Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Unlawful Dissent: New Laws Around the Globe Don’t Curb Inequity, They Undercut Social Protests and Gag Free Speech


by BRETT WARNKE
Only a month after swearing in, President Obama was given the first “Economic Intelligence Briefing” by his sunny CIA director, Leon Panetta.  The goal was to prepare policymakers for the blowback from an electorate reeling from unemployment and looming bank failures.  The director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, told a Senate panel the same week, “Our analysis indicates that economic crisis increases the risk of regime-threatening instability if it continues for a cone-or two-year period.  Instability can loosen the fragile hold that many developing countries have on law and order.”
As the financial crisis worsened, there were successful revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya—all in part catalyzed by deepening economic troubles—while in Yemen, consistently ranked the poorest country in the Middle East, President Saleh was finally forced out.  Meanwhile, protestors in Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and Lebanon all echoed an economic refrain and were met with varying degrees of severity and compromise by their governments.
Africa and the Gulf were astir and in the months after the initial crisis, it was the developed world that took the lead in scrabbling at the roots of “instability” through new ordinances, laws, fines, and security measures aimed to control and limit dissent.
In the US local and state governments have passed numerous initiatives that limit, in various ways, the ability of people to express dissent.  Every high school student should know about the famous Alien and Sedition Acts.  But the government has gone further since 2001 in using old and new laws in its arsenal of legislation:  The Espionage Act, The FISA Amendment Act, The Authorization to Use Military Force Act, The Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, and the recent NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act.  The latter was signed with a reservation by President Obama who said, “I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”  While the bill was opposed by leaders of the FBI, the CIA, The Director of National Intelligence, and even Obama, it stubbornly survived.  The Act declares that “covered persons” who “substantially supported” al-Qaeda or “associated forces” in hostility against the United States can be subject to indefinite detention.
In May, the US District Court Judge Katherine Forrest (an Obama appointee) ruled a section of NDAA unconstitutional, finding that broad and vague language threatened US citizens with military detention for First and Fifth Amendment-protected speech and associations.  The House subsequently rejected a (rare) bipartisan amendment to bar the military detention of people apprehended on US soil.
Obama clarified that he would not use the law on American citizens but that was not good enough for Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky and other writers and activists who had filed the lawsuit fighting the NDAA as unconstitutional.
“[NDAA] expands the capacity of the power of the state to define who is a ‘terrorist,’” Hedges argued before Forrest’s decision.  “Corporate elites understand that economically, things are about to get much worse….they don’t trust the police to protect them.  And they want to be able to call in the Army.  If this bill goes into law, they will be able to do that.”
At the local level, American activists are experiencing legislative action that gives city governments expanded police power.  Jake Olzen, a writer for Waging Non-Violence and a Chicago organizer said, “We’re seeing a trend where there are now laws on the books that–when applied–give the state heavy-handed consequences for basic first amendment activities.”
In 2003 Chicago police had allowed protests against the Iraq war to continue without a permit but arbitrarily decided when protests should end.  They made arrests without being clear about when demonstrators should disperse.  Consequently, in Feb. 2012, Chicago agreed to pay a $6.2 million settlement to the protestors after a class action lawsuit was filed.
Joe Baker of Occupy Chicago argues that the use of state force has broadened the base of political activists to include the anti-war movement, civil libertarians, labor, immigrant supporters, anti-police brutality and wrongful conviction forces, and even national figures like Jesse Jackson.
“More and more, the government’s use of raids, subpoenas and courts to criminalize political activism and label it as ‘terrorism’ is driving activists away from the Democrats and electoral politics,” Baker said.
After millions were spent on police overreach, Chicago’s leaders did not want to make a similar mistake before last spring’s NATO summit.  On Jan. 18, the city council of Chicago prepared for the $60 million gathering by passing an ordinance requiring demonstrators to “supply a description of the size and dimension of any sign, banner or other attention-getting device that is too large to be carried by one person.”
This ordinance expanded the mayor’s power to police protest and was nicknamed “sit down and shut up.”  Chicago has also required demonstrators to obtain $1 million insurance coverage to “indemnify the city against any additional or uncovered third party claims against the city arising out of or caused by the parade and agree to reimburse the city” for damages caused by demonstrations.  Fines ranged from $200-$1,000 and/or ten days in jail.  Local CANG8 (Coalition Against NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda) and Occupy Chicago were then able to organize a mass campaign around civil liberties.
“The move by Emanuel to restrict protest has to be seen within the context of the repression of dissent,” Baker said.  “The attacks on Arabs and Muslims over the past decade, the violent repression of the protest at the RNC in 2008, the raids and grand jury repression that my wife and I and 22 other anti-war activists have lived through, and more recently the attacks by local police and the FBI on the Occupy Movement and the anti-NATO protest here in Chicago.”  In preparation for NATO’s summit, Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy described training 13,000 police officers for “mass arrests.”
Chicago is merely a recent effort; it was Seattle’s past that was prologue.  A harsh police reaction to the 35,000 WTO protestors in 1999 resulted in apologies from the police department.  But police violence has only escalated since Seattle and its “free speech zones” became the clever still-thriving means to corral and isolate dissent while maintaining a pretense of legitimacy.
Massive summits like these have been a business boon for local economies and politicians who, flushed with funds, then hear ear-kissing arguments from the weapons industry and other obvious beneficiaries of “law and order” policy.  Some examples:  It cost 98.7 million to “secure” the G20 in Pittsburgh.  For the 2002 WEF meeting in New York, $11 million was spent just on police overtime alone.  The 2003 IMF/World Bank meeting cost $14 million.  And for London 2009 G20, it cost $30 million.  An astonishing $1 billion was spent on Toronto’s 2010 G8/G20, half a billion of that for the Canadian Mounted Police.  There are other costs, too, not just for weapons and manpower.   Keeping the journalists tame and busy inside the pampered convention centers or hotels (rather than on the streets) is pricey, as was a snaking 12 kilometer $12 million fence for the 2007 G8 summit.
Such expenditures could be easily dismissed as a “partisan issue,” the boondoggle of reactionaries.  But it was Democrat Bill Clinton who proposed the government earmark of $15 million for the 2000 IMF security costs, funds later spent on a flood of overtime pay for police from cities neighboring Washington.  Tampa’s current mayor, also a Democrat, beams like an overfed cat when discussing the $50 million allocated for being the host city of the RNC.
But why so much overwhelming expense and force?  The hosts of the 2004 G8 summit in Georgia likely saw the tumult in Seattle five years earlier—with cops clad in body armor and using paramilitary tactics—as far too permissive and hoped to maintain an appearance of absolute order.  After accepting $25 million for increased security (smuggled into an Iraq appropriations bill) Governor Perdue declared a state of emergency.  Accordingly, Savannah and Brunswick, cities near the site of the summit “looked like military-occupied cities.”  Police disguised themselves as protestors while 136 state and local agencies deployed roughly 11,000 patrolmen, security, and military.  These agents were given extensive power to stop any protest.  Subsequently, the National Lawyers Guild produced a report detailing then Attorney General Ashcroft’s unwillingness to prosecute police brutality or exercise federal prosecutorial oversight of national, systemic police violations of civil rights.
Before protests like these have even begun, police have preemptively confiscated literature, signs, banners, and even the cheeky means of attracting dissent.  A 2004 NLG report described how policing tactics during demonstrations include “conducting mass false arrests and detentions; employing pop-up lines; using dangerous rush tactics with police on motorcycle, bicycle, and horseback; and using deadly “less lethal” weapons.”
Even mocking America’s decadent and hypocritical leadership, a political pastime since the Constitutional Convention, is now under assault.  While presidential puppets, ludicrous masks, and punchy political art have been a useful agent for translating popular contempt, in 2000 at the Republican national Convention, police raided a trolley barn in Philadelphia and arrested 75 puppet makers.  And this month, in preparation for the Tampa Republican National Convention, the police department has gone further by essentially getting the police department to declare  puppets illegal in the event zone near downtown.
A proliferation of special ordinances for public spaces—sidewalks and streets—have incrementally limited the already scanty space for assembly.  Such rules are swiftly passed on the eve of an event but can result in broad, interminable prohibitions on protected constitutional activity long after the convention balloons drift away.  A notable example is the RNC 8 episode.  Through the controversial testimony of an informant, eight activists were charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism” under a never-used Minnesota terrorism law.  No terrorism charges stuck.
Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, sees a double standard in treatment for reactionary and activist protestors.
“Something is terribly amiss when you can come to a presidential nominating convention with a pistol under your shirt, but police can detain you for brandishing a puppet,” she wrote in an email.
