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Less than two weeks have passed and yet it isn’t too early to say it: the People’s Climate March changed the social map—many maps, in fact, since hundreds of smaller marches took place in 162 countries. That march in New York City, spectacular as it may have been with its 400,000 participants, joyous as it was, moving as it was (slow-moving, actually, since it filled more than a mile’s worth of wide avenues and countless side streets), was no simple spectacle for a day. It represented the upwelling of something that matters so much more: a genuine global climate movement.

When I first heard the term “climate movement” a year ago, as a latecomer to this developing tale, I suspected the term was extravagant, a product of wishful thinking. I had, after all, seen a few movements in my time (and participated in several). I knew something of what they felt like and looked like—and this, I felt, wasn’t it.

I knew, of course, that there were climate-related organizations, demonstrations, projects, books, magazines, tweets, and for an amateur, I was reasonably well read on “the issues,” but I didn’t see, hear or otherwise sense that intangible, polymorphous, transformative presence that adds up to a true, potentially society-changing movement.

It seemed clear enough then: I could go about most of my life without brushing up against it. Now, call me a convert, but it’s here; it’s big; it’s real; it matters.

There is today a climate movement as there was a civil rights movement and an antiwar movement and a women’s liberation movement and a gay rights movement—each of them much more than its component actions, moments, slogans, proposals, names, projects, issues, demands (or, as we say today, having grown more polite, “asks”); each of them a culture, or an intertwined set of cultures; each of them a political force in the broadest as well as the narrowest sense; each generating the wildest hopes and deepest disappointments. Climate change is now one of them: a burgeoning social fact.

The extraordinary range, age and diversity exhibited in the People’s Climate March—race, class, sex, you name it, and if you were there, you saw it—changes the game. The phalanxes of unions, indigenous and religious groups, and all manner of local activists in New York formed an extraordinary mélange. There were hundreds and hundreds of grassroots groups on the move—or forced to stand still for hours on end, waiting for the immense throng, hemmed in by police barricades, to find room to walk, let alone march. At least in the area that I could survey—I was marching with the Divest Harvard group, alongside Mothers Out Front—opposition to fracking seemed like the most common thread. And the only audible appeal to a politician I heard was a clamor to get Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban fracking in New York State.

If what follows sounds circular, so be it: there is a social movement when some critical mass of people feel that it exists and act as if they belong to it. They begin to sense a shared culture, with its own heroes, villains, symbols, slogans, and chants. Their moods rise and fall with its fate. They take pleasure in each others’ company. They look forward to each rendezvous. And people on every side—the friendly, the indifferent, as well as the hostile—all take note of it as well and feel something about it; they take sides; they factor it into their calculations; they strive to bolster or obstruct or channel it. It moves into their mental space.

The climate movement is, of course, plural, a bundle of tendencies. There are those who emphasize climate justice—“fairness, equity, and ecological rootedness” in one formulation—and those who don’t. Politico’s headline-writer called 350.org and other march co-sponsors “rowdy greens,” to distinguish them from old-line Washington-based environmental groups. To my mind, they are not so much rowdy as decentralized on principle, which means that the range of approaches and styles is striking. This is a feature characteristic of all the great social movements of our time.

Unities and Diversities

Degrees of militancy also vary— again, this goes with the territory of mass movements. The day after the march came the Flood Wall Street sit-downs, tiny by comparison and far more targeted on specific enemies: the hell-bent fossil-fuel corporations that pump record amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and the banks that support them. These demonstrations have their own disruptive but remarkably civil forms of disobedience, and there will be more of them in the months to come, as well as a host of local campaigns—against tar sands oil in South Portland, Maine, on ranches and campuses inNebraska, and among Texas evangelicals; against fracking throughout New York and many other states. Some will be more militant, some more sedate, some broader-based, some narrower. Factions will emerge—a movement large enough to turn out throngs won’t be able to avoid them—but so will an acute awareness of commonalities, not least the recognition that time is running out for a civilization that seems unnervingly committed to burning down the house it inhabits.

“Were you in New York on September 21, 2014?” will be a question that future generations will wield as today those of a certain age might ask, “Were you in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963?” (In both cases, they’re prone to mistake a single manifestation for the entirety of the movement.)

Cynics will look at photos of the crowd, observe the staggering range of posters and banners, and conclude that those 400,000 participants—the number certified in a remarkable act of legitimation by Fox News—are so disparate that they can’t even agree about what they stand for; and that would be accurate, up to a point, but rather trivial in the end and certainly not as important as critics might imagine.

The same could have been said of the vast antiwar mobilizations of the late 1960s—crowds ranging from Quaker pacifists and Democratic liberals to Vietnam veterans and Viet Cong supporters, and more brands of revolutionary socialists than General Mills made cereals—and of the early feminist parades as well. The civil rights movement called itself nothing more specific than a “freedom movement,” and both its supporters and its adversaries knew in their bones what that meant. The house of the climate movement will hold many mansions (and probably its share of hovels, too), but for all the differing emphases, even conflicts on particular issues, there will be a great bulge of de facto agreement on one thing: governing institutions have, so far, defaulted and the depredations of corporations and governments have to be stopped. Now.

Complaints about the movement’s disparate nature, its radical “horizontalism,” its lack of “demands” also miss the coordination abundantly in evidence. At 12:58 that Sunday in New York, two minutes of silence, previously announced via text messages and e-mails, cascaded northward from Columbus Circle up Central Park West through a boisterous crowd—a crowd of crowds—and suddenly the roar, the bands, the noise subsided. The silence surged block after block in the most disciplined manner. You could feel it rippling uptown. And so did the clamor that followed, block by block, the whooping and horn-blowing and marching-band uproar that signaled a single, unmistakable, gigantic statement: “We’re here!”

Slash-and-burn leftists will carp. Some already have, calling the March “a corporate PR campaign,” a zinger joyfully picked up by the world’s biggest climate change denial site, or claiming that the march sold out to capitalism because $220,000 was raised to plaster the subways with posters advertising the march and some large environmental groups have decidedly un-green investment policies. It will be said that to make any substantial progress, there must be a global revolution against capitalism, but what such a revolution should disown is decidedly unclear: markets? All large corporations, or some? All profit motives?

And what forms of social organization are to be recommended is equally blurry. Broad-brush sloganeering is feel-good bait for those who nestle comfortably in the history of left-wing revolutions, but erases important distinctions among types of capitalists and forms of capitalism. There’s a world of difference between the ExxonMobils and BPs straining to extract every last reserve of fossil fuel from the ground and companies that harness solar, wind, and other sustainable energy. There’s equally a world of difference between American-style top-down corporate governance and German-style codetermination, a system in which labor elects almost half a company’s board of directors.

Caps and Freezes

Critics will accurately note that this new movement is unfocused; it does not converge on a single demand or small set of demands as did the anti–Vietnam War movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, or the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s, which was responsible for the only New York protest (Central Park, 1982) that outnumbered the People’s Climate March. Some climate activists think a carbon tax might prove the common denominator; it’s even supported by some conservatives, and recent moves by fossil-fuel companies suggest that they believe a carbon tax is only a matter of time. Others doubt that America is ready for new taxes, whatever they’re called.

What policies and terminology will best underscore the truths that carbon-based energy is scarcely “cheap” and that it exacts a host of planet-imperilingsocial and economic costs remains in dispute. There’s a big push for “carbon pricing” from the World Bank, for instance. What’s meant is a mixture of taxes, cap-and-trade policies and internal pricing proposals, all based on the principle that once the actual costs of carbon are factored into policy calculations, it will become pricier and renewable energy less so.

After the march, Éva Borsody-Das, an activist with the Divest Harvard alumni, wondered whether unity might be attained on the common ground of a “carbon freeze.” It would be modeled on the “nuclear freeze” proposal of the early 1980s for a US-Soviet agreement to stop the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. The author-psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, a veteran of that movement, has proposed the use of the term “climate freeze,” meaning “a transnational demand for cutting back on carbon emissions.” In Lifton’s judgment, public as well as elite opinion is undergoing a “climate swerve” that might plow the ground for advances in policy.

What would such freezes mean? How would progress toward them be measured? Would they be enough? That’s for future debates within the movement to sort out, if they can. But immense social movements are not buckets of answers but places where people converge on questions. They are zones where debates evolve. They raise expectations, they disappoint. They win battles, but lose them, too. People arrive, people burn out, people fall away. They get fed up with one another, accuse one another of buying in and selling out and preaching to the choir, and undoubtedly in the case of the present movement, of other charges that none of us have yet imagined.

But don’t forget this: the movement has arrived. It’s a fact. And as the climate-change crisis mounts and powerful institutions default, it needs to grow if we have any hope of keeping in the ground the lion’s share of the carbon reserves already known to lie there. (Eighty percent of them is the figure usually cited.)

It would be decidedly premature to suggest that this movement will soon win anything, no less everything it wants, or that it will succeed in curtailing the burn-off of fossil fuel carbon compounds and all the extinctions and acidifications and extreme weather and sea rise that will follow. But the People’s Climate March does suggest that something commensurate with the magnitude of the global climate crisis has come into being.

The great boom of the last two-and-a-half centuries happened because industrialists took charge of the remains of previous life forms—fossil fuels indeed!—to power the most rapid, productive and destructive transformation in history. They remade the world and, in the process, unmade it. With all its accomplishments, the world they made is well on its way to burning through its assets.

Nature and history have talked back. In a few short centuries, the carbon-based fuels of the industrial breakthrough have come to threaten the entirety of a civilization they made possible. In the People’s Climate March is the suggestion that civilization might rise to the challenge, perhaps in time to avert total catastrophe. After the march, the four-letter word I heard most was hope.

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Apocalyptic climate change is upon us. For shorthand, let’s call it a slow-motion apocalypse to distinguish it from an intergalactic attack out of the blue or a suddenly surging Genesis-style flood.

Slow-motion, however, is not no-motion. In fits and starts, speeding up and slowing down, turning risks into clumps of extreme fact, one catastrophe after another—even if there can be no 100 percent certitude about the origin of each one—the planetary future careens toward the unlivable. That future is, it seems, arriving ahead of schedule, though erratically enough that most people—in the lucky, prosperous countries at any rate—can still imagine the planet conducting something close to business as usual.

To those who pay attention, of course, the recent bursts of extreme weather are not “remote “or “abstract,” nor matters to be deferred until later in the century while we worry about more immediate problems. The coming dystopian landscape is all too real and it is already right here for many millions. (Think: the Philippines, the Maldives Islands, drowned New Orleans, the New York City subways, Far Rockaway, the Jersey Shore, the parched Southwest, the parched and then flooded Midwest and other food belts, the Western forests that these days are regularly engulfed in “record” flames and so on.) A child born in the United States this year stands a reasonable chance of living into the next century when everything, from available arable land and food resources to life on our disappearing seacoasts, will have changed, changed utterly.

