Why not BOTH paper and digital? That's my solution.
08 Nov 2009 12:35 pm
Running With Informavores
Nick Bilton is one voice in an exchange about digital information over at Edge:
I feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show ... Every moment of our day revolves around the idea of telling stories. So why should a select group of people in the world be the only ones with a soapbox or the keys to the printing press to tell their stories? Let everyone share their information, build their communities, and contribute to the conversation.
Nick Carr highlights other aspects of the debate. Personally, I love both ways of understanding the changing world. I still read my NYT on dead-tree every morning, with coffee and ginger snaps, and then plunge into the bloggy chaos. Why do we always have to choose between them? Why not both
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Palin's Game
07 Nov 2009 07:46 pm
Sunlight And Palin
A reader writes:
You ask, what it is about sunlight and open debate that Palin is afraid of.
My guess is that it isn't fear. (Though she knows on some level that she's not capable of debate with her dismal language skills.) I think that it's because the debate isn't the point. Because she doesn't want debate. Her sole objective, and that of the neocons who back her, is to continue consolidating a rabid right wing base, to reinforce the views they already have and then send them out to keep their fellow members of the base in line.
She's simply to serve as the beacon to draw them, and the fount of "wisdom" if you will giving them elementary level talking points to carry forth and congeal their allegiance, cement it, and hopefully draw in their neighbors votes. And their money of course.
She isn't about debate. She's preaching to her choir. She's keeping them on the same page of the hymnal and singing the same tune.Louder and louder. I mean, it's pretty clear by now isn't it that the GOP is now the right wing, and that they have no interest in opposing views or drawing in other people? The Big Tent is now only open to the already converted and the true believers.
Sunlight And Palin
A reader writes:
You ask, what it is about sunlight and open debate that Palin is afraid of.
My guess is that it isn't fear. (Though she knows on some level that she's not capable of debate with her dismal language skills.) I think that it's because the debate isn't the point. Because she doesn't want debate. Her sole objective, and that of the neocons who back her, is to continue consolidating a rabid right wing base, to reinforce the views they already have and then send them out to keep their fellow members of the base in line.
She's simply to serve as the beacon to draw them, and the fount of "wisdom" if you will giving them elementary level talking points to carry forth and congeal their allegiance, cement it, and hopefully draw in their neighbors votes. And their money of course.
She isn't about debate. She's preaching to her choir. She's keeping them on the same page of the hymnal and singing the same tune.Louder and louder. I mean, it's pretty clear by now isn't it that the GOP is now the right wing, and that they have no interest in opposing views or drawing in other people? The Big Tent is now only open to the already converted and the true believers.
The Waning of the South's Political Influence?
→ Culture, Politics
Gone With the Wind
— By Kevin Drum | Wed November 4, 2009 3:25 PM PST
After the election last November I noted that "for the first time since Reconstruction, the South will be almost completely shut out of national power....This is the first time this will be true in well over a century."
Over at the Economist, an exile from Dixie puts a little more meat on those bones. During the 90s and early oughts, he notes, Washington was almost completely controlled by Southerners: Clinton, Gore, Gingrich, Armey, Lott, Bush, Frist, and DeLay. "It was southerners in every position of power for an unusually long time."
In 2006, things started to go wrong. Nancy Pelosi (California) and Harry Reid (Nevada) took over the top jobs in Congress. Then Barack Obama (Illinois) was elected president, and declined to balance his ticket regionally by picking a southerner.
But the Republican leadership shifted too. The party ran two non-southerners for president and vice-president in John McCain and Sarah Palin. The RNC is now run by a black Marylander, Michael Steele. The House minority leader, John Boehner, hails from Ohio. The whip's job has gone to Eric Cantor who, though Virginian, is an atypical southern Republican in being Jewish. Only Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate majority leader, is the stereotypical white Protestant southerner. His whip and assistant, John Kyl, comes from Arizona.
"I want my country back," has become a conservative-populist rallying cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing of power north and towards the coasts. It won't last, either. But it's a painful reality right now for a region that once revelled in separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long stretch.
Despite the oceans of ink spent analyzing the electoral shift in 2006 and 2008, I continue to think this transformation has been underappreciated. The Old South has punched above its weight in American politics ever since 1787, and during the few times their influence has temporarily waned (Reconstruction, the 60s) it drove them crazy with fear and persecution mongering. So it's not really surprising that it's happening again.
It's hard to say what's next. Republicans are the party of the South these days, and sure, the GOP will regain power eventually. But will they be able to do it if they remain a party dominated by the culture of Dixie? Demographics suggest pretty strongly that they can't, which means that eventually the South will have to come to grips with the fact that they no longer hold the whip hand in American politics and probably never will again. This means acknowledging that they're just another region, one with influence that waxes and wanes but basically corresponds to their population. I wonder how long it will take for them to do that?
Gone With the Wind
— By Kevin Drum | Wed November 4, 2009 3:25 PM PST
After the election last November I noted that "for the first time since Reconstruction, the South will be almost completely shut out of national power....This is the first time this will be true in well over a century."
Over at the Economist, an exile from Dixie puts a little more meat on those bones. During the 90s and early oughts, he notes, Washington was almost completely controlled by Southerners: Clinton, Gore, Gingrich, Armey, Lott, Bush, Frist, and DeLay. "It was southerners in every position of power for an unusually long time."
In 2006, things started to go wrong. Nancy Pelosi (California) and Harry Reid (Nevada) took over the top jobs in Congress. Then Barack Obama (Illinois) was elected president, and declined to balance his ticket regionally by picking a southerner.
But the Republican leadership shifted too. The party ran two non-southerners for president and vice-president in John McCain and Sarah Palin. The RNC is now run by a black Marylander, Michael Steele. The House minority leader, John Boehner, hails from Ohio. The whip's job has gone to Eric Cantor who, though Virginian, is an atypical southern Republican in being Jewish. Only Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate majority leader, is the stereotypical white Protestant southerner. His whip and assistant, John Kyl, comes from Arizona.
"I want my country back," has become a conservative-populist rallying cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing of power north and towards the coasts. It won't last, either. But it's a painful reality right now for a region that once revelled in separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long stretch.
Despite the oceans of ink spent analyzing the electoral shift in 2006 and 2008, I continue to think this transformation has been underappreciated. The Old South has punched above its weight in American politics ever since 1787, and during the few times their influence has temporarily waned (Reconstruction, the 60s) it drove them crazy with fear and persecution mongering. So it's not really surprising that it's happening again.
It's hard to say what's next. Republicans are the party of the South these days, and sure, the GOP will regain power eventually. But will they be able to do it if they remain a party dominated by the culture of Dixie? Demographics suggest pretty strongly that they can't, which means that eventually the South will have to come to grips with the fact that they no longer hold the whip hand in American politics and probably never will again. This means acknowledging that they're just another region, one with influence that waxes and wanes but basically corresponds to their population. I wonder how long it will take for them to do that?
