Have you noticed the proliferation of recent stories on TV, radio, in print, and online claiming there’s a war between the old and the young? Once you start paying attention you’ll see the headlines everywhere. One of the shrillest and most egregious screeds was by Stephen Marche in the April 2012 issue of Esquire. In an article titled “The War Against Youth,” Marche writes:

One thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don’t form a community of interest. One takes from the other ... Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably ... The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security ... Only 58 percent of Boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either starve or the government will have to pay for them... Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way ... The situation is obviously unsustainable ...

What Marche and the other alarmists are referring to is the aging of the world’s population, especially in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China. Just as the post-WWII generation in the U.S. is larger than that of the Gen-Xers and Millennials, so too is the population aging in China, as a result of the latter’s one-child policy. Novelist Martin Amis quips that this worldwide “silver ­tsunami’” of increasingly aging people will lead to civil war between the old and the young. His prescription? “There should be euthanasia booths on every ­corner where you could get a martini and a medal.”

It’s true that young people are being robbed of their futures. But Baby Boomers are not responsible for this theft. We’re all in this together. Since 2008, U.S. workers have lost trillions in savings and millions of houses have been foreclosed. And real salaries haven’t grown in 30 years. People of every age are out of work. Baby Boomers aren’t the enemy of Gen-Xers or Millennials. We are each other’s best and natural allies.

The real culprits are the One Percenters: the Wall Street bankers, the corporate polluters, (especially big coal, oil, and natural gas), and the politicians and media who serve them. Boomers are no more responsible for mortgaging the future of the young than blacks are for the loss of poor whites’ jobs, or women for the loss of men’s jobs. The Haves (the One Percenters) will always try to turn different segments of the 99 Percent against each other. That’s how they hold onto their power, even as the System itself runs increasingly out of anyone’s control.

So who’s trying to stir up this age war, and what’s their motivation? According to Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a progressive think-tank, it’s a deliberate campaign:

There is a well-funded effort in this country to try to distract the public’s attention from the massive upward redistribution of income over the last three decades by trying to claim that the issue is one of generational conflict rather than class conflict... Billionaire investment banker Peter Peterson is the most well-known funder of this effort, having kicked in a billion
dollars of his own money for the cause.  

One of the best sources of on-going coverage of all things age-related, including this invented generational war, is the daily blog Time Goes By, by Ronnie Bennett. In her June 25 issue, Bennett takes New York Times’ Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt to task for his June 24 article, “Old vs. Young.” She writes, “In Leonhardt’s world, the average $1,100 per month Social Security check is way too much, and if young people can’t have Medicare then old people shouldn’t have it either. It doesn’t occur to Leonhardt (or anyone else who blames elders for everyone else’s ills) that the better solution all around would be to expand Medicare to everyone along with paying all workers a living wage and seeing that the wealthy among us pay their fair share in taxes.”

Baker acknowledges that young people are not doing well. “But this is a story of Wall Street greed, corruption, and incompetence. It has nothing to do with the Social Security and Medicare received by the elderly.”

Don’t allow yourself to be fooled by this manufactured conflict between the old and the young. Find out more about this concerted campaign from sources like the CEPR and Ronnie Bennett. And, whenever you find stories in the media that perpetuate the deception of the generational war, contact the authors and their publishers and advertisers, and let them know the truth.

Eric Utne is the founder of Utne Reader

Image courtesy of bobboo_77, licensed under Creative Commons 

Constructive dialogue is a rarity these days. All too often, vital discussion is cut off in favor of its opposite, and we’re reduced once again to seeing the most complex and significant questions we face in strictly two-dimensional terms: red/blue, black/white, in group/out group. Especially this year, escaping the mainstream partisan noise can be a real challenge.

So we’re pleased to present something very different today. Courtesy of American Public Media, the following is the second of On Being’s Civil Conversations Project, hosted by Krista Tippett. Today’s installment, “Pro Life, Pro Choice, Pro Dialogue,” a discussion between Frances Kissling and David Gushee, takes a decidedly unconventional look at a deeply personal and emotional issue. Check out a video of the full discussion below.

 

Frances Kissling is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics and a frequent contributor to The Nation and Salon.com, where she discusses faith and women’s rights. Kissling is also a leading pro-choice activist and was the president of Catholics for a Free Choice for 25 years. Along with Ellen Frankfurt, she is the coauthor of Rose: The Investigation of a Wrongful Death, and has contributed to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian.

David Gushee is an internationally-recognized Holocaust scholar, ethicist, and professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. Also a committed activist, Gushee is president of Evangelicals for Human Rights and since 2010 has served on a bipartisan task force led by the Constitution Project which investigates detainee treatment at Guantanamo Bay. His latest book, Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul, is a collection of essays that examine the War on Terror from legal, ethical, and spiritual perspectives. 

Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning journalist and has hosted National Public Radio’s On Being for more than ten years. The granddaughter of an Oklahoma Baptist minister, Tippett served as a foreign correspondent in a divided Cold War-era Berlin before returning to the U.S. to complete a M.Div. from Yale. Since then, she has strived to achieve constructive dialogue around some of today’s most contentious and vital issues. Her latest book is Einstein’s God.

And be sure to check back later this week for our interview with author and On Being host Krista Tippett. 
 

Photo by Matt M. Johnson/On Being/Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
 

For many people, poverty means a diet of highly processed foods and the attendant poor health. Reversing such a trend might seem overwhelming, but the founders of Wholesome Wave saw it as an opportunity. Michel Nischan and Gus Schumacher created the Double Value Coupon Program, making SNAP benefits worth double in farmers markets. The program is now enabling health, strengthening local economies, and empowering communities across the United States.

Utne Reader assistant editor Suzanne Lindgren interviewed Michel Nischan by phone in late August 2012. Here is the transcript.  

Utne Reader: When we read about Wholesome Wave and the Double Value Coupon Program, we thought it was an innovative idea, so we started looking into the organization.

Michel Nischan: We’re really proud of the work we’re doing here and we’re thrilled to say that we’re seeing it have an impact. That’s all any of us can hope for, especially those of us interested in food and social justice. We feel pretty good about it. It’s been easy for us to sleep at night.

First I wanted to ask you about the origins of Wholesome Wave. What inspired it and how did it come about?

I’ve been a locavore chef for over 30 years now. My focus on locavore came because my parents really should have been farmers and were displaced by the conventional agricultural takeover of the small American family farm. So back after World War II they kind of were forced from their birthright. I really should be a farmer in Missouri right now that cooks well, you know? But I’m perfectly happy doing what I’m doing. That was the background of why I was doing what I was doing as a chef.
About halfway through my career--18 years ago--my son Chris was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. I learned very very quickly that what we fed Chris would have more to do with the quality of his long term outcome than his insulin regimen and everything else around banishing the disease. During pouring myself into the study of what to do to help Chris, I started learning about Type II diabetes, which is far more prevalent. The thing that really broke my heart, well there were two things that broke my heart. The first is that it’s diet preventable, caused by a poor diet in the majority of cases. Some of it is hereditary, but the majority of it is caused by poor food choices and lifestyle. The second thing that broke my heart is that the majority of people that suffer from it are living in the type of poverty that disallows them from being able to change or prevent such a condition from happening to them or their family members.
I hit a point of probably undiagnosed clinical depression, because I was chef of a white tablecloth restaurant, feeling good about doing local food because I could charge 30 dollars for an entree, then learning about the number of Americans suffering from this terribly devastating disease and they really had no control over being able to prevent it. It was at that time that I was introduced to Gus Schumacher, the co-founder of Wholesome Wave. He’s our executive vice president of policy. He’s the guy who helped us get our incentive program into the Farm Bill that passed the Senate. Our fingers are crossed.
Anyway, I was introduced to Gus because I had this desire to do something about it. Gus, when he was Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services--which is the third highest in the USDA behind the Secretary of Agriculture--Gus’ proudest moment was creating the Farmers Market Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children living in poverty and for seniors living in poverty. It was terribly underfunded, which he had nothing to do with, but a disappointment for him.
So he and I were both going through our own phases of, ‘Damn! How can we make this better?’ And we founded Wholesome Wave in 2007. We started back in 1999 doing hobby kind of stuff, helping non-profit friends of ours and refugee and immigrant farmers get better prices by introducing them to restaurants, et cetera, et cetera. We were having fun, but we formally founded back in 2007 around the last Farm Bill.

OK

So it was kind of like, my son getting diabetes, Gus’ programs getting underfunded, the energy around that but also the opportunity we saw when we realized that there are so many people in underserved communities that are in a position to benefit from better food access. And when you combine all of their food assistance benefits, it’s tens of billions of dollars a year that come into the American economy that can only be spent on food. We saw that as a big opportunity for local farmers, for environmental protection, et cetera.

One of the things we found so innovative about the program is that, not only does it help people afford the food that they want to eat, but it’s also great for the local economy.

