Media

The Sliming of Josh Freeman

Dave Zirin — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 22:32:16 +0000

Would the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their head coach Greg Schiano leak confidential information that implied one of their own players was on drugs as a way to deflect attention from another wretched season? Schiano says “absolutely not.” But the facts point in the direction of him or his staff, and the facts are ugly as hell.

Quarterback Josh Freeman is officially in “stage one” of the NFL’s drug testing program. That means he voluntarily entered. He did so as a way to show league officials that the one time he tested positive for a banned substance, a prescription medication for ADHD, it was a one-time mistake. By electing for stage one, Freeman’s involvement is supposed to be confidential. So confidential in fact that even his team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is not supposed to know that he had entered the program. It means he had been tested forty-six times over the last eighteen months for every possible substance and passed every time.

But Josh Freeman, in high-profile fashion, is on the outs in Tampa Bay. After a dazzling beginning to his career, Freeman has withered in recent years. Following a 0-3 start in which he didn’t complete 50 percent of his passes, Freeman’s relationship with head coach Schiano would be best described as “cyanogenic.” But it is hard to think of any quarterback, or any human who could mesh with the tyrannical, browbeating former Rutgers coach.

Schiano is the sort of person who thinks heading up a football team means you need to act like an amalgam of General Patton and Chet from Weird Science. He is not only barely holding onto his job. He is barely holding onto a team that has had multiple meetings about how much they hate his style, his play-calling and pretty much everything short of his haircut. Benching Freeman is a way to deflect attention from his own epic failure as coach and be given time to break in Freeman’s backup, a raw rookie third-round draft pick named Mike Glennon.

After his benching, Freeman demanded a trade, and the team clearly wants to oblige and get as much as they can in return. But alas, there is a tension. While upper management wants to maximize Freeman’s value, those in tenuous positions of power on the Bucs—like the gobsmacking twenty-six assistant coaches on staff—have an incentive to make Josh Freeman to look as cancerous as possible. Someone connected to the team released information to ESPN’s “NFL insider” Chris Mortensen, who, in a manner far closer to Judith Miller than Glenn Greenwald, dutifully reported the leak that Freeman was in “stage one” of the drug program, while leaving out that he was reporting confidential information or the nature of the drugs involved. Immediately the rumors started to swirl and the sliming was underway.

This is exactly why sports unions take such pains—despite all the slings and arrows from the media, politicians and owners that they are “soft” on drugs—to protect players from abuses in how drug testing is administered. It is why they fight for ironclad confidentiality clauses for first offenders and an independent appeals process. They do it to protect players from having their reputations tarred from false positives. But even more significantly, they simply do not trust those in management to not use drug testing as a form of leverage against players. In other words, they believe that, left to their own devices, owners and coaches will treat players the way the Bucs are treating Josh Freeman.

I was able to get through to NFL Player’s Association executive director DeMaurice Smith after he visited Tampa Bay in an already scheduled visit as part of the routine rounds of the union. He said, “We always protect player rights with vigilance. A breach of confidentiality is one of those instances where the league should agree with us on a zero tolerance policy.” Smith is clearly challenging NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to treat this as a serious league violation. Goodell, who has liked to present himself as a Eastwood-esque sheriff when dealing with player misconduct, should treat this with the same seriousness. The smart money says he will not. When it comes to players, Goodell is Eastwood. When it comes to disciplining management, he is more like the empty chair.

As for Josh Freeman, he had to issue a hastily composed comment last night addressing the rumors that he was in some sort of rehab. He describes the vague leaking of confidential information as a case of being “publicly violated.” People should read his full statement. This is someone who has been grievously wronged.

Whether or not you are a fan of Tampa Bay, the Bucs or even football, you should care about this issue. Drug testing and a complete absence of what can now quaintly be called “privacy” has become normalized in the American workplace. The idea that someone with a union contract that guarantees some basic protections can have his confidentiality treated like toilet paper is alarming. The idea that the Bucs could get away with this on the largest possible media platform is enraging. The idea that Greg Schiano can plead ignorance and only say, “I know what I’ve done, and I’m 100% comfortable with my behavior” and when pressed, “I’m not at liberty to comment on that,” is a joke. He should be saying that he will find out who violated his player’s privacy and discipline them. Anything short of that are grounds for dismissal. If the Bucs owners won’t do it, the league should step in. If the league won’t step in, an already angry Bucs team should just walk out. The Tampa Bay organization under Schiano has become the worst kind of laughingstock: the kind that isn’t funny.

Bill de Blasio Hits Back at Joe Lhota’s ‘Commie’ Charge

Leslie Savan — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 18:59:14 +0000

Left, an August 6, 2013, file photo, of New York Republican mayoral hopeful Joe Lhota, and right a September 10, 2013, file photo of New York City Democratic mayoral hopeful Bill de Blasio. (AP Photo)

After more than a week of being painted as a commie and worse, Bill de Blasio hit back yesterday against his opponent in the NYC mayor’s race with: TOP 10 FACTS ABOUT JOE LHOTA’S ICON, EXTREME CONSERVATIVE BARRY GOLDWATER. Those include Goldwater’s infamous vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, wanting to use nukes in Vietnam, and his infamous maxim: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” And the de Blasio camp didn’t even get to the John Birch Society championing Sen. Goldwater in his presidential run against LBJ in 1964.

The ugly tit-for-tat began last week, when The New York Times detailed de Blasio’s support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s. That spawned an outbreak of innuendo—that he somehow supported the Sandinistas’ alleged anti-Semitism (a charge designed to cut into the Democrat’s Jewish vote), that he was a “bleary, dreary”-eyed druggie in college, that he was an unreconstructed commie symp. “Mr. de Blasio’s class warfare strategy in New York City,” Lhota himself said, “is directly out of the Marxist playbook. Now we know why.”

