Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 887
January 21, 2016
How to ignore a mass poisoning in America: The Flint water crisis outrage gets even worse
A "political football." That's how Dennis Muchmore, the former chief of staff to Michigan governor Rick Snyder, described the crisis over the water in the city of Flint in a September 2015 email. The water, which was from the Flint River and which was shot through with poisonous amounts of lead from old, leaking pipes, had wreaked terrible havoc on Flint's residents for nearly 18 months at this point. It had caused people to begin violently vomiting in the night. It was making people's hair fall out in great clumps. It was stunting children's growth and causing potentially irreversible brain damage. It was even too dangerous for car parts. To Muchmore, though, Flint's nightmare was something to sneer at. Many government officials, he wrote, thought that
"some in Flint are taking the very sensitive issue of children's exposure to lead and trying to turn it into a political football claiming the departments are underestimating the impacts on the populations and particularly trying to shift responsibility to the state."That email is part of a larger cache of correspondence about Flint that was released by Snyder on Wednesday night. It is perhaps the most damning example of the cavalier way that Flint was left to poison itself to death, even as residents raised holy hell about what was happening to them. When Michigan wasn't ignoring them, or telling them they were wrong, it was trying to figure out how it could evade accountability—or, in Muchmore's words, seeing how to reject efforts to "shift responsibility to the state." Sadly for him, Muchmore admits that, technically, the state—and not Flint itself–was ultimately responsible for the decision to begin using water from the Flint River in April of 2014. "We’re not able to avoid the subject," he laments. A better person might not have written these things, but Flint was not given the luxury of being governed by such people. It is no surprise that Flint was treated with this kind of appalling indifference. That is nothing new. You'd be hard-pressed to find a starker example of the serial indignities doled out to poor people and people of color in the United States than the history of Flint.
As one of the main centers of the auto industry, Flint played a central role in America's postwar rise to global economic dominance. It was rewarded for this by being promptly tossed on the scrap heap when deindustrialization swept across the country. Then, when Michigan's financial crisis began spiraling out of control, the state decided that Flint's citizens—along with people in lots of other cities that just happened to have large poor, black populations—no longer deserved even basic democracy, and handed power over to a string of unelected "emergency managers." (Among other things, one of those emergency managers ignored Flint's City Council when it voted to switch back to the city's previous water source.)
Given all of that, it would have been more surprising if Flint's crisis had been taken seriously. Once you've decided that people are incapable of responsibly exercising their right to vote—you know, the kind of thing they used to say to keep women and black people from the polls back in the day—it's not a huge step to deciding that they don't possess the skills necessary to understand when their own water is poisoning them.
Snyder—in an eerie parallel to that other Midwestern villain, Rahm Emanuel—has gone from overseeing this orgy of cruelty to emotionally promising to stick around and fix the mess. In a recent speech, he floridly apologized for letting Flint down and assured everyone that he understood the gravity of their predicament. However true that may be, he surely understands the gravity of his own predicament far more. Snyder is not the first rich, racist man to oversee a government that favors other rich, racist people and leaves everyone else to drown, but he is the one in the driver's seat right now. It's hard to see how he can stick around. With any luck, he'll be bounced from his office soon enough. Ensuring that the people of Flint are treated as human beings and not the detritus of Michigan's lost glory years is a more difficult task.
This global wealth study will make you weep: The most disturbing findings from Oxfam’s latest report
You may have seen the headlines from Davos, Switzerland, where Oxfam’s latest global inequality report found the world’s richest 62 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people. But what’s most shocking is not what is happening at the top of the economic ladder, but at the bottom. “The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes,” Oxfam said. “The richest 1 percent have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together… Meanwhile, the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years.” This gap “is just the latest evidence that today we live in a world with levels of inequality we may not have seen for over a century,” they said. But the fine print of Oxfam's analysis of wealth trends between 2010 and 2015 finds the poor are getting much poorer. “The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 percent in the five years since 2010—that’s an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542 billion), to $1.76 trillion,” Oxfam noted. “Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars in the same period—a drop of 41 percent. Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1 percent of the total increase in global wealth, while half of that increase has gone to the top 1 percent.” Oxfam continued, “The average annual income of the poorest 10 percent of people in the world has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century. Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year.” Oxfam, which combats poverty globally, said “apologists” for the rich often cite the numbers of people worldwide living in extreme poverty was cut in half between 1990 and 2010 “as proof that inequality is not a major problem.” However, that “misses the point,” because “had inequality within countries not grown during that period, an extra 200 million people would have escaped poverty.” Wealth trickles up, not down, says Oxfam, because the richest individuals use a system of global tax-avoidance schemes to avoid paying taxes to their governments. “Once [wealth is] there, an ever more elaborate system of tax havens and an industry of wealth managers ensure that it stays there, far from the reach of ordinary citizens and their governments." These disparities do more than keep the world's poor living in harsh and primitive settings. Oxfam cited other studies that have found countries with the greatest economic disparities also see other social inequities reaching into higher social classes. “The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently found that countries with higher income inequality also tend to have larger gaps between women and men in terms of health, education, labour market participation, and representation in institutions like parliaments,” it said. “The gender pay gap was also found to be higher in more unequal societies. It is worth noting that 53 of the world’s richest 62 people are men.” But the world’s poor face many additional challenges. Most of the very poor live in regions that will be most heavily impacted by rising sea levels and other expected climate change consequences, even though the carbon footprints of these individuals is minuscule compared to “the average footprint of the richest 1 percent globally,” Oxfam said. The biggest reason the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer—and wages for the middle-class in countries like the U.S. have stagnated in recent decades—is because investments have been rewarded, but not labor. “One of the key trends underlying this huge concentration of wealth and incomes is the increasing return to capital versus labour,” the report said. “In almost all rich countries and in most developing countries, the share of national income going to workers has been falling.” “This means workers are capturing less and less of the gains from growth,” they explained. “In contrast, the owners of capital have seen their capital consistently grow (through interest payments, dividends, or retained profits) faster than the rate the economy has been growing. Tax avoidance by the owners of capital, and governments reducing taxes on capital gains have further added to these returns.” This wage stagnation and disparities also has a large gender component—with women losing out, Oxfam reported. “Women make up the majority of the world’s low-paid workers and are concentrated in the most precarious jobs,” they said. “Meanwhile, chief executive salaries have rocketed. CEOs at the top US firms have seen their salaries increase by more than half (by 54.3 percent) since 2009, while ordinary wages have barely moved. The CEO of India’s top information technology firm makes 416 times the salary of a typical employee there. Women hold just 24 of the CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies.” The report said the most powerful companies “often use their power and position to capture economic gain for themselves,” pointing to policy changes in the U.S. and elsewhere that have become a mainstay of the major political parties and their defenders in the media, “including privatization, deregulation, financial secrecy and globalization, especially of finance.” The global oil and gas industry has resisted political changes that would respond to climate change, the report said, as one example, while the global garment sector has “consistently” used its dominant position “to insist on poverty wages.” The U.S.-based pharmaceutical industry has also pushed medical costs higher across the globe due to international trade agreements. “All these are examples of how and why our current economic system—the economy for the 99 percent—is broken,” Oxfam said. “It is failing the majority of people, and failing the planet. There is no dispute that today we are living through an inequality crisis—on that, the IMF, the OECD, the Pope and many others are all agreed. But the time has come to do something about it. Inequality is not inevitable. The current system did not come about by accident; it is the result of deliberate policy choices, of our leaders listening to the 1 percent and their supporters rather than acting in the interests of the majority.” “Our world is not short of wealth,” Oxfam concluded. “It simply makes no economic sense—or indeed moral sense—to have so much in the hands of so few. Oxfam believes humanity can do better than this, that we have the talent, the technology and the imagination to build a much better world. We have the chance to build a more humane economy, where the interests of the majority are put first. A world where there is decent work for all, where women and men are equal, where tax havens are something people read about in history books, and where the richest pay their fair share to support a society that benefits everyone.”
You may have seen the headlines from Davos, Switzerland, where Oxfam’s latest global inequality report found the world’s richest 62 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people. But what’s most shocking is not what is happening at the top of the economic ladder, but at the bottom. “The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes,” Oxfam said. “The richest 1 percent have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together… Meanwhile, the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years.” This gap “is just the latest evidence that today we live in a world with levels of inequality we may not have seen for over a century,” they said. But the fine print of Oxfam's analysis of wealth trends between 2010 and 2015 finds the poor are getting much poorer. “The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 percent in the five years since 2010—that’s an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542 billion), to $1.76 trillion,” Oxfam noted. “Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars in the same period—a drop of 41 percent. Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1 percent of the total increase in global wealth, while half of that increase has gone to the top 1 percent.” Oxfam continued, “The average annual income of the poorest 10 percent of people in the world has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century. Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year.” Oxfam, which combats poverty globally, said “apologists” for the rich often cite the numbers of people worldwide living in extreme poverty was cut in half between 1990 and 2010 “as proof that inequality is not a major problem.” However, that “misses the point,” because “had inequality within countries not grown during that period, an extra 200 million people would have escaped poverty.” Wealth trickles up, not down, says Oxfam, because the richest individuals use a system of global tax-avoidance schemes to avoid paying taxes to their governments. “Once [wealth is] there, an ever more elaborate system of tax havens and an industry of wealth managers ensure that it stays there, far from the reach of ordinary citizens and their governments." These disparities do more than keep the world's poor living in harsh and primitive settings. Oxfam cited other studies that have found countries with the greatest economic disparities also see other social inequities reaching into higher social classes. “The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently found that countries with higher income inequality also tend to have larger gaps between women and men in terms of health, education, labour market participation, and representation in institutions like parliaments,” it said. “The gender pay gap was also found to be higher in more unequal societies. It is worth noting that 53 of the world’s richest 62 people are men.” But the world’s poor face many additional challenges. Most of the very poor live in regions that will be most heavily impacted by rising sea levels and other expected climate change consequences, even though the carbon footprints of these individuals is minuscule compared to “the average footprint of the richest 1 percent globally,” Oxfam said. The biggest reason the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer—and wages for the middle-class in countries like the U.S. have stagnated in recent decades—is because investments have been rewarded, but not labor. “One of the key trends underlying this huge concentration of wealth and incomes is the increasing return to capital versus labour,” the report said. “In almost all rich countries and in most developing countries, the share of national income going to workers has been falling.” “This means workers are capturing less and less of the gains from growth,” they explained. “In contrast, the owners of capital have seen their capital consistently grow (through interest payments, dividends, or retained profits) faster than the rate the economy has been growing. Tax avoidance by the owners of capital, and governments reducing taxes on capital gains have further added to these returns.” This wage stagnation and disparities also has a large gender component—with women losing out, Oxfam reported. “Women make up the majority of the world’s low-paid workers and are concentrated in the most precarious jobs,” they said. “Meanwhile, chief executive salaries have rocketed. CEOs at the top US firms have seen their salaries increase by more than half (by 54.3 percent) since 2009, while ordinary wages have barely moved. The CEO of India’s top information technology firm makes 416 times the salary of a typical employee there. Women hold just 24 of the CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies.” The report said the most powerful companies “often use their power and position to capture economic gain for themselves,” pointing to policy changes in the U.S. and elsewhere that have become a mainstay of the major political parties and their defenders in the media, “including privatization, deregulation, financial secrecy and globalization, especially of finance.” The global oil and gas industry has resisted political changes that would respond to climate change, the report said, as one example, while the global garment sector has “consistently” used its dominant position “to insist on poverty wages.” The U.S.-based pharmaceutical industry has also pushed medical costs higher across the globe due to international trade agreements. “All these are examples of how and why our current economic system—the economy for the 99 percent—is broken,” Oxfam said. “It is failing the majority of people, and failing the planet. There is no dispute that today we are living through an inequality crisis—on that, the IMF, the OECD, the Pope and many others are all agreed. But the time has come to do something about it. Inequality is not inevitable. The current system did not come about by accident; it is the result of deliberate policy choices, of our leaders listening to the 1 percent and their supporters rather than acting in the interests of the majority.” “Our world is not short of wealth,” Oxfam concluded. “It simply makes no economic sense—or indeed moral sense—to have so much in the hands of so few. Oxfam believes humanity can do better than this, that we have the talent, the technology and the imagination to build a much better world. We have the chance to build a more humane economy, where the interests of the majority are put first. A world where there is decent work for all, where women and men are equal, where tax havens are something people read about in history books, and where the richest pay their fair share to support a society that benefits everyone.”