A movement to forestall such menaces must convince many more millions outside Bangladesh or the Pacific islands that what’s “out there” is not remote in time or geographically far away, but remarkably close at hand, already lapping at many shores—and then to mobilize those millions to leverage our strengths and exploit the weaknesses of the institutions arrayed against us that benefit from destruction and have a stake in our weakness.

There is a poetic fitness to human history at this juncture. Eons ago, various forms of life became defunct. A civilization then evolved to extract the remains of that defunct life from the earth and turn it into energy. As a result, it’s now we who are challenged to avoid making our own style of existence defunct.

Is it not uncanny that we have come face-to-face with the consequences of a way of life based on burning up the remnants of previous broken-down orders of life? It’s a misnomer to call those remains—coal, oil and gas—“fossil fuels.” They are not actually made up of fossils at all. Still, there’s an eerie justice in the inaccuracy, since here we are, converting the residue of earlier breakdowns into another possible breakdown. The question is: will we become the next fossils?

Subsidizing Big Energy

The institutions of our ruling world have a powerful stake in the mad momentum of climate change—the energy system that’s producing it and the political stasis that sustains and guarantees it—so powerful as to seem unbreakable. Don’t count on them to avert the coming crisis. They can’t. In some sense, they are the crisis.

Corporations and governments promote the burning of fossil fuels, which means the dumping of its waste product, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere where, in record amounts, it heats the planet. This is not an oversight; it is a business model.

Governments collude with global warming, in part by bankrolling the giant fossil fuel companies (FFCs). As a recent report written by Shelagh Whitley for the Overseas Development Institute puts it,

“Producers of oil, gas, and coal received more than $500 billion in government subsidies around the world in 2011… If their aim is to avoid dangerous climate change, governments are shooting themselves in both feet. They are subsidizing the very activities that are pushing the world towards dangerous climate change, and creating barriers to investment in low-carbon development and subsidy incentives that encourage investment in carbon-intensive energy.”

Of course a half-trillion dollars in subsidies doesn’t just happen. It cannot be said too often: the FFCs thrive by conniving with governments. They finance politicians to do their bidding. Seven of the ten largest companies in the world are FFCs, as are four of the ten most profitable (just outnumbering three Chinese banks, which presumably have their own major FFC connections). These behemoths have phenomenal clout when they lobby for fossil-fuel-friendly development and against remedial policies like a carbon tax. And if this were not enough, they flood the world with fraudulent claims that climate change is not happening, or is not dangerous, or that its dimensions and human causes are controversial among scientists whose profession it is to study the climate.

The Cascade

Fossilized corporations do their thing while frozen governments produce (or opt out of) hapless and toothless international agreements. By default, initiative must arise elsewhere—in places where reason and passion have some purchase as well as a tradition, places where new power may be created and deployed. This counterpower is, in fact, developing.

Given the might and recalcitrance of the usual culpable and complicit institutions, it falls to people’s initiatives and to other kinds of institutions to take up the slack. This means universities, churches and other investment pools, now increasingly under pressure from mushrooming campaigns to divest funds from FFCs; and popular movements against coal, oil, fracking and other dangerous projects—in particular, at the moment, movements in the US, Canada and elsewhere to stop tar sands pipelines.

Those in the growing divestment movement suffer no illusions that universities themselves wield the magnitude of power you find in investment banks or, of course, the FFCs themselves. They are simply seeking leverage where they can. The sums of capital held by universities, in particular, are small on the scale of things. Harvard, the educational institution with the largest endowment (some $32.7 billion at last count), reports that only 3 percent of its direct holdings are in the top 200 energy outfits. (The amount of its money held indirectly and opaquely, through private capital pools, and so also possibly invested in FFCs, is unclear.) Though millions of dollars are at stake, that’s a drop in the bucket for Harvard, whose holdings amount, in turn, to nowhere near a drop in the total market capitalization of those energy giants.

Set against a landscape in which people have lost faith in the principle sectors of power, however, universities still have a certain legitimacy that grants them the potential for leverage. Divestment will make news precisely because such movements are unusual: universities biting the hands of the dogs that feed them, so to speak.

We won’t know how much influence that legitimacy can bring about until the attempts are made. What we do know, from historical precedent, is that such efforts, even when they start on a small scale, tend to inspire more of the same. As Robert Kinloch Massie argues in his fine book on South African sanctions, Loosing the Bonds, divestment campaigns such as those over apartheid and Big Tobacco (phased out by Harvard in 1990) worked by creating a cascade effect.

With climate change, the stigmatization of the FFCs is already spreading from universities and churches to city and state pension funds. Eventually, if it works, the cascade changes the atmosphere around private and public investment decisions. Then those decisions themselves begin to change and such changes become part of a new market calculation for investors and politicians alike.

That’s why it matters so much that some 400 divestment campaigns are currently underway at American colleges and universities. Cascades of influence can move institutions, often in surprising ways. Every time a divestment demand is put forward, the conversation changes in elite board rooms where investment decisions are made. Children of FFC executives go home for Christmas and their nagging questions make their parents’ business-as-usual lives less comfortable. (This dynamic, though seldom credited, undoubtedly played some role in ending the Vietnam War.)

At Harvard, my alma mater, a fierce campaign by courageous and strategic-minded students has spun off a parallel campaign by alumni. They are being asked to withhold contributions to the university and to donate to an escrow fund until Harvard divests from its direct holdings in FFCs and undertakes to divest from its indirect holdings as well.

Is this sort of demand just a gesture of moral purity? Not necessarily. Indeed, there may well be an economic payoff for morally motivated divestment and reinvestment. My fellow alumnus Bevis Longstreth, a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, makes a strong case that the policies of the FFCs are shortsighted and risky. (During the year 2012 alone, the top 200 sank $674 billion into acquiring and developing new energy reserves and working out ways to exploit them.) Significant parts of the capital they are now investing will likely be “wasted,” since in a climate-change world, large portions of those reserves will have to stay in the ground.

Looked at in the long term, the FFCs may not turn out to be such smart investments after all. Indeed, in the boilerplate language of financial prospectuses, past results are no guarantee of future results; and there are already investment models showing that non-FFC funds deliver better proceeds.

These efforts and arguments have yet to convince Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust that climate change is one of those “extraordinarily rare circumstances” when divestment is justified. Instead, she proposes “engagement” with the boards of the energy companies, as if sweet reason by itself stood a chance of outtalking sweet crude oil. She touts Harvard’s teaching and research on climate issues, while neglecting the way those corporations fund disinformation meant to blunt the effect of that teaching and research. Having declared that the issue is not “political,” she defends Harvard’s investments in the chief funders of propaganda against climate science. Some rejection of politics! Meanwhile, for saying no to divestment, President Faust wins the applause of an Alabama coal company front group.

Still, Divest Harvard is undeterred. By conducting referenda, organizing panels and rallies, gathering signatures and activating alumni, it and like-minded groups are in the process of changing elite conversations about wealth and moral responsibility in the midst of a slow-motion apocalypse. They are helping ensure that previously unthinkable conversations become thinkable.

Something similar is taking place on many other campuses. At the same time, writers in influential conservative publications have already begun taking this movement seriously, and the first signs of a changing state of mind are evident. A report out of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, for example, recently warned against the risks of “stranded assets” (all those fossil fuels already bought and paid for by the FFCs that will never make it out of the ground). The Economist has begun to doubt that oil is such a great investment. The Financial Times heralds the spread of divestment efforts to city governments.

Hinges Open Doors

Transforming the world is something like winning a war. If the objective is to eliminate a condition like hunger, mass violence, or racial domination, then the institutions and systems of power that produce, defend and sustain this condition have to be dislodged and defeated. For that, most people have to stop experiencing the condition—and the enemy that makes it possible—as abstractions “out there.”

A movement isn’t called that for nothing. It has to move people. It needs lovers, and friends, and allies. It has to generate a cascade of feeling—moral feeling. The movement’s passion has to become a general passion. And that passion must be focused: the concern that people feel about some large condition “out there” has to find traction closer to home.

Vis-à-vis the slow-motion apocalypse of climate change, there’s plenty of bad news daily and it’s hitting ever closer home, even if you live in the parching Southwest or the burning West, not the Philippines or the Maldive Islands. Until recently, however, it sometimes felt as if the climate movement was spinning its wheels, gaining no traction. But the extraordinary work of Bill McKibben and his collaborators at 350.org, and the movements against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and its Canadian equivalent, the Northern Gateway pipeline, have changed the climate-change climate.

Now, the divestment movement, too, becomes a junction point where action in the here-and-now, on local ground, gains momentum toward a grander transformation. These movements are the hinges on which the door to a livable future swings.

Michael T. Klare asks, “Are We on the Brink of a Green Revolution?”

A New York City police officer near the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday, July 11, 2012, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
 
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Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they are aware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata). American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around. There’s also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence.
 
Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows. The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time—look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don’t. What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counterterrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon. (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on this sort of spying on Americans.)

Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high. But as always, dots need connecting. Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America.

Two Stories From Occupy Wall Street

The first is about surveillance. The second is about provocation.

On September 17, 2011, Plan A for the New York activists who came to be known as Occupy Wall Street was to march to the territory outside the bank headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. Once there, they discovered that the block was entirely fenced in. Many activists came to believe that the police had learned their initial destination from e-mail circulating beforehand. Whereupon they headed for nearby Zuccotti Park and a movement was born.

The evening before May Day 2012, a rump Occupy group marched out of San Francisco’s Dolores Park and into the Mission District, a neighborhood where not so many 1 percenters live, work or shop. There, they proceeded to trash “mom and pop shops, local boutiques and businesses, and cars,” according to Scott Rossi, a medic and eyewitness, who summed his feelings up this way afterward: “We were hijacked.” The people “leading the march tonight,” he added, were

clean cut, athletic, commanding, gravitas not borne of charisma but of testosterone and intimidation. They were decked out in outfits typically attributed to those in the “black bloc” spectrum of tactics, yet their clothes were too new, and something was just off about them. They were very combative and nearly physically violent with the livestreamers on site, and got ignorant with me, a medic, when I intervened.… I didn’t recognize any of these people. Their eyes were too angry, their mouths were too severe. They felt “military” if that makes sense. Something just wasn’t right about them on too many levels.

He was quick to add, “I’m not one of those tin foil hat conspiracy theorists. I don’t subscribe to those theories that Queen Elizabeth’s Reptilian slave driver masters run the Fed. I’ve read up on agents provocateurs and plants and that sort of thing and I have to say that, without a doubt, I believe 100 percent that the people that started tonight’s events in the Mission were exactly that.”

Taken aback, Occupy San Francisco condemned the sideshow: “We consider these acts of vandalism and violence a brutal assault on our community and the 99%.”

