. . . because much of the content relates both to Washington, D.C., and "outside the beltway" -- the heartland, specifically Iowa -- and because after going from Iowa to Washington via Texas and California I subsequently returned, From DC 2 Iowa.
I'm angry. Really angry. Why do we take this? Why aren't Americans marching on Washington by the millions?
What the sickness industry and our puppet politicians have been demonstrating about the current operation of politics and "health care" in America is shameful. When it's all over, and President Obama proclaims the outcome "a good start," we will all continue to pay more and more, while getting less and less, year after year. The campaign contributions will increase, as will the compensation packages for the sickness industry's CEOs and the proportion of our premiums going to "administration" (already roughly 10 times those for Medicare/Medicaid, or what others countries pay).
Hopefully, after it's over, this shameful chapter of American politics and corporate control will be written up and made required reading for every school child and college student. What a lesson in the "decline and fall of the American empire" (to borrow from Gibbon's title); the control of our mass media; the revolving door phenomenon; the role of lobbyists; the power and use of deliberately misleading industry "talking points" by "their" elected officials and media outlets; the impact of campaign contributions on public policy; the price we pay for our failure to have public funding of campaigns; the willingness of Wall Street, corporate executives and elected officials to knowingly harm the health of the American people (as with the environment, or any other public good) in their drive to increase profits and their own personal power and wealth.
The potential list of references for these assertions of mine is endless, so I'll just provide three or four.
Of course, this story was published after, and possibly as an effort to regain some of the paper's prior reputation before, the publisher was shamed.
How shamed? For the role of the mainstream media in the sickness industry's efforts see, Nicholas Johnson, "Rare Washington Post Apology Misses Mark," July 5, 2009. In case you missed the story, the Post's publisher was caught selling access to her reporters and editors, along with the Obama officials and legislators to whom she has the power to issue command performances, for small, off-the-record dinners at her home. The price tag: $25,000 per sickness industry lobbyist per dinner, or $250,000 for sickness industry lobbyists who feel they'd need a series of such opportunities to guarantee defeat of the "public option." So much for the days and heroes of Watergate fame.
The Nation has reported the formula for calculating how large a campaign contribution it takes to get a Democrat to oppose a "public option" in the bill (notwithstanding the fact that 76% of their constituents want it). Sebastian Jones, "Noted: Health and Wealth,"The Nation, July 13, 2009 ("[T]he White House . . . starts at a significant disadvantage, perhaps as large as $1.38 billion. According to the Center for Responsive Politics . . . that's the sum that five industries -- pharmaceuticals/health products, insurance, health services/HMOs, hospitals/nursing homes and health professionals -- spent lobbying lawmakers . . .. Beyond lobbying, hundreds of millions have been spent . . . in campaign contributions . . .. So what does all this money buy? According to Nate Silver . . . the low sum of $60,000 in campaign contributions over the past six years would cut in half the odds of a centrist Democrat supporting [a "public option" in] the plan").
Last week I wrote in the Des Moines Register: "The for-profit marketplace does some things well. Health care's not one of them. We pay more while covering fewer and getting less, with more rapidly increasing costs, than any country on Earth. Insurance companies create the ever-increasing profits Wall Street demands by ever-increasing premiums, denying coverage to some and the legitimate claims of others." See, Nicholas Johnson, "Why GOP Fears Meaningful Health Care," July 8, 2009.
A confession: The statement about Wall Street's involvement, increasing premiums and denial of coverage and claims, was intuition. It just seemed to me when I wrote that it was probably what is going on.
His name is Wendell Potter, a former senior vice president of communications for Cigna, the fourth largest health insurance company in the country -- the single live guest on "Bill Moyers Journal," PBS, July 10, 2009. Here is the the main Moyers' Web site, and the page for the show with Potter (both with lots of additional, related, material and links to more).
It's an absolutely appalling tale he has to tell about Wall Street's pressure on the companies, the companies' refusal to cover some and denying the claims of others, the lobbying efforts, the deliberate misrepresentation of the issues, and the full bore attempt to discredit and marginalize Michael Moore's documentary, "Sicko" -- about which Potter acknowledged, "I thought that he [Moore] hit the nail on the head with his movie." For some reason, this portion of the Moyers' interview was deleted from the PBS and Moyers' sites; it can, however, be found here.
You owe it to yourself to take a look at the portion of the interview that PBS/Moyers does make available, and to check out the other information and links from their sites.
This is a tragic, despicable, shameful story in the history of American capitalism and politics that we all need to understand. _____________
* Why do I put this blog ID at the top of the entry, when you know full well what blog you're reading? Because there are a number of Internet sites that, for whatever reason, simply take the blog entries of others and reproduce them as their own without crediting the source. I don't mind the flattering attention, but would appreciate acknowledgment as the source, even if I have to embed it myself. -- Nicholas Johnson
What You've Always Wanted to Ask About the Financial Collapse Except for Your Fear As to What the Answer Might Be (brought to you by FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com*)
Since June 23, 2006, I have written 639 entries for this blog.
Never before have I ever said something was a "must read."
Nor am I now saying that some creation of mine is a "must read."
But what I am prepared to say is that what I am going to tell you about, and encourage you to read for yourself -- or watch as an online video -- is a must read for all Americans.