You may have seen the headlines from Davos, Switzerland, where Oxfam’s latest global inequality report found the world’s richest 62 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people. But what’s most shocking is not what is happening at the top of the economic ladder, but at the bottom. “The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes,” Oxfam said. “The richest 1 percent have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together… Meanwhile, the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years.” This gap “is just the latest evidence that today we live in a world with levels of inequality we may not have seen for over a century,” they said. But the fine print of Oxfam's analysis of wealth trends between 2010 and 2015 finds the poor are getting much poorer. “The wealth of the richest 62 people has risen by 44 percent in the five years since 2010—that’s an increase of more than half a trillion dollars ($542 billion), to $1.76 trillion,” Oxfam noted. “Meanwhile, the wealth of the bottom half fell by just over a trillion dollars in the same period—a drop of 41 percent. Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1 percent of the total increase in global wealth, while half of that increase has gone to the top 1 percent.” Oxfam continued, “The average annual income of the poorest 10 percent of people in the world has risen by less than $3 each year in almost a quarter of a century. Their daily income has risen by less than a single cent every year.” Oxfam, which combats poverty globally, said “apologists” for the rich often cite the numbers of people worldwide living in extreme poverty was cut in half between 1990 and 2010 “as proof that inequality is not a major problem.” However, that “misses the point,” because “had inequality within countries not grown during that period, an extra 200 million people would have escaped poverty.” Wealth trickles up, not down, says Oxfam, because the richest individuals use a system of global tax-avoidance schemes to avoid paying taxes to their governments. “Once [wealth is] there, an ever more elaborate system of tax havens and an industry of wealth managers ensure that it stays there, far from the reach of ordinary citizens and their governments." These disparities do more than keep the world's poor living in harsh and primitive settings. Oxfam cited other studies that have found countries with the greatest economic disparities also see other social inequities reaching into higher social classes. “The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently found that countries with higher income inequality also tend to have larger gaps between women and men in terms of health, education, labour market participation, and representation in institutions like parliaments,” it said. “The gender pay gap was also found to be higher in more unequal societies. It is worth noting that 53 of the world’s richest 62 people are men.” But the world’s poor face many additional challenges. Most of the very poor live in regions that will be most heavily impacted by rising sea levels and other expected climate change consequences, even though the carbon footprints of these individuals is minuscule compared to “the average footprint of the richest 1 percent globally,” Oxfam said. The biggest reason the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer—and wages for the middle-class in countries like the U.S. have stagnated in recent decades—is because investments have been rewarded, but not labor. “One of the key trends underlying this huge concentration of wealth and incomes is the increasing return to capital versus labour,” the report said. “In almost all rich countries and in most developing countries, the share of national income going to workers has been falling.” “This means workers are capturing less and less of the gains from growth,” they explained. “In contrast, the owners of capital have seen their capital consistently grow (through interest payments, dividends, or retained profits) faster than the rate the economy has been growing. Tax avoidance by the owners of capital, and governments reducing taxes on capital gains have further added to these returns.” This wage stagnation and disparities also has a large gender component—with women losing out, Oxfam reported. “Women make up the majority of the world’s low-paid workers and are concentrated in the most precarious jobs,” they said. “Meanwhile, chief executive salaries have rocketed. CEOs at the top US firms have seen their salaries increase by more than half (by 54.3 percent) since 2009, while ordinary wages have barely moved. The CEO of India’s top information technology firm makes 416 times the salary of a typical employee there. Women hold just 24 of the CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies.” The report said the most powerful companies “often use their power and position to capture economic gain for themselves,” pointing to policy changes in the U.S. and elsewhere that have become a mainstay of the major political parties and their defenders in the media, “including privatization, deregulation, financial secrecy and globalization, especially of finance.” The global oil and gas industry has resisted political changes that would respond to climate change, the report said, as one example, while the global garment sector has “consistently” used its dominant position “to insist on poverty wages.” The U.S.-based pharmaceutical industry has also pushed medical costs higher across the globe due to international trade agreements. “All these are examples of how and why our current economic system—the economy for the 99 percent—is broken,” Oxfam said. “It is failing the majority of people, and failing the planet. There is no dispute that today we are living through an inequality crisis—on that, the IMF, the OECD, the Pope and many others are all agreed. But the time has come to do something about it. Inequality is not inevitable. The current system did not come about by accident; it is the result of deliberate policy choices, of our leaders listening to the 1 percent and their supporters rather than acting in the interests of the majority.” “Our world is not short of wealth,” Oxfam concluded. “It simply makes no economic sense—or indeed moral sense—to have so much in the hands of so few. Oxfam believes humanity can do better than this, that we have the talent, the technology and the imagination to build a much better world. We have the chance to build a more humane economy, where the interests of the majority are put first. A world where there is decent work for all, where women and men are equal, where tax havens are something people read about in history books, and where the richest pay their fair share to support a society that benefits everyone.”
Donald Trump has bullied the press into submission, and it really wasn’t hard
It's sad that Donald Trump is normalizing so many unsavory traits with his presidential push this season. He's normalizing bigotry and xenophobia in the campaign arena, for instance. He's also mainstreaming the manhandling of the press. Just ask Trip Gabriel. The New York Times reporter was tossed out of a Trump event in Iowa last week. He was thrown out by a Trump staff member and a local police officer who suggested he was following the orders of Trump's Iowa campaign chief. (Days earlier, Grabriel had written a piece that raised questions about Trump's ground game in Iowa.) On the surface, that's a shocking event: the Republican frontrunner's campaign singling out a Times reporter and having him physically ousted. But since last summer, this type of bullying behavior has become quite common, and the media's response has become nearly mute. Indeed, Gabriel's ejection was noted in the media but didn't seem to set off any loud alarm. Covering Trump today means being confined to metal barrier press pens at events. It means rarely being allowed to ask the candidate questions and being the target of vicious insults from the candidate and his fans. (One CBS reporter covering a rally was recently asked by a Trump supporter if he was taking pictures on behalf of ISIS.) Trump and his campaign push the press around at will and they pay no real price. If anything, Trump gets showered with more press attention despite calling out reporters as "scum"; despite denouncing them as liars and cheats at his campaign rallies. On and on the bullying goes and the pushback remains minimal. This is a profound embarrassment for the national press corps. It's a profound embarrassment for editors and producers in positions of influence who have voluntarily acquiesced their power in order to bow down to Trump and his campaign road show. The gleeful bullying of the press meshes with the bullying that often goes on at Trump rallies, where violence percolates. Like those thug rallies, we've certainly never seen this kind of behavior from a major party's political frontrunner. But like the Trump rallies, where's the indignation over the constant press intimidation? Where are the outraged editorials? Where are the endless, handwringing TV panel debates about what Trump's hatred of the pressreally means; what it tells us about his possible character flaws, and his would-be presidency. It's possible the press doesn't want to make itself the story, that it wants to maintain its role as observers and not newsmaker and that's why it has refrained from turning Trump's bullying into a big story. That theory takes a hit though when you consider the same press corps has written endlessly about Hillary Clinton's relationship with the press and has stressed over and over what a central role reporters play in her White House push. It's true that last November, representatives from several news networks banded together and held a call to discuss "how embeds and reporters from outlets are being treated" by the Trump campaign. But as Huffington Post's Michael Calderone recently reported, the Trump campaign seems uninterested in the press complaints: "In recent weeks, journalists have again been ordered not to leave the press pen by campaign staffers and volunteers and even Secret Service agents, according to reporters who were granted anonymity to speak candidly. Journalists also said they were not allowed to approach the candidate to ask questions after events." Journalists: We think you're treating us badly. Trump campaign: We don't care what you think. Consider: *At a recent Trump rally, a Huffington Post reporter noted, "that a Secret Service agent stepped up to help when a Trump campaign staffer tried to interfere with his reporting." *Trump bashed Fox News host Megyn Kelly as "bitter" and "overrated," called NBC's Chuck Todd "pathetic," and announced most journalists are "absolute scum." *Asked about allegations from a 1993 book that Trump had sexually assaulted his then-wife Ivana Trump (she later recanted the claim), Donald Trump's attorney threatened a Daily Beast reporter: "So I'm warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I'm going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?" *At a South Carolina rally, Trump mocked and mimicked a New York Times reporter who suffers from a chronic condition called arthrogryposis, which limits the movement of his arms. *His campaign barred a BuzzFeed reporter from attending an event in Newton, Iowa, denied Des Moines Register and Huffington Post reporters press credentials to campaign events, and barred reporters from Fusion from covering a Trump event in Doral, Florida. *Univision anchor Jorge Ramos was physically removed from a Trump press conference. *A security guard at an Iowa rally threatened to eject any reporter who interviewed Trump supporters: "You talk to people and you leave." *At a South Carolina event, Trump derided NBC's Katy Tur as "Little Katy, third-rate journalist." Trump fans then rained boos down on Tur, according to the Daily Beast. One more, from the Washington Post:
After CNN reporter Noah Gray left "the pen" to document a group of protesters who unveiled a sign reading "Migrant lives matter," Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski turned to campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks and said: "Hey: Tell Noah, get back in the pen or he's f***** blacklisted," according to a recording of the incident.This type of behavior is completely unprecedented. If a leading Democrat were guilty of any of the above transgressions, there would be a roiling Beltway media revolt that would denounce the Democratic campaign continuously. Uninterrupted. But the Trump campaign has committed all of the above offenses. So why is it mostly crickets from the same press corps?