“When special ordinances are passed, protests should be aware that the rights we’ve long cherished are stripped away with the stroke of a pen,” she wrote.  “In the eyes of the police, ordinary objects, such as string or cardboard, are transformed into weapons.  Searches no longer require probable cause.  Intent can be imputed into the type of juice bottle you’re carrying.  Healthy speech becomes a terrorist threat.  The right to speech and assembly becomes a parking lot with a time limit.  Public spaces become private spaces.  One risks bodily injury or arrest merely for daring to occupy public forums and speak out.”
Lamentably, the US is not alone in the curbing and controlling dissent.  Conservative forces in other countries have been pushing for stronger state authority in handling organized demonstrations.  The Cameron coalition has pushed a “stability” agenda in the wake of the economic crisis that has left the country with its highest unemployment rate since 1994 and a biting austerity budget.
Cameron’s government slashed nearly 80% from higher education transferring costs to students.  Consequently, the government found itself rocked by disorder from below.  In March 2011, 250,000 people demonstrated in London in a show of public discontent
Police used an obscure law, “The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994” to assume broad powers.  The law requires that protestors remove masks and balaclavas or face arrest.  It also allows police to stop and search individuals without reasonable suspicion; blacks in England are 29.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.
The Anglo-Caribbean writer Darcus Howe told the BBC how his fourteen-year old grandson who was harassed by the police “countless times” as a result of the stop and search law.  The parallels between 2011 and a 1981 Brixton upheaval were numerous:  a conservative prime minister undertaking brutal cuts, the targeted searches of young black youths, and a fiery community response in the form of violence and looting.  During Howe’s interview, a BBC journalist insinuated that Howe was a rioter due to his presence in Brixton’s 1981 demonstrations.
The searches as well as Cameron’s cuts were cited by numerous demonstrators as igniters for the August 2011 riots in London’s Afro-Caribbean communities that put 2,987 protestors in stir and flooded London with over 16,000 police.  Thatcher ferociously denounced the 1981 Brixton riots and demonstrations in Liverpool and rejected the link between crime and social conditions, blaming the uprising on the liberalism of the 1960s.  “What aggravated the riots into a virtual saturnalia…was the impression given by television that…rioters could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest,” she wrote in her memoir.
The Thatcher Cabinet even discussed jailing reporters over their coverage of the uprisings.  In 2011 when facing similar turmoil as a result of similar policies, Cameron resorted to the Manichean:  the city was comprised of “thugs”—those people “with no loyalty to society” who “feel the world owes them something”—and the “law-abiding.”  As buildings burned, Cameron offered police arbitrary power.  “Whatever tactics the police feel they need to employ, they will have legal backing to do so,” Cameron thundered.  “Nothing is off the table.”
Spain’s government has also been challenged by tens of thousands of people in the streets, vast numbers of whom are unemployed youth who’ve joined the ranks of the indignando movement since May 2010.  Jorge Diez, the Spanish Minister for Home Affairs, was inspired by protests on March 29th to reform the penal code to criminalize protests that “seriously disturb the public peace,” by labeling protestors involved in such acts as “urban guerillas.”  A minimum jail sentence of two years could be imposed on protestors instigating or carrying out violence and “serious disturbances of public order and intent to organize violent demonstrations through means such as social networking” would carry the same penalty as involvement in a criminal organization.
In Chile, Minister of the Interior Rodrigo Hinzpeter has urged Congress to approve a law that seeks harsher punishments for protestors.  This has come during repeated flares of student activism in the past year.  In August, police in Santiago used water cannons to break up marches by thousands of students protesting inequality associated with school privatizations—75 were arrested and 49 policemen were injured before hundreds of students were evicted from occupied schools.
The new law commonly known as “Hinzpeter Law,” which was approved by committees and will soon be debated in Chile’s Congress calls for 541 days to 3 years of jail time for individuals who are found guilty of doing what the Santiago students did—occupy public and private buildings.  It would also exact punishments for disrupting services or traffic.
“The problem with this law is that it does not define disorder,” Amnesty International Chile Executive Director Ana Piquer said.  “This means that anyone could be prosecuted, even those who protest peacefully, without guns or violence or any type of disorderly action.”
The controversy has quieted since October 2011 when a draft was made public.  Hinzpeter would criminalize occupations of public or privately owned buildings as well as rioting and damage to public infrastructure.  It was drafted by former Senator Miguel Otero—a member of the right-wing Renovation Party and current advisor to the country’s Chamber of Commerce—after marches last June resulted in clashes between police and students protesting for free education.  Students claim that agent provocateurs and undercover police incited violence during demonstrations.
Most notorious, though, is Russia’s cynical use of state operations to curb dissent amid popular ferment. For ten years Putin’s “managed capitalism” has resulted in standard of living improvements, a GDP grown tenfold, low unemployment, and the resulting rewards of high oil prices.  But political discontent among the country’s middle class has intensified.  The state media is seen as Putin’s mouthpiece and 58 attacks were reported on journalists in 2010 alone.  The iron limits of protest were best exemplified in the Pussy Riot sentencing, in which 3 members of a feminist punk band convicted of “hooliganism” after performing a protest song in a church.  They received a two year prison sentence in a penal colony.  Earlier, in 2007 Putin signed an “anti-extremism” law allowing for internet censorship and in 2009 five journalists were killed as a result of their efforts, one on July 13 in Siberia.
To counteract organized dissent, the Duma passed a new law raising fines for participating in unsanctioned protest.  The fine is what an average Russian earns in one year, roughly $9,000.  Putin signed the act increasing fines on June 8th, agreeing that the new law would protect the motherland from “radicalism.”  Internally, the counterstroke has reached deeper than at any point since the Soviet Union’s dissolution.  Access to websites of at least three media outlets that criticize Putin were blocked or disrupted on June 12 by hacker attacks while Moscow, a city that requires a permit for “legal” gatherings, often unleashes police to bust up protests.
Even in Canada, ranked sixth best place in the world to live, the state has clamped down on demonstration.  In a furious torrent this May, over 100,000 students poured into the streets after an 80% increase in the cost of college tuition.  The National Assembly of Quebec passed a special “emergency law,” Bill 78, which activists consider a violation of freedoms of speech, assembly, and movement.  This was undertaken three days after riot squads deployed tear gas and arrested several people on May 15. And while this law expires July 1, 2013, Section 16 requires organizers of protests involving 50 or more people to notify police about the protest at least eight hours in advance.  Section 25 states that fines can be issued between $1,000 to $125,000.
The new bill has been criticized both in and outside Canada.
“Moves to restrict freedom of assembly in many parts of the world are alarming,” said Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “In the context of student protests, I am disappointed by the new legislation passed in Quebec that restricts their rights to freedom of association and of peaceful assembly.”
In May, hundreds of lawyers took to the streets to denounce the law as extreme.  And a spokesman for the largest student association, CLASSE, denounced the school legislation:  “The bill that the government is proposing to table is an anti-union law, it is authoritarian, repressive and breaks the students’ right to strike…This is a government that prefers to hit…its youth, ridicule its youth rather than listen to them.”  In fact, students were told that “all necessary force” would be used to keep classes running as well as a legal injunction (submitted by students who wished to return to class) to violate the strike.
As the party conventions undertake the predictable nominating process and feathery rhetoric the real news will come from the streets and how its occupants are treated. Tampa expected nearly 15,000 protestors and has increased security, even buying armored vehicles, tactical weapons, and police bikes for rapid deployment.  It should be remembered that it was in Tampa, during a 2001 pro-Bush rally at Legends Field, that two grandmothers and another protester were arrested for holding up small, handwritten protests signs outside a “protest zone.”
The methods of democratic dissent are under well-funded assault through effective and adaptable tactics around the globe.  Luis Fernandez, author of Policing Dissent, sees no slowing of growing police power in the US either.  “The police tend to adapt quickly,” he said in an interview.  “As guardians of the public order, they are paid to figure out how to respond to civil disturbance.  Social movements, meanwhile, are more glacial in developing new strategies.”
There is swelling evidence of these strategies in the headlines:  unwarranted incursions into Muslim neighborhoods, the near militarization of protest sites, and recent revelations by William Binney, a retired NSA spook turned whistleblower, of a deepening apparatus of warrantless domestic spying.  In our time, not some Conrad novel, police are pro-actively infiltrating social movements—change-agents from the republic’s founding—and are attempting to subvert and dismember them.  Citizens around the world will need to consider the results of future “instability,” not just from the incompetence and greed of elites who invoke the dreaded word to reinforce their authority.  They will need to consider the unintended instability fomented by the costs of police encroachment upon dissent, legislating away the polite fiction of their inalienable rights, and the price of state neglect for society’s multiplying vulnerable.  If power yields nothing without a demand, the last decade stands as a bleak warning for those with claims to be heard.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Chicago Teacher's Union Strike, Sept. 10, 2012

