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Awesome Women Journalists

[ 25 ] March 1, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Alyssa Rosenberg, who is pretty great herself, has been pushing the story of absurd gender disparities at major magazines, noting that, with a few exceptions like Mother Jones, men dominate the bylines at most publications. Scraping the bottom of the barrel was the New York Review of Books (and really, what is more male than the New York Review of Books? Not that it has to be but it is), which is 2011 had 133 pieces by men and 19 by women. Even The Nation had 293 by men and 118 by women. That’s really bad. And I say this as a white dude who would really like to be published by some of these people. It’s completely ridiculous.

Today, Rosenberg followed up on her piece by listing some of her favorite female journalists who need work at more prominent publications. Among them are Sarah Jaffe, my friend and old blog partner at Alterdestiny who now runs the labor section at Alternet, as well as Kate Sheppard, who does awesome work on climate change and the environment at Mother Jones. I am especially excited that Sarah is listed here–not only because I know her but because labor reporting has always been way too dominated by men and because she does amazing work on these issues. She was one of the nation’s primary reporters on the Occupy movement and, frankly, doesn’t get 10% of the attention she deserves.

There are so many other great women out there who deserve major props. Let’s get them some work, damn it!

UPDATE [SL]: On the general issue, see also E.J. Graff.

Sweet Dreams

[ 14 ] February 29, 2012 | Erik Loomis

A little French film from circa 1907 to help you have the most pleasant dreams this evening.

No nightmares at all to be had tonight. Nope. None.

Won’t Someone Think of the Benetton-Clad Children?

[ 78 ] February 29, 2012 | Erik Loomis

McArdle outdoes herself in a column entitled (and I swear this is not a parody unless someone hacked the Atlantic site) “Are the Rich Completely Undeserving of Sympathy?”

Um, yes.

McArdle speaks for those silenced by the leftist conspiracy–rich people with declining Wall Street bonuses who might have to move out of their 5 million dollar house.

I believe that Elizabeth Warren has made this point–when people get into financial trouble, they often say, “Well, I didn’t take fancy vacations or go to restaurants all the time or buy 17 pairs of Jimmy Choos.” But (with the exception of some really compulsive spenders) this isn’t the stuff that gets people into trouble. It’s the big house with the stretch mortgage that you convinced yourself you had to have because it was in a good school district and you needed a yard and a bedroom apiece for the kids. It’s that brand new SUV (or Volvo station wagon) you persuaded yourself to buy because it was important to have a safe car. It’s the school activities or travel sports teams that cost thousands of dollars, which you let your kids start in ninth grade because you didn’t know that you’d have to break their hearts by pulling them out in their junior year. The divorce decree you signed because you didn’t realize your income was going to drop by a third.

It now seems clear to me that the truly oppressed and misunderstood in this country are living in Greenwich, Connecticut. If my parents hadn’t spent $5000 for every season I played youth soccer, I would be smoking crack right now. Won’t somebody think about the Benetton-clad children???!!???

Would Santorum Approve?

[ 31 ] February 29, 2012 | Erik Loomis

I’m not so sure Santorum would approve of this sex kit for church-going Polish Catholics:

The dice recommends where partners should caress or kiss each other, if they have run out of ideas in their long marriages. (Hands, as scandalous as that is, is one of the recommendations.)

Customers can buy the dice separately, or in a “romantic evening package” that comes with raunchy underwear, massage oil and a book called “Theology of the body – blessed by John Paul II.”

Bringing the pope into the bedroom is extra sexy.

I am also fascinated by Father Ksawery Knotz and his preachings on oral sex and Catholic doctrine:

Caressing the external genitals with your lips or tongue as an element of foreplay is morally acceptable and we must not perceive it as a sin…The Church preaching would contradict itself claiming that some parts of a beloved person’s body, such as mouth, breasts, thighs, buttocks, can be caressed and kissed, while others, such as genitals, cannot be kissed, caressed or touched.

There you have it. Having spent the first half of 2011 being schooled in Catholic sexual theology, I find this kind of thing so incredibly weird.

I would pay to have a reporter ask Santorum if he approved of Catholic teachings on oral sex.