Bill McKibben: The fossil fuel industry is leading its own zombie apocalypse
When I was a kid, I was creepily fascinated by the wrongheaded idea, current in my grade school, that your hair and your fingernails kept growing after you died. The lesson seemed to be that it was hard to kill something off -- if it wanted to keep going. Something similar is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry. Even as the global warming crisis makes it clear that coal, natural gas, and oil are yesterday’s energy, the momentum of two centuries of fossil fuel development means new projects keep emerging in a zombie-like fashion. In fact, the climactic fight at the end of the fossil fuel era is already underway, even if it’s happening almost in secret. That’s because so much of the action isn’t taking place in big, headline-grabbing climate change settings like the recent conference of 195 nations in Paris; it’s taking place in hearing rooms and farmers’ fields across this continent (and other continents, too). Local activists are making desperate stands to stop new fossil fuel projects, while the giant energy companies are making equally desperate attempts to build while they still can. Though such conflicts and protests are mostly too small and local to attract national media attention, the outcome of these thousands of fights will do much to determine whether we emerge from this century with a habitable planet. In fact, far more than any set of paper promises by politicians, they really are the battle for the future. Here’s how Diane Leopold, president of the giant fracking company Dominion Energy, put it at a conference earlier this year: “It may be the most challenging” period in fossil fuel history, she said, because of “an increase in high-intensity opposition” to infrastructure projects that is becoming steadily “louder, better-funded, and more sophisticated.” Or, in the words of the head of the American Natural Gas Association, referring to the bitter struggle between activists and the Canadian tar sands industry over the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, “Call it the Keystone-ization of every project that’s out there.” Pipelines, Pipelines, Everywhere I hesitate to even start listing them all, because I’m going to miss dozens, but here are some of the prospective pipelines people are currently fighting across North America: the Alberta Clipper and the Sandpiper pipelines in the upper Midwest, Enbridge Line 3, the Dakota Access, the Line 9 and Energy East pipelines in Ontario and environs, the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipelines in British Columbia, the Piñon pipeline in Navajo Country, the Sabal Trail pipeline in Alabama and Georgia, the Appalachian Connector, the Vermont Gas pipeline down the western side of my own state, the Algonquin pipeline, the Constitution pipeline, the Spectra pipeline, and on and on. And it’s not just pipelines, not by a long shot. I couldn’t begin to start tallying up the number of proposed liquid natural gas terminals, prospective coal export facilities and new oil ports, fracking wells, and mountaintop removal coal sites where people are already waging serious trench warfare. As I write these words, brave activists are on trial for trying to block oil trains in the Pacific Northwest. In the Finger Lakes not a week goes by without mass arrests of local activists attempting to stop the building of a giant underground gas storage cavern. In California, it’s frack wells in Kern County. As I said: endless. And endlessly resourceful, too. Everywhere the opposition is forced by statute to make its stand not on climate change arguments, but on old grounds. This pipeline will hurt water quality. That coal port will increase local pollution. The dust that flies off those coal trains will cause asthma. All the arguments are perfectly correct and accurate and by themselves enough to justify stopping many of these plans, but a far more important argument always lurks in the background: each of these new infrastructure projects is a way to extend the life of the fossil fuel era a few more disastrous decades. Here’s the basic math: if you build a pipeline in 2016, the investment will be amortized for 40 years or more. It is designed to last -- to carry coal slurry or gas or oil -- well into the second half of the twenty-first century. It is, in other words, designed to do the very thing scientists insist we simply can’t keep doing, and do it long past the point when physics swears we must stop. These projects are the result of several kinds of momentum. Because fossil fuel companies have made huge sums of money for so long, they have the political clout to keep politicians saying yes. Just a week after the Paris accords were signed, for instance, the well-paid American employees of those companies, otherwise known as senators and representatives, overturned a 40-year-old ban on U.S. oil exports, a gift that an ExxonMobil spokesman had asked for in the most explicit terms only a few weeks earlier. “The sooner this happens, the better for us,” he’d told theNew York Times, at the very moment when other journalists were breaking the story of that company’s epic three-decade legacy of deceit, its attempt to suppress public knowledge of a globally warming planet that Exxon officials knew they were helping to create. That scandal didn’t matter. The habit of giving in to Big Oil was just too strong. Driving a Stake Through a Fossil-Fueled World The money, however, is only part of it. There’s also a sense in which the whole process is simply on autopilot. For many decades the economic health of the nation and access to fossil fuels were more or less synonymous. So it’s no wonder that the laws, statutes, and regulations favor business-as-usual. The advent of the environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s introduced a few new rules, but they were only designed to keep that business-as-usual from going disastrously, visibly wrong. You could drill and mine and pump, but you were supposed to prevent the really obvious pollution. No Deepwater Horizons. And so fossil fuel projects still get approved almost automatically, because there’s no legal reason not to do so. In Australia, for instance, a new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, replaced the climate-change-denying Tony Abbott. His minister for the environment, Greg Hunt, was a particular standout at the recent Paris talks, gassing on at great length about his “deeply personal” commitment to stopping climate change, calling the new pact the “most important environmental agreement ever.” A month earlier, though, he’d approved plans for the largest coal mine on Earth, demanding slight revisions to make sure that the habitat of the southern black-throated finch would not be destroyed. Campaigners had hung much of their argument against the mine on the bird’s possible extinction, since given the way Australia’s laws are written this was one of the few hooks they had. The fact that scientists have stated quite plainly that such coal must remain in the ground if the globe is to meet its temperature targets and prevent catastrophic environmental changes has no standing. It’s the most important argument in the world, but no one in authority can officially hear it. It’s not just Australia, of course. As 2016 began in my own Vermont -- as enlightened a patch of territory as you’re likely to find -- the state’s Public Service Board approved a big new gas pipeline. Under long-standing regulations, they said, it would be “in the public interest,” even though science has recently made it clear that the methane leaking from the fracked gas the pipeline will carry is worse than the burning of coal. Their decision came two weeks after the temperature in the city of Burlington hit 68 on Christmas eve, breaking the old record by, oh, 17 degrees. But it didn’t matter. This zombie-like process is guaranteed to go on for years, even decades, as at every turn the fossil fuel industry fights the new laws and regulations that would be necessary, were agreements like the Paris accord to have any real teeth. The only way to short-circuit this process is to fight like hell, raising the political and economic price of new infrastructure to the point where politicians begin to balk. That’s what happened with Keystone -- when enough voices were raised, the powers-that-be finally decided it wasn’t worth it. And it’s happening elsewhere, too. Other Canadian tar sands pipelines have also been blocked. Coal ports planned for the West Coast haven’t been built. That Australian coal mine may have official approval, but almost every big bank in the world has balked at providing it the billions it would require. There’s much more of this fight coming -- led, as usual, by indigenous groups, by farmers and ranchers, by people living on the front lines of both climate change and extractive industry. Increasingly they’re being joined by climate scientists, faith communities, and students in last-ditch efforts to lock in fossil fuels. This will undoubtedly be a key battleground for the climate justice movement. In May, for instance, a vast coalition across six continents will engage in mass civil disobedience to “keep it in the ground.” And in a few places you can see more than just the opposition; you can see the next steps unfolding. Last fall, for instance, Portland, Oregon -- the scene of a memorable “kayaktivist” blockade to keep Shell’s Arctic drilling rigs bottled up in port -- passed a remarkable resolution. No new fossil fuel infrastructure would be built in the city, its council and mayor declared. The law will almost certainly block a huge proposed propane export terminal, but far more important, it opens much wider the door to the future. If you can’t do fossil fuel, after all, you have to do something else -- sun, wind, conservation. This has to be our response to the living-dead future that the fossil fuel industry and its allied politicians imagine for our beleaguered world: no new fossil fuel infrastructure. None. The climate math is just too obvious. This business of driving stakes through the heart of one project after another is exhausting. So many petitions, so many demonstrations, so many meetings. But at least for now, there’s really no other way to kill a zombie.When I was a kid, I was creepily fascinated by the wrongheaded idea, current in my grade school, that your hair and your fingernails kept growing after you died. The lesson seemed to be that it was hard to kill something off -- if it wanted to keep going. Something similar is happening right now with the fossil fuel industry. Even as the global warming crisis makes it clear that coal, natural gas, and oil are yesterday’s energy, the momentum of two centuries of fossil fuel development means new projects keep emerging in a zombie-like fashion. In fact, the climactic fight at the end of the fossil fuel era is already underway, even if it’s happening almost in secret. That’s because so much of the action isn’t taking place in big, headline-grabbing climate change settings like the recent conference of 195 nations in Paris; it’s taking place in hearing rooms and farmers’ fields across this continent (and other continents, too). Local activists are making desperate stands to stop new fossil fuel projects, while the giant energy companies are making equally desperate attempts to build while they still can. Though such conflicts and protests are mostly too small and local to attract national media attention, the outcome of these thousands of fights will do much to determine whether we emerge from this century with a habitable planet. In fact, far more than any set of paper promises by politicians, they really are the battle for the future. Here’s how Diane Leopold, president of the giant fracking company Dominion Energy, put it at a conference earlier this year: “It may be the most challenging” period in fossil fuel history, she said, because of “an increase in high-intensity opposition” to infrastructure projects that is becoming steadily “louder, better-funded, and more sophisticated.” Or, in the words of the head of the American Natural Gas Association, referring to the bitter struggle between activists and the Canadian tar sands industry over the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, “Call it the Keystone-ization of every project that’s out there.” Pipelines, Pipelines, Everywhere I hesitate to even start listing them all, because I’m going to miss dozens, but here are some of the prospective pipelines people are currently fighting across North America: the Alberta Clipper and the Sandpiper pipelines in the upper Midwest, Enbridge Line 3, the Dakota Access, the Line 9 and Energy East pipelines in Ontario and environs, the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipelines in British Columbia, the Piñon pipeline in Navajo Country, the Sabal Trail pipeline in Alabama and Georgia, the Appalachian Connector, the Vermont Gas pipeline down the western side of my own state, the Algonquin pipeline, the Constitution pipeline, the Spectra pipeline, and on and on. And it’s not just pipelines, not by a long shot. I couldn’t begin to start tallying up the number of proposed liquid natural gas terminals, prospective coal export facilities and new oil ports, fracking wells, and mountaintop removal coal sites where people are already waging serious trench warfare. As I write these words, brave activists are on trial for trying to block oil trains in the Pacific Northwest. In the Finger Lakes not a week goes by without mass arrests of local activists attempting to stop the building of a giant underground gas storage cavern. In California, it’s frack wells in Kern County. As I said: endless. And endlessly resourceful, too. Everywhere the opposition is forced by statute to make its stand not on climate change arguments, but on old grounds. This pipeline will hurt water quality. That coal port will increase local pollution. The dust that flies off those coal trains will cause asthma. All the arguments are perfectly correct and accurate and by themselves enough to justify stopping many of these plans, but a far more important argument always lurks in the background: each of these new infrastructure projects is a way to extend the life of the fossil fuel era a few more disastrous decades. Here’s the basic math: if you build a pipeline in 2016, the investment will be amortized for 40 years or more. It is designed to last -- to carry coal slurry or gas or oil -- well into the second half of the twenty-first century. It is, in other words, designed to do the very thing scientists insist we simply can’t keep doing, and do it long past the point when physics swears we must stop. These projects are the result of several kinds of momentum. Because fossil fuel companies have made huge sums of money for so long, they have the political clout to keep politicians saying yes. Just a week after the Paris accords were signed, for instance, the well-paid American employees of those companies, otherwise known as senators and