Absolutely. One of the things we love--and you guys may have come across this on our website--in our data outcomes we surveyed I think it was 1700 farmers in 2010 and 2200 in 2011, around 600 federal benefits consumers in 2010 and 1300 in 2011. In the farm sector, 10 percent of the farms had to increase acreage, diversify crop plantings. It was either 8 or 12 percent actually added hoop houses. The SNAP and the WIC people were showing up when it was sleeting and raining and snowing and cold when, pardon the expression, all the white people were staying home because the weather was bad. Underserved community members were going because it was their only healthy food access. The farmers were blown away by that. They diversified crop plantings, they added infrastructural investments. On the consumer end, we asked the question, ‘Why is this program important to you? Why is going to the market important to you?’ Is it that the market accepts the benefits, is it that the market doubles [the value], et cetera. We always expected those to be the two top reasons. The number one reason--and it was something like 87 percent said it was most important in 2010 and 91 percent in 2011--quality of produce. Number two was that the market accepted the benefits and three was supporting local farmers and businesses.
So it’s not that folks in these communities maybe want the access. They’re desperate for it, they just can’t afford it. When they provide affordability with something as simple as a two-for-one sale they come in droves and they continue to come after the benefit is gone. It’s good stuff.

Was the Double Value Coupon Program the founding program of Wholesome Wave?
 

It’s the founding program. We actually were dabbling, because I had opened Dressing Room restaurant, which I own and the late actor Paul Newman was my partner. So I knew I wanted to do Wholesome Wave, we knew we wanted to deal in underserved communities and get more affordable food access. Our initial concept was, ‘Let’s figure out how to do this,’ that’s before we founded. So we funded, with the proceeds from Dressing Room restaurant, a farmers market in the parking lot of Westport County Playhouse. It was the first producer-only farmers market in Fairfield County, Connecticut. You know, there were farmers markets, but a lot of them were reselling stuff that they got at the Bronx Produce Terminal. So we did a producer only thing and we thought if we could introduce these guys to a really lucrative market we could talk them into going into Bridgeport or Norwalk. We learned very quickly that that wasn’t going to work, so that’s when we felt that the incentive program would be the thing that would really help make markets viable in underserved communities. Farmers will go anywhere if they know that people, want their produce, will buy it, and that they can go back at the end of the day with an empty truck and decent amount of money.That’s a good thing and that’s exactly what the program did, so it was our founding program. When we formalized Wholesome Wave, we formalized it out of the Double Value Coupon Program.

And the growth that’s happening, is that all through Wholesome Wave, or are there other programs like it starting on their own?
 

We’re aware of a few dozen programs out there that have started on their own because they just say, ‘Wow, we could do that.’ And they’re going out and raising their own money and they’re doubling it, they’re getting EBT machines. We think that’s fabulous. We’re working through a network of 70 non-profit program partners. With doubling we’re in 29 states and Washington D.C., in over 400 markets. What we don’t want to be is the kind of non-profit where it’s like, ‘Here’s our concept, here’s the way you have to do it. We’re coming into your community, we gotta set up an office, everything has to be this color and this language.’ We don’t do that because we realize that urban communities are different than rural communities, that Eastern are different that Western are different than Southern or Central-Western. There are really great people on the ground in all regions of the world working on food justice issues. To come and set up in somebody else’s community and have brand stability to put them out of business, as well ignore the fact that these organizations are talented, capable, passionate, and already have deep relationships of trust established in the communities they’re working in. So that’s the way we went in. When Gus and I were doing the hobby stuff, we were very familiar with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Gus was a consultant for them, I was on their conference planning committee for a couple years, we’d gotten to know a lot of the Kellogg grantees and other groups that were out there that weren’t funded by Kellogg that were doing really great work. When we started the program we immediately went to non-profits we knew we could trust, they had deep relationships in their community and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this idea. What do you think?’ They said, ‘Wow, we love it. How do we get in?’ Then we’d say, ‘Well, all we need from you is that you craft a budget and you have to build it out so you’re the cashier of the market, you’re taking responsibility for an alternative currency, so that we’re not creating an opportunity for fraud. So the accounting management is important and the data collection. Those two things are what thread all of our 70 partners together. Those are the things everybody has to do the same. Otherwise, they can call it whatever they want. It’s Double Dollars in D.C. It’s Market Match in California, it’s Double-Up Food Bucks in Michigan. You know, do whatever you want with that stuff, but we all have to agree that if we’re going to change the legislation and shift the way public dollars are working to get a better outcome, we need to be able to build a case that’s irrefutable. We really probably have, indirectly, 250 Wholesome Wavers. It’s working beautifully and it allowed us to deploy rapidly and the outcomes are powerful.

Tell me about the programs Wholesome Wave has started doing since this one.
 

It’s interesting because we had another founding program that we just backed off on. We had very limited human resources and the marketplace wasn’t quite ready for the concept. It was a program called Green Wave, and that was a farm to college program.
We recognized the energy that was being created by the Yale Sustainable Food Project when Alice Waters went in and got really mad about the food they were serving in the cafeteria there and said, ‘There must be a way you can take just one of twelve campuses and have everything come from local, organic producers, cooked from scratch for the kids.’ They still have not been able to do that. It was a big mission, but it did create all of these contracts now, where institutions of higher learning are requiring the Aramarks and the Sodexhos to go a certain percent local by certain years or they can lose their contract. But we also saw that they couldn’t enforce the contract because these food service companies could prove that they couldn’t get the amount of food to be able to meet the mandates.
I was on the advisory board--Alice invited me and Gus both to be on the advisory board of that--so when we looked at it we said, ‘Listen, we need to push some of this upstream. We need to find mid-size producers that can come up with a tractor load of tomatoes, a third of a tractor load of eggplant, a couple tons of onions and have oven-roasted pizza sauce that can be made into pasta sauce, oven-roasted vegetable lasagna, and can be turned into a soup, a variety of different things, so we can take these tractor loads and put them into a condition where there’s the skill and infrastructure level that these kitchens can handle.
It was funny because Alice looked at it and she was like, ‘Oh, look how big the kitchens are. There’s no reason we can’t do this.’ And I’m looking at them with my background in food service, saying, ‘This kitchen can’t handle a tractor load of tomatoes.’ They don’t have the equipment to be able to put it into that form where they can serve the local food year-round Connecticut only has a five-month growing season, and three of those months school’s out of session. So what do we do, right?
We started that program and just backed off on it because people weren’t getting it. But now there’s all this energy around food hubs. We always believed that if we were going to be successful steering public money in the direction of helping more people across more socio-economic demographics to afford locally grown food and demand it, that the businesses don’t exist to be able to take advantage of that new market we would be creating. It would be an incomplete mission. We would end up doing all this great work only to have the big boxes of the major multinational food companies swoop in and figure out a way to get into the vegetable business. So, the Healthy Food Commerce Initiative is our newest, most exciting program, but it was part of us from the very beginning in that, ‘How do we use instruments like farm credit, new markets tax credit, social finance, funds like Imprint Capital and RSF out of San Francisco, and some of these others and help steer them and help re-arrange the instruments so they’re appropriate for these types of food businesses.
How do we get the businesses and these really excited, engaged entrepreneurs the technical assistance they need so that they better understand the opportunities for their business so they can accept financing and pay it back. So we’ve believe that school food’s going to be changed to the types of facilities that are co-owned by farmers and community entrepreneurs that can change school food in 10 school districts without having to rebuild 12,000 kitchens, which is not going to happen on current school budgets, and hire 100,000 more cafeteria workers, which isn’t going to happen on current school budgets. That’s a good one.
And then our Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program we actually started working on almost immediately after we deployed the doubling. We realized with the doubling that for that program to be successful and be widely accepted by people living in poverty, we didn’t want to make a condition of them being able to take part in the two-for-one sale having to roll their sleeve up. And be monitored for health outcomes. We knew we needed another program and we also knew that the health outcomes would be important if we wanted to target the Affordable Health Care Act and really look at the Measurable Prevention Clause, Title VI Section 4013, because that’s an even bigger pot of potential money for local farmers than the Farm Bill. We designed the program, we’ve raised enough money so that doctors and nurse practitioners in underserved community health clinics working in conjunction with nutritionists can actually advise--triage an entire at-risk family--advise them to eat better and to exercise and then give them the resources to eat better.So they go to markets where we already have the non-profit program expert collecting data and managing alternative currency and we’ve created this wrap-around community of practice which also includes the community member, instead of them just being separate silos of something that might be available to someone living in poverty. Everyone is touching the same patient, the patient’s giving feedback, everyone’s acting like neighbors. We’ve broken the silos down. Because it’s a private prescription and it doesn’t require someone to spend their food stamps--so it’s not a two-for-one sale, it’s a doctor saying, ‘You need to eat better, here’s your prescription’--the families are enthusiastic about coming back once a month to be measured for health outcomes. Those are our three programs and then we have the policy department, which Gus heads. He’s the one who’s been sharing all of our outcomes in Washington in a way that’s equaling policy change.

 

Resources: 

Visit Wholesome Wave online.

Read Nischan’s essay, “The Economic Case for Food Stamps,” at The Atlantic.

