This article is printed here courtesy of The Progressive , where it originally appeared as a letter to the editor in response to the article “Less Work, More Life.”

The Progressive, in the September issue, both in Matthew Rothschild’s “Editor’s Note” and in the article by John de Graaf (“Less Work, More Life”), offers “less work” and a 30-hour workweek as needs that are as indisputable as the need to eat.

Though I would support the idea of a 30-hour workweek in some circumstances, I see nothing absolute or indisputable about it. It can be proposed as a universal need only after abandonment of any respect for vocation and the replacement of discourse by slogans.

It is true that the industrialization of virtually all forms of production and service has filled the world with “jobs” that are meaningless, demeaning, and boring—as well as inherently destructive. I don’t think there is a good argument for the existence of such work, and I wish for its elimination, but even its reduction calls for economic changes not yet defined, let alone advocated, by the “left” or the “right.” Neither side, so far as I know, has produced a reliable distinction between good work and bad work. To shorten the “official workweek” while consenting to the continuation of bad work is not much of a solution.

The old and honorable idea of “vocation” is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.

Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.

But aren’t we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at work?

And isn’t that exactly why we object (when we do object) to bad work?

And if you are called to music or farming or carpentry or healing, if you make your living by your calling, if you use your skills well and to a good purpose and therefore are happy or satisfied in your work, why should you necessarily do less of it?

More important, why should you think of your life as distinct from it?

And why should you not be affronted by some official decree that you should do less of it?

A useful discourse on the subject of work would raise a number of questions that Mr. de Graaf has neglected to ask:

What work are we talking about?

Did you choose your work, or are you doing it under compulsion as the way to earn money?

How much of your intelligence, your affection, your skill, and your pride is employed in your work?

Do you respect the product or the service that is the result of your work?

For whom do you work: a manager, a boss, or yourself?

What are the ecological and social costs of your work?

If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of Mr. de Graaf and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.

I don’t think anybody can honorably object to the proposition, in theory, that it is better “to reduce hours rather than lay off workers.” But this raises the likelihood of reduced income and therefore of less “life.” As a remedy for this, Mr. de Graaf can offer only “unemployment benefits,” one of the industrial economy’s more fragile “safety nets.”

And what are people going to do with the “more life” that is understood to be the result of “less work”? Mr. de Graaf says that they “will exercise more, sleep more, garden more, spend more time with friends and family, and drive less.” This happy vision descends from the proposition, popular not so long ago, that in the spare time gained by the purchase of “labor-saving devices,” people would patronize libraries, museums, and symphony orchestras.

But what if the liberated workers drive more?

What if they recreate themselves with off-road vehicles, fast motorboats, fast food, computer games, television, electronic “communication,” and the various genres of pornography?

Well, that’ll be “life,” supposedly, and anything beats work.

Mr. de Graaf makes the further doubtful assumption that work is a static quantity, dependably available, and divisible into dependably sufficient portions. This supposes that one of the purposes of the industrial economy is to provide employment to workers. On the contrary, one of the purposes of this economy has always been to transform independent farmers, shopkeepers, and tradespeople into employees, and then to use the employees as cheaply as possible, and then to replace them as soon as possible with technological substitutes.

So there could be fewer working hours to divide, more workers among whom to divide them, and fewer unemployment benefits to take up the slack.

On the other hand, there is a lot of work needing to be done—ecosystem and watershed restoration, improved transportation networks, healthier and safer food production, soil conservation, etc.—that nobody yet is willing to pay for. Sooner or later, such work will have to be done.

We may end up working longer workdays in order not to “live,” but to survive.

Wendell Berry
Port Royal, Kentucky

Mr. Berry’s letter originally appeared in The Progressive (November 2010) in response to the article “Less Work, More Life.”

Source: The Progressive 

Image by jimbowen0306, licensed under Creative Commons. 

This article is printed here courtesy of The Progressive . To read a response to it by Wendell Berry, go here.

A few years ago, after finding my way through an incredible jumble of bicycles outside her building, I met with a University of Amsterdam professor who studies work-life balance. She recounted a conversation she’d just had with the manager of the Dutch division of an American company who had come to Holland from the United States two years earlier:

Professor: Do you notice a difference between the approach to work time and free time here compared to the United States?

Manager: Yes, it dawned on me my second week on the job. It was a Friday evening, eight o’clock, and we had an important shipment to get out on Monday. I called my assistant at home, and told her to call some of the workers to get some things done on the weekend in preparation.

Professor: What did she say?

Manager: She said she didn’t work on the weekends, and didn’t expect to be called at home when she wasn’t working.

Professor: And what did you say?

Manager: I said, “Well, excuse me, but I’m the new manager here, and we’re a company that competes in the global economy, and we have an important shipment to get out, and we appreciate employees who are team players.” She said, “OK, I can do what you ask of me, but under Dutch law, you have to pay me double time for unscheduled, overtime, weekend work. And if I call these people, they’ll just get mad at me for interrupting their family time. Don’t worry, we’ll come in Monday, work hard, and get the job done.”

Professor: What did you say then?

Manager: I said, “Oh, forget it!” I hung up the phone in frustration and stewed all weekend.

Professor: And then what happened?

Manager: They came in Monday and got the job done. They work very hard when they’re working so everything was fine. And that’s how it’s been ever since. I’ve gotten to like it that way because now even I have a life.

Less work, more life. It’s a tradeoff that a lot of American workers might appreciate.

Pollsters find time stress a constant complaint among Americans. Until the current recession, Americans were working some of the longest hours in the industrial world.

Conservatives say this is all voluntary: American just like to work a lot. But Gallup’s daily survey finds them 20 percent happier on weekends than on workdays—what a surprise! And when Americans rank the pleasure their daily activities bring, working ends up second from the bottom (socializing after work is second from the top!), more pleasurable only than that mother of all downers, the morning commute.

By contrast, the Netherlands boasts the world’s shortest working hours. Dutch workers put in 400 fewer annual hours on the job than American workers do. And yet, the Dutch economy has been very productive. Unemployment (at 5.8 percent) is much lower than in the United States, while the Netherlands boasts a positive trade balance and strong personal savings. A Gallup survey ranks the Dutch third in the world in life satisfaction, behind only the Danes and Finns, and well ahead of Americans.

