
Borchert: How would you describe the ideological outlook of the Tea Party?
DiMaggio: It’s the same group of Americans – the 20-25 percent of the public – who are essentially Bush dead-enders. Ideologically speaking, I describe the Tea Partiers as packaging old wine into new bottles. On one level, there is an extremely strong overlap between the Tea Party and the traditional religious right that emerged in the 1980s; on a second level, the Tea Party is representative of the same extreme economic right that has long supported deregulation and an assault on the social welfare state. There is nothing controversial about these claims, as public opinion polling (and analysis of these polls) demonstrates these points very clearly. I document these basic patterns in more detail in my first Tea Party book: Crashing the Tea Party – co-authored with progressive Historian Paul Street.
A major problem with the Tea Party, in terms of “building a bridge” between its members and Occupy Wall Street, is that very few Tea Partiers (only 15%) even blame Wall Street for the current problems we are facing today. While their rage at the stagnation of American prosperity is very legitimate, their attribution of responsibility for this stagnation is so childishly naïve, staggeringly ignorant, and disturbingly proto-fascistic that it makes working with them difficult, if not impossible. How do you work with people that think Obama is a Nazi, socialist, Kenyan Muslim terrorist? Pick your pejorative adjective as applied to Obama, and Tea Partiers likely agree with it. The above descriptions are so often lumped together in Tea Party rhetoric to the point where political ideologies such as Islamic fundamentalism, socialism, and Nazism, etc. are absurdly lumped together, as if these philosophies have anything in common. One wouldn’t know that there are fundamental differences between these ideologies by talking to Tea Partiers, however, as I learned the hard way in my observations of the group throughout Midwestern chapters and nationally. I’m no Obama supporter, but what we need now are legitimate criticisms of the bi-partisan, pro-business system, not fantastic propaganda that actively misinforms and confuses the public. Tea Party supporters increasingly cling to romantic and ignorant notions that if we could somehow return to the “good old days” of “free market,” deregulatory capitalism, we would put ourselves back on the path to prosperity. They seem totally unwilling or unable to recognize that it was this very deregulation, and the corresponding assault on the welfare state, that put us on the path to economic ruin. They want the Republican Party to move further to the right, failing to recognize that this right-ward drift is the primary cause of America’s problems, not the solution to them.
Borchert: There have been a handful of books written on this subject, but how is your analytical approach unique?
DiMaggio: Just about all the other research on the Tea Party was rushed and lacking in any empirical rigor. The widely read Tea Party books released prior to my and Paul Street’s books were released either at the time of the April 15, 2010 national rallies (some even before the rallies), to no later than the fall of 2010. There is no way that any of these authors could have engaged in a serious intellectual or academic analysis of the Tea Party, wrote out their analysis, and had it published at the exact time of the April 15th rallies (or before), or even so shortly after. Academically speaking, serious analyses of issues (current events related) necessitate a longer research timeframe. The writing and production schedules are significantly longer for serious works to get out, as my books were not released until summer 2011 (Crashing the Tea Party) and November 2011 (The Rise of the Tea Party). Such relatively short production schedules are really the least amount of time it takes for any respectable academic or intellectual analysis to be undertaken, written, and printed. Even I felt quite a bit rushed with my relatively longer time frame compared to the production periods for earlier Tea Party books.
A brief look at the earlier books on the subject suggests that none were very rigorous or serious in terms of their analyses. A New American Tea Party, written by Tea Partier John O’Hara was nothing more than a partisan prop for the Tea Party, repeating tired Republican talking points and propaganda. The same was true of other Tea Party promotional books, including Rand Paul’s The Tea Party Goes to Washington and Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe’s Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, among others.