Learn more about his work as a chef and policy innovator at Food Republic, PLAN!T NOW, and PBS Food.

Video: TEDxManhattan: Great Tomatoes For All

Philip Belpasso playing the flute at Zuccotti Park, Wall Street Protest March, September 26, 2011, Financial District, New York. Photo by PaulSteinJC, licensed under Creative Commons. 

This post originally appeared on Shareable. Introduction by Neal Gorenflo, Publisher of Shareable 

One of the legacies of socialist “Red Vienna” in the 1920s is a huge stock of quality housing owned by the city available at below-market rates. This not only makes affordable housing widely available, it keeps a lid on overall housing prices. This undoubtedly adds to the appeal of prosperous Vienna, voted as the world’s most livable city in 2011.

Even though this historical anecdote is relevant today, considering the damage done by a speculative housing market run amok, we never hear about it. Mainstream discourse about cities is dominated by free-market, pro-growth ideas that has continued unabated even after the flaws of capitalism were made glaringly obvious by the 2008 financial meltdown. The Floridas and Glaesers of the world carry on with their growth-talk as if the crisis never happened (and global warming doesn’t exist). If you believe the future will be made in cities, then this trading in failed ideas doesn’t bode well for the future.

What’s missing in this dialogue is a profound but ignored truth: The commons is the goose that lays the golden eggs. Without the commons, there is no market or future. If every resource is commodified, if every square inch of real estate is subjected to speculative forces, if every calorie of every urbanite is used to simply meet bread and board, then we seal off the future. Without commons, there’s no room for people to maneuver, there’s no space for change, and no space for life. The future is literally born out of commons.

Another pollutant in the popular discourse about cities is the idea is that they are the solution to our great crises. This is wildly naïve. Rapid urbanization is a symptom of systemic problems, not a solution. Our global trade regime is driving the enclosure and destruction of our remaining commons and ruining local agricultural markets, making it impossible for rural populations to survive. As Mike Davis observes in Planet of Slums, rural poverty is driving much of the migration to cities, not mythical opportunities. The poor are being pushed more than pulled.

Cities hold great promise, but they are not yet the engines of transformations we need them to be. We need new ideas.

Harvey’s new book Rebel Cities tempted me and I was richly rewarded. His analysis of the market’s role in creating social inequalities offered a more convincing view of urban processes than I’ve gotten anywhere. It was as if gum were cleared from my eyes.

And while Harvey is a Marxist, he’s no demagogue. Rebel Cities offers enlightening critiques of liberals, anarchists, and even commons advocates. When it comes down to it, Harvey stands for something as American as apple pie—cities by the people, for the people. I will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone who shares that idea, whatever you call them.

I asked my friend Chris Carlsson, a co-founder of Critical Mass, to interview Harvey as he explored similar themes in his book, Nowtopia. Below is a recent e-mail discussion between Carlsson and Harvey which I think you’ll find fascinating no matter your political persuasion. Alone, Harvey is not the complete tonic, but I hope the interview broadens your view of cities like Rebel Cities did for me.

 

The gentrification blues at work on a Noah's Bagels in Seattle, Washington. Credit: Tedeytan. Licensed under Creative Commons.
 

Chris Carlsson: Who did you write Rebel Cities for? 

My aim was to write a book for everyone who has serious questions about the qualities of the urban life to which they are exposed and the limited choices that arise, given the way in which political and economic power asserts a hegemonic right to build cities according to its own desires and needs (for profit and capital accumulation) rather than to satisfy the needs of people.

In so doing, I wanted to provide indications of the kind of theoretical framework to which I appeal and I, therefore, use seemingly abstract (often, but not exclusively, Marxist) concepts. But my aim is to use these concepts in such a way that anybody can grasp them. (I don’t always succeed, of course.) I then hope that people might become interested to seek a deeper knowledge of the sort of framework that I use. For example, in “The Art of Rent,” I use a seemingly arcane concept of monopoly rent, but I hope by the end of the chapter people can understand very well what it might mean and wonder how it is that a society that lauds competition as foundational to its functioning is populated by capitalists who will go to great lengths to secure monopoly power by any means and how they capture unearned rents by resorting to that power.

If people want a broader understanding of my framework, they can use many resources including my own Enigma of Capital, and A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and my website lectures (including those on Marx’s Capital and the Companion to Marx’s Capital). I hope, however, that Rebel Cities is understandable enough without going through all of those materials first. In my view, one of the biggest problems for anti-capitalist social movements in our times is the lack of an agreed-upon framework to understand the dynamics of what is going on; if I can somehow incite activists to think more broadly about what they are doing and the general situation in which they are doing it (and how particular struggles relate to each other), then I would be very happy.

 

You write: “The chaotic processes of capitalist creative destruction have evidently reduced the collective left to a state of energetic but fragmented incoherence, even as periodic eruptions of mass movements of protest … suggest that the objective conditions for a more radical break with the capitalist law of value are more than ripe for the taking.” 

For many people, targeting the “capitalist law of value” is terribly abstract. Can you rephrase that in terms that people can see and feel in their everyday lives? 

I could substitute the phrase “capitalist law of value” with the phrase “the maximization of profit in a context of global competition” and then point to the devastating history of deindustrialization (more destruction than creation) from the 1980s across city after city, not only in North America, but also Europe and elsewhere (e.g. Mumbai and Northern China).

But I wanted to use the term “value” very explicitly to raise the question of what it is that capital values and how radically that contrasts with other ways of thinking about the values that might prevail in another kind of society. The capitalist law of value is what animates the activities of Bain Capital, etc. and we have to see that value system as profoundly opposed to human emancipation and well-being, that there is a distinctive “law of value” that capital internalizes and imposes that overrides all other values that stand in its path.

The values that capital internalizes do not contribute to the well-being of people and indeed may threaten our survival. The more people come to recognize the value system of capital the more we can mobilize “our” alternative values against it. To see the fight against capitalism as a fight over values is very important. It has, at various times, animated a theology of liberation that is profoundly anti-capitalist. It is for this reason that the capitalist class does not want to talk of or admit to the distinctive “law of value” that animates its actions. Apologists for capital claim they are for family values, for example, while capitalism promotes policies that destroy families. They claim they are in favor of freedom, but omit to say the freedom they favor is that of a few to exploit and live off the labor of the many, of the Wall Streeters to be free of regulation to gain their inordinate bonuses through predatory practices.

  Many people joined in to help make the protest signs used for the march on Wall Street, September 26th 2011, Zuccotti Park, Financial District, New York. Photo by PaulSteinJC, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Most of the people reading this website are involved in various types of co-ops, collectives, and projects that are proudly based on values beyond mere monetary profit. But you don’t think this is enough. You argue: “… attempts to change the world by worker control and analogous movements — such as community-owned projects, so-called “moral” or “solidarity” economies, local economic trading systems and barter, the creation of autonomous spaces (the most famous of which today would be that of the Zapatistas) — have not, so far, proved viable as templates for more global anti-capitalist solutions, in spite of the noble efforts and sacrifices that have often kept these efforts going in the face of fierce hostilities and active repressions … Indeed, it can all too easily happen that workers end up in a condition of collective self-exploitation that is every bit as repressive as that which capital imposes …” 

You properly point out that efforts to create socialism in one country, let alone one city, or one small enterprise, have always failed. Why do you think people ignore this overwhelming history and keep trying to make it work anyway? 

This is one of the most difficult paradoxes embedded in the history of the left (its thinking, its project, and its activities). We can all understand the urge to control our own lives, to achieve some degree of autonomy at work, as well as in the neighborhoods we inhabit; and that basic urge which is, I believe, both widespread and broadly acceptable to many elements in society, can be the basis for a broader politics. When capital collapses as it periodically does, then workers frequently mobilize (as in Argentina in 2001-02) to save their jobs, and there are some long-lasting examples of cooperative systems and of worker control that are encouraging (e.g. Mondragon).

The problem is that these operations operate in a context where the capitalist law of value (Yes, that is why this is so important.) remains hegemonic such that producers are subject to the “coercive laws of competition” that eventually force such independent efforts towards autonomous forms of organization to behave like capitalist enterprises. This is why it is so important to eventually think and act in such a way as to challenge the hegemony of the “capitalist law of value”.

Lefebvre thus notes that heterotopic practices (spaces where something radically different happens) can only survive for a while before they are eventually re-absorbed into the dominant practices. This says that, at some point, we have to mount a challenge to the dominant practices and that means challenging the power of a deeply entrenched and thoroughly dominant capitalist class and the law of value to which it adheres (as represented by, for example, Bain Capital). You are right that this is a somewhat abstract idea; but if we cannot embrace it, then we will simply be ruled by other abstractions (such as those of “the market” or “globalization”).