Chicago teachers strike for the first time in a quarter of a century.

Chicago's leaders hope to lengthen the school day by 20 percent and offered a 2 percent raise.
Pickets were started Sept. 10 at 675 Chicago public schools.

175 schools will remain open for students who remain on free and reduced lunch.
                                         

Chicago Public Schools diverted $70 million from teachers salaries and unemployment benefits to avoid paying teachers a 4 percent salary increase in 2011, the same year city leaders claimed the city was broke.  The money was given to Chicago's Police Department.

The CTU represents 30,000 teaches and is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers.

Wages, job security, and evaluations are the major hang-ups in negotiations with the city government.  Labor leaders described successes in winning provisions for nursing mothers, updated technology, ready-to-use textbooks, and private spaces for counselors and social workers.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

In the Time of Legal Coups? by Brett Warnke for Counterpunch



From Egypt and the Maldives to Honduras and Paraguay
In the Time of Legal Coups?
by BRETT WARNKE

A June coup in Paraguay deposed left-leaning President Fernando Lugo and resembles others in recent years, specifically, the desire of the plotters to give the transition an appearance of legal legitimacy.  NYU Professor Greg Grandin said in an interview, “The Paraguayan coup could have happened without the Honduran coup of 2009, but Honduras softened the ground.  The similarities between the two are remarkable.”
Lugo, a former Catholic priest who refused to take a salary as President because 60% of the country lives in poverty, was impeached and after a two-day trial was removed from office.  Lugo had been accused of “poor performance” by his detractors in his handling of squatter removal in which several police and homeless people were killed.  He was elected in 2008. His speeches were infused with liberation theology rhetoric, earning him the nickname: “The Bishop of the Poor.”
According to Grandin, “Lugo was the first President to break with the land status quo.  He encouraged a peasant push for land reform.”  After the overthrow, Secretary General Ali Rodriguez of the Union of South American Nations worried that “due process” was not respected and described the action as a “threat of rupture in the democratic order.”
The democratic order in Paraguay is quite recent.  For 35 years the right wing dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner and his Colorado Party, economically stratified Paraguay became a haven for fleeing Nazis and arms smugglers.  A U.S. Cold War ally, Stroessner was one of the longest-serving heads of state in history.  After his own ouster by a military coup of his own in 1989, the 1990s were rife with coup plots and government intrigue.  Landowners formed private armies on vast plantations and the nation became even more of, in Grandin’s words, “an oligarchic state.”
In Turkey, for example, before a 2010 referendum that changed the constitution, the military interdicted in coups—in 1960 and 1980—as a check to any perceived threat to the secular reforms undertaken by Ataturk. And Pakistan, like nineteenth century Prussia, has been described as an “army with a state,” because of the military’s superintending power over those cobbled together nations.
But no one was more surprised by the 2009 Honduran coup than populist President Zelaya.  His removal added a new element:  a “legal” varnish to the restoration of that country’s old guard.  “The idea of procedural democracy has taken hold in Latin America,” Grandin said.  “There have been a lot of fights between the social forces of left and right in electoralism.  But no one today is seriously testing the legitimacy of procedural democracy.”
In July 2009, President Zelaya was removed from power by gunpoint after he strengthened relations with Venezuela and sought constitutional changes through a referendum. The procedural nature of his removal was notable:  The Attorney General ordered Zelaya’s removal, the President’s resignation was forged, and he was subsequently shuttled out of the country before a provisional president was sworn in after congressional approval.  All of this had a clean, transitional and stable facade.  However, civil rights were suspended and despite human rights abuses and killings by the Honduran military, none of those involved in the coup have been brought to justice.
The hazy definition of a coup seems to be changing.  While voting fraud is endemic in developed countries like Russia—whose streets have been filled in recent months with demonstrations against President Putin’s authoritarianism and vote-rigging—the veneer of democracy is necessary.  Even failed states like Afghanistan or dictatorships like Iran must pretend to give their people a voice.  But the rule of law and an emphasis on amorphous, ever-changing procedures is the new fetish of the autocrats.  Maumoon Gayoom, who ruled the Maldives as a one-party state from 1978-2000, was asked about the removal of Mohammad Nasheed, a reformer who had been imprisoned and tortured by Gayoom’s military.  According to the Daily Sun, Gayoom’s first response was to call the new government “legal” and say that the new president “is the democratically elected president of the Maldives, according to our constitution.”  In exceedingly careful language he said, “I had no personal involvement in anything like a coup organised by myself.”

Did Mohammad Nasheed, the President of the Maldives really “resign,” if the officers threatened violence in the capital?  While no elections have been slated—they have been called for, which facilitates an image of peaceful transition and stability. Dhunya Maumoon, daughter of Maumoon Gayoom, is now in the country’s cabinet, demonstrating very clearly who is back in charge.

The most outstanding example of a legal coup in recent days has been in Egypt where the Mubarak-appointed supreme court dissolved an Islamist-led Parliament and returned power to the junta. Professor Khalid Fahmy of American University in Cairo described this phenomenon saying,  “This is a coup.”  “It’s a legal coup — not legal because it’s legitimate — but legal in the sense that the army has staged a coup using the courts,” he said.  Similarly, political scientist Omar Asour told NPR in June, “I think it’s a coup with a legal framework, and until now it’s bloodless, so – but we’ll see the reactions on the street.”

In the capitals of Egypt, Honduras, The Maldives, and Paraguay, thousands have demonstrated against these recent seizures of state.  And during the last week in June mounted riot police dispersed pro-Lugo protests in Asuncion with tear gas and shields.  Yet, the counterstroke within these states may lead to the mushrooming of social movements.  Professor Grandin said, “One similarity between Paraguay and Honduras that is overlooked:  It may backfire.  The Honduras plotters didn’t get their wish and now there is a stronger social movement than ever before.”