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Igor Panarin's Doomsday Tea Party
BY Nick Baumann
5 November 2009
Mother Jones
For more than a decade Dr. Igor Panarin, a Russian academic, has been predicting that sometime around 2010 the United States will collapse, splintering into separate states, some of them controlled by foreign powers. Outside of Russia, no one's put much stock in his crackpot and stereotype-based theories—until now, that is. Who are the newest members of the Igor Panarin fan club? Tea partiers who’ve rallied against the Obama administration's policies and blasted the president for pushing a "socialist" agenda. And he's especially big among tea party activists in Texas, who have hosted Panarin and promoted his work.
In Russia, Panarin, who hosts a weekly radio show, is considered a mainstream expert on the United States. Like Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Panarin used to work for the KGB. He clearly has the support of the Kremlin, for he teaches at* the school that trains Russia's diplomats. And since the election of Barack Obama last November, Panarin has found a new audience in America among far right activists, many of whom believe Obama is destroying the country.
According to Panarin, the US will collapse within the next year because of its economic problems and deep racial and ethnic divisions. He changes the details from year to year, but here's the general gist: the South, "with its Hispanics," Panarin says, will break away from the union and merge or ally with Mexico. The rest of America will split into several other countries, some becoming the protectorates of other major powers. Alaska, naturally, will go to Russia. The Chinese will take over the West Coast. (Why? Panarin points out that most Californians' laptops are made in China and that the West has a "growing Chinese population.") "Five of the poorer central states, with their large Native American populations, and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong," will compose two other countries, he explained in Moscow last year. The Northeast, he says, will fall under the sway of "global capital and finance" based in London—an idea, no doubt, that appeals to those tea partiers who worry about nefarious international forces exerting influence over the US economy.
Since the Drudge Report first highlighted his theories last November, several conservative websites and blogs have featured him. In September, Chuck Baldwin, a perennial far-right presidential candidate on the Constitution Party ticket, observed that Panarin's predictions of "some sort of break up of the United States in the near future" was a "very realistic probability." (Columnist and MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan linked to Baldwin's article on Panarin.) Joseph Farah, the founder of the arch-conservative website WorldNetDaily, which is famous for promoting "birther" allegations questioning Obama's citizenship, wrote in December that he wasn't "buying into Panarin's entire prediction" but that "there's something to it." More than half of the nearly 3,000 WND readers who responded to a poll attached to Farah's piece agreed that "the US is on course to break up soon, and another 18 percent said they thought the United States wouldn't break up, but would 'continue to lose sovereignty to the UN and other global entities.'"
This week Panarin made a trip to the United States. Tea party activists were waiting. On Monday night, the Houston Tea Party Patriots sponsored a speech by Panarin at a local Hilton. The event was titled "Global Crisis: Can the United States Remain United?" Panarin's hosts, according to a flier promoting the event, want to "make sure" Panarin's scenario "never happens." But they weren't sure it wouldn't come to pass. In a blog post promoting the event, these tea party activists noted that Panarin's prediction has been dismissed as a "radical impossibility. But is it?"
Texas was an appropriate place for Panarin to visit. He has said that he views Republican Gov. Rick Perry's talk of secession, Chuck Norris' offer to run for president of Texas, and the country's political battles over immigration as evidence for his thesis. And it certainly doesn't hurt Panarin's appeal to the far right that he is deeply critical of President Obama, whom he has compared to Mikhail Gorbachev. Obama, he says, "likes to talk but hasn’t really managed to do anything." Panarin also talks about America's "moral" collapse—a theme popular among social conservatives.
After his lecture in Texas, Panarin traveled to Washington, DC, on Tuesday to debate his America-is-doomed theory at the city's Russian Cultural Center. He gave his usual spiel—that the US is on the verge of breakup—without producing much in the way of evidence or argument. In the audience were a group of conservative activists who dominated the question-and-answer period. One of them, Bob Hoy, a tea party organizer from Northern Virginia, echoed Panarin's prediction of racial strife, but differed with the Russian on the timeline for America's impending disintegration. He thought it would be a matter of decades, not months. Hoy said that by 2065, "100 years after Ted Kennedy changed the immigration laws," America would be no more, due to an invasion of immigrants. Hoy warned that America, "founded by Europeans," was under siege. "No one wants to live in an integrated neighborhood," he added, arguing that white people flee "black" areas as soon as they can.
When Panarin polled the audience on whether they agreed with his theory, about 10 of the 50 or so people present raised their hands. With the tea partiers embracing Panarin, he can rest assured that if he falls out of favor in Russia, he'll have a receptive audience in America—that is, if America still exists.
*Corrected to reflect the fact that Panarin is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia. He doesn't run it.
5 November 2009
Mother Jones
For more than a decade Dr. Igor Panarin, a Russian academic, has been predicting that sometime around 2010 the United States will collapse, splintering into separate states, some of them controlled by foreign powers. Outside of Russia, no one's put much stock in his crackpot and stereotype-based theories—until now, that is. Who are the newest members of the Igor Panarin fan club? Tea partiers who’ve rallied against the Obama administration's policies and blasted the president for pushing a "socialist" agenda. And he's especially big among tea party activists in Texas, who have hosted Panarin and promoted his work.
In Russia, Panarin, who hosts a weekly radio show, is considered a mainstream expert on the United States. Like Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Panarin used to work for the KGB. He clearly has the support of the Kremlin, for he teaches at* the school that trains Russia's diplomats. And since the election of Barack Obama last November, Panarin has found a new audience in America among far right activists, many of whom believe Obama is destroying the country.
According to Panarin, the US will collapse within the next year because of its economic problems and deep racial and ethnic divisions. He changes the details from year to year, but here's the general gist: the South, "with its Hispanics," Panarin says, will break away from the union and merge or ally with Mexico. The rest of America will split into several other countries, some becoming the protectorates of other major powers. Alaska, naturally, will go to Russia. The Chinese will take over the West Coast. (Why? Panarin points out that most Californians' laptops are made in China and that the West has a "growing Chinese population.") "Five of the poorer central states, with their large Native American populations, and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong," will compose two other countries, he explained in Moscow last year. The Northeast, he says, will fall under the sway of "global capital and finance" based in London—an idea, no doubt, that appeals to those tea partiers who worry about nefarious international forces exerting influence over the US economy.
Since the Drudge Report first highlighted his theories last November, several conservative websites and blogs have featured him. In September, Chuck Baldwin, a perennial far-right presidential candidate on the Constitution Party ticket, observed that Panarin's predictions of "some sort of break up of the United States in the near future" was a "very realistic probability." (Columnist and MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan linked to Baldwin's article on Panarin.) Joseph Farah, the founder of the arch-conservative website WorldNetDaily, which is famous for promoting "birther" allegations questioning Obama's citizenship, wrote in December that he wasn't "buying into Panarin's entire prediction" but that "there's something to it." More than half of the nearly 3,000 WND readers who responded to a poll attached to Farah's piece agreed that "the US is on course to break up soon, and another 18 percent said they thought the United States wouldn't break up, but would 'continue to lose sovereignty to the UN and other global entities.'"
