By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics

Well, it looks like McCain will be carrying the banner for the Republicans this fall, after so many previous tries, and after being essentially written off by the pundits just a few short months ago. That was when Giuliani was considered the front-runner.

This is one among many reasons why we shouldn’t rely on pundits. Once the voters started speaking, it was clear that Giuliani was a non-starter. I heard one commentator say this week that he had the worst dollars-to-delegates ratio in the history of politics: $50 million to get one lone delegate. Ouch!

McCain is much, much better than his competitors on some issues, notably torture and campaign finance reform. But on war (for me, the dealbreaker issue), he’s the worst of the lot–even more hawkish than GWB. Yikes! And his own shady past on ethics issues–he was one of the infamous Keating 5, after all–makes me wonder how sincere the reform really is.

Still, he’s certainly less of a flip-flopper than Romney, who would have made a great used car salesman. And far less scary than our American Ayatollah Huckabee, whose election would make me seriously consider leaving the country; as a non-Christian with progressive politics, I’m not sure there would be room for me in a country governed by someone who equates homosexuality with necrophilia.

Much less clarity on the Democrat side. For me, the real question now becomes who could beat McCain. For reasons I stated here, I believe that in a McCain-Clinton contest, McCain would win, although I think she might beat Romney. But some of my friends believe that Obama hasn’t yet shown he can attract enough white voters to prevail against any opponent in November.

I know that I personally would not vote for Hilary Clinton–but I have the luxury of living in a state where my vote doesn’t count anyway: no matter what I do no matter who the candidate, Massachusetts will go for the Democrat.

The real shame for me, yesterday, was standing with my ballot and looking at Dennis Kucinich’s name right next to Barack Obama’s, thinking about what might have been. Kucinich has withdrawn, of course, and I’m not going to waste my vote on a candidate who’s no longer interested. But I think it’s a crime that the media–the same media that annointed Giuliani–decided for itself that it would not let us hear the voices of any of the candidates whose positions actually represented progressive change, and gave us a media blackout on the candidates who should matter most. They refused to cover Kucinich, Gravel, Dodd, and Ron Paul, among others–all of those bringing forward substantive reforms on a host of issues. This, to me, is a serious ethical breach and somehow we need a mechanism to address this that doesn’t interfere with the First Amendment.

For broadcast media, at least, the solution may lie with their licenses to use the public’s own airwaves for profit. For print media, the solution is probably intense public pressure in the form of letter-to-the-editor campaigns, pickets in front of their stockholder meetings, and so forth.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

Note from Shel: This guest column by Paul Rogat Loeb, a writer whose work I like quite a bit, outlines many of the reasons why I chose Obama when Kucinich left the race.

A Dozen Reasons Why This Edwards Voter Is Now Backing Obama

Guest Column By Paul Rogat Loeb

I gave John Edwards more money than I’ve given to any candidate in my life, and I’m glad I did. He raised critical issues about America’s economic divides, and got them on the Democratic agenda. He was the first major candidate to stake out strong comprehensive platforms on global warming and health care. He hammered away on the Iraq war, even using scarce campaign resources to run ads during recent key Senate votes. He’d have made a powerful nominee˜and president.

I’ve been going through my mourning for a while for his campaign not getting more traction, so his withdrawal announcement didn’t shock me. But sad as I am about his departure, I feel good about being able to switch my support to Barack Obama, and will do all I can to help him win.

I’ve actually been giving small donations to both since Iowa, while hoping that the Edwards campaign would belatedly catch fire, and e.html>exploring ways the two campaigns could work together. With Edwards gone, I think Obama is the natural choice for his supporters, and that Edwards should step up and endorse him as his preferred nominee. All three major Democratic candidates have their flaws and strengths˜they all have excellent global warming plans, for instance. But Edwards wasn’t just being rhetorical when he said that both he and Obama represent voices for change, versus Clinton’s embodiment of a Washington status quo joining money and power.

Here are a dozen reasons why I feel proud to have my energy, dollars and vote now go to Obama:

1. The Iraq war: Obviously, invading Iraq remains the most damaging single action of the Bush era. Obama spoke out against it at a public rally while Clinton was echoing Bush’s talking points and voting for it. Obama’s current advisors also consistently opposed the war, while Clinton’s consistently supported it. It’s appropriate that Clinton jumped to her feet to clap when Bush said in his recent State of the Union address that there was “no doubt” that “the surge is working.”