Where does such vandalism and violence come from? We don’t know. There are actual activists who believe that they are doing good this way; and there are government infiltrators; and then there are double agents who don’t know who they work for, ultimately, but like smashing things or blowing them up. By definition, masked trashers of windows in Oakland or elsewhere are anonymous. In anonymity, they—and the burners of flags and setters of bombs—magnify their power. They hijack the media spotlight. In this way, tiny groups—incendiary, sincere, fraudulent, whoever they are—seize levers that can move the entire world.

The Sting of the Clueless Bee

Who casts the first stone? Who smashes the first window? Who teaches bombers to build and plant actual or spurious bombs? The history of the secret police planting agents provocateurs in popular movements goes back at least to nineteenth-century France and twentieth-century Russia. In 1905, for example, the priest who led the St. Petersburg’s revolution was some sort of double agent, as was the man who organized the assassination of the czar’s uncle, the grand duke. As it happens, the United States has its own surprisingly full history of such planted agents at work turning small groups or movements in directions that, for better or far more often worse, they weren’t planning on going. One well-documented case is that of “Tommy the Traveler,” a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organizer who after years of trying to arouse violent action convinced two 19-year-old students to firebomb an ROTC headquarters at Hobart College in upstate New York. The writer John Schultz reported on likely provocateurs in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968. How much of this sort of thing went on? Who knows? Many relevant documents molded in unopened archives, or have been heavily redacted or destroyed.

As the Boston marathon bombing illustrates, there are homegrown terrorists capable of producing the weapons they need and killing Americans without the slightest help from the US government. But historically, it’s surprising how relatively often the gendarme is also a ringleader. Just how often is hard to know, since information on the subject is fiendishly hard to pry loose from the secret world.

Through 2011, 508 defendants in the United States were prosecuted in what the Department of Justice calls “terrorism-related cases.” According to Mother Jones’s Trevor Aaronson, the FBI ran sting operations that “resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants”—about one-third of the total. “Of that total, forty-nine defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action. With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings.”

In Cleveland, on May Day of 2012, in the words of a Rolling Stone exposé, the FBI “turned five stoner misfits into the world’s most hapless terrorist cell.” To do this, the FBI put a deeply indebted, convicted bank robber and bad-check passer on its payroll, and hooked him up with an arms dealer, also paid by the bureau. The FBI undercover man then hustled five wacked-out wannabe anarchists into procuring what they thought was enough C4 plastic explosive to build bombs they thought would blow up a bridge. The bombs were, of course, dummies. The five were arrested and await trial.

What do such cases mean? What is the FBI up to? Trevor Aaronson offers this appraisal:

The FBI’s goal is to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters and operators—by raising the risk of even the smallest step toward violent action. It’s a form of deterrence.… Advocates insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn’t been a successful large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what can’t be answered—as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge—is how many of the bureau’s targets would have taken the step over the line at all, were it not for an informant.

Perhaps Aaronson is a bit too generous. The FBI may, at times, be anything but thoughtful in its provocations. It may, in fact, be flatly dopey. COINTELPRO records released since the 1960s under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that it took FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover until 1968 to discover that there was such a thing as a New Left that might be of interest. Between 1960 and 1968, as the New Left was becoming a formidable force in its own right, the bureau’s top officials seem to have thought that groups like Students for a Democratic Society were simply covers for the Communist Party, which was like mistaking the fleas for the dog. We have been assured that the FBI of today has learned something since the days of J. Edgar Hoover. But of ignorance and stupidity there is no end.

Trivial and Nontrivial Pursuits

Entrapment and instigation to commit crimes are in themselves genuine dangers to American liberties, even when the liberties are those of the reckless and wild. But there is another danger to such pursuits: the attention the authorities pay to nonexistent threats (or the creation of such threats) is attention not paid to actual threats.

Anyone concerned about the security of Americans should cast a suspicious eye on the allocation or simply squandering of resources on wild goose chases. Consider some particulars which have recently come to light. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups—during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity.’ ”

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center, one of seventy-seven coordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, it was not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’ ”

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of… Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.

Public Agencies and the “Private Sector”

So we know that Boston’s master coordinators—its Committee on Public Safety, you might say—were worried about constitutionally protected activity, including its consequences for “commercial and financial sector assets.” Unsurprisingly, the feds worked closely with Wall Street even before the settling of Zuccotti Park. More surprisingly, in Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations—and vice versa.

Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.” Last December using FOIA, PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.” Consider these examples from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:

• “As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.”

• “The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to…[twenty-two] campus police officials.… A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

• An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector,” sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on November 2, 2011] to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’ Naval Criminal Investigative Services reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor.”

• DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,” which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” It advised corporate employees to dress conservatively, avoid political discussions and “avoid all large gatherings related to civil issues. Even seemingly peaceful rallies can spur violent activity or be met with resistance by security forces.”

• The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.

• In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.” Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a ‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.’ ”

Sometimes, “intelligence” moves in the opposite direction—from private corporations to public agencies. Among the collectors of such “intelligence” are entities that, like the various intelligence and law enforcement outfits, do not make distinctions between terrorists and nonviolent protesters. Consider TransCanada, the corporation that plans to build the 1,179-mile Keystone-XL tar sands pipeline across the US and in the process realize its “vision to become the leading energy infrastructure company in North America.“ The anti-pipeline group Bold Nebraska filed a successful Freedom of Information Act request with the Nebraska State Patrol and so was able to put TransCanada’s briefing slideshow up online.

So it can be documented in living color that the company lectured federal agents and local police to look into the use of “anti-terrorism statutes” against peaceful anti-Keystone activists. TransCanada showed slides that cited as sinister the “attendance” of Bold Nebraska members at public events, noting “Suspicious Vehicles/Photography.” TransCanada alerted the authorities that Nebraska protesters were guilty of “aggressive/abusive behavior,” citing a local anti-pipeline group that, they said, committed a “slap on the shoulder” at the Merrick County Board Meeting (possessor of said shoulder unspecified). They fingered nonviolent activists by name and photo, paying them the tribute of calling them “’Professionals’ & Organized.” Native News Network pointed out that “although TransCanada’s presentation to authorities contains information about property destruction, sabotage, and booby traps, police in Texas and Oklahoma have never alleged, accused, or charged Tar Sands Blockade activists of any such behaviors.”

Centers for Fusion, Diffusion and Confusion

After September 11, 2001, government agencies at all levels, suddenly eager to break down information barriers and connect the sort of dots that had gone massively unconnected before the Al Qaeda attacks, used Department of Homeland Security funds to start “fusion centers.” These are supposed to coordinate anti-terrorist intelligence gathering and analysis. They are also supposed to “fuse” intelligence reports from federal, state and local authorities, as well as private companies that conduct intelligence operations. According to the ACLU, at least seventy-seven fusion centers currently receive federal funds.

Much is not known about these centers, including just who runs them, by what rules and which public and private entities are among the fused. There is nothing public about most of them. However, some things are known about a few. Several fusion center reports that have gone public illustrate a remarkably slapdash approach to what constitutes “terrorist danger” and just what kinds of data are considered relevant for law enforcement. In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned, for instance, that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’ a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.” (The map is no longer online.)

So far, the prize for pure fused wordiness goes to a 215-page manual issued in 2009 by the Virginia Fusion Center (VFC), filled with Keystone Kop–style passages among pages that in their intrusive sweep are anything but funny. The VFC warned, for instance, that “the Garbage Liberation Front (GLF) is an ecological direct action group that demonstrates the joining of anarchism and environmental movements.” Among GLF’s dangerous activities well worth the watching, the VFC included “dumpster diving, squatting, and train hopping.”

In a similarly jaw-dropping manner, the manual claimed—the italics are mine—that “Katuah Earth First (KEF), based in Asheville, North Carolina, sends activists throughout the region to train and engage in criminal activity. KEF has trained local environmentalists in non-violent tactics, including blocking roads and leading demonstrations, at action camps in Virginia. While KEF has been primarily involved in protests and university outreach, members have also engaged in vandalism.” Vandalism! Send out an APB!

The VFC also warned that, “although the anarchist threat to Virginia is assessed as low, these individuals view the government as unnecessary, which could lead to threats or attacks against government figures or establishments.” It singled out the following 2008 incidents as worth notice:

• At the Martinsville Speedway, “A temporary employee called in a bomb threat during a Sprint Cup race…because he was tired of picking up trash and wanted to go home.”

• In Missouri, “a mobile security team observed an individual photographing an unspecified oil refinery.… The person abruptly left the scene before he could be questioned.”

• Somewhere in Virginia, “seven passengers aboard a white pontoon boat dressed in traditional Middle Eastern garments immediately sped away after being sighted in the recreational area, which is in close proximity to” a power plant.

What idiot or idiots wrote this script?

Given a disturbing lack of evidence of terrorist actions undertaken or in prospect, the authors even warned:

It is likely that potential incidents of interest are occurring, but that such incidents are either not recognized by initial responders or simply not reported. The lack of detailed information for Virginia instances of monitored trends should not be construed to represent a lack of occurrence.

Lest it be thought that Virginia stands alone and shivering on the summit of bureaucratic stupidity, consider an “intelligence report” from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” described, in the ACLU’s words, “a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the antiwar movement, a former US Congresswoman, the US Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.’ ”

And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be ‘factually weak.’ ” The Inspector General called “troubling” what the Los Angeles Times described as “singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended ‘without adequate basis.’ ”

Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General’s report) “there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.”

One of these investigations concerned Greenpeace protests planned for ExxonMobil shareholder meetings. (Note: I was on Greenpeace’s board of directors during three of those years.) The inquiry was kept open “for over three years, long past the shareholder meetings that the subjects were supposedly planning to disrupt.” The FBI put the names of Greenpeace members on its federal watch list. Around the same time, an ExxonMobil-funded lobby got the IRS to audit Greenpeace.

This counterintelligence archipelago of malfeasance and stupidity is sometimes fused with ass-covering fabrication. In Pittsburgh, on the day after Thanksgiving 2002 (“a slow work day” in the Justice Department inspector general’s estimation), a rookie FBI agent was outfitted with a camera, sent to an antiwar rally, and told to look for terrorism suspects. The “possibility that any useful information would result from this make-work assignment was remote,” the report added drily.

The agent was unable to identify any terrorism subjects at the event, but he photographed a woman in order to have something to show his supervisor. He told us he had spoken to a woman leafletter at the rally who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, and that she was probably the person he photographed.

The sequel was not quite so droll. The Inspector General found that FBI officials, including their chief lawyer in Pittsburgh, manufactured postdated “routing slips” and the rest of a phony paper trail to justify this surveillance retroactively.

Moreover, at least one fusion center has involved military intelligence in civilian law enforcement. In 2009, a military operative from Fort Lewis, Washington, worked undercover collecting information on peace groups in the Northwest. In fact, he helped run the Port Militarization Resistance group’s Listserv. Once uncovered, he told activists there were others doing similar work in the Army. How much the military spies on American citizens is unknown and, at the moment at least, unknowable.