No issues over the past year -- indeed, over the past 70-plus years -- come close to the significance of those surrounding the economic harm we're all now suffering, brought on by what turns out to be deliberate, knowing, criminal fraud perpetrated by the so-called leaders of our financial and political establishment.
This is something every American has an obligation to understand -- as best we can, given the efforts of those responsible to cover up the facts (notwithstanding their professed commitment to "transparency") and the seeming lack of motivation by the establishment media (as with the onset of the second Iraq War) to investigate and report what's going on. For our sake and that of the future generations who will be paying for these crimes, we need to know what happened -- historically and recently -- that brought us to where we are, who played what roles, why they're not even being replaced let alone prosecuted, and what's going on now in Washington and Wall Street.
For those facts turn out to be far more startling and worse than anything I've even imagined, let alone actually asserted in any of the 47 blog entries I've uploaded on this subject over the past eight months (and are linked from the bottom of this entry).
What I'm referring to is Bill Moyers' interview with William K. Black, broadcast by PBS on the April 3, 2009, "Bill Moyers Journal." Here is the video, and a transcript, of that interview.
Only a smattering of brief excerpts are going to be reproduced here, but they should be enough to prompt you to want to watch, or read, the entire exchange.
First off, just who is this William K. Black? Here are some excerpts from his Web page at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law (where you will find more, if you're interested):
Associate Professor of Economics and Law; A.B. (University of Michigan); J.D. (University of Michigan Law School); Ph.D. (University of California at Irvine) . . .
Bill Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
He was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Senior Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. His regulatory career is profiled in Chapter 2 of Professor Riccucci's book Unsung Heroes (Georgetown U. Press: 1995), Chapter 4 (“The Consummate Professional: Creating Leadership”) of Professor Bowman, et al’s book The Professional Edge (M.E. Sharpe 2004), and Joseph M. Tonon’s article: “The Costs of Speaking Truth to Power: How Professionalism Facilitates Credible Communication” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 2008 18(2):275-295.
In short, Black is not just a member of cable television's shouting, "chattering class." In terms of education and experience, he knows what he's talking about.
Here's how Bill Moyers introduced him:
For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s. . . .
Bill Black was in New York this week for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists gathered to ask the question, "How do they get away with it?" Well, no one has asked that question more often than Bill Black. . . .
During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black — kill him dead." . . .
Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."
Here are some excerpts from the interview. To give the text a little more appearance of organization, and to find what you may be looking for, I have put in bold "headings" of sorts, either emphasizing their words or [bracketed inserts] of my own.
BILL MOYERS: How did they do it? . . .
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, the way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road.
BILL MOYERS: So you're suggesting, saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: How do they get away with it? I mean, what about their own checks and balances in the company? What about their accounting divisions?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: All of those checks and balances report to the CEO, so if the CEO goes bad, all of the checks and balances are easily overcome. And the art form is not simply to defeat those internal controls, but to suborn them, to turn them into your greatest allies. And the bonus programs are exactly how you do that. . . .
BILL MOYERS: Why did they call them liars' loans? . . .
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets. . . . [T]hey were also called, in the trade, ninja loans . . . no income verification, no job verification, no asset verification. . . . One company produced as many losses as the entire Savings and Loan debacle. . . . IndyMac specialized in making liars' loans. In 2006 alone, it sold $80 billion dollars of liars' loans to other companies. $80 billion. . . . Even Ronald Reagan, you know, said, "Trust, but verify." They just gutted the verification process. We know that will produce enormous fraud, under economic theory, criminology theory, and two thousand years of life experience.
BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that these complex instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them? [NJ: And the role of AAA ratings.]
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad.
And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."
BILL MOYERS: So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right, and the investment banker that — we call it pooling — puts together these bad mortgages, these liars' loans, and creates the toxic waste of these derivatives. All of them do that. And then they sell it to the world and the world just thinks because it has a triple-A rating it must actually be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80 percent losses on these things, because of course they, in reality, are toxic waste. . . .
BILL MOYERS: Is there a law against liars' loans?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not directly, but there, of course, many laws against fraud, and liars' loans are fraudulent. . . . because they're not going to be repaid and because they had false representations. They involve deceit, which is the essence of fraud.
BILL MOYERS: Why is it so hard to prosecute? Why hasn't anyone been brought to justice over this? [NJ: And FBI warning 2004, but radical reduction in FBI investigators today.]
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they didn't even begin to investigate the major lenders until the market had actually collapsed, which is completely contrary to what we did successfully in the Savings and Loan crisis, right? Even while the institutions were reporting they were the most profitable savings and loan in America, we knew they were frauds. And we were moving to close them down. . . .
[T]he FBI publicly warned, in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that they were going to make sure that they didn't let that happen. . . [T]his crisis is . . . certainly 100 times worse than the Savings and Loan crisis [and yet there are only] one-fifth as many FBI agents [available to investigate the crimes involved in it] as worked the Savings and Loan crisis. . . .