Kiado Cruz speaks in Rhode Island by Brett Warnke


Cruz speaks on Cultivating Peace
By BRETT WARNKE
              
            The New England Witness for Peace group invited Kiado Cruz to speak about the nexus between agriculture and social justice in a lecture called "Cultivating Peace, One Garden at a Time."  Cruz, 30, who spoke at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of South County (UUCSC), is a community organizer from a village in the lower Sierra Norte called Santa Cruz de Yagavilla whose people speak Zapatoec.  Poor education and run-down public facilities as well as crippling aftershocks from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have devastated the Oaxaca region in southwestern Mexico.  An estimated 1.5 million agricultural jobs have been lost since NAFTA went into effect in 1994.  And while Mexico quintupled its exports since the passing of
NAFTA, totaling $292 billion by 2006, the GDP dropped by 6 percent in 2009 as world demand for exports fell.  25 percent of the people who were born in Cruz's community have left. , desperately searching for food and jobs as cheap labor in the city of Oaxaca (pronounced Wa-hA-ca) or further north in the United States.  Oaxaca, birthplace of the famed 19th century reformer and Zapatoec President Benito Juarez, has been deeply affected by U.S. trade policy and its ethnically and linguistically diverse municipalities have rapidly declined because of migration.
       Cruz has been an organizer for RASA, The Autonomous Network for Food Sovereignty, a school that concentrates on indigenous forms of education such as mentoring, horizontal networking and apprenticeship, community service, and environmental stability.  He will travel 1200 miles at 16 confirmed events around New England including meetings with immigrant groups, community health projects, Yale's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, a radio show in Virginia, and visit with national legislators.
       Cruz spoke about sustainable agriculture as well as community organizing.  In an interview he said, "We need to retake certain things.  My community should be producing its own food.  Growing local food is an opportunity for us to express to the world the political and economic necessity of alternatives to the present system.  It is necessary for us to think about where our food is coming from, not just in Oaxaca, but everywhere.  What has happened is that the market has opened up but small farms are competing with enormous ones.  This has forced people to leave their family and community farms.  In desperation and destitution, they leave their community.  With imported U.S. corn being so cheap, this has been hard on the Mexican people."
       Susan Letendre is traveling and collaborating with Cruz.  She is an environmental educator with the Rhode Island based Seven Story Market, an organization that works to tell indigenous peoples' stories, supports their enterprise, and provides a market for their arts.  She said, "[Cruz] brings a connection between environmental protection, our current food system, and the current trade policy.  His talk has the ability to close the loop for people."
       Cruz also spoke about the difficulties that many unprepared migrants face when entering cities:  "It is very different for those accustomed to a rural life.  The aggressiveness of cities is different for those accustomed to a rural life.  The aggressiveness of cities is different from what we have known our entire lives."  He also spoke about the nostalgia--what many local Cape Verdian immigrants call
"sodade"--that migrant laborer feel for their abandoned communities.
       "Migrants will live near one another in order to recreate a sense of community and share our experiences and pain."
       In a previous interview, Cruz spoke about the indigenous people's relationship with their local food, specifically corn, and its powerful symbolism.  Cruz said, "Corn is not just a thing, a useful
item.  It doesn't only have utilitarian purposes.  It is something that is much deeper and has spiritual meaning for us.  It is a part of us.  What makes this vision unique or different from the common
perception of corn is that it can be used to represent how we can see nature and our place in it.  Corn is not just a thing; it is something that is alive.  And, like everything else that is alive, when we die we go back to this nature that we all are a part of.  Corn is a way to express this idea that is very different from other ways of seeing."
He also said that planting corn today is a political action against the unfair neo-liberal trade policies that have shaken his region.
       "Each day it is more difficult for people to understand where their
food comes from," he said.
       Today, more than 20 percent o the corn consumed in Mexico is grown in America.  And the once rich variety of corn has vanished, replacing it with a single type.  Letendre said that in a trip to Oaxaca she met elderly farmers, still harvesting under a merciless sun who were reminiscing about the multitude of corn that has been lost.
       "They described the texture and the flavors," she said, "how it grew, the different sizes...but then they looked at me and realized that I had no memory of this crop; this corn was gone forever.  Then they looked at me and said, 'we’re old, to remember such things.'

Andre Dubus "Townie" Review for Providence Journal by Brett Warnke


Andre Dubus III’s new memoir Townie offers little to the reader except a baggy story with a few interesting flashes of desperation and setting.  Dubus, the son of another fiction writer, is a rarity in the literary world.  Other than Martin Amis, few literary sons have successfully continued in the occupation of their fathers.  But this Dubus, who received so much acclaim with his novel The House of Sand and Fog and so much attention for The Garden of Last Days stumbles in this disappointing volume. 
With a promising opening, we follow the author on a jog with his college professor father, a man who eventually leaves his wife and family for a bohemian life of books and women.  Andre is wearing his sister’s shoes but presses forth in the run, hoping to compete (and bond) with his Dad.  The story is littered with small and similarly engaging but very loosely related vignettes.  But they often stick and sink in a bog of redundancy or are lost in a flurry of superfluous detail. 
Even this compelling opening which hooked my interest also cracked my hopes.  Dubus senior “had a brown beard he kept trimmed and he ran five miles a day, a ritual he had begun in the Marine Corps...”  But only a few pages after we discovered that jogging “was a habit he’d formed in the Marine Corps.”  And if the early one hundred page opaque portrait of his boyhood self—a scrawny and timid Louisiana boy brought to the post-industrial waste of Eastern Massachussetts—leaves the reader unfulfilled, the following 300 pages of bulking up leads to this: 
“They’d be up in her room, the door closed, Grand Funk Railroad playing, Pink Floyd, Robin Trower, the Stones.”  Later, Andre notices the jazz collection, “Stan Getz, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck and Connonball Adderly. There was Dylan, too.  And Kris Kritofferson and Joan Baez.”    In one chapter, in the backseat of a car “Aerosmith blasting from his speakers.”  Or from his sister’s room he “could hear Mick Jagger singing, Angie, you’re beautiful…” beside his own room which hung “blacklight posters of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.” 
We get it.  But Dubus clearly does not. 
Townie is slow, brutal, and unbeautiful; the writing is clear but merely so.  And while Dubus has a roving eye, he would rather describe gritty bikers’ outfits for half a page (“T-shirts with a neon wolf engraved across the chest…”) than focus on his story.  Perhaps the most titillating episode was when Dubus actually wrote about something other than weights and fights in what he calls “the forced busing riots,” which caused so much class and racial antagonism.  But it goes nowhere.      
The underwhelming structure of the book distracts from the interesting, timely stories he tells of economic hardship and the chilly remove he describes with his father reveal isolation and are untypically pithy:  “[O]ur father never called us and we never called him.”  But while his father might be proud of his son for following his bookish life, I was disappointed in him.
  