representatives, overturned a 40-year-old ban on U.S. oil exports, a gift that an ExxonMobil spokesman had asked for in the most explicit terms only a few weeks earlier. “The sooner this happens, the better for us,” he’d told theNew York Times, at the very moment when other journalists were breaking the story of that company’s epic three-decade legacy of deceit, its attempt to suppress public knowledge of a globally warming planet that Exxon officials knew they were helping to create. That scandal didn’t matter. The habit of giving in to Big Oil was just too strong. Driving a Stake Through a Fossil-Fueled World The money, however, is only part of it. There’s also a sense in which the whole process is simply on autopilot. For many decades the economic health of the nation and access to fossil fuels were more or less synonymous. So it’s no wonder that the laws, statutes, and regulations favor business-as-usual. The advent of the environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s introduced a few new rules, but they were only designed to keep that business-as-usual from going disastrously, visibly wrong. You could drill and mine and pump, but you were supposed to prevent the really obvious pollution. No Deepwater Horizons. And so fossil fuel projects still get approved almost automatically, because there’s no legal reason not to do so. In Australia, for instance, a new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, replaced the climate-change-denying Tony Abbott. His minister for the environment, Greg Hunt, was a particular standout at the recent Paris talks, gassing on at great length about his “deeply personal” commitment to stopping climate change, calling the new pact the “most important environmental agreement ever.” A month earlier, though, he’d approved plans for the largest coal mine on Earth, demanding slight revisions to make sure that the habitat of the southern black-throated finch would not be destroyed. Campaigners had hung much of their argument against the mine on the bird’s possible extinction, since given the way Australia’s laws are written this was one of the few hooks they had. The fact that scientists have stated quite plainly that such coal must remain in the ground if the globe is to meet its temperature targets and prevent catastrophic environmental changes has no standing. It’s the most important argument in the world, but no one in authority can officially hear it. It’s not just Australia, of course. As 2016 began in my own Vermont -- as enlightened a patch of territory as you’re likely to find -- the state’s Public Service Board approved a big new gas pipeline. Under long-standing regulations, they said, it would be “in the public interest,” even though science has recently made it clear that the methane leaking from the fracked gas the pipeline will carry is worse than the burning of coal. Their decision came two weeks after the temperature in the city of Burlington hit 68 on Christmas eve, breaking the old record by, oh, 17 degrees. But it didn’t matter. This zombie-like process is guaranteed to go on for years, even decades, as at every turn the fossil fuel industry fights the new laws and regulations that would be necessary, were agreements like the Paris accord to have any real teeth. The only way to short-circuit this process is to fight like hell, raising the political and economic price of new infrastructure to the point where politicians begin to balk. That’s what happened with Keystone -- when enough voices were raised, the powers-that-be finally decided it wasn’t worth it. And it’s happening elsewhere, too. Other Canadian tar sands pipelines have also been blocked. Coal ports planned for the West Coast haven’t been built. That Australian coal mine may have official approval, but almost every big bank in the world has balked at providing it the billions it would require. There’s much more of this fight coming -- led, as usual, by indigenous groups, by farmers and ranchers, by people living on the front lines of both climate change and extractive industry. Increasingly they’re being joined by climate scientists, faith communities, and students in last-ditch efforts to lock in fossil fuels. This will undoubtedly be a key battleground for the climate justice movement. In May, for instance, a vast coalition across six continents will engage in mass civil disobedience to “keep it in the ground.” And in a few places you can see more than just the opposition; you can see the next steps unfolding. Last fall, for instance, Portland, Oregon -- the scene of a memorable “kayaktivist” blockade to keep Shell’s Arctic drilling rigs bottled up in port -- passed a remarkable resolution. No new fossil fuel infrastructure would be built in the city, its council and mayor declared. The law will almost certainly block a huge proposed propane export terminal, but far more important, it opens much wider the door to the future. If you can’t do fossil fuel, after all, you have to do something else -- sun, wind, conservation. This has to be our response to the living-dead future that the fossil fuel industry and its allied politicians imagine for our beleaguered world: no new fossil fuel infrastructure. None. The climate math is just too obvious. This business of driving stakes through the heart of one project after another is exhausting. So many petitions, so many demonstrations, so many meetings. But at least for now, there’s really no other way to kill a zombie.
Robert Reich: Democrats have abandoned the white working class
Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats? The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action). The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.” All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it. Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains. In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners drown. Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class. Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations. In part, it’s because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. “Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big corporations and the Street. Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America. But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. Will they? That’s one of the biggest political unknowns in 2016 and beyond.Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats? The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action). The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.” All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it. Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains. In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners drown. Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class. Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations. In part, it’s because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. “Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big corporations and the Street. Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America. But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. Will they? That’s one of the biggest political unknowns in 2016 and beyond.Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats? The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action). The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.” All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it. Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains. In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners drown. Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class. Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations. In part, it’s because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. “Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big corporations and the Street. Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America. But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. Will they? That’s one of the biggest political unknowns in 2016 and beyond.Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats? The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action). The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.” All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it. Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains. In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners drown. Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class. Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations. In part, it’s because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. “Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big corporations and the Street. Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America. But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. Will they? That’s one of the biggest political unknowns in 2016 and beyond.
January 20, 2016
Wow, you hate the f**king Eagles: When uncool celebrities die, jerks just can’t help themselves
Music fans have already had a rough few weeks, between the deaths of Motörhead frontman Lemmy, R&B/soul legend Natalie Cole and chameleonic rocker David Bowie. This rash of bad news continued Monday, with the news that both Mott the Hoople drummer Dale Griffin and Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey had died. The latter passed away at the age of 67, due to "complications from rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis and pneumonia," the band noted. Frey's songwriting achievements transformed classic rock: He co-wrote a slew of Eagles classics: "Desperado," "Hotel California," "Take It to the Limit," "Lyin' Eyes" and "Take It Easy," to name a few. In the '80s, solo hits such as "Smugglers Blues" and "You Belong to the City"—not to mention a notable guest spot on the TV show "Miami Vice"— introduced him to a whole new audience. Unlike the near-universal outpouring of sorrow for Bowie and Lemmy, the initial online reaction to Frey's death online frequently came tinged with snark or mild derision. My husband spotted someone quipping, "The heat is off!"—a reference to Frey's '80s hit "The Heat Is On"—while a friend-of-a-friend blocked someone who greeted news of his passing with pleasure. References to the Mojo Nixon song "Don Henley Must Die" and to the memorable "The Big Lebowski" lines about how much The Dude despises the Eagles popped up elsewhere. And still other acquaintances griped about the unwelcome intrusion of Eagles or Frey videos that were no doubt going to pop up on Facebook feeds. The latter distress is easily solved: Don't log on to Facebook for a while—or, easier still, don't click on the videos. Still, I was troubled and disheartened that the immediate reaction to Frey's death was often a flippant comment. Certainly this response came because his professional persona could be outwardly prickly: Rolling Stone characterized his interviews in the 2013 documentary "History of the Eagles" as "delightfully unrepentant," and noted he "pull[ed] no punches when discussing the band's formation, its lineup changes and especially his fractured relationship with guitarist Don Felder." The Eagles as well were a critical punching bag long before "The Big Lebowski" codified the hatred: Despite massive commercial success, the band was often reviled—as Robert Christgau wrote in 1972, "Listening to the Eagles has left me feeling alienated from things I used to love." But just because Frey's music or personality might not be someone's cup of tea doesn't mean his passing should be fodder for online comedy or jokes. In fact, celebrity deaths often highlight one of the worst parts of social media: the pressure so many feel to weigh in on every major passing, even if they have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation. Rather than making a quick comment and moving on, FOMO compels people to join in the collective mourning and add their own thoughts about a musician, actor, author or politician. If someone is a fan of the deceased or has a personal attachment, the response is often sincere and genuine—but if they're not a fan, it's too easy for the reaction to either emphasize this fact or (worse yet) approach the death with a joke. Social media is an amazing tool for connection and camaraderie, but it can also enable and exacerbate emotional detachment from real-life tragedies. At the same time, the power of collective mourning can be healing, as Bowie's death especially underscored. There's a reason why so many Facebook newsfeeds exploded with articles about the Starman's life, vintage interviews and music videos—it was a comfort to find out that so many other people were grieving, and many found solace in the empathy and understanding that rose from sharing happier moments and positive stories. And learning more about an admired artist's personal life from friends or collaborators makes his or her art seem more vibrant and alive. But not every musician is as beloved or critically respected as Bowie is and was, which is a major difference. In many circles, liking Frey and Eagles is considered uncool or unacceptable, which makes public admissions of fandom taboo, something to be ridiculed or hidden. Again, that's no excuse for snide remarks, especially because dictating who should be mourned—and chiding people about how they mourn, something else that happened in recent weeks—is patently unfair. Everyone has a different relationship to a celebrity, especially musicians; one person's loathed artist is another person's cherished icon. As a music writer friend, Mark Deming, eloquently wrote on Facebook: "I'm pretty outspoken about my dislike of the Eagles, but I also know that Glenn Frey had family and friends who cared about him, and that anyone as popular as that band was made music that impacted a lot of people in very different ways. If 'Peaceful, Easy Feeling' was playing when you met your future spouse, or 'The Best of My Love' was your brother's first dance at his wedding, that song that may annoy other people has a very personal meaning for you, and I truly respect that." Indeed, Frey's death didn't necessarily mean that the Eagles' music should automatically receive a critical free pass from now on—the same way Bowie's death or Lemmy's deaths doesn't mean their respective catalogs should be canonized. But neither does it mean that his passing deserves condescension or sarcasm. Frey was a complicated figure—just like Lemmy was, just like Bowie was, just like all celebrities are. Even Eagles cohort Don Henley admitted these complexities, in a touching statement released after Frey's death: "He was like a brother to me; we were family, and like most families, there was some dysfunction. … He was funny, bullheaded, mercurial, generous, deeply talented and driven." But in this statement, Henley also noted how much his former bandmate loved his wife and kids, which is an important point to make: At the end of the day, Frey was a family-oriented man dealing with serious health problems, which is a universal experience countless non-celebrity families face on a daily basis. Frey's songwriting and musical talents gave him an elevated place in pop culture, but his death leaves his relatives, friends and bandmates reeling with sorrow. And there's really nothing funny about that.Music fans have already had a rough few weeks, between the deaths of Motörhead frontman Lemmy, R&B/soul legend Natalie Cole and chameleonic rocker David Bowie. This rash of bad news continued Monday, with the news that both Mott the Hoople drummer Dale Griffin and Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey had died. The latter passed away at the age of 67, due to "complications from rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis and pneumonia," the band noted. Frey's songwriting achievements transformed classic rock: He co-wrote a slew of Eagles classics: "Desperado," "Hotel California," "Take It to the Limit," "Lyin' Eyes" and "Take It Easy," to name a few. In the '80s, solo hits such as "Smugglers Blues" and "You Belong to the City"—not to mention a notable guest spot on the TV show "Miami Vice"— introduced him to a whole new audience. Unlike the near-universal outpouring of sorrow for Bowie and Lemmy, the initial online reaction to Frey's death online frequently came tinged with snark or mild derision. My husband spotted someone quipping, "The heat is off!"