[NJ: Role/responsibility of President Clinton, Summers, Rubin, Senator Graham]
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There were two really big things, under the Clinton administration. One, they got rid of the law that came out of the real-world disasters of the Great Depression. We learned a lot of things in the Great Depression. And one is we had to separate what's called commercial banking from investment banking. That's the Glass-Steagall law. But we thought we were much smarter, supposedly. So we got rid of that law, and that was bipartisan.
And the other thing is we passed a law, because there was a very good regulator, Brooksley Born, that everybody should know about and probably doesn't. She tried to do the right thing to regulate one of these exotic derivatives that you're talking about. We call them C.D.F.S. And Summers, Rubin, and Phil Graham came together to say not only will we block this particular regulation. We will pass a law that says you can't regulate. And it's this type of derivative that is most involved in the AIG scandal. AIG all by itself, cost the same as the entire Savings and Loan debacle. . . .
BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, "contracts, sacred." But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.
BILL MOYERS: The cover up? . . .
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is . . . covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine. . . .
Geithner . . . was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. . . . as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is responsible for regulating most of the largest bank holding companies in America. . . .
Until you get the facts, it's harder to blow all this up. And, of course, the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts . . . about how bad the condition of the banks is. So, as long as I keep the old CEO who caused the problems, is he going to go vigorously around finding the problems? Finding the frauds? . . . Taking away people's bonuses? . . .
[NJ: What's wrong with the Obama Administration approach? Refusing to obey the law.]
WILLIAM K. BLACK: . . . [1] [F]irst, the policies are substantively bad.
[2] Second, I think they completely lack integrity.
[3] Third, they violate the rule of law. This is being done just like Secretary Paulson did it. In violation of the law. We adopted a law after the Savings and Loan crisis, called the Prompt Corrective Action Law. And it requires them to close these institutions. And they're refusing to obey the law. . . .
BILL MOYERS: So, Paulson could have done this? Geithner could do this?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not could. Was mandated--
BILL MOYERS: By the law.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: By the law. . . .
BILL MOYERS: What the reason they give for not doing it?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They ignore it. And nobody calls them on it. . . .
[At a minimum] where's the Pecora investigation? . . . The Great Depression, we said, "Hey, we have to learn the facts. What caused this disaster, so that we can take steps, like pass the Glass-Steagall law, that will prevent future disasters?" Where's our investigation?
What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, "Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking. Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. And here, we've got a double tragedy. It isn't just that we are failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. We're failing to learn from the successes of the past.
[NJ: Best practices; worst practices]
WILLIAM K. BLACK: In the Savings and Loan debacle, we developed excellent ways for dealing with the frauds, and for dealing with the failed institutions. And for 15 years after the Savings and Loan crisis, didn't matter which party was in power, the U.S. Treasury Secretary would fly over to Tokyo and tell the Japanese, "You ought to do things the way we did in the Savings and Loan crisis, because it worked really well. Instead you're covering up the bank losses, because you know, you say you need confidence. And so, we have to lie to the people to create confidence. And it doesn't work. You will cause your recession to continue and continue." And the Japanese call it the lost decade. That was the result.
So, now we get in trouble, and what do we do? We adopt the Japanese approach of lying about the assets. And you know what? It's working just as well as it did in Japan.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely. . . .
BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone . . . Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn't want us to know that. And it was only Congressional pressure, and not Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner, but Congressional pressure on AIG. . . .
[NJ: What can we do? Why not keep CEOs in place?]
WILLIAM K. BLACK: We need some chairmen or chairwomen . . . in Congress, to hold the necessary hearings. And we can blast this out.
But if you leave the failed CEOs in place, it isn't just that they're terrible business people, though they are. It isn't just that they lack integrity, though they do. Because they were engaged in these frauds. But they're not going to disclose the truth about the assets.
BILL MOYERS: And we have to know that [the truth about the assets], in order to know what?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: To know everything. To know who committed the frauds. Whose bonuses we should recover. How much the assets are worth. How much they should be sold for. Is the bank insolvent, such that we should resolve it in this way? It's the predicate, right? You need to know the facts to make intelligent decisions. And they're deliberately leaving in place the people that caused the problem, because they don't want the facts. And this is not new. The Reagan Administration's central priority, at all times, during the Savings and Loan crisis, was covering up the losses. . . .
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, and this week in New York, at this conference, you described this as more than a financial crisis. You called it a moral crisis.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because it is a fundamental lack of integrity. But also because, if you look back at crises, an economist who is also a presidential appointee, as a regulator in the Savings and Loan industry, right here in New York, Larry White, wrote a book about the Savings and Loan crisis. And he said, you know, one of the most interesting questions is why so few people engaged in fraud? Because objectively, you could have gotten away with it. But only about ten percent of the CEOs, engaged in fraud. So, 90 percent of them were restrained by ethics and integrity. So, far more than law or by F.B.I. agents, it's our integrity that often prevents the greatest abuses. And what we had in this crisis, instead of the Savings and Loan, is the most elite institutions in America engaging or facilitating fraud. . . .
BILL MOYERS: It was relatively a handful of people.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: And their ideologies, which swept away regulation. So, in the example, regulation means that cheaters don't prosper. So, instead of being bad for capitalism, it's what saves capitalism. "Honest purveyors prosper" is what we want. And you need regulation and law enforcement to be able to do this. The tragedy of this crisis is it didn't need to happen at all. . . .