You dismiss Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons with the point that he is studying cattle herders with privately owned herds, undercutting the very presumption of a commons in land and resources. But you also look critically at Elinor Ostrom’s ideas about the commons, mostly because of her relatively small samples of communities self-managing common resources.  Though she short-circuits the banal opposition of state and market, she ducks (as do most anarchists and autonomists, as you argue) the problem of organizing complex, territorially dispersed economic relationships. “How can radical decentralization — surely a worthwhile objective — work without constituting some higher-order hierarchical authority? It is simply naïve to believe that polycentrism or any other form of decentralization can work without strong hierarchical constraints and active enforcement.”  

Do you think the state, currently a wholly-owned project of “the existing democracy of money power,” can be made to serve other interests than capital accumulation and economic growth? 

The state is not a monolith, but a complicated ecosystem of administrative structures. At the core of the capitalist state lies what I call a “state-finance nexus” which, in our times, is best represented by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve; and I think it was deeply illustrative that these two institutions, in effect, took over the U.S. government entirely in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse. It is notoriously the case within the state that the Treasury has the final say over many projects in other departments.

In parallel with the state-finance nexus is the military industrial complex which is a bit of a misnomer because it is really about the concentration of military and police powers backed by a justice system that is shaped in support of capitalist class power. These make for a distinctively capitalist class state apparatus. Obviously, that form of state power has to be confronted and defeated if we are to liberate ourselves from submission to the capitalist law of value.

But, beyond that, there are many aspects of public administration providing essential public services — public health, housing, education, and the governance of common property resources. In our own society, these branches of government often become corrupted by capital, to be sure, but it is not beyond the power of political movements of the left at the local, national, even international levels to discipline these aspects of the state apparatus to emancipatory public purposes.

Ironically, neoliberalism, by turning the provision of much of this terrain of state action over to NGOs, has opened a potential path to socialize these aspects of the state to the will of the people if the limitations of the NGO form could be overcome. The frontal attack from the left against state power has to target the state-finance nexus and the military/police complex and not the sewage department or the organization of the Internet and air traffic control, even as it has to be alert to how all departments of the current state are likely to be used as vehicles for furthering capital accumulation. The current situation is that the capitalist class is heightening its powers of control through militarization and the state-finance nexus while not bothering with much else.

 The first day of Occupy Wall Street, September 17, 2011. Wall Street barricaded and Zuccotti Park taken. PhotobyDavid Shankbone, licensed under Creative Commons.
 

At the end of your book you write, “Alternative democratic vehicles such as popular assemblies need to be constructed if urban life is to be revitalized and reconstructed outside of dominant class relations.” How do you see the Occupy Wall Street movement evolving in the absence of public space? 

It is clear that the vicious police response to Occupy Wall Street is an indication of the paranoid fear of Wall Street that a popular movement might arise to threaten the power of the state-finance nexus and, as has happened in Iceland and now in Ireland to indict and eventually jail the bankers.

Militarization is, for them, the necessary answer, and part of that militarization is the control over public space to deny that the Occupy movement has a public space for its operations. In that case, the liberation of public space for public political purposes becomes a preliminary battle that will have to be fought. The assemblies provided a brief whiff of what an alternative democracy might look like, but the small scales and limited arenas make it crucial to experiment with other democratic forms of popular governance capable of looking at the metropolitan region as a whole … how to organize a whole city like New York or Sao Paulo.

A street scene in Berlin's Schöneberg district showing the interplay between blight and gentrification. Credit: Sugar Ray Banister. Licensed under Creative Commons.

 

Going beyond physical space, you helpfully point out that, “There is, in effect, a social practice of commoning. […] At the heart of the practice of commoning lies the principle that the relation between the social group and that aspect of the environment being treated as a common shall be both collective and non-commodified—off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations.”  

How do you see this logic of “commoning” emerging from the actual social movements of our time, which seem preoccupied with ethical shopping on one hand, or addressing racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other identitarian questions on the other? 

The essence of a great urban and civic life, for me, is the free intermingling of all manner of people opening up the possibilities of all manner of encounters. If, for often good reasons, women, LGBT youth, or other so-called “identitarian” groups cannot freely use the public and supposedly “common” spaces of the city, then it is critical that movements emerge to liberate those common spaces for their participation. Such movements can provide a vital opening for a broader common politics. The problem comes when that is the only preoccupation for that group and what begins as a demand for inclusion becomes a movement for exclusions. Alliances are needed and the more it becomes acceptable to liberate public spaces for all public purposes, the more open become the democratic possibilities to go a-commoning, to build a commons and achieve a politics of the commons throughout the city or metropolitan region as a whole. But there are counter-movements that have to be combated. Right now, exclusionary fascist movements (like Golden Dawn in Greece) are precisely occupying space by space urban neighborhoods (e.g. in Athens); they are occupying spaces in the name of an exclusionary politics. This is an extreme case, of course, but I think it critical that the relation between the commons and the balance between enclosures and exclusions, on the one hand, and openings and free uses, on the other, be perpetually open for discussion and political struggle. These are the sorts of battles in which we all have to be involved. There is no automatic harmony to be had and I actually think a certain level of perpetual conflict around urban life is a very positive feature.

 

Artists and “culture workers” have historically been leading voices of dissent, but we see a lot less of that now. Most people are beholden to one or another institution of the “nonprofit industrial complex” as the Incite! Collective put it in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. The types of dissent remain safely within boundaries that do not challenge the logic of markets and money. 

You write, “It is one thing to be transgressive about sexuality, religion, social mores, and artistic and architectural conventions, but quite another to be transgressive in relation to the institutions and practices of capitalist domination that actually penetrate deeply into cultural institutions. […] The problem for capital is to find ways to co-opt, subsume, commodify, and monetize such cultural differences and cultural commons just enough to be able to appropriate monopoly rents from them.” 

How do highly individualized and competitive artists and culture producers find common ground to fight for a world beyond remuneration? 

I don’t quite agree with the view that the cultural workers are passive. The context has changed (which is what I am pointing to as culture becomes an industry and a vehicle for capital accumulation and building asset values) which means that dissidence has to take a different form of expression. Subversion, rather than confrontation, has to become the main tactic and I see quite a lot of evidence of a willingness to do that. We have, incidentally, very much the same problem in academia. My colleagues have quite a lot to learn about how to go about that and, in the cultural world, that sentiment for subversion is far more widespread.

 

You write, “The struggle for the right to the city is against the powers of capital that ruthlessly feed upon and extract rents from the common life that others have produced. […] Capitalist urbanization perpetually tends to destroy the city as a social, political, and livable commons.” Americans are fairly religious about the idea of private property. Even progressives don’t like to challenge the prerogatives of property ownership.  

Do you think there can be any meaningful way to halt gentrification and the debasement of thriving urban neighborhoods that it brings, short of creating collective ownership of neighborhood properties? 

The thing that often amazes me is the wide array of instruments already available for left experimentation in all manner of arenas of social life. This is very true of housing with all sorts of possible property arrangements that offer ways to secure housing for low-income populations. Yet these instruments are neglected and underutilized, in part, I suspect, because of ideological barriers but also due to lack of political and other forms of support for them.

Much can be done within existing structures, but, again, the problem is how, for example, limited equity co-ops might be reabsorbed into the dominant practices unless there is an active social movement to keep them in place and expand them. Otherwise, we are in the situation of winning a skirmish here or there (e.g. against gentrification) but losing most of the battles and having no impact on the anti-capitalist war. So when and how are we going to learn to fight the war against the dominant practices?

You point to the need to integrate an understanding of the process of urbanization and built-environment formation into the general theory of the laws of motion of capital. Other writers have analyzed the breakdown of Fordist mass production and the evolution of capitalism into a system based on a “social factory.” 

I think we should get away from the imagery of the factory entirely. The issue of the urban is quite different because it is not only about production, but about realization of values through consumption, consumerism, spectacle (e.g. Olympic Games which have sent many cities into economic difficulties and played a key role in the Greek collapse of public finances). One of the things I get from Marx’s theories is the relation between production of values and the realization of values through exchange in the market and both are equally important and the urban is “where it all comes together”.

 

A public square in Helsinki offers plenty of space for activists to gather. Credit: La Citta Vita. Used under Creative Commons license. 

You note, “Public spaces and public goods in the city have always been a matter of state power and public administration, and such spaces and goods do not necessarily a commons make.” How can public spaces become a commons? 

Language is a commons and part of what political life is about is changing the languages we use to relate to each other and to understand the world around us (which is why I want to talk about the capitalist law of value). But the commons has to be materialized and objectified (e.g. in print) and discussed (e.g. in an assembly or a chat room). Commoning embraces all of these features. It is not only a physical space, but bodies on the street still have a political priority (as we saw in Tahrir Square) and this is particularly important to the degree that the capitalist class has almost total power over all other forms of political power (money, the repressive apparatus, key elements in the state apparatus, political elections, the law, etc.).

Finally, you argue that “Decentralization and autonomy are primary vehicles for producing greater inequality through neoliberalization.” How do social movements fight this trajectory while holding on to their own autonomist and egalitarian practices? 