—a reference to Frey's '80s hit "The Heat Is On"—while a friend-of-a-friend blocked someone who greeted news of his passing with pleasure. References to the Mojo Nixon song "Don Henley Must Die" and to the memorable "The Big Lebowski" lines about how much The Dude despises the Eagles popped up elsewhere. And still other acquaintances griped about the unwelcome intrusion of Eagles or Frey videos that were no doubt going to pop up on Facebook feeds. The latter distress is easily solved: Don't log on to Facebook for a while—or, easier still, don't click on the videos. Still, I was troubled and disheartened that the immediate reaction to Frey's death was often a flippant comment. Certainly this response came because his professional persona could be outwardly prickly: Rolling Stone characterized his interviews in the 2013 documentary "History of the Eagles" as "delightfully unrepentant," and noted he "pull[ed] no punches when discussing the band's formation, its lineup changes and especially his fractured relationship with guitarist Don Felder." The Eagles as well were a critical punching bag long before "The Big Lebowski" codified the hatred: Despite massive commercial success, the band was often reviled—as Robert Christgau wrote in 1972, "Listening to the Eagles has left me feeling alienated from things I used to love." But just because Frey's music or personality might not be someone's cup of tea doesn't mean his passing should be fodder for online comedy or jokes. In fact, celebrity deaths often highlight one of the worst parts of social media: the pressure so many feel to weigh in on every major passing, even if they have nothing meaningful to add to the conversation. Rather than making a quick comment and moving on, FOMO compels people to join in the collective mourning and add their own thoughts about a musician, actor, author or politician. If someone is a fan of the deceased or has a personal attachment, the response is often sincere and genuine—but if they're not a fan, it's too easy for the reaction to either emphasize this fact or (worse yet) approach the death with a joke. Social media is an amazing tool for connection and camaraderie, but it can also enable and exacerbate emotional detachment from real-life tragedies. At the same time, the power of collective mourning can be healing, as Bowie's death especially underscored. There's a reason why so many Facebook newsfeeds exploded with articles about the Starman's life, vintage interviews and music videos—it was a comfort to find out that so many other people were grieving, and many found solace in the empathy and understanding that rose from sharing happier moments and positive stories. And learning more about an admired artist's personal life from friends or collaborators makes his or her art seem more vibrant and alive. But not every musician is as beloved or critically respected as Bowie is and was, which is a major difference. In many circles, liking Frey and Eagles is considered uncool or unacceptable, which makes public admissions of fandom taboo, something to be ridiculed or hidden. Again, that's no excuse for snide remarks, especially because dictating who should be mourned—and chiding people about how they mourn, something else that happened in recent weeks—is patently unfair. Everyone has a different relationship to a celebrity, especially musicians; one person's loathed artist is another person's cherished icon. As a music writer friend, Mark Deming, eloquently wrote on Facebook: "I'm pretty outspoken about my dislike of the Eagles, but I also know that Glenn Frey had family and friends who cared about him, and that anyone as popular as that band was made music that impacted a lot of people in very different ways. If 'Peaceful, Easy Feeling' was playing when you met your future spouse, or 'The Best of My Love' was your brother's first dance at his wedding, that song that may annoy other people has a very personal meaning for you, and I truly respect that." Indeed, Frey's death didn't necessarily mean that the Eagles' music should automatically receive a critical free pass from now on—the same way Bowie's death or Lemmy's deaths doesn't mean their respective catalogs should be canonized. But neither does it mean that his passing deserves condescension or sarcasm. Frey was a complicated figure—just like Lemmy was, just like Bowie was, just like all celebrities are. Even Eagles cohort Don Henley admitted these complexities, in a touching statement released after Frey's death: "He was like a brother to me; we were family, and like most families, there was some dysfunction. … He was funny, bullheaded, mercurial, generous, deeply talented and driven." But in this statement, Henley also noted how much his former bandmate loved his wife and kids, which is an important point to make: At the end of the day, Frey was a family-oriented man dealing with serious health problems, which is a universal experience countless non-celebrity families face on a daily basis. Frey's songwriting and musical talents gave him an elevated place in pop culture, but his death leaves his relatives, friends and bandmates reeling with sorrow. And there's really nothing funny about that.
After Sarah Palin and John Wayne, now what? Trump’s nightmare coalition reaches a defining moment
Now that Donald Trump has the endorsement of a movie star who’s been dead for more than 35 years and a failed politician whose public and private life has been a total disaster – I mean, he’s golden, right? A total shoo-in, not just for the Republican nomination and the White House but Amazing World Rulership and Domination and Return to Greatness™. I don’t know who completes the trifecta of endorsements most perfectly, after John Wayne and Sarah Palin. (It must be Halloween, because one of them’s a ghost and the other’s a goblin! I’m here all week, and the brisket-style tempeh is so good.) My colleagues have suggested Chuck Norris, Ted Nugent and Vince Vaughn, but those are all a) way too obvious and b) people who have probably already endorsed Trump, without anyone noticing or caring. I’m going with Freddy Krueger, basement demon-scourge of the Reagan era, who has approximately the same complexion as Donald Trump and a similarly heavy-handed sense of humor. “Let’s make America great again, Nancy!” Skritchy-skritchy-skritch. Like John Wayne, Freddy has not been alive for some time. Like Wayne, who repeatedly played cowboys and war heroes in the movies but did not like riding horses and never served in the military, Freddy is not what he appears to be. He’s a symbolic projection of American masculinity and violence, of weakness presented as strength. If you find the version of those things presented by Marion Morrison of Winterset, Iowa, more appealing (to give John Wayne his true and, let’s face it, suspiciously girly name) – well, that’s subjective, am I right? As for Sarah Palin, she’s like Freddy too, at least insofar as Palin is a grotesque figure out of the Grand Guignol tradition who murders people in their dreams. No, wait – I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. Let’s go more generic: Like Freddy, Palin is alternately horrifying, comic and tragic. They both represent the American dream rendered as incoherent and gruesome fantasy, but in both cases despite the carnage they leave behind their failure and defeat are foregone conclusions. I have spent way more time thinking about the “Nightmare on Elm Street” universe than any normal person should, and in the end there is considerable pathos to onetime janitor Fred Krueger, a victim who redirects his pain and suffering upon the innocent. Perhaps the most diplomatic way of putting it is to say that I sense a similar dynamic at work behind the erratic personal and political career of Sarah Palin, which resists all efforts at rational explication. I suppose it’s true that for those on the troglodyte right who are super-excited about the Palin endorsement, and the endorsement of whomever among John Wayne’s extended family has the self-appointed authority to speak for the long-dead star, Freddy Krueger doesn’t hold the same appeal. But why the hell not? I mean, presumably the Trump campaign wants to reach “younger voters” who are in touch with “popular culture.” Admittedly what I mean by that is voters younger than 70 and pop culture subsequent to Elvis’ second appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." The Freddy Krueger demographic, otherwise known as people such as myself who spent too much of the 1980s drinking beer and smoking weed and watching horror-movie sequels, is almost entirely untapped! Some dude wrote a whole article on the Breitbart site on Tuesday about why the John Wayne pseudo-endorsement was a big deal, because it proved that Trump “cares about what we are about.” (I read that sentence several times without understanding it. Who is “we”? And how ridiculous is the verb “to care,” associated with Donald Trump?) His only real argument is that despite having died in 1979, John Wayne remains the most popular movie star among older, conservative white men. In other words, the decaying demographic that is most likely to support Trump in the first place has only heard of one movie actor, who didn’t actually endorse anybody in this race because he’s dead and he can’t. (And did I mention that he kind of had a girl’s name?) Breaking news! Sarah Palin has made her own bed through repeated acts of headstrong idiocy and ignorance, and she gets to lie in it, even if one suspects that Krueger-like subterranean or psychological factors are at work. What can we say about the fact that the endorsement of someone who thoroughly sabotaged the only national campaign she has ever been involved in (or ever will be) and then resigned from the office to which the voters of Alaska had actually elected her, for unclear reasons, is widely seen as a big boost for Trump among conservative voters? I guess we can say the obvious: There is a large constituency among white Americans that doesn’t much care about winning elections and doesn’t care at all about governing the country. They just want to blow everything up or tear it down. They’re like first-wave British punk rockers, circa 1977, except with fashions by way of Dick’s Sporting Goods and Dress Barn. They wanna be anarchy. I’m not sure why I feel impelled to defend John Wayne from Donald Trump, if only a little. Wayne was in many respects a lamentable individual. Over the last couple of days many people have recirculated his infamous Playboy interview from 1971, in which Wayne described himself as a “white supremacist,” probably without understanding the specific resonance of that term, and justified the Native American genocide. (Natives, you see, were “selfishly” hanging onto North American real estate that white people needed for swimming pools and shopping malls.) By that time the erstwhile Marion Morrison had pretty much become a Trump voter, an aging, ignorant bigot embittered by Hollywood’s political infighting and the culture wars of the 1960s, slowly dying of cancer after years of self-inflicted damage. (Wayne was a prodigious drinker, and for much of his life smoked six packs of cigarettes a day.) But Wayne had also had a tempestuous on-and-off affair with Marlene Dietrich – the archetypal American plus the archetypal European – and that alone makes him a more interesting person than Donald Trump will ever be. (Trump’s ex-wife Ivana could be understood as a third-rate Dietrich imitation.) Wayne spoke fluent Spanish, and all three of his wives (to whom he was enthusiastically unfaithful) were of Latin American origin and not United States citizens from birth. He was a conservative Republican all his adult life, serving as a figurehead for anti-Communist groups in Hollywood and then as the major celebrity booster of the Vietnam War, long after public opinion had begun to shift against it. But at the end of his life he broke with the GOP over the Panama Canal Treaty negotiated by Jimmy Carter (the Iran deal of its day, perhaps), and advocated handing over the canal to the Panamanian government. So during his last months of life, Wayne was besieged by right-wing hate mail, a curious irony those who venerate him now are unlikely to bring up. This probably isn’t the right venue for a larger discussion of Wayne’s career as an actor and an icon, but his performances are far more interesting than his posthumous reputation as an all-purpose vessel for patriotism would suggest. There’s a Hollywood yarn, probably apocryphal, about John Ford watching Wayne in Howard Hawks’ movie “Red River” and exclaiming, “I never knew the big lug could act!” (Ford had already directed Wayne several times, most notably in “Stagecoach.”) He could indeed, and Ford got one of the great American screen performances out of him in “The Searchers,” a morally ambiguous western classic that expresses the psychic and erotic torment behind the murderous relationship between whites and Native Americans better than any other film. Trump is an actor too, but nowhere near as good or as graceful. If Wayne’s movie persona was an artful simulation of idealized American masculinity, Trump is a debased copy of that simulation, with the stoicism replaced by empty bluster and the cowboy garb replaced by a $5,000 suit. Trump is the blowhard Eastern banker whose daughter will run away with Wayne at the end of the movie, except that he’s somehow managed to convince the terrified townspeople (at least for now) that he’s the real hero. John Wayne’s heirs and their corporate entity have done the Duke a disservice by pimping him out to this billionaire impostor and his psychotic Alaskan spirit guide, who seem bent on destroying Wayne’s political party and damn near everything else. Down in the basement, Freddy is sharpening his fingers and laughing.