It took a while, but yesterday the Times ran a profile of the young Joe Lhota. In college, he spent “nights in the gallery of the United States Senate, where he sat rapt as Mr. Goldwater, his boyhood hero, orated on the floor.” Lhota, the Times noted, was also accepted into “a right-leaning summer boot camp for undergraduates” that was “the brainchild of a group of conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr.”

(De Blasio could as well have run the Top 10 Facts about Buckley, including his support for Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he called “a prophet,” his admiration for dictators, like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, and his notion of the “cultural superiority of white over Negro.”)

Yes, this sort of guilt by association is absurd. Because even though Lhota says, “I still am a virulent anti-communist,” and de Blasio still finds elements of democratic socialism appealing, in truth Lhota is no more a Bircher or white supremacist than de Blasio is a fellow traveler or anti-Semite.

And at first de Blasio shunned the whole approach. “It’s 2013. I’d like to note, I’m not going to stoop to Joe Lhota’s level here,” he said. “I am a progressive who believes in an activist approach to government. You can call it whatever the heck you want.”

But de Blasio has been forced to hit back; the media was keeping him on the defense, chasing him, asking did he ever agree with Marxism, why’d he honeymoon in Cuba? Even allies in the press wanted to know, was his support for the Sandinistas merely a “youthful indiscretion,” as someone at a New Yorker lunch asked him. “No, it’s not a youthful indiscretion,” he said, refusing to take the cowardly way out. “The reason I got involved, was because of United States foreign policy.”

But for some reason, the press isn’t on Lhota’s tail to explain his adulation of Goldwater, much less are they grilling him on if we should we nuke Syria or whether he’d vote against the Civil Rights Act (not a far-fetched question given the Supreme Court’s gutting of section 4 of the Voting Rights Act). The Times certainly didn’t ask him such questions, nor would it occur to most reporters to do so.

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This is a case of the media not making false equivalencies but habitually failing to notice actual equivalencies. Politicians’ involvement in left-wing causes stimulates media hormones more than the right-wing ones do. Partly that’s because the center has moved rightward. But even if it hadn’t, America’s red-baiting, McCarthyite past still has the power to taint.

For whatever reason, ventures into lefty world are treated like a dirty bad act, and they produce a kind of slut-shaming. Maybe the body politic needs to believe that it contains something just too awful to fully accept.

De Blasio may become not just NYC’s most progressive mayor but the first big-name pol to break that bleary, dreary mindset.

Read John Nichols’s post on the ideological differences between de Blasio and current mayor Mike Bloomberg.

‘NYT’ Fingers McClatchy for ‘Terror’ Leak—and Now McClatchy Hits Back

Greg Mitchell — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:02:26 +0000

(AP/Mark Lennihan)

Yesterday morning the top story at the New York Times site reported on US analysts feeling that the early-August leak to the media on how Al Qaeda communicates had done more to harm our anti-terrorism effort than anything revealed by Edward Snowden. You remember: we briefly closed some of our embassies, for starters.

And the Times quickly recounted how it refused to publish the names that were key in the information, at the request of the government, and only did so after our security folks had given them clearance—after the McClatchy news outlet went with it.

The communication intercepts between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi revealed what American intelligence officials and lawmakers have described as one of the most serious plots against American and other Western interests since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It prompted the closing of 19 United States Embassies and consulates for a week, when the authorities ultimately concluded that the plot focused on the embassy in Yemen.

McClatchy Newspapers first reported on the conversations between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi on Aug. 4. Two days before that, the New York Times agreed to withhold the identities of the Qaeda leaders after senior American intelligence officials said the information could jeopardize their operations. After the government became aware of the McClatchy article, it dropped its objections to the Times’s publishing the same information, and the newspaper did so on Aug. 5.

This was a rather serious claim against rival McClatchy, so I awaited some kind of response. Now McClatchy hits back at the Times in this report.

For example: “McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher said: ‘We believe that if the Yemenis knew that the United States had intercepted conversations between two al Qaida honchos, Americans should as well.’” More:

Ever since that report, the Times article said, terrorists had stopped using “a major communications channel” that U.S. officials had been monitoring and that intelligence officials “have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaida’s leaders and operatives.”

Asher, in a statement, said that in the nearly two months since McClatchy had published its story, no U.S. agency has contacted the newspaper company about the article or has asked any questions about the origins of the story.

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“Multiple sources inside and outside of the Yemeni government confirmed our reporting and not one of them told us not to publish the facts,” Asher said.

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert and the author of “The Last Refuge,” a book on al Qaida in Yemen, backed Asher’s assessment, saying that he had been told before the McClatchy report that Zawahiri and Wuhayshi were the two men who’d been monitored and that many people in Yemen knew the details of the communication. Johnsen had made a similar statement to McClatchy in early August.

“The idea that the identities of Wuhayshi and Zawahiri are responsible for the difficulties the U.S. is having in tracking al Qaida and AQAP is laughable,” Johnsen said Monday, referring to the Yemen al Qaida affiliate by its initials. “The U.S. publicly closed 19 embassies, the participation of Wuhayshi and Zawahiri was well known in Yemen. I was told about it prior to McClatchy publishing it. And once the leaks start from the U.S. government they can be hard to stop or to control.”

Robert Scheer explores the differences between state-sanctioned leaks and those from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.