The Dutch have been reducing time on the job through work-sharing policies since the 1982 Wassenaar Agreement, when labor unions agreed to modify wage demands in return for more time. Their Working Hours Adjustment Act (2000) require that employers allow workers to cut their hours to part-time while keeping their jobs, hourly pay, health care, and pro-rated benefits.

Anmarie Widener, a health researcher and part-time instructor at Georgetown University, was impressed by the Dutch devotion to time for family and recreation she witnessed while getting her Ph.D. in the Netherlands. Her dissertation compares life satisfaction among Dutch and American parents. Not surprisingly, she says, “My polling showed that in almost every area of life, Dutch parents are substantially more satisfied than their American counterparts.” And so are their children. A 2007 UNICEF study ranked children’s welfare in the Netherlands as the highest in the world. By contrast, the United States was twenty of twenty-one wealthy countries studied, barely edging out the United Kingdom.

Work sharing may be all the more important in times like the present. Economist Dean Baker argues that any further economic stimuli should include Kurzarbeit, or “short work,” a German policy that encourages employers to reduce hours rather than lay workers off when times are tight. Instead of cutting 20 percent of the workforce, a German company might reduce each worker’s load by a day. Unemployment benefits kick in for the reduced work time, so workers earn roughly 90 percent of their former incomes for 80 percent of the work.

Other countries have followed suit—the French believe in “working less so all can work.”

Here in the United States, a bill sponsored by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, would allow federal unemployment benefits to be used to top up salaries of reduced-hour workers in the United States. When the bill was discussed in Barney Frank’s House Financial Services Committee, not only did Dean Baker testify in favor but so did Kevin Hassett, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Hassett pointed out that even though the Germans’ economy tanked like ours did in 2008, their unemployment rate hasn’t risen—thanks to Kurzarbeit. The law allows companies to retain workers instead of having to rehire later, he said. It’s good for them, good for the workers, and doesn’t really cost any more than traditional unemployment payments. It’s a win, win, win. Nonetheless, not a single Republican has supported the bill and not all Democrats do either, so it remains in limbo.

Shorter working hours—the roses of “Bread and Roses” fame—are part of a long and progressive American tradition. A famous Dorothea Lange photo from 1937 shows a National Association of Manufacturers billboard on a hardware store. It reads: “World’s Shortest Working Hours—There’s No Way Like the American Way!” A bill passed the U.S. Senate in 1933 that would have made the official workweek only thirty hours long. Presidents from FDR to Richard Nixon called for reducing working hours.

In our time, feminist and women’s groups, including MomsRising.org and the National Partnership for Women and Families, have led the way in promoting work-life balance policies, demanding paid family leave, paid sick days, and flexible hours. Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida has introduced a bill calling for mandatory paid vacations, guaranteed by law in almost every country. The United States joins Burma and a handful of others that don’t offer this basic benefit.

As Juliet Schor makes clear in her new book, Plenitude: the New Economics of True Wealth, shorter work time also makes environmental sense. Planetary restraints and climate change require us to reduce our consumption of resources. Demands for quick extraction of resources lead to catastrophes like the oil volcano beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

As productivity increases, we seem faced with a choice between environmental disaster or massive unemployment. Unless, of course, we slow down by reducing working hours and sharing the work. Half a century of economic growth has not increased our happiness. More free time might well do so. It will certainly improve our health.

Americans will exercise more, sleep more, garden more, volunteer more, spend more time with friends and family, and drive less. We need full employment, but not by returning to the unhealthy overwork of recent decades As Derek Bok puts it in his new book, The Politics of Happiness:

“If it turns out to be true that rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier, as much of the recent research suggests, what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our gross domestic product?”

Progressives would do well to advocate reduced working hours instead of demanding unsustainable growth. Suzy Ross, who teaches at San Jose State University, told me that when her co-workers found that they would have to take furlough days and commensurate pay cuts in response to California’s budget crisis, they all responded in anger. Now, she says, they appreciate the extra two days off each month, and few want to give them up, though they could use the money.

Reducing work hours and sharing available work is essential for our families, health, economic security, and the environment.

It’s time to get on with it.

This article originally appeared in The Progressive, September 2010. To read a response to it by Wendell Berry, go here.

John de Graaf is a documentary filmmaker, director of Take Back Your Time (www.timeday.org), and co-author of “Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic.” His new book, “What’s the Economy For, Anyway?” will be published by Bloomsbury Press in 2011. 

Source: The Progressive  

Image by dizid, licensed under Creative Commons.   

 

 

Excerpted from Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists by Courtney E. Martin (Beacon Press, 2010). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.   

 

 

 

 

Class Action
Tyrone Boucher, radical philanthropist, 
Philadelphia 

I wait by the Mahatma Gandhi statue in Union Square as the sounds of an urban farmers’ market buzz around me—crates of vegetables being lifted from truck beds, a guy hawking newspapers by the subway entrance, a conversation between two organic farmers. It seems an apt place to meet Tyrone Boucher for the first time. He’s the cofounder, with activist lawyer Dean Spade, of a blog called Enough, “a space for conversations about how a commitment to wealth redistribution plays out in our lives,” and he’s currently investing time and energy in food politics—working at a small-scale cooperative called Mariposa, in West Philadelphia.

I stumbled on his blog months earlier and was shocked at how transparent Tyrone, age twenty-six, was—he posted his entire giving plan and a thoughtful letter to his father about his reasoning for giving away the $400,000 he inherited. He’s part of a larger movement of young people from wealthy families who are questioning the morality of wealth accumulation and pioneering new ways of what they call “social justice philanthropy.”

The timing couldn’t be better: the United States is currently experiencing the biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in its history. The Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College estimates that even with the recent economic recession, $41 trillion will be inherited during the fifty-five-year period from class action 1998 through 2052. But the huge amount of wealth being passed down is concentrated in very few hands. According to the ChristianScience Monitor, only 24 percent of adult Americans expect to get an inheritance, and those who do can expect to receive an average of only $37,700. Tyrone’s experience is rare, but it also means that what he does with his inheritance—and what other young people like him do—can have a significant impact on all of us.

After e-mailing back and forth a bit, Tyrone and I found a time when he would be in New York to see his partner. We didn’t bother exchanging phone numbers or physical descriptions. I put two and two together and figured Tyrone was probably a black gay guy in his twenties. 