What is so odd in these times is that much of the left agrees with much of the right that decentralization and opposition to all forms of centralized power is the answer. This is why I talk of the “fetishism of organizational forms” that prevails on the contemporary left. The market is, of course, when individualized, the most decentralized decision-making system you can imagine and it is exactly the organization of such a competitive decentralized market that produces, as Marx so clearly proved, highly concentrated capitalist class power. It does so because “there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.”

If all the world were organized into a series of independent and totally autonomous anarchist communes, then how would the global commons (e.g. biodiversity) be preserved, and what would prevent some communes from becoming much more prosperous than others, and how would the free flow of people and goods and products from one place to another work (most communes have some principles for exclusion)? Interestingly, most corporations are into networked models of administration and there are all sorts of parallels between left and right which pass unrecognized, as well as overlaps between corporate practices and anarchist visions.

There is a lot to be said for a decentralized basis for political action. But, at some point, it has also to jump scales and organize at least at the metropolitan bioregional level to take on those wretched dominant class practices that seem to survive unscathed in the midst of the current plethora of oppositional social movements.

***

David Harvey (born 31 October 1935, Gillingham, Kent, England) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanities. In addition, he is the world's most cited academic geographer, and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate; most recently he has been credited with restoring social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism. He is a leading proponent of the idea of the right to the city, as well as a member of the Interim Committee for the emerging International Organization for a Participatory Society.

Chris Carlsson , co-director of the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco (a wiki-based digital archive at foundsf.org), is a writer, publisher, editor, and community organizer. He has written two books (After the Deluge, Nowtopia) edited six books, (Reclaiming San Francisco, The Political Edge, Bad Attitude, Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco, 1968-78, and SHIFT HAPPENS! Critical Mass at 20). He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay. He has produced Shaping San Francisco’s weekly public Talks and conducted its award-winning bicycle history tours since January 2006. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the Internet.

 

This post originally appeared on TomDispatch.  

[A longer version of this essay appears in "Politics," the Fall 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly; this slightly shortened version is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

All power corrupts but some must govern. -- John le Carré

The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q Score or disturb a Gallup poll, the candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. The sponsors of the event, generous to a fault but careful to remain anonymous, dress it up with the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, abundant assortments of multiflavored sound bites, and the candidates so well-contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game-show contestants, or posed as noble knights-at-arms setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by klieg light, until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they were produced.

Best of all, at least from the point of view of the commercial oligarchy paying for both the politicians and the press coverage, the issue is never about the why of who owes what to whom, only about the how much and when, or if, the check is in the mail. No loose talk about what is meant by the word democracy or in what ways it refers to the cherished hope of liberty embodied in the history of a courageous people.

The campaigns don’t favor the voters with the gratitude and respect owed to their standing as valuable citizens participant in the making of such a thing as a common good. They stay on message with their parsing of democracy as the ancient Greek name for the American Express card, picturing the great, good American place as a Florida resort hotel wherein all present receive the privileges and comforts owed to their status as valued customers, invited to convert the practice of citizenship into the art of shopping, to select wisely from the campaign advertisements, texting A for Yes, B for No.

The sales pitch bends down to the electorate as if to a crowd of restless children, deems the body politic incapable of generous impulse, selfless motive, or creative thought, delivers the insult with a headwaiter’s condescending smile. How then expect the people to trust a government that invests no trust in them? Why the surprise that over the last 30 years the voting public has been giving ever-louder voice to its contempt for any and all politicians, no matter what their color, creed, prior arrest record, or sexual affiliation? The congressional disapproval rating (78% earlier this year) correlates with the estimates of low attendance among young voters (down 20% from 2008) at the November polls.

Democracy as an ATM 

If democracy means anything at all (if it isn’t what the late Gore Vidal called “the national nonsense-word”), it is the holding of one’s fellow citizens in thoughtful regard, not because they are beautiful or rich or famous, but because they are one’s fellow citizens. Republican democracy is a shared work of the imagination among people of myriad talents, interests, voices, and generations that proceeds on the premise that the labor never ends, entails a ceaseless making and remaking of its laws and customs, i.e., a sentient organism as opposed to an ATM, the government an us, not a them.

Contrary to the contemporary view of politics as a rat’s nest of paltry swindling, Niccolò Machiavelli, the fifteenth-century courtier and political theorist, rates it as the most worthy of human endeavors when supported by a citizenry possessed of the will to act rather than the wish to be cared for. Without the “affection of peoples for self-government…cities have never increased either in dominion or wealth.”

Thomas Paine in the opening chapter of Common Sense finds “the strength of government and the happiness of the governed” in the freedom of the common people to “mutually and naturally support each other.” He envisions a bringing together of representatives from every quarter of society -- carpenters and shipwrights as well as lawyers and saloonkeepers -- and his thinking about the mongrel splendors of democracy echoes that of Plato in The Republic: “Like a coat embroidered with every kind of ornament, this city, embroidered with every kind of character, would seem to be the most beautiful.”

Published in January 1776, Paine’s pamphlet ran through printings of 500,000 copies in a few months and served as the founding document of the American Revolution, its line of reasoning implicit in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The wealthy and well-educated gentlemen who gathered 11 years later in Philadelphia to frame the Constitution shared Paine’s distrust of monarchy but not his faith in the abilities of the common people, whom they were inclined to look upon as the clear and present danger seen by the delegate Gouverneur Morris as an ignorant rabble and a “riotous mob.”

From Aristotle the founders borrowed the theorem that all government, no matter what its name or form, incorporates the means by which the privileged few arrange the distribution of law and property for the less-fortunate many. Recognizing in themselves the sort of people to whom James Madison assigned “the most wisdom to discern, and the most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society,” they undertook to draft a constitution that employed an aristocratic means to achieve a democratic end.

Accepting of the fact that whereas a democratic society puts a premium on equality, a capitalist economy does not, the contrivance was designed to nurture both the private and the public good, accommodate the motions of the heart as well as the movement of the market, the institutions of government meant to support the liberties of the people, not the ambitions of the state. By combining the elements of an organism with those of a mechanism, the Constitution offered as warranty for the meeting of its objectives the character of the men charged with its conduct and deportment, i.e., the enlightened tinkering of what both Jefferson and Hamilton conceived as a class of patrician landlords presumably relieved of the necessity to cheat and steal and lie. 

Good intentions, like mother’s milk, are a perishable commodity. As wealth accumulates, men decay, and sooner or later an aristocracy that once might have aspired to an ideal of wisdom and virtue goes rancid in the sun, becomes an oligarchy distinguished by a character that Aristotle likened to that of “the prosperous fool” -- its members so besotted by their faith in money that “they therefore imagine there is nothing that it cannot buy.”

Postponing the Feast of Fools 

The making of America’s politics over the last 236 years can be said to consist of the attempt to ward off, or at least postpone, the feast of fools. Some historians note that what the framers of the Constitution hoped to establish in 1787 (“a republic,” according to Benjamin Franklin, “if you can keep it”) didn’t survive the War of 1812. Others suggest that the republic was gutted by the spoils system introduced by Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. None of the informed sources doubt that it perished during the prolonged heyday of the late-nineteenth-century Gilded Age.

Mark Twain coined the phrase to represent his further observation that a society consisting of the sum of its vanity and greed is not a society at all but a state of war. In the event that anybody missed Twain’s meaning, President Grover Cleveland in 1887 set forth the rules of engagement while explaining his veto of a bill offering financial aid to the poor: “The lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”

Twenty years later, Arthur T. Hadley, the president of Yale, provided an academic gloss: “The fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand and property owners on the other. The forces of democracy on the one side... and the forces of property on the other side.” 

In the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the forces of democracy pushed forward civil-service reform in the 1880s, the populist rising in the 1890s, the progressive movement in the 1910s, President Teddy Roosevelt’s preservation of the nation’s wilderness and his harassment of the Wall Street trusts -- but it was the stock-market collapse in 1929 that equipped the strength of the country’s democratic convictions with the power of the law. What Paine had meant by the community of common interest found voice and form in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, in the fighting of World War II by a citizen army willing and able to perform what Machiavelli would have recognized as acts of public conscience.

During the middle years of the twentieth century, America at times showed itself deserving of what Albert Camus named as a place “where the single word liberty makes hearts beat faster,” the emotion present and accounted for in the passage of the Social Security Act, in the mounting of the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements, in the promise of LBJ’s Great Society. But that was long ago and in another country, and instead of making hearts beat faster, the word liberty in America’s currently reactionary scheme of things slows the pulse and chills the blood.

Ronald Reagan’s new Morning in America brought with it in the early 1980s the second coming of a gilded age more swinish than the first, and as the country continues to divide ever more obviously into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor, the fictions of unity and democratic intent lose their capacity to command belief. If by the time Bill Clinton had settled comfortably into the White House it was no longer possible to pretend that everybody was as equal as everybody else, it was clear that all things bright and beautiful were to be associated with the word private, terminal squalor and toxic waste with the word public.