Hollywood, Hitler and Harvard

Jon Wiener — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 19:36:31 +0000

(Courtesy of Youtube user Harvard University Press)

It doesn’t happen very often that a leading critic calls on a university press to withdraw and then reissue a corrected version of a scholarly book. But it’s happening now—the book is The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, by Ben Urwand; the publisher is Harvard University Press, and the critic is David Denby of The New Yorker, who said in a radio interview with me, “I have called for Harvard University Press to withdraw it and get him to rework it.”

Urwand claims to show “for the first time” what he calls a “bargain” made in the 1930s between the Hollywood studios, headed mostly by Jews, and “Adolf Hitler, the person and human being.” The “bargain” was that the studios “followed the instructions of the German consul in Los Angeles,” changed film scripts and cut scenes the Nazi official objected to, and cancelled planned anti-Nazi films—in exchange for continuing to distribute films and make money in Germany.

Denby reviewed the book and wrote a follow-up blog post, agreeing with Urwand that Hollywood was timid and cowardly in responding to the rise of Hitler, but calling the book “recklessly misleading.” Other reviewers have made similar criticisms. Even some of those thanked by Urwand in his acknowledgements are criticizing the book. David Thomson is perhaps our greatest film writer, author of the indispensable Biographical Dictionary of American Film and more than a dozen other wonderful books, and film critic for The New Republic. He told me “there are quite a lot of ways in which one can find fault with the book.” He described “mistakes and misjudgments,” and “a certain recklessness in the book and that’s not been kindly served by the publisher.”

The problem for Thomson, Denby and others starts with the book’s title: The Collaboration. There is a huge scholarly literature on “collaboration and resistance” in World War II. Typical topic: “the French: bystanders or collaborators?” A collaborator, according to the Cambridge dictionary, is “a person who works with an enemy who has taken control of their country.” Urwand knows this, but insists his title is okay because he found the German word for “collaboration” in the Nazi documents from the 1930s describing their relationship with Hollywood studios. That doesn’t work. “This is not a case of collaboration in any sense of the word,” Thomson concluded. “It was a mistake to call the book that.”

The second problem comes with the book’s subtitle: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. There were two notorious “pacts” with Hitler—the Munich pact of 1938, where the French and British let Hitler have his way with Czechoslovakia, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, where the two agreed not to go to war and instead divided up Poland. It’s wrong to use the same term to describe the actions of Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and the others.

Urwand told me in an e-mail that the criticism of his book has been so strong “because this material is so new and so shocking.” But his critics have said precisely the opposite: Although Urwand has provided a great deal of new documentation, the story he tells is one we already know. Urwand claims to “reveal” for “the first time” the close cooperation between the Hollywood studios and the Nazi government, but several books have already done that, most recently Hollywood and Hitler, by Thomas Doherty, published by Columbia University Press in April 2013. As The New York Times Book Review explained, Doherty shows that “Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at the time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,” and that “a great majority of American studios went out of their way to avoid any mention of the ominous political developments in Germany from the moment of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until well into 1939.” They also backed away from depicting anti-Semitism or indeed any Jewish subject matter. Doherty shows how the key figure for the studios was the German consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling. The motivation of the studio heads, as the Times Book Review put it, was “largely commercial”—they “did not want to risk the loss of a major European market by offending Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, whose censors decided which foreign films would be shown in Germany.”

Doherty relied primarily on the trade press, while Urwand did massive archival work. His book includes sixty-five pages of endnotes, reporting on his research in five German archives and a dozen more in the US, including much more on Gyssling than Doherty found. But what he documents is basically the same story. Thomson told me, “It’s true that a lot of Hollywood was cowardly, compromising, opportunistic, looking out for its own interest. But why be surprised about that? That’s the nature of Hollywood. There’s a way in which the book is unduly outraged by things that a more experienced Hollywood commentator would understand as being part of the system.”

Another problem for Urwand: the leading Jewish defense organizations urged the studios not to make movies about anti-Semitism or Hitler. Urwand acknowledges that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee both urged the studio heads not to make films that might lead people to blame the Jews for fomenting another war. Thus greed and cowardice were not the only motives.

Urwand writes as if the main source of pressure on the studios to change scripts and kill projects came from Gyssling, the Nazi consul, but as Doherty shows, the more insistent demands for changes came from the Production Code Administration, the “Hays Office,” headed by Joseph I. Breen, a prominent Catholic layman--Denby calls him an anti-Semite, but Doherty disagrees. Breen insisted that anti-Nazi material be cut from films, citing a statement in the code that “all nations shall be represented fairly.” Sometimes Breen responded to letters from Gyssling, but more often he acted on his own. Urwand replies that the Hays Office was a creation of the studios, which is true, and he suggests that the studio heads could have replaced Breen if they wanted. That however is hard to imagine; would these Jews really fire a prominent Catholic because they wanted to make pro-Jewish films?

And it wasn’t just the Nazis that Hollywood was cooperating with. The studios submitted to censorship from all kinds of people all the time, as Doherty and others have shown, to hold on to audiences in particular foreign countries and also in the United States. Films were cut or altered at the request of the British, the French and even the Japanese; and also in response to demands in the US from Catholic groups, temperance groups, women’s groups, and local censorship boards in places like Chicago and Kansas City. The film studios were not in the business of protecting the First Amendment rights of artists; their number-one concern was to avoid offense to anyone.

The more original parts of Urwand’s book have gotten the harshest criticism. Urwand describes the film Our Daily Bread, directed by King Vidor, as a “Hollywood movie that delivered a National Socialist message.” Denby points out that it was in fact a left-wing film that the Nazis liked for their own peculiar reasons. Urwand’s “treatment of the King Vidor film is very misguided,” Thomson said.

