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August 13, 2015

Pimple poppers are perfectionists: The roots of our ugliest grooming habits

Many people think of nail biting as a nervous habit, but the driving force may not be anxiety. Mounting evidence shows that people who compulsively bite their nails, pick their skin or pull their hair are often perfectionists, and their actions may help soothe boredom, irritation and dissatisfaction. As many as one in 20 people suffer from body-focused repetitive disorders, engaging in behaviors such as biting their nails or plucking out hair until they damage their appearance or cause themselves pain. These disorders are related to tic disorders and, more distantly, obsessive-compulsive disorder. As such, the repetitive behavior is extremely difficult to quit—yet many people continue to think they simply have a nervous habit and are too weak-willed to overcome it. A new study adds evidence to a theory that perfectionism rather than anxiety is at the root of these behaviors. The researchers first surveyed 48 participants, half of whom had these disorders and half of whom did not, on their organizational behavior and ability to regulate their emotions. Those with the disorders scored as organizational perfectionists, indicating a tendency to overplan, overwork themselves and get frustrated quickly without high levels of activity. Researchers then put the subjects in situations designed to provoke four different emotions: to incite stress, they showed a movie of a plane crash; to promote relaxation, they showed a movie of waves; to elicit frustration, they presented a difficult puzzle but said it was easy; and to evoke boredom, they made participants sit in a room alone. People who had the disorders engaged in the body-focused behaviors during all the situations except the relaxing movie. The work, which was published earlier this year in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, jibes with a recent theory that stress is far from the sole cause of these compulsions. Boredom and frustration, easily elicited by an underlying perfectionist personality, may be more important triggers. Past research suggests that the biting or scratching indeed makes people feel better temporarily—perhaps satisfying the perfectionist urge to be doing something rather than nothing. After the initial relief, however, comes pain, shame and embarrassment. The findings could help therapists treat patients who suffer from the disorders; studies have shown that these types of perfectionist beliefs and behaviors can be eased with cognitive-behavior therapy. If patients can learn to think and act differently when tension builds, they may be able to stop the urge before it starts.

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Published on August 13, 2015 02:15

Conservatives’ crippling masculinity crisis: Cuckservatives, men’s rights activism and the privilege the right refuses to acknowledge

I’d like to advance the following proposition: A real man strives to be valued as an individual on the basis of what he does, not by maintaining unfair privileges he possesses through sheer dumb luck. This may seem obvious, but there is a glaring disconnect between the (often hyper-masculine) rhetoric of many white male conservatives today and the simple premise mentioned above. For three recent examples, see: The popularity of the term “cuckservative.” For those of you unfamiliar with “cuckservative,” it is an increasingly popular insult among American conservatives defined as a Republican and/or conservative who is too cowardly to do anything about his country being taken away from him, akin to a man being cuckolded by his wife. Although the term has spread thanks to Donald Trump’s online supporters – who have used it against Trump critics from GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to Erick Erickson, who withdrew Trump’s invitation to a conservative gathering in Georgia after his controversial remarks about Megyn Kelly – it is by no means specifically about him. In fact, it is commonly used to attack any conservative who takes a “politically correct” position against right-wingers accused of making racist, sexist, or other bigoted comments. The assumption is that a “true conservative” will remain silent when the Ferguson, MO police department is caught racially profiling African Americans and silencing protesters, or when a prominent presidential candidate promotes the myth that Mexican immigrants are more likely to commit rape, or when Internet trolls engage in misogynistic attacks against female gamers and game developers…. if, indeed, the true conservative isn’t expected to outright support these things. The growth of Men’s Rights Activism. Although there are thousands of blogs that consider themselves to be pro-Men’s Rights Activism (MRA), containing a wide range of flawed arguments, a cornerstone of virtually all MRA ideology is a staunch opposition to feminism. More specifically, it’s the idea that feminism constitutes an attempt by women to oppress men and make themselves into the superior gender. While some MRAs insist that gender equality has already been achieved and that feminism is thus moot, even as others openly argue that men are inherently superior to women and deserve special privileges, there is a broad agreement that women have too much power over men today and that progressive ideas regarding gender are to blame. As Adam Serwer and Katie J. M. Baker of BuzzFeed wrote about Paul Elam (the founder of A Voice for Men, one of the largest and most well-known MRA groups online), “He preaches the gospel that men’s failures and disappointments are not due to personal shortcomings or lapsed responsibility, but rather institutionalized feminism and a family court system rigged against dutiful fathers, as well as a world gripped by ‘misandry,’ or the hatred of men.” The growth of white minority politics. This is very similar to the arguments of those who believe in what a former Republican political adviser dubbed “white minority politics,” or “an anxiety underneath this [the Tea Party] that President Obama represents the rise of a multicultural elite and the rise of a non-white majority in America.” Although most Tea Partyers deny that they are racist, surveys have found that Tea Partyers are more likely than non-Tea Partyers to hold racist opinions, such as that “if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites” or that “whiteness, the ability to speak English well, and native-born status” were very important to “what it means to be fully American.” Similarly, as Steven Rosenfeld of Alternet pointed out, Donald Trump began to rise in Republican Party polls precisely because of his racist comments against Mexican-Americans… just as his short-lived 2012 presidential candidacy experienced a surge when he started promoting birther conspiracy theories, which are inextricably tied to the racist idea that a black president must somehow be “un-American”. What does this mean? There are two common themes linking these facets of the modern conservative movement: The recognition that groups which used to lack power (women in the case of the former, non-whites in the case of the latter) are, thanks to left-wing ideas about gender and race, challenging traditional sexual and racial power dynamics, and The argument that white men are somehow being victimized by these developments. The most immediate problem is that, objectively speaking, being a white male in America is still far better than being non-white and/or female: Whites are less likely to be arrested, more likely to get into college and receive a job offer, and have an easier time finding adequate housing than their non-white counterparts; meanwhile, women continue to be paid less than men for the same work, experience sexual assault (from rape to sexual harassment) at staggeringly high rates, and are victimized by sex trafficking (women are 85% of sex trafficking victims; 41% of sex trafficking victims live in the United States). By contrast, despite comprising only 31% of the population, white men hold roughly 65% of all elected offices (including 80% of Congress) and, as of 2011, 74.4% of corporate director positions. On a deeper level, however, the issue is that the white men who oppose gender and racial progressivism are effectively forfeiting a key component of their masculinity in the process. Although there are plenty of white men who have encountered forms of injustice that impede their ability to succeed, there is a difference between these individuals and the ones who insist that it is fact that they are white and/or male that is responsible for their failures. As the pioneering sociologist Eric Hoffer once explained: “The individual on his own is stable only so long as he is possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual’s powers and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day. When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from an unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride — the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.” In other words: If you were born as a white man in America, you had the dumb luck of belonging to a demographic that has a number of privileges. While there is no reason to feel personally guilty about this, it does behoove you to recognize that you’ve benefited from these advantages and (if you’re of a more selfless mindset) strive to level out the playing field for those who don’t share them. When conservatives instead act as if advocates of racial and sexual progressivism are “cuckolding” them, or that men and whites should mobilize to reclaim America, they are – knowingly or otherwise – attempting to solidify a social hierarchy that will serve their interests regardless of their actual merit as individual human beings. If this isn’t an unmanly thing to do, then I don’t what is.