This week Panarin made a trip to the United States. Tea party activists were waiting. On Monday night, the Houston Tea Party Patriots sponsored a speech by Panarin at a local Hilton. The event was titled "Global Crisis: Can the United States Remain United?" Panarin's hosts, according to a flier promoting the event, want to "make sure" Panarin's scenario "never happens." But they weren't sure it wouldn't come to pass. In a blog post promoting the event, these tea party activists noted that Panarin's prediction has been dismissed as a "radical impossibility. But is it?"
Texas was an appropriate place for Panarin to visit. He has said that he views Republican Gov. Rick Perry's talk of secession, Chuck Norris' offer to run for president of Texas, and the country's political battles over immigration as evidence for his thesis. And it certainly doesn't hurt Panarin's appeal to the far right that he is deeply critical of President Obama, whom he has compared to Mikhail Gorbachev. Obama, he says, "likes to talk but hasn’t really managed to do anything." Panarin also talks about America's "moral" collapse—a theme popular among social conservatives.
After his lecture in Texas, Panarin traveled to Washington, DC, on Tuesday to debate his America-is-doomed theory at the city's Russian Cultural Center. He gave his usual spiel—that the US is on the verge of breakup—without producing much in the way of evidence or argument. In the audience were a group of conservative activists who dominated the question-and-answer period. One of them, Bob Hoy, a tea party organizer from Northern Virginia, echoed Panarin's prediction of racial strife, but differed with the Russian on the timeline for America's impending disintegration. He thought it would be a matter of decades, not months. Hoy said that by 2065, "100 years after Ted Kennedy changed the immigration laws," America would be no more, due to an invasion of immigrants. Hoy warned that America, "founded by Europeans," was under siege. "No one wants to live in an integrated neighborhood," he added, arguing that white people flee "black" areas as soon as they can.
When Panarin polled the audience on whether they agreed with his theory, about 10 of the 50 or so people present raised their hands. With the tea partiers embracing Panarin, he can rest assured that if he falls out of favor in Russia, he'll have a receptive audience in America—that is, if America still exists.
*Corrected to reflect the fact that Panarin is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia. He doesn't run it.
WND's Jerome Corsi Claims Fort Hood Shooter Advised Obama
BY Jason Linkins
6 November 2009
Huffington Post
Well, if you were wondering what paranoiac smear artist would be the first to step out and attempt to name President Barack Obama as the man who guided Nidal Malik Hasan to his murderous rampage at Fort Hood yesterday, the answer -- naturally! -- is Jerome Corsi. Corsi has a long history of lunatic, fact-averse ravings and he fails to disappoint on that regard on the pages of World Net Daily, today, in a piece entitled "Shooter advised Obama transition." Except, of course, he didn't do any such thing.
Corsi hangs his entire allegation on a document produced on May 19, 2009 by The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute entitled "Thinking Anew, Security Priorities For The Next Administration." In that document, Nidal Hasan is listed, on page 29, as a "Task Force Event Participant." He was one of hundreds of people listed as a "participant." Significantly, Nidal was not the author of the document. He was not a member of the HSPI's "Presidential Transition Task Force." Nor was he a member of the HSPI's "Task Force Staff." He was not a member of the HSPI's Steering Committee or a briefer to the task force.
Also, the activities of the HSPI here do not in anyway constitute official transition advice to the White House, despite the fact that a committee got named the "Presidential Transition Task Force" and the HSPI's activities involved identifying homeland security priorities and offering advice. Here is what the HSPI does:
Founded in 2003, The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) is a nonpartisan "think and do" tank whose mission is to build bridges between theory and practice to advance homeland security through an interdisciplinary approach. By convening domestic and international policymakers and practitioners at all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and academia, HSPI creates innovative strategies and solutions to current and future threats to the nation.
The task force gave itself the following mission: "to further policy discussions of the top strategic priorities in the area of security in order to generate actionable recommendations, for the Administration taking office in January 2009, designed to effectively meet the most vexing challenges the United States faces today."
Essentially, what the HSPI did (and all of this is spelled out explicitly in this document's executive summary) is convene a giant group of security wonks and academics, heard some briefings, made some "internal deliberations," and generated a set of priorities and recommendations. Then those recommendations got published, and maybe someone at the White House read them, but it's more likely that the content ended up as material to cite in the middle of further security-wonk discussions.
And at some point in the process, Nidal Hasan might have sat in a room while this was happening, with a few hundred other people.
But none of this constitutes formal advice given to the president on homeland security during the transition of power. This was a university panel that has sod all to do with the White House, generating ideas, and calling it "advice" for the president. If two or three of you wanted to meet up with me at the Au Bon Pain on Pennsylvania Avenue this afternoon and chat today, we will have accomplished basically the same thing.
Corsi, in fact, knows this. He writes:
While the GWU task force participants included several members of government, including representatives of the Department of Justice and the U.S Department of Homeland Security, there is no indication in the document that the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition, other than to serve in a university-based advisory capacity.
In short, the facts Corsi obtained torpedo the premise of his piece, which, I remind you, is that the "shooter advised [the] Obama transition." Were this being written for a responsible journalistic entity, some creature called an "editor" would have stepped in and said, "Hey, Jerome, you realize that by your own findings, you article is complete horseshit, right?" But this is World Net Daily, written by and for complete charlatans.
UPDATE: I contacted Frank Cilluffo, the director of the HSPI at George Washington University, who tells me that Nidal Hasan has no affiliation with the HSPI or with George Washington University, at all. "[Hasan] has no role on the task force, other than the fact that he attended these meetings as an audience member, as did hundreds of others." Hasan's name appears on the list of participants only because he provided the HSPI with an RSVP, indicating his attendance. Cilluffo told me, "We always record RSVPs and publish them as a matter of transparency, and will continue to do so."
6 November 2009
Huffington Post
Well, if you were wondering what paranoiac smear artist would be the first to step out and attempt to name President Barack Obama as the man who guided Nidal Malik Hasan to his murderous rampage at Fort Hood yesterday, the answer -- naturally! -- is Jerome Corsi. Corsi has a long history of lunatic, fact-averse ravings and he fails to disappoint on that regard on the pages of World Net Daily, today, in a piece entitled "Shooter advised Obama transition." Except, of course, he didn't do any such thing.
Corsi hangs his entire allegation on a document produced on May 19, 2009 by The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute entitled "Thinking Anew, Security Priorities For The Next Administration." In that document, Nidal Hasan is listed, on page 29, as a "Task Force Event Participant." He was one of hundreds of people listed as a "participant." Significantly, Nidal was not the author of the document. He was not a member of the HSPI's "Presidential Transition Task Force." Nor was he a member of the HSPI's "Task Force Staff." He was not a member of the HSPI's Steering Committee or a briefer to the task force.