2. Clinton’s Iran vote: The Kyl-Lieberman bill gave the Bush administration so wide an opening for war that Jim Webb called it “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream.” Hillary voted for it. Obama and Edwards opposed it.

3. The youth vote: If a Party attracts new voters for their first few elections, they tend to stick for the rest of their lives. Obama is doing this on a level unseen in decades. By tearing down the candidate who inspires them, Clinton will so embitter many young voters they’ll stay home.

4. Hope matters: When people join movements to realize raised hopes, our nation has a chance of changing. When they damp their hopes, as Clinton suggests, it doesn’t. Like Edwards, Obama has helped people feel they can participate in a powerful transformative narrative. That’s something to embrace, not mock.

5. Follow the money: All the candidates have some problematic donors˜it’s the system–but Hillary’s the only one with money from Rupert Murdoch. Edwards and Obama refused money from lobbyists. Clinton claimed they were just citizens speaking out, and held a massive fundraising dinner with homeland security lobbyists. Obama spearheaded a public financing bill in the Illinois legislature, while Clinton had to be shamed by a full-page Common Cause ad in the Des Moines Register to join Obama and Edwards in taking that stand.

6. John McCain: If McCain is indeed the Republican nominee, than as Frank Rich brilliantly points out, he’s perfectly primed to run as the war hero with independence, maturity and integrity, against the reckless, corrupt and utterly polarizing Clintons. Never mind that McCain’s integrity and independence is largely a media myth (think the Charles Keating scandal and his craven embrace of Bush in 2004), but Bill and Hillary heralding their two-for-one White House return will energize and unite an otherwise ambivalent and fractured Republican base.

7. Mark Penn: Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, runs a PR firm that prepped the Blackwater CEO for his recent congressional testimony, is aggressively involved in anti-union efforts, and has represented villains from the Argentine military junta and Philip Morris to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster.

8. Sleazy campaigning: Hillary stayed on the ballot in Michigan after Edwards and Obama pulled their names, then audaciously said the delegates she won unopposed should count retroactively. She, Bill and their surrogates have conducted a politics of personal attack that begins to echo Karl Rove, from distorting Obama’s position on Iraq and abortion choice, to dancing out surrogates to imply that the Republicans will tar him as a drug user.

9. NAFTA: Hillary can’t have it both ways in stoking nostalgia for Bill. NAFTA damaged lives and communities and widened America’s economic divides. Edwards spoke out powerfully against it. Clinton now claims the agreement needs to be modified, but her husband staked all his political capital in ramming it through, helping to hollow out America’s economy and split the Democratic Party for the 1994 Gingrich sweep.

10. Widening the circle: Obviously Obama spurs massive enthusiasm in the young and in the African-American community. I’m also impressed at the range of people turning out to support his campaign. At a Seattle rally I attended, the volunteer state campaign chair had started as Perot activist. The founding coordinator in the state’s second-largest county, a white female Iraq war vet, voted for Bush in 2000 and written in Colin Powell in 2004 before becoming outraged about Iraq “I’ve always leaned conservative,” she said, “but Obama’s announcement speech moved me to tears. The Audacity of Hope made me rethink my beliefs. He inspires me with his honesty and integrity.” As well as inspiring plenty of progressive activists, Obama is engaging people who haven’t come near progressive electoral politics in years.

11. The story we tell: Obama captures people with a narrative about where he wants to take America. His personal story is powerful, but he keeps the emphasis on the ordinary citizens who need to take action to make change. Clinton, in contrast, focuses largely on her personal story, her presumed strengths and travails. Except for the symbolism of having a woman president, it’s a recipe that downplays the possibility of common action for change.

12. Citizen movements matter: Edwards not only ran for president, but worked to build a citizen movement capable of working for change whatever his candidacy’s outcome. Obama has taken a similar approach, beginning when he first organized low-income Chicago communities and coordinated a still-legendary voter registration drive. His speeches consciously encourage his supporters to join together and constitute a force equivalent to the abolitionist, union, suffrage, and civil rights movements. Like Edwards, he’s working to build a movement capable of pushing his policies through the political resistance he will face (and probably of pushing him too if he fails to lead with enough courage). In this context, Clinton’s LBJ/Martin Luther King comparison, and her dismissal of the power of words to inspire people, is all too revealing. She really does believe change comes from knowing how to work the insider levers of power. Edwards and Obama know it takes more.