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Published on August 13, 2015 02:00

August 12, 2015

Cuckservatives, libtards and the obscenities of angry white men: “If he’d called [Megyn Kelly] a bitch, we’d never see Donald Trump again”

Linguist John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia University, is one of the most perceptive interpreters of the American language. He’s written about Creole tongues, profanity and race relations for much of his career. In the spring he got tangled in controversy when he spoke of the new racial connotations of the word “thug.” We spoke to McWhorter about politics, forbidden words and how language changes over time. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. In the last week or so we’ve had the Republican debate, the end of John Stewart’s tenure on “The Daily Show,” the one-year anniversary of the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 50th anniversary of the unrest in Watts. Is language doing anything interesting these days as we try to describe these things? Is there a way it’s leading us astray? Those events are all extremely disparate. What we’re seeing in many ways is that we live in an America where we think that there are words we call profanity -- "damn," "fuck," "hell" and "shit." And there are issues surrounding words like the N-word, or the F-word that refers to gay men, the B-word that refers to women. But the fact is, damn, fuck, hell and shit are now salty. Those words are not profanity – they are words we shield our children from until they are of a certain age. But that’s not what profanity is supposed to be. What liberated those words from being forbidden? Because they were when we were growing up. It’s what a society considers unexpressable or dangerous. So there was a time, in the West, when that was religion. So “Oh, my God.” And notice that today, “Oh, my God” is not profane at all. Then, there is sex and excretion. That gets going long before the Victorians – it gets going in the United States in the Jacksonian era. So people get very prim about those things. And that lasted up through my childhood in the ‘70s, when it really was profane to say "hell," "shit" or "fuck." Even for an adult, depending on the setting. For example, I myself and my wife use the word “fuck” all the time. And I don’t think anyone would say we’re particularly profane people. My parents were angry, hard-drinking people – they didn’t say “fuck” much; they said “shit” more. What we really are afraid of in our society, and what we’re afraid of – and this is a good thing in many ways – is slurs against groups. Against racial groups, against women, pretty soon it will start with class. So today if a Martian looked at our society, they’d say, “These people have taboos, they have profanity…” But it wouldn’t be “shit” – it would be “n*gger.” So that’s where we are. What it means is that in today’s debates, we hear all sorts of things said you’d never have expected. So Donald Trump – even if obnoxious in 1955 – would never have said something along the lines of, "You must be having your period.” That would be utterly unthinkable. He’d be asked to leave the planet. While today, he could pull something like that. It’s considered extremely rude, but life will go on. While if he’d called [Megyn Kelly] a bitch, we’d never see Donald Trump again. That’s because what we fear, what we value, what we want to stamp out of society is different. So speaking of newer terms, we hear these words “libtard” and “cuckservative.” What do those tell us? Well, “cuckservative” is clever in its way because it’s supposed to sound like “cuckold.” But it also sounds like “cock” and “suck” – it sounds like you’re making a disparaging sexual comment. But what’s interesting about “cuckservative” is that could even become a popular term among a set of educated people. Once again, we’re not really worried about sex and excretion the way we used to be. Now, “libtard” kind of pushes it, because to call someone a “retard” now is almost as bad as calling someone – I hate to even say the word – a “cunt” or a “bitch.” My impression is that “cuckservative” is getting around more than “libtard” and I think partly because it seems less cruel. The fact that they’re being used, though ... Politics has a always been a dirty, nasty business -- but nobody in 1935 could have called someone a “cuckservative.” That’s because times have changed since then … Even in 1970 that would never have happened. The Internet must have played a role in these words getting around in a way that’s different from the age of print. It happens faster. The word "asshole"…. It only comes in in the [1960s] and then grew in the ‘70s; I’m just old enough to remember when it was fresh. Holden Caulfield, in “Catcher in the Rye,” calls people all kinds of things. But he doesn’t call anybody an asshole. That’s because the term didn’t exist. I mention "asshole," because it took a while to catch on. Because today, if someone came up with that, it would be on the nation’s lips within three weeks. That’s because we have this machine. The other thing about the Internet is that it makes us all a village. That means we talk at each other instead of writing at each other. If you think about, say, Nixon – people who hate Nixon, and you hate people who like Nixon -- you’re gonna talk about it in your living room. You might write some letters in your living room. But America couldn’t talk to America. Today, you’re always in your living room with the whole country – and that encourages speaking over writing (even if what you’re technically doing is writing). And that helps to coarsen the discourse from where it was even 15 years ago. What you’re talking about – even though we’re typing this stuff – is a return to an oral society. Very much so. We’re back in the village. How language starts is 300 people, living God knows where, who don’t have writing – they don’t know what writing is – and they’re talking all the time. That’s what human beings do. The idea that some human beings might curl up with something called a book, and engage it all by themselves – that’s very peculiar, and something that came around very late in the game. So we’re back in the village, even if it’s a giant village. But when you’re talking, you’re coarse. All human beings are coarse. And so we’re just going back to what’s in a way a very primitive state … It doesn’t lend itself to reflection. You spoke a few months ago about the way the term “thug” was serving as code for a kind of dangerous black man. Do you hear anything operating that way these days? Boy, did I catch hell from that. I don’t think I’ve ever been more misunderstood. Usually I get kicked by the left, because I’m supposed to be a black person who says, “Calm down.” But this time, everyone hated me because they thought I was saying, “Every time you say the word 'thug,' you’re saying n*gger,” which was not what I meant. The term "thug," which refers to certain outbreaks of violence, is used more when people are black than when they are white. There’s a sense that "thug" means not just a person breaking windows, and is uncouth, but is a certain black archetype. It’s not only white people who have created it -- black popular culture has created the idea of the thug as someone you have a grudging affection for. This was something enshrined by older rap iconography… There’s a little of this in “The Wire.” It’s taken on a certain racialized meaning… “A certain kind of black person is up to that again.” Words have many shades and meanings as they move through time. But this is one of them – it’s become a racialized term. And in the same way, “hipster” can be used to describe a kind of interloping white person. I think especially in gentrifying communities. I think of Spike Lee and the rant he gave when he was talking about people moving into Fort Greene – “these motherfucking hipsters …” There was a tinge of his saying “hipster” that meant “white people moving in.” George Jefferson would have said “honkies.” But the hipster [Lee] was talking about was not a black hipster. So there are ways, these days, we can use racially tinged terms without pulling out taboo words. You’re working on a new book. Can you give us a sense of what you’re writing and thinking about these days? I’m working on a book about how the word is not something that is, but about something going on. The general public needs to understand that language is inherently always morphing. Whether the culture changes or not, whether we need new words or not – language is something that changes. The dictionary is just an artificial representation. And I was writing this long before the “thug” controversy.Linguist John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia University, is one of the most perceptive interpreters of the American language. He’s written about Creole tongues, profanity and race relations for much of his career. In the spring he got tangled in controversy when he spoke of the new racial connotations of the word “thug.” We spoke to McWhorter about politics, forbidden words and how language changes over time. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. In the last week or so we’ve had the Republican debate, the end of John Stewart’s tenure on “The Daily Show,” the one-year anniversary of the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 50th anniversary of the unrest in Watts. Is language doing anything interesting these days as we try to describe these things? Is there a way it’s leading us astray? Those events are all extremely disparate. What we’re seeing in many ways is that we live in an America where we think that there are words we call profanity -- "damn," "fuck," "hell" and "shit." And there are issues surrounding words like the N-word, or the F-word that refers to gay men, the B-word that refers to women. But the fact is, damn, fuck, hell and shit are now salty. Those words are not profanity – they are words we shield our children from until they are of a certain age. But that’s not what profanity is supposed to be. What liberated those words from being forbidden? Because they were when we were growing up. It’s what a society considers unexpressable or dangerous. So there was a time, in the West, when that was religion. So “Oh, my God.” And notice that today, “Oh, my God” is not profane at all. Then, there is sex and excretion. That gets going long before the Victorians – it gets going in the United States in the Jacksonian era. So people get very prim about those things. And that lasted up through my childhood in the ‘70s, when it really was profane to say "hell," "shit" or "fuck." Even for an adult, depending on the setting. For example, I myself and my wife use the word “fuck” all the time. And I don’t think anyone would say we’re particularly profane people. My parents were angry, hard-drinking people – they didn’t say “fuck” much; they said “shit” more. What we really are afraid of in our society, and what we’re afraid of – and this is a good thing in many ways – is slurs against groups. Against racial groups, against women, pretty soon it will start with class. So today if a Martian looked at our society, they’d say, “These people have taboos, they have profanity…” But it wouldn’t be “shit” – it would be “n*gger.” So that’s where we are. What it means is that in today’s debates, we hear all sorts of things said you’d never have expected. So Donald Trump – even if obnoxious in 1955 – would never have said something along the lines of, "You must be having your period.” That would be utterly unthinkable. He’d be asked to leave the planet. While today, he could pull something like that. It’s considered extremely rude, but life will go on. While if he’d called [Megyn Kelly] a bitch, we’d never see Donald Trump again. That’s because what we fear, what we value, what we want to stamp out of society is different. So speaking of newer terms, we hear these words “libtard” and “cuckservative.” What do those tell us? Well, “cuckservative” is clever in its way because it’s supposed to sound like “cuckold.” But it also sounds like “cock” and “suck” – it sounds like you’re making a disparaging sexual comment. But what’s interesting about “cuckservative” is that could even become a popular term among a set of educated people. Once again, we’re not really worried about sex and excretion the way we used to be. Now, “libtard” kind of pushes it, because to call someone a “retard” now is almost as bad as calling someone – I hate to even say the word – a “cunt” or a “bitch.” My impression is that “cuckservative” is getting around more than “libtard” and I think partly because it seems less cruel. The fact that they’re being used, though ... Politics has a always been a dirty, nasty business -- but nobody in 1935 could have called someone a “cuckservative.” That’s because times have changed since then … Even in 1970 that would never have happened. The Internet must have played a role in these words getting around in a way that’s different from the age of print. It happens faster. The word "asshole"…. It only comes in in the [1960s] and then grew in the ‘70s; I’m just old enough to remember when it was fresh. Holden Caulfield, in “Catcher in the Rye,” calls people all kinds of things. But he doesn’t call anybody an asshole. That’s because the term didn’t exist. I mention "asshole," because it took a while to catch on. Because today, if someone came up with that, it would be on the nation’s lips within three weeks. That’s because we have this machine. The other thing about the Internet is that it makes us all a village. That means we talk at each other instead of writing at each other. If you think about, say, Nixon – people who hate Nixon, and you hate people who like Nixon -- you’re gonna talk about it in your living room. You might write some letters in your living room. But America couldn’t talk to America. Today, you’re always in your living room with the whole country – and that encourages speaking over writing (even if what you’re technically doing is writing). And that helps to coarsen the discourse from where it was even 15 years ago. What you’re talking about – even though we’re typing this stuff – is a return to an oral society. Very much so. We’re back in the village. How language starts is 300 people, living God knows where, who don’t have writing – they don’t know what writing is – and they’re talking all the time. That’s what human beings do. The idea that some human beings might curl up with something called a book, and engage it all by themselves – that’s very peculiar, and something that came around very late in the game. So we’re back in the village, even if it’s a giant village. But when you’re talking, you’re coarse. All human beings are coarse. And so we’re just going back to what’s in a way a very primitive state … It doesn’t lend itself to reflection. You spoke a few months ago about the way the term “thug” was serving as code for a kind of dangerous black man. Do you hear anything operating that way these days? Boy, did I catch hell from that. I don’t think I’ve ever been more misunderstood. Usually I get kicked by the left, because I’m supposed to be a black person who says, “Calm down.” But this time, everyone hated me because they thought I was saying, “Every time you say the word 'thug,' you’re saying n*gger,” which was not what I meant. The term "thug," which refers to certain outbreaks of violence, is used more when people are black than when they are white. There’s a sense that "thug" means not just a person breaking windows, and is uncouth, but is a certain black archetype. It’s not only white people who have created it -- black popular culture has created the idea of the thug as someone you have a grudging affection for. This was something enshrined by older rap iconography… There’s a little of this in “The Wire.” It’s taken on a certain racialized meaning… “A certain kind of black person is up to that again.” Words have many shades and meanings as they move through time. But this is one of them – it’s become a racialized term. And in the same way, “hipster” can be used to describe a kind of interloping white person. I think especially in gentrifying communities. I think of Spike Lee and the rant he gave when he was talking about people moving into Fort Greene – “these motherfucking hipsters …” There was a tinge of his saying “hipster” that meant “white people moving in.” George Jefferson would have said “honkies.” But the hipster [Lee] was talking about was not a black hipster. So there are ways, these days, we can use racially tinged terms without pulling out taboo words. You’re working on a new book. Can you give us a sense of what you’re writing and thinking about these days? I’m working on a book about how the word is not something that is, but about something going on. The general public needs to understand that language is inherently always morphing. Whether the culture changes or not, whether we need new words or not – language is something that changes. The dictionary is just an artificial representation. And I was writing this long before the “thug” controversy.