Also, the activities of the HSPI here do not in anyway constitute official transition advice to the White House, despite the fact that a committee got named the "Presidential Transition Task Force" and the HSPI's activities involved identifying homeland security priorities and offering advice. Here is what the HSPI does:
Founded in 2003, The George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) is a nonpartisan "think and do" tank whose mission is to build bridges between theory and practice to advance homeland security through an interdisciplinary approach. By convening domestic and international policymakers and practitioners at all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and academia, HSPI creates innovative strategies and solutions to current and future threats to the nation.
The task force gave itself the following mission: "to further policy discussions of the top strategic priorities in the area of security in order to generate actionable recommendations, for the Administration taking office in January 2009, designed to effectively meet the most vexing challenges the United States faces today."
Essentially, what the HSPI did (and all of this is spelled out explicitly in this document's executive summary) is convene a giant group of security wonks and academics, heard some briefings, made some "internal deliberations," and generated a set of priorities and recommendations. Then those recommendations got published, and maybe someone at the White House read them, but it's more likely that the content ended up as material to cite in the middle of further security-wonk discussions.
And at some point in the process, Nidal Hasan might have sat in a room while this was happening, with a few hundred other people.
But none of this constitutes formal advice given to the president on homeland security during the transition of power. This was a university panel that has sod all to do with the White House, generating ideas, and calling it "advice" for the president. If two or three of you wanted to meet up with me at the Au Bon Pain on Pennsylvania Avenue this afternoon and chat today, we will have accomplished basically the same thing.
Corsi, in fact, knows this. He writes:
While the GWU task force participants included several members of government, including representatives of the Department of Justice and the U.S Department of Homeland Security, there is no indication in the document that the group played any formal role in the official Obama transition, other than to serve in a university-based advisory capacity.
In short, the facts Corsi obtained torpedo the premise of his piece, which, I remind you, is that the "shooter advised [the] Obama transition." Were this being written for a responsible journalistic entity, some creature called an "editor" would have stepped in and said, "Hey, Jerome, you realize that by your own findings, you article is complete horseshit, right?" But this is World Net Daily, written by and for complete charlatans.
UPDATE: I contacted Frank Cilluffo, the director of the HSPI at George Washington University, who tells me that Nidal Hasan has no affiliation with the HSPI or with George Washington University, at all. "[Hasan] has no role on the task force, other than the fact that he attended these meetings as an audience member, as did hundreds of others." Hasan's name appears on the list of participants only because he provided the HSPI with an RSVP, indicating his attendance. Cilluffo told me, "We always record RSVPs and publish them as a matter of transparency, and will continue to do so."
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Kindle for the Academic
BY Alex Golub
Inside Higher Ed
3 November 2009
E-book readers are all the rage these days -- from scenes of Oprah's audience ecstatically receiving complimentary Kindles to models of Sony's new eBook readers, this long-promised technology looks like it has finally arrived. Much has been written about the effect that e-books will have on the publishing industry (including scholarly publication), education, and its niche in the ecosystem of Extremely Complicated Handheld Devices Our Students Understand. But how useful are these devices for academics and how do they fit into our own personal scholarly ecosystems?
I recently got to spend two months up close and personal with a newly purchased Kindle from Amazon when I spent my summer conducting two months of fieldwork in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Over that time, and for about a month before hand, I had a chance to read both academic and nonacademic work on the Kindle. Based on that experience, my overall impression is that while the Kindle and other ebook readers might not quite be reader for prime time, they are going to be an important part of academic work in the future.
Let’s face it: at heart, the Kindle is designed to let you read mystery novels, not academic books. It is small, light, and has terrific battery life. In this respect, Jeff Bezos has succeeded in his goal of creating a device that "just lets you read." But for an academic like me, whose casual reading list consists of books that normal humans find pointlessly opaque, does it matter than I can now read anywhere? The answer, I think, is Yes. The Kindle is remarkably freeing -- suddenly your porch or the beach is a workspace (this is particularly important to me, since I live in Hawaii and spend much of my time on my lanai). I never realized how much reading I did at my computer until I had the ability to read somewhere else. Admittedly, some might consider the workspaceization of their entire lives a minus rather than a plus, but as academics when has our life ever been separate from our work?
Academics often have a different experience of reading from that of regular readers -- our books are expensive, they are odd sizes, we intend to use them our entire lives and are careful about their condition, and we travel everywhere with an elaborate array of mechanical pencils, sticky notes, and highlighters to read them. The physical experience of reading on a Kindle solves many of these problems for us. Over the summer I read Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of War and Peace, something that I had tried and failed to accomplish before simply because the book was too damn large to handle. Kindles can be held over one's head while in bed or on the couch without tiring the arms, a key consideration for academics who 1) read everywhere, all the time and 2) have no upper body strength.
There are drawbacks to reading on the Kindle, of course. First, it is not a book. If one of the main reasons you read books is feel and smell the pages in order to gratify your self-image as a "reader" or "intellectual," then the Kindle is probably not for you. But if, as an academic, you are interested in the content of the book you are reading, then the Kindle's lack of pages offers a different set of challenges. Most obviously, you must give up being able to remember that the passage you are looking for is on the left or right hand side of the page. More substantively, though, the Kindle makes moving back and forth between endnotes, body text, and bibliographic material a tremendous pain -- a key concern for scholars who read by moving through the main text of a book and its scholarly apparatus simultaneously. And I must admit, while it’s nice to be able to search the contents of your book, I somehow feel that flipping through it is a method of browsing that has some obscure but important utility that the Kindle hasn't yet duplicated.
Most importantly, many academics add value to their library by writing in their books. While the Kindle’s built-in underlining feature does a much less-suck job of marking up texts than I originally expected, the markup features of the device are simply not as good as paper. While underlining may be fine for some, I am sure that many academics are like me in that they have their own complex and idiosyncratic method of annotating books which features complex circling, numbering, bracketing, and so forth -- none of which is available for the Kindle. And of course if the things you read feature charts, graphs, or even pictures, the Kindle's small screen will render them illegible.
Of course, you can do more than just read books on your Kindle. You can email PDFs to it, put .doc files on it, and so forth. This makes reading journal articles a snap -- although it will be even more of a snap when we can just go to JSTOR and click the "send this article to my eBook reader" link. It saves us from dragging around lengthy MAs and dissertations to read, although of course we can't mark up and then hand back the drafts of our students' work that we read on the Kindle.
In fact, I must admit that I think the book as an artifact is already dead. The Internet has created a used book market in which different versions, printings, pressings, covers of books matter not at all. Each book is, in a way, a replica of all the other books of the same title. Getting "reading copies" of books is now so easy that the e-book feels like the nail in the coffin, not a game-changer.