John Hiatt Sings of The Open Road


                       Newport—On Saturday, June 26 the Sunset Music Series at Newport’s Yachting Center began its summer cast of performances with a red-hot show by eleven-time Grammy-nominated musician John Hiatt.  The setting, a wide white tent at near full capacity, reminded the heartland rocker of an “old revival.”  And what the mostly silver-haired audience lacked in cartilage, it made up for in energy.  Cheers roared and lovers briefly danced as Hiatt’s love of rock ‘n’ roll charged an adoring crowd.
The concert was in promotion of Hiatt’s new and twentieth album, “The Open Road.”  The title track at first seems an easy gesture towards an American cliché. Writers from Jack Keruoac to Cormac McCarthy have taken us on lurid journeys through the continental interior before.  So have Robert Frank’s photographs, Walt Whitman’s poetry, Edward Hopper’s paintings, and Romantic ditties from Willie Nelson to Bob Seger.  But Hiatt’s open road is not a free and expansive path for an easy rider, it’s the setting for a mad rev of futility—a last effort to escape the hopelessness of a world that is “burned and dead.”  One of his song’s various characters has “seen enough to kill anyone’s soul” and speeds desperately ahead “keepin’ her eyes on the open road.”  With other titles like “Haulin” and “Movin’ On,” the album is a musical testament to writer Norman Mailer’s anxious statement:  “In motion, a man has a chance.” 
                       The Hoosier Hiatt was born in the vast plateland of the American Midwest, a region where trips are calculated in hours, not miles.  He has said that all his previous albums are about a return home.  Perhaps “The Open Road’s” new restlessness and desire for escape come from the emotional ache of middle age or a realization that there is more behind him than ahead.  Whatever the reasons, Hiatt’s album is as powerful and alive as the best of his past work and can be placed only slightly below his imperishable Grammy-nominated 2000 folk album “Crossing Muddy Waters.”  In that album’s title track, a “sweet brown girl” (a slave?) sets out alone from the tobacco fields like a “rusty shot in a hollow sky.”  Hiatt’s new fervent journeys are as somber, moving, and endlessly repeatable. 
                       Hiatt is a performer who needs to be heard live.  The walled remove and tameness of the studio is no place for his band’s slamming drums and whining guitars.  Saturday’s performance was reliably entertaining and his tracks were predictably chosen.  Wearing a salmon shirt he smiled toothily through popular songs like “Cry Love,” “The Tiki Bar Is Open,”“Master of Disaster,” and “Perfectly Good Guitar.”  And during the night’s slow songs like “Feels like Rain” the blue lights lit Hiatt’s pained grimace, an expression akin to the face of a child forced to down old cough syrup.  But the night’s loudest applause for Hiatt.  It went to his “Combo” bandmate and electric guitarist Doug Lancio.  The stoical, rubber-shouldered Lancio picked his way from guitar to mandolin, receiving ever-rising applause with each transition.
But if the night’s opening was a howling success, it was eclipsed, however slightly, by the over-zealousness of the venue’s dour security.  Passionate patrons were given a talking-to if they even attempted to move with rhythm in the tent’s wide aisles.  Hiatt encouraged the crowd to express their “personal liberty” by moving to the beat of his drummer.  But the evening’s blackshirts would have none of it.  Perhaps, in the summer’s remaining shows, the Yacht Club could encourage a little less New England reserve and a bit more spirit of the heartland revival tent.  With six dollar beers and forty-five dollar tickets, an active groove is the least a host could allow. 

Clarence Darrow: American Iconoclast by Andrew Kersten by Brett Warnke for Providence Journal


By Brett Warnke 
Clarence Darrow “American iconoclast” by Andrew E. Kersten
In the so-called Gilded Age men like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Morgan did not just wield power, they set policy.  George Pullman refused to discuss terms with the unions in his boxcar factories and when confronted with a roll of demands (an eight-hour work day, no child labor, freedom to purchase goods independent of the company, etc.) one corporate leader “referred the list to the dustbin.”  Lincoln Steffens referred to these demi-gods of capitalism as “plutogogues.”  Their most mellifluous adversary and the working man’s fiercest advocate was Clarence Darrow, “Labor’s lawyer.” 
In “Clarence Darrow:  American Iconoclast” Andrew Kersten has produced a concise and engaging history of Darrow and his times.  If Kersten’s book is sometimes repetitious and clunky it succeeds in contextualizing Darrow’s era and remains a pithy alternative to the lyricism and narrative of Irving Stone’s 500-page biography.  Kersten writes that in the middle of Darrow’s life the old lion “had finally become a public intellectual, an opinion maker and at times a cynic, who loved to engage and enrage the American public while singling out the foes of liberty and freedom for ridicule and advocating tolerance as well as those ideas that might advance civilization.”
Darrow, an Ohio lawyer, was the skeptic—the humanist—who defended Leopold and Loeb and challenged the strutting fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan at the Snopes “Monkey Trial.”  Yet Darrow’s true ambition was thinking and demanding that task of others.  His progressive and contrarian mission produced disappointment—bootlickers of the establishment were repeatedly elected and men like Jay Gould (who famously said he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,”) grew in power and stature.  Kersten’s strength is sketching the age Darrow occupied and illustrating its antagonisms.  His Darrow, whether New Deal skeptic, women’s suffrage opponent, or naïve World War I cheerleader, was human.  But at least he was for humanity.

"Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary" Review


By BRETT WARNKE
Review of Daniel Patrick Moynihan:  A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary; published October 12, 2010 by Public Affairs.
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New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said enough for himself, as you will notice upon picking up the recently released 674-page A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary.  But with no complete memoir or autobiography (other than A Dangerous Place) this book reveals him as a gifted bureaucratic pamphleteer.  The letters reveal him as a quirky, brilliant, calculating, thinker and a spiky and vengeful pain in the ass.  But they are the perfect medium for a man whose life is best told in the memoranda and jottings through which he hoped to spur action. (By others of course—Moynihan clearly enjoyed the study and the debating stage.)
In the flurry of these letters, Moynihan writes of growing up in Hell’s Kitchen just as the great New York wave of immigrants had been halted by the racist Johnson Reed Act.  He mentions his boyhood shoe-shining and mischief, noting that the Kitchen was so Irish that he didn’t know he was Irish until he left.  After joining Kennedy’s “best and brightest” Moynihan’s illusions began to evaporate; his stint in the Johnson White House was brief.  Subsequently, he moved in and out of academia and became a fixture in the Washington establishment.  Moynihan cottoned on to the incoming Republicans and understood the “self-made” mythology which feeds conservatism; he adapted his tune accordingly to influence Richard Nixon who had also lifted the awful Henry Kissinger from the failed Rockefeller campaign.  Moynihan’s writings are keenly aware of the personalities and preoccupations in those squalid Nixon years and, like Kissinger, he was able to stoke Nixon’s coals.  In one memo, Moynihan describes Johnson being “toppled by a mob”—ever the reactionary’s nightmare—and describes the unwashed crowd comprised of “college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls.”  (This was the White House Democrat, by the way.)  He wrote that Nixon would be free to “dominate and direct” social transformation, cleverly playing upon the red-baiter’s incurable narcissism. 
Arthur Schlesinger’s similarly excellent diaries reveal the personal contradictions and intestine squabbles that made Moynihan notorious, relevant, and fascinating:
Pat Moynihan is up for reelection this year.  He is a brilliant and entirely opportunistic man.  He anticipated the neoconservative swing and in 1967 gave a talk to the ADA in which he said, in effect, liberalism had gone too far, government couldn’t solve all our problems and, in particular, the young and the blacks were becoming pains in the neck.  I think that Pat had a bum rap after his 1964 study on the family but that he took it too personally and expended too much energy in subsequent years paying people back. 
Schlesinger, noting another exchange after one of his unnumbered cocktail parties writes of Moynihan’s “egotism and rancor:”
Pat, I thought, was more than usually intolerable.  He swells like a bullfrog and punctuates his speech with a repertoire of sweeping gestures and smug expressions.  Like the late Dean Acheson, he tells stories all of which illustrate his triumph over someone else.  He was superficially cordial but obviously detests me (manners and feelings I reciprocate). 
                To say that Moynihan, an elected politician for 24 years, was more “complex” or argue that he had “enemies on all sides” would be offering two clichés, but true ones.  But Schlesinger’s criticism is not (only) petty jealousy.
The New Yorker won overwhelming majorities to a Senate seat beginning in 1976, yet he never exclusively belonged to (what is called) left or right.   As well as being a pol, he was a writer, ambassador, and policy wonk.  Liberals, before reading the Portrait’s letters, could describe him as a vengeful courtier (not unlike the similarly bow-tied Schlesinger), a wily hanger-on, who haunted the White House to satisfy ego and vendettas.  In this view, Moynihan was an obliging pillow who produced policy to fit the backsides of the powerful; an ambassador to India, he was safe during the sordid close of Nixon’s tenure; an opportunist, he finally deciding to round off an increasingly conservative career by getting himself elected through ethnic politics in New York. 
His internal criticisms would raise liberal hackles even today.  “Too frequently of late,” he wrote to Nixon in 1969, “the liberal upper middle class has proposed to solve problems of those at the bottom at the expense, or seeming expense, of those in between.”  This from a Kennedy man who supported community action, favored  racial quotas, and wrote that if the country had four centuries of exploitation to overcome “we will not do so by giving Negroes an equal opportunity with whites who are by now miles ahead.”      
But those who may still denounce him as a compromiser or collaborator should also note that Moynihan recognized climate change as early as 1969, blasted the ossification and incompetence of the CIA which (along with not foreseeing recent develops in the Middle East) was astonishingly ignorant of the Soviet Union’s deterioration.  He spoke out against torture at the UN, defended what was left of the Great Society, bravely assailed the excesses of Clinton’s shameful welfare “reform,” (which he called “boob bait for bubbas”) and warned the world about the rise of ethnic politics in his prescient study Pandaemonium.  He even warned about a “diffuse, decentralized, irrational, even psychotic groups,” then plaguing the former Axis powers in the 1970s.   
But most importantly in the context of today’s enduring national security state, Moynihan presciently criticized the proliferation of government secrets as having no basis in law.  In memos as well as a book he takes on the culture of secrecy, quoting Max Weber,  that secrets were the “sharp weapons of the bureaucracy.” And, looking back, was Moynihan wrong to denounce, what he called, “the more hysterical members of the New Left who assume that the only thing that can save this civilization is for it to be destroyed”?  Or when he wrote (in 1981) that “we shall spend the coming years worrying about the deficit, arguing about military spending, and trying to cut domestic programs to ease the burden of both”? 
But how could we forget the Buchananite faction of the right wing?  Their gorge will rise as they read of Moynihan’s support for international law and the incisive though critical support he offered America’s social programs.  Moynihan’ pragmatism pushed him to offer solutions today’s far-right crowd could never consider.   He urged Nixon to pass an “income strategy” that guaranteed a wage which, the senator argued, fit within conservative principles not to offer a redistributive dole.  If employment was a key to the conservative goal of social stability, Moynihan argued, why would they be against keeping post-industrialism’s losers within the market rather than prey to crime or, even worse, leftists? 
But Moynihan did not, in this collection, comment on President Ford’s ghastly nod to Suharto’s invasion of East Timor and was naïve enough to suggest to Kissinger that he broach human rights at the UN.   This astonishing cluelessness reveals itself again when he wrote to Harry McPherson that Nixon “would be genuinely interested in our views.”  Anthony Summers argued as much in Arrogance of Power, writing that after a meeting with Nixon, Moynihan “came away from a first meeting with Nixon amazed at his ready admission of the huge gaps in his knowledge.”  Moynihan’s illusion of a humble and curious Nixon burned off as the President ignored his Cabinet and extended his criminal policy in Southeast Asia.  Moynihan also half-rightly wrote that Communism in America was an “ethnic phenomenon.”  Maybe.  But radicals like Thomas Paine, Eugene Debs, and Cesar Chavez who could certainly not be considered Communists can still never be discarded as merely members of the political consensus. 
Moynihan called himself a “Madisonian” but saw himself as a moral pragmatist.  He also said he wouldn’t mind the label “Al Smith Democrat.”  But, more so than a book by a “reliable” vote like Kucinich or Frank for the center-left of American politics, Moynihan’s letters are worth reading and his ideas are worth considering because he shook liberals from their cozy illusions about the welfare state.  The sadness which comes after reviewing Moynihan’s letters is that, like Larkin and Bellow’s recent collections, they are the last of a vanishing genre, the concluding pieces of an Enlightenment tradition of reasoned, patient, and developed correspondence.  This is a medium which has no heirs and Moynihan was one of its masters. 

Alan Ehrenhalt "The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City" Brett Warnke Review for Providence Journal


They are young, bearded, booted, and armed with i-Pods and diplomas.  And they are coming to a city near you:  They are the millennials.  The causes of this new reality and a readable and engaging analysis of urban America’s changing make-up can be found in Ehrenhalt’s excellent new book.  While “gentrification” is already forty years old and freighted with assumptions, Ehrenhalt prefers to label what is happening to America’s cities as “demographic inversion.”  The hip, young, white upper-middle class is moving in and the working class and minorities are relocating outside cities.  “The late twentieth century was the age of poor inner cities and wealthy suburbs,” Ehrenhalt writes, ”The twenty first century is emerging as an age of affluent inner neighborhoods and immigrants settling on the outside.”
 Ehrenhalt places America’s urban centers in their modern context by guiding the reader through the history of nineteenth century European cities and their contemporary parallels.  In fascinating cases studies of cities and their inner suburbs--from New York to Phoenix--Ehrenhalt provides amazing insight.  For example, he details how immigrants are now bypassing cities and blowing life into hollowed out post-industrial areas.  The proximity of public transportation, an international airport, and cheap housing units were a recipe for economic boom in some areas while, in Philadelphia, no airport and a hostility to immigration has left the city stuck in stasis. 
            He wonderfully summarizes the flops and successes of urban centers and interestingly details the problems of planning and the mess wrought by free-market sprawl.  Today, for obvious reasons of cost and convenience, more younger people hope to live an urban lifestyle rather than “car dependent suburbia.”  But his study of urban life is not lifelessly analytical.  In one intriguing study Ehrenhalt describes the unique efforts of Texas State Representative Garnet Coleman who, rather than wish fair wind to demographic inversion, is furiously purchasing up inner-city real estate in an effort to slow or delay the move of his African-American constituents. 
            Perhaps the necessary successor to this book will be an evaluation of how the new generation of urban dwellers will reshape politics.  Already, as evidenced in books like Bowling Alone, participation in civic affairs within cities is dwindling.  How will the reverse flow of America’s population transform America’s political scene?  With 82% of Americans living in cities and suburbs, the upcoming election will be a forecast of what is to come.








Peter Beherns "The O'Briens" Review for Providence Journal by Brett Warnke


“The O’Briens” by Peter Beherns, Pantheon Press , March 2012, 384 pp. 
By BRETT WARNKE
Disgorged from Irish coffin ships along the St. Lawrence during the Great Starvation, young immigrants fell upon Canada and the New World.  Peter Behrens new novel, The O’Briens, follows four generations of an Irish-Canadian family who seem to forget this history as quickly as they take part in it.  Joe, the novel’s surly and indefatigable protagonist eschews any connection to the Emerald Isle.  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about Ireland,” he admits to his brother, Grattan, who brims with unrealized illusions of aiding the struggling republic after World War I. 
 The novel follows the deep tracks of the O’Briens from their early frontier life in the logged and cleared Canadian countryside, “the breadbasket of the British Empire.”  Beherns then takes the reader from the Boer War to the Beatles.  Beherns is interested in how a family is shaped by its context.  But he is also concerned with the loneliness, or at least the aloneness of the O’Briens.  The family’s patriarch is buried in a solitary undated grave and the epistolary sections of the novel (mostly set during the wars) reveal quaking isolation and anxiety.  “Everyone needs a home, Mr. O’Brien.”  To which Grattan O’Brien admitted, “Do they?  I think I carry my home inside my head.”
Joe O’Brien is the self-made head of the family.  And while he is a tireless worker, he is also a muted self-medicating union-buster whose intermittent booze-guzzles in New York nearly destroy his marriage.  Beherns, while so often excellent, can slip into weaker lines:  “the city had a killer side.”  
Yet, Beherns beautifully captures the blinkered isolationism and purposeful neglect in those months before the Second World War:  “People in other cities were being terrorized, but it had not mattered as much as a new pair of shoes.”  Also, the passing of glory is brilliantly explored as soldiers fight and die while their forsaken monuments stare blankly ahead, forgotten by a busy public.  