Thomson also cited the conclusion of the book as especially problematic. Urwand told The New York Times that the only time he ever shouted in an archive was when he found documents showing that Jack Warner and other studio heads took a Rhine cruise in July 1945 on Hitler’s yacht. What exactly was Urwand shouting about? Hitler, of course, was dead by that point, and the war in Europe was over; their host was General George Marshall. The studio heads had not only visited the Rhine but also the death camp at Dachau. “They had seen firsthand one of the sites where the murder of the Jews had taken place,” Urwand writes. But after returning to the US, “they did not put it on the screen.” That’s the last thing in his book. So even when there was no more money to be made by collaborating with Hitler, the Jews who ran the studios still didn’t expose his crimes against their people! “The boat trip at the end is really kind of fatuous,” Thomson says. “It makes the book seem more reckless than it might be.”

Urwand also makes a mistake historians are supposed to avoid: instead of exploring the historical context around his central characters, he judges them by what we subsequently learned. Yes, the studio heads failed to see that the Holocaust was coming. But as Doherty has written, in the 1930s “the Nazis had not yet become what they are now: a universal emblem for absolute evil. From our perspective, the rise of Nazism looks like a linear trajectory, a series of accelerating events terminating inevitably at the gates of Auschwitz. But at the time, the endgame of Nazism was not so clear. Most Americans, including the Hollywood moguls, had no inkling of the horrors to come.”

There’s a deeper issue for some of the critics. People like Denby object to the book in part because it comes close to arguing that the Jews who ran Hollywood were so greedy they would cooperate with Hitler himself, selling out their own people to make money. It’s an age-old anti-Semitic trope. Urwand, perhaps anticipating this theme, emphasizes his status as the child of Jewish refugees from anti-Semitism. At his website he describes himself as “the son of Jewish immigrants: his father was forced to leave Cairo, Egypt in 1956, and his mother fled Budapest, Hungary the same year.” He also says that, as an undergrad at the University of Sydney, he “won the prize for best history thesis for his work on Steven Spielberg and Schindler’s List.”

The book does have at least two significant supporters. Harvard published the book with quotes on the back cover from Greil Marcus and Richard J. Evans. Marcus has written many well-known and much-admired books on American popular culture, including one on the film The Manchurian Candidate. He is described by Urwand in his acknowledgements as the person who “guided me from the moment I first stumbled upon materials in the archives,” and as someone who “has been unbelievably generous and constantly inspiring.” Marcus told me he did not want to add anything to his statement on the jacket, where he describes the book as “a tremendous piece of work, fully sustained, building momentum charged by thrillingly detailed storytelling, increasing suspense, and a consistent movement from outrages to atrocities, with a stunning conclusion of heroism and tragedy.”

Evans, who has written what is widely regarded as the definitive history of Germany in World War II, is quoted on the jacket praising the book as “full of startling and surprising revelations, presented…without any moralizing or sensationalism.” But “moralizing and sensationalism” are exactly what many critics found in the book. When I asked Evans what he thought of the critics’ arguments, he replied that he had reviewed the manuscript for the press; “I have read David Denby’s critique,” he said, “and others as well. I am not in any way convinced by them. If you read them carefully, they are either so general and rhetorical as to carry no conviction, or they pick up extremely minor points that in no way affect the overall argument.” He concluded that Urwand had written “an oustanding work of scholarship that should provide cause for reflection, not prompt knee-jerk reactions from people who are intelligent enough to know better.”

But it’s hard to find supporters of the book among other historians who study the subject. The Hollywood Reporter described Deborah Lipstadt, the award-winning Holocaust historian at Emory, as a “prominent defender” of Urwand in the controversy, citing her quote in The New York Times that the book “could be a blockbuster.” But she made it clear in that interview that she had not yet read the book—and she told me it is not correct to describe her as a “defender” of Urwand’s work.

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I e-mailed six Berkeley faculty members thanked by Urwand in his acknowledgements, asking for their comments on the criticisms of the book. Waldo Martin and Anton Kaes did not respond. Kathleen Moran said she had not read the book. Urwand’s dissertation committee consisted of Leon Litwack, a leading historian of African-Americans (see update with comment from Litwack below), and Carol Clover, who has written a book on horror films, and who said she could not comment because she had not read the published book. The only one who defended Urwand was Martin Jay—he’s a distinguished intellectual historian and scholar of visual culture. He raised the issue of what he called “the time-dishonored anti-Semitic trope” of the greedy Jew. “Ben was aware of this issue,” Jay wrote, “but felt his evidence led him to those very conclusions.” Jay called Denby’s pieces “over-the-top,” especially what he called “the silliness of saying it was a scandal that a university press like Harvard didn’t check facts, as if this were a function of university press staffs.” Jay acknowledged that Denby raised two “valid questions”: “the 20-20 hindsight issue: the moguls were still unaware of the true nature of Nazi anti-Semitism,” and the fact of “Jewish anxiety over playing into the hands of American anti-Semites who were looking for any opportunity to blame the Jews for wanting another war.” But, he said, Urwand’s “evidence suggests there was more to the story.”

There is one possible source of the problem identified by both Denby and Thomson as the “recklessness” of the book: Harvard University Press took the unusual step of hiring an outside publicist, Goldberg McDuffie, to promote what had started as a Berkeley history PhD thesis. Goldberg McDuffie represents best-selling authors as well as companies like Amazon, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Some have suggested that the exaggerated claims for the book’s “collaboration” thesis are the work of the big-time publicist and a publisher eager for a bestseller, rather than the mild-mannered author. Thomson says Urwand was not served well by the press, and that the problems in the book could easily have been solved by an editor. “If you had a much more moderate title,” he said, “straightaway the book would have slipped into a different position.”