The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas. Their anxious and spendthrift company bears the mark of oligarchy ridden with the disease diagnosed by the ancient Greeks as pleonexia, the appetite for more of everything -- more McMansions, more defense contracts, more beachfront, more tax subsidy, more prosperous fools. Aristotle mentions a faction of especially reactionary oligarchs in ancient Athens who took a vow of selfishness not unlike the anti-tax pledge administered by Grover Norquist to Republican stalwarts in modern Washington: “I will be an enemy to the people and will devise all the harm against them which I can.”

A Government That Sets Itself Above the Law 

The hostile intent has been conscientiously sustained over the last 30 years, no matter which party is in control of Congress or the White House, and no matter what the issue immediately at hand -- the environment or the debt, defense spending or campaign-finance reform. The concentrations of wealth and power express their fear and suspicion of the American people with a concerted effort to restrict their liberties, letting fall into disrepair nearly all of the infrastructure -- roads, water systems, schools, power plants, bridges, hospitals -- that provides the country with the foundation of its common enterprise.

The domestic legislative measures accord with the formulation of a national-security state backed by the guarantee of never-ending foreign war that arms the government with police powers more repressive than those available to the agents of the eighteenth-century British crown. The Justice Department reserves the right to tap anybody’s phone, open anybody’s mail, decide who is, and who is not, an un-American. The various government security agencies now publish 50,000 intelligence reports a year, monitoring the world’s Web traffic and sifting the footage from surveillance cameras as numerous as the stars in the Milky Way. President Barack Obama elaborates President George W. Bush’s notions of preemptive strike by claiming the further privilege to order the killing of any American citizen overseas who is believed to be a terrorist or a friend of terrorists, to act the part of jury, judge, and executioner whenever and however it suits his exalted fancy.

Troubled op-ed columnists sometimes refer to the embarrassing paradox implicit in the waging of secret and undeclared war under the banners of a free, open, and democratic society. They don’t proceed to the further observation that the nation’s foreign policy is cut from the same criminal cloth as its domestic economic policy. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the predatory business dealing that engendered the Wall Street collapse in 2008 both enjoyed the full faith and backing of a government that sets itself above the law.

The upper servants of the oligarchy, among them most of the members of Congress and the majority of the news media’s talking heads, receive their economic freedoms by way of compensation for the loss of their political liberties. The right to freely purchase in exchange for the right to freely speak. If they wish to hold a public office or command attention as upholders of the truth, they can’t afford to fool around with any new, possibly subversive ideas.

Paine had in mind a representative assembly that asked as many questions as possible from as many different sorts of people as possible. The ensuing debate was expected to be loud, forthright, and informative. James Fenimore Cooper seconded the motion in 1838, arguing that the strength of the American democracy rests on the capacity of its citizens to speak and think without cant. “By candor we are not to understand trifling and uncalled-for expositions of truth… but a sentiment that proves the conviction of the necessity of speaking truth, when speaking at all; a contempt for all designing evasions of our real opinions. In all the general concerns, the public has a right to be treated with candor. Without this manly and truly republican quality... the institutions are converted into a stupendous fraud.”

Oligarchy prefers trifling evasions to real opinions. The preference accounts for the current absence of honest or intelligible debate on Capitol Hill. The members of Congress embody the characteristics of only one turn of mind -- that of the obliging publicist. They leave it to staff assistants to write the legislation and the speeches, spend 50% of their time soliciting campaign funds. When standing in a hotel ballroom or when seated in a television studio, it is the duty of the tribunes of the people to insist that the drug traffic be stopped, the budget balanced, the schools improved, paradise regained. Off camera, they bootleg the distribution of the nation’s wealth to the gentry at whose feet they dance for coins.

A Media Enabling and Codependent 

As with the Congress, so also with the major news media that serve at the pleasure of a commercial oligarchy that pays them, and pays them handsomely, for their pretense of speaking truth to power. On network television, the giving voice to what Cooper would have regarded as real opinions doesn’t set up a tasteful lead-in to the advertisements for Pantene Pro-V or the U.S. Marine Corps. The prominent figures in our contemporary Washington press corps regard themselves as government functionaries, enabling and codependent. Their point of view is that of the country’s landlords, their practice equivalent to what is known among Wall Street stock market touts as “securitizing the junk.”

The time allowed on Face the Nation or Meet the Press facilitates the transmission of sound-bite spin and the swallowing of welcome lies. Explain to us, my general, why the United States must continue the war in Afghanistan, and we will relay the message to the American people in words of two syllables. Instruct us, Mr. Chairman, in the reasons why the oil companies and the banks produce the paper that Congress doesn’t read but passes into law, and we will show the reasons to be sound. Do not be frightened by our pretending to be scornful or suspicious. Give us this day our daily bread, and we will hide your stupidity and greed in plain sight, in the rose bushes of inside-the-beltway gossip.

The cable-news networks meanwhile package dissent as tabloid entertainment, a commodity so clearly labeled as pasteurized ideology that it is rendered harmless and threatens nobody with the awful prospect of having to learn something they didn’t already know. Comedians on the order of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher respond with jokes offered as consolation prizes for the acceptance of things as they are and the loss of hope in things as they might become. As soporifics, not, God forbid, as incitements to revolution or the setting up of guillotines in Yankee Stadium and the Staples Center.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hold each other responsible for stirring up class warfare between the 1% and the 99%; each of them can be counted upon to mourn the passing of America’s once-upon-a-time egalitarian state of grace. They deliver the message to fund-raising dinners that charge up to $40,000 for the poached salmon, but the only thing worth noting in the ballroom or the hospitality tent is the absence among the invited bank accounts (prospective donor, showcase celebrity, attending journalist) of anybody intimately acquainted with—seriously angry about, other than rhetorically interested in—the fact of being poor.

When intended to draw blood instead of laughs, speaking truth to power doesn’t lead to a secure retirement on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard. Paine was the most famous political thinker of his day, his books in the late eighteenth century selling more copies than the Bible, but after the Americans had won their War of Independence, his notions of democracy were deemed unsuitable to the work of dividing up the spoils. The proprietors of their newfound estate claimed the privilege of apportioning its freedoms, and they remembered that Paine opposed the holding of slaves and the denial to women of the same sort of rights awarded to men. A man too much given to plain speaking, on too familiar terms with the lower orders of society, and therefore not to be trusted.

His opinions having become both suspect and irrelevant in Philadelphia, Paine sailed in 1787 for Europe, where he was soon charged with seditious treason in Britain (for publishing part two of The Rights of Man), imprisoned and sentenced to death in France (for his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI on the ground that it was an unprincipled act of murder). In 1794, Paine fell from grace as an American patriot as a consequence of his publishing The Age of Reason, the pamphlet in which he ridiculed the authority of an established church and remarked on “the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled.” The American congregation found him guilty of the crime of blasphemy, and on his return to America in 1802, he was met at the dock in Baltimore with newspaper headlines damning him as a “loathsome reptile,” a “lying, drunken, brutal infidel.”When he died in poverty in 1809, he was buried, as unceremoniously as a dog in a ditch, in unhallowed ground on his farm in New Rochelle.

Paine’s misfortunes speak to the difference between politics as a passing around of handsome platitudes and politics as a sowing of the bitter seeds of social change. The speaking of truth to power when the doing so threatens to lend to words the force of deeds is as rare as it is brave. The signers of the Declaration of Independence accepted the prospect of being hanged in the event that America lost the war.

Our own contemporary political discourse lacks force and meaning because it is a commodity engineered, like baby formula and Broadway musicals, to dispose of any and all unwonted risk. The forces of property occupying both the government and the news media don’t rate politics as a serious enterprise, certainly not as one worth the trouble to suppress.

It is the wisdom of the age -- shared by Democrat and Republican, by forlorn idealist and anxious realist -- that money rules the world, transcends the boundaries of sovereign states, serves as the light unto the nations, and waters the tree of liberty. What need of statesmen, much less politicians, when it isn’t really necessary to know their names or remember what they say? The future is a product to be bought, not a fortune to be told.

Happily, at least for the moment, the society is rich enough to afford the staging of the fiction of democracy as a means of quieting the suspicions of a potentially riotous mob with the telling of a fairy tale. The rising cost of the production -- the pointless nominating conventions decorated with 15,000 journalists as backdrop for the 150,000 balloons -- reflects the ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact. The country is being asked to vote in November for television commercials because only in the fanciful time zone of a television commercial can the American democracy still be said to exist.

Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham’s Quarterly , and a TomDispatch regular . Formerly editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay, shortened slightly for TomDispatch, introduces "Politics," the Fall 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. 

Copyright 2012 Lewis Lapham

Image by the Josh Copeland, licensed under Creative Commons.  

 

This morning, KPFK, a listener-sponsored Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles hosted a debate between Chris Hedges and Dinesh D’Souza. The debate is moderated by Sonali Kolhatkar, host of the KPFK show Uprising and author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence. Hedges and D’Souza touch on the War on Terror, the Arab Spring, and the 2012 election, among other topics. Both authors have been fiercely critical of U.S. foreign policy and the Obama administration, but for very different reasons. You can listen to the full hour-long debate below, courtesy of KPFK.
 