When a white trans kid, wearing black jeans cuffed at the ankle and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, walks up and says shyly, sweetly, “Courtney?” I am totally stunned—confronted with my own taken-for-granted assumption. In fact, it takes me a minute to even become conscious of how stunned I look. Tyrone has a punk rock aesthetic, his playfully curving eyebrows erupting into little unruly tufts at both centers, and tattooed lines on two fingers of his hands. He emanates gentleness.

“Hi,” I say, eventually replacing my shock with a smile. “So good to meet you.”

Tyrone doesn’t mind surprising people. In fact, his young life has been composed of a series of experiments in not meeting people’s expectations. Unlike so many privileged kids of our generation—known for its dutifulness—Tyrone has consistently rejected the rules put on him by a society that he diagnoses as oppressive and unjust. School? Couldn’t stand it. Even though he attended the Putney School in Vermont, a place he describes as an “artsy farm high school,” he spent most of those years frustrated that he wasn’t allowed to do his own thing. He zealously do it anyway thumbed through the pages of The Teenage Liberation Handbook:How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education, fantasizing about all of the exciting projects he could undertake if he wasn’t stuck in high school. He loved learning and felt grateful for the amazing art program and nontraditional after-school activities (blacksmithing, gardening, knitting, farming) that his progressive private high school had to offer, but he resented being asked to pour energy into classes he wasn’t interested in.

He remembers his state of mind at the time: “I know deep down in the depths of my being that I just don’t give a shit about school. And that’s fine with me.”

What he did give a shit about was the DIY (do it yourself) punk subculture that he became immersed in during high school—a culture that nurtured independent production of music, zines, and art and encouraged independent thinking and creativity. This community was where he felt most at home. “My early understanding was ‘I’m a freak,’” Tyrone says. “I’m not like other kids. I’m queer and a weirdo and I don’t fit in.” He spent much of his time at shows of obscure punk bands, rocking out alongside friends covered in tattoos, wearing threadbare T-shirts and weathered Carhartts. But it wasn’t just about the music; it was about a whole philosophy of life that challenged mainstream norms and strove to build community and culture based on independence from the status quo.

But everything was not as it seemed. Though Tyrone was internally rejecting traditional education, he was also filling out applications for a long list of mostly elite colleges and scoring in the top 1 percent on his SATs. When I ask him about the contradiction—typing out college admissions applications while adoring The TeenageLiberation Handbook—he replies, “I was just on autopilot.”

The answer doesn’t satisfy me. After all, this was a kid hellbent on redefining education, creating his own path, and stepping off the mainstream trajectory defined for him by his family class action and class upbringing. When I push him on it, he relents. “I think

I just sort of thought that if I filled out the applications, then I could keep my dad off my back. I never thought I would actually go to any of the schools I was applying to.”

“I wasn’t supposed to tell you this,” Tyrone’s mom said. Tyrone was flopped on the couch in their airy Vermont farmhouse, thumbing through some zines and chatting with his mom about the future. Graduation was approaching, and Tyrone’s dad—divorced from his mom by this time—was hoping that Tyrone would go to one of the colleges that had accepted him. The fat envelopes weighed heavily in Tyrone’s mind. He wanted to be free, unencumbered, not sit in more classrooms.

His mom went on, “You have a trust fund. You’re going to inherit four hundred thousand dollars when you turn twenty-one.”

Tyrone wasn’t surprised, exactly—he knew that his father, who lived in a fancy new condo in Austin, was wealthy and generous. It wasn’t old money; Tyrone’s father made his fortune by cofounding a software company in the family’s basement when

Tyrone was a baby. So no, it wasn’t surprising; but hearing the number out loud, the concrete nature of the tall, proud four and those zeroes, overwhelmed Tyrone. (Of course $400,000, as significant a sum as it is, pales in comparison to the amount of money some kids from wealthy families inherit.)

“The minute I get it, I’m going to give it away,” he told his mom.

That was actually the last conversation that Tyrone had about his trust fund for years. He says, “I filed it away.”

“Did you file it away effectively?” I ask, imagining Tyrone among a little crew of pierced punks eating pizza from a Domino’s dumpster, reveling in their rejection of capitalism and napkins. It seems as if it would have been really hard to compartmentalize

“I didn’t tell people. I didn’t talk about it. Nobody talked about their class background—at least not about having privilege,” he says.

“It’s interesting to me that in a culture built on the idea of not conforming and being deeply vulnerable and honest, it wouldn’t come up,” I tell him.

“Hence the problem of so much of that subculture,” Tyrone admits. “It was cool to act poor. There’s no analysis of what it means to actually be poor.”

After graduating high school, Tyrone took a year off, during which he got a premier education in adventure. He lived the life of a true vagabond—hitchhiking wherever the wind or a new friend took him, scrounging for food, sleeping outside—until he finally relented and went to Stanford.

“Stanford?” I ask in disbelief. “Of all the schools, Stanford seems like one of the least likely fits for you.”

“Exactly,” says Tyrone. “I thought it would be a unique experience. Already, in high school, I was so entrenched in my counterculture that I was bored with it. I figured that if I went to a counterculture college, I might be tempted to pretend it was real life.” Stanford—with its palm trees bending gracefully beside California mission-style buildings and its sun-kissed lacrosse players laughing on the quad—was a symbol of elitism so pronounced, so obvious, that it didn’t feel dangerous to Tyrone. There would be no chance of slipping into conformity when it manifested as keg parties and classes in free-market economics.

Indeed. After just two months, Tyrone left Stanford, never to return.

For the next four years (2001–2005), instead of sitting in the hallowed halls of Stanford, Tyrone continued to travel with his motley community of hitchhiking, train-hopping punks and queers. It was a beautiful, liberating time. Tyrone felt truly independent, while simultaneously surrounded by a loyal community class action of DIY mavens, anarchists, and dropouts. He felt like the breach that had always gaped uncomfortably large between his values and his lifestyle was being lovingly sewn shut.

But it wasn’t utopia. Looking back, Tyrone feels conflicted. “There’s part of me that has this reaction—‘Oh God, I was so oblivious.’ There were so many problematic things about that time,” he says, referring to the lack of race and class awareness among many of the punk kids. Indeed, some critics call the white kids that hang out on park benches in San Francisco’s Haight neighborhood or play bad music in Washington Square Park “trustafarians”—referring to their unconscious parody of those who come from poorer, darker cultures.

Tyrone staves off the embarrassment by seeing that season of his life for what it really was. “For me, that moment in time, personally, was more about my own liberation from alienation and isolation than about a political awakening.”