Other scholars who have faced intense and widespread criticism of their books have responded to critics with long detailed essays, sometimes in scholarly journals—for example David Abraham on German business and the Nazis, and Daniel Goldhagen on the Catholic Church and the Nazis. Urwand in contrast has written a five-paragraph letter to The New Yorker, only part of which was published in the magazine. His published letter restated his argument for using “collaboration” as his title. In the four paragraphs the magazine did not publish, but which he sent to me, he noted that the Hayes office was a representative of the film industry, and took up a couple of lesser issues, including how the studios got their money out of Germany. His published letter concluded, “It is time to face the actions of the Hollywood studios.” He told me he has no plans for any further response to his critics.

In the meantime, History News Network, a widely read website, polled historians on Denby’s proposal, asking, “Should Harvard University Press conduct a review of ‘The Collaboration’?” As of this writing (September 30), 62 percent said “yes,” with ninety-one people voting, and only 33 percent said “no.”

The director of Harvard University Press, William P. Sisler, has made it clear they’re not going to do that, and in fact the only books that get withdrawn by the publishers have authors who are guilty of massive research errors, systematic fraud or plagiarism. I know of only one scholarly book by a historian that has been withdrawn and reissued: Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis, by David Abraham, withdrawn by Princeton in 1984 after Abraham conceded his footnotes contained significant errors, and republished in a corrected version in 1986 by Holmes and Meier. (That story is told in my book Historians in Trouble.)

But even if you set aside Denby’s proposal and arguments, you still have Jeanine Basinger’s judgment. She’s a distinguished historian of film who teaches at Wesleyan, and her review, in The Wall Street Journal, concluded that Urwand’s book “clamors for attention and makes sensation out of facts that film historians have already weighed.” In addition, “he has judged the past from the informed awareness of the present, elevating the bad judgment and greed of individuals into actual political collaboration. His book does not prove it.” That seems right to me.
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UPDATE Oct. 1: Berkeley historian Leon Litwack writes, "Ben was my student and I supervised the dissertation. He impressed me from the very outset. The depth and quality of the research, the imaginative and critical powers he brought to the book, the resources he uncovered, the literary skills he demonstrated place the book at the top of the scholarship on the subject. I am hardly surprised at the controversy it has generated. Hollywood's record on the African American experience speaks for itself."

Media Coverage of Shutdown Threat: A Journalistic ‘Disgrace’

Greg Mitchell — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 13:33:29 +0000

(AP/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Probably the smartest thing I read all weekend on the pending government shutdown, and the debt ceiling crisis, came from James Fallows. And, courtesy of the often laughable (and dangerous) Washington Post editorial section, we get yet another example in this parade of disgrace this morning.

At his Atlantic blog, Fallow slammed media for once again practicing “false equivalence,” but does provide links to a few folks who have gotten it right (see below). Read the whole thing as he traces a historic fiasco we haven’t seen in decades, maybe over a century. Here’s an excerpt:

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a “standoff,” a “showdown,” a “failure of leadership,” a sign of “partisan gridlock,” or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement, represents a failure of journalism and an inability to see or describe what is going on….This isn’t “gridlock.” It is a ferocious struggle within one party, between its traditionalists and its radical factions, with results that unfortunately can harm all the rest of us—and, should there be a debt default, could harm the rest of the world too…

In case the point is not clear yet: there is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored. If someone can think of a precedent after the era of John C. Calhoun, let me know.

Today the Post published this editorial drivel:

Ultimately, the grown-ups in the room will have to do their jobs, which in a democracy with divided government means compromising for the common good. That means Mr. Boehner, his counterpart in the Senate, Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), minority leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the president. Both sides are inordinately concerned with making sure that, if catastrophe comes, the other side takes the political hit. In truth, none of their reputations stands to benefit.

Of course, we get ths kind of “analysis” from Politico all the time, but thankfully here’s Roger Simon, today under the title (with a Beatles reference?), “The Frauds on the Hill Target Obama”:

And since when did the extremists in Congress care about the will of the people? Is it the will of the people that government be closed, salaries stopped, services suspended?

Slyness and game-playing rule the day. Having lost the vote on Obamacare, the extremists and those who fear them will vote to cut off the funding of government unless Obamacare is suspended. And then they will try to force the United States to default on its debt.

Not because they wish to do the will of the people, but because they wish to thwart the will of the people.

And when, in those rare moments, they decide to earn their salaries of $174,000 per year (plus expenses, plus perks, plus pensions) and actually pass a bill, what do they do? The week before last, the House voted to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program over the next 10 years.

It voted to deny people food.

And stop for presses for this:

At 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, POLITICO congressional reporter Ginger Gibson tweeted: “I’m not over exaggerating when I say I can smell the booze wafting from members as they walk off the floor.”

What is the old joke? “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.”

Some of our lawmakers appear to be having both.

Dave Weigel of Slate just posted an excellent debunking of GOP claims that the Dems have been just as bad in the past in holding debt ceiling increases hostage. For updates on the shutdown see my daily blog Pressing Issues.

And here are those valuable links courtesy of Fallows:

For examples of coverage that plainly states what is going on, here is a small sampling: Greg Sargent, Derek Thompson, John Gilmour (on why Ronald Reagan believed in compromise), Jonathan Rauch, Brian Beutler, Jonathan Chait, Andrew Sullivan (also here), Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas, Dan Froomkin. On today’s Diane Rehm show News Roundup, panelists Ruth Marcus, Janet Hook, and Todd Purdum all said with a bluntness unusual for a D.C.-based talk show that we are witnessing the effects not of gridlock but of one party’s internal crisis.