That’s why this Edwards supporter is proud to do all I can to make Barack Obama the Democratic nominee and president.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News

Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 blog has a very interesting analysis of the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo merger:

The main problem with Microsoft and Yahoo, looking forward, is that they are not web-native companies — they rely on centralized control models, rather than distributed network models — thus they are not aligned with the grain of the web, which is a fundamentally a distributed network.

Microsoft and Yahoo rely on software lock-ins (Windows, Office, IM clients, web mail) to maintain their user bases — but without distributing any of that value to the network or harnessing the value that the network would give back if they did. As such, they do not benefit from network effects, which is precisely what powers Google — and why Google will likely still beat a combined Microsoft/Yahoo.

Jeff Jarvis, in Buzz Machine, also sees a similarity of operational strategies in these two giants:

Yahoo, I’ve long argued, is the last old media company, for it operates on the old-media model: It owns or controls content, markets to bring audience in, then bombards us with ads until we leave. Contrast that with Google, which comes to us with its ads and content and tools, all of which I can distribute on my blog. Yahoo, like media before it, is centralized. Google is distributed.

Maybe I’m thick, but I don’t really see the similarity. I see Yahoo as in many ways much more like Google than like Microsoft–and in many ways, as the precursor to all these Web 2.0 social networks springing up:

  • Yahoo spread virally because it created a much better search experience–as Google did later to overcome it
  • Yahoo has tried over and over again to broaden its offerings and provide one-stop shopping for free, a model which Google emulated
  • Yahoo’s corporate culture is much more Silicon Valley-loosey goosey, while MS is much more of an old-line massive and rigidly structured corporation–more like its original partner IBM (read yahoo exec Tim Sanders’ book, Love is the Killer App, which I reviewed here–scroll down–for a look into Yahoo’s culture)

    I would in fact argue that at least some Yahoo tools offer exactly the same kind of distributed power that Google does. For instance, Yahoo acquired, years ago, the first e-mail discussion group tools that really allowed anyone to set up and run a discussion list or newsletter (egroups, which had recently bought onelist) and rolled them into its own Yahoogroups–one of the few instances in which I find a Yahoo tool superior to Google’s version. How many hundreds of thousands of people are operating–for free–this very powerful and completely decentralized information creation and distribution method that once required a programmer and a pile of money?

    In fact, other than placing ads, I can’t think of anything that Yahoo charges for–whereas MS’s whole model is based on expensive software and forced upgrades.

    One thing all three companies, Microsoft, Yahoo, AND Google, have in common is their desire to aggregate massive amounts of information about their users–which makes me, personally, very nervous.

    Overall, I agree that Google will be the victor–but not for the reasons Karp and Jarvis posit. Google will win because it just provides a much better user experience. Which would you rather search with: Google’s clean, pleasant interface, instant results, and much better ability to return the right pages on the first results page, or Yahoo’s visual bombardment, slower and less accurate results? Most people have chosen Google.

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    By Posted on Posted in Politics

    Well, I never thought I’d see ultra-right and often-bizarre commentator Ann Coulter endorse Hillary Clinton. But Coulter said that if McCain is the GOP nominee, not only would she vote for Hillary, she’d actually go out and campaign for her!

    Apparently the very conservative McCain is not conservative enough for the woman who called John Edwards a faggot–and she sees Clinton as more likely to continue the war, the repressive policies, etc. McCain is no liberal, and he was the one who sang “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”. But Coulter may be right I have no confidence that Hillary will end the war, and that’s a lot of why I’m voting for Obama Tuesday.

    Wonder what Hillary thinks of Coulter’s ‘endorsement.”

    Meanwhile, George Lakoff has a very perceptive column on the real differences between Hillary and Obama–not about issues, on which they’re largely in agreement, but about personality and style. This goes a long way to explain why Hillary, cut off from emotional rapport and drowning in her policy-wonk bathtub, is such a divisive figure–and why Obama has been a much better coalition-builder. Strongly recommended.

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    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Politics

    Warning: I’m about to share a link to something filthy, vile, and disgusting. We all knew that if Obama turned into a serious candidate, as he most certainly has, that the racists would get down and dirty. I already heard William Bennett on the radio talking repeatedly about “Barack Hussein Obama”–and yes, the emphasis was in the original.