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Published on August 12, 2015 16:00

“Straight Outta Compton” and the prehistory of #BlackLivesMatter: How gangsta rap shaped our culture

You can tell that a musical movement has radical potential as soon as white people with bad haircuts start trying to destroy it. I certainly remember that gangsta-rap supergroup N.W.A’s 1988 debut album, “Straight Outta Compton,” was greeted with a mixture of outrage and consternation by those forces in society who always fail to recognize that they have cast themselves in the roles of prim schoolmarm and/or hypocritical preacher. (Either they pretend not to remember that the same thing happened with Elvis, with comic books, with horror movies, with heavy metal and punk rock and video games, or they soberly assure us that this case is very different.) But I had forgotten that N.W.A’s first national tour was greeted with riled-up demonstrators who bought piles of “Straight Outta Compton” LPs and CDs simply in order to crush them with bulldozers. In director F. Gary Gray’s crowd-pleasing new N.W.A biopic, also called “Straight Outta Compton,” group co-founders Dr. Dre (played by Corey Hawkins) and Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) look out a tour-bus window at the angry crowd of record-crushers in bemusement. Those people bought the damn thing, right? They can do what they want with it. That moment is no more than a comic footnote in Gray’s film, a sprawling, overstuffed, formulaic but highly entertaining story of pop stardom and its discontents in which the pioneers of gangsta rap are burnished to a high mythological gloss. (Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, surviving N.W.A founders turned showbiz zillionaires, are among the movie’s producers, so this should be viewed as the authorized and somewhat sanitized version of history.) But I think the symbolic violence of the record-crushers has a resonance that reaches both backward and forward in cultural history. Those people would never have heard of N.W.A or their obscure Los Angeles neighborhood if it hadn’t been for one song on that album, of course – and the way America reacted to that song eerily prefigured our current social and racial divisions over police violence and African-Americans. At the time, N.W.A specifically rejected any activist role or perspective; gangsta rap was partly a reaction against the didactic, “conscious” hip-hop of Public Enemy or Boogie Down Productions. At its most nihilistic, gangsta rap had a lot in common with the “no future” ethos of early punk rock; N.W.A was closer to the Sex Pistols than the Clash, and their music portrayed a world in which black lives didn’t matter. All that looks a whole lot different with a quarter-century's worth of hindsight, and Gray’s film seeks to connect the historical dots somewhat, while varnishing over the less savory details. As Stereo Williams of the Daily Beast has explored, “Straight Outta Compton” never mentions Dr. Dre’s history of alleged violence against women, or the pervasive misogyny of the gangsta genre. But let’s get back to those white folks who wanted to destroy N.W.A so badly they gave them lots of free publicity and bonus record sales. That response (as well as being idiotic) reflects a deep-seated American anxiety about the corrosive social effects of pop music in general and black music in particular. At the time, it clearly echoed a bizarre and revelatory event from less than a decade earlier, the notorious Disco Demolition Night at Chicago’s Comiskey Field in July of 1979. Lured by a local rock DJ who vowed to rid the world of the scourge of disco music – which to many whites of the 1970s was tainted both with blackness and gayness – nearly 50,000 people showed up to watch him blow up a bin of dance records between games of a White Sox doubleheader. The crowd was virtually all white and heavily dosed with beer and weed, and the result was essentially a riot: Fans stormed the field, climbed the foul poles, tore up the bases and the pitching rubber and tried to invade the Sox owner’s private box. All to prove that disco sucked. At least Disco Demolition Night had an undeniable libidinal energy, although the usual double standard of American life applied: A drunken white mob engaged in pointless property destruction are high-spirited hell-raisers, perhaps regrettable but essentially comic. Almost any group of black men, outside an authorized context, is perceived as inherently threatening. In “Straight Outta Compton,” we see a fictionalized retelling of the episode that supposedly sparked “Fuck tha Police,” N.W.A’s most controversial and influential song. While recording their album at a studio in Torrance, a middle-class and mostly white community on L.A.’s southern beachfront, the group’s members are harassed and humiliated by abusive local cops, one of them an African-American who assures their white manager (played by Paul Giamatti) that rap isn’t music and he’s wasting his time with these gang-banger criminals. Whether or not it really happened that way, that cop plays an important role in the film as the sole spokesman for the middle-class black community’s discomfort with gangsta rap. That was the song, of course, that brought down the ire of the protesters with the plaid shorts, the white sneakers and the rented bulldozers. “Fuck tha Police” was widely understood in mainstream white America not as an angry complaint or a cynical chronicle of street reality – or, in structural terms, as an outlet for youthful aggression, closely akin to the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” or the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” – but as an actual incitement to violence. It’s amazing to look back and see the extent of the hysteria: Five young men from an obscure Los Angeles suburb made a self-produced record for a small indie label, which was almost entirely banned from radio play and attracted official warnings from the FBI and the Secret Service. Authorities in several cities refused to let them play, and the movie depicts N.W.A driven from the stage and arrested by Detroit cops after defying an order not to play the Song That Shall Not Be Named. (Reality is a bit more prosaic: Their show was shut down and the band members were questioned at their hotel, but no one was arrested.) It wouldn’t be fair to suggest that only whites were offended by that song, or by the other sagas of dope deals, promiscuity and casual violence written by Ice Cube and MC Ren, the group’s principal lyricists. Ever since rap music emerged in the late ‘70s it has been divisive within the African-American community, and for many middle-class black people at the time the braggadocio, misogyny and apparent celebration of criminality in gangsta rap seemed to embrace all the worst stereotypes about their community. None of that debate about rap within the black community directly surfaces in “Straight Outta Compton,” which was scripted by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, from an original story by Berloff, S. Leigh Savidge and Alan Wenkus. For longtime hip-hop fans, however, the Dark Side of the Force is more than evident in R. Marcos Taylor’s terrifying performance as Suge Knight, the brilliant entrepreneur who did so much to market hip-hop as a global generational brand, and arguably did even more to destroy it. Knight is depicted here as a violent hothead surrounded by sinister companions and obsessed with humiliating his rivals, but needless to say the most damaging rumors or allegations surrounding him go unmentioned. (In a case of life imitating art imitating life, Knight currently faces murder charges for running over a music industry rival with his car – after an altercation on the set of this movie.) For those who launched a remarkably counterproductive campaign against N.W.A, the problem wasn’t simply that a rap group from L.A. had cut a record expressing dreadful disrespect for law enforcement. It was the disturbing and destabilizing effect that record had, and exactly the same is true for those who stand with Darren Wilson, or try to depict #BlackLivesMatter protesters as hoodlums and anarchists. As we see in the movie (although it goes unmentioned), by the midpoint of N.W.A’s 1989 tour their audiences were often one-third to one-half white, and sometimes more; almost 80 percent of sales of “Straight Outta Compton” came outside major cities. Exactly what kind of vicarious thrill or identification those white fans got from chanting along with "Fuck tha Police" is a complicated question much discussed by music critics and hip-hop scholars, and not one this movie even tries to address. But that moment of cultural rebellion shifted the consciousness of young Americans in one direction, and this moment of political direct action is doing the same in another. There are plenty of people who don’t want the national consciousness shifted, and indeed would like to unshift it as much as possible. Those people will fight back however they can, and are unquestionably dangerous in the moment. History ultimately renders them pathetic.