[NJ: Black's four-point plan.]
Now, going forward,
[1] get rid of the people that have caused the problems. That's a pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers, that caused the problems? That's facially nuts. That's our current system. So stop that current system.
[2] We're hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions, right?
[3] Follow what works instead of what's failed.
[4] Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they've had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks. And by the way, the folks who are the better regulators, they paid their taxes. So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker.
[End of transcript excerpts.]
Following this interview there was at least one person, a woman Black refers to only as "a commentator," who questioned Black's charge that Paulson and Geithner have violated the requirements of The Prompt Corrective Action Law. He answers at length in a statement (which at least I find persuasive) on the "Bill Moyers Journal" site, William K. Black on The Prompt Corrective Action Law. Here is a very brief sampling excerpt:
Before the legal minutia, let’s not lose sight of the policy issue
To review the bidding to date: there is a consensus among economists and white-collar criminologists (and senior regulators that have successfully resolved prior crises such as William Seidman, Edwin Gray, and Paul Volcker) that failing banks should be placed promptly into receivership if they cannot recapitalize. So the fundamental question, even if the PCA law was never passed, is what can the nation do to end the disastrous Paulson/Geithner policy of covering up the largest banks’ losses and leaving the CEOs and senior officers that caused their failures, often through fraud, in power? How many of those of us that voted for Mr. Obama believed that they were voting for a continuation of Bush’s failed financial regulatory policies? Given the terrible cost to taxpayers during the early years of the S&L debacle of “forbearance” for failed S&Ls, the horrific failure of Japan’s embrace of the cover up of its bank losses, and the great success of the vigorous reregulation of the S&L industry why would we adopt the failed strategy instead of the proven success? The way we reregulated the S&L industry was not simply an economic success, it was vital to restoring at least some integrity. We insisted on honest accounting, used prompt receiverships, and rooted out the control frauds. This led to over 1000 felony convictions related to the debacle – the greatest criminal justice success in history against elite white-collar criminals.
On to the legal specifics
The commentator argues that the PCA law does not mandate receiverships, citing exceptions to the mandatory language. None of the exceptions apply in the circumstances we are discussing and neither the Bush nor the Obama administration purports to be following such exceptions. Instead, what is occurring is a coverup designed to evade the PCA that relies on abusive accounting to hide the banks’ losses that arose due to mortgage and accounting fraud. There is a certain awful symmetry to thinking that the cure for accounting fraud is greater accounting fraud countenanced, even arguably mandated, by the government. Governmental abuse of accounting makes it far harder to prosecute bank officials that enriched themselves through accounting fraud.
* Why do I put this blog ID at the top of the entry, when you know full well what blog you're reading? Because there are a number of Internet sites that, for whatever reason, simply take the blog entries of others and reproduce them as their own without crediting the source. I don't mind the flattering attention, but would appreciate acknowledgment as the source -- even if I have to embed it myself. -- Nicholas Johnson
"The Story of Stuff," the Alternative, Government by Campaign Contribution, and Population Control (brought to you by FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com*)
Note: Since writing this, a reader posted a comment (see below) taking issue with the accuracy of "The Story of Stuff" video (embedded below). Indeed, "taking issue" is an understatement. He is "appalled" that I am "enthralled" by a video that is "beyond belief" and "so full of patent falsehoods" as to be little more than a "load of neo-Marxist garbage."
The comment was posted here on May 14. By coincidence, the very next evening Bill Moyers led one of his "Journal" segments with an excerpt from that very same "Story of Stuff" video, prior to his interview with the New York Times former science reporter, Daniel Goleman. The Web site for this segment, which contains a link to the entire "Story of Stuff," explains,
"Goleman's latest book is ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE: HOW KNOWING THE HIDDEN IMPACTS OF WHAT WE BUY CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING. The book argues that new information technologies will create 'radical transparency,' allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made — changing everything for the better."
The comment on this blog entry does not cite any specific "patent falsehood," nor would I research and respond with any confirming sources of data if it had. I'll leave that to those who, like Goleman, write books rather than blog entries, or research and produce nationally-distributed television programs, like Moyers.
Of course, everyone should make an effort to be as accurate as possible in what they put into a video, such as "The Story of Stuff" -- or the videos they embed in a blog entry, as I have done.
But there is a concept in defamation law that I think is applicable by analogy in this instance. It is referred to as "the sting of the charges." It goes to the question of the "truth" defense. For example, if the plaintiff alleges that he was defamed by the defendant's charge that the plaintiff embezzled "over $100,000 from the bank," because in fact he only embezzled $87,000, the plaintiff can still use the "truth" defense because the inaccuracy did not diminish the fact that "the sting of the charges" (embezzlement of a significant amount) was true.
What "The Story of Stuff" and Goleman and Moyers and perhaps hundreds of others with and without scientific credentials seem to be suggesting is that there are economic, ecological, and epidemiological externalities that flow from our consumer consumption. They take into account the extraction process that obtains the basic natural resources, the manufacturing process, transportation to our stores, and the ultimate disposal of the product and the packaging in which it comes. As the story of these consequences gets around, governmental and personal decisions can better take them into account -- for the benefit of ourselves and future generations.