Do we hear an echo from the abyss of the counterintelligence programs of the 1960s and 1970s, when FBI memos—I have some in my own heavily redacted files obtained through an FOIA request—were routinely copied to military intelligence units? Then, too, military intelligence operatives spied on activists who violated no laws, were not suspected of violating laws, and had they violated laws, would not have been under military jurisdiction in any case. During those years, more than 1,500 Army intelligence agents in plain clothes were spying, undercover, on domestic political groups (according to “Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967–70,” an unpublished dissertation by former Army intelligence captain Christopher H. Pyle). They posed as students, sometimes growing long hair and beards for the purpose, or as reporters and camera crews. They recorded speeches and conversations on concealed tape recorders. The Army lied about their purposes, claiming they were interested solely in “civil disturbance planning.”

Years later, I met one of these agents, now retired, in San Francisco. He knew more about what I was doing in the late 1960s than my mother did.

Squaring Circles

In 2009, President Obama told the graduating class at the Naval Academy that, “as Americans, we reject the false choice between our security and our ideals.” Security and ideals: officially we want both. But how do you square circles, especially in a world in which “security” has often enough become a stand-in for whatever intelligence operatives decide to do?

The ACLU’s Tennessee office sums the situation up nicely: “While the ostensible purpose of fusion centers, to improve sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different levels and arms of government, is legitimate and important, using the centers to monitor protected First Amendment activity clearly crosses the line.” Nationally, the ACLU rightly worries about who is in charge of fusion centers and by what rules they operate, about what becomes of privacy when private corporations are inserted into the intelligence process, about what the military is doing meddling in civilian law enforcement, about data-mining operations that Federal guidelines encourage, and about the secrecy walls behind which the fusion centers operate.

Even when fusion centers do their best to square that circle in their own guidelines, like the ones obtained by the ACLU from Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Fusion Center (CFC), the knots in which they tie themselves are all over the page. Imagine, then, what happens when you let informers or agents provocateurs loose in actual undercover situations.

“Undercovers,” writes the Massachusetts CFC, “may not seek to gain access to private meetings and should not actively participate in meetings.… At the preliminary inquiry stage, sources and informants should not be used to cultivate relationships with persons and groups that are the subject of the preliminary inquiry.” So far so good. Then, it adds, “Investigators may, however, interview, obtain, and accept information known to sources and informants.” By eavesdropping, say? Collecting trash? Hacking? All without warrants? Without probable cause?

“Undercovers and informants,” the guidelines continue, “are strictly prohibited from engaging in any conduct the sole purpose of which is to disrupt the lawful exercise of political activity, from disrupting the lawful operations of an organization, from sowing seeds of distrust between members of an organization involved in lawful activity, or from instigating unlawful acts or engaging in unlawful or unauthorized investigative activities.” Now, go back and note that little, easy-to-miss word “sole.” Who knows just what grim circles that tiny word squares?

The Massachusetts CFC at least addresses the issue of entrapment: “Undercovers should not become so involved in a group that they are participating in directing the operations of a group, either by accepting a formal position in the hierarchy or by informally establishing the group’s policy and priorities. This does not mean an undercover cannot support a group’s policies and priorities; rather an undercover should not become a driving force behind a group’s unlawful activities.” Did Cleveland’s fusion center have such guidelines? Did they follow them? Do other state fusion centers? We don’t know.

Whatever the fog of surveillance, when it comes to informers, agents provocateurs, and similar matters, four things are clear enough:

• Terrorist plots arise, in the United States as elsewhere, with the intent of committing murder and mayhem. Since 2001, in the US, these have been almost exclusively the work of freelance Islamist ideologues like the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston. None have been connected in any meaningful way with any legitimate organization or movement.

• Government surveillance may in some cases have been helpful in scotching such plots, but there is no evidence that it has been essential.

• Even based on the limited information available to us, since September 11, 2001, the net of surveillance has been thrown wide indeed. Tabs have been kept on members of quite a range of suspect populations, including American Muslims, anarchists, and environmentalists, among others—in situation after situation where there was no probable cause to suspect preparations for a crime.

• At least on occasion—we have no way of knowing how often—agents provocateurs on government payrolls have spurred violence.

How much official unintelligence is at work? How many demonstrations are being poked and prodded by undercover agents? How many acts of violence are being suborned? It would be foolish to say we know. At least equally foolish would be to trust the authorities to keep to honest-to-goodness police work when they are so mightily tempted to take the low road into straight-out, unwarranted espionage and instigation.

While the Occupy Wall Street movement has largely disappeared in the US, mass protests in Brazil are picking up steam—and now Eduardo Galeano is weighing in.

The New York Times building in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
 
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Everyone knows this story, though fewer and fewer read it on paper.  There are barely enough pages left to wrap fish.  The second paper in town has shut down.  Sometimes the daily delivers only three days a week.  Advertising long ago started fleeing to Craigslist and Internet points south.  Subscriptions are dwindling.  Online versions don’t bring in much ad revenue.  Who can avoid the obvious, if little covered question: Is the press too big to fail?  Or was it failing long before it began to falter financially?
 
In the previous century, there was a brief Golden Age of American journalism, though what glittered like gold leaf sometimes turned out to be tinsel.  Then came regression to the mean.  Since 2000, we have seen the titans of the news presuming that Bush was the victor over Gore, hustling us into war with Iraq, obscuring climate change, and turning blind eyes to derivatives, mortgage-based securities, collateralized debt obligations, and the other flimsy creations with which a vast, showy, ramshackle international financial house of cards was built.  When you think about the crisis of journalism, including the loss of advertising and the shriveled newsrooms — there were fewer newsroom employees in 2010 than in 1978, when records were first kept — also think of anesthetized watchdogs snoring on Wall Street while the Arctic ice cap melts.

Deserting readers mean broken business models.  Per household circulation of daily American newspapers has been declining steadily for 60 years, since long before the Internet arrived.  It’s gone from 1.24 papers per household in 1950 to 0.37 per household in 2010. To get the sports scores, your horoscope, or the crossword puzzle, the casual reader no longer needs even to glance at a whole paper, and so is less likely to brush up against actual — even superficial — news. Never mind that the small-r republican model on which the United States was founded presupposed that some critical mass of citizens would spend a critical mass of their time figuring out what’s what and forming judgments accordingly.

Don’t be fooled, though, by any inflated talk about the early days of American journalism.  In the beginning, there was no Golden Age.  To be sure, a remark Thomas Jefferson made in 1787 is often quoted admiringly (especially in newspapers): "If it were left to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter."

Protected by the First Amendment, however, the press of the early republic was unbridled, scurrilous, vicious, and flagrantly partisan.  In 1807, then-President Jefferson, with much more experience under his belt, wrote, "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”

Two Golden Decades

If there was a Golden Age for the American press, it came in a two-decade period during the Cold War, when total per capita daily newspaper circulation kept rising, even as television scooped up eyeballs and eardrums.  Admittedly, most of the time, even then, elites in Washington or elsewhere enjoyed the journalistic glad hand.  Still, from 1954 to 1974, some watchdogs did bark. Civil rights coverage, for example, did help bring down white supremacy, while Vietnam and Watergate reportage helped topple two sitting presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Of course, press watchdogs also licked the hands of the perpetrators when Washington overthrew democratic governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and when it helped out in Chile in 1973.  As for Vietnam, it wasn’t as simple a tale of journalistic triumph as we now imagine.  For years, in manifold ways, reporters deferred to official positions on the war’s “progress,” so much so that today their reports read like sheaves of Pentagon press releases.  Typically, all but one source quoted in New York Times coverage of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incidents, which precipitated a major U.S. escalation of the war, were White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials (and they were lying).  In the war’s early years, at least one network, NBC, even asked the Pentagon to institute censorship.

Nonetheless, the sense that the war was an unjustifiable grind grew, especially after the Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive of January-February 1968, startling the U.S. military, Washington officials, and journalists alike. When, in 1969, Seymour Hersh reported for the tiny Dispatch News Service that a unit from the Americal Division had slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in a village named My Lai, his story went mainstream.

Still, the long bombing campaign that President Nixon ordered in Cambodia and Laos did not feature on television, and barely made the newspapers.  And even when, in a remarkable feat of reporting, it finally did in a major way, there was no journalistic sequel.  The “secret” bombing of Cambodia — secret from Americans, that is — was reported on page one of the New York Times on May 9, 1969, and 37 years later, the reporter, William Beecher, said this about his story: “We're not talking of some small covert operation here, but a massive saturation bombing campaign, with a false set of coordinates to mislead the Congress and the public… You would have thought that such a story would have caused a firestorm. It did not.”

After Watergate, whatever hard-won, truth-bound independence the mainstream press had wrested from its own history failed to hold.  In the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, for example, most Washington journalism once again collapsed into deference, and so, too, did the financial press on its own front.  Washington’s war-making might and Wall Street’s financial maneuvers were both deemed too mighty, too smart, too hypermodern to fail.

Although the New York Times and the Washington Post later acknowledged flaws in their Iraq reporting, neither paper nor other major outlets have owned up to the negligence that led up to the great global economic meltdown of 2007-2008. We are far from grasping how fully business journalism played cheerleader and pedestal-builder for the titans of finance as they erected a fantastical Tower of Derivatives, which grew way too tall to fail without wrecking the global economy.

Start to finish, financial journalism was breathless about the market thrills that led to the 2007-2008 crash: the financialization of the global economy, the metastasis of derivatives, and especially the deregulation underway since the late 1970s that culminated in the 1999 congressional repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (with President Bill Clinton blithely signing off on it).  That repeal paved the way for commercial and investment banks, as well as insurance companies, to merge into “too-big-to-fail” corporations, unleashed with low capital requirements and soon enough piled high with the potential for collapse.

A Proquest database search of all American newspapers during the calendar year 1999 reveals a grand total of two pieces warning that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a mistake.  The first appeared in the Bangor Daily News of Maine, the second in the St. Petersburg Times of Florida. Count ‘em: two.

On February 24, 2002, as the scandal of the derivative-soaked Enron Corporation unfolded, the New York Times’s Daniel Altman did distinguish himself with a page-one business section report headlined “Contracts So Complex They Imperil The System.”  He wrote: “The veil of complexity, whose weave is tightening as sophisticated derivatives evolve and proliferate, poses subtle risks to the financial system — risks that are impossible to quantify, sometimes even to identify.” He stood almost alone in those years in such coverage.  Most financial journalists preferred then to cite the grand Yoda of American quotables, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.  And he was just the first and foremost among a range of giddy authorities on whom those reporters repeatedly relied for reassurance that derivatives were the great stabilizers of the economy.

On March 23, 2008, as the bubble was finally bursting, Times reporters Nelson Schwartz and Julie Creswell noted that “during the late 1990s, Wall Street fought bitterly against any attempt to regulate the emerging derivatives market.” They went on:

“A milestone in the deregulation effort came in the fall of 2000, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill effectively kept much of the market for derivatives and other exotic instruments off-limits to agencies that regulate more conventional assets like stocks, bonds and futures contracts.”