There were a few other books that attempted to take a journalistic or academic analysis, including Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes, Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen’s Mad as Hell, and Kate Zernike’s Boiling Mad. The problem with these books is that they appear at first glance to be serious analyses of the Tea Party, although that impression falls apart upon closer inspection. Lepore’s book is quite thin when you look at it in terms of page length and in her analysis, and although it’s decent in terms of dissecting the Tea Party’s fundamentalist ideology, Lepore actually engages in no original analysis of the Tea Party in terms of making use of primary data (even little secondary data is used, since the book is largely conversational in tone). Zernike’s book repeats many of the worst stereotypes and misconceptions of the Tea Party, particularly the erroneous claim that it is a “social movement.” As a reporter for the New York Times, she takes for granted that the group is a non-partisan rebellion against the Washington establishment, conveniently ignoring the critical evidence I explore in my recent books which suggest the exact opposite. Finally, Rasmussen and Schoen (both are partisan pollsters who work for the political-media establishment) wrote a book, Mad as Hell, which is the worst kind of “analysis,” in that it relies on polling questions that would be condemned as propagandistic by any semi-competent public opinion scholar. Rasmussen Reports (a polling firm run by Scott Rasmussen) is to polling what Fox News is to “news.” It’s nothing to be take even remotely seriously in terms of its content, as Rasmussen ritually overestimates the conservatism of the public by using loaded (biased) question wording that clearly favors Republican-conservative positions over more neutral question framing. In short, there has been little-to-no original, quality research on the Tea Party up until this point.
Borchert: How do you apply the “propaganda model” first developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent?
DiMaggio: On the most basic level, I document how the mass media have been instrumental in manufacturing dissent against potentially progressive health care reforms, via their sympathetic reporting of the “Tea Party revolution” and their heavily reported criticisms of reform efforts. I document these relationships empirically, exposing specific pro-conservative, pro-Tea Party themes that dominated the news in mid to late 2009 and early 2010. I then show how these patterns correlated with growing opposition to progressive health care reforms (and even the mildly progressive reforms promoted by Obama) among those paying closest attention to the media-political debate on health care. I use standard political science statistical analysis and modeling to accomplish this goal, although readers will need to look to The Rise of the Tea Party for more details. In other words, I apply Chomsky and Herman’s idea of manufacturing consent in favor of official narratives, and show how it also relates to fostering opposition to any positive progressive agenda that may be fulfilled by the state. I also examine how thought control works in a democratic society. In a country where you can’t use the stick of military coercion and terror to implement policy, more subtle methods of manipulation of the American mind are needed. I examine how hegemonic factors such as partisanship, ideological orientation, political attentiveness, and media consumption (much more so than socio-demographic variables such as race, sex, income, and other factors) play an instrumental role in influencing the public’s formation of policy attitudes.
Borchert: You spent some time attending Tea Party meetings in the Chicago area –what were your first-hand impressions of the people there and their motivations?
DiMaggio: The Tea Party organizers were largely autocratic, only interested in directing the agenda from the top down, with the help of local “Tea Party” candidates, who were really just Republicans running for office. This is radically different from the participatory principle stressed by OWS chapters. Local (Tea Party) leaders were quite open with me that their primary goal was returning a largely discredited and extremely unpopular Republican Party to power, contrary to the public rhetoric of the Tea Party that the “movement” had “nothing to do” with partisan politics. Most interesting was the revelation that I quickly stumbled upon that this “movement” is for all intents and purposes a mile wide and an inch deep. There were virtually no local chapters throughout the Chicago area, a disturbing revelation considering that Illinois had the largest number of Tea Partiers elected in the 2010 midterms of any state, and considering that the vast majority of them were elected in the Chicago area. The few local chapters that existed throughout Chicago and its suburbs rarely saw much attendance or participation from members who did bother to show up. This pattern was repeated nationally, with just 8 percent of cities claiming a Tea Party rally on April 15th 2010 actually displaying evidence through their local website or the national Tea Party Patriots’ website of any sort of regular, monthly meetings.
