September 30, 2009

The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it—Gore Vidal

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Interviewed by Tim Teeman, The Times of London ||  [print_link]

A CONVERSATION WITH GORE VIDAL UNFOLDS AT HIS PACE. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.”

‘Reagan is not clear about the difference between Medici and Gucci. He knows Nancy wears one of them’

In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.

He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.

He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”

Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.

In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.

“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”

Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.

Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”

He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”

Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”

There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.

Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”

I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”

That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.

Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”

•••••

SELECTED COMMENTS

Hugh Frazier wrote:

Typical Gore Vidal sloppiness: the “call no man happy until he dead” idea was first attributed to Solon (who lived well before Aeschylus) by Herodotus.

“An unlucky rich man is more capable of satisfying his desires and of riding out disaster when it strikes, but a lucky man is better off than him… He is the one who deserves to be described as happy. But until he is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate.”

Herodotus, The Histories Bk. 1, ch. 32, pp. 15-16.

October 1, 2009 4:41 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

K Burnu wrote:

I enjoyed Mr. Teeman’s interview with Gore Vidal. I’ve read Mr. Vidal’s novels and many of his essays; I have been profoundly moved by his style, his wit, and how he puts a wrap on his stories. Reading his essays, and certainly his memoirs, one has to take some of what he maintains with a grain of salt – – or perhaps a car full of salt. For instance, the errant details he recalls of Joe Kennedy calling the family together after Jack’s election could be the result of the story’s having been embellished over the years. As any one of us orally recalls past events, we embellish and put our own spin on what we remember; and what we remember may not have been exactly as the event recalled actually happened. It’s excusable. Look how often Reagan was excused, while he was president, for some of his exaggeration and hyperbole when recounting the past. This is not to say I put Mr. Vidal in the same category as Mr. Reagan. I don’t, and I share many of Mr. Vidal’s views of the 40th US President.

I disagree little with Mr. Vidal’s observations of current U.S. culture. I share some of his sentiments. I’m in my 50’s and I work with a lot of young people in their 20’s. What amazes me is how little they know of their own country’s history. Is what was taught to me in my public schools not taught to them? It causes me to wonder: how much have they forgotten what they learned? Also, I am amazed at how much I am misinterpreted – – and I speak as clearly as I can. Perhaps our paying too much attention to what television and radio offers us has much to do with that. Even outside of the discussion of gay or straight relationships, Mr. Vidal’s summation of the public in “They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’” could surely extend to the public’s lack of understanding of so many other concerns.

Yes, it could happen that, in a society as much unaware as Mr. Vidal is observing, a military takeover could occur in the US.

October 1, 2009 4:39 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

Ramesh Raghuvanshi wrote:

Gore Vidal is very credulous person he did not know bit of the human nature, so lifelong he is grumbling for this or that.Another thing is he constantly running for cheap publicity so he always say pompously anything.Man is irrational animal, his only aim is survive in this world in any condition so you cannot make this earth paradise,If Gore Vidal want understand man he must understand first this irrational tendency.

October 1, 2009 4:15 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

michael carmichael wrote:

Vidal is anything but boring. Sadly, I fear that we shall soon see a military dictatorship in the USA — and the repercussions of that will be global — military dictatorships will become planetary in scope not merely threatening democracy but replacing it with corporate fascism predicated on national security concerns fanned by the omnipresent threat of terrorism.

October 1, 2009 3:36 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

Natalie Rosen wrote:

I have ALWAYS loved Gore Vidal. He is BRILLIANT. I agree with most of what he says especially the part of the utter stupidity of too many Americans for my liking. I totally agree about Obama and although I was an ARDENT supporter I am having HUGE doubts now. Health care in the US should be a given. He should have made it happen. He still could but I doubt it. Vidal is so correct and I said it as well, Obama is INEXPERIENCED it is the greatest flaw of his presidency so far or any presidency for that matter.

Power ESPECIALLY in the US in beyond most people’s grasp and understanding. It is HUGE HUGE HUGE monied corporate interests which buy the state and the parties quell the masses by paying lip service to platitudes which they know the people will swallow. It’s the way its always been and the way of the world usually as well.

I do, however disagree with his seeming infatuation of McVeigh without his mentioning the loathsome act he perpetrated killing and maiming so many. No matter who does it its a disgusting act. If Gore is against a fascist state then what did he THINK McVeigh was all about? Still I love Gore’s realism and his curmudgeon personality. I have always loved 99% of what he says. His novels are brilliant.

I fear for my country mainly because of the people’s intellectual deficits. It is sad . I am told the ancient Greeks had a saying:

“The Gods themselves are helpless in the face of stupidity.”

By Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Created 09/29/2009

“Who are you going to believe, Obama or your lying eyes?”

It is hard to understand why thousands of protesters ever bothered going to the G20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh. They foolishly marched about, yelling and carrying signs and demanding action on climate change, health care reform, employment for all, a bailout for the people, and an end to endless war and empire building.

How could they possibly have missed the great largesse of Barack Obama and representatives of the other powerful nations? There must be some new and secret regulations we don’t know about. They must be very secret, because it doesn’t look like anything has been reined in for the global finance system. But what do we know? Obama said something like that is going on, so it has to be true.

“Global capitalism seems to create “bubbles” that devastate the lives of millions of people.”

So you see, global capitalism is kind of a fuzzy thing after all. The capitalism system may appear to be very concrete. It seems to create “bubbles” that devastate the lives of millions of people. It seems to demand that politicians turn over trillions of dollars in public resources. It appears to determine who will win elective office. It all must be a cruel optical illusion. After all, who are you going to believe, Obama or your lying eyes?

“If protesting ‘won’t make much of a difference’ it must be because the president already knows he won’t be listening.”

Obama always says such nice things. Despite telling citizens that they shouldn’t bother protesting because he never did, and after all he was a community organizer, he also said they have a right to waste their time [2]. “One of the great things about the United States is you can speak your mind.”

For a moment there it seemed that speaking one’s mind was problematic to say the least. The president doesn’t think that protesting global capitalism is necessary, because it is so fuzzy and so warm and isn’t the cause of any problems, but what the hell. Knock yourself out if you want. Go ahead and waste time marching if you having nothing else to do with your life.

The Pittsburgh protests should be the last to take place during the Obama presidency. If protesting “won’t make much of a difference” it must be because the president already knows he won’t be listening. Why bother protesting when powerful people let it be known that they aren’t at all impressed in the first place. The point of marching is to make political demands, but if the target of the demand couldn’t care less, well, figure it out for yourself.

It is wonderful that Barack Obama is president. Now we know what we should and should not bother doing. We shouldn’t blame capitalism because it doesn’t really have anything to do with us, and it is really nice, too. Thank you very much Mr. President. You set us straight once and for all.

Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgandaReport.com.

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-obama-knows-best

Links:

[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009909200322

[2] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090925/ap_on_bi_ge/g20_summit

[3] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-obama-knows-best

By BAR executive editor Glen Ford  [print_link]

President Obama attempts to depict proponents of Medicare for all as lefty health care “extremists.” But that’s precisely the kind of “robust” public plan favored by two-thirds of Americans, according to a recent poll. Obama is to the Right of the people, and the GOP is off the map.

“Most people favor a public option that is a lot more “robust” than anything the Congress is offering.”

Despite the infamous Max Baucus Senate committee’s long-anticipated rejection of even a fig leaf of a public health care “option,” public opinion remains remarkably firm in support of allowing everyone access to a comprehensive government health plan. A New York Times/CBS News survey last week provided the best polling evidence in recent months that most people favor a public option that is a lot more “robust” than anything the Congress is offering, aside from straight-up single payer.

The poll once again confirms that something very much like single payer remains an idea whose time has come. After all these month’s of the Obama Administration’s attempts to shrivel into near nothingness the very concept of health care “reform,” and despite the mad howlings of Republicans about the evils of “socialized medicine,” two-thirds of the American people still support a Medicare-like government health care plan. Unlike some recent surveys, the language of the pollsters’ question was straightforward and unambiguous:

“Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans?”

That is the definition of a very “robust” public health care option. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they were in favor.

“Americans overwhelmingly endorse expanding Medicare to all who want it.”

It’s a pity that the New York Times and CBS News neglected to ask how the public feels about a full-blown single payer plan, which has for years commanded strong majorities. But the poll does show conclusively that Americans overwhelmingly endorse expanding Medicare to all who want it – and let the private insurers sink or swim on their own.

Still, it is a wonderment that, with all the disinformation from the Hard Right, and almost a year of backroom dealing, backstabbing and dissembling from President Obama and other corporate Democrats, who have mangled reform into a giant subsidy for the privateers, the people still know what they want: Medicare for all, at the very least.

HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All single payer bill – but the measure is anathema to President Obama, who spent most of his energies marginalizing Conyers and his allies in the early months of the administration. Obama has consistently (and viciously) tried to depict single payers and their “robust” fellow travelers as the “extremist” lefty mirror images of rightwing “tea-baggers.” Yet at the end of the day, the public center of gravity on health care remains situated in the political realm of the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Obama is way off to the Right somewhere, in the general vicinity of his soul mate Sen. Baucus, whom the president early on empowered as his health care torchbearer (more like fire-quencher).

“The ‘robust’ public option does not exist in any practical sense.”

The NYT/CBS poll shows the public is not in the least confused about what it wants from the president and the congress on the health care front. Rather, they are befuddled about what Obama wants (55 percent say he has not clearly explained himself), and near-totally up in the air about what the Republicans want (76 percent don’t understand the GOP’s position). The more the people learn about both, the less they’ll like either of them.

Which brings me to the most uplifting aspect of the poll: It is the best recent evidence that Obama has not succeeded in narrowing public perceptions of the scope of health care “reform” to fit his own puny, corporate-vetted positions. The real reform genie is permanently out of the bottle, and he is quite “robust.”

Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .

Dateline: September 14, 2009

Going to the Root—

Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

By ROBERT JENSEN

JOURNALISM SCHOOLS HAVE MUCH IN COMMON with the mainstream news media they traditionally serve. As the business model for conventional corporate journalism collapses and digital technologies reshape the media landscape, journalism schools struggle with parallel problems around curricula and personnel. As I begin my third decade of teaching journalism, I hear more and more students doubting the relevance of journalism schools — for good reasons. The best of our students are worried not just about whether they can find a job after graduation but also whether those jobs will allow them to contribute to shaping a decent future for a world on the brink.

Can journalism and journalism education be relevant as it becomes increasing clear that the political, economic, and social systems that structure our world are failing us on all counts? Do these institutions have the capacity to see past the problems of falling ad revenues and outdated curricula, and struggle to understand the crises of our age? Can journalists and journalism educators find the courage to grapple with these challenges? The question isn’t whether journalism and education are important in a democratic society but whether the institutions in which those two endeavors traditionally have been carried out can adapt — not only to the specific changes in that industry, but to that world in crisis.

My answer is a tentative “yes, but” — only if both enterprises jettison the illusions of neutrality that have hampered their ability to monitor the centers of power for citizens and model real critical thinking for students.

Journalism’s business problems provide an opportunity for journalism education to remake itself, which should start with a declaration of independence from the mainstream media and a renunciation of the corporate media’s allegiances to the existing power structure. Our only hope is in getting radical, going to the root of the problems.

Toward that end, I proposed a new mission statement to my faculty colleagues in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. I argued that by stating bluntly the nature of the crises we face in today’s world and breaking with our longstanding subordination to the industry, we could offer an exciting alternative to students who don’t want to repeat the failures of our generation.

It quickly became clear that while some colleagues agreed with some aspects of the statement below, only a handful would endorse it as a mission statement. Some disagreed with my assessment of the crises we face, while others thought it politically ill-advised to criticize the industry and corporate power so directly. But nothing in that discussion dissuaded me from my conclusion that if journalism education is to be relevant in the coming decades, we must change course dramatically.

So, I offer this mission statement to a broader audience as one starting point for debate about the future of journalism schools, which must be connected to a discussion about the fundamental distribution of wealth and power in the larger world. Journalism alone can’t turn around a dying culture, of course, but it can be part of the process by which a more just and sustainable alternative emerges.

Journalism for Justice/Storytelling for Sustainability: News Media Education for a New Future

Schools of journalism must recognize that our work goes forward in a society facing multiple crises — political and cultural, economic and ecological. These crises are not the product of temporary downturns but evidence of a permanent decline if the existing systems and structures of power continue on their present trajectory.

These failing systems produce too little equality within the human family and too much devastation in the larger ecosystem. We face a world that is profoundly unjust in the distribution of wealth and power, and fundamentally unsustainable in our use of the ecological resources of the planet. The task of journalism is to deepen our understanding of these challenges and communicate that understanding to the public to foster the meaningful dialogue necessary for real democracy.

The best traditions of journalism are based in resistance to the illegitimate structures of authority at the heart of our problems. From Thomas Paine to Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Wells and Ida Tarbell, the most revered journalists have had the courage to take a stand for ordinary people and against arrogant concentrations of power. But today, commercial journalism is constrained by diversionary and deceptive claims to neutrality, leaving journalists trapped in a corporate-defined and -directed subservience to the status quo. Increasingly we live with a journalism that rarely speaks truth to power and routinely echoes the platitudes of the powerful. Even when journalists raise critical questions, too often it is within the parameters set by the wealthy and their political allies.

In a world in which an increasingly predatory global corporate economy leaves half the population living on less than $2.50 a day, can we ignore the call for justice? In a world in which all indicators of the health of the ecosystem that makes our lives possible are in dramatic decline, can we ignore the cry of the living world? Mass media have a moral responsibility to produce journalism for justice and storytelling for sustainability.

As the journalism industry faces a broken business model and struggles for solutions, there are great opportunities to reshape journalism to serve people and the planet, following the traditions of the spirited independent journalists of the past and present. The curriculum for this should not only offer training for a job but also inspire a collective search for the values and ideas that can animate a just and sustainable society. We invite you to join us in this exciting time for journalism. By remembering the inspirational lessons of our past and facing honestly the problems of the present, we help make possible a new future in which justice and sustainability define not just our dreams but our lives.

A note to critics: Some might argue that this mission statement threatens to “politicize the classroom.” This kind of complaint is based on the naïve notion that a curriculum in the humanities and social sciences can be magically constructed outside of, and unaffected by, the distribution of wealth and power in the larger society. The choices that go into all teaching — from the identification of relevant problems, to the selection of appropriate materials, to the analyses offered in lectures — are based on claims about the nature of a good life and a good society. The important questions are whether instructors are open with students about how those choices are made and can justify those choices on intellectual grounds. In other words, there is a politics to all teaching, but good teaching is more than the assertion of one’s politics.

When a department constructs a curriculum that supports the existing distribution of wealth and power, challenges rarely arise. Perhaps the most politicized departments on any college campus are in the business school, where the highly ideological assertions of corporate capitalism are rarely challenged and the curriculum is built on that ideology. In a healthy educational institution with real academic freedom, we should encourage a diversity of approaches to complex questions. This mission statement identifies problems and suggests we consider the systemic and structural roots of those problems without asserting simplistic solutions. Such an approach honors the best traditions in journalism and scholarship, offering a path for struggling with difficult questions rather than dictating simplistic answers.

SOMEBODY HAS TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT THESE PEOPLE—

The ACORN I Know

By dswanson – Posted on 25 September 2009  ||| [print_link]

By David Swanson

D. Swanson

If someone told you that a bunch of low-income people, most of them African-American or Latino, most of them women, most of them elderly, had been victimized by a predatory mortgage lender that stripped them of much of their equity or of their entire homes, you might not be surprised. But if I told you that these women and men had gotten together and, after three years of work, brought the nation’s largest high-cost lender to its knees, forced it to sell out to a foreign company, and won back a half a billion dollars of what had been taken from them—one of the largest consumer settlements ever—you’d probably ask me what country this had happened in. Surely it couldn’t have been in the United States of the Second Gilded Age, the land of unbridled corporate power and radical government activism on behalf of the rich and the greedy.

Yet, it was. These victims identified a problem and named it “predatory lending” in the late 1990s. Their campaign to reform Household International (also known as Household Finance and as Beneficial) played out from 2001 to 2003, concluding with a settlement that includes a ban on badmouthing the company. That’s why more people haven’t heard about this. The families who fought back and defeated Household are barred from bragging about it or teaching the lessons they learned, because that would require recounting the damage that Household did to homes and neighborhoods. These families are members of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

I was ACORN’s communications coordinator during much of the Household campaign, but left before it ended. No one has asked me not to tell this story.

In low-income minority neighborhoods in the United States, what little wealth there is, is in home equity. Home equity makes up 74.9 percent of the net wealth for Hispanics in the bottom two income quintiles (0-40 percent) and 78.7 percent of the net wealth for African Americans in the second income quintile (20-40 percent). There have been gains in minority home ownership over the past few decades, in part as a result of the work by community groups like ACORN and National People’s Action to force banks to make loans in these communities, but the home ownership is fragile and not protected by additional savings. Lenders in the past decade have focused on stripping away equity and community groups have been forced to focus on keeping out loans that are worse than no loans at all.

Most high-cost loans are refinance loans. Too often they are marketed aggressively and deceptively, including through live- checks in the mail that result in very high-cost loans that the lender will be only too happy to refinance into a new mortgage. Often these loans are made with excessive, sometimes variable, interest rates, outrageously high fees, and fees financed into the loans so that the borrower pays interest on them and often is not told about them. They are made with bogus products built in, on which the borrower also pays interest. Hidden balloon payments force repeated refinancings for additional fees each time. Mandatory arbitration clauses attempt to prevent borrowers from taking lenders to court. The practice of loaning more than the value of a home traps borrowers in loans they cannot refinance with a responsible lender. Consolidation of additional debts further decreases equity, placing the home at greater risk. Quiet omission of taxes and insurance from a mortgage that previously included those charges results in a crisis when yearly bills arrive.

Predatory lenders turn the usual logic of lending upside down. They make their money by intentionally making loans that the borrowers will be unable to repay. They charge fees for each refinancing until finally seizing the house. Fannie Mae has estimated that as many as half of all borrowers in subprime (high-cost) loans could have qualified for a lower cost mortgage.

High-cost loans are not just made to people with poor credit. They’re often made to people who have poor banking services in their neighborhoods.

ACORN members don’t take abuse of their neighborhoods lying down, and Household was a leading cause of the rows of vacant houses appearing in ACORN neighborhoods in the 1990s. ACORN launched a campaign to reform Household that included numerous strategies. One, an ACORN stand-by, was direct action. Repeatedly, ACORN members in numerous cities around the country simultaneously protested in Household offices to demand reform. At the same time, ACORN was working to pass anti-predatory lending legislation in local and state governments and Congress. ACORN members made sure that in each case the victims testifying were victims of Household and that Household’s abuses were highlighted. When ACORN released major reports on predatory lending, the examples included were always from Household.

ACORN also worked with the Coalition for Responsible Wealth to advance a shareholder resolution that would have tied Household’s executives’ compensation to ending its predatory lending. In 2001 Household held its shareholders meeting in an out-of-the-way suburb of Tampa, Florida. A crowd of ACORN members was there with shark suits and shark balloons to protest.

The resolution won 5 percent. Over the next year, ACORN pressured state pension funds and other shareholders. Household held its 2002 meeting an hour and a half from the nearest airport in rural Kentucky. Members made the trip by car from all over the country. The protest may have been the biggest thing the town of London, Kentucky had seen in years. The resolution won 30 percent.

As a result, various local and state governments threatened to divest from Household. ACORN also put pressure on stores like Best Buy that used Household credit cards. At the same time, ACORN Housing Corporation was assisting many Household victims in either refinancing out of their Household loans or at least canceling some of the rip-off services built into their loans, such as credit insurance. ACORN was also getting the word out to stay away from Household.

ACORN wrote up numerous accounts of Household predatory loans and took them to the attorney generals in state after state urging investigations. ACORN similarly pressured federal regulators to act. ACORN assisted borrowers in filing a number of class-action suits against Household targeting those of its practices that were clearly illegal even under existing law. They let Wall Street analysts know what Household stood to lose from these lawsuits, as well as from various reforms that Household periodically announced in its attempt to hold off the pressure.

But ACORN members never let up. They protested again and again at Household offices and held press conferences in front of homes about to be lost to Household. They protested the secondary market that was putting up capital for these predatory loans and they held a major protest at the trade group that lobbied in Washington for Household and its fellow sharks. Then, in the summer of 2002, in the wealthy suburbs north of Chicago, victims of Household from around the country poured out of busses by the thousands onto the lawns of the board members and the CEO of Household. They knocked on doors and spoke to those who had hurt them from a distance. When the police made them leave, ACORN members plastered “Wanted” posters all over the neighborhood telling the board members’ neighbors what crimes the Household executives were guilty of.

Through all of this, we worked the media. I kept a database of victims’ stories and contact information and put them in touch with reporters whenever the reporters were willing to tell not just the victimization story but also the story of fighting back. We generated several hundred print articles and several hundred TV and radio stories about Household’s predatory lending practices. We worked the small neighborhood papers, flyers in churches, posters on walls. We provoked lengthy articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times , and Forbes Magazine . We kept up an endless barrage in the trade press: the American Banker, National Mortgage News, etc.

A handful of ACORN staff people with great expertise and unrelenting effort organized thousands of members to drive this campaign until Household agreed to pay victims $489 million through the 50 states attorneys general, and later agreed to pay millions more through ACORN, as well as to reform its practices.

This campaign was an example of what can be done if enough different angles are pursued at once and the company ripping you off is put on the defensive and constantly hit with the unexpected. This campaign increased the size and power of ACORN to effect future progressive change. This is good news for low-income neighborhoods, but bad news for Wells Fargo, the predatory lender next on ACORN’s list.

DAVID SWANSON is a longtime activist for social justice. He has worked hard in recent years to obtain an impeachment against the Bush camarilla.