“I like that spot where fear and laughter converge”: Carrie Brownstein on how “Portlandia” takes on aging, “Transparent” and channeling Sleater-Kinney on set
Carrie Brownstein is kind of a unicorn. She took a break from being a rock star to start a sketch comedy career, and then took a break from that to write a memoir. In 2015 she played a second season as Syd in Amazon Studios’ award-winning “Transparent” and took a turn on the silver screen opposite Rooney Mara in “Carol,” as an enigmatic romantic interest at a hip New York party. But despite the Sleater-Kinney reunion tour last year and a burgeoning non-comedy career, Brownstein is still committed to “Portlandia.” IFC’s sketch comedy show is remarkably consistent, if niche; last season, “The Story of Toni & Candace” offered a bizarre and brilliant back story for the show’s iconic feminist bookstore owners that indicated the creative fount for the show’s brand of humor is far from exhausted. Brownstein and her co-creator Fred Armisen play all genders and all characters, including numerous that have intense relationships with each other; their own real-life relationship appears to be an endless source of inspiration. This season, “Portlandia” is getting a tad more serious. The three episodes sent to critics were all about aging, in some capacity—whether that was admitting that weekend-long music festivals aren’t fun anymore, or coming to terms with a tepid relationship, or acknowledging at long last a desire to have kids. Interspersed, of course, with these meditations on growing older are the characters’ desperate attempts to remain young, hip and relevant—or failing that, to at least appear like they are. In the episode “Breaking Up,” airing Feb. 18, Armisen and Brownstein both deliver performances that are almost dramatic, in the midst of situations that are often ludicrous; it’s one of the most affecting episodes of the show I’ve ever seen. As it turns out, Brownstein wrote it, adding one more accomplishment to a long list. I sat down with her to talk “Portlandia,” persona and feminism. Based on the first three episodes, this season of "Portlandia" is focusing more on aging than the last few have. Yeah, I think the notion of aging… and death… and mortality… were definitely themes that permeated a lot of the writing this season for sure. Just because of you and Fred Armisen’s personal experiences, or something else? I think both. There’s a certain point when you realize that what we’re all doing is cascading toward death, from the moment we’re born. It’s an undeniable fact that we try to mask and obfuscate, whether we do that through our actions or through physical transformations that downplay or mitigate the appearance of growing older. But the truth is that each of us have moments in our lives where we feel acutely aware or confronted by the idea that portions of our life are in the rearview mirror and we can’t really recapture them. So even though that sounds like an existential crisis, that is really our fundamental crisis as humans—and that is, I think, what we were mulling over this season “Portlandia” is so incisive and observant about this hip, indie, liberal culture. And the free-spiritedness eternal youth of it is kind of antithetical to the notion of death, and being aware of your own mortality. Yeah, well: I think the flip side of that juvenilia and perennial adolescence is coming to terms with the fact that that’s a fallacy—sort of a false idol. So I think it was almost inevitable that the show that commented on that seeking of youth would eventually run into the very firm wall of aging. What’s interesting is that you and Fred Armisen and (executive producer) Jonathan Krisel are making it funny. Talking with you, you sound very serious about the topic, but in “Portlandia” it’s very much played for laughs—such as when Fred wakes up with gray hair, for example. We try to balance some darker subject matter with the absurdism of the show. And we weren’t going to completely eschew that just so that we could— [laughing] lecture people about mortality, you know? We’re not trying to be didactic or pedantic, we’re kind of just trying to explore our own sense of disbelief that everyone has—as they kind of look around themselves, and realize the ways that they moved away from all the things we assumed we would embrace forever. So, yeah, we tried to infuse... even some surrealism. You saw the part where Fred jumps into the black hole, right? [In "Going Gray," as a way of trying to time travel, sort of. —ed.] Our ideal model for an episode is to start with something grounded, move to absurdity and end up somewhere surreal, at least momentarily. Because I think at that point you’re viewing it from all angles, and almost viewing from the way that we each experience things. You know, we don’t always just experience things as this kind of… you’d like to experience everything pragmatically, and even emotionally, in this kind of mature emotional state. But we don’t! We start out pragmatically, we start out with maturity, and then we devolve into these almost, you know, infantile and desperate and sometimes humorous ways of dealing with our own phenomena. I’ve heard you say in other interviews that with your work on “Portlandia,” you’ve been inspired by Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin on “Saturday Night Live” as well as “Kids in the Hall.” Is that where the surreal aspect of something like, Fred jumping into a black hole, comes from? I really do love, particularly in terms of a sketch show, “Kids in the Hall,” but also the Gilda Radner years of “Saturday Night Live,” her and [Dan] Aykroyd, even just some of that [Jim] Belushi—some of that just strangeness, you know? And I think strangeness is an undervalued element to comedy, or one that is often misunderstood. To sort of go off on a tangent here—another show I really love is “Strangers With Candy,” and what I loved about that show, and also “Kids in the Hall,” is that it reveled, sometimes, in the grotesque. And grotesqueness and strangeness have, I think, a relationship to one another. Sometimes by making something grotesque you actually see the essence of it. Because it’s the most extreme, distorted view of a person, of a personality, of a situation. And I liked that “Kids in the Hall” were always willing to go there and “Strangers With Candy,” for sure, I love that about Amy Sedaris. So I think that those are tools that we like to employ, whether it’s the strange or the grotesque, to just kind of get at something fundamental about a topic. And that’s always really interesting to us [the “Portlandia” crew], yeah. I guess we like to dive into that realm. You could be talking about horror, instead of comedy. Sure, yeah. It’s interesting—when you watch a horror film, sometimes people will laugh at the violence of it, or from fear. Because I think it does elicit something so base. It’s tapping into those places where we realize certain emotions are flip sides of the same coin. Sometimes I think about laughing and crying: It’s the same heaving emotion; you can change on a dime from laughing to crying. And fear and laughter is the same thing, like one is the antidote, or the answer to the other. I like that spot where they converge. I just saw Sleater-Kinney in concert for the first time in your reunion tour. You have a stage presence in the band that is, I would say it’s related, but it’s different from your presence on “Portlandia.” It’s less about the power or the charisma of being the guitarist onstage and a little bit more about being relatable, and sort of quirky. I was curious if you felt like, you as a performer, if those two were the same types of performance to you—making people laugh and moving people through music. “Portlandia” isn’t a live performance, so there is a different feeling to it, but it doesn’t feel schizophrenic at all; but it definitely feels like two connected but disparate aspects of who I am. They occupy different personae, but they have an underlying commonality, which is an aiming to connect with people—to do that sort of outside of the confines of day-to-day interaction or discourse, to communicate through performance, communicate through music or humor. The aim for connection is the throughline, but the ways they shape are very different and feel somewhat different to me. Is your performance in “Carol” closer to the Sleater-Kinney side of you? There is something stylized about that world that is so different. I would argue that Todd [Haynes, director of “Carol”]’s world is a very unique one, so there was really no analogue for me. “Transparent,” actually, has more of a sense—a similarity, a symmetry with Sleater-Kinney, probably. Where Jill Soloway is coming from, and that desire to push boundaries, that desire to be political, not at the expense of storytelling; those are things I think that cater to me. If I remember correctly, Jill Soloway describes her parent’s transition using really similar language in the way that you’ve talked about your own father coming out. Yeah. The first time we met, we sat down, a couple of years ago to talk about my potential participation in “Transparent”; that was one of the first things we talked about. She had read an interview where I talked about my father coming out, and she had her own reasons obviously for relating to that, so it was one of the first things that brought us together. Just some commonalities. We get along in general but we certainly share somewhat similar journeys, in that regard. I’m curious to see if Syd has a place in “Transparent” season 3. None of the exes have really gone away in the show, I’ve noticed. [Laughs.] Yeah, the Pfeffermans keep people in their orbit, just in case they want them to come back to torture them more. I really don’t know—I would love to be asked back. I didn’t realize that there was part of “Carol” that you filmed that we didn’t see. Are you allowed to tell me what that was? For length, obviously a lot of scenes get cut. It was just more scenes from that party. My part was, at this point, a cameo that ended up appearing on-screen. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. But honestly it was so cool. I was very honored to audition and get that part and have two days on set, in the world of Todd Haynes. There were so many talented and immense people working on that film, that even just to dip my toe into it for a moment was completely worth it. You were perfect casting for that scene. You’re such an icon. And in this film about, among other things, queer identity, you present this fundamental choice for Rooney Mara’s character Therese when she’s at that party. It’s like, “Here’s the unknown future, with this really cool girl,” or “Here’s the past, with this very deep connection.” Well… thanks. [Laughs.] I obviously don’t see it with that same objectivity, but I’m just like—who wouldn’t choose Cate Blanchett almost over anyone, you know? Many people would just leave—men and women, would just leave spouses left and right. And just walk toward her, like she was a human Mecca. But thanks for saying that. I think Therese made the right choice. Sorry, it must be weird to have a random person say something like, “yeah, you know you’re, like, an icon of romance for a lot of people.” No, no, I’m flattered! But I don’t think anyone sees themselves like that. I’m just like “Oh, OK.” I’ll let my dad know you said that, he’ll be like, oh good, I did something right. To return to “Portlandia,” the breakup episode struck me as being not exactly serious, but certainly more moving than what I was expecting. There are some great, very funny bits in that—the whole painting nude sequence— Jesus, yeah. [Laughs.] But then it ends on this unresolved moment of conflict. It speaks to the fact that the season is talking about aging, and how you sort of can’t be young forever. That’s actually one of the episodes I wrote this season, and I don’t know. I was so aware—we were all kind of aware—I mean we all write together, and then we kind of split off and then we each work on scripts, and that’s the one that I wanted to write. It was a little bit nerve-wracking because I knew that the tone of it was like, we were making this 24-minute indie film. About love and loss and, you know, just, unfulfillment. But I’m proud of the way it ends in that kind of unresolved way, because that’s the way most of us go through life, including our relationships. As much as we desire certainty, it’s hard not to have a day or a moment—or for some people, months or years—where we’re not grappling with questions about their own motivations, about their own sense of failures, or success and, you know, just trying to improve upon ourselves. So even though we went to places that I thought were humorous, like you said, and with the paintings—I knew by having Candace as a character in there, that we would be able to get to some really funny things. I really like the characters of Dave and Kath; I think they’re very relatable—we really wanted to leave it unresolved in the end, which is how a lot of things in real life are. I think we really actually operate in that state, of feeling unresolved about a lot of things. Not everything is tied out, even things that we’re involved in and we continue on with, the lack of resolution is actually the constant, that’s a very uncomfortable place to be and you have to seek your own… you can’t really find resolution via other people. It’s a strange one for us but I was glad that we explored that, because it did feel different. Like you said, especially the way we ended it. We finished shooting that scene, riding in that car, and Jonathan Krisel, who directed that episode, was like “Huh... It’s really sad! I don’t know…” [Laughs.] I was like, “OK, I guess we’ll just hope it works, and we’ll try to make the middle part of that episode as ridiculous as possible.” Lastly—two of your most iconic characters from “Portlandia” are Toni and Candace, the feminist bookstore owners. You’ve said elsewhere that you think those characters are heroes, for being able to make feminism funny. Can you elaborate on that? I don’t know if it’s important to me that it’s funny, because I think it’s a disservice to any ideology or philosophy or political movement to ensure likability. At the same time, I think that to be able to illustrate a variety of viewpoints and perspectives and iterations of feminism and intersectionality I think is crucial, so for me personally, I feel lucky to explore my own relationship to feminism, through various outlets. Sleater-Kinney has its own version of feminism; we have our own history and within the band we have three different histories. I like to think of Toni and Candace as heroes because they’re just these very unlikely protagonists, and I like how contradiction and flaws are very imbedded into their personalities and their ethos. I mean, they’re barely second-wave feminists—just completely off the charts with how misguided they are. But I like that! Because I think part of the journey of any movement—and this is one that is so multifaceted—is to be able to get to a place where you don’t have to be representational anymore. You get to a place where you get to be both heroic but also completely flawed. It’s a good place to be. For two women running a bookstore that’s kind of an interesting dynamic; these two characters that should be benign, should be underestimated; but it turns out, they can’t be ignored either.