Read John Nichols on the looming government shutdown and DC statehood.

Who Is the Walter White of the Sports World? The Answer Is Obvious

Dave Zirin — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 22:45:33 +0000

World famous Tour de France champion and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, now infamous for prolonged steroid use, during a December 2007 USO tour in Iraq. (Wikimedia Commons)

I have spent the last several days in a Breaking Bad fever dream, asking myself, “Who is the Walter White/Heisenberg of the sports world?” I am very aware that I couldn’t come up with a hackier First Take–style question unless I was asking what sports commissioner is most like Miley Cyrus. Yet when a piece of popular art speaks to our age of collective dread as perceptively as Breaking Bad, it is worth maxing out its usage as a lens before the next shiny pop culture bauble draws our attention.

Before I posit who I believe the Walter White of the sports world to be, I should be upfront about what I think to be his defining characteristics.

Walter White is someone:

1) Who has undeniable, outlier-level abilities.

2) Whose skills are exceeded only by his self-regard.

3) Who falls and falls down hard, in a manner best described as “squalid.”

4) Who justifies his actions under a cloak of nauseating self-righteousness.

5) Who has a legitimate beef with the twenty-first-century America that has shaped his range of choices.

Using these criteria, the mind immediately floats toward athletes the public loves to hate: the sorts of iconic figures who could credibly re-enact this scene from Scarface.

First, the obvious anabolic antiheroes spring to mind: Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez: people who hit the heights and then had a great fall. But how far did they really fall? Walter White’s story is ending as badly as anyone not named Prometheus. Bonds and Clemens have boundless fortunes and even in some circles, their reputations. Barry Bonds is still beloved in San Francisco and recognized, even by the most militant anti-steroid furies, as one of the best all-round players in history. Roger Clemens beat prison and was even an honored guest in Houston this past weekend for Andy Pettitte’s last game.

A-Rod, despite his wealth, does not look like he will emerge with any kind of fan base. But Walter White could be incredibly cunning. A-Rod has shown none of the cleverness, self-righteousness, or defiance of Breaking Bad’s protagonist, his face an expressionless mask. As a pulsing, malevolent presence, A-Rod has been more Hannah Montana than Tony Montana.

Lastly, PEDs and PEDs alone are in my humble view not enough to make you a Walter White. To take them is a decision athletes make with themselves, not something they are pushing upon others. The individual steroid user, in my mind, just doesn’t cut it.

What about a real criminal, someone like O.J. Simpson? OJ is closer to our Heisenberg: two people undone by ego, with Walter White’s “accidental” display of Leaves of Grass the equivalent of O.J.’s If I Did It book. The difference, of course, is that OJ was not trying to reach some kind of distorted American Dream that night in Brentwood. There was no pot of gold, no justifications that he was doing it for family. O.J. has been left with only his infamy and claims of innocence. Say what you will about Walter White’s aria of self-delusion, he never said to Hank, “But if I was going to cook up blue-meth, here is how I’d do it.”

There can be only one Walter White of the sports world, and it has to be Lance Armstrong. Most obviously, you have “the big C” cancer, as a handy narrative starting point and fail-safe justification for the slew of poor decisions that followed. Armstrong was no run-of-the-mill steroid user either. There is considerable evidence that Armstrong was not just someone who used PEDs in a sport swimming in them. He managed a team of cyclists and, according to testimony taken under oath, he insisted they partake, bullying, manipulating or just threatening anyone who didn’t. This is pure Walter White, corrupting those closest to him whether willingly (Skylar) or unwillingly (paying for Hank’s rehab with meth money). In those good times, before the ship was sinking, both also had comical mouthpieces, with ESPN’s Rick Reilly in the role of Saul Goodman.

There is a more heartbreaking parallel as well. Both were idolized by people with physical challenges who were devastated by the truth. Even in our cynical times, Lance Armstrong truly hurt the cancer survivors who believed his years of denials, including those in my family who have worn the yellow bracelet. That is personified in Walter’s son Flynn, born with cerebral palsy, who went from revering to hating this father in the time it took to slash a knife through the air.

But the most critical parallel is that Lance Armstrong like Walter White had every reason to look at this country and find justifications for getting his piece of the American Dream by any means necessary. The hardscrabble Texas son of a single mom who worked as a cashier at Kroger’s was going to fight his way out, Old West-style, in the face of impossible odds. The chemistry teacher with a baby on the way, cancer in his body and no means to leave his family anything but hospital bills looked out at his own pitiless Western landscape and grabbed the only bootstrap available.

As much as we demonize Walter White or Lance Armstrong, their crimes are both at end a function of the far more destructive, lethal and lucrative war on drugs. From the private prison profiteers, to the firearms manufacturers, to the pharmaceutical lobbyists and USADA government agents spending millions in tax dollars investigating retired athletes, there are far more important people to focus upon than the Walter Whites and Lance Armstrongs of the world. In a sane universe, their own moral failings would matter far less than he structures that produce them. We find them compelling precisely because it is so much easier to focus on the man who knocks than on why the door itself can feel so very paper-thin.

Bill de Blasio Hurls the ‘NY Post’ Into a Time Warp

Leslie Savan — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 21:14:03 +0000

(Screengrab from nypost.com)

Since Sunday, when The New York Times published a cover story about Bill de Blasio’s 1988 trip to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine, and noted his admiration for the Sandinistas, the right-wing press has been salivating: in the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor they think they finally have the “socialist” that they could only pretend Obama was.