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Published on August 12, 2015 16:00

Why Ferguson will happen again: America is forgetting the Michael Brown atrocity

On Friday, the 363rd day after the killing of Michael Brown, Jr., I visited his memorial in the Canfield neighborhood of Ferguson, Mo., where his bullet-riddled body lay for four and a half hours last August 9. Having spent the day speaking at and in participating in a conference at a local church about the role of scholarship and the church in the Movement for Black Lives, I had not readied myself to encounter Canfield for the second time. But as my comrades and I got out of the car, and peered a few feet away at Mike Brown’s memorial, lined with teddy bears and marked on either end by two orange traffic cones, the devastation settled into my stomach yet again. The tears started dripping faster than I could catch them. I may never understand why the story of this kid pulls at my heartstrings the way it does. None of us may ever understand. The vast majority of local activists who have spent their year staring down police officers, taking milk baths to treat tear gas, being arrested, and advocating for change in their community never knew Michael Brown. But he is family. His fate is linked to ours. If it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us. Over the weekend, the public memorials and remembrances for Mike remained peaceful until Sunday evening when some unknown group of people began shooting, seemingly in a conflict unrelated to the protests. Police also claim that one of Michael Brown’s classmates, an 18 year old young man named Tyrone Harris, opened fire on four police officers in plain clothes, necessitating that they shoot him. He remains in critical condition. I remain dubious of their account of events. These incidents allegedly incited the police to once again bring out their riot gear, their armored vehicles and their tear gas, which they used on protestors lining the streets on West Florissant and Canfield Drive. Thus, the last few days have become an eerie repeat of how we spent August 2014, following Twitter for news reports of the terrible violence and fear gripping people in St. Louis. Mainstream media coverage has stayed true to form, offering accounts of police who have been forced into violence because of violent, angry protestors. On both Sunday and Monday, I spent the day checking in with local activists and other friends and supporters who have become family over the last 12 months. From them I heard a different story, about police giving orders to disperse while flanking protestors in on both sides making it nearly impossible for them to leave. I watched video that a good friend recorded hastily in retreat, where I heard the sounds of Black people running from police, screaming in distress, trying to avoid tear gas canisters, trying to make sure they made it out with everyone they came with. This is what state violence against peaceful protestors looks like. And the broad masses of the American populace have not yet become discontent enough with these violations of the rights of American citizens to rise up and do anything about it. Too many people are content to dismiss these protests as the acts of angry, illogical, and violent youth. Someone once told me that the root of all anger is fear. I’m not big on sweeping platitudes, but there is a visceral fear that animates the anger of those of us pushing our country to change. We fear for our lives. We fear for the lives of those we love. And we have been told, in every way possible, that our lives are not worthy of care or protection. We have every right to be afraid. We have every right to be angry. Our country wants us to fear it. On Monday evening, five armed white men, a militia group calling themselves the “Oath Keepers,” showed up to the Ferguson protests declaring their intent to keep the streets safe. Described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a fiercely antigovernment, militaristic group, these militia men claimed to be there to protect the protestors. But here is the question: How is it that five white men with assault weapons and military fatigues can arrive and patrol police officers and leave without being arrested, tear gassed, or killed? How is it that armed white men can openly patrol streets but unarmed Black people keep ending up dead? How is it that armed white men are not seen by law enforcement as a threat? Yes, the police chief called them “unnecessary and inflammatory,” but this is qualitatively different than viewing them as an active and dangerous threat. Yet the throwing of water bottles by protestors is a “threat” frequently met with tear gas. There is no universe in which a group of Black men dressed in fatigues and armed with assault weapons could show up to patrol the police and protect protestors without swift and significant reprisal. This week’s crude repetition of events that horrified us last August are a cautionary tale in what happens when America refuses to learn the lessons of the past. For the last year, I have been thinking through how white people have arrived at this particular moment, a moment where Black people are being slaughtered with impunity while white Americans pretend that things are fine. When I was a teenager, I remember being a part of a multiracial generation of youth who looked with horror upon the sins of white people in the early and mid-20th century. My white friends often spoke of their grandparents and even their parents’ racism and seemed not to want to repeat those mistakes. In fact, frequently, they did not understand how white people in the past had engaged in such atrocities. Back then, even I did not believe that we could turn back time. I did not believe state-sanctioned lynchings would still occur. Lynchings and denials of civil rights were so clearly inhumane. But I am struck by the fact that many of the police officers and vigilantes, who have killed Mike Brown and Sam DuBose and Walter Scott and the Charleston 9, are younger than I am. They were born in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Michael Brown’s mother is my age. And here we are again in an era of lynchings and the systematic denial of civil rights. What kind of forgetting makes that possible? What kinds of things do you have to believe about yourself to see one group subjected to heinous acts of state violence and conclude that they did something to deserve it? How are you any different, then, than the people who raised you? Back at Mike Brown’s memorial, I cried, in part, because it had been one full year later, and the memorial was still there. The objects of tribute had changed. Regularly, the memorial is dismantled. But members of the community keep coming back. They keep choosing to remember. They keep choosing to bring an offering. The place where Mike Brown’s body lay is holy ground. I have not forgotten. But I went back because I needed to remember. Forgetting makes such atrocity possible. Forgetting will cause you to retread the same ground again and again. White people’s willful forgetting of their long history of violent, anti-black racial atrocity dooms them to repeat the harms of the past. For Black people that means our salvation is in remembering. Remembering what white people are capable of. Remembering how much our country does not love us. Remembering our slain. Remembering that their broken bodies and their spilled blood compel us to keep on fighting.