“Little-noticed” indeed.  According to Lexis-Nexis, not a single substantive mention of this law appeared in the Times that year.  On October 1, 2000,Washington Post writer Jerry Knight did note ruefully, “What's fascinating about the policy debate is the agreement on the guiding principle:  The government should not stand in the way of financial innovation.”

In a syndicated column on Christmas Eve, way-out-of-the-mainstream columnist Molly Ivins was not so poker-faced.  She called the new law “a little horror.” And in that she stood alone.  That was it outside of financial journals like theAmerican Banker and HedgeWorld Daily News, which, of course, were thrilled by the act.  That magic word “modernization” in its title evidently froze the collective journalistic brain.

Or in those years consider how the New York Times covered the exotic derivatives called “collateralized debt obligations,” among the principal cards of which the era's entire international financial house was built.  These tricky arcana, marketed as little miracles of risk management, multiplied from an estimated $20 billion in 2004 to more than $180 billion by 2007.  The Times’s Floyd Norris drily mentioned them in a 2001 front-page business section article about American Express headlined “They Sold the Derivative, but They Didn't Understand It.”  He quoted the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank this way: "There are all kinds of transactions going on out there where one party doesn't understand it."  From then on, no substantial Timesfront-page business section article so much as mentioned collateralized debt obligations for almost four years.

In 2009, in an enlightening article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, looked at the nine most influential business press outlets from January 1, 2000, through June 30, 2007 — that is, for the entire period of the housing bubble. A total of 730 articles contained what Starkman judged to be significant warnings that the bubble could burst.  That’s 730 out of more than one million articles these journals published.

The formula was simple and straightforward: the business press served the market movers and shakers.  It was a reputation-making machine, a publicity apparatus for the industry.  In other words, the job of financial reporters in those years was to remain fast asleep as the most flagrantly abusive part of the mortgage industry, subprime mortgages, was integrated into routine banking.

Meanwhile, thanks to that same financial press, a culture of celebrity enveloped the big names of finance: CEOs of major banks, Wall Street investors, operators of hedge funds.  They were repeatedly portrayed not just as fabulously successful tycoons doing their best for the society, but as fabulously giving philanthropists, their names engraved into the walls of university buildings, museums, symphony halls, and opera houses.  They weren’t just bringers of liquidity to markets, but wise men, too.  In an all-enveloping media atmosphere in which the press indulged without a blink, they were held to be not only creators of wealth but moral exemplars.  Indeed, the two were essentially interchangeable: they were moral exemplars because they were creators of wealth.

The Desertification of the News

Oh, and in case you think that the coverage from hell of the events leading up to the financial meltdown was uniquely poor, think again.  On an even greater meltdown that lies ahead, the press is barely, finally, still haphazardly coming around to addressing convulsive climate change with the seriousness it deserves.  At least it is now an intermittent story, though rarely linked toendemic drought and starvation.  Still, as Wen Stephenson, formerly editor of the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section and TheAtlantic.com and senior producer of National Public Radio’s “On Point,” summed up the situation in a striking online piece in the alternative Boston Phoenix: the subject is seldom treated as urgent and is frequently covered as a topic for special interests, a “problem,” not an “existential threat.”  (Another note on vanishing news:  Since publishing Stephenson’s article, the Phoenix has ceased to exist.)

Even now, when it comes to climate change, our gasping journalism does not “flood the zone.”  It also has a remarkable record of bending over backward to prove its “objectivity” by turning piece after piece into a debate between a vast majority of scientists knowledgeable on the subject and a fringe of climate-change deniers and doubters.

When it came to our financial titans, in all those years the press rarely felt the need for a dissenting voice.  Now, on the great subject of our moment, the press repeatedly clutches for the rituals of detachment.  Two British scholarsstudying climate coverage surveyed 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002 and found that most of them gave as much attention to the tiny group of climate-change doubters as to the consensus of scientists.

And if the press has, until very recently, largely failed us on the subject, the TV news is a disgrace.  Despite the record temperatures of 2012, the intensifying storms, droughts, wildfires and other wild weather events, the disappearingArctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute.  The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites — those high-minded talking-head episodes that set a lot of the agenda in Washington and for the attuned public — were otherwise occupied.

All last year, according to the liberal research group Media Matters,

“The Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change… ABC's This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes… NBC's Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention… Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming ‘junk science’ on ABC's This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change… In four years, Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.”

The mounting financial troubles of journalism only tighten the muzzle on a somnolent watchdog.  It’s unlikely that serious business coverage will be beefed up by media companies counting their pennies on their way down the slippery circulation slope.  Why invest in scrutiny of government regulators when the cost is lower for celebrity-spotting and the circulation benefits so much greater?  Meanwhile, the nation’s best daily environmental coverage takes a big hit.  In January, the New York Times's management decided to close down its environmental desk, scratching two environmental editor positions and reassigning five reporters.  How could such a move not discourage young journalists from aiming to make careers on the environmental beat?

The rolling default in climate-change coverage cries out for the most serious professional self-scrutiny.  Will it do for journalists and editors to remain thoroughly tangled up in their own remarkably unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes news? It’s long past time to reconsider some journalistic conventions: that to be newsworthy, events must be singular and dramatic(melting glaciers are held to be boring), must feature newsworthy figures (Al Gore is old news), and must be treated with balance (as in: some say the earth is spherical, others say it’s flat).

But don’t let anyone off the hook.  Norms can be bent.  Consider this apt headline on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek after Hurricane Sandy drowned large sections of New York City and the surrounding area: “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”  Come on, people: Can you really find no way to dramatize the extinction of species, the spread of starvation, the accelerating droughts, desertification, floods, and violent storms?  With all the dots you already report, even with shrunken staffs, can you really find no way to connect them?

If it is held unfair, or naïve, or both, to ask faltering news organizations to take up the slack left by our corrupt, self-dealing, shortsighted institutions, then it remains for start-up efforts to embarrass the established journals.

Online efforts matter. It’s a good sign that the dot-connecting site InsideClimateNews.org was just honored with a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

But tens of millions of readers still rely on the old media, either directly or via the snippets that stream through Google, Yahoo, and other aggregator sites.  Given the stakes, we dare not settle for nostalgia or restoration, or pray that the remedy is new technology.  Polishing up the old medals will not avail.  Reruns of His Girl Friday, All the President’s Men, and Broadcast News may be entertaining, but it’s more important to keep in mind that the good old days were not so good after all.  The press was never too great to fail.  Missing the story is a tradition.  So now the question is: Who is going to bring us the news of all the institutions, from City Hall to Congress, from Wall Street to the White House, that fail us?

Shutterstock / kuppa
 
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell thinks it’s “time to have a discussion” about arming school officials. Ohio’s John Kasich says he intends to sign a new concealed-carry law that allows guns into the Statehouse parking garage. Texas’s Rick Perry suggests that local school districts could permit teachers to tote their guns to class. For these Republican governors, as for the gun lobby that’s got their backs, the Newtown massacre is another reason not to limit guns.

Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, posted just after the shooting: “How many more children have to die before this country realizes that No Gun Zones create perfect locations for violence? You can not stop criminals and mad men with laws, you can only stop violence with the fear of armed victims.” The editor of the group’s website, Dave Workman, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, noted that Connecticut is “a very restrictive state, and this presumably occurred in a gun-free school zone.… It creates a situation where the criminals have guns, and everyone else is defenseless.” These are not marginal views confined to the right-wing websites.

The structure of this line of argument has certain standard features. First, the more-guns-the-better lobby insists that good-guy gunners will always, everywhere, shoot down bad-guy gunners. Gottlieb is apparently certain that Adam Lanza, fresh from murdering his mother and evidently, deeply, unfathomably insane, would have been deterred if, on arriving at Sandy Hook Elementary School, he’d been confronted by “armed victims.” He brought a whole arsenal with him—should a tank be posted at every school door?

The second, related line of argument is that the proposed cure is worse than the disease; that what has disarmed the good guys is tight regulation by bureaucrats. Workman neatly sidesteps the fact that the “very restrictive state” of Connecticut does not ban large-magazine, semiautomatic handguns or the semiautomatic rifle used by Lanza to slaughter twenty children and six adults.

Ideologies are marvelous things; the more paranoid, the more marvelous. Poke them, and they spring right back into shape. Infinitely elastic, they stretch to encompass vast numbers of awkward events. To the 100 percent mind, all square pegs can be squeezed into round holes. Paranoia always knows best. Certainty trumps complication. Has the easing of gun restrictions in recent years stopped mass killings? Hardly. Is America, rich in guns, low in gun violence? To the contrary. But the 100 percent mind always has the same metaphor at hand: the slippery slope. If you despise Norwegian social democracy, then Anders Behring Breivik is your negative poster child for the futility, or worse, of all gun laws except those that mandate guns.

No advocate of gun restrictions should think that the Newtown atrocity will, by itself, tilt the political landscape. Events alone do not destroy the bad theories of absolutists. When December 21 has come and gone, and the world yet goes on spinning, true believers of the Mayan apocalypse theory will surely go back to the drawing boards, reinterpret the signs and emerge refreshed to reimagine the end of the world. Splendidly, former NRA absolutists like Joe Scarborough have reconsidered their dogma, but do not expect the atrocity in Newtown to shake the faith of the truest believers, for their faith is not a hypothesis—it is a pillar of their identity.

The truest believers will not swerve. Such, after all, is the prediction of one of the classic works of social psychology, When Prophecy Fails, published in 1956 by Leon W. Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter. A UFO cult in the Midwest expected that on a given date only they, the true believers, would be lifted away from a great flood and carried to safety. When the date arrived but neither the flood nor the spaceship did, the more fervent cultists emerged more energetic than ever, and more doctrinaire. They ingeniously figured out where they had gone wrong—they had missed certain signals from beyond—and plunged onward. Those who had invested more in their beliefs stuck fast to their gospel.

So Mike Huckabee is insulated from evidence when he says on Fox News: “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?” He is fortified against the objection that if God is so frail as to be capable of banishment from schools, he could not be much of a Deity at all.

The gun control lobby does not lack for strong arguments. It has not lacked them for decades. What it lacks is political power. Never mind that most NRA members support some gun restrictions. Gun control advocates are not widely mobilized, and, at least until now, top politicians have not worked to mobilize them. Against those who are adamant that good gunners always, everywhere, conquer bad gunners, and who tend to vote on that single issue, gun controllers fail to command anything like the equivalent moral force.

Perry, Kasich, Huckabee, Gottlieb, Workman and company will not be defeated by rage or logic. Even satire fails. The gun lobby will prevail until moral passion pours forth against the possession of super lethal, easy-massacre weapons. It’s good news that President Obama has declared an end to business as usual, but now, at town meetings, everywhere, politicians have to confront hosts of fervent citizens coming together, revolted by the sheer indecency of easy-kill firearms and committed to staying the course against them. Where is that pro-life movement?