    But Alec Baldwin shared a clipping on Huffington Post from his small-town Long Island (NOT Mississippi) newspaper that is incredibly audacious in its hatred–thank you, Alex, for pointing out the barbarism we’re up against. It was written by the publisher of the paper, so don’t expect any firings. But a nice boycott might be in order. And wouldn’t it be nice if the publisher saw fit to enroll in a course on civil rights, ethics, or both?

    I personally find nothing funny in this “satire.”

    For whatever it’s worth, I had planned to endorse Obama in this space anyway, now that Kucinich is out of the race. I hereby endorse him–not because of this racist screed, but because I’d already made the decision (and actually last night authorized my name on a signature ad in our local paper). And I hope when people start to confront the racism of their own neighbors, that he will receive many, many more endorsements.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

    I don’t dip into Alternet as often as I should. But I did today, and I found the juxtaposition of two stories very interesting:

    1. The FBI agent in charge of interrogating Saddam Hussein for seven months says that not only was there no link between Saddam and Al Qaida, but Saddam saw Bin Laden as a dangerous and destablizing force.

    2. Months after the scandal first broke (or is it years), government honchos are still interfering with scientists who try to speak out on climate change.

    These two stories share a pattern: a White House administration that sees truth as an inconvenient obstacle, but one it can easily climb over. See my post earlier today about the 935 documented lies on just one issue, in just two years.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

    While I was still feeling nauseous after the smug hypocrisy and misleading statements that filled last night’s State of the Union address, I followed a link to a study released this week by the well-respected Center for Public Integrity.

    That study documents 935 false statements by the Bush administration just about Iraq, counting only the two years beginning 9/11/01. 259 of these lies were straight from the lips of George W. Bush. That means Bush lied about Iraq (either about WMDs or the imaginary Al Qaida connection) once every 2.8 days–and his administration lied more than once a day.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the last president impeached for telling one single lie, about a personal matter that affected only his immediate family and a few others. Yes, that was wrong. But how much worse is it to tell almost a thousand lies on just this one topic (who knows how many others?), and have on your conscience some 4000 dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, that country in ruins and our own a rogue state that can’t meet its own people’s basic needs, and our reputation as a great nation in tatters.

    Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi, what will it take to convince you that the time is long past to put impeachment back on the table?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics-International, Peace and War, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice

    Throughout history, far more lasting, positive social change has been accomplished through

    nonviolent (though often massive) organizing than through coups, violence, military dictatorships of the left or the right.

    Need examples? Just in my own lifetime, there are many. A few to tickle your memory:

  • The US Civil Rights movement
  • Abolition of apartheid in South Africa
  • The Solidarity movement and the dismantling of the entire Soviet empire
  • Getting the US out of Vietnam

    The skills involved in this kind of organizing are not necessarily intuitive, and if you only look at traditional history sources, they aren’t well documented. However, plenty of people’s history exists, and numerous courageous individuals have spent their lives studying these skills, and building them in others.

    I didn’t know Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, or Dorothy Day–but I have been fortunate to know personally some of the leaders of this movement. The late Dave Dellinger was a personal friend for a few years. And I knew George Lakey and Stephen Zunes when I lived in a nonviolent study and action community in Philadelphia. Stephen and I even collaborated as the principal authors of a paper on future directions for the peace movement.

    I bring this up not to name-drop but to be able to speak from personal experience that these are people of very high integrity.

    So I was a bit shocked to get an e-mail from Stephen calling attention to criticism he and Gene Sharp (author of the definitive analysis of nonviolent social change, The Politics of Nonviolent Action), and others. Apparently, they are being targeted by certain elements of the left who sees them as tools of imperialism–including Hugo chavez of Venezuela.

    Stephen has posted a long rebuttal to this absurd claim on the Foreign Policy in Focus website.

    Stephen points out that the consulting he and other nonviolent activists do focuses on helping democratic opposition to totalitarian groups favored by US government interests, and not on destabilizing governments the US doesn’t like. In fact,

    …The only visit to Venezuela that has taken place on behalf of any of these non-profit groups engaged in educational efforts on strategic nonviolence was in early 2006 when I – along with David Hartsough, the radical pacifist director of Peaceworkers – led a series of workshops at the World Social Forum in Caracas. There we lectured and led discussions on the power of nonviolent resistance as well as offered a series of screenings of a film ICNC helped develop on the pro-democracy movement in Chile against the former U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet. The only reference to Venezuela during those workshops was how massive nonviolent action could be used to resist a possible coup against Chavez, not foment one. In fact, Hartsough and I met with some Venezuelan officials regarding proposals that the government train the population in various methods of nonviolent civil defense to resist any possible future attempts to overthrow Chavez.