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Published on August 12, 2015 03:00

Jeb’s Iraq revisionism: His idiot brother wrecked the place, but it’s all Obama’s fault

With the Donald Trump show still sucking up media and voter attention, other Republican candidates are searching for ways to break through the noise and make their presences felt. Some are attacking Trump directly to try and snag a slice of his spotlight, while others are carving out extreme positions on social issues. Jeb Bush, who slouched his way through last week’s debate, is trying to refocus attention on foreign policy with a big speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Jeb's had a rough go of it when it comes to foreign policy. After spending several days earlier this spring giving contradictory and evasive answers to the question of whether he would have authorized the Iraq invasion, Jeb was beseeched by his brother’s neoconservative pals to get his act together and start blaming Obama for everything bad that happened in Iraq. Jeb listened to their advice, and in last night’s speech he expanded the circle of blame to include Hillary Clinton:

So why was the success of the surge followed by a withdrawal from Iraq, leaving not even the residual force that commanders and the joint chiefs knew was necessary? That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill – and that Iran has exploited to the full as well. ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat. And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this? Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge…then joined in claiming credit for its success … then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away.

There’s nothing here we haven’t heard from Jeb before. Back in February he gave another big foreign policy speech, and in the question-and-answer session that followed he heartily embraced this idea that Iraq was “won” by the time Obama came into office. After deploying the passive-voice to gloss over all the grisly chaos his brother visited on Iraq – “There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure” – Jeb offered a spirited hosanna in praise of the surge:

But my brother’s administration, through the surge, which was one of the most heroic acts of courage, politically, that any president’s done, because there was no support for it. It was hugely successful and it created a stability that, when the new president came in, he could have built on to create a fragile but more stable situation that would not have allowed for the void to be filled. The void has been filled because we created the void.

The Republican foreign policy platform of the post-George W. Bush era is built around this idea that we actually won the Iraq war before Obama came in and lost it. It’s a fabrication, and it was concocted by the same people who dreamed up the invasion in the first place so that they could dodge ownership of the disaster they created. It’s a fiction that gives false comfort to those who believe against all evidence that the United States can reshape the world through military power – a notion that almost every Republican presidential candidate subscribes to. Peter Beinart wrote the most recent debunking of the idea that the surge “succeeded” for the latest issue of The Atlantic, making the critical point that the reduction in violence that conservatives and Republicans boast about today was not its primary goal:

The United States military bribed, cajoled, and bludgeoned Iraqis into multiple cease-fires. The Iraqi state was still broken; its new ruling elite showed little of the political magnanimity necessary to reconstruct it in an inclusive fashion. And the Band-Aids that Petraeus and his troops had courageously affixed began peeling off almost immediately.

This point can’t be made enough: the surge was not meant to just tamp down violence. It was supposed to provide Iraqi leaders the space and security they needed to achieve political reconciliation. The exact opposite happened: then-prime minister Nouri al-Maliki exploited the lull in violence to consolidate power and crack down on his political and sectarian rivals. If you argue that the surge was a “success,” you’re saying that the government we installed in Iraq was stable, healthy, and up to the task of running the country. That obviously was not the case. Jeb was a full-throated supporter of the Iraq war, and he can’t really distance himself from it given that the strategic calamity of the Iraq invasion is, for him, a family heirloom. But by rewriting a bit of history and retroactively shifting a few goalposts, he can once again preach the virtues of the Bush Doctrine while chiding Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for losing the war his brother “won.” Thus we’re left with a surreal and infuriating situation in which a member of the Bush family is accusing someone else of refusing to take ownership of our failed Iraq policy.With the Donald Trump show still sucking up media and voter attention, other Republican candidates are searching for ways to break through the noise and make their presences felt. Some are attacking Trump directly to try and snag a slice of his spotlight, while others are carving out extreme positions on social issues. Jeb Bush, who slouched his way through last week’s debate, is trying to refocus attention on foreign policy with a big speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Jeb's had a rough go of it when it comes to foreign policy. After spending several days earlier this spring giving contradictory and evasive answers to the question of whether he would have authorized the Iraq invasion, Jeb was beseeched by his brother’s neoconservative pals to get his act together and start blaming Obama for everything bad that happened in Iraq. Jeb listened to their advice, and in last night’s speech he expanded the circle of blame to include Hillary Clinton:

So why was the success of the surge followed by a withdrawal from Iraq, leaving not even the residual force that commanders and the joint chiefs knew was necessary? That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill – and that Iran has exploited to the full as well. ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat. And where was Secretary of State Clinton in all of this? Like the president himself, she had opposed the surge…then joined in claiming credit for its success … then stood by as that hard-won victory by American and allied forces was thrown away.

But my brother’s administration, through the surge, which was one of the most heroic acts of courage, politically, that any president’s done, because there was no support for it. It was hugely successful and it created a stability that, when the new president came in, he could have built on to create a fragile but more stable situation that would not have allowed for the void to be filled. The void has been filled because we created the void.

The United States military bribed, cajoled, and bludgeoned Iraqis into multiple cease-fires. The Iraqi state was still broken; its new ruling elite showed little of the political magnanimity necessary to reconstruct it in an inclusive fashion. And the Band-Aids that Petraeus and his troops had courageously affixed began peeling off almost immediately.

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Published on August 12, 2015 02:59

The GOP’s Donald Trump problem isn’t really about Donald Trump at all

It's inescapable that the GOP has a Donald Trump problem—though some now have reason to hope that Trump himself may start to fade, if not tumble, in the wake of his spat with Megyn Kelly, a typically operatic bit of reality TV. (Having Erick Erickson, whom Kelly has excoriated for his sexism, come to her aid in the aftermath must surely have given Kelly an added laugh, and given us all reason to wish the contest were more in mode of "Survivor.") But even if Trump were to magically disappear overnight, that would only end the most obvious, and superficial, aspect of the GOP's Trump problem, which is not Trump himself -- what he is, says and does -- so much as it's the GOP's necrotic, post-autopsy condition that called him forth, like a demon summoned from the underworld. Trump himself may or may not stay around—he could even run as an independent—but the GOP's real Trump problem, call it the “deep Trump problem,” is what his emergence says about the party's pathetic weakness, both as an institution, and as reflected in its presidential field (underscored again in the Fox debate). It's the problem behind the problem that the GOP's post-2012 autopsy was supposed to solve. The party has long thrived on the power of comforting (and threat-managing) conservative narratives, backed by massive cash flows, with little regard—if not outright disdain—for how the narratives relate to reality. But the institutional power to pull this trick off is no longer the equal of the irrational powers it has successfully summoned for so long. There is no master sorcerer in charge, and the sorcerer's apprentice is in way over his head. Take Trump out of the GOP presidential race—as so many establishment types hope or expect to happen—and what do you have left? No one who looks really promising, which is why Trump could make such a big splash in the first place. Bush was always even more problematic as the Establishment candidate than Romney had been—Romney averaged around 20 percent or more for three years before the primaries began, Bush averaged less than 15 percent the last two years—and his debate performance was typically flat, devoid of distinction. He did falsely claim, “our economy grew at double the rate of the nation,” when the real difference was far more modest: Florida's per-capita GDP grew 19.8 percent over Bush's two terms (2.5 percent per year), compared to 16.4 percent nationwide (2.1 percent annually), and was due to a housing bubble, which later went bust. But why would anyone even notice? As for the supposed debate winners—Rubio, Kasich and Fiorina (in the under-card)—they all have profound problems of their own, under-scrutinized so far, because of their poor standings. The already-struggling Rubio, who actually advertised his lack of a résumé, has been decimated by Trump's rise, dropping more than 50 percent since Trump entered the race in five-poll rolling averages, more than Huckabee or Carson, and more than double Scott Walker. Kasich, although long on résumé, has nothing outstanding to point to (Ohio job growth is subpar, for example). And then there's failed businesswoman (and failed Senate candidate) Carly “Demon Sheep” Fiorina. The fact that candidates like these are getting buzz only underscores how pathetic the party is, and how far its infatuation with campaign rhetoric has gotten divorced from reality. In the GOP's deluded imagination, Fiorina “proves” that the party's war on women is a myth—pay no attention to the latest lie-based crusade to destroy Planned Parenthood. In the real world, the fact that Fiorina's presidential bid is taken seriously after losing a Senate bid by 10 points proves just the opposite: how desperate for cover the misogynist GOP is, and how shamelessly they practice the very promotion of “unqualified women and minorities” (see Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Alan Keyes) that they claim to abhor. This large, but unpromising field is really no surprise, however. It's just what you should expect when big money and ideological powerhouses essentially eclipse the traditional party structure. The centrifugal process has been underway for decades, but now it's reached a crisis—witness the GOP's inability to act on their own 2012 autopsy, which we'll return to below. Conservatives' Latest Psycho-dynamic Turn The result of this process is both messy and complex, though Joan Walsh and Chauncey DeVega were both onto something highly significant calling attention to a disturbing new right-wing meme for attacking—other conservatives! First, Walsh explained:

The spread of the epithet “cuckservative” is a sign that the crudest psycho-sexual insecurity animates the far right. “Cuckservative,” you see, is short for a cuckolded conservative. It’s not about a Republican whose wife is cheating on him, but one whose country is being taken away from him, and who’s too cowardly to do anything about it. OK, that’s gross and sexist enough already, but there’s more. It apparently comes from a kind of pornography known as “cuck,” in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man.

Then DeVega added an extensive examination of historical roots and psychological resonances involved, adding the crucial point that there's something other than traditional interracial cuckolding involved:

No, this camp of aggrieved and imperiled white men, drunk on toxic white masculinity, are terrified of their supposed status as “victims” in a more inclusive and cosmopolitan 21st century America. Whereas cuckolding has its foundations in eroticism, the term “cuckservative” has evolved from a related, but ultimately very different, psychosexual fixation: racialized castration anxieties.... The legacy of the South’s planter class — the 1 percent [of] its time, who profited from the blood of the slave plantations, work camps, tenant labor, sharecropping fields, and chain gangs — is also seen in the contemporary Republican Party. When the Republican Party’s leaders and media elites talk about “makers and takers” and “lazy” American workers, when they wage war on the poor and the social safety net, what we’re seeing is the new political economy of neoliberalism mated with the philosophical legacy of the planter class.

An Institutional Historical Framework The insights I've barely sampled are crucial for understanding the GOP's psycho-dynamics, which increasingly drive a party long out of touch with empirical reality. But if we want a better empirical grasp of what's happening with them, we need to look to institutional histories as well. Two books are particularly helpful in this regard. The first is "Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie" by Augustus B. Cochran III, the second is "Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Cochran's thesis was that the U.S. in 2000 was strikingly similar to the South in 1950 as described in V.O. Key’s classic work, "Southern Politics in State and Nation," as I recently described here at Salon, as an aid to understanding Bill Clinton's politics:

Cochran argued that the structures were different, but the functions were the same, like the relationship between gills and lungs. “Key argued that because Southern politics lacked strong, responsive parties, was based on a narrow electorate, and was designed to perpetuate white supremacy, Southern electoral institutions lacked the coherence, continuity, and accountability that could make Southern politics rational and democratic,” Cochran noted. And he argued that just as these factors hobbled the South’s ability to become an industrial democracy, a parallel set of constraints were crippling America’s ability to become a postindustrial democracy.

Cochran also pointed out that Southern politics was a prime form of entertainment. Southern politicians were much better at telling stories than they were at building (much less fixing) roads. Many of the institutions today are different, but the functions are similar. Most notably, the one-party system functioning as a money-and-media, elite-serving no-party system has been replaced by a gridlocked, two-party system functioning as a money-and-media, elite-serving no-party system. While most of U.S. history has seen one party or another dominate Congress and the White House for periods of roughly 36 years, the 1968 election began a long period of dealigned government, in which divided government was the rule. And this is the system under which—as I noted here recently—the bottom 90 percent lost 12.45 percent in average income between 1973 and 2008, while the top 1 percent gained 3.51 percent per year. That's why it makes a lot of sense to regard it as a period of de facto one-party rule. But there's more to the story. In "Off Center," Hacker and Pierson had a similar view of democratic dysfunction. "[T]hanks to personality-focused elections, run through a news media that provides increasingly little in the way of substantive information, most voters find it hard even to learn the basics. Political elites know this well," they wrote. But Hacker and Pierson focused on how GOP operatives had gamed this system in a particular, highly coordinated way, closer to an old Southern oligarchic clique, as Cochran might have argued, than to a traditional political party. With redistricting narrowing the number of competitive seats in Congress, powerful, well-financed ideological groups gained substantially greater leverage—no reason for GOP candidates to seek out the center to win general elections, the only threat they faced was from the right. Together, these two books help us understand how America's political institutions have been hijacked by elites in general on the one hand, and by well-organized ideological extremists on the other. Standing at the intersection of these two forces are figures like the Koch brothers, who spent decades laying the foundations for the Tea Party, and a growing number of other billionaire mega-donors given unprecedented political power via the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. But now, the fact that just one such mega-donor can keep a candidate alive indefinitely is just one facet of how different the current political environment is—with or without Donald Trump. Inadvertently, it seems, self-satisfied elites have let loose centrifugal forces far more powerful than they can control. To really understand what's happening with the GOP now, we have to combine this institutional framework with social psycho-dynamics that Walsh and DeVega pointed out, which have a powerful centrifugal force of their own. Not surprisingly, there's strong opposition to connecting these two realms, often expressed in common political narratives. When Rush Limbaugh inveighs against GOP elites, for example, he's masking the fact that he owes his entire career to them. In 1987, Reagan's FCC chair, Dennis R. Patrick, eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, which opened the doors for the creation of right-wing talk radio. No need for balance, no need to serve the public interest. Also, no possibility of a true left-wing counterpart, for at least two major reasons: First, the money from (elite!) advertisers would never flow so freely, and second, the affect-oriented, demonizing rhetoric that's Limbaugh's stock in trade has no comparable left-wing equivalent. Lest anyone doubt Limbaugh's importance, let's remember how Gingrich had him give a pep talk to GOP Congress members after winning control of Congress in 1994. And to clarity his function, David Niewert's award-winning analysis, “Rush, Newspeak and Fascism,” explained (among many other things) Limbaugh's role as a transmitter of hard right ideas, attitudes, myths and fixations into the broader conservative mainstream. One must also understand Limbaugh's anti-elitism—much like Trump's—as a posture typical of elite-serving fascism, long seen in America in an ideological orientation known as “producerism.” This posture situates middle classes as subject to attacks on two fronts—from elites above, and “parasites” below. In practice, the “parasites” are hated for who they are, elites for what they do—when they do anything that might help the parasites. Thus, Trump the billionaire who calls Mexicans “rapists” is automatically excused: He's not an elite, he's magically “one of us.” This is the key nexus of how “social issues” and economic issues interact: “right-wing populists” are only anti-elitist in this narrowly manipulable sense, and “social issues” only matter as a way to stigmatize those who can be looked down on. And who is better at looking down at people than Donald Trump? It's arguably the most central aspect of his character. It's also the very essence of today's GOP. The Problem Behind the Problem Earlier, I referred to the GOP's deep Trump problem as “the problem behind the problem that the GOP's post-2012 autopsy was supposed to solve.” It's time to unpack what that means. In the autopsy's very first section, the “Introduction to Messaging,” it said:

The GOP today is a tale of two parties. One of them, the gubernatorial wing, is growing and successful. The other, the federal wing, is increasingly marginalizing itself... Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. States in which our presidential candidates used to win, such as New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Florida, are increasingly voting Democratic. We are losing in too many places.