As academics, we often read extremely specialized books printed in very short runs in places that are, in general, very far from where we live. The Kindle really helps "long tail" readers like us because it lets you download a sample chapter, and then purchase, download, and read a new title, something that is tremendously exciting for academics, whose books often don't have a "look inside" feature on the Amazon Web site (or Google Books, or wherever), and who otherwise might waste time and money getting a book shipped to them simply so they can verify whether it is worth reading or not. In an age when our libraries are more and more cash-strapped, e-book distribution offers a lot of hope for niche publishing -- and academic publishing is nothing if not niche.
Except textbooks. I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them.
And this brings us to the crux of the issue: Max Weber once remarked that scholars are the only remaining technical specialists who own their own means of production: their library. The Kindle changes this. The Kindle is the inkjet printer of the 21st century: the business model is to give you the device for free and then charge you for refills. Sure, the Kindle promises liberation to traveling bookworms, who can now travel without an emergency stock of extremely heavy extra reading in their bags. This space-saving feature offers even more respite for academics who find the book to oxygen ratio in their over-packed offices dangerously low. But then again, books are visible in a way e-books are not. I don't know about you, but one big consequence of developing an electric library of PDFs and book is that I forget what is in it, something that is harder to do when your books are there in the room with you, on an easily-eyeball-able shelf. And I, at least, am reluctant to discard a book I have marked up no matter how ubiquitous replacement copies are: My markings add value to my library.
More importantly, what happens to our scholarly means of production when they in Amazon’s copy-protected format? A glitch -- or policy change -- at Amazon may result in an erased library, and it is not entirely clear to me that Amazon’s interests are aligned with scholars. We want our digital content to be open and accessible to us. We want our underlinings and notes to transfer seamlessly from our e-book readers to our PDF collection programs to our printers, and we want to be able to mark up our content a lot (this is the academic version of the "remixing" that Lawrence Lessig talks about). We want to be able to buy content from anyone -- not just Amazon -- and read it on our Kindles. We want to be able to read journal articles on our Kindle every time a new issue of our favorite journal hits our RSS readers. Will Amazon facilitate this or will it lock the Kindle down? In sum, while e-book readers could be an important part of our future academic reading habits, questions remain.
A key to making them attractive is developing an ecosystem of scholarly information sources around them: larger libraries of scholarly books, reasonably priced, and with a firm title to ownership. Better connections between the content repositories such as journal websites and our handheld readers, more ways to make annotations and display information. Compatibility of files across readers (something that could be facilitated by adopting Open Access standards) and ways to share marked up documents with our colleagues. Perhaps one thing that I don't want on my e-book reader is more bells and whistles -- the harder it is to check my email or surf the web on my reader, the more work I'm likely to get some reading done. Until law and policy provide stronger consumer rights for people to own, rather than lease, the information they purchase, books offer a surety of title that e-books cannot replace.
It is too early for academics to shift much of their workload over to e-book format -- although that day may come sooner than we expect. So if you, like me, are going to spend a lot of time traveling or just away from bookstores, it might be the time to try one of these devices. While they are not ready for prime time yet, they are still great places to outsource our pleasure reading and reference libraries. And soon they might be good for even more.
Alex Golub is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Inside Higher Ed
3 November 2009
E-book readers are all the rage these days -- from scenes of Oprah's audience ecstatically receiving complimentary Kindles to models of Sony's new eBook readers, this long-promised technology looks like it has finally arrived. Much has been written about the effect that e-books will have on the publishing industry (including scholarly publication), education, and its niche in the ecosystem of Extremely Complicated Handheld Devices Our Students Understand. But how useful are these devices for academics and how do they fit into our own personal scholarly ecosystems?
I recently got to spend two months up close and personal with a newly purchased Kindle from Amazon when I spent my summer conducting two months of fieldwork in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Over that time, and for about a month before hand, I had a chance to read both academic and nonacademic work on the Kindle. Based on that experience, my overall impression is that while the Kindle and other ebook readers might not quite be reader for prime time, they are going to be an important part of academic work in the future.
Let’s face it: at heart, the Kindle is designed to let you read mystery novels, not academic books. It is small, light, and has terrific battery life. In this respect, Jeff Bezos has succeeded in his goal of creating a device that "just lets you read." But for an academic like me, whose casual reading list consists of books that normal humans find pointlessly opaque, does it matter than I can now read anywhere? The answer, I think, is Yes. The Kindle is remarkably freeing -- suddenly your porch or the beach is a workspace (this is particularly important to me, since I live in Hawaii and spend much of my time on my lanai). I never realized how much reading I did at my computer until I had the ability to read somewhere else. Admittedly, some might consider the workspaceization of their entire lives a minus rather than a plus, but as academics when has our life ever been separate from our work?
Academics often have a different experience of reading from that of regular readers -- our books are expensive, they are odd sizes, we intend to use them our entire lives and are careful about their condition, and we travel everywhere with an elaborate array of mechanical pencils, sticky notes, and highlighters to read them. The physical experience of reading on a Kindle solves many of these problems for us. Over the summer I read Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of War and Peace, something that I had tried and failed to accomplish before simply because the book was too damn large to handle. Kindles can be held over one's head while in bed or on the couch without tiring the arms, a key consideration for academics who 1) read everywhere, all the time and 2) have no upper body strength.
There are drawbacks to reading on the Kindle, of course. First, it is not a book. If one of the main reasons you read books is feel and smell the pages in order to gratify your self-image as a "reader" or "intellectual," then the Kindle is probably not for you. But if, as an academic, you are interested in the content of the book you are reading, then the Kindle's lack of pages offers a different set of challenges. Most obviously, you must give up being able to remember that the passage you are looking for is on the left or right hand side of the page. More substantively, though, the Kindle makes moving back and forth between endnotes, body text, and bibliographic material a tremendous pain -- a key concern for scholars who read by moving through the main text of a book and its scholarly apparatus simultaneously. And I must admit, while it’s nice to be able to search the contents of your book, I somehow feel that flipping through it is a method of browsing that has some obscure but important utility that the Kindle hasn't yet duplicated.
Most importantly, many academics add value to their library by writing in their books. While the Kindle’s built-in underlining feature does a much less-suck job of marking up texts than I originally expected, the markup features of the device are simply not as good as paper. While underlining may be fine for some, I am sure that many academics are like me in that they have their own complex and idiosyncratic method of annotating books which features complex circling, numbering, bracketing, and so forth -- none of which is available for the Kindle. And of course if the things you read feature charts, graphs, or even pictures, the Kindle's small screen will render them illegible.
Of course, you can do more than just read books on your Kindle. You can email PDFs to it, put .doc files on it, and so forth. This makes reading journal articles a snap -- although it will be even more of a snap when we can just go to JSTOR and click the "send this article to my eBook reader" link. It saves us from dragging around lengthy MAs and dissertations to read, although of course we can't mark up and then hand back the drafts of our students' work that we read on the Kindle.