It’s free and everyone knows how to do it: The craze that’s sweeping the nation — we hope
Everyone knows walking is good for you. It’s plain common sense, backed by a wealth of recent medical research. In fact, a major new study found that lack of physical activity is twice as deadly for us as obesity. Health data shows that as little as 30 minutes of walking a day cuts the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in half, lowers the likelihood of diabetes by 60 percent, limits colon cancer by 31 percent for women and reduces risk of dementia, heart disease, depression, osteoporosis, glaucoma and catching a cold. This kind of evidence prompted U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to issue a call for Americans to walk more. “Physical activity – such as brisk walking – can significantly reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes,” Murthy explains. “Even a small first effort can make a big difference in improving the personal health of an individual and the public health of the nation.” “Walking is the most common form of physical activity across incomes and ages and education levels,” adds Thomas Schmid of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s because it’s free, easy, relaxing, available right out your front door and easily incorporated into daily schedules. Plus it’s fun. The CDC’s most recent research shows the number of Americans who take a walk at least once a week rose six percent in the last decade. Still less than half of all adults meet the minimum recommended guidelines for walking, rolling in a wheelchair or other physical activity (30 minutes a day five days a week), according to the CDC. Even worse, only a quarter of high school students today reach the mark (an hour a day seven days a week), according to the Surgeon General’s report. What can be done to ensure the health of our country? The Surgeon General encourages everyone to walk and work to make their hometowns more safe and inviting for people on foot. He lauds the new walking movement that’s emerged over the past few years for getting Americans moving again. Health care professionals are on the frontlines of this effort, and many are bringing the message back to their clinics by including physical activity as one of the vital signs—like blood pressure and tobacco use—they check on with patients. Some MDs even write prescriptions for walking. Several health care systems track physical activity in their health care records, including Greenville Health in South Carolina, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah and Idaho, and Kaiser Permanente, an integrated health care delivery system, in California and seven other states. If Walking Were a New Drug, It Would Make Headlines “What if there was a pill you took one day that lowered your blood pressure, prevented diabetes, improved your mood and protected against depression, increased bone density and prevented fractures, helped you remain independent as an older adult, enhanced your ability to think, and gave you more energy?” Robert Sallis and Karen J. Coleman ask in Sports Medicine Bulletin. “Would you be asking your doctor to prescribe it for you?” Such a drug already exists, Sallis notes, it’s called walking. “If walking was a pill or surgical procedure, it would be on '60 Minutes.'” Sallis, a family practitioner at a Kaiser Permanente clinic in Fontana, California, keeps special walking RX prescription pads in his exam rooms, which he fills out for some patients saying, “This is what I want you to do to treat your high blood pressure or depression or diabetes etc. If it’s not enough, then we will consider using a medication.” What are patients’ reactions? “They respond very well to this message,” Sallis says. “This approach really frames for them how important exercise is to their health and treating their disease.” Sallis first spoke up about walking and other physical activity being recognized as a vital sign in 2007, when serving as president of the American College of Sports Medicine and helping launch the Exercise is Medicine initiative with the American Medical Association. The aim of that project is to highlight the mounting research proving that physical activity should be seen as essential to health and the treatment of disease. It’s obvious that doctors, nurses and other clinicians should raise the idea of walking during medical exams, when people are paying particularly close attention to their health and how to maintain it. Putting the Plan Into Action In 2009, physical activity was designated as a vital sign for Kaiser Permanente facilities in Southern California and the idea was quickly adopted throughout the rest of the non-profit organization, the nation’s largest integrated care health system with 10.2 million members, 17,000 physicians, 50,000 nurses, 620 clinics and 38 medical centers on the West Coast, the Mid-Atlantic region, Colorado, Hawaii, and Georgia. Patients are asked how many days a week on average they engage in moderate or strenuous physical exercise, like a brisk walk, and for how many minutes? These two simple questions frequently spark conversation about the value of walking (or yoga, Zumba classes, bicycling, gardening and other physical activity) in treating and preventing disease. A follow-up study published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found that 18 months after Kaiser Permanente adopted physical activity as a vital sign in Southern California, 86 percent of all adult patients had a record of their activity levels included in electronic medical records. In 2013, Kaiser Permanente’s Exercise as a Vital Sign program was honored with an Innovation Award by the National Business Coalition on Health. “Asking an individual about their daily physical activity helps our providers learn what matters to our patients and prompts our patients to think about healthier habits,” explains Lisa Schilling, vice president for Healthcare Performance Improvement with Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute. “It also allows us to connect the individual to resources and habits that promote better health.” Even health care professionals sometimes need encouragement to live more healthy. Zendi Solano, a research assistant for Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, California, admits that she knew the importance of exercise but “really didn’t take it seriously” until her doctor asked about it during a checkup. Diabetes runs in Solano’s family, and she was obese with elevated blood sugar. Right then and there, she decided to take up running. At her next physical, Solano had lost 30 pounds and her blood sugar levels were normal. Being asked about exercise as a vital sign, she says, “is a great reminder.” About two-thirds of Sallis’ patients fall below the minimum federal guidelines for exercise, and half of those report no moderate physical activity at all during an average week, he says. "Talking about physical activity can have an impact on everyone," he says, especially high risk patients with diabetes, lung disease, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis or other chronic diseases. “Anyone who is at risk for chronic disease should consider exercise an essential vaccine to greatly lower risk of illness and…extend life,” he wrote in a guest editorial for the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The power of exercise to heal really hit home for Sallis after meeting Valerie, a 68-year-old patient with Parkinson’s disease who hobbled into his office with a walker. She was desperate and depressed because her medication was no longer working. He recommended she visit a fitness professional to walk on a treadmill at one mile-per-hour speed along with some resistance training and stretches. “In a month and a half, she came back to my office without the walker and telling me she had more energy and a more positive outlook,” he remembers. This convinced him, “if something so simple and inexpensive as exercise can have such a profound effect, shouldn’t we try to prescribe this powerful medicine to all of our patients?” Say Yes to Better Health For Liz Joy, medical director for community health at Intermountain Healthcare based in Utah, the “aha” moment about physical activity as a vital sign came in 2008 at a meeting focused on preventing obesity among youth. “It was a roomful of physicians, health care directors, scientists and coaches,” she remembers, “and one speaker got up and asked: ‘What is health care doing about this crisis?’ That’s when it came to me that physical activity needs to become a vital sign.” Intermountain adopted the idea in 2013 in its electronic health record for use by clinicians in Utah and Idaho. “It’s a way to bring discussion of physical activity into the exam room,” Joy explains. “Even if it’s just a brief conversation about how important it is to your overall health. I can let patients know it’s as important as blood pressure, and more important than obesity and cholesterol to your overall health.” “I generally start by talking about walking, because it’s free and everyone knows how to walk,” she adds. “I’ll tell them just start with 10 minutes at a time, and no one has ever said they can’t do that. Do that three times a day, and you have your 30 minute daily minimum.” Joy notes that doctors have been charting people’s weight for generations, telling them to lose weight while watching the national obesity rate continue to rise. “Talking about physical activity is a positive conversation—something people can do to improve their health. And when they take that first step, sometimes their eating habits begin to change too. You’ve helped enhance their self-efficacy.” Some of her patients don’t consider walking real exercise, so the conversation can offer new motivation to get back on their feet. “I saw a patient and was surprised his records showed that his physical activity was zero. I knew he had a dog, and I asked if walked the dog? Yes, he said 30-60 minutes a day. But he didn’t think of it as exercise.” “The physical activity vital sign is a great prompt to have a conversation with patients about activity and exercise—to let them things like gardening and dog walking count,” she adds. Joy points out that health care systems have a strong incentive for adding physical activity to their lists of vital signs. “Physical activity is stressed in Medicare reimbursements as one of the HEDIS (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) measures, which Medicare and others use to assess the quality of health care delivery to determine level of payments. It’s a huge financial driver.” Spreading the Message Into Exam Rooms Everywhere The American College of Sports Medicine has joined with other groups in the walking movement to alert health care professionals about the promise of adding physical activity to their list of vital signs. “One strategy is to get influential medical organizations to formally adopt physical activity as a vital sign, and then activate their individual members,” says ACSM CEO Jim Whitehead. They’re already working toward that goal with 10 medical societies, including the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Cardiology and the Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association. “This is for all health care providers, not just physicians. Nurses can often make a greater impact because they typically spend more time with you, ” notes Brenda Chamness, ACSM Strategic Health Program’s senior director. Working with Kaiser Permanente and the Every Body Walk! Collaborative, a coalition of organizations ranging from the CDC to AARP to NAACP to the PTA, ACSM hosted a two-day scientific roundtable on the subject last April, which detailed recent research and presented best practices used by working physicians, including Robert Sallis and Liz Joy. In October, several hundred health professionals around the country took part in a webinar on Making Physical Activity a Vital Sign. “All this can have a major impact by showing people that they all don’t have to go to the gym to be healthy,” says Adrian Hutber, vice president of Exercise Is Medicine at ACSM. “They can just go out and take a walk.” Jay Walljasper, author of "The Great Neighborhood Book," writes, speaks and consults on how to create better communities. Contact him at jay@jaywalljasper.com.