So the document's entire thrust can be seen as an extended effort to remake the national GOP in the model of its governors—governors who, by the very nature of the job, are generally much more pragmatically oriented (though many also win in off-year elections, with much smaller, more right-leaning electorates). As soon as it was released, Joan Walsh noted it was hard to see an organized constituency for the advised changes, “while there’s plenty of party opposition,” pointing directly at two prominent representatives:

“Let’s be clear about one thing, we’re not here to rebrand a party,” Sarah Palin declared [at CPAC] Saturday. “We’re here to rebuild a country.” Rush Limbaugh has already declared war on Priebus and his makeover plans. “The Republicans are just getting totally bamboozled right now,” Limbaugh told his listeners. “The Republican Party lost because it’s not conservative, it didn’t get its base out.” People say they need to moderate their tone — they don’t.” He dismissed Priebus’ project as designed to soothe the party’s “donor base.”

Limbaugh was right about one thing: The “donor base” is why the GOP's done so much better with governors. There's a variety of reasons for that, not least the fact that states are smaller entities, where it's easier for donors to coordinate their efforts, and it's more immediately in their interest not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. But Walsh also ended her piece saying, “His autopsy won’t make sense until Republicans realize their party is dead as a national entity at least in its current paranoid, polarizing incarnation.” And here's the twist: Nationally—as pointed out above—the GOP's donor base has spent decades creating that very same “paranoid, polarizing incarnation.” It's their formula, nobody else's. Certainly not Donald Trump. He is, as he claims, just a player. He didn't invent the game, which is why all attempts to use a “base vs. donor” model—rather than a synergistic “base and donor” model—are bound to miss what's most significant here, the heart of what the GOP's deep Trump problem is all about. And that heart is simple, really. It's the same problem that German conservatives faced in the early 1930s. They chose to throw in with Hitler as their solution—but it was they who spent years creating both the problem and Hitler. And the same can be said about today's conservative elites and Donald Trump. I'm not saying that Donald Trump is Hitler—he's more like Mussolini, I mean Berlusconi. It's the myopic fecklessness of today's conservative elites that's the real story here. That's the GOP's real deep Donald Trump problem. They're way bigger clowns than he ever dreamed of being.

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Published on August 12, 2015 02:58

The secret to weight loss Coca-Cola doesn’t want you to know

Don’t stress too much about cutting calories if you want to shed pounds—focus on getting more exercise. That’s the controversial message beverage giant Coca-Cola is backing in its new campaign to curb obesity. Coke is pushing this idea via a new Coke-backed nonprofit called Global Energy Balance Network, The New York Times reported on August 9. Money from Coke, the Times reported, is also financing studies that support the notion that exercise trumps diet. But is there any merit to such a stance? Not much, says Rutgers University–based diet and behavior expert Charlotte Markey. She is the author of an upcoming cover story in Scientific American MIND on this topic, and spoke about the Coke claims withScientific American on Monday. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.] In your fall Scientific American MIND feature you write “study after study shows that working out is not terribly effective for weight loss on its own.” Why is that? Exercise increases appetite, and most people just make up for whatever they exercised off. There’s a lot of wonderful reasons to exercise and I always suggest it to people who are trying to lose weight—some sort of exercise regimen keeps them focused on their health and doing what is good for them, and it’s psychologically healthy. But in and of itself it won’t usually help people lose weight. Two years ago there was a review study in Frontiers in Psychology that concluded dieting often actually led to weight gain. Why would that happen? When people try to diet, they try to restrict themselves, which often leads to overeating. They cut out food groups which make those food groups more desirable to them. They think too much about short-term goals and don’t think about sustainable changes. But if you are going to lose weight, you have to change your behaviors for the rest of your life or otherwise you gain it back. That’s not a sexy message because it seems daunting. Coke’s message is don’t worry so much about dieting but worry a bit more about exercise. Is there something to that then? I find everything going on here very troubling. In the promotional video from Coke’s group, linked to by the NYT, exercise scientist Steve Blair says we don’t know what is causing obesity and we need more research. That message is oversimplified and terribly misleading. We actually know a great deal about what leads to obesity. It’s not a great mystery. People are eating too much and not exercising enough…that makes it inevitable that people will be obese. The group’s emphasis on physical activity is misleading based on what the data shows. There’s no data to support saying if you exercise for 30 minutes three times a week that this will take care of the problem. We have data refuting that. In reality, we need people to stop drinking sugary beverages like soda. Soda is the one consumable beverage that is repeatedly cited as having the biggest impact on obesity rates. From a public health standpoint, we want soda out of schools and we want cities to really decrease intake of soda—and Coca-Cola knows this and knows they are being proactive and defensive against taxes on soda and other limitations. What does a sustainable weight loss regime look like? It looks like making regular, sustainable dietary changes. It does not have to be a complete revamp of someone’s way of eating since that is not typically sustainable. But, in most cases, it has to involve dropping 300 or more calories per day; that can be done by dropping a couple sodas per day. People have to commit to this and prepare themselves—weight loss is a marathon and not a sprint. Exercise is important for sustaining weight loss though, right? Can you talk a bit about what the literature says on that? Exercise makes people feel good. Avoiding food can just make people feel deprived. Exercise also gets people distracted from wanting food or other stressors, and it alleviates stress. But exercise also has real physical benefits. Right. We are burning calories. It’s good for all of our systems—from our heart to our digestive system to our psychological well-being. People should exercise for their health overall but alone it’s not good for weight loss. Researchers are supposed to note their funding sources. So if scientists acknowledge their work is supported by Coke, does it resolve conflicts of interest? I think that’s a good ethical question. Funding research is expensive. If Coke or anyone wants to contribute to unbiased research, then I don’t want to stop them. I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing. Obviously there is a conflict of interest, and I don’t think it’s an accident that Coke seems to be targeting people who have been doing physical activity work their entire careers and not people who have been doing eating and diet work. I am not arguing that exercise isn’t important but it strikes me as a bit suspect. No respectable researcher would be part of an enterprise that hides results that do not support the Coke message, and some of these researchers are well known and quite reputable so I do not think that is on the table. I think the issue is what is done with the results and how they are presented to the public. Coke is spending millions of dollars here and has a marketing PR budget that researchers don’t have so they can take the findings and share them and use them to try to fight policy and all these laws that are being debated about taxing soda. Coke has this body of evidence that is biased since they are funding exercise studies and not diet studies. They can then use these in public policy debates, and I think that could be really worrisome. [Editor’s Note: Scientific American asked Coca-Cola to explain their position and the company e-mailed this response: “We recognize moderation and diet play a pivotal role in managing health and weight in combination with exercise. In fact, we continue to take steps to help people manage their calories—whether it’s through the introduction of smaller-sized packs, front-of-pack calorie labeling or innovation through new products such as Coca-Cola Life. In addition, last year we joined with the American Beverage Association, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and other industry partners on a beverage-calorie reduction commitment for every person of 20 percent by 2025. Clearly, we support calorie reduction as a tool for a healthier life.”]