Debates about details aside, it seems to me "the sting of the charges" is something to which we need pay attention.
-- N.J., May 16, 2009
_______________
A week or so ago I posted a blog entry called, "Don't Buy Stuff," March 6, 2009. It addressed the values of paying cash, my experience doing so with automobiles, and it included the "Saturday Night Live" 2:28-minute sketch entitled "Don't Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford" ["Don't Buy Stuff: The sure-fire way to get out of debt," NBC Saturday Night Live, Season 31, Episode 12, aired February 4, 2006].
If you missed that blog entry you might want to go back and check it out, along with that "Saturday Night Live" sketch.
Meanwhile, today I'd like to continue the theme with a little more in-depth look at "The Story of Stuff."
The Story of Stuff
A week ago Tom Friedman asked, "What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: 'No more.'” Thomas L. Friedman, "The Inflection is Near?"New York Times, March 7, 2009 [hard copy version, March 8, 2009, p. WK12, New York edition]. The entire column is very much worth reading.
His is a profound and fundamental question being asked, and discussed, around the world today as the friends and beneficiaries of bankers and financiers, who are now running Washington, blindly continue on with their multi-trillion-dollar giveaway of our grandchildren's money in a failing effort to reconstruct the capitalist, consumer economy that enabled greed to fuel a drive off the cliff -- and will undoubtedly succeed in doing so again if we merely rebuild what we had before.
"The Story of Stuff" is a video narrated by Annie Leonard and made possible by the Tides Foundation, Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption, and Free Range Studios; see also http://www.storyofstuff.com/. My thanks to Trina L.C. Sonnenberg, TLC Promotions, Internet Marketing Maven, for bringing it to my attention.
The video is suitable for all ages -- and if you're a teacher of a subject as to which it would be relevant (whether K-12 or college) you might want to think about it as a discussion-starter for your class. Although it runs 21:19 I think you'll find it very much worth your time (as a summary of what would otherwise have taken you an entire semester in a classroom!) -- entertaining in its own way as well as educational. It contains occasional observations some might consider ideological -- causing you either to cheer or sneer depending on your orientation -- but they are few and far between and seemed to me mostly just factual.
India: The Alternative
NPR's "Morning Edition" had a segment this morning that provides one illustration of how another country is faring, and why, during this global economic collapse. "Why India's Economy Fares Better Than Others," NPR, Morning Edition, March 16, 2009 ("Steve Inskeep talks with Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics about how India [is] . . . significantly less affected than the U.S. and Europe").
It's as if the country's billion people had watched "The Story of Stuff" video and decided to begin practicing its clear implications.
India hasn't had a banking problem because it decided "government is the solution, not the problem," and nationalized all its banks long before our bankers became "thieves in suits."
It hasn't bought into the idea that global trade is good for everybody, and let its companies outsource, go offshore, and otherwise destroy jobs, as we have with NAFTA in the name of increased corporate profit. It only exports about 20% of its production -- comparied to some 40-50% in China -- so it doesn't feel as much hurt when global trade declines.
And why haven't its farmers been hurt economically? Because, for whatever reason, India has bought into the idea ecologists have long been urging upon us: eat locally grown foods. Not only is it a way of supporting the agricultural sector, it also radically cuts back on the economic, energy, and ecological consequences of transporting foods -- often into other agricultural areas, as we do in Iowa.
The result? While the U.S. economy is now going into "negative growth" India's economy, while declining, was 9% growth annually, is now 7%, and has 5% predicted for the future.
None of this is to say that all is wonderful in India -- I presume you've seen the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" -- but it does provide a specific example of what we, too, could do if we would really take the lessons of "The Story of Stuff" to heart.
Government by Campaign Contribution
There are some feigned expressions of outrage from Washington, that those who created the problems through personal enrichment are now enriching themselves further with taxpayer-funded multi-million-dollar bonuses, but little in the way of prosecutions, or efforts to get our money back. There are expressions that "we must re-examine and improve our regulatory model so that this never happens again." But we have had this conversation before; this is the happening that is "again;" and the problem is not entirely the model, it is also the people running it -- and few to none of them seem to be being prosecuted either.
Congress has a lot of explaining to do -- after we clean out the lot of them. I've documented before how those who make campaign contributions in the $100,000 to $1,000,000 range generally get something like a 1000-to-2000-to-one return on their "investment" -- for an investment it is, and one that pays much better returns than any on Wall Street. Nicholas Johnson, "Campaigns: You Pay $4 or $4000,"Des Moines Register, July 21, 1996, p. C2.
So it comes as no surprise to me to find out that the financial community has contributed some $5 billion to Congress over the past 10 years in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses. After all, members of Congress and senators are honorable people; they don't take $5 billion from someone and then give them a poke in the eye with a sharp stick -- not if they want another $5 billion over the next 10 years. They behave as they've been behaving; they give Wall Street its $5-to-10 trillion return on its $5 billion investment. See the report, Robert Weissman and James Donahue, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," Essential Information/Consumer Education Foundation, March 2009, linked from "$5 Billion in Political Contributions Bought Wall Street Freedom from Regulation, Restraint, Report Finds," March 4, 2009, Wall Street Watch.
And Population Control?