His awakening unfolded more like a sleepy morning than a burst of sunlight—a radical-women-of-color zine here, a disillusioning conversation there. Every time he would stop at his dad’s condo, he would spend hours printing out readings on white supremacy. Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”—in which she encourages the reader to examine unearned privileges as minute as easily finding Band-Aids to match your skin tone—had a big impact on Tyrone. He devoured bell hooks and Angela Davis, examining the bibliographies in the back of each of their tomes to determine his next assignment. Tyrone, though not a fan of formal schooling, is a voracious reader and self-motivated learner. More than any other person I profiled for this book, he was constantly recommending books to me.

The readings helped him see his adventures on the road in a harsher light. For several years, Tyrone attended Camp Trans, a big festival in the middle of the woods that was created to challenge the transphobic policy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a large annual feminist gathering that excludes transgender women. Tyrone reveled in the gender diversity of the participants, but remembers taking a good look around and realizing, “Huh, I hang out with mostly white people, and I always have.”

He was also growing increasingly uncomfortable with hiding his wealth. When opportunities came up for new friends to come and stay at his parents’ houses, he felt tense. What would they make of his father’s aesthetic—all modern, sharp edges, brushed steel, and dark hardwood? What would they think about his mother, just one lone woman, living in such a big farmhouse? “The dissonance between my politics and my class privilege was getting louder and louder in my own head,” Tyrone reflects. He had been through the process of coming to terms with his racial privilege. It seemed well past time to do the same with regard to his class privilege.

His motivation was solidified by one particularly difficult conversation that he had with a friend who grew up poor. “How could you turn your back on an opportunity like going to Stanford?” she asked. “Nobody gets that. How can you act like you’re above it?”

Tyrone felt like he’d been slapped in the face. He didn’t regret leaving Stanford. He knew that he would have been miserable there, that the place would have crushed his spirit, but he did have regrets. “What I find really embarrassing to think about in retrospect,” Tyrone says, “was my own arrogance.”

The next time we meet, Tyrone is talking a mile a minute, bubbling over with excitement about his recent trip to upstate New York to meet “movement elders” David Gilbert and Naomi Jaffe, two key figures from the Weather Underground Organization (WUO)—the militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society. SDS, as it was referred to, was the organizational center of student activism in the sixties. Its methods were disruptive, but generally peaceful—hosting teach-ins against the Vietnam War, protesting corporate recruiting and paternalistic rules on campuses, and coordinating the largest student strike in U.S. history, involving campuses all over the nation, on April 26, 1968.

The WUO, also called the Weathermen, was founded in 1969 by a mostly white faction of SDS members who wanted to develop more militant, underground resistance to U.S. imperialism in solidarity with people of color. In their founding document, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, they established their philosophy: “the main struggle going on in the world today is between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.”

Over the next five years or so, the WUO would conduct a campaign of bombings, usually targeted at government buildings; help writer and drug enthusiast Timothy Leary get out of jail; and even issue a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States government. Naomi Jaffe says, “We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. 

The WUO and militant groups like it aimed to protect human life, but in the heat of their militancy, they sometimes failed. On March 6, 1970, three WUO members died in an accidental explosion at their pad in Greenwich Village. And Gilbert is currently serving a sentence of seventy-five years to life for his role in an attempted robbery that ended in the death of two police officers and a security guard in 1981. Tyrone visited Gilbert at the Clinton Correctional Facility, where he’s incarcerated. Jaffe, who was never incarcerated, lives in Troy, New York, and is involved with antiracist and feminist organizing. Tyrone was introduced to both of them through a friend.

“It must have been incredible to exist in that political moment, to feel that liberation movements were on the verge of defeating imperialism,” he exclaims, referring to the explosive moment in the late sixties and early seventies when the WUO was most active. It’s not just the idealism of the day that seems to inspire Tyrone, but the deep commitment of those privileged young people who believed in revolutionary struggle. He often talks about various clandestine activists from the sixties and seventies who supported nationalist liberation movements, both in the United States and globally, risking safety and security because of a deep belief in justice.

In contrast, Tyrone and I sit discussing radical revolution in a place that, on the surface, seems distant from the radical struggle that is the topic of our conversation—the Resource Generation offices, located in the headquarters of the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, a luxury brownstone on East Eighteenth Street in Manhattan. Dan Berger, a young radical, wrote a painstaking history of the WUO, and in it he argues that “privilege was its raison d’être—the group set out to use its privilege in service of revolutionary change.” Resource Generation (RG)—the very center of the new movement of young radical Americans with privilege, and the organization responsible for Tyrone’s class consciousness—has an almost identical raison d’être, but its methodologies manifest very differently. RG organizes young people with wealth to leverage their class privilege for social justice. They don’t bomb buildings; they teach workshops, organize conferences, and support young people to have dialogues with their families and communities about class, wealth, and social change.

Tyrone facilitates workshops for RG from time to time, so we are welcome to use their space when we have our interviews. “Something that hits me really hard when I hear about political movements from a few decades ago,” Tyrone says, “was that the nonprofit system didn’t exist on the left at that time. Things are so different now—I’ve never known a world before the nonprofit industrial complex.”

The term “nonprofit industrial complex” was coined by an organization called INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence—a collective that was stripped of its Ford Foundation funding after publicly declaring support for Palestinians. INCITE! Compiled a collection of essays, considered required reading among the more radical RG folks, called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, published by South End Press in 2007. In it, the authors argue that the nonprofit model “replicates historical oppression by keeping funders in power over activists, emphasizing institution building and business practices over organizing and systemic change, and perhaps most egregious, forcing social justice activists to please their funders rather than their own communities.”

Though the rhetoric in the book can sometimes feel hyperbolic, the argument is profound. The development of the nonprofit sector—initiated largely because it would provide a tax haven for the superrich, while also allowing them to do some good—has historically been seen through rose-colored glasses. Philanthropists are routinely celebrated for “making the world a better place”; but if you actually examine where people donate their money, most often it would be more accurate to recognize them for making their world a better place. Giving to alma maters and elite cultural organizations, like the ballet or the opera, top most yearly philanthropy lists. The Giving USA Foundation found that dollars donated to groups working most directly with those in poverty dropped from 24 percent of annual philanthropy in 1955 to 8 percent in 2004; organizations that help America’s poor are particularly neglected.