In fact, I must admit that I think the book as an artifact is already dead. The Internet has created a used book market in which different versions, printings, pressings, covers of books matter not at all. Each book is, in a way, a replica of all the other books of the same title. Getting "reading copies" of books is now so easy that the e-book feels like the nail in the coffin, not a game-changer.
As academics, we often read extremely specialized books printed in very short runs in places that are, in general, very far from where we live. The Kindle really helps "long tail" readers like us because it lets you download a sample chapter, and then purchase, download, and read a new title, something that is tremendously exciting for academics, whose books often don't have a "look inside" feature on the Amazon Web site (or Google Books, or wherever), and who otherwise might waste time and money getting a book shipped to them simply so they can verify whether it is worth reading or not. In an age when our libraries are more and more cash-strapped, e-book distribution offers a lot of hope for niche publishing -- and academic publishing is nothing if not niche.
Except textbooks. I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them.
And this brings us to the crux of the issue: Max Weber once remarked that scholars are the only remaining technical specialists who own their own means of production: their library. The Kindle changes this. The Kindle is the inkjet printer of the 21st century: the business model is to give you the device for free and then charge you for refills. Sure, the Kindle promises liberation to traveling bookworms, who can now travel without an emergency stock of extremely heavy extra reading in their bags. This space-saving feature offers even more respite for academics who find the book to oxygen ratio in their over-packed offices dangerously low. But then again, books are visible in a way e-books are not. I don't know about you, but one big consequence of developing an electric library of PDFs and book is that I forget what is in it, something that is harder to do when your books are there in the room with you, on an easily-eyeball-able shelf. And I, at least, am reluctant to discard a book I have marked up no matter how ubiquitous replacement copies are: My markings add value to my library.
More importantly, what happens to our scholarly means of production when they in Amazon’s copy-protected format? A glitch -- or policy change -- at Amazon may result in an erased library, and it is not entirely clear to me that Amazon’s interests are aligned with scholars. We want our digital content to be open and accessible to us. We want our underlinings and notes to transfer seamlessly from our e-book readers to our PDF collection programs to our printers, and we want to be able to mark up our content a lot (this is the academic version of the "remixing" that Lawrence Lessig talks about). We want to be able to buy content from anyone -- not just Amazon -- and read it on our Kindles. We want to be able to read journal articles on our Kindle every time a new issue of our favorite journal hits our RSS readers. Will Amazon facilitate this or will it lock the Kindle down? In sum, while e-book readers could be an important part of our future academic reading habits, questions remain.
A key to making them attractive is developing an ecosystem of scholarly information sources around them: larger libraries of scholarly books, reasonably priced, and with a firm title to ownership. Better connections between the content repositories such as journal websites and our handheld readers, more ways to make annotations and display information. Compatibility of files across readers (something that could be facilitated by adopting Open Access standards) and ways to share marked up documents with our colleagues. Perhaps one thing that I don't want on my e-book reader is more bells and whistles -- the harder it is to check my email or surf the web on my reader, the more work I'm likely to get some reading done. Until law and policy provide stronger consumer rights for people to own, rather than lease, the information they purchase, books offer a surety of title that e-books cannot replace.
It is too early for academics to shift much of their workload over to e-book format -- although that day may come sooner than we expect. So if you, like me, are going to spend a lot of time traveling or just away from bookstores, it might be the time to try one of these devices. While they are not ready for prime time yet, they are still great places to outsource our pleasure reading and reference libraries. And soon they might be good for even more.
Alex Golub is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
One Progressive's Hopeful Note
AT least one progressive thinks we are proceeding in a new progressive era. I hope he is correct.
Robert CreamerPolitical organizer, strategist and author
Posted: November 3, 2009 09:14 AM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
One Year After Obama's Victory: We Are in the Opening Months of a New Progressive Era
digg Huffpost - stumble reddit del.ico.us ShareThis
I know there are many Progressives who are disappointed at the pace of change, or who believe that there are many instances when the Obama administration should take bolder action. Sometimes I am among them. But there is no question that in the first nine months of his presidency, Barack Obama has begun to lead America in a fundamentally new direction. The success of this new progressive project will certainly depend on the decisions that he and those around him make in the years ahead. But it will also depend on the skill, resilience and resourcefulness of the progressive forces in America.
In evaluating his leadership -- and the success progressives have had since that hopeful night in Chicago's Grant Park -- seven points are especially important.
1). Obama has fundamentally changed the political value frame. For the thirty years before Obama's election, the full constellation of right wing values charted the path for American political and economic development. Obama has shifted that value frame from the Right's belief in unbridled pursuit of individual interest, to the progressive commitment to the common good; from selfishness to commitment to others; from division to unity; from fear to hope; to the sense that we're all in this together, not "all in this alone."
The administration's political messaging, its expressed beliefs, and its policy goals all embody these progressive values -- and many of its key personnel are deeply committed to those values as well. We have a White House where idealism is cool once again.
2). Progressives are on the offensive, not the defensive. After being in a defensive crouch for over thirty years, Progressives have taken the offense. For years we have fought about defending values and policies - defending Medicare, defending Social Security, combating the ascendant Neo-Con foreign policy, defending the role of government, defending unions, defending civil liberties, defending the incomes of everyday Americans.
Now the Right is attempting to slow our progress on climate change, the rights of unions, civil liberties, a public option, immigration reform, and regulating Wall Street.
In the long battle between progressive and conservative values in America, that denotes a critical turning point - because in any type of combat, including politics - the force on the offense almost always prevails.
3). While the pace of many big changes has taken longer than some had hoped, it is easy to forget the major successes that have already been achieved. Here are a few:
Saving the economy from complete meltdown - another Great Depression --following the failure of eight years of right wing economic policy and financial risk-taking "gone wild" - including his bold rescue of the American auto industry.
Laying the first layer of a foundation for longterm, bottom-up economic growth by passing the largest economic recovery package in history and a Federal Budget that the Center on Budget Priorities called the most progressive budget in half a century.
Abandoning the failed Neo-Con foreign policy and changing our relationship with the rest of the world.
Signing into law measures that had repeatedly passed the Democratic Congress but been vetoed by George Bush - the "Matthew Shepard" bill that expands the definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation, expanding the State Children's Health Care Program (SCHIP), and passing the "Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act" that seriously strengthened the ability of women to seek redress for employment discrimination.
The administration and Congress ended a program of wasteful subsidies to private banks that provided student loans with Federal money and used the savings to greatly expand Pell Grants to college students.
Executive actions like ending the "Global Gag Rule" that prevented U.S. foreign aid from going to family planning programs that even mentioned abortion - and changes in labor law enforcement that make it easier to organize on the job.
Ending torture.
Funding stem cell research and generally restoring a respect for science to government.
Setting and keeping to a schedule to end the American presence in Iraq.