Listen: Hedges vs. D'Souza 

About the Speakers 

Chris Hedges is a journalist and author, who spent nearly 20 years as a war correspondent in Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. In 2002, he was part of a team of reporters at the New York Times who received the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Death of the Liberal Class. His latest book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, was coauthored with artist Joe Sacco, and describes inequality and poverty in 21^st century America. Hedges is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and writes a weekly column for TruthDig.

Dinesh D’Souza is a New York Times bestselling author, filmmaker, and president of King’s College in New York City. A vocal critic of the Obama administration, D’Souza served as a policy advisor to Ronald Reagan before moving on to fellowships at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution. Since then, he has debated with Michael Shermer and Christopher Hitchens, and authored several books defending conservative Christian values. D’Souza is the director of a new film called 2016: Obama’s America, which appeared this summer and has already grossed close to $30 million. The film is based on D'Souza's 2010 book, The Roots of Obama's Rage.

You can find more information about Uprising at www.uprisingradio.org and www.facebook.com/uprisingradio. 

Image of Chris Hedges by Chris Hedges, licensed under Creative Commons. Image of Dinesh D'Souza by Mark Taylor, licensed under Creative Commons. 
 

 This post originally appeared on Shareable.net.  

Last year, on September 17, a group of about 1000 people gathered in Bowling Green to attempt to Occupy Wall Street, whatever that meant. For those of us who’d been participating in the planning assemblies all August, well, it went a little better than any of us imagined it would. 2012 has seen less world-changing protest than 2011, with Arab Spring, Walkerville in Wisconsin, the Indignados movement in Spain, the uprisings in Greece and Israel, the London riots, the Wukan commune and of course, Occupy. Still, 2012 has seen Occupy Nigeria, huge student movements in Chile and Quebec, Mayday, corruption protests in India, organizing around Trayvon Martin, and, with the escalating teachers’ strike in Chicago and a potential East and West coast port shutdown, a still developing but potentially powerful chain of strikes. The world is changed, changed utterly, and there is no doubt in my mind that the next decade will see increasingly wild and escalating peoples’ movements throughout the globe.

But as Occupy Wall Street ‘turns one year old’, the vision for the movement is shakier. This weekend, leading up to a mass day of action for September 17, Occupy organizers have planned a series of events: an open ended educational rally at Washington Square Park and an anti-capitalist march uptown on September 15th, a march and party at Foley Square and Zuccotti on the 16th, and an “anarchists against capitalism” march and rally on the big day, Monday, 9/17, at Zuccotti park, including an attempted shut down of Wall Street. Not to be flanked or caught off-guard again, the NYPD have already installed cement barriers around Zuccotti, making it look more like a security checkpoint in the Middle East than a public park in downtown Manhattan.

As we move towards OWS’ first big day since the lukewarm success of Mayday, it seems like there’s a lot at stake, and it's hard to imagine how we can turn it into something lasting. For one thing, it’s clear that the militarized, misanthropic police forces of America (perhaps even the world) will never let people establish another occupation in a public park—from the spring’s attempted re-occupations of a series of parks in Manhattan to the Gill Tract farm occupation in Berkeley, police and owners have shown an absolute unwillingness to allow another occupation to take hold. Even building occupations, like the 888 Turk occupation in San Francisco, have been responded to with immediate crackdown.

And while this behavior of the police’s is vile and authoritarian, they’re strategically right not to allow an inch. OWS produced a rupture in the ‘post-political’ ‘after-history’ narrative that Neoliberalism loves to tell itself, and proved that resistance to austerity and marketization is a real force, both here and abroad. And Occupy opened up new communities of resistance and new territories for struggle across the country while radicalizing thousands. The media narrative that “OWS changed the dialogue” is a purposefully miniscule claim. The real effects of Occupy are harder to nail down but much more meaningful.

Still, what of September 17th? It’s hard to say. In some ways, the feeling is similar to that we were experiencing this time last year: how many people will show up? Will we be immediately shut down by the NYPD? What will it end up meaning? But there’s a lack now too: an original energy, an excitement that marked last summer is missing. We want a new rupture to explode, but no one agrees on how to make it happen.

Until the 17th, it seems, there will be more questions than answers. What does it mean to ‘celebrate’ a year since Occupy’s appearance? Is Occupy still a meaningful force in people’s lives? In America? Can September 17th lead to a new phase of struggle in New York, or will it be the end to a movement that was always hard to capture under a single rubric anyway? Even the impulse towards prognostication seems to portend an unhappy result.

But this pessimism of the intellect also hides something fundamental about Occupy. While we may never have a camp in downtown Manhattan again (or, at least, not until we’re much more powerful) the downstream effects and inspiration of Occupy are everywhere. The militancy of the Chicago Teacher’s Strike, the biggest such strike in generations, reflects a new capacity for grassroots struggle inspired by Walkerville in Wisconsin and by Occupy. (Of course, it also reflects a tremendous amount of hard work and organization within the union by its new leading coalition, which should not be overlooked). Occupy has helped open up a space for radical action in America, and that space still has not closed. Whatever the future holds for Occupy Wall Street, whatever the results of September 17 (and, if you’re in New York, I hope to see you there!) we live in a new phase of grassroots action and social struggle.

A few more Occupy articles to read: Solidarity During Wartime in the Streets of Chicago, Occupy Main Street: Reports from the Front-Lines, From Foreclosure to Occupation, The Park and the Protests 

Image by DoctorTongs, licensed under Creative Commons.  

This post originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” -- a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global -- has been a smart move politically at home. It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national security card in this election year. But “smart power” has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself.

Power was not always Obama’s strong suit. When he ran for president in 2008, he appeared to friend and foe alike as Mr. Softy. He wanted out of the war in Iraq. He was no fan of nuclear weapons. He favored carrots over sticks when approaching America’s adversaries.

His opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, tried to turn this hesitation to use hard power into a sign of a man too inexperienced to be entrusted with the presidency. In 2007, when Obama offered to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran, Clinton fired back that such a policy was “irresponsible and frankly naïve.” In February 2008, she went further with a TV ad that asked voters who should answer the White House phone at 3 a.m. Obama, she implied, lacked the requisite body parts -- muscle, backbone, cojones-- to make the hard presidential decisions in a crisis.

Obama didn’t take the bait. “When that call gets answered, shouldn’t the president be the one -- the only one -- who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start,” his response ad intoned. “Who understood the real threat to America was al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Who led the effort to secure loose nuclear weapons around the globe.”

Like most successful politicians, Barack Obama could be all things to all people. His opposition to the Iraq War made him the darling of the peace movement. But he was no peace candidate, for he always promised, as in his response to that phone call ad, to shift U.S. military power toward the “right war” in Afghanistan. As president, he quickly and effectively drove a stake through the heart of Mr. Softy with his pro-military, pro-war speech at, of all places, the ceremony awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama’s protean abilities have come to the fore in his approach to what once was called “soft power,” a term Harvard professor Joseph Nye coined in his 1990 book Bound to Lead. For more than 20 years, Nye has been urging U.S. policymakers to find different ways of leading the world, exercising what he termed “power with others as much as power over others.”

After 9/11, when “soft” became an increasingly suspect word, Washington policymakers began to use “smart power” to denote a menu of expanded options that were to combine the capabilities of both the State Department and the Pentagon. "We must use what has been called 'smart power,' the full range of tools at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural -- picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation," Hillary Clinton said at her confirmation hearing for her new role as secretary of state. "With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy."

But diplomacy has not been at the vanguard of Obama’s foreign policy. From drone attacks in Pakistan and cyber-warfare against Iran to the vaunted “Pacific pivot” and the expansion of U.S. military intervention in Africa, the Obama administration has let the Pentagon and the CIA call the shots. The president’s foreign policy has certainly been “smart” from a domestic political point of view. With the ordering of the Seal Team Six raid into Pakistan that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden and “leading from behind” in the Libya intervention, the president has effectively removed foreign policy as a Republican talking point. He has left the hawks of the other party with very little room for maneuver.

But in its actual effects overseas, his version of “smart power” has been anything but smart. It has maintained imperial overstretch at self-destructive expense, infuriated strategic competitors like China, hardened the position of adversaries like Iran and North Korea, and tried the patience of even long-time allies in Europe and Asia.

Only one thing makes Obama’s policy look geopolitically smart -- and that’s Mitt Romney’s prospective foreign policy. On global issues, then, the November elections will offer voters a particularly unpalatable choice: between a Democratic militarist and an even more over-the-top militaristic Republican, between Bush Lite all over again and Bush heavy, between dumb and dumber.

Mr. Softy Goes to Washington 

Mr. Softy went to Washington in 2008 and discovered a backbone. That, at least, is how many foreign policy analysts described the “maturation” process of the new president. “Barack Obama is a soft power president,” wrote the Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman in 2009. “But the world keeps asking him hard power questions.”