Local Tea Party organizers did from time to time get a sizable (albeit relatively small) number of people to show up at rallies. These organizers were very honest about how they managed to accomplish this considering that they had meager to non-existent participation at the local level across the city and its suburbs. They made use of what they called the “email blast” strategy: send out of massive number of emails to people who have visited local Tea Party sites; get people to show up for their yearly (or sometimes twice yearly) protest and photo-op in celebration of the Tea Party “revolution.” This strategy was actually quite effective in getting a larger number of people (relative to anemic meeting turnout) to occasionally attend rallies, but there was literally nothing behind it in terms of building a movement, and it showed at rallies. No institutions or Tea Party organizations were present in terms of tabling or leafleting at the April 15th, 2010 Chicago rally, nor could they be, considering there is virtually no organizing to begin with. At other rallies, I occasionally found some evidence of local organizing, but it was almost entirely booths and tabling for local Republicans running for office and engaging in promotional public relations efforts. This is hardly the stuff of social movements, as anyone familiar with movements knows all too well. In short, the Tea Party revealed itself through my observations to be largely a partisan, top-down, elitist affair.
Borchert: Do you think Tea Party supporters are motivated by genuine grievances?
DiMaggio: I would add, in addition to what I already said, that these are the same individuals (Tea Party supporters) who have spent decades deriding progressives and anyone on the left who bemoaned the growing inequality throughout the country, largely a product of the class war that has been declared by big business against American workers. Now we are told on the left that these are precisely the kind of people we need to work with in order to build a movement. I simply don’t buy this. If these individuals want to consider in an open minded way the possibility that corporate America may be engaging in behavior that is very destructive to the fabric of American society, than I will be happy to make an effort to work with them in the future. Tea Partiers (particularly the active core group) are totally unwilling, from what I have seen, to consider such points of view. In fact, acknowledging class war runs so strongly contrary to their world view that it would require them to acknowledge that everything they’ve come to believe with regard to the inherent virtues of “free market,” “libertarian capitalism” is propagandistic fiction. There may be some hope for the members of the general public, however, who claim to be sympathetic to the Tea Party, but are not part of the dedicated cadre of inner circle, true believers, who are largely repeating Republican Party talking points and pushing an extreme right-wing, pro-corporate agenda. There may be a group of people in the general public who share some sympathy for the Tea Party, while also remaining open to progressive issues. These individuals, if willing to support a progressive-left agenda, should be courted when building a democratic social movement for the future. Whether this group really constitutes a significant portion of Tea Party America remains to be seen. I can say that I haven’t seen this (supposed) part of the Tea Party stand up and vocally support the OWS movement or the Madison protestors. This does not bode well for the “work with the Tea Party” advocates on the left.
Borchert: Is OWS the answer to the Tea Party? Can they even be compared?
DiMaggio: I think OWS is the polar opposite of the Tea Party. I’ve participated in the OWS movement in Illinois, in the capitol where I live (Springfield), and spoken with a number of others involved in the movement in New York and other Midwestern states. From what I’ve seen so far there are few similarities. While the Tea Party stresses the virtues of “free market” capitalism and favors of business deregulation, elimination of the social welfare state, and ever decreasing tax cuts for the rich, the OWS movement is the opposite in its politics. While still quite vague in many of its demands, the movement has at least refocused attention toward the real culprits in this economic crisis: Wall Street and the government officials who enable them. OWS looks for greater transparency in the political process, and expects political officials to make a serious effort to promote the common interests of American public over expansive corporate power. This is the first vital step needed for the left if we are to move in a new direction in which Americans redirect their rage in more productive ways. I think OWS, or a possible successor to OWS, will need to develop a far more specific agenda with regard to how we will move forward in promoting a more democratic future. General rage as directed against the political and economic establishments is a good start, but it also won’t get you very far in the mid to long term. It will inevitably result (if the movement continues to gain steam) in a systematic effort from the Democratic Party to co-opt the movement, while granting minimum concessions. This has already happened to a significant degree, and will continue into the future if nothing is done to challenge this development. OWS will need to establish a set of demands that are separate from the corporatism being offered by the Democrats if it wants to represent an alternative path to the mainstream “liberalism.”