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Occupy must become a full-service movement. It must offer meaningful work to a vast range of supporters, from nonviolent direct-action enthusiasts to occasional protesters at stockholder meetings to signers of petitions and campaigners, in order to drive big money out of politics. It must be more than a protest movement. After a brilliant start, it must continue engaging America in what amounts to a moral as well as a political upheaval. It must think of itself as an awakening that challenges people at every level not to tell Occupy what to do but to ask themselves what they will do, individually and together, to revive values more decent than “enrich yourself.”

It’s not a bad idea to restate Occupy’s core principle: it is a movement on behalf of the thwarted 99 percent against the dominant institutions that fatten the 1 percent. It aims to bring to an end the grotesque state of affairs in which the burden of big money crushes democracy and to depose the forces that produced economic catastrophe, along with their shabby ideas and financial delirium. It knows, in the words of one sign, “The system isn’t broken, it’s fixed.”

To take on a warped state of affairs that has been decades in the making will take decades. Such a tall order requires an organizational evolution. The kind of face-to-face meetings that flourished in the encampments and may yet flourish there again are both necessary and inadequate for a mass movement. Occupy should develop national communication networks that can decide on coordinated actions. Supermajorities, not unanimities, should decide. Technology should be explored to expedite debates in which Occupiers engage one another and don’t just skip from person to person expressing opinions helter-skelter.

In the realm of direct action, it’s crucial to gather new circles of supporters by winning tangible victories. One priority is to fight for live-in victories, as Occupy Our Homes, Take Back the Land and other networks are doing. There has already been, in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Seattle, California and elsewhere, considerable success at creating what are, in effect, functional little encampments that stop illicit foreclosures, auctions and evictions. Committed people in Brooklyn and other neighborhoods are forming electronic networks to mobilize people as needed to prevent evictions.

Occupy Student Debt, which asks students to sign a pledge to renounce their student loans once 1 million signatures are reached, is another good way to go. The impediments are many. The pressure of personal guilt stops many from renouncing what seemed the only conceivable ladder to upward mobility, and student debt has been rigged to be exempt from bankruptcy. But the principle is worth exploring: people who have skin in the game must step up.

It’s promising that Occupy networks are coordinating actions that target particularly egregious and vulnerable 1 percent institutions. (Bank of America, barely afloat on a raft of bad paper, seems one promising candidate. Why should it be preserved?) Proposed actions run from getting depositors to move money from the monster banks (already somewhat successful) to getting pension funds to move their money to pop-up brick-and-mortar occupations to occupying shareholder meetings of various deserving corporations. National coordination would be a help in providing a focus and thus winning the attention of corporate media, which, while reduced in influence, still matter.

Some face-to-face encampments continue to matter, too. Occupiers need to meet and learn from one another, listen, talk, perform, enjoy. The occupations also need to secure themselves against criminal activity that does not serve the movement’s larger purposes. Being in public means not only that; it means that you’re a billboard for the movement, a billboard flooded with media, a billboard that sends messages to lots of people who have little idea what Occupy stands for.

I argued before in these pages [“Occupy Nonviolence,” February 27] that, to paraphrase one recent slogan, the 99 percent must be 100 percent nonviolent. So offers of nonviolent training by MoveOn and other OWS allies should be gratefully accepted. Co-optation fears should be aired, of course, but in the present context, they are marginal and should be laid aside in favor of mutually beneficial work. Moreover, since belligerent, oversupplied police, agents provocateurs and masked resisters of police-state tactics in Chicago for NATO, and Charlotte and Tampa for the conventions, are likely to provoke riotous outbreaks that can tar the whole movement, might there not be particular on-the-spot use for Occupy Marines, Occupy the Police and other Occupy supporters trained in discipline to stand at the ready to contain and nonviolently quell any outbreaks of property damage? Don’t just renounce violence—seal it off.

While talk of a May 1 general strike is catnip for revolutionaries, Occupy aid to worker movements is a prime way to relate to the employed. One example: on February 24, Chicago Occupiers supported a UE local occupying the Serious Materials window plant to stop closure. General strikes should not be declared except by organized or organizing workers.

Finally, the spirit of Occupy belongs in the political campaigns even as activists will disagree about which ones deserve support. Networks in and around Occupy should support candidates who pledge to push money out of politics, to make taxes far more progressive, to regulate banks far more stringently than Dodd-Frank. Occupy will never collapse into electoral campaigns. It need not be phobic about co-optation.

The American people are not shopping for vanguards. They do not await signals to raise the ante for ever more militant action or revolutionary upheaval. What they do await is plausible hope. Winning them to the cause of substantial change requires constant recognition that great things will have to be achieved by the Americans we have, not the Americans we wish to have.

ALSO IN THIS FORUM

Richard Kim: “The Occupy Spring?”
Michael Moore: “The Purpose of Occupy Wall Street Is to Occupy Wall Street”
Ilyse Hogue: “Occupy Is Dead! Long Live Occupy!”
Bill Fletcher Jr.: “Occupy the Imagination”
Frances Fox Piven: “Occupy! and Make Them Do It”
Stephen Lerner: “Horizontal Meets Vertical; Occupy Meets Establishment”
Jeremy Brecher: “Occupy Climate Change”
Jonathan Schell: “If Vaclav Havel Met Occupy’s Human Mic…”
Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett: “Occupying the Unexpected”

An Occupy protester in Chicago, Monday, Oct. 3, 2011. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
 
This piece is adapted from “In Chicago, Throwing Down the Gauntlet,” which originally appeared in the online edition of the Occupied Wall Street Journal (occupiedmedia.us) on January 25.
 
This past fall, Occupy transformed the political landscape by seizing a moment, wedding righteous anger to high spirits—by existing and enduring in public places. The occupations cleared spaces for public life, for mutual education and controversy. From them came all kinds of direct actions that carried symbolic weight. From them also came the marches of tens of thousands where the inner movement of the encampments was joined by the outer movement of the membership organizations—the unions, progressive groups and so on. That was when the movement broke through to the larger public—by looking like the 99 percent.

Then, in house occupations and anti-foreclosure actions, the movement began to deliver palpable results—putting real families in real homes, preventing evictions. And despite ample provocation by paramilitarized police, the movement occupied the moral high ground by staying almost wholly nonviolent. Now, ready or not, here comes the election cycle of 2012, putting pressure on the movement to keep up a vital tension between self-maintenance and growth, between challenging the whole plutocratic political economy and upping the odds of reforms that can arrest and reverse it.

And, right on cue, here come the city governments of Chicago, Tampa and Charlotte, readying noxious rules and massive armament to corral the likely thousands of demonstrators who will gather, in the Occupy spirit—though not necessarily with any official imprimatur—to greet the G-8 and NATO in May, the Republicans in August and the Democrats in September, respectively.

In Chicago, at the behest of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the City Council on January 18 passed a stupendous ordinance, requiring, among other things, that all applicants for demonstration permits (1) supply at the time of application “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,” and (2) 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 any damage to the public way or city property arising out of or caused by the parade.” (If all that weren’t tragic and farcical enough, it now also becomes mandatory that the applicants submit “a list identifying the type and number of all animals that applicant intends to have at the parade.”) The minimum fine for a violation jumps to $200; the maximum is $1,000 and/or ten days in jail.

The local press accepted Emanuel’s spin and treated the final version of the ordinance as a back-down after critics assailed an earlier version. It is not a back-down. It is full frontal abuse of the First Amendment. Chicago’s applicants had to scramble to file their papers before the new regulations took effect on January 28. And even then, the feds may end up pre-empting the city by imposing still more-stringent national security laws.

Plastic netting, video surveillance, bans on “weapons” like pens, fenced-in “free speech zones,” beefed-up police forces, pepper spray and tanks—some of what’s in store for protesters in Tampa and Charlotte—are officialdom’s bankrupt notions of how a democracy ought to confront “the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” in the words of some eighteenth-century document. These are slaps in the face of the people’s right to govern themselves, as much as the Citizens United decision and the billion-dollar election campaigns that line the pockets of the oligarchs who hold free licenses to operate TV and radio stations on the public airwaves.

The authorities in Chicago, Tampa and Charlotte hope to scare Occupiers away. They’ve thrown down their gauntlets. These are flagrant insults. And very likely some who show up to stand for economic justice and decency will react not only with indignation and mockery (eminently called for) but in-your-face breakage and belligerence, even though Occupy Chicago explicitly defines itself as a “nonviolent nonpartisan people’s movement.” No matter whether it’s the riot police or the agents provocateurs or the “black bloc” who cast the first stones, under Chicago’s new ordinance, if vandals hijack the demo or damage property, the city could legally force the organizers to pick up the tab.

It’s not hard to imagine scenarios in which windows are smashed and heads clubbed. What happens then—regardless of who started it, regardless of the assemblies’ nuanced arguments about the true meaning of violence—is that the image of the protest becomes just that: violence. Which offends people in living rooms everywhere, many of whom sympathize with the thrust of Occupy. Seeing what gets framed as “violent clashes,” whoever started them, they cringe and pull back. What moves to the forefront of their minds is an association between Occupy and a symbolic amalgam of disruption, inconvenience and the privileged frolic of rich kids. Panicky about the loss of law and order, they’re more likely to vote for take-no-prisoners politicians whose idea of reform is a reformatory.

I was on the streets of Chicago in August 1968 when provocative disrupters among overwhelmingly nonviolent protesters were infiltrated by provocateurs and beset by rampaging police, producing a televised spectacle that had the perverse effect of encouraging a disengaged public to side with the police against what they thought were dangerous and frivolous revolutionaries—even as the Vietnam War declined in popularity. Let there be no romanticizing of those who “upped the ante” toward militancy, indifferent to the fact that 95 percent of America was politically on their right—or of the few hundreds whose stagy vandalism (“Days of Rage”) a year later sounded the death knell for a mass student movement.

The greater Occupy movement has rightly understood nonviolence not as a negation, the absence of destructiveness, but as a creative endeavor—a repertory for invention. But Occupy has been reluctant to be more explicit about it. An “Open Letter to the Occupy Movement: Why We Need Agreements” makes the case that Occupy should define itself, explicitly, as a movement of “strategic nonviolent direct action.” By renouncing violence against persons or property, Occupy would enhance its appeal to the disabled and people of color, who have good reason to stay away from volatile confrontations. By isolating those who seize the spotlight by smashing things, it can prevent them from trampling the ethos of a brilliantly leaderless movement.

Think about right-wing billionaires like David Koch and Sheldon Adelson. Would they rather see Occupy preoccupied with the cops, or fighting the banks? Smashing windows, or bringing down politicians who oppose reinstating Glass-Steagall?

The Occupy movement has till now been a seedbed of creativity. Now it needs to amp up its declaration of values.