According to this scenario, Obama made quiet overtures to North Korea, and Pyongyang responded by testing a nuclear weapon. The president went to Cairo and made an impressive speech in which he said, among other things, “we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But individuals and movements in the Muslim world -- al-Qaeda, the Taliban -- continued to challenge American power. The president made a bold move to throw his support behind nuclear abolition, but the nuclear lobby in the United States forced him to commit huge sums to modernizing the very nuclear complex he promised to negotiate out of existence.

According to this scenario, Obama came to Washington with a fistful of carrots to coax the world, nonviolently, in the direction of peace and justice. The world was not cooperative, and so, in practice, those carrots began to function more like orange-colored sticks.

This view of Obama is fundamentally mistaken. Mr. Softy was a straw man created from the dreams of his dovish supporters and the nightmares of his hawkish opponents. That Obama avatar was useful during the primary and the general election campaign to appeal to a nation weary of eight years of cowboy globalism. Like a campaign advisor ill-suited to the bruising policy world of Washington, Mr. Softy didn’t survive the transition.

Consider, for example, Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009. This inspiring speech should have signaled a profound shift in U.S. policy toward the Muslim world. But what Obama didn’t mention in his speech was his earlier conversation with outgoing president George W. Bush in which he’d secretly agreed to continue two major Bush initiatives: the CIA’s unmanned drone air war in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands and the covert program to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program with computer viruses.

Obama didn’t just continue these programs; he amplified them. The result has been an unprecedented expansion of U.S. military power through unmanned drones in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan as well as Somalia and Yemen. The use of drones, and the civilian casualties they’ve caused, has in turn enflamed public opinion around the world, with the favorability rating of the United States under Obama in majority Muslim countries falling to a new low of 15% in 2012, lower, that is, than the rock-bottom standard set by the Bush administration.

The drone campaign has undermined other smart power approaches, including that old standby diplomacy, not only by antagonizing potential interlocutors but also by killing a good number of them. Along with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, often cited as one of Obama’s signal accomplishments, the drone war has by now provoked a slow-motion rupture in relations between Washington and Islamabad.

The covert cyber-war initiative against Iran’s nuclear program, conducted with Israeli cooperation, produced both the Stuxnet worm, which wreaked havoc on Iranian centrifuges, and the Flame virus, which monitored its computer network. Instead of vigorously pursuing diplomatic solutions -- such as the nuclear compromise that Brazil and Turkey cobbled togetherin 2010 that might have defused the situation and guaranteed a world without an Iranian bomb -- the Obama administration acted secretly and aggressively. If the United States had been the target of such a cyber attack, Washington would have considered it an act of war. Meanwhile, the United States has set a dangerous precedent for future attacks in this newest theater of operations and unleashed a weapon that could even be reverse-engineered and sent back in our direction.

Nor was diplomacy ever actually on the table with North Korea. The Obama team came in with a less than half-hearted commitment to the Six Party process -- the negotiations to address North Korea’s nuclear program among the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas, which had stalled in the final months of George W. Bush’s second term. In the National Security Council, Asia point man Jeffrey Bader axed a State Department cable that would have reassured the North Koreans that a U.S. policy of engagement would continue. “Strategic patience” became the euphemism for doing nothing and letting hawkish leaders in Tokyo and Seoul unravel the previous years of engagement. After some predictably belligerent rhetoric from Pyongyang, followed by a failed missile launch and a second nuclear test, Obama largely dispensed with diplomacy altogether.

Hillary Clinton did indeed move quickly to increase the size of the State Department budget to hire more people and implement more programs to beef up diplomacy. That budget grew by more than 7% in 2009-2010. But that didn’t bring the department of diplomacy up to even $50 billion. In fact, it is still plagued by a serious shortage of diplomats and, as State Department whistleblower Peter van Buren has written, “The whole of the Foreign Service is smaller than the complement aboard one aircraft carrier.” Meanwhile, despite a persistent recession, the Pentagon budget continued to rise during the Obama years -- a roughly 3% increase in 2010 to about $700 billion. (And Mitt Romney promises to hike it even more drastically.)

Like most Democratic politicians, Obama has been acutely aware that hard power is a way of establishing political invulnerability in the face of Republican attacks. But the use of hard power to gain political points at home is a risky affair. It is the nature of this "dumb power" to make the United States into a bigger target, alienate allies, and jeopardize authentic efforts at multilateralism.

A Kinder, Gentler Empire 

Despite its rhetorical flexibility, “smart power” has several inherent flaws. First, it focuses on the means of exercising power without questioning the ends toward which power is deployed. The State Department and the Pentagon will tussle over which agency can more effectively win the hearts and minds of Afghans. But neither agency is willing to rethink the U.S. presence in the country or acknowledge how few hearts and minds have been won.

As with Afghanistan, so with the rest of the world. For all his talk of power “with” rather than “over,” Joseph Nye has largely been concerned with different methods by which the United States can maintain dominion. “Smart power” is not about the inherent value of diplomacy, the virtues of collective decision-making, or the imperatives of peace, justice, or environmental sustainability. Rather it is a way of calculating how best to get others to do what America wants them to do, with the threat of a drone strike or a Special Forces incursion always present in the background.

The Pentagon, at least, has been clear about this point. In 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued for “strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power.” The Pentagon has long realized that a toolbox with only a single hammer in it handicaps the handyman, but it still persists in seeing a world full of nails.

At a more practical level, “smart power” encounters problems because in this “integration,” the Pentagon always turns out to be the primary partner. As a result, the work of diplomats, dispensers of humanitarian aid, and all the other “do-gooders” who attempt to distinguish their work from soldiers is compromised. After decades of trying to persuade their overseas partners that they are not simply civilian adjuncts to the Pentagon, the staff of the State Department has now jumped into bed with the military. They might as well put big bull’s eyes on their backs, and there’s nothing smart about that.

“Smart power” also provides a lifeline for a military that might face significant cuts if Congress’s sequestration plan goes through. NATO has already shown the way. Its embrace of “smart defense” is a direct response to military cutbacks by European governments. The Pentagon is deeply worried that budget-cutters will follow the European example, so it is doing what corporations everywhere attempt during a crisis. It is trying to rebrand its services.

Always in search of a mission, the Pentagon now has its fingers in just about every pie in the bakery. The Marines are doing drug interdiction in Guatemala. Special Operations forces are constructing cyclone shelters in Bangladesh. The U.S. Navy provided post-disaster relief in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, while the U.S. Army did the same in Haiti. In 2011, the Africa Command budgeted $150 million for development and health care.

The Pentagon, in other words, has turned itself into an all-purpose agency, even attempting “reconstruction” along with State and various crony corporations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is preparing for the impact of climate change, pouring R & D dollars into alternative energy, and running operations in cyberspace. The Pentagon has been smart about its power by spreading it everywhere.

Dumb vs. Dumber 

As president, Obama has shown no hesitation to use force. But his use of military power has not proven any “smarter” than that of his predecessor. Iran and North Korea pushed ahead with their nuclear programs when diplomatic alternatives were not forthcoming. Nuclear power Pakistan is closer to outright anarchy than four years ago. Afghanistan is a mess, and an arms race is heating up in East Asia, fueled in part by the efforts of the United States and its allies to box in China with more air and sea power.

In one way, however, Obama has been Mr. Softy. He has shown no backbone whatsoever in confronting the bullies already in America’s corner. He has done little to push back against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his occupation policies. He hasn’t confronted Saudi Arabia, the most autocratic of U.S. allies. In fact, he has leveraged the power of both countries -- toward Iran, Syria, Bahrain. A key component of “smart power” is outsourcing the messy stuff to others.

Make no mistake: Mitt Romney is worse. A Romney-Ryan administration would be a step backward to the policies of the early Bush years. President Romney would increase military spending, restart a cold war with Russia, possibly undertake a hot war against Iran, deep-six as many multilateral agreements as he could, and generally resurrect the Ugly American policies of the recent past.

But President Romney wouldn’t fundamentally alter U.S. foreign policy. After all, President Obama has largely preserved the post-9/11 fundamentals laid down by George W. Bush, which in turn drew heavily on a unilateralist and militarist recipe that top chefs from Bill Clinton on back merely tweaked.

Obama has mentioned, sotto voce, that Mr. Softy might resurface if the incumbent is reelected. Off mic, as he mentioned in an aside to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a meeting in Seoul last spring, he has promised to show more “flexibility” in his second term. This might translate into more arms agreements with Russia, more diplomatic overtures like the effort with Burma, and more spending of political capital to address global warming, non-proliferation, global poverty, and health pandemics.

But don’t count on it. The smart money is not with Obama’s smart power. Mr. Softy has largely been an electoral ploy. If he’s re-elected, Obama will undoubtedly continue to act as Mr. Stick. Brace yourself for four more years of dumb power -- or, if he loses, even dumber power.

John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular , is an Open Society Fellow for 2012-13 focusing on Eastern Europe. He is the author of Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam (City Lights Books). His writings can be found on his website johnfeffer.com . To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which John Feffer discusses power -- hard, soft, smart, and dumb -- click here or download it to your iPod here. 

Copyright 2012 John Feffer

Image by the U.S. Army, licensed under Creative Commons.