There are some very small similarities between OWS and the Tea Party. Whereas Tea Partiers share a very general (albeit misdirected) rage against the political establishment, OWS also expresses general distrust of the political-economic system. This, in my mind, is where the similarities end. On another level, the decentralized, leaderless orientation of the OWS is dramatically different from the largely centralized, heavily leader oriented Tea Party phenomenon, which relies on pundits and political officials such as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the Tea Party Caucuses in the House and Senate in order to set the Tea Party agenda nationally. This is a dramatic difference between OWS and the Tea Party.
Borchert: What is the state of the Tea Party today, and what can we expect from them in the coming years?
DiMaggio: The Tea Party hit a plateau as of mid to late 2011. As of October 2011, about one quarter of Americans consider themselves to be Tea Party supporters. This number has barely changed over the last year. Opposition, however, has increased by somewhere between 10 to 25 percentage points among the general public within the same period. This is because there were many undecideds in early 2010 who didn’t know what the Tea Party was, but since then, and since the ugly summer 2011 debt ceiling debate, have come to see the Tea Party “revolution” as yet another ugly manifestation of partisan establishment politics in Washington. Much of the public (most actually) are not too fond of the group’s demands to gut popular social welfare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or of their demands to balance budgets on the backs of the working and middle class (and the poor), while refusing to cut America’s bloated, imperialist military apparatus. Most also are disgusted at the Tea Party-Republican effort to give the rich a free pass (via the extension of the Bush tax cuts). In other words, the Tea Party has had its day in the sun, now it will likely continue at least through the 2012 elections (perhaps further), greatly mobilizing and energizing the conservative base. It is unlikely to do much else, however, since its support base is no longer growing, and public opposition has increased significantly.
Still, the Tea Party has been an incredibly important phenomenon for a few reasons: 1. It was instrumental in derailing what could have been historic health care reforms in the form of a public option (or even universal health care); 2. It has demonstrated that the only way the Republican Party can get back into power is through the manufacturing of false populism from the top down. The Republican Party is so unpopular today that it can only gain power by default, fostering anger against the Democratic Party, and sitting back and falling into electoral victories due to growing public disenfranchisement with the Democrats. I expect the Tea Party will serve as a lesson for the future. Expect plenty of other false populist narratives and “movements” to emerge on the right in coming years, in line with the predictions of progressive William Greider, who warned of the ever growing “rancid populism” of the right which now seems to be standard fare in American political discourse.
Anthony DiMaggio is the author of numerous books, The Rise of the Tea Party, due out in November 2011 from Monthly Review Press, and other works such as Crashing the Tea Party (2011); When Media Goes to War (2010); and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He has taught American politics and International Relations in Political Science at a number of colleges and universities, and can be reached at: adimag2@uic.edu.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
This voice, speaking on 12 Sept, 2001, sounds prescient - pay heed!
Published on Wednesday, September 12, 2001
The War Comes Home
by Rahul Mahajan
The war that the United States has been waging against the nonwhite peoples of the world for over half a century came home yesterday.
Nothing does, nothing can, justify the brutal terror attack that may have killed thousands of innocent civilians. It is a crime against humanity of the highest order, and the sympathies of all right-thinking people must be with the families of the victims.
But we must understand what led to it, and draw the right lessons from it, or as Santayana suggested, we may be condemned to relive it.
Let us not pretend that this was the only harvest in history that was never sown.
The main practitioner of attacks that either deliberately target civilians or are so indiscriminate that it makes no difference, is no shadowy Middle Eastern terrorist, but our own government.
Where was the justified rage of commentators, analysts, and talking heads when the United States attacked civilians on a massive scale during the Gulf War, even referring to Basra, a city of 800,000, as a "military target." Where was it when they deliberately destroyed the water treatment systems of the country, and then spent ten years carefully rationing the chlorine needed to treat the water and the medicines that could be used to fight an explosion of water-borne disease, while over 1 million Iraqi civilians died?