Of course, as my son, Sherman, is constantly reminding everyone -- most recently me, by email, this morning, "It's gotten to the point where I have a hard time listening to the environmentalists and smart growth advocates. Of course I agree with most of their ideas, but I just don't see how a person/group can rant and rave about the many ways in which humans are destroying the Earth yet not even mention population control as a primary part of any solution."
I'd say what he's pointing out is "the elephant in the living room" but for the pathos: one of the many consequences of largely uncontrolled population growth is its impact on endangered species, all wildlife in general, and elephants in particular.
More on "Stuff"
As far back as 1972 I was writing about this stuff, and my stuff, in a book that still enjoys a bit of a cult following, called Test Pattern for Living. It's available as a free download from my Web site, if you're interested.
My son, Gregory, has a more current version of the theme in his new book, Put Your Life on a Diet.
And let us never forget George Carlin, 1937-2008, and his insights about our "stuff." "George Carlin Talks About 'Stuff,'" George Carlin's classic standup routine about the importance in our lives of "stuff" from his appearance at Comic Relief in 1986, from YouTube:
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* Why do I put this blog ID at the top of the entry, when you know full well what blog you're reading? Because there are a number of Internet sites that, for whatever reason, simply take the blog entries of others and reproduce them as their own without crediting the source. I don't mind the flattering attention, but would appreciate acknowledgment as the source -- even if I have to embed it myself. -- Nicholas Johnson
Note: [May 1] This blog entry was written following the Bill Moyers interview, but before Reverend Wright's appearances before the NAACP and National Press Club. If those appearances, and his other statements, were intended to exact retribution from Senator Obama by weakening his chances to be nominated and elected, I think he succeeded. If they were -- reasonably and understandably -- merely intended to respond to his critics and regain his reputation, I think he failed. (As an Indiana voter was heard to say on NPR this morning, "I'm more interested in hearing about gas prices than the rantings of that 'jerk.'") Meanwhile, this morning's Register has a column well worth reading by those still interested in better understanding the Black church in South Chicago. Marc Hansen, "Pastors like Obama's abound, black Chicago native says,"Des Moines Register, May 1, 2008.
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[April 26] I write this blog entry well knowing that there will be some who will condemn me for it -- without either reading what I write, or knowing what Jeremiah Wright actually said on the occasions from which the out-of-context excerpts were lifted for less than honorable reasons. (Of course, there's always the distinct possibility those who do read through to the end, and are more familiar with Wright than I, will also condemn me for it!)
Having known and admired Bill Moyers for over 40 years, I watched the PBS broadcast of his interview of Pastor Wright last evening with open mind. Because my wife had another commitment at that time I ended up watching it a second time, from videotape, with her. "Bill Moyers' Interview with Reverend Jeremiah Wright," Bill Moyers Journal, April 26, 2006 (with links to both a video, and a transcript, of the program).
This morning, as I was still thinking about the interview, I was suddenly reminded of a story about Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thoreau was not enthusiastic about supporting with taxes a government whose policies toward slavery and war he strongly opposed. As a result, he was jailed.
Emerson . . . criticized the imprisonment as pointless. According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?” Emerson was “out there” because he believed it was shortsighted to protest an isolated evil; society required an entire rebirth of spirituality.
Emerson missed the point of Thoreau’s protest, which was not intended to reform society but was simply an act of conscience. If we do not distinguish right from wrong, Thoreau argued that we will eventually lose the capacity to make the distinction and become, instead, morally numb.
In short, with regard to who was inside the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and who was outside, the question is not “Barack, what are you doing in there?” The question is, "What are we doing out here?”
I've attended Jesse Jackson's "church" in South Chicago, and AME churches in Iowa City and elsewhere. I keep a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King on my office wall. As an FCC commissioner and since I've greatly admired the media reform work of the United Church of Christ through its Dr. Everett Parker and the church's Office of Communications. But I've never set foot in Pastor Wright's Trinity UCC in Chicago -- and I should have. I would be the first to concede how little I really know of the history and role of the Black church in America. I am as guilty as any white male of what has been described as the most segregated hour in America: 11:00 a.m. Sunday mornings.
With that out of the way, at the outset let's put those out-of-context video excerpts of Wright's from past years back in context.
(1) The use of "God damn" in the reproduced "God damn America" excerpt was, for starters, a Biblical reference not the colloquial, use of "God damn" as an all-purpose swear word. Consider this statement of Wright from the transcript of last night's interview:
[I]f you look at the damning, condemning, if you look at Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn't bless everything. God does not bless gang-bangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs that hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. God does not bless the killing of enemies. And when you look at blessings and curses out of that Hebrew tradition from the book of Deuteronomy, that's what the prophets were saying, that God is not blessing this. God does not bless it -- bless us. And when we're calling them, the prophets call them to repentance and to come back to God. If my people who are called by my name, God says to Solomon, will humble themselves and pray, seek my faith and turn from their wicked ways. God says that wicked ways, not Jeremiah Wright, then will I hear from heaven.
I'll return to this in a moment.