Everyone knows walking is good for you. It’s plain common sense, backed by a wealth of recent medical research. In fact, a major new study found that lack of physical activity is twice as deadly for us as obesity. Health data shows that as little as 30 minutes of walking a day cuts the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in half, lowers the likelihood of diabetes by 60 percent, limits colon cancer by 31 percent for women and reduces risk of dementia, heart disease, depression, osteoporosis, glaucoma and catching a cold. This kind of evidence prompted U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to issue a call for Americans to walk more. “Physical activity – such as brisk walking – can significantly reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes,” Murthy explains. “Even a small first effort can make a big difference in improving the personal health of an individual and the public health of the nation.” “Walking is the most common form of physical activity across incomes and ages and education levels,” adds Thomas Schmid of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s because it’s free, easy, relaxing, available right out your front door and easily incorporated into daily schedules. Plus it’s fun. The CDC’s most recent research shows the number of Americans who take a walk at least once a week rose six percent in the last decade. Still less than half of all adults meet the minimum recommended guidelines for walking, rolling in a wheelchair or other physical activity (30 minutes a day five days a week), according to the CDC. Even worse, only a quarter of high school students today reach the mark (an hour a day seven days a week), according to the Surgeon General’s report. What can be done to ensure the health of our country? The Surgeon General encourages everyone to walk and work to make their hometowns more safe and inviting for people on foot. He lauds the new walking movement that’s emerged over the past few years for getting Americans moving again. Health care professionals are on the frontlines of this effort, and many are bringing the message back to their clinics by including physical activity as one of the vital signs—like blood pressure and tobacco use—they check on with patients. Some MDs even write prescriptions for walking. Several health care systems track physical activity in their health care records, including Greenville Health in South Carolina, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah and Idaho, and Kaiser Permanente, an integrated health care delivery system, in California and seven other states. If Walking Were a New Drug, It Would Make Headlines “What if there was a pill you took one day that lowered your blood pressure, prevented diabetes, improved your mood and protected against depression, increased bone density and prevented fractures, helped you remain independent as an older adult, enhanced your ability to think, and gave you more energy?” Robert Sallis and Karen J. Coleman ask in Sports Medicine Bulletin. “Would you be asking your doctor to prescribe it for you?” Such a drug already exists, Sallis notes, it’s called walking. “If walking was a pill or surgical procedure, it would be on '60 Minutes.'” Sallis, a family practitioner at a Kaiser Permanente clinic in Fontana, California, keeps special walking RX prescription pads in his exam rooms, which he fills out for some patients saying, “This is what I want you to do to treat your high blood pressure or depression or diabetes etc. If it’s not enough, then we will consider using a medication.” What are patients’ reactions? “They respond very well to this message,” Sallis says. “This approach really frames for them how important exercise is to their health and treating their disease.” Sallis first spoke up about walking and other physical activity being recognized as a vital sign in 2007, when serving as president of the American College of Sports Medicine and helping launch the Exercise is Medicine initiative with the American Medical Association. The aim of that project is to highlight the mounting research proving that physical activity should be seen as essential to health and the treatment of disease. It’s obvious that doctors, nurses and other clinicians should raise the idea of walking during medical exams, when people are paying particularly close attention to their health and how to maintain it. Putting the Plan Into Action In 2009, physical activity was designated as a vital sign for Kaiser Permanente facilities in Southern California and the idea was quickly adopted throughout the rest of the non-profit organization, the nation’s largest integrated care health system with 10.2 million members, 17,000 physicians, 50,000 nurses, 620 clinics and 38 medical centers on the West Coast, the Mid-Atlantic region, Colorado, Hawaii, and Georgia. Patients are asked how many days a week on average they engage in moderate or strenuous physical exercise, like a brisk walk, and for how many minutes? These two simple questions frequently spark conversation about the value of walking (or yoga, Zumba classes, bicycling, gardening and other physical activity) in treating and preventing disease. A follow-up study published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found that 18 months after Kaiser Permanente adopted physical activity as a vital sign in Southern California, 86 percent of all adult patients had a record of their activity levels included in electronic medical records. In 2013, Kaiser Permanente’s Exercise as a Vital Sign program was honored with an Innovation Award by the National Business Coalition on Health. “Asking an individual about their daily physical activity helps our providers learn what matters to our patients and prompts our patients to think about healthier habits,” explains Lisa Schilling, vice president for Healthcare Performance Improvement with Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute. “It also allows us to connect the individual to resources and habits that promote better health.” Even health care professionals sometimes need encouragement to live more healthy. Zendi Solano, a research assistant for Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, California, admits that she knew the importance of exercise but “really didn’t take it seriously” until her doctor asked about it during a checkup. Diabetes runs in Solano’s family, and she was obese with elevated blood sugar. Right then and there, she decided to take up running. At her next physical, Solano had lost 30 pounds and her blood sugar levels were normal. Being asked about exercise as a vital sign, she says, “is a great reminder.” About two-thirds of Sallis’ patients fall below the minimum federal guidelines for exercise, and half of those report no moderate physical activity at all during an average week, he says. "Talking about physical activity can have an impact on everyone," he says, especially high risk patients with diabetes, lung disease, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis or other chronic diseases. “Anyone who is at risk for chronic disease should consider exercise an essential vaccine to greatly lower risk of illness and…extend life,” he wrote in a guest editorial for the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The power of exercise to heal really hit home for Sallis after meeting Valerie, a 68-year-old patient with Parkinson’s disease who hobbled into his office with a walker. She was desperate and depressed because her medication was no longer working. He recommended she visit a fitness professional to walk on a treadmill at one mile-per-hour speed along with some resistance training and stretches. “In a month and a half, she came back to my office without the walker and telling me she had more energy and a more positive outlook,” he remembers. This convinced him, “if something so simple and inexpensive as exercise can have such a profound effect, shouldn’t we try to prescribe this powerful medicine to all of our patients?” Say Yes to Better Health For Liz Joy, medical director for community health at Intermountain Healthcare based in Utah, the “aha” moment about physical activity as a vital sign came in 2008 at a meeting focused on preventing obesity among youth. “It was a roomful of physicians, health care directors, scientists and coaches,” she remembers, “and one speaker got up and asked: ‘What is health care doing about this crisis?’ That’s when it came to me that physical activity needs to become a vital sign.” Intermountain adopted the idea in 2013 in its electronic health record for use by clinicians in Utah and Idaho. “It’s a way to bring discussion of physical activity into the exam room,” Joy explains. “Even if it’s just a brief conversation about how important it is to your overall health. I can let patients know it’s as important as blood pressure, and more important than obesity and cholesterol to your overall health.” “I generally start by talking about walking, because it’s free and everyone knows how to walk,” she adds. “I’ll tell them just start with 10 minutes at a time, and no one has ever said they can’t do that. Do that three times a day, and you have your 30 minute daily minimum.” Joy notes that doctors have been charting people’s weight for generations, telling them to lose weight while watching the national obesity rate continue to rise. “Talking about physical activity is a positive conversation—something people can do to improve their health. And when they take that first step, sometimes their eating habits begin to change too. You’ve helped enhance their self-efficacy.” Some of her patients don’t consider walking real exercise, so the conversation can offer new motivation to get back on their feet. “I saw a patient and was surprised his records showed that his physical activity was zero. I knew he had a dog, and I asked if walked the dog? Yes, he said 30-60 minutes a day. But he didn’t think of it as exercise.” “The physical activity vital sign is a great prompt to have a conversation with patients about activity and exercise—to let them things like gardening and dog walking count,” she adds. Joy points out that health care systems have a strong incentive for adding physical activity to their lists of vital signs. “Physical activity is stressed in Medicare reimbursements as one of the HEDIS (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) measures, which Medicare and others use to assess the quality of health care delivery to determine level of payments. It’s a huge financial driver.” Spreading the Message Into Exam Rooms Everywhere The American College of Sports Medicine has joined with other groups in the walking movement to alert health care professionals about the promise of adding physical activity to their list of vital signs. “One strategy is to get influential medical organizations to formally adopt physical activity as a vital sign, and then activate their individual members,” says ACSM CEO Jim Whitehead. They’re already working toward that goal with 10 medical societies, including the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Cardiology and the Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association. “This is for all health care providers, not just physicians. Nurses can often make a greater impact because they typically spend more time with you, ” notes Brenda Chamness, ACSM Strategic Health Program’s senior director. Working with Kaiser Permanente and the Every Body Walk! Collaborative, a coalition of organizations ranging from the CDC to AARP to NAACP to the PTA, ACSM hosted a two-day scientific roundtable on the subject last April, which detailed recent research and presented best practices used by working physicians, including Robert Sallis and Liz Joy. In October, several hundred health professionals around the country took part in a webinar on Making Physical Activity a Vital Sign. “All this can have a major impact by showing people that they all don’t have to go to the gym to be healthy,” says Adrian Hutber, vice president of Exercise Is Medicine at ACSM. “They can just go out and take a walk.” Jay Walljasper, author of "The Great Neighborhood Book," writes, speaks and consults on how to create better communities. Contact him at jay@jaywalljasper.com. 