Church and State

[ 48 ] February 28, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Rick Santorum:

But Mr. Santorum accused “our culture, our education system’’ of falsely “teaching our children that separation of church and state” is mentioned in the Constitution.

The Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Liberals and Gay History

[ 85 ] February 28, 2012 | Erik Loomis

This Frank Rich article on liberal hypocrisy and gay history really annoyed me. Not that Rich is wrong–liberals have not supported gay rights until very recently. But, well, duh? Is anyone questioning that? Am I somehow supposed to be surprised or outraged that Reuben Askew supported Florida’s anti-gay campaign in the 1970s? Isn’t that akin to being surprised that a southern Democrat would support segregation in 1957?

I’m not sure what Rich is trying to say here. Are liberals making a claim to having been pro-gay 20 years ago? He talks about Bill Clinton whitewashing his own past. Well first of all, Bill Clinton is barely a liberal. Second, Clinton is whitewashing his past because he knows he was wrong. And isn’t that good that he knows he is wrong?

Gay rights is the great success story of the early 21st century. We aren’t all the way to equality yet. We aren’t even close to that. Yet I remember 20 years ago this spring my home town of Springfield, Oregon being torn apart by anti-gay ballot measures that would fail miserably today. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is no more and gay marriage has become legal in several states. All polls point to growing support for full equality. The Santorums of the world may be outraged, but they are increasingly a minority, not a majority.

This is all awesome. But at the same time, it means that it is not only not surprising, but entirely predictable that mainline Democratic politicians would not be out in front on this issue 20 years ago. Unless Rich is damning all of liberalism for being squishy on equal rights generally, and Rich is most certainly not condemning liberalism, I don’t really see what his point is. It’s worth noting liberalism’s traditionally weak position on gay rights and reminding us of that history, but there’s not the ah-ha moment Rich thinks he provides.

But then that’s Rich’s entire journalism career.

Essentially, I feel Rich is updating the argument that Democrats aren’t the party of civil rights because Robert Byrd was a KKK member in 1946.

New Front in the War on Labor

[ 52 ] February 28, 2012 | Erik Loomis

It is my contention that we will see bills in the next 5 years that outright ban unionization, even in the private sector. And even I am too pessimistic, we will certainly see a strategy from Republicans not so different than their abortion strategy–define the laws down so narrowly that very few people will be able to join unions. I’m not sure what the labor version of Virginia’s state-supported sexual assault law would be. Some sort of Clockwork Orange-style montage for anyone who signed a union card?

Anyway, the latest front is in Georgia. As Sarah Jaffe reports, the Georgia legislature is looking to ban picketing. Creating lovely new laws such as “conspiracy to commit criminal trespass,” the bill specifically goes after organizations picketing outside people’s homes. It turns out that the 1st Amendment has a clause that ensures “the resident’s right to quiet enjoyment” of their home. I’m sure the extremely principled men of the Supreme Court will find a constitutional justification for this new right, at least when applied to plutocrats!

In addition:

Along with the attacks on unions and other protest groups’ right to peaceably assemble, the bill also includes a slew of provisions to make it clear that the already right-to-work-for-less state isn’t going to make it easy for workers to join unions. “Right-to-work” already makes sure that workers don’t have to even pay their share of the costs of representation, despite requiring the union to bargain for all employees in a union shop. The new bill would reiterate this, and require private employers to post notices in the workplace reminding workers that they have the “right” not to join the union. (In other words, it mandates anti-union information being posted in the workplace; management will no doubt be happy to comply.)

It also requires workers to certify in writing every year that yes, they really do want their boss to deduct their union representation fees and dues from their paycheck.

Blech.

The Rick Smith Show also had a story on this, interviewing Ben Speight. Good stuff.