Gregg Jones "Honor In The Dust" Brett Warnke Review


Honor In the Dust, Gregg Jones’s excellent new history of America’s war in the Philippines opens with, what euphemistically became known as “water detail.”  This tactic, first developed by the Spanish Inquisition, flushes the victim’s mouth and stomach with water but does not outwardly damage the body. In those early days of American empire, the Providence Sunday Journal assured its readers that the “water cure…does not have serious after effects.”  But in our new age of waterboarding, many are still feeling the effects. 
 This is just one piece of the terrifying legacy of the lesser known “nasty little war” (1901-1902) that followed the brief and decisive Spanish-American War.  At the opening of the twentieth century, the Indian Wars had been bloodily concluded and what Jones calls the “postwar doldrums” had lead expansionists like Roosevelt to eye glory and the possibility of new markets in China with a beachhead in the Philippines.   As Roosevelt himself asserted, “This country needs a war.”  But what American soldiers received was not glory, but a slow and deadly slog through island jungles fighting for something called “benevolent assimilation” and a national resistance that should have been a warning against a similar folly in Vietnam.
Honor in the Dust is part war novel, backroom account, and courtroom drama.  Each page offers beautiful, engaging writing and complex personalities that appall and amaze.  Excellent passages are taken from Stephen Crane and Mark Twain and lesser known personages are skillfully rendered.  Such figures include foaming zealots like Indiana Senator Beveridgere, brave critics of Roosevelt’s policies like Massachusetts’s GOP Senator George Hoar, and brutes like General “Hell-roaring” Jake Smith who told his troops, “I wish you to kill and burn.”   
                Like John Sayles’s film Amigo or his fantastic novel A Moment in the Sun, Honor in the Dust is a haunting history of overreach and tells the early political struggle to stop it.

Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power" Brett Warnke Review for Providence Journal


By BRETT WARNKE
Robert Caro’s massive trilogy of biographies on Lyndon Johnson is unfinished.  Yet, the follow-up to this masterful book will not come soon enough.  After a generation of tax cuts and deregulation punctuated by Congressional deadlock, Lyndon Johnson’s legacy demands scrutiny, especially by those who still believe in the relevance of the public sphere.  How did a modern President accomplish so much and so swiftly?  And what was bred in Johnson’s bones that allowed him to self-destruct with equal haste?  Johnson’s tragic commitment to Vietnam will forever disfigure his legacy—the millions dead, the environmental devastation, the financial waste, the deferred dream of the Great Society—but his domestic legislative accomplishments, which Caro so brilliantly explores in this volume which covers 1960-64, can be fitted within the presidential top tier.  
As Vice President, Johnson was ignored and ultimately outflanked by his nemesis, Robert Kennedy.  The one-time Majority Leader Johnson had been called the “master of the Senate,” but as a Vice President who had won Kennedy Texas (and therefore the election of 1960) had so little clout that he was not even told about the backroom deal that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis!  VP Johnson felt his career had short-circuited by 1962.  But Kennedy’s assassination and the seamless transition of power showed Johnson’s administrative savvy and a command of the details. 
“I do understand power,” he once told an aide, “Whatever else may be said about me…I know where to look for it, and how to use it.”  Caro vividly captures Johnson’s contempt for the kiss-up cabal, those worshipers at the altar of Camelot, who would spend a generation hooking every one of Johnson’s legislative successes to Kennedy’s unimpressive two years.  And Caro’s seemingly endless narrative engagingly explores little-remembered figures like the segregationist and reactionary, Senator Harry Byrd, who set the fiscal terms through which Johnson would accomplish his seminal legislative triumph, The Voting Rights Act of 1964.  Caro’s Johnson is difficult to love; he is petty, pouty, and vacillates to the point of inaction in some scenes.  But Johnson’s hatred of poverty, a condition he witnessed in the Texas hill country, allowed him his most useful gift:  The ability to differentiate between the little guy and the small man.  Johnson’s legislative commitment to fairness and results-driven programs (like the little-praised community action and Fair Housing Act of 1968) allow us to still feel the impact of this man’s mighty legacy. 

Mitt Romney Should Like Ike, Not Rerun Reagan by Brett Warnke


On Thursday, August 30 Mitt Romney will stand stiffly before the RNC less as a champion and more as an instrument.  Grover Norquist has called for “installing” Romney while others, with less hubris, just want Mitt to use the provided funds to eject Obama and bring “stability.”  The Romney team has spoken of James K. Polk—the canny expansionist who worked himself to death—as a model for his administration.  But Romney would do well to give Ike a second glance, especially before his speech. 