The nonprofit sector also has an interesting impact on youth activism. Young people pumped up on altruistic visions log on to Idealist.org, clamoring for nonprofit jobs that seem to be the most direct route to do good. They are quickly assimilated into a system that, more often than not, maintains the status quo whereby wealthy, mostly white people hold institutional power—with the added psychological bonus of getting to feel smug about their charity work. As Tiffany Lethabo King and Ewuare Osayande ask in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “What are the implications of a social justice movement in which power and resources are transferred based on one’s ability to develop a relationship with the right white people?”

Tyrone was already convinced of this critique, but studying radical youth activism of the sixties and seventies seems to have only increased his investment in the idea that the nonprofit system is actually part of the problem. “During that era, there was so much social justice movement stuff happening, and no one who was truly working for fundamental change expected to be paid for their activism.” 

“Right,” I respond. “But isn’t there also an inherent elitism in expecting people to be able to do activism without being paid? Wasn’t that part of the critique of the radical left movement in the sixties—that they weren’t aware of the luxury of protest?”

Tyrone is quick to counter: “The work people do to fight for liberation is different than the work we do to earn a living, and it always has been. There’s certainly overlap sometimes, but you have to wonder: why would the capitalist system pay you to fight it? If we’re trying to build a mass movement, we need to create social justice infrastructure that supports everyone, not just the handful of folks who are able to be paid to do the work.” He continues, “It doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t work for social justice nonprofits, but if that’s the main model we have for building movements, it limits us.”

Tyrone himself now lives on very little money each year—$17,119.16 in 2008, actually (he keeps an Excel spreadsheet with all of his expenses). He tries to make as many of his own meals as possible, with an intention to buy locally grown, organic produce from the co-op he helps run. He pays $275 a month in rent, always takes the bus when he comes to New York to visit Elspeth (his partner, the program coordinator at RG), and spends very little on clothing and entertainment. One manifestation of his political principles, in line with globalization experts like Naomi Klein (author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine), is a commitment to conscious consumption. Tyrone makes a note of every single thing he buys.

He also recognizes that living cheaply, ironically, is also a privilege of sorts. Tyrone wrote on his blog:

One great thing about giving away this money is that it’s made me think hard about living within my means. When I decided to give away most of my trust fund, I realized that I was going to have to get my act together financially and stop living like an irresponsible rich kid who could get bailed out by my parents whenever I over-drafted my bank account. . . . Of course, having class privilege means I get to see living on a really small budget as an exciting project rather than a stressful necessity. Truly being poor is expensive, and having had good healthcare my whole life, never having to go into debt, not having to take financial care of my family, and a million other things make it easy for me to live cheaply.

Tyrone is also opposed to ambition of the careerist sort, so emphasized for young Americans in today’s preprofessional college environment. In fact, the idea of being part of this book, of being recognized as unique or special in some way, was initially extremely off-putting to him. Tyrone spent much of our first meeting trying to convince me of all the other grassroots activists that I should choose rather than him. Like a lover playing hard to get, he only intrigued me more.

Tyrone is fired up now, talking about grassroots movements the world over. He jumps from the economist Milton Friedman to the Ford Foundation and neocolonialism in Latin America, to memoirs by clandestine radicals, to the problems with elite philanthropy—all in a matter of minutes. It’s hard not to be intimidated by the depth of Tyrone’s knowledge. Probably noticing that I’m beginning to look overwhelmed, he takes a deep breath and says, “I get really excited about this stuff. I was talking to Elspeth about this. . . . There are certain conversations that I’m interested in having, but I realize I should sort of start at step one.”

It’s the wisdom of an older, more patient Tyrone—one who realizes that not everyone is as steeped in movement histories and social change philosophies. I can imagine him early in his political awakening, operating on six cylinders of new learning and outrage, unintentionally steamrolling less informed people. “Bottom line,” he says, getting back to basics, “is that grassroots movements have always come from poor people, from disenfranchised people. They don’t come from academics and philanthropists. Someone commented on Enough after foundations started losing all this money in the stock market crash, asking how horrifying it is that our movement funders are literally more invested in the success of capitalism than they are in the success of grassroots movements.”

I want to believe—truth be told, I have to believe—that people sometimes do nothing to end suffering, or in the case of so much elite philanthropy, do inadequate or misguided things to end suffering, because they don’t know another way. It’s not that people don’t care, that the rich who give copious amounts of money to the opera or the ballet have stones for hearts. It’s not that they are superfans of free-market capitalism. (Okay, maybe some of them are, but they’re rarely the ones dishing out lots of money to support the arts.) More often, it’s that they have been socialized in a system where that is what people do with their money. They get psychological rewards—the beauty of the music, the recognition from their friends, the continuation of a family tradition. Most wealthy people simply haven’t been inspired to see another way—as Tyrone, blessed with a very rebellious, curious nature, has—or had a powerful experience of a different kind of giving.

David Gilbert himself said, “In learning from history, we need to break from the mainstream culture that defines people as either purely ‘good guys’ or purely ‘bad guys,’ which can lead to the self-delusion that getting certain basics down guarantees that everything else we do is right. The WUO made giant errors along with trailblazing advances. Hopefully both are rich in lessons for a new generation of activists.”

I can see Tyrone wrestling with this wisdom when he speaks about these issues, when he meets young people just being initiated into the community at RG and the idea that, in his words, “being rich is wrong.” It takes such patience, such conscientiousness, a constant return to empathy despite all the forces that make it easier to see certain people as the enemy. And as it turns out, sometimes the easiest people to vilify are those who remind us most of ourselves.

Tyrone wrote beautifully about his own challenges with this on his blog after a recent conference:

In doing economic justice work with other class-privileged folks, I struggle with what often feels like a fine balance: trying to constantly betray and oppose the oppressive systems that I benefit from, while also having real compassion for myself and other folks who are struggling to find their way out of those systems in lots of different ways. Each year [at RG’s national conference] we do an anonymous survey to collect data about how much money participants have and how much we’re giving away, and then present the results in a slideshow during one of the plenary sessions. It’s always shocking to see the results: millions and millions of dollars owned by the small group of people right there in the room (mostly inherited from wealthy families), and a minuscule percentage of it being given away. It’s pretty disturbing to sit in such a major locus of massive wealth accumulation—even more disturbing because we represent some of the very few rich people attempting to challenge economic injustice. It’s an incredible illustration of how deeply the messages of capitalism—to hoard, protect, and grow wealthy—penetrate. I spoke with several anti-capitalist . . . attendees after the survey about our shared inclination to shout, “People—what are we doing!?? We are the problem!”