Putting in motion a legislative agenda that will make major progressive change: providing health care for all, creating clean energy jobs and addressing global warming, overhauling the regulation of the financial sector and beginning to shrink its dominance in the American economy, and passing comprehensive immigration reform.
4). Why have the major initiatives in his agenda taken longer than some might have hoped? Because, as a great American once said: "power surrenders nothing without a struggle." You don't just snap your fingers to make fundamental change. That's because fundamental change alters the relations of power - it removes power and money from one group of people and gives it to another.
The insurance companies and big Wall Street banks were not about to just roll over and say "I give up."
Why is it so tough to pass real health care reform through a Congress that is dominated by Democrats? Because Congress is an expression of the distribution of power in American society and that's what Progressives are out to change. Obama - and the rest of the progressive forces in America - have to make change starting with things as they are - not things as they wish they were.
That doesn't mean we can make fundamental change. Nor does it mean we have to settle for "gradualism" or accept the rules of the game as they are. It does mean that change is not neat and simple. It involves struggle and conflict. It is war without bloodshed and sometimes it isn't pretty. It means you can't have the rain without the thunder and lightning - and sometimes it takes a little longer than planned.
5). The importance of a President that is both committed to progressive values and cool under fire is not simply manifest when it comes to passing a legislative agenda. It is critical when it comes time to deal with any form of real crises.
In 1963, John Kennedy relied on his own steady temperament and progressive values to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly led to nuclear War with the Soviet Union. Think how lucky we were that George Bush and Don Rumsfeld were not the ones with their fingers on the nuclear trigger .
This administration demonstrated its ability to deal with major crises as soon as it walked in the door and acted decisively to avoid another Great Depression. America could confront any number of other unexpected dangerous crises on any given day. It ought to literally make the people of America sleep better tonight that Barack Obama, and not George W. Bush or John McCain or Sarah Palin, sits in the Oval Office to deal with them.
6). The key for us - and for Obama - is not to miss this historic window of opportunity to make real structural change - to emerge from battle having changed the relations of power. That is the central element that will allow progress to continue and accelerate.
The key to health care reform, regulatory reform, energy legislation, and immigration reform is to get the architecture right. Quantitative questions we can compromise on now - and fix later. But we have to get the qualitative things right the first time.
We must have a public option in a health care bill, not just to provide consumers with more choices or put downward pressure on health insurance rates. We need a public option to change the relations of power in the health care industry. We need to take power away from private insurers who have a stranglehold on our health care and put it into the hands of voters, citizens and and consumers who make choices.
We need to change the regulatory architecture of the financial sector to reduce its outsized power, to change the perverse incentives that promote reckless risk-taking, and to prevent it from siphoning off all of our nation's economic growth from ordinary Americans as it did during the last eight years.
We need to change the rules of the economic game that incentivize the discharge of greenhouse gases and enslave us to foreign oil.
And Progressives need to change the immigration laws to take 12 million people out of the shadows - and, by the way, to change the balance of electoral power in a number of key states.
Progressive success ultimately revolves around our ability to change the relations of power - to democratize power in our society. Obama and those leading his administration understand that and have launched an agenda to help make it happen.
7). Finally, how long the window for progressive change stays open depends entirely on our ability to forge an enduring progressive political majority - among the electorate, in Congress and in our state Legislatures.
In the near term, that means holding our ground in the 2010 mid-terms. Of course the major factor affecting our success in 2010 will be Obama's ability to show progress creating jobs. That will certainly require a good deal more Federal stimulus early next year.
It will also require continued attention to great messaging and to political organizing. So far Obama has done his politics with enormous skill. His approval rating stands at a robust 56% in most polls and fewer Americans (20%) self-identify as Republicans than at any other time in a quarter-century. We've done a good job helping the Republicans marginalize themselves - but of course Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party gang haven't needed much help guiding their party out to the margins of the political playing field.
Obama's commitment to political organization has not diminished. His political organization, Organize for America (OFA) has blossomed into a major force. By and large, Obama has done a masterful job cultivating and maintaining the relationship of his administration to the many elements of the progressive base.
But our success in 2010 also rests upon Obama's ability to deliver real, meaningful change on his big-ticket items over the next six months. Someone suggested the other day that if we can't get everything we want on health care or regulatory reform, we should stall action and ask the voters to send us more progressive Democrats. Unfortunately, history tells us that if Obama doesn't deliver on things like health care reform, his numbers and the Democratic brand will sink and leave many Democratic candidates for Congress looking for other lines of work.
We have to win health care reform and the other items on our agenda before the next election season. That doesn't mean we should settle for wins in name only. Completely apart from the importance of changing the relations of power in America, real change is necessary to produce the final ingredient for electoral success in 2010: Obama needs to be able to reinvigorate the base - to inspire once again. To inspire the base we have to deliver real change. For instance, we can't settle for a health care bill that is not affordable and doesn't have a public option -- and if it takes a bloody fight to get them, we have to have the stomach for the task.
A lot has happened since November 4, 2008 and the plot line will thicken over the next six months. Barack Obama will be the leading man in this drama. But, just as in the campaign, there is also no doubt that this story will have a cast of thousands who will have an enormous amount to say about the outcome. And I am more convinced than ever that the 2008 Obama slogan got it right: "Yes We Can."
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/one-year-after-obamas-vic_b_343465.html
Robert CreamerPolitical organizer, strategist and author
Posted: November 3, 2009 09:14 AM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
One Year After Obama's Victory: We Are in the Opening Months of a New Progressive Era
digg Huffpost - stumble reddit del.ico.us ShareThis
I know there are many Progressives who are disappointed at the pace of change, or who believe that there are many instances when the Obama administration should take bolder action. Sometimes I am among them. But there is no question that in the first nine months of his presidency, Barack Obama has begun to lead America in a fundamentally new direction. The success of this new progressive project will certainly depend on the decisions that he and those around him make in the years ahead. But it will also depend on the skill, resilience and resourcefulness of the progressive forces in America.
In evaluating his leadership -- and the success progressives have had since that hopeful night in Chicago's Grant Park -- seven points are especially important.
1). Obama has fundamentally changed the political value frame. For the thirty years before Obama's election, the full constellation of right wing values charted the path for American political and economic development. Obama has shifted that value frame from the Right's belief in unbridled pursuit of individual interest, to the progressive commitment to the common good; from selfishness to commitment to others; from division to unity; from fear to hope; to the sense that we're all in this together, not "all in this alone."
The administration's political messaging, its expressed beliefs, and its policy goals all embody these progressive values -- and many of its key personnel are deeply committed to those values as well. We have a White House where idealism is cool once again.
2). Progressives are on the offensive, not the defensive. After being in a defensive crouch for over thirty years, Progressives have taken the offense. For years we have fought about defending values and policies - defending Medicare, defending Social Security, combating the ascendant Neo-Con foreign policy, defending the role of government, defending unions, defending civil liberties, defending the incomes of everyday Americans.