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Published on August 12, 2015 02:45

Robert Reich: American CEO pay is completely out of control

The Securities and Exchange Commission approved a rule last week requiring that large publicly held corporations disclose the ratios of the pay of their top CEOs to the pay of their median workers. About time. For the last thirty years almost all incentives operating on American corporations have resulted in lower pay for average workers and higher pay for CEOs and other top executives. Consider that in 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers. Now, the ratio is over 300 to 1. Not only has CEO pay exploded, so has the pay of top executives just below them. The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the five highest-paid executives of large corporations ballooned from an average of 5 percent in 1993 to more than 15 percent by 2005 (the latest data available). Corporations might otherwise have devoted this sizable sum to research and development, additional jobs, higher wages for average workers, or dividends to shareholders – who, not incidentally, are supposed to be the owners of the firm. Corporate apologists say CEOs and other top executives are worth these amounts because their corporations have performed so well over the last three decades that CEOs are like star baseball players or movie stars. Baloney. Most CEOs haven’t done anything special. The entire stock market surged over this time. Even if a company’s CEO simply played online solitaire for thirty years, the company’s stock would have ridden the wave. Besides, that stock market surge has had less to do with widespread economic gains than with changes in market rules favoring big companies and major banks over average employees, consumers, and taxpayers. Consider, for example, the stronger and more extensive intellectual-property rights now enjoyed by major corporations, and the far weaker antitrust enforcement against them. Add in the rash of taxpayer-funded bailouts, taxpayer-funded subsidies, and bankruptcies favoring big banks and corporations over employees and small borrowers. Not to mention trade agreements making it easier to outsource American jobs, and state legislation (cynically termed “right-to-work” laws) dramatically reducing the power of unions to bargain for higher wages. The result has been higher stock prices but not higher living standards for most Americans. Which doesn’t justify sky-high CEO pay unless you think some CEOs deserve it for their political prowess in wangling these legal changes through Congress and state legislatures. It even turns out the higher the CEO pay, the worse the firm does. Professors Michael J. Cooper of the University of Utah, Huseyin Gulen of Purdue University, and P. Raghavendra Rau of the University of Cambridge, recently found that companies with the highest-paid CEOs returned about 10 percent less to their shareholders than do their industry peers. So why aren’t shareholders hollering about CEO pay? Because corporate law in the United States gives shareholders at most an advisory role. They can holler all they want, but CEOs don’t have to listen. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, received a pay package in 2013 valued at $78.4 million, a sum so stunning that Oracle shareholders rejected it. That made no difference because Ellison controlled the board. In Australia, by contrast, shareholders have the right to force an entire corporate board to stand for re-election if 25 percent or more of a company’s shareholders vote against a CEO pay plan two years in a row. Which is why Australian CEOs are paid an average of only 70 times the pay of the typical Australian worker. The new SEC rule requiring disclosure of pay ratios could help strengthen the hand of American shareholders. The rule might generate other reforms as well – such as pegging corporate tax rates to those ratios. Under a bill introduced in the California legislature last year, a company whose CEO earns only 25 times the pay of its typical worker would pay a corporate tax rate of only 7 percent, rather than the 8.8 percent rate now applied to all California firms. On the other hand, a company whose CEO earns 200 times the pay of its typical employee, would face a 9.5 percent rate. If the CEO earned 400 times, the rate would be 13 percent. The bill hasn’t made it through the legislature because business groups call it a “job killer.” The reality is the opposite. CEOs don’t create jobs. Their customers create jobs by buying more of what their companies have to sell. So pushing companies to put less money into the hands of their CEOs and more into the hands of their average employees will create more jobs. The SEC’s disclosure rule isn’t perfect. Some corporations could try to game it by contracting out their low-wage jobs. Some industries pay their typical workers higher wages than other industries. But the rule marks an important start.The Securities and Exchange Commission approved a rule last week requiring that large publicly held corporations disclose the ratios of the pay of their top CEOs to the pay of their median workers. About time. For the last thirty years almost all incentives operating on American corporations have resulted in lower pay for average workers and higher pay for CEOs and other top executives. Consider that in 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers. Now, the ratio is over 300 to 1. Not only has CEO pay exploded, so has the pay of top executives just below them. The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the five highest-paid executives of large corporations ballooned from an average of 5 percent in 1993 to more than 15 percent by 2005 (the latest data available). Corporations might otherwise have devoted this sizable sum to research and development, additional jobs, higher wages for average workers, or dividends to shareholders – who, not incidentally, are supposed to be the owners of the firm. Corporate apologists say CEOs and other top executives are worth these amounts because their corporations have performed so well over the last three decades that CEOs are like star baseball players or movie stars. Baloney. Most CEOs haven’t done anything special. The entire stock market surged over this time. Even if a company’s CEO simply played online solitaire for thirty years, the company’s stock would have ridden the wave. Besides, that stock market surge has had less to do with widespread economic gains than with changes in market rules favoring big companies and major banks over average employees, consumers, and taxpayers. Consider, for example, the stronger and more extensive intellectual-property rights now enjoyed by major corporations, and the far weaker antitrust enforcement against them. Add in the rash of taxpayer-funded bailouts, taxpayer-funded subsidies, and bankruptcies favoring big banks and corporations over employees and small borrowers. Not to mention trade agreements making it easier to outsource American jobs, and state legislation (cynically termed “right-to-work” laws) dramatically reducing the power of unions to bargain for higher wages. The result has been higher stock prices but not higher living standards for most Americans. Which doesn’t justify sky-high CEO pay unless you think some CEOs deserve it for their political prowess in wangling these legal changes through Congress and state legislatures. It even turns out the higher the CEO pay, the worse the firm does. Professors Michael J. Cooper of the University of Utah, Huseyin Gulen of Purdue University, and P. Raghavendra Rau of the University of Cambridge, recently found that companies with the highest-paid CEOs returned about 10 percent less to their shareholders than do their industry peers. So why aren’t shareholders hollering about CEO pay? Because corporate law in the United States gives shareholders at most an advisory role. They can holler all they want, but CEOs don’t have to listen. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, received a pay package in 2013 valued at $78.4 million, a sum so stunning that Oracle shareholders rejected it. That made no difference because Ellison controlled the board. In Australia, by contrast, shareholders have the right to force an entire corporate board to stand for re-election if 25 percent or more of a company’s shareholders vote against a CEO pay plan two years in a row. Which is why Australian CEOs are paid an average of only 70 times the pay of the typical Australian worker. The new SEC rule requiring disclosure of pay ratios could help strengthen the hand of American shareholders. The rule might generate other reforms as well – such as pegging corporate tax rates to those ratios. Under a bill introduced in the California legislature last year, a company whose CEO earns only 25 times the pay of its typical worker would pay a corporate tax rate of only 7 percent, rather than the 8.8 percent rate now applied to all California firms. On the other hand, a company whose CEO earns 200 times the pay of its typical employee, would face a 9.5 percent rate. If the CEO earned 400 times, the rate would be 13 percent. The bill hasn’t made it through the legislature because business groups call it a “job killer.” The reality is the opposite. CEOs don’t create jobs. Their customers create jobs by buying more of what their companies have to sell. So pushing companies to put less money into the hands of their CEOs and more into the hands of their average employees will create more jobs. The SEC’s disclosure rule isn’t perfect. Some corporations could try to game it by contracting out their low-wage jobs. Some industries pay their typical workers higher wages than other industries. But the rule marks an important start.

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Published on August 12, 2015 02:30

Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders is good for the Democratic Party

The linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky is one of the most quoted individuals in the world, and one the globe's most prominent thinkers. Although he has a sizable following, he is rarely seen in mainstream media, and has only been called to testify before Congress once (during the Vietnam War). Yet today Chomsky finally has a mutual admirer in the political system, and he happens to be out-polling every GOP contender. In May of 1985, then-Mayor Bernie Sanders of Burlington, Vermont brought Noam Chomsky to talk about the U.S. military intervention in Latin America. “At a time when many intellectuals...find it more comfortable to be silence and to go with the flow as it were, it is comforting to find on occasion individuals who have the guts to speak out about the important issues of our time, and certainly Professor Chomsky has been the person to do it,” he said. Watch Bernie introduce Chomsky, and Chomsky's address to Burlington: A friend of mine emailed Chomsky recently to ask about the Sanders campaign. This is what Chomsky said:

I'm glad that Sanders is running. A good way to bring important ideas and facts to people. His candidacy might also press the Dems a little in a progressive direction. In our system of bought elections he has scarcely a chance of getting beyond the primaries, and even if by some miracle he were elected he wouldn't be able to do anything, lacking any congressional representatives, governors, etc. As far as I can see he's a thorn in the side of the Clinton machine, which is not a bad thing.

A few months ago, The Guardian also asked Chomsky about Sanders, and received a similar response. When they informed Sanders of this response, he said he was “not as pessimistic as Noam...He’s right, we live in an increasingly oligarchic form of society, where billionaires are able to buy elections and candidates, and it is very difficult, not just for Bernie Sanders but for any candidate who represents working families. But I think the situation is not totally hopeless, and I think we do have a shot to win this thing.”