(2) Now let's deal with "America's chickens have come home to roost." As you'll see, for starters, these were not even his words; he was beginning with Psalm 137 and ending by quoting (or more likely paraphrasing) a white, American ambassador. (For more about Ambassador Edward Peck's views see Sam Stein, "Meet The (White) Man Who Inspired Wright's Controversial Sermon,"The Huffington Post, March 21, 2008 2:00 p.m., with links to more.)
Here again, from last night's interview, the words of Pastor Wright:
I had to show them [in his first sermon following 9/11] using that Psalm 137, how the people who were carried away into slavery were very angry, very bitter, moved and in their anger from wanting revenge against the armies that had carried them away to slavery, to the babies. That Psalm ends up sayin' "Let's kill the babies - let's bash their heads against the stone." So, now you move from revolt and revulsion as to what has happened to you, to you want revenge. You move from anger with the military to taking it out on the innocents. You wanna kill babies. That's what's going on in Psalm 137. . . .
[What follows from here is within the video and transcript of the interview, but is from a video of Wright's sermon following 9/11]
The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, these soldiers who captured the king, those soldiers who slaughtered his son and put his eyes out, the soldiers who sacked the city, burned the towns, burned the temples, burned the towers, and moved from the hatred for armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents, the babies, the babies. "Blessed are they who dash your baby's brains against a rock." And that, my beloved, is a dangerous place to be. Yet, that is where the people of faith are in 551 BC and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks and we don't care who gets hurt in the process.
I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox news commentators to no end. He pointed out -- You see him John? -- a white man -- he pointed out -- an Ambassador! -- he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true.
America's chickens are coming home to roost! We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadafi's home and killed his child. "Blessed are they who bash your children's head against a rock!" We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians -- not soldiers -- people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America's chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism.
A white Ambassador said that y'all, not a Black militant. Not a Reverend who preaches about racism. An Ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and who's trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised.
The fact is that the history of America, indeed much if not most of what many would consider its "progress," is strewn with the speeches and writings of those who showed their love of the country through their efforts to make it even better.
We have also benefited from time to time from our cheerleaders and Dr. Feelgoods. But they've never been very effective in either diagnosing or curing our ills.
From Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (1980) (Amazon.com and here) -- with thousands of other examples before and since -- we are deeply indebted to those who have shown their patriotism with a revelation of the greatest truths about our past and present condition, and proposals for our future -- rather than limiting it to the wearing of a flag lapel pin.
Pastor Jeremiah Wright is, in my present judgment, a part of that tradition.
Would I phrase it precisely as he does? Of course not. Do I believe everything he believes? No. He no more needs my defense than I am obliged to provide it.
But I do now believe, as I formerly only suspected, that the efforts of Senator Obama's opponents, and what Pastor Wright calls the "corporate media," to brand these out-of-context excerpts into the cerebral cortices of 300 million Americans was a deliberate, unfair, unpatriotic and mean-spirited act.
And now, to close, here are some excerpts from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," circulated throughout the America of 1849. As you read them think about the extent to which Thoreau's themes resonate with today's Libertarians, or Republican tax-cutters, as well as progressives -- and the sermons of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, when listened to in their entirety.
How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. [7] . . .
Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave . . .. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless. . . .
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. . . .
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. . . .
Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. . . .
But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels? [16] . . .
I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name, — if ten honest men only, — aye, if one honest man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done for ever. . . .
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her but against her, — the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor. . . . A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. . . .
Confucius said, — “If a State is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a State is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.” . . .
The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.
Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. . . .
There's a lot to comment about today, so this blog entry may expand from time to time throughout the day beyond what are, for now, entries about Jack Valenti, and the start of one about the Pella rain forest. Now (12:30 p.m.) with an entry on the return of "Bill Moyers Journal," opening with Jon Stewart -- a must see for fans of either or both!
Jack Valenti: September 5, 1921-April 26, 2007
Jack Valenti died yesterday. If you're unfamiliar with this extraordinary man, one of the more thorough morning-after obits is Adam Bernstein, "A Hollywood Promoter on Both Coasts,"Washington Post, April 27, 2007, p. A1.
I first met Jack Valenti in February of 1964.
Following my Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Black I accepted a professorship at the University of California Law School in Berkeley, "Boalt Hall," where my teaching and legal writing was focused on "administrative law" -- encouraged by Ken Davis, Walter Gellhorn, Frank Newman and others in the field. The Washington law firm, Covington & Burling, had long felt I should be practicing law instead, and repeatedly gave me the opportunity to do so. Feeling that a little experience with administrative agency practice might be a worthy compromise -- if I could limit it to a two-year leave of absence -- the firm agreed to those terms and the family headed to Washington.
One day I received a call from the White House advising me that Bill Moyers wanted to see me. Although there are newspaper accounts from the time asserting that Bill and I were roommates at the University of Texas, they were not true. We were both married at the time, lived with our wives rather than each other, in fact never even met in Austin, and -- as you'll soon see -- never met that day in February either.
So I was totally mystified as to why he would want to see me. Not only did I not know Bill Moyers, I didn't know any other member of President Johnson's staff, either, and I had never met the President. I didn't know any senators or members of congress or party campaign contributors. I was working on a sort of "administrative procedure act" for anti-dumping procedures and involved with some airline matters before what was then the Civil Aeronautics Board, but I couldn't imagine that anyone in the White House would even know, let alone care, about that.