I try to remember that my rage against these systems is not objective or theoretical, but is a lot about how much I hate being in a role that often makes me complicit with massive global exploitation and oppression. I think my indignation and tendency towards ranting can be ways to push the pain of this away—like if I just constantly articulate some really well thought out critique of capitalism, and write things dissecting the ways that privilege functions, and drag all the privileged people I know into these really complex critical conversations, then I can distract myself from how much it all hurts and is sad.

Many of the young people who end up “coming out” at RG have passed as middle class their entire lives, mastering tricks to appear less wealthy than they are around new friends. Having their parents drop them off blocks before their destination so no one sees the Lexus, wearing thrift-store clothing, and complaining about imaginary debt are some perennial favorites.

The language—“coming out,” “passing”—isn’t just coincidental. One of the first things that I noticed, once I started hanging out with Tyrone and some of the other RG staff, is that the majority of them are queer, trans-identified, or both. Tyrone talks excitedly about how he came out at fourteen, at the same time as his own mother: “It was awesome!”

He didn’t change his name to Tyrone or start asking that people use the masculine pronoun until his vagabond days. He describes coming of age in a queer community that was vibrantly redefining gender; he felt supported to claim the gender identity that felt most right for him, whether it was normative or not. Politically, his commitment to trans liberation is bound up in his commitment to broader economic justice; trans and gendervariant people are often the ones who are hardest hit by poverty, policing, and other forms of injustice.

Tyrone feels grateful today for the privilege of having had such a tight-knit queer community. “I don’t always realize how nurturing it is until I step outside of it into a space where I’m the only queer or trans person,” he says. “Now I work and organize a lot in spaces that aren’t explicitly queer, but queer community was the air I breathed for a while, and I am so grateful for that.”

So why the big crossover between the queer and radical giving communities? Tyrone ventures a theory about alienation: “If you’re queer, you’re more likely to have a negative experience of wealthy culture,” he says. “That pushes you to critique the culture at large.” Many of the kids who gravitate toward RG have been rejected by extended family members, harassed at school or on the streets, or experienced subtle judgment or a basic lack of understanding from parents and friends.

It makes a lot of sense. Wealthy people, children especially, tend to be insulated from the world of poverty. Tyrone explains, “Privileged people generally don’t have to challenge ourselves. We’re not the ones who are going to die. That’s what inspires me about white antiracist organizing and groups like Resource Generation that are challenging the invisibilized role that capitalism and white supremacy play in injustice. That’s what inspires me about solidarity movements of privileged people that make oppression our business and our responsibility. They’re saying, ‘We can’t continue to live our lives in a bubble. We can see that there’s a war against poor people and people of color, and that if we’re not working for liberation we’re a part of that oppression.’”

After wealthy queer kids experience discrimination, they’re more likely to see it all around them. They may not declare war, like their predecessors in the sixties, but they certainly can’t retreat back into their wealthy bunkers either.

Tyrone clutches a fat marker in his hand and stands next to a big white flip chart. “When I first started coming up with my own giving plan,” he says, “I wanted it to be perfect—politically speaking. I wanted to do the research and create this totally perfect thing that would redistribute my inherited wealth in the most socially just way, and then be done with it.”

The ten young people seated in front of him in a U shape laugh a bit in relieved recognition. Guilt over the many complexities and hypocrisies inherent in being a left-leaning person with wealth is prevalent in this community. Karen Pittelman, whom Tyrone calls a “fabulous, radical philanthropist extraordinaire,”gave away $4 million upon inheriting it at twenty-one years old. She also wrote a book—considered the primer on the movement—titled Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use It for Social Change. In it she jokes, “Based on dedicated attempts by many of us involved with Resource Generation, we can say definitely that punching ourselves in the face does not resolve any of these contradictions.”

One of the most interesting dynamics in the coming-out process for rich kids is rewriting some of the family mythology around how their wealth was earned in the first place. Many wealthy children are raised on very precious, and sometimes exaggerated, American Dream stories about the ways in which they came into wealth. These stories can mask the role of race and educational privilege, immigration status, exploitative practices (sweatshops, union busting), and other systemic factors that contribute to the process of wealth accumulation. Pittelman also writes, “Dealing with discrimination requires reclaiming individual identity. Understanding privilege, on the other hand, requires figuring out all the ways that we’re not unique individuals.”

Rich kids have to get sober about their family history, but also start to dissect their own lives in order to see the ways in which class privilege, not some special gift or mysterious divinity, has led to many of their opportunities. This is especially critical for privileged young people born in the eighties and nineties, many of whom were raised to believe they were rarified human beings destined for greatness, thanks to trends in affirmative parenting and self-esteem education run amuck. Many privileged children have actually been done a disservice by being pumped up on unrealistic expectations for their lives and shielded from the kinds of opportunities to fail and recover that create resilience.

Coming to terms with privilege is about not only rewriting family mythology but erasing family hubris. Many wealthy kids are raised to see their parents and other high earners or big inheritors as expert in a way the rest of the philistine world simply is not. In this worldview, it seems natural that rich people—who, again, deserve their excess wealth—are positioned to make the smartest decisions about how their donations might be spent to better humanity. The social justice philanthropy framework, in contrast, pushes privileged people to not only give away money, but also let go of a sense of superiority.

Tyrone has written the elements of this small but growing type of giving on the flip chart at the front of the room:

• Addresses root causes

• Inclusive decision making

• Makes the field of philanthropy more accessible and diverse

• Donors and foundations act as allies to social justice organizations and movements

“Social justice philanthropy grew out of the sixties and seventies liberation and  community self-determination movements,” Tyrone says in a patient, excited voice. “It’s about actually changing systems, rather than providing Band-Aids.”

One example that Tyrone often cites is a collaboration he engaged in with other RG-related young people, called Gulf South Allied Funders (GSAF). In the immediate aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, this small group of young people got together to brainstorm how they might leverage their own wealth, and the wealth of their networks, to get the people affected by the storms the resources they needed. They decided that they would give and raise one million dollars a year for three years to support grassroots rebuilding and social justice work in the Gulf Coast region—and rather than choosing whom to give the money to themselves, they would find a grant-making organization with strong ties in the region that could distribute the money to effective grassroots organizations.