The Long Arm of Woodrow Wilson

[ 53 ] February 27, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Woodrow Wilson’s reputation has been torn to shreds in the last ten years. This can go a bit too far; in the end, regardless of his motives, Wilson did sign a lot of legislation the country really needed. Nevertheless, it’s easy to argue that, outside of JFK, Wilson is the most overrated president in American history. We can argue about the worst thing Wilson did, but I don’t think any of his actions have a more detrimental effect on American society today than the Espionage Act of 1917. Wilson first proposed this law in 1915, but with the entry of the U.S. into World War in April 1917, the Espionage Act, along with a lot of other very bad legislation, became law. The government intended to use the war to crack down on all the radicals threatening it, threats many Americans defined very broadly, mostly to include the “foreign” of various definitions, races, and ideologies. For instance, the 18th Amendment became law during these years after a sixty year temperance movement because alcohol became equated with foreigners in the minds of self-respecting Americans. In my own research, this law comes to bear upon the Industrial Workers of the World and the opening government repression gave to local communities to eliminate radicals once and for all, whether we are talking about the Bisbee Deportation of 1917 or the Centralia Massacre of 1919.

The Espionage Act gave the government broadly defined powers to crack down on any behavior that might be seen as undermining America’s military operations or to promote the success of its enemies. Wilson wanted the ability to censor the press, but at least Congress denied him this. It was followed by the even more terrible Sedition Act of 1918 which prohibited speech seen as detrimental to American interests, of course vaguely defined. The Sedition Act was repealed in 1921 but the Espionage Act remains on the books.

Usually, the Espionage Act is forgotten about but the government has occasionally brought it out to crack down on people it wanted to silence. It was the Espionage Act that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged with violating when they gave secrets to the Soviet Union. Nixon used it unsuccessfully to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg and others for leaking the Pentagon Papers.

Today, the Obama Administration has revived the Espionage Act in a broader way than probably any administration since Wilson. David Carr details how aggressively Obama has used the law to crack down on whistleblowers and leakers within the government. This is really unacceptable. The Obama Administration is completely hypocritical in praising freedom of the press overseas while using the Espionage Act to protect its own actions at home. I’m usually fairly unsympathetic to Glenn Greenwald’s argument that Democrats allow Democratic Administrations to get away scot free with actions that they would howl about if Republicans were doing them, but in this case, that line of argument makes sense. Were this the administration of George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, this would be a major story of how the Republicans don’t respect our basic rights. Instead, the use of the Espionage Act against leakers and whistleblowers is a blip on the radar of the Democratic public.

This is wrong. The Espionage Act needs to be repealed immediately and President Obama needs to be called to the carpet on his use of this loathsome law. Moreover, I don’t think historians look back kindly on any situation when the government has used this law. It always reeks of repression and is a black mark on any administration. I don’t want historians to look back on Obama in 50 years and see a president who used an antiquated and repressive law to eliminate low-level leaks in his administration. Alas, that is the road the president presently drives.

Erland Josephson, RIP

[ 1 ] February 27, 2012 | Erik Loomis

One of the last great postwar European actors has passed. Erland Josephson, star of many of Ingmar Bergman’s and Andrei Tarkovsky’s later works, died at the age of 88. While partial to Bergman overall, and especially to Scenes from a Marriage, Josephson’s first lead role for Bergman, I think my favorite work of his is in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. Here is one scene in remembrance:

Tweety on JFK

[ 34 ] February 27, 2012 | Erik Loomis

David Greenberg with a classic take-down of Chris Matthews’ ridiculous new biography of JFK. The whole thing is a must-read, but essentially Greenberg notes that Matthews dreams of an uber-masculine Kennedy who keeps those elite effete liberals at bay. This fits the sexist and misogynist Matthews who we all know from his moronic television show.

Greenberg:

Matthews thinks of liberalism in the same crude, blinkered, and gendered way that he thinks about politics in general. His view of liberalism, widely shared among the punditocracy, comes straight from the demonology of Richard Nixon, who equated liberals with effete, Ivy League-educated advocates of subversive 1960s values. To Matthews, similarly, liberals can never be tough, strong, or masculine; they are soft and effeminate, personified by the shrewish Eleanor Roosevelt or the light-in-his-loafers Stevenson. But of course many liberals of the era opposed communism vigorously, took an unsentimental view of politics and human nature, knew how to play politics, and otherwise defied the stereotypes. This ignorance about the nature and complexity of postwar liberalism may account for Matthews’s inability to understand Kennedy, whom he makes out to be much closer to the socially conservative working-class Irish of Boston’s neighborhoods than he actually was.