It was Eisenhower who was a respected “unifier” (a key word with the Romney campaign) who understood the difference between real and imagined threats in foreign policy (a Romney weakness) and successful wedded entrepreneurial initiative to government investment.    
In 1956, after four years of the glorious burden on his already heavily adorned chest, Eisenhower addressed the Republican National Convention and asked for a renewal on his White House lease.  This was one of the 20th century Republican Party’s best convention addresses, spelling out how conservatives could be the party of the future.  In a clipped staccato the former Supreme Allied Commander sounded more ready for morning muster and a jaunty bugle than a conservative assembly.  Admittedly, neither Ike nor Romney are much good behind the microphone but whether the smoky crowd knew it or not, Eisenhower was a skilled speech writer.  (Imagine the 2012 Republican nominee quoting Ibsen as Ike did!)  Dwight’s dowdy glasses and everyman act was mostly for the obliging cameras.  In fact, it was the “simple soldier” Eisenhower who penned some of the peacock Douglas MacArthur’s most eloquent remarks.
Ike’s 1956 advice:  “If we and our successors are as courageous and forward-looking and as militantly determined, here under the klieg-lights of the twentieth century, as Abraham Lincoln and his associates were in the bonfire-light of the nineteenth, the Republican Party will continue to grow in the confidence and affection of the American people, not only to November next, but indeed to, and beyond, its second centennial.”
A Republican President did preside over the second centennial and Romney’s Republican Party need not worry about its members being “militantly determined” about anything.  Only Herbert Hoover precedes Romney as a “success” in private business.  But Eisenhower, like Hamilton and his fellow Federalists and unlike Hoover, understood the power of government investment and its ability to catalyze dormant entrepreneurial energy.  Eisenhower’s lasting legacy is beneath the wheels of Romney’s campaign bus as he shuttles from big city to small towns.   
Ike’s 1956 advice:  “My friends, there are only a few days left for registering in a number of our States. That is one thing you cannot defer. The records show that our registration as compared to former years at this time is way down across the land--registration across the board. Let's help the American Heritage, let's help the Boy Scouts, let's help everybody to get people out to register to vote.  Now, of special relevance, and to me particularly gratifying, is the fact that the country's young people show a consistent preference for this Administration. After all, let us not forget, these young people are America's future. Parenthetically, may I say I shall never cease to hope that the several states will give them the voting privilege at a somewhat earlier age than is now generally the case.”
Eisenhower not only wanted people to vote for him, he wanted people to vote.  A candidate Romney will need to illustrate that he wants all Americans to vote, not just the ones with this or that ID.  Young people, the elderly, the poor, and minorities are being quietly singled out of Romney’s vision of American “unity” and his speech could follow Ike’s prescient words.  It was more than a decade before those old enough to kill Viet Cong were given the ability to vote.  But the Boomerang Generation of millennials—likely deterred by Romney’s indifference to their mountainous personal debt—endlessly tweaking their resumes in their parents’ basement are not leaping into his corner.  Romney’s Republican Party cannot win in a minority-infused future with rhetoric only about burdensome public debt (much of it from Republican administrations) while remaining silent about ID laws, the Dream Act, and relief for student debt.     
Ike’s 1956 advice:  “Our Party as far back as 1856 began establishing a record of bringing together,. as its largest element, the working people and small farmers, as well as the small businessmen. It attracted minority groups, scholars and writers, not to mention reformers of all kinds, Free-Soilers, Independent Democrats, Conscience Whigs, Barnburners, "soft Hunkers," teetotallers, vegetarians, and transcendentalists!”
As an aside, can you imagine a Tea Party rally attended by Thoreau and Emerson?  I digress.  Karl Rove has been the Cassandra for conservatives on their lurking Spanish-speaking problem.  Latinos, as Rove said this week in an interview with Politico, should be Republicans:  entrepreneurial in ethic, religious in belief, and middle-class in aspiration.[1]  Romney will need to put down new stakes for his own vision of conservatism’s big tent while picking up the votes of upper-middle class whites, a natural constituency, of which he is losing and without which he cannot win. 
Ike’s 1956 advice: “It so important that great governmental programs be based upon principle rather than upon shifting political opportunism.”
Romney will need to seek a measured truce with Planned Parenthood—a group he has pledged to defund.  A reversal and truce would be a bold challenge to a base already suspicious of his pro-life credentials but would prevent national discussions of basic women’s health from devolving into loose talk of baby murder.  It would counteract the Aken effect.  Can an “installed” Romney have enough leadership and vision to prevent his party’s Tea Party quarter—in the name of principle—from holding up people’s unemployment checks over petty budgetary squabbles? 
Ike’s 1956 advice: “My second reason for saying that the Republican Party is the Party of the Future is this: It is the Party which concentrates on the facts and issues of today and tomorrow, not the facts and issues of yesterday.”
While Romney’s “Restore our Future” smacks of the Bourbons snatching a crown beside a tumbrel, Ike’s party (like today’s conservatives) had a Republican-fueled depression to account for and run away from.  To “restore” America to an anti-regulatory agenda after so much irresponsibility in government and recklessness on Wall Street is unserious.  If Obama’s tactics are to keep silent about his first-term’s legislation than Romney will need to contrast that blank screen with bold colors.  But Republicans stump speeches have the feel of a party dry of ideas; predictable invocations of principles are no substitute for –as Eisenhower knew—using government as a mechanism for public investment and stable growth.  Why must Romney’s restoration only be of an 80’s-style supply-side agenda?  Reagan raised taxes and even George W. Bush requested a stimulus.       
Ike’s 1956 advice:  “With two-thirds of us living in big cities, questions of urban organization and redevelopment must be given high priority. Highest of all, perhaps, will be the priority of first-class education to meet the demands of our swiftly growing school-age population.”
Ike’s administration saw an escalation in the Great Migration of African-Americans off the land and into the cities.  Republicans will need to acknowledge the challenges of today’s “great inversion” now underway:  the reverse flow of people with capital into cities and the flushing of lower-income people out.  To claim a future for the Republicans, Romney will need to speak candidly to a conservative base in the south and west about the future of cities.  Ike was also a Republican who integrated public schools and thought they could be the incubators of future knowledge and wisdom; Romney cannot ignore public education nor only deploy the word “union” beside the word “boss.”  Ike himself believed in the principle of collective bargaining without interference as “the cornerstone of the American philosophy of labor-management relations.”   
Ike’s 1956 advice:  “What is more, the Republican Party's record on social justice rests, not on words and promises, but on accomplishment. The record shows that a wide range of quietly effective actions, conceived in understanding and good will for all, has brought about more genuine--and often voluntary--progress toward equal justice and opportunity in the last three years than was accomplished in all the previous twenty put together. Elimination of various kinds of discrimination in the Armed Services, the District of Columbia, and among the employees of government contractors provides specific examples of this progress.”
Yes, Social Justice was the name of Father Coughlin’s pamphlet.  And yes Glenn Beck’s ramblings have pitted dittoheads against the phrase.  But the Republicans were once the party of Lincoln, a cautious strategist, rhetorical abolitionist, and also one who understood using government power to reformulate a nation in trouble.  The invocation of “social justice” by a Republican today could take the sting out of the scorpion and return political argument to individual interests and national aspirations instead of rejecting or ignoring public work.  And obviously Eisenhower was not entirely deaf to minority concerns though no fiery reformer.  Meanwhile, Romney’s 0% rating among African-Americans is not only shameful, but strategically short-sighted.  How can a party combat a history of “southern strategies” “dog whistling” and talk of “welfare queens” with no African-American tab on the Republican website?    
Ike’s 1956 advice:  We must insure a fair chance to such people as mature workers who have trouble getting jobs, older citizens with problems of health, housing, security and recreation, migratory farm laborers and physically-handicapped workers. We have with us, also, problems involving American Indians, low-income farmers and laborers, women who sometimes do not get equal pay for equal work, small businessmen, and employers and workers in areas which need special assistance for redevelopment.
For Mitt Romney to even mention some of these phrases would be a step forward.  Romney could address youth underemployment and those millions of Baby Boomers caught at the end of their careers who, after being dumped overboard, are overqualified and under-supported.  Leadership on women in the workplace would intensify a constituency of aspiring and powerful women and counteract liberal monopoly on notions of “equality” and recent talk of a “war on women.”
Ike’s 1956 advice:  “Science and technology, labor-saving methods, management, labor organization, education, medicine--and not least, politics and government.-all these have brought within our grasp a world in which backbreaking toil and longer hours will not be necessary.”
Sadly, rapidity has only accelerated work, not diminished its amount.  Romney, as a businessman, could address the extraordinary productivity of the American worker and their deplorable lack of compensation.  The resulting squeeze is choking demand and evaporating the American dream conservatives rely upon as a basis of social order.  No investment in training or education and no discussion of the great divergence—itself partially brought on by the technological revolution—condemns a future generation to “electronic sweatshops” in call- centers and other short-sighted service-oriented labor.  It also will allow the slow bleed of white collar knowledge jobs to an increasingly educated and cheaper developing world.   President Eisenhower, a recent and formidable persona Romney could emulate told his fellow conservatives in 1956 that “constant change without principle becomes chaos.”  Polls by the Financial Times showing half of people have a negative view towards globalization illustrates a disconnect between how elites and workers feel about rapid free trade.[2]
After all, the ripping torrent hollowing out blue collar small towns and now white collar home ownership and job security in the suburbs is frankly not felt at the top.  How could it be?  Can Romney detail a globalizing economy—one that asks workers to train their foreign replacements—a little less mordant? 
In sum, the winding political path Romney has taken testifies to the identity crisis among conservatives, unsure what they want to conserve but far-sighted on what they wish to destroy. 
Romney may want to emulate Polk, but I think he should like Ike. 



[1] C-Span Karl Rove interview with Politico. 
[2] Jiles, Chris “Rich Nations Backlash Against Globalization,” Financial Times. 7/23/2007.