Tyrone doesn’t have as much access to old money as many of the other young people in RG. He didn’t, however, use that as an excuse to avoid fund-raising from his extended network. “Despite the fact that my money hasn’t been passed down for generations, I went to private school. I went to summer camp. We don’t always admit that our socioeconomic circles include a lot of people with money, but if we’re coming from a place of class privilege, they often do.”

In March 2008, Tyrone brought his dad to New Orleans for a donor tour with the Twenty-first Century Foundation (the New York City–based black social justice foundation that GSAF partnered with). It was a moving experience for both of them. One night, after meeting with various grassroots leaders in rural Mississippi and Louisiana—mostly based in small local churches—Tyrone’s dad turned to him and said, “This funding model makes so much sense—as an outside donor, you can’t just look in the Yellow Pages under ‘powerful community leader’ and know who’s doing this work. The relationship building [that Twenty-first Century is doing] is really important.”

The next year, Tyrone returned to New Orleans for a month as a volunteer, working with grassroots groups like Safe Streets, Strong Communities, which is fighting police brutality and incarceration conditions in the New Orleans area—both huge problems post-Katrina. “What’s happening in New Orleans in the aftermath of the storms is a really brutal example of the type of systemic violence that happens everywhere because of capitalism and white supremacy,” Tyrone says. “Many of the people who have been doing the grassroots rebuilding work were fighting the same problems before Katrina. They’re the problems poor people and people of color face everywhere—lack of affordable housing, lack of quality education, police violence, incarceration, racial profiling. . . . People started paying a lot of attention to these things after Katrina, but they aren’t new.”

The project Tyrone worked on had all the elements of social justice philanthropy. Rather than handpicking organizations worthy of their charity, as so many donors do, even in regions and fields they know next to nothing about, the Gulf South Allied Funders recognized what they did know—organizing rich people to support social justice—and what they didn’t know— what folks in New Orleans needed and how they needed to get it. This approach requires humility and trust—two qualities rarely associated with the superrich.

After the workshop, Tyrone and I sit and catch up. His paternal grandmother has fallen sick, and Tyrone’s dad and his dad’s siblings had to relocate her to an assisted living home. The experience has shaken the whole family. “I think it tapped into some existential fear in my dad,” Tyrone tells me. “He was really dealing with how much money it cost for my grandmother to have round-the-clock care. It brought up a lot of stuff about money and security and his desire for me to be okay and to be taken care of.”

The experience prompted an intense conversation between Tyrone and his dad about the remaining money in his trust. Tyrone had planned on giving away his entire inheritance in a short period of time, and his dad had repeatedly urged him to reconsider. In previous conversations with his father, when Tyrone would talk about his projected giving plan, things sometimes devolved quickly. He says, “Eventually he would get scared and I would get indignant, and then he’d end up saying, ‘You’re young and idealistic.’ And I’d say, ‘You’re a pawn of capitalism.’ And the conversation would pretty much stop there.”

But this time was markedly different. “We had a really deep interaction,” Tyrone says. “For maybe the very first time, I really got that the money he’d set aside for me and my brother was so deeply based in love and wanting us to be taken care of. It doesn’t change the fact that I don’t believe in inheritance, but it’s important for me to respect and appreciate that gift he gave me. People like my dad are particularly positioned to accumulate wealth with the help of a lot of race, class, and gender privilege, but of course it’s also true that he worked really hard to support us. I’m trying to hold both pieces—the critique and the love.”

When Tyrone thinks about planning for his future, he imagines investing in justice and community rather than in a big retirement fund. He wants to help build a world in which all people are taken care of, no matter how much or how little money they have. “The future’s totally scary,” he says. “Social Security doesn’t take care of people, our resources are increasingly privatized, the U.S. is the only industrialized country without universal health care. . . . All you have to do is read an article about climate change to get totally freaked out about the future. But that’s the psychology of capitalism, right? Make everyone feel so insecure that we hoard all the resources we can class action and forget how to share or take care of each other. I’ve noticed that often, the more money people have, the more scared and alone they feel. Real safety requires interdependence; wealth so often takes that away from us.

“We talked about how money doesn’t make you safe, which, on one level, he agrees with. But on this other level, he just really needs me to hear him,” Tyrone says. They talked about the possibility of Tyrone slowing down the process of giving away his trust fund. “I finally asked him, ‘Dad, what are you going to be comfortable with?’”

Tyrone is compromising for now. He’ll still give away half of the $400,000 in his trust fund by 2010, but the rest he agreed to leave untouched for a while, pending further conversation with his dad. He still plans to give most of it away, but he’s willing to wait for a while and keep engaging his dad in the conversation. For him, it feels like maintaining a balance between his political ideals and the understanding that decisions like this are bound up in the complexity of human relationships and family. “I think of giving money,” he once wrote, “as one small facet of my social justice work that reflects my broader commitment to wealth redistribution, anti-oppression, and grassroots organizing.” For now, he will continue his economic justice organizing and his food justice work with the Philly co-op. He gets excited about building bridges between radical philanthropists and the grassroots organizations that are leading liberation movements. He would like to continue to do workshops on radical giving and work toward creating an even more liberatory conception of social justice philanthropy. Tyrone would like to keep the WUO’s intention, as described by Bill Ayers—“to show that ‘the man’ is penetrable”—alive and kicking in the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, he will continue to wrestle with his own nature— the passion that leads him to inspired action but can also tempt him to fall into polarized thinking. Ultimately, what is most impressive about Tyrone Boucher is not his willingness to part with his trust fund—unusual as it is. Nor is it his intelligence or his penchant for adventure. What is most impressive about Tyrone is his courage to consistently examine himself. On his blog he writes: I’ve sometimes been encouraged by fellow organizers to take my political intensity down a notch because it can alienate people. It’s important for me to hear this, because it reminds me how important it is to meet people where they’re at, be compassionate and humble in my relationships with other radical or progressive folks who share my privilege, and work in my own communities to help build a strong multiracial, cross-class movement. I appreciate being challenged about this stuff, and it often serves as a much-needed check on my tendency towards stubborn indignation. But this conversation touches on something that I ponder a lot, something about militancy and ideology and the balance between being gentle enough to be accessible and having a political critique that is strong and uncompromising. Reading Tyrone’s words, I was reminded of Plato’s old edict: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Suffering is hell. We must do everything we can to eradicate it. But in the meantime, we must also suffer the absolute terror of being honest about our own tendencies, our own gifts, our own limitations. We must see the ways in which we ourselves are the problem and—sometimes even more difficult—the ways in which everybody else, even the most unconscious of people, could be part of the solution.