And there’s a bonus: They can also get Bill de Blasio to play the Bill Ayers role. As a New York Post headline put it, “Obama to meet Sandinista-supporting de Blasio.”

Although the Times piece dug up details on de Blasio’s youthful non-indiscretions, none of it is truly “news” (as the Times’s Michael Powell later not>ed; nor was it hidden (de Blasio spoke publicly about his time in Nicaraguan just last December). But the Postis excitedly fishing with every bit of red-bait they can muster, no matter how much it may embarrass them.

The virulently anti-union tabloid has even had to make like they support unions. In “de Blasio’s beloved Nicaragua,” the Post writes (going on to quote the human-rights watchdog group Freedom House), “Employees have reportedly been dismissed for union activities, and citizens have no effective recourse when labor laws are violated by those in power.” Those may sound like the tactics of the right’s beloved governors Scott Walker (Wisconsin) and John Kasich (Ohio), but the chance to spark suspicion trumps principle every time.

Recounting the radical acts the young de Blasio was capable of, the Post says, “He also castigated the operators of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor—three years after the accident—for being ‘ignorant.’”

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The implication is not only that the operators didn’t deserve such harsh words, but that de Blasio failed to deliver them in a timely manner—something the Post, without a hint of irony, is reporting on three decades after the offense.

But by far the most embarrassing thing the Post has published (maybe ever) is a time-warped attempt to cast the college-age de Blasio as a druggy hippie and part of the “activist set.”

Far out, man—I might be your mayor soon.

City Hall hopeful Bill de Blasio was a much scruffier dude back in his college days, with a hairdo almost as distinctive as son Dante’s Afro, a beard to match and a far-away gaze.

This NYU yearbook photo…indicates that ties were not in style among the school’s activist set.

De Blasio was quite the whippersnapper, let me tell you.

But luckily, his Republican rival, Joe Lhota, provides a glimpse of his yearbook photo in this ad, and the Post should have nothing to complain about.

‘The Guardian’ Posts Shocking Video on H-Bomb That Nearly Exploded in North Carolina

Greg Mitchell — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 17:42:50 +0000

US nuclear weapons test, October 31, 1952. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/National Nuclear Security Administration)

A few days back I covered the new book on nuclear weapons accidents and near-accidents in the US by Eric Schlosser, Command and Control. This was quickly followed by the release of a document, via The Guardian, proving how close we really came—i.e., very—to a detonation in North Carolina in 1961 that could have killed millions on the East Coast.

A fallout map tracing the likely path of the radiation was even published.

Now The Guardian, also via Schlosser, posted today an “official” video from the Sandia labs (see below) that documents the accident, along with this story. The video also mentions other accidents.

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Of course, the near-miss was kept hidden from Americans for years—and how close we came until this day. Sclosser tells The Guardian that the significance of the video was that it “conclusively establishes that the Sandia weapons lab itself was concerned about the risk of accidental detonation. Their own experts said that disaster was prevented by a single switch that they knew to be defective.” And see my book and ebook Atomic Cover-up.

Read Greg Mitchell’s article on the anniversary of the “Atomic Plague” cover-up.

California Governor Signs Domestic Worker Bill of Rights

Laura Flanders — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 23:23:28 +0000

(Reuters/Luke MacGregor)

Early Thursday afternoon on the West Coast, Governor Jerry Brown tweeted a message: “Today, I signed a bill to help California’s domestic workers.”

Just sixty characters, the governor’s announcement brought Ai Jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance to tears: “Cannot stop crying tears of joy & pride. After 7 years of hard work & two vetoes, finally a victory for domestic workers in CA”, tweeted Poo.

The California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights will make California the third state in the nation with a bill of rights for domestic workers. (A similar law took effect in New York State in November 2010. Hawaii’s Governor Abercrombie signed a domestic workers bill of rights this summer.) Enforcement is always an issue, but should it be implemented as intended, California’s new law will finally provide overtime pay to an estimated 200,000 California housekeepers, child care providers and caregivers when they work more than nine hours in a day or forty-five hours a week.

“Domestic workers are primarily women of color, many of them immigrants, and their work has not been respected in the past,” said Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), who wrote the bill. “Now, they will be entitled to overtime, like just about every other California working person.”

A slightly broader version of Ammiano’s bill passed last year, only to be vetoed by the governor. What made the difference?

“Last year was hard. Getting up the next day was really difficult,” said Laphonza Butler, president of the SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, about the governor's veto last September. The SEIU ULCW was part of the broad coalition that worked with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the California Domestic Workers Coalition both years. This year's bill was known as AB 241.

For all the tweeting on announcement day, it wasn’t short-form social media so much as hard-slog footwork and long-term coalition building that turned things around in 2013, Butler said. “What made the difference was a lot of community and worker activity that made the governor realize we’ve got to do something about an economy that keeps workers in poverty.”

Finances came in too. A year ago, Governor Brown was focused on solving the state’s deficit. Frustrated as they were by the vetoing of their bill, the coalition behind the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights put their person-power behind passing Proposition 30. Officially, “Temporary Taxes to Fund Education” Proposition 30—to increase taxes—was approved by California voters by a margin of 55 to 45 percent in November 2012.

“The work that the coalition did on passing Prop 30, created better revenue for the state and that opened up space for the governor to think about other issues,” said Butler.

The domestic workers’ bill was also weakened. Stripped out of Ammiano’s 2012 version were meal and rest breaks and part-time babysitters.

A federal ruling providing minimum wage and overtime to home healthcare workers was announced last week.

For why passage of AB 241 is such a big deal, see what Ai Jen Poo and Lourdes Balagot-Pablo, a California home health worker had to tell me when we talked at the AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles earlier this month. Or take it from comedian Amy Poehler, one of the many celebrities that got behind the campaign.