Matthews accepts at face value, for example, Kennedy’s description of himself in 1946 as a “fighting conservative,” claiming that he was “clearly drawing a line between himself and his party’s liberal wing.” Perhaps. But he doesn’t include JFK’s avowals of his own liberalism, such as his statement that a liberal is someone who “cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties,” and that under that definition, “I’m proud to say I’m a liberal.” Nor, as noted, does Matthews, despite his rote rehearsal of Kennedy’s major achievements as president, delve much into the lesser-known elements of the president’s progressive record, in such areas as economics, education, and women’s rights. Matthews’s portrait of Kennedy is finally incoherent, because he wants to celebrate Kennedy’s liberal achievements without celebrating liberalism.

Environmental Funders and the Grassroots

[ 24 ] February 26, 2012 | Erik Loomis

David Roberts has an excellent piece up at Grist decrying the disconnect between environmental funders and grassroots organizations.

There is a criticism of funders on the left that is so old and familiar as to have become cliché. It goes like this: The right’s funders have spent the last 30 years building a bottom-up movement. The wealthy conservatives who give money view the heads of movement institutions as trusted peers, so they are content to give without strings attached — their money is “patient.” The right now has institutions and infrastructure that recruit young people, pay them enough to live on, mentor and train them, and send them out into the courts, local politics, and think tanks.

The left’s funders, on the other hand, have pursued high-profile national legislative wins. Their money is impatient and results-based. Institutions receiving the money are treated like untrustworthy employees, forced to submit endless progress reports and beg anew for money every year or two. The result is short-term thinking and number-pumping. Young people are treated like chattel, given unpaid internships and asked to accept poverty. Grassroots organizing and local politics are neglected in favor of D.C.-focused lobbying meant to influence elites.

When it comes to environmental philanthropy, this familiar critique is, at least in broad outlines, correct. What’s more, environmental funding tends to be extremely siloed; there’s little overlap with broader issues of social and economic justice. Basically, a few big D.C.-based green groups get the bulk of the money, to be spent effecting federal legislation and policy, while smaller community-organizing groups go hungry.

When reviewing Douglas Bevington’s book on grassroots activism and the ancient forest campaigns, I particularly highlighted Bevington demonstrating how grassroots organizations had to run an end-around on the big greens, whose commitment to fundraising and having a seat at the table made them adverse to any kind of radical action. Little has changed on that front, although I’d also argue that, unfortunately, the level of environmental radicalism is not as strong as it was two decades ago either.

Roberts makes a convincing case, noting that the top-down big-organization lobbying strategy has not been effective. Not a single major piece of environmental legislation has passed Congress since the Clean Air Act amendments in 1990. That’s 22 years of an ineffective strategy. That’s not to say that the legislative strategy should be ignored, but, like the labor movement, the big greens have had a very difficult time reconciling themselves to the fact that their once brilliant legislative strategy has become completely ineffective. Environmentalism has more residual public popularity than unionism and so there’s more room for immediate payoff by feeding money to grassroots organizations. This seems like an obviously good idea, at least as an experiment, but there’s a multi-decade history by environmental funders of keeping their distance from the hippies and the freaks. I doubt that’s going to change overnight.

Two Hacks, Beat as One

[ 24 ] February 24, 2012 | Erik Loomis

Andrew Revkin is getting defensive over the backlash against his hack job on Peter Gleick leaking the Heartland documents. Revkin has pulled out the big guns to make us stop–the notoriously ethical Megan McArdle!!!

[7:37 p.m. | Updated | I've been remiss in not pointing out the important reporting of Megan McArdle of The Atlantic on the origins of the Heartland files and some of Gleick's statements. Her latest piece is a must-read that asks more probing questions and clarifies what is, and is not, responsible investigative journalism.]

Yes, the full-on conspiracy theorist McArdle clearly gives us all lessons in responsible investigative journalism. Moreover, her long-demonstrated objectivity on climate change should give anyone defending Glecik pause. Pause to think whether Revkin or McArdle is the greatest hack.