Where was it when the U.S. invaded Panama, in blatant violation of international law, shelled a lower-class civilian neighborhood of Panama City for hours, broadcasting commands for the people to surrender in English, not Spanish, and then bulldozed most of the estimated four thousand (mostly civilian) dead into unmarked mass graves?
Or during Guatemala's genocidal dirty war against the indigenous Mayan population, inaugurated after a CIA-sponsored military coup in 1954, and supported by the United States through the 1980's, which killed a quarter of a million people? When the United States financed an army of thugs to rape, torture, and murder innocent peasants in Nicaragua whose only crime was that they wanted to control their own lives?
When NATO destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Serbia? When, on hundreds of different occasions since December 1998, U.S. planes dropped bombs on Iraq?
None of these victimizations of innocent people in other countries by our government justifies the victimization of innocent Americans by any foreign agency (and we must remember that as yet there is no conclusive evidence about who committed these atrocities). But they do help to explain the anger many people feel against the United States, and the symbols of its power.
Everybody (so it seems) is beating the drums of war, in a way we have not seen in this country since the much-referred-to attack on Pearl Harbor. George W. Bush, in his speech to the nation yesterday, said "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these attacks and those who harbor them," suggesting that retaliation will not only be swift and severe but indiscriminate, that it will involve targeting the innocent citizens of the country from which the perpetrators happened to plan this attack.
Unfortunately, it seems that most Americans are choosing to learn the wrong lessons from this. Instead of learning that the imperial fantasies of being able to destroy entire countries without incurring a single American casualty, of being able to antagonize half the world and somehow assure complete safety by intelligence operations have crumbled when brought into contact with reality, they have decided that what we really need is more of a failed and completely untenable policy.
In this Orwellian world we have lived in for almost six decades, we have internalized the debasement of language so thoroughly that we rarely question it. We have spent all that time being told, and thinking, that "national security" is imperiled by Cubans' desire to live free of external domination, by anything that threatens U.S. corporate profits, that it is something that has to do with the ability of our government and our corporations to control the rest of the world.
Now, confronted with the first significant real threat to national security in a long time, we should finally be able to see that our genuine security is not enhanced by military aggression against other countries, by buildup of expensive military equipment that could not possibly have helped against an attack like this, or by attempts at total economic domination of the Third World.
Massive retaliation will just keep us locked in a cycle of violence. We have come to the sharp limits of the security that can come from the boot on the neck, and must, if we are to be secure, try what can come from the open hand.
Mutual disarmament and peace based on global justice are the only way. Let us be first in peace as we have been first in war for so long.
###
The War Comes Home
by Rahul Mahajan
The war that the United States has been waging against the nonwhite peoples of the world for over half a century came home yesterday.
Nothing does, nothing can, justify the brutal terror attack that may have killed thousands of innocent civilians. It is a crime against humanity of the highest order, and the sympathies of all right-thinking people must be with the families of the victims.
But we must understand what led to it, and draw the right lessons from it, or as Santayana suggested, we may be condemned to relive it.
Let us not pretend that this was the only harvest in history that was never sown.
The main practitioner of attacks that either deliberately target civilians or are so indiscriminate that it makes no difference, is no shadowy Middle Eastern terrorist, but our own government.
Where was the justified rage of commentators, analysts, and talking heads when the United States attacked civilians on a massive scale during the Gulf War, even referring to Basra, a city of 800,000, as a "military target." Where was it when they deliberately destroyed the water treatment systems of the country, and then spent ten years carefully rationing the chlorine needed to treat the water and the medicines that could be used to fight an explosion of water-borne disease, while over 1 million Iraqi civilians died?
Where was it when the U.S. invaded Panama, in blatant violation of international law, shelled a lower-class civilian neighborhood of Panama City for hours, broadcasting commands for the people to surrender in English, not Spanish, and then bulldozed most of the estimated four thousand (mostly civilian) dead into unmarked mass graves?