Notable among the bravos flying around the Twitter-sphere immediately after Governor Brown’s message was one from Hand in Hand, a domestic worker’s employers’ group: “Employers join domestic workers in celebrating!!!!! Yes we did!!!”

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Butler praised the governor, the legislators who were willing to take up the bill and push it a second time and the workers in two states:

Getting up and dusting oneself off [after defeat]. There’s nothing harder than that, but the voice of those workers said to all of us that we didn’t have a choice, that we had to move and go at this one more time. The success we all saw in New York, that gave us the hope that this actually could be done.

For her part Poo (reached after her tears had dried), praised the organizers: “I’m just so proud of our members and organizers in California who—from a statewide caravan to cookies—ran such a fantastic campaign. It’s a testament to the dedication and incredible capacity of the women.”

Watch out Massachusetts, Poo says that state’s next.

Today’s bill contains a three-year sunset provision: a committee will be set up to review the success of the bill, and lawmakers would have three years to make it permanent.

Take Action: Fight for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in Your State

Slave Labor? Mass Prisons? FIFA Mangles the World Cup and the Beautiful Game

Dave Zirin — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 17:49:49 +0000

Demonstrators carry a banner made of Brazilian national flags during a protest against the Confederations Cup and President Dilma Rousseff's government, in Recife City, Brazil, June 20, 2013. (REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci)

Is it possible to be sickened by everything that goes into staging the World Cup while also loving the tournament itself? For eighty-three years the answer to that has been a resounding yes. The thinking, from FIFA, soccer’s ruling body, down to fans, has been that if a few eggs must be broken, then that’s the price we must pay for a brilliant global frittata. But, with two stories that broke this week, FIFA is truly testing the limits of what people will swallow.

The first exposé was by Sam Borden in The New York Times about the efforts to build the first-ever “World Cup quality stadium” in the middle of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest for next year’s tournament. The Amazon is often described as the “lungs of the world,” producing 20 percent of the earth’s oxygen, so people who are pro-breathing might be angered over what is being done in the name of just four World Cup matches. Brazil will be spending $325 million, almost $40 million more than the original estimates, while uprooting acres of the most ecologically delicate region on the planet. Romário, a former Brazilian national team star who is now a member of the Brazilian Congress, called the project “absurd”, saying, “There will be a couple games there, and then what? Who will go? It is an absolute waste of time and money.”

One option being discussed—and only barely mentioned by the Times—is turning the entire stadium into a prison. Sabino Marques, president of the Amazonas custodial system’s monitoring and control group, endorsed this idea, saying, “After the World Cup, I believe there will be entirely idle spaces. Every day we have arrests in Amazonas and where are we going to put them?” Using soccer stadiums as prisons has a notoriously bloody echo in Latin American history, one not lost on those throughout the country protesting the priorities of both FIFA and the Brazilian government.

As horrific as this scenario seems, FIFA and Qatar, site of the 2022 World Cup, has a construction operation that makes Brazil’s look positively benign. Guardian reporter Pete Pattison, doing the kind of journalism that sometimes feels extinct, has written a series about Qatar’s stadium-building policies that have already resulted in the deaths of dozens of Nepalese migrant laborers. Unlike other Olympic-sized projects with a body count—see Greece in 2004—the deaths are not primarily a result of workplace accidents, but heart failure: young healthy men having heart attacks.

As Pattinson writes, “This summer, Nepalese workers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, many of them young men who had sudden heart attacks. The investigation found evidence to suggest that thousands of Nepalese, who make up the single largest group of labourers in Qatar, face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery, as defined by the International Labour Organisation, during a building binge paving the way for 2022.”

The charge of “slavery” that many Nepalese workers are bringing forth results from the fact that their pay is being withheld to keep them from fleeing the labor camps in the night. Food and water have also been rationed as a way to compel the Nepalese to work for free. After a day in the scorching sun, they sleep in filth, twelve to a room.

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Pattinson quotes one Nepalese migrant employed at the Lusail City development, a $45 billion city constructed from the ground up, which will include the 90,000-seat stadium for the World Cup final. “We’d like to leave, but the company won’t let us,” he says. “I’m angry about how this company is treating us, but we’re helpless. I regret coming here, but what to do? We were compelled to come just to make a living, but we’ve had no luck.”

In normal times, over 90 percent of workers in Qatar are immigrants, with 40 percent coming from Nepal. But these are not normal times. There has been a massive push for migrant workers, as Qatar aims to spend over $100 billion on stadiums and infrastructure for the World Cup, part of a broader effort to remake and “modernize” the emirate. A hundred thousand workers have already come from Nepal, one of the poorest nations on earth, and as many as 1.5 million will need to be recruited to get the job done. Thousands more will die if action is not taken.

I spoke with Jules Boykoff, author of Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games and a former professional soccer player. He said, “Sports mega-events like the World Cup are upbeat shakedowns with appalling human costs. This is trickle-up economics that magnifies the widening chasm between the happy-faced promises of mega-event boosters and on-the-ground reality for the rest of us.”

The issue is clearly not soccer. It is clearly not even having a global tournament like The World Cup. It is the way these mega-events are linked to massive development projects used as neoliberal Trojan Horses to push through policies that would stun the most hardened of cynics. The people of Brazil, demanding “FIFA quality hospitals and schools,” have shown a way to envision how we can emerge from this brutal cycle. The Nepalese migrant workers, just by having the courage to come forward, are doing the same.

Dave Zirin looks at author Eduardo Galeano's comments on Brazilian soccer protests.