Now the Right is attempting to slow our progress on climate change, the rights of unions, civil liberties, a public option, immigration reform, and regulating Wall Street.
In the long battle between progressive and conservative values in America, that denotes a critical turning point - because in any type of combat, including politics - the force on the offense almost always prevails.
3). While the pace of many big changes has taken longer than some had hoped, it is easy to forget the major successes that have already been achieved. Here are a few:
Saving the economy from complete meltdown - another Great Depression --following the failure of eight years of right wing economic policy and financial risk-taking "gone wild" - including his bold rescue of the American auto industry.
Laying the first layer of a foundation for longterm, bottom-up economic growth by passing the largest economic recovery package in history and a Federal Budget that the Center on Budget Priorities called the most progressive budget in half a century.
Abandoning the failed Neo-Con foreign policy and changing our relationship with the rest of the world.
Signing into law measures that had repeatedly passed the Democratic Congress but been vetoed by George Bush - the "Matthew Shepard" bill that expands the definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation, expanding the State Children's Health Care Program (SCHIP), and passing the "Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act" that seriously strengthened the ability of women to seek redress for employment discrimination.
The administration and Congress ended a program of wasteful subsidies to private banks that provided student loans with Federal money and used the savings to greatly expand Pell Grants to college students.
Executive actions like ending the "Global Gag Rule" that prevented U.S. foreign aid from going to family planning programs that even mentioned abortion - and changes in labor law enforcement that make it easier to organize on the job.
Ending torture.
Funding stem cell research and generally restoring a respect for science to government.
Setting and keeping to a schedule to end the American presence in Iraq.
Putting in motion a legislative agenda that will make major progressive change: providing health care for all, creating clean energy jobs and addressing global warming, overhauling the regulation of the financial sector and beginning to shrink its dominance in the American economy, and passing comprehensive immigration reform.
4). Why have the major initiatives in his agenda taken longer than some might have hoped? Because, as a great American once said: "power surrenders nothing without a struggle." You don't just snap your fingers to make fundamental change. That's because fundamental change alters the relations of power - it removes power and money from one group of people and gives it to another.
The insurance companies and big Wall Street banks were not about to just roll over and say "I give up."
Why is it so tough to pass real health care reform through a Congress that is dominated by Democrats? Because Congress is an expression of the distribution of power in American society and that's what Progressives are out to change. Obama - and the rest of the progressive forces in America - have to make change starting with things as they are - not things as they wish they were.
That doesn't mean we can make fundamental change. Nor does it mean we have to settle for "gradualism" or accept the rules of the game as they are. It does mean that change is not neat and simple. It involves struggle and conflict. It is war without bloodshed and sometimes it isn't pretty. It means you can't have the rain without the thunder and lightning - and sometimes it takes a little longer than planned.
5). The importance of a President that is both committed to progressive values and cool under fire is not simply manifest when it comes to passing a legislative agenda. It is critical when it comes time to deal with any form of real crises.
In 1963, John Kennedy relied on his own steady temperament and progressive values to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly led to nuclear War with the Soviet Union. Think how lucky we were that George Bush and Don Rumsfeld were not the ones with their fingers on the nuclear trigger .
This administration demonstrated its ability to deal with major crises as soon as it walked in the door and acted decisively to avoid another Great Depression. America could confront any number of other unexpected dangerous crises on any given day. It ought to literally make the people of America sleep better tonight that Barack Obama, and not George W. Bush or John McCain or Sarah Palin, sits in the Oval Office to deal with them.
6). The key for us - and for Obama - is not to miss this historic window of opportunity to make real structural change - to emerge from battle having changed the relations of power. That is the central element that will allow progress to continue and accelerate.
The key to health care reform, regulatory reform, energy legislation, and immigration reform is to get the architecture right. Quantitative questions we can compromise on now - and fix later. But we have to get the qualitative things right the first time.
We must have a public option in a health care bill, not just to provide consumers with more choices or put downward pressure on health insurance rates. We need a public option to change the relations of power in the health care industry. We need to take power away from private insurers who have a stranglehold on our health care and put it into the hands of voters, citizens and and consumers who make choices.
We need to change the regulatory architecture of the financial sector to reduce its outsized power, to change the perverse incentives that promote reckless risk-taking, and to prevent it from siphoning off all of our nation's economic growth from ordinary Americans as it did during the last eight years.
We need to change the rules of the economic game that incentivize the discharge of greenhouse gases and enslave us to foreign oil.
And Progressives need to change the immigration laws to take 12 million people out of the shadows - and, by the way, to change the balance of electoral power in a number of key states.
Progressive success ultimately revolves around our ability to change the relations of power - to democratize power in our society. Obama and those leading his administration understand that and have launched an agenda to help make it happen.
7). Finally, how long the window for progressive change stays open depends entirely on our ability to forge an enduring progressive political majority - among the electorate, in Congress and in our state Legislatures.
In the near term, that means holding our ground in the 2010 mid-terms. Of course the major factor affecting our success in 2010 will be Obama's ability to show progress creating jobs. That will certainly require a good deal more Federal stimulus early next year.
It will also require continued attention to great messaging and to political organizing. So far Obama has done his politics with enormous skill. His approval rating stands at a robust 56% in most polls and fewer Americans (20%) self-identify as Republicans than at any other time in a quarter-century. We've done a good job helping the Republicans marginalize themselves - but of course Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party gang haven't needed much help guiding their party out to the margins of the political playing field.
Obama's commitment to political organization has not diminished. His political organization, Organize for America (OFA) has blossomed into a major force. By and large, Obama has done a masterful job cultivating and maintaining the relationship of his administration to the many elements of the progressive base.
But our success in 2010 also rests upon Obama's ability to deliver real, meaningful change on his big-ticket items over the next six months. Someone suggested the other day that if we can't get everything we want on health care or regulatory reform, we should stall action and ask the voters to send us more progressive Democrats. Unfortunately, history tells us that if Obama doesn't deliver on things like health care reform, his numbers and the Democratic brand will sink and leave many Democratic candidates for Congress looking for other lines of work.
We have to win health care reform and the other items on our agenda before the next election season. That doesn't mean we should settle for wins in name only. Completely apart from the importance of changing the relations of power in America, real change is necessary to produce the final ingredient for electoral success in 2010: Obama needs to be able to reinvigorate the base - to inspire once again. To inspire the base we have to deliver real change. For instance, we can't settle for a health care bill that is not affordable and doesn't have a public option -- and if it takes a bloody fight to get them, we have to have the stomach for the task.
A lot has happened since November 4, 2008 and the plot line will thicken over the next six months. Barack Obama will be the leading man in this drama. But, just as in the campaign, there is also no doubt that this story will have a cast of thousands who will have an enormous amount to say about the outcome. And I am more convinced than ever that the 2008 Obama slogan got it right: "Yes We Can."
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/one-year-after-obamas-vic_b_343465.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)