New York City

I wish I could say I was surprised that The Nation assigned a hatchet man to trash my book The Intellectuals and the Flag: the ever on-message Daniel Lazare, who’s sputtered against my work for years [“Pledging Allegiance,” March 20]. On his Long March to expose apostasy and dig up Fragments of the True Left, no scruple impedes Lazare.

Because Lazare is perhaps The Nation‘s back of the book’s main go-to guy for heresy hunts, it’s worth a fair number of words to see how shoddy his work is. His method is part fabrication, part demonology, part projection. Even when he tenders an idea, he warps it with his steel-trap either-or mind. Thus, when he makes the reasonable point that one could respond to the attacks of September 11 “as a New Yorker, as a human being, as a secularist or as an anti-imperialist”–that is, one didn’t have to respond as an American, perish the thought–he overlooks the many passages in my title essay where I do respond precisely as a New Yorker, a human being and, in fact, as an anti-imperialist, as well as an American. Lazare thinks I had to choose. That’s his thuggish mind, not mine.

Lazare is a champion cherry-picker–he should apply for a job in Dick Cheney’s office. In his many paragraphs of rant against what he takes to be my view of patriotism, there appear exactly two quotations from my book. Since Lazare is too busy to quote me, I refer the interested reader to a sentence in which, truth be told, I anticipate the likes of Lazare: “Viewing the ongoing politics of the Americans as contemptibly shallow and compromised, the demonological attitude naturally rules out patriotic attachment to those very Americans.” Lazare illustrates the same point when he imputes to me the view that “responding as an American meant seeing 9/11 in essentially nationalist terms as a case of turbanned foreigners visiting evil on an innocent United States.” Every claim that he puts in my mouth in this sentence is false–and refuted in the book.

Lazare is so contemptuous of the contrast I draw between patriotism and nationalism that he can’t be troubled to note it. So I end up on his anathema list along, I suppose, with the fellow who said, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it”–Mark Twain, who was also, I believe, a human being, a secularist and an anti-imperialist, as am I, though I may not have recited the loyalty oath prescribed by Inquisitor Lazare.

Most loathsomely, Lazare concocts the impression that I offer “a halfhearted defense of the war in Iraq,” and that my “thesis” is “that the war was a well-intentioned, if badly executed, attempt to rid the world of a noxious tyrant.” This is where tendentiousness rounds the corner and heads for dementia. Here is how Lazare works: He quotes exactly nothing from my book that says such a thing. There is nothing: I wrote against the war, spoke against it in many venues, marched against it, vigiled against it. Here is one sentence from the book: “By the time George W. Bush declared war without end against an ‘axis of evil’…I felt again the old anger and shame at being attached to a nation–my nation–ruled by runaway bullies, indifferent to principle, playing fast and loose with the truth, their lives manifesting supreme loyalty to private (though government-slathered) interests yet quick to lecture dissenters about the merits of patriotism.” On the next page, I criticize the Democrats for ducking the issue in 2002.

While Lazare was busy foraging for an essay of mine in Mother Jones to trash, he might have found many in which I argued against the war. Instead, he offers this: “Citing his fellow Dissent-nik Paul Berman, Gitlin bravely inveighs against Islamic fundamentalism as ‘a poisonous, nihilist, totalitarian creed allied, in its ideological DNA, to fascism and communism.’ But he neglects to explain why, if Islamic fundamentalism and Soviet Communism are ideological brothers, they would fight a war to the death in Afghanistan.”

But the very next sentence after the one Lazare cites reads: “Unlike him [Berman], I concluded that its [Islamism’s] roots are principally non-Western and that the wrong interventions–as against Iraq’s Ba’athist tyranny–are likely to backfire.” By the way, by Lazare’s illogic, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could not have gone to war with each other; nor the Soviet Union and China; nor Saddam’s Iraq and Khomeini’s Iran.

Lazare is a professional subject-changer and barrel-bottom scraper. I criticize the likes of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said for finding nothing good to say about US interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, whereupon Lazare objects that Chomsky is a “critical patriot” and Said was an “old-fashioned liberal.” So? I write that totalist ideologies proved murderous, and Lazare, in his fourth-grade gotcha! manner, objects that democracy, socialism and science are also “totalist” (his scare quotes)–yet also liberating. QED! But of course democracy and science are not at all totalist, for they make room for dissent–as would socialism too if it were democratic.

Lazare thinks I wrote in Mother Jones against “Blaming America First” because I was “incensed” that my friend Katha Pollitt had written against flying the flag, and that I implied that Pollitt and her co-thinkers derived pleasure from the suffering around them. In truth, I was not writing about Katha, nor was I incensed about her views–in fact, we appeared together, amicably, arguing against an Iraq war on Democracy Now!, though we did disagree on some particulars. I was indeed incensed by Chomsky, who on the day of the mass murder was too busy denouncing Bill Clinton’s 1998 attack on Sudan to express more than a perfunctory word about the Americans (and others) pulverized. Lazare then says I attacked Chomsky and Said as “foolish or disloyal.” In fact, I attacked them as foolish, not disloyal. It is Lazare who is obsessed with loyalty–to what shimmering idea he does not get around to speaking.

But Lazare, in full jihad mode, flies past my observation, in the same Mother Jones piece, that “the American flag sprouted in the days after September 11, for many of us, as a badge of belonging, not a call to shed innocent blood.” He extracts what he detests in one Mother Jones piece and doesn’t mention my other Mother Jones work at all, including my polemic against the 2002 Bush National Security Statement.

Meanwhile, one-third of the pages of my book concern David Riesman, C. Wright Mills and Irving Howe, intellectuals who in their work aspired to comprehensiveness, comprehensibility and political use. Another one-third make arguments about postmodernism, cultural studies and university values. Lazare is too busy fulminating against my (shall we say) disloyalty even to pay any of this any mind. A mind like an ice pick cannot be bothered.

TODD GITLIN

New York City

Until I read Daniel Lazare’s review of Todd Gitlin’s The Intellectuals and the Flag, I foolishly believed that Gitlin was an opponent of the war in Iraq. Maybe I believed this because Gitlin argued in a September 2002 New York Times op-ed article that “liberals should oppose this administration’s push toward war in Iraq.” Or maybe I believed it because, in a talk he gave at NYU in November 2002, he said that war in Iraq was likely to bring about “carnage and a boost to terror,” that “wars must be a matter of last resort” and that despite the “monstrous tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the use of force for ‘regime change’ is not proportionate, nor is it justified.” Or maybe I believed it because in the title essay of the book reviewed by Lazare, Gitlin says that Bush and his entourage “bamboozled the public,” that they were “lying,” “cherry-picking the evidence,” “covering up the counter-evidence” and “playing the bully’s game of triumph of the will.” Until I read Lazare’s review, I had no idea that all of this added up, as Lazare puts it, to a “half-hearted defense of the war in Iraq.” That Gitlin is very sly! Thank goodness we have sharp-eyed and intellectually scrupulous critics like Lazare to expose him.

BRIAN MORTON

Chevy Chase, Md.

Any future historian seeking a prime example of idiocy on the American left will have to look no further than Daniel Lazare’s tirade against Todd Gitlin’s latest book. Here she will find Gitlin, a consistent and eloquent opponent of the Iraq War, described as a member of the “foreign policy establishment” and an ally of “authoritarianism.” Here she will find Lazare mocking the very idea that left-wing patriotism can be anything other than a surrender to jingoism–although such worthies as Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King Jr. invoked American ideals to support their demands. And here she will find evidence that certain radicals gain more satisfaction from hating a prominent progressive like Gitlin than in figuring out how to rescue the positive aspects of national traditions from the right-wing government that speaks in their name. The Intellectuals and the Flag is a splendid contribution to the revival of a credible left that might actually play a part in changing our country. Lazare’s review is a mélange of falsehoods and baseless rants that reminded me of the kind of hack jobs once performed by Stalinist writers like Mike Gold and V.J. Jerome. It should have no place in the most popular weekly on the current American left.

MICHAEL KAZIN

LAZARE REPLIES

New York City

Todd Gitlin has written a long, furious blast of a letter, so I’ll be as clear and calm as I can in reply. It is beyond me why Gitlin characterizes my point about the importance of perspective as “thuggish.” I think it’s obvious: The “optic” one chooses to view a particular event helps determine one’s perception, analysis and response. In Gitlin’s case, choosing to view 9/11 through patriotic lenses fairly insured that he’d join in the mood of belligerent nationalism that was sweeping the country and that he’d be incensed at those who refused to do likewise. The astonishing charge of “schadenfreude” that he hurled at certain unnamed leftists in his notorious Mother Jones article a few months later was the inevitable upshot. Not even Bush or Cheney went this far. Yet Gitlin not only refuses to apologize but is now furious that I would even bring it up.

Gitlin writes that “Lazare is so contemptuous of the contrast I draw between patriotism and nationalism that he can’t be troubled to note it.” But in fact I quoted him at length on the subject of “democratic patriotism.” I just didn’t find his comments very convincing. Gitlin describes me as loathsome, tendentious and demented for suggesting that the arguments in The Intellectuals and the Flag add up to “a halfhearted defense” of the Iraq War and adds that I quoted “exactly nothing from my book that says such a thing.” But while noting his statement that the Bush Administration’s reasons for going to war were “shabby, sloppy and evasive,” I also quoted him as saying that “the other powers’ approach” to the problem of Saddam was deficient and that removing Saddam was not without its “virtues.” Despite Bush’s shortcomings, in other words, Gitlin managed to find something good to say about the invasion’s chief goal while arguing that no one else was able to come up with anything better. I think “a halfhearted defense” in this context is entirely accurate.

Although I didn’t say so in my review, I might point out that Gitlin went on in his book to describe the invasion not as wrong, but as merely “botched”–which suggests that, had it been properly executed, he might very well have been in support. I might also point out that he set off a round of booing at the 2003 Socialist Scholars Conference when, on the eve of the invasion, he told the assembled leftists to brace themselves because the outcome might turn out to be better than they were expecting. Needless to say, he was wrong. Gitlin no doubt thought he was being very sage in criticizing not only Bush but leftists who, he thought, were soft on Saddam. But the charge was groundless and only succeeded in infuriating the war’s opponents.

Gitlin accuses me of failing to quote the distinction he draws between Paul Berman’s thesis that Islamic fundamentalism, communism and fascism are all brothers under the skin and his own position that Islamic fundamentalism’s “roots are principally non-Western and that the wrong interventions–as against Iraq’s Ba’athist tyranny–are likely to backfire.” I didn’t quote it, because I thought it was a minor qualification that added little to the overall discussion. But maybe I should have, if only because it exemplifies so much of what is wrong with his writing. After all, what does the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism have to do with overthrowing a Baathist regime that was predominantly secular and nationalist? Not only is the statement that “wrong interventions…are likely to backfire” a tautology (can wrong interventions do anything but backfire?) but it is also a purely pragmatic argument that, by limiting itself to the likely consequences of such actions, avoids any question as to their underlying morality. The point is not whether intervention would work (whatever “work” means in this context) but whether it would be right or wrong in the first place.