Excerpted from Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists by Courtney E. Martin (Beacon Press, 2010). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.   

Camden , New Jersey, where Walt Whitman is buried, is the poorest and most dangerous city in the United States. Chris Hedges has a dispatch in The Nation that paints an almost unbelievably dystopic portrait of a place that few Americans would recognize or ever visit. It’s a tough read, and you’d be hard pressed to find in Hedges’ story a single kernel of any version of the American dream. Joe Sacco’s accompanying illustrations would not look out of place in his graphic novels set in Palestine or Bosnia. 

Once a booming city of 120,000 and industrial power that employed 36,000 in its shipyards, today Camden’s population has shrunk to 70,390. The high school dropout rate is 70 percent, Hedges reports, and unemployment is somewhere in the range of 30-40 percent. Hundreds of the homeless live in elaborate encampments, and open air drug markets represent one of the city’s few viable businesses. Despite such grim facts, Hedges writes, “The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt.” 

Not surprisingly, Camden and its residents are mining the ruins to get by: 

The city is busily cannibalizing itself in a desperate bid to generate revenue. Giant scrap piles rise in hulks along the banks of the Delaware. The piles, filled with discarded appliances, rusted filing cabinets, twisted pipes, old turbines and corrugated sheet metal, are as high as a three- or four-story house, and at their base are large pools of brackish water. A crane, outfitted with a large magnet, sways over the pile and swings scrap over to a shredding machine. A pickup and a U-Haul filled with old refrigerators, gates, screen doors and pipes are unloading in front of a small booth when we arrive. There are about twenty scrap merchants in the city, and they have created a market for the metal guts of apartments and houses. As soon as a house is empty—even if only for a few days between renters or because it is being painted—the hustlers break in and strip every pipe, radiator, screen door and window. Over the past three or four decades thousands of owners, faced with the destruction, have walked away from their properties. Camden produces a million tons of scrap a year. Its huge shredding machines in the port can chop up automobiles and stoves into chunks the size of a baseball. Ships from Turkey, China and India pull into the port and take the scrap back to smelters in their countries. 

For a little perspective, the Fall 2010 issue of Global Journalist has a slideshow of a community of 2,000 residents that has sprung up in the middle of a cemetery in Manila, and the photographs and commentary of James Chance make what might otherwise seem like an unspeakably sad story look positively hopeful when considered alongside Hedges’ bleak portrait of Camden. 

Source: The Nation, Global Journalist  

Writing for Guernica, anti-war activist Norman Solomon had this to say about the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks this week:

No government wants to face documentation of actual policies, goals and priorities that directly contradict its public claims of virtue. In societies with democratic freedoms, the governments that have the most to fear from such disclosures are the ones that have been doing the most lying to their own people.

That above statement—as well as the rest of the essay by Solomon, and others, like this one by Arianna Huffington and this one by Tom Hayden in The Nation—is exactly why Tim Heffernan at Esquiremisses the point on what WikiLeaks is doing. These leaked documents may not be all that surprising when one thinks about what governments do and how armies act in times of war. Any lack of surprise, however, comes from previous speculation (by you, me, anyone paying attention) for which there is now proof in the form of these released documents. While they may confirm more than inform, what led us to become informed has been much guess work and the stuff of Tom Clancy novels—not necessarily the proof of actual government documents. The dismissal, then, of these documents as unimportant is the wrong response. Indeed, confirming speculation is of great importance, otherwise the deceit continues unabated and jabs of “conspiracy theory” are more easily thrown (see video below).    

Another point where the debate goes awry is in discussing the prosecution of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is the vehicle by which these cables—and the previous war logs—are released. The only people who should be held accountable by any U.S. court would be those providing the information to the messenger, as was pointed out this morning on Democracy Now! by Scott Horton, a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine:

I think, here, the U.S. government does have a basis to bring criminal claims against persons who disclose this information. It’s the individuals who owe the duty to the United States to preserve the confidentiality or secrecy of the information and who disclosed it. So whoever did that—and, of course, Bradley Manning is a focus—would naturally be the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution.

While the claim that WikiLeaks should be prosecuted is troubling, The Washington Times’ claims that WikiLeaks should be responsible for any sort of “verification” or “corroboration” of the leaked documents may be more so. The paper itself admits that “The WikiLeaks database may be a starting point for analysis of events in the Iraq war, but it renders only a superficial look at any given topic.” Why then should an organization whose stated purpose is “to publish original source material” be expected to also fulfill the job of the journalists who come to the “starting point” to create their stories? It is the responsibility of The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and, yes, even The Washington Times—though they apparently have the desire to shirk that responsibility—et al. to craft the stories that appear as news to the public. As with the Pentagon Papers, the lot of the information is there, but it may take news organizations or political theorists to wade through what it all means. That’s the journalists’ responsibility, not that of the vehicle delivering the information. 

And while the expectation of The Washington Times is misbegotten, it is another suggestion in the same article that is downright scary:

The government also should be waging war on the Wikileaks Web presence. There are a variety of means whereby technicians could render inoperable the sites distributing the classified information. Wikileaks could respond by using alternate sites, but those could be targeted as soon as they came online. Wikileaks has a small staff and limited resources. Relentless attacks on the servers and sites dispensing this classified information would have a debilitating effect on the leakers' morale and help widen the fissures that already have appeared in the group. This battle could offer some practical experience to American cyberwarriors who one day will face even greater threats from state-sponsored Web war.

The fact that anyone in the world can view Pentagon classified documents at will sends a signal of American impotence and inspires future cyberfoes. If Wikileaks wants to play this game, the very least our government can do is suit up and get out on the field.

That’s the true American spirit! Get caught lying and use the whistleblower as target practice for a future war. Norman Solomon long ago concluded that the “nation’s military and diplomacy are moving parts of the same vast war machinery.” With calls to action like that from The Washington Times we might as well add the nation’s media to the list.

Update, 12/02/10: 

 

Source: Guernica, Esquire, Democracy Now!, The Washington Times, The Huffington Post, The Nation 

Image by Jer Thorp , licensed under Creative Commons.