    • I very much like Stephen’s analogy of nonviolence training and the appropriate technology/green development movement:

    Just as sustainable agricultural technologies and methods are more effective in meeting human needs and preserving the planet than the conventional development strategies promoted by Western governments, nonviolent action has been shown to be more effective in advancing democratic change than threats of foreign military intervention, backing coup plotters, imposing punitive sanctions, supporting armed rebel groups, and other methods traditionally instigated by the United States and its allies. And just as the application of appropriate technologies can also be a means of countering the damage caused by unsustainable neo-liberal economic models pushed by Western governments and international financial institutions, the use of massive nonviolent action can counter some of the damage resulting from the arms trade, military intervention, and other harmful manifestations of Western militarism.

    Apparently, there will be some kind of action campaign in support of Gene Sharp and others. I Not in the article but in the letter, Zunes writes,

    I’ve recently posted an article which critically examines these claims that popular indigenous pro-democracy struggles and Western nonviolent activists who support them are somehow collaborators with U.S. imperialism… Among the things I address is the irony that so many on the authoritarian left ˆ after years of romanticizing armed struggle as the only way to defeat dictatorships, disparaging the potential of nonviolent action to overthrow repressive governments, and dismissing the notion of a nonviolent revolution — are now expressing their alarm at how successful popular nonviolent insurrections can be, even to the point of naively thinking that they are so easy to pull off that it could somehow be organized from foreign capitals. (One would think that Marxists would recognize that revolutions grow out of objective social conditions…)

    Anyway, I will shortly be sending all of you an open letter in support of Gene Sharp and other folks who do this kind of work I hope you will consider signing on to.

    When I get the link, I’ll post it here.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Peace and War, Politics

    Facing a tough race for his own seat in Congress, Dennis Kucinich is ending his presidential campaign.

    This is very unfortunate. I heard Kucinich speak during the 2004 campaign, happily voted for him in the primary, and was appalled to see the way mainstream media refused to acknowledge his candidacy.

    In fact, Kucinich and the similarly ignored Ron Paul are the only ones to raise any truly visionary ideas in this campaign (unless you count Huckabee’s idea to rewrite the Constitution as a Christian fundamentalist document–ugh!). Kucinich’s platform included single-payer health care, a dramatic shift toward renewable energy, and many other things we progressives have advocated for years–and which the mainstream media cloaks in invisibility, so candidates with something fresh to bring to the table get no coverage, and people have to hear about them through their own personal networks and brave media outlets like Democracy Now.

    I question the ethics of a media empire that decides which candidates we should listen to, sanitizes those remaining, and ducks out on intelligent coverage of real issues. The whole system is deeply broken.

    To me, Kucinich was the first person since George McGovern and Shirley Chisolm that I could vote for with a smile and a light heart, as someone who actually represents my views, and I wasn’t old enough to vote for McGovern.

    He and Ron Paul have been the only ones willing to speak truth to power. Gravel has good politics but he’s been reaaaaly quiet!

    The country is poorer for him being forced out.

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    By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, General Commentary, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life

    Maybe there’s hope for our society. I stopped into Simply Books in the C concourse of Atlanta’s massive Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, not expecting much. After all, most airport bookstores, and even a lot of chain-owned downtown and mall stores lately, cram their shelves with trashy mass-market novels by the likes of Danielle Steel.

    I don’t mind a good yarn; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all the Harry Potter books, Kite Runner, and even the occasional Stephen King–but when I dragged myself through one of Steel’s, I found it one of the most uninteresting and poorly written novels I’d ever encountered.

    This bookstore, despite its very limited shelf space, was great. I saw literally dozens of books I’d have been happy to read–including some you may eventually read about in my monthly review column. In my brief foray, I saw these among others:

  • Giving, by Bill Clinton
  • Gary Hirshberg, founding CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt, writing about socially/environmentally conscious companies
  • The Zookeeper’s Wife, a novelized account of a true family that risked their own lives to hide dozens of Jews in the zoo during the Nazi era
  • About five of Jeffrey Gitomer’s entertaining and acerbic sales books
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns, sequel to Kite Runner
  • Meatball Sundae–the latest unconventional marketing rant from mega-guru Seth Godin

    • It is soooo refreshing to see an ariport store whose buyer values intelligent discourse! (And don’t worry, there were plenty of beach novels, too.

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