A few other points: Gitlin says I am wrong to argue that if fundamentalism and Soviet Communism were brothers under the skin, it would beg the question of why they “would fight a war to the death in Afghanistan.” He replies that ideological brothers often go to war with one another and cites Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II as an example. But this statement leaves me puzzled. Is he saying that the Nazis and Soviets were ideological brothers as well? If so, he should be aware that the only people who maintained this position at the time were a few isolationists calling for a plague on both their houses and quietly hoping that Hitler would be left alone to finish the job against Stalin. Most others, including nearly everyone on the left, recognized that despite certain superficial similarities at the top, the war between Germany and Russia was between fundamentally antagonistic social systems. If Gitlin disagrees, perhaps he should explain why.

Finally, I’m glad that Gitlin and Pollitt are friends, but I still find his comments about Noam Chomsky to be despicable. I don’t know Chomsky and actually disagree with a fair amount of what he has to say. Yet I’m absolutely confident that he was as appalled and outraged at the slaughter of the innocents on 9/11 as everyone else. If he brought up Sudan, it was only to make the vital point that while the victims were innocent the US government was not, and that Americans should demand that it come clean about its many unsavory activities in the Third World. If more dissidents had succeeded in making themselves heard in those days, we would be a lot better off now. But they were quickly silenced by people yelling “schadenfreude” and other terms of abuse, and so the war effort continued unimpeded.

Hatchet man…fabrication…loathsome: Gitlin insists that patriotism is an ideology of tolerance but grows angry and abusive when confronted with someone who disagrees. What’s wrong with this picture?

Regarding Brian Morton and Michael Kazin, it’s clear that Gitlin has been e-mailing his Dissent colleagues to get them to respond. I wonder what left-wing stalwarts on the editorial board we’ll be hearing from next–Paul Berman? Martin Peretz? Perhaps Mitchell Cohen will write in to explain why he supports the war, while his co-editor Michael Walzer clears up the mysteries of his own anti-antiwar position. The 2002 Times op-ed article Morton cites was actually a hack job that attacked “intellectuals and activists on the far left” who, according to Gitlin, “could not be troubled much with compassion or defense.” Once again, he portrays leftists as anti-American ideologues unmoved by 3,000 deaths, which is undoubtedly why the Times chose to run that absurd piece. Kazin’s letter is even worse–an obnoxious, bullying screed that insists we all acknowledge Gitlin as “a consistent and eloquent opponent” of the war merely because Kazin says so. As for the charge of Stalinism, I’ve been the most fervent of anti-Stalinists ever since joining a Trotskyist cell in Madison, Wisconsin, at age 20 (a long, long time ago, unfortunately). In neolib-speak, “Stalinist” seems to be a general term of abuse for anyone daring to challenge the left-wing credentials of the various stuffed shirts who write for Dissent. Wherever he is, I’m sure that Uncle Joe is enjoying the compliment.

DANIEL LAZARE

The Bush Administration misses no opportunity to smack the mainstream media around for undermining the otherwise stellar reputation of the United States (Newsweek triggered riots in Afghanistan!). But these same media could plausibly be charged–at least some of the time–with burnishing the Administration’s facade.

Although militant jihadists need no particular pretext to justify their anti-American outbursts, surely no feature of the American occupation of Iraq has angered more friends, ex-friends and half-friends abroad–not to mention at home–than the torture and often arbitrary imprisonment of suspects in the chain of prison camps stretching from Cuba’s Guantánamo to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan’s Bagram. Yet to an astonishing degree, the major news media have given a pass to one egregious feature of these American camps, arguably more egregious than torture, sexual titillation, the use of dogs or the desecration of the Koran: the number of detainees who have died in US custody.

It was left to an opinion columnist, the New York Times‘s Thomas Friedman, not a news reporter, to declare on May 27 that “the abuse at Guantánamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks?”

The Times itself recently issued an in-house report calling for a sharper demarcation between news and opinion, and yet in a stark and consequential matter of fact the presumably hard news side has mainly gone missing. The pattern of deaths has scarcely been noticed. Reporters are not doing the needed round-ups, adding up facts and looking at patterns.

I used the LexisNexis database to see what major US news organs have reported about deaths of prisoners in US hands since the beginning of 2005. Here are the results. On television: nothing on CBS, one brief mention on NBC, another on ABC. Nothing on CNN, nothing on Fox, nothing on MSNBC. On public television and radio, now under fire from the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for “liberal bias”: After Friedman’s column appeared, Jim Lehrer cited 100 deaths, considering twenty to be “homicide,” and NPR’s Talk of the Nation interviewed Amnesty International’s William Schulz, who said, “Twenty-seven of those detained by the United States have been ruled to be the victims of homicide by medical examiners.” That’s it from the broadcasting subversives. Nothing from Time–or Newsweek.

Among the top newspapers inventoried by LexisNexis (thus excluding the Wall Street Journal), the Times is almost alone in giving any attention to deaths suffered at American hands. A long and powerful front-page article by Tim Golden on May 22 mentioned two deaths under torture in Bagram. Another front-pager by Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt (March 16) was headlined “U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide,” citing military officials as its sources. On March 10, in the twenty-third paragraph of a story that started on page one, Schmitt reported that Vice Adm. Albert Church, the naval inspector general, found “68 detainees who died while in American custody,” but that only six “were related to detainee abuse.” Turning to other major papers: An April 28 report in the Boston Globe mentioned “at least 28 deaths.” A Washington Post report on Admiral Church’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee did not mention deaths at all. That’s it from America’s major newspapers.

After the massacres of September 11, 2001, the Times published “Portraits of Grief,” a series that memorialized the more than 2,700 victims. ABC’s Nightline went past its normal length to list the names of all US soldiers dead in Iraq. The sheer numbers of the American dead are of course amply reported, though only some of the wounded are included in official figures. The number of Iraqis thought to be dead and wounded is barely noted. It requires no claim of moral equivalence, no imputation that any or all of the prisoners who died were innocent (or guilty), to say that the death of prisoners at US military bases and prisons is a proper subject of journalistic attention. Friedman, the columnist, rightly called these deaths, whatever their exact number, “not just deeply immoral” but “strategically dangerous.” Surely they matter.

The news would not be gloating, or dragging the Bush White House into imaginary mud, if it compiled and investigated these numbers. It would be reporting.

The war on the other side of the world was launched with high expectations but is now widely seen as a fiasco. Young Americans are being sacrificed in hostilities whose justification once sounded high-minded but has since decayed into a farrago of political dogmas, lies and distortions. Americans are sometimes negligent, sometimes brutal toward the people the US government is supposed to be liberating, and the latter want the former to leave. Support for the war erodes at home, and the President is despised worldwide.

The furies of the war echo in the furies of the antiwar movement. Despite efforts to sustain a playful mood, rage grows in activists’ hearts. Rage has become a sort of identity looking for outlets, as the Iraq stance of the Democratic nominee for President frustrates antiwar forces. For months, demonstrators have been making plans to manifest their displeasure during the Republican convention in New York City in late August.

Peaceful demonstrators are squaring off with stiff-necked authorities over the city’s refusal to grant permission for the rally they want. Meanwhile, other demonstrators welcome a chance to provoke mayhem. Their numbers may be tiny, but the press is primed to amplify the sour notes, acting on its ingrained principle, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Authoritarian forces are ready to chortle at the resulting spectacle and swing public opinion behind them.

For all the differences between the Vietnam of 1968 and the Iraq of 2004, between Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, aren’t the similarities a trifle unnerving?

Red-hot rage may seem in order when the country’s values have been trampled upon by a government with a dubious claim to legitimacy. Yet the theatrics of rage can easily play into Bush’s hands. Righteousness, if not rooted in humility and focused on results–on persuasive power–will offend more than it attracts and fall victim to its own arrogance, as surely as arrogance undercuts Bush.

The power of nonviolence rests in its welcoming spirit, its power to elicit identification and its promise of reconciliation. Consider the brave young men and women of the civil rights movement, sitting with dignity at lunch counters throughout the South. In film footage of the time, you can see them attacked by uncivilized whites, who curse them, beat them–and thus reveal themselves as bullies and cowards. The civilly disobedient cover themselves in self-defense but never raise their hands in anger. They appeal over their adversaries’ heads to the majority who, they believe–they have to believe–will see the justice of their cause.

As thousands of Republicans gather to nominate Bush for re-election, and as many more protesters–perhaps fifty times more–gather to express themselves against the damage Bush is doing, Americans of all stripes will be watching. Fair-minded people can understand dignified opposition even when they disagree with it. Rage in the streets is something else altogether. Protesters who spell “Bush” with a swastika, who smash windows, fight the police or try to block Manhattan commuters might as well stay home and send their contributions to the Republicans.

It is, or ought to be, so obvious that violence and chaos in the streets works to Bush’s advantage that not a few oppositionists worry about the Republicans planting their own provocateurs in the protest. Such a scenario is not farfetched. Provocateurs know some history, too. They know that disciplined handfuls can start riots amid turmoil. In 1968 a substantial number of the toughs who surged through the Chicago streets, inciting the police to riot, were later revealed to be police and intelligence agents. They urged violent actions, pulled down American flags, led taunts and otherwise triggered police attacks. Afterward, demonstrators exulted, equating their seduction of the cameras with victory. But most spectators who watched the clashes on TV sided with the police. Richard Nixon’s people knew what use to make of the footage. They strengthened their hold over the law-and-order vote.

In jittery 2004, swing voters in a country poised on a political knife-edge could again be stampeded to support the incumbent if they equate the opposition with disruption. Although we have no idea how many demonstrators are prepared to act recklessly, recent postings on antiwar websites suggest a go-for-broke mood among some: “If we kick their ass in the early part of the week, we’re going to inspire people to come out into the streets and join us…. Harassing the shit out of the GOP delegates is going to create a mosaic of interesting, militant resistance.” “We need to destroy the model of what ‘normal people’ think of protest movements: all that sign-holding, standing around and chanting slogans.” “Who gives a fuck about some voter in Missouri? How about the billions around the world who are fucking tired of the U.S.A.?”

Everyone shares responsibility to avert a debacle. The police ought to be scrupulously well-behaved. The media ought to cover disruptions proportionately. Viewers must understand that the cameras are drawn to sensational excess. And the marchers need their own monitors to practice nonviolent discipline and contain any disruptors–who are, de facto, not misguided friends but opponents.

Now, in a precarious time, every force in America is being tested. The Bush Administration plainly flunks. The Bloomberg administration has proved its small-mindedness. But we who oppose Bush face our own tests. If, as the whole world watches, rioters hijack the protest, the fine intentions of millions will have been canceled by the behavior of a few. Let dissent with dignity win the day and let us get on with a more perfect chapter of American history.