Or during Guatemala's genocidal dirty war against the indigenous Mayan population, inaugurated after a CIA-sponsored military coup in 1954, and supported by the United States through the 1980's, which killed a quarter of a million people? When the United States financed an army of thugs to rape, torture, and murder innocent peasants in Nicaragua whose only crime was that they wanted to control their own lives?
When NATO destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Serbia? When, on hundreds of different occasions since December 1998, U.S. planes dropped bombs on Iraq?
None of these victimizations of innocent people in other countries by our government justifies the victimization of innocent Americans by any foreign agency (and we must remember that as yet there is no conclusive evidence about who committed these atrocities). But they do help to explain the anger many people feel against the United States, and the symbols of its power.
Everybody (so it seems) is beating the drums of war, in a way we have not seen in this country since the much-referred-to attack on Pearl Harbor. George W. Bush, in his speech to the nation yesterday, said "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these attacks and those who harbor them," suggesting that retaliation will not only be swift and severe but indiscriminate, that it will involve targeting the innocent citizens of the country from which the perpetrators happened to plan this attack.
Unfortunately, it seems that most Americans are choosing to learn the wrong lessons from this. Instead of learning that the imperial fantasies of being able to destroy entire countries without incurring a single American casualty, of being able to antagonize half the world and somehow assure complete safety by intelligence operations have crumbled when brought into contact with reality, they have decided that what we really need is more of a failed and completely untenable policy.
In this Orwellian world we have lived in for almost six decades, we have internalized the debasement of language so thoroughly that we rarely question it. We have spent all that time being told, and thinking, that "national security" is imperiled by Cubans' desire to live free of external domination, by anything that threatens U.S. corporate profits, that it is something that has to do with the ability of our government and our corporations to control the rest of the world.
Now, confronted with the first significant real threat to national security in a long time, we should finally be able to see that our genuine security is not enhanced by military aggression against other countries, by buildup of expensive military equipment that could not possibly have helped against an attack like this, or by attempts at total economic domination of the Third World.
Massive retaliation will just keep us locked in a cycle of violence. We have come to the sharp limits of the security that can come from the boot on the neck, and must, if we are to be secure, try what can come from the open hand.
Mutual disarmament and peace based on global justice are the only way. Let us be first in peace as we have been first in war for so long.
Rahul Mahajan is an antiwar activist, and serves on the Coordinating Committee of the National Network to End the War Against Iraq and the Board of Directors of Peace Action. He can be reached at rahul@tao.ca
###
Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed: It is class warfare.
Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by TruthDig.com
Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed
by Robert Scheer
It is class warfare. But it was begun not by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly but rather the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders in control of their economic and political destiny.
Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that is after payment of the taxes that the superrich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.
Those three decades of rampant upper-crust greed unleashed by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s will be well marked by future historians recording the death of the American dream. In that decisive historical period the middle class began to evaporate and the nation’s income gap increased to alarming proportions. “As a result of that uneven growth,” the CBO explained, “the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979: The share of income accruing to higher-income households increased, whereas the share accruing to other households declined. ... The share of after-tax household income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income more than doubled. ...”
That was before the 2008 meltdown that ushered in the massive increase in unemployment and housing foreclosures that further eroded the standard of living of the vast majority of Americans while the superrich rewarded themselves with immense bonuses. To stress the role of the financial industry in this march to greater income inequality as the Occupy Wall Street movement has done is not a matter of ideology or rhetoric, but, as the CBO report details, a matter of discernible fact.
The CBO noted that in comparing top earners, “The [income] share of financial professionals almost doubled from 1979 to 2005” and that “employees in the financial and legal professions made up a larger share of the highest earners than people in those other groups.”
No wonder, since it was the bankers and the lawyers serving them who managed to end the sensible government regulations that contained their greed. The undermining of those regulations began during the Reagan presidency, and so it is not surprising that, as the CBO reports, “the compensation differential between the financial sector and the rest of the economy appears inexplicably large from 1990 onward.” Citing a major study on the subject, the CBO added, “The authors believe that deregulation and corporate finance activities linked to initial public offerings and credit risks are the primary causes of the higher compensation differential.”
So much for the claim that excessive government regulation has discouraged business activity. The CBO report also denies the charge that taxes on the wealthy have placed an undue burden on the economy, documenting that federal revenue sources have become more regressive and that the tax burden on the wealthy has declined since 1979.
In the face of the evidence that class inequality had been rising sharply in the United States even before the banking-induced recession, it would seem that the Occupy Wall Street protests are a quite measured and even timid response to the crisis.
Actually, the rallying cry of that movement was originally enunciated not by the protesters in the streets, but by one of the nation’s most respected economists. Last April, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote an article in Vanity Fair titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” that should be required reading for those well-paid pundits who question the logic and motives of the Wall Street protesters. “Americans have been watching protests [abroad] against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few,” Stiglitz wrote. “Yet, in our democracy, 1% of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.”
Maybe justice will prevail despite the suffering that the 1 percent has inflicted on the foreclosed and the jobless. But to date those who have seized 40 percent of the nation’s wealth still control the big guns in this war of classes.
Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed
by Robert Scheer
It is class warfare. But it was begun not by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly but rather the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders in control of their economic and political destiny.
Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that is after payment of the taxes that the superrich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.
Those three decades of rampant upper-crust greed unleashed by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s will be well marked by future historians recording the death of the American dream. In that decisive historical period the middle class began to evaporate and the nation’s income gap increased to alarming proportions. “As a result of that uneven growth,” the CBO explained, “the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979: The share of income accruing to higher-income households increased, whereas the share accruing to other households declined. ... The share of after-tax household income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income more than doubled. ...”
That was before the 2008 meltdown that ushered in the massive increase in unemployment and housing foreclosures that further eroded the standard of living of the vast majority of Americans while the superrich rewarded themselves with immense bonuses. To stress the role of the financial industry in this march to greater income inequality as the Occupy Wall Street movement has done is not a matter of ideology or rhetoric, but, as the CBO report details, a matter of discernible fact.
The CBO noted that in comparing top earners, “The [income] share of financial professionals almost doubled from 1979 to 2005” and that “employees in the financial and legal professions made up a larger share of the highest earners than people in those other groups.”
No wonder, since it was the bankers and the lawyers serving them who managed to end the sensible government regulations that contained their greed. The undermining of those regulations began during the Reagan presidency, and so it is not surprising that, as the CBO reports, “the compensation differential between the financial sector and the rest of the economy appears inexplicably large from 1990 onward.” Citing a major study on the subject, the CBO added, “The authors believe that deregulation and corporate finance activities linked to initial public offerings and credit risks are the primary causes of the higher compensation differential.”
So much for the claim that excessive government regulation has discouraged business activity. The CBO report also denies the charge that taxes on the wealthy have placed an undue burden on the economy, documenting that federal revenue sources have become more regressive and that the tax burden on the wealthy has declined since 1979.
In the face of the evidence that class inequality had been rising sharply in the United States even before the banking-induced recession, it would seem that the Occupy Wall Street protests are a quite measured and even timid response to the crisis.
Actually, the rallying cry of that movement was originally enunciated not by the protesters in the streets, but by one of the nation’s most respected economists. Last April, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote an article in Vanity Fair titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” that should be required reading for those well-paid pundits who question the logic and motives of the Wall Street protesters. “Americans have been watching protests [abroad] against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few,” Stiglitz wrote. “Yet, in our democracy, 1% of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.”
Maybe justice will prevail despite the suffering that the 1 percent has inflicted on the foreclosed and the jobless. But to date those who have seized 40 percent of the nation’s wealth still control the big guns in this war of classes.
Copyright © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.
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