I had only been at the White House once before as a high school student for a rose garden event with President Harry Truman, and was looking forward to seeing the West Wing for the first time. So I went over, and waited -- and waited, and waited. It was about 45 minutes past the time for what I had been told was my appointment with Bill Moyers when a fellow tapped me on the shoulder and told me to follow him. We went down a corridor, he opened a door, pointed to the chair where I was to sit, and left.
It was only later I would discover that my White House tour guide had been Jack Valenti -- though I more quickly figured out that the room where he'd told me to wait was the Oval Office. (The rest of that story is that the only other occupant of the room was President Johnson, who eventually engaged me in conversation about something called the Maritime Administration and all the reasons why my country needed me to be Maritime Administrator. I made the mistake of telling the President all the reasons why I didn't think that was a good idea, and why I wanted to return to Covington and then to Berkeley. Why a mistake? Because he wisely realized that anyone who would want to be Maritime Administrator was probably unqualified to hold the office -- and as it turned out I was the only name on his list who didn't want the job.)
(Although Bill Moyers and I later did meet and become friends, I found it a little ironic in later years to discover that Bill, at age 29 and one of the principal advisors to the President of the United States, was alone among Johnson's staff in thinking that I -- also 29 years old -- was "too young" for the responsibilities of the Maritime Administrator. The Senate Commerce Committee members, by contrast, thought my prior shipping experience -- which I candidly explained to them was limited to the rather unsuccessful operation of a canoe on the Iowa River -- fully qualified me for the position.)
Jack Valenti and I stayed in contact over his Johnson years and subsequently during his tour as President of the Motion Picture Association of America. With his skills as a speaker and publicist, his contacts in Hollywood and Washington, he rapidly became, and remained, the most effective lobbyist in Washington.
One of his numerous advantages was that he had a lavish private dining room and theater where he could invite Washington's powerful to sit down with Hollywood's beautiful to watch the best of his industry's movies. Those were evenings that I, and any other guest, long remembered. (He was also the supplier of films to the occupants of the White House, for showings at Camp David or "at home.")
During the 1970s, when I was enjoying my own "15 minutes of fame" as a young single man in Washington, I developed a friendship with Kathleen Nolan, the national president of the Screen Actors Guild who had recently been appointed to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Watching her function in Washington and Los Angeles during those bi-coastal years with her gave me new insight into Jack Valenti's lobbying advantage.
She could pick up the phone and call the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of Labor -- or even the President -- and suddenly they would have nothing better to do that afternoon than to invite her to come see them.
Jack Valenti had the same kind of access. Partly it was those dinners. Partly it's just that people with power like to associate with other people with power. And power can come from celebrity as well as from wealth, corporate or political and governmental power. Jack, of course, had all five.
Kathleen was -- and remains -- a skilled actor with hundreds of credits, charming, attractive, energized and fun. But, like Jack, she was probably also seen by politicians as a possible way of getting to other Hollywood celebrities who, if one could get them to attend one's Los Angeles fundraisers, might be helpful in raising campaign contributions.
A part of Jack's effectiveness was his strategic sense. There was a time when, as chair of the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, I was involved in what I believe may have been the only successful effort to reduce levels of violence in television programming. (We tied it to the advertisers on the most violent programs.) Years earlier, following official inquiries into the causes of civil disorders in the late 1960s, the movie industry was also taking heat -- as now once again -- for the impact of media and movie violence on real life violence.
Other industries' lobbyists didn't even bother to put a velvet glove over their steel fist; they just came out slugging, threatening members of congress, bullying, attacking their "enemies" -- the sort of approach that earned Tom DeLay his nickname: "The Hammer."
Jack, seeing what was coming in the form of potentially heavy handed government regulation, decided to seize, rather than seethe, the day. Rather than attack the industry's critics, he expressed compassion for those concerned about movies' content, suggested they were entitled to protection, and proposed the movie "ratings" system that is still with us today. It was a brilliant stroke, and preserved the movie industry's artistic freedom for decades.
[In response to "Anonymous'" 8:22 a.m. Comment added to this blog entry ("Wasn't Jack Valenti the same guy who wanted the VCR made illegal in the early 1980s?") I don't mean to leave the impression that Valenti's every lobbying effort took "the public interest" into full consideration, or that he was a paragon of virtue in all respects of life. Only that he was very skillful as a lobbyist.]
His campaigns on behalf of his industry's copyright rights helped impress upon me that, while there has been corporate abuse of copyright, extending its terms and protections well beyond what many of us believe was intended by those who wrote it into the Constitution, one can understand the concern of someone who has put $80 million into a feature film only to find it available in DVD format on the streets of Beijing, Moscow and Singapore before it even reaches theaters in the U.S.
I won't go on with Jack Valenti stories. Read the Washington Post piece. It also refers to a number of his books. His was a life worth knowing about, one I am pleased to have intersected in the few ways I did -- starting with that day in February 1964 when I was supposed to meet with Bill Moyers.
_______________ Bill Moyers Journal Returns Tonight: Jon Stewart
Speaking of Bill Moyers, his "Bill Moyers Journal" returns to public television tonight, Friday, April 27, and his first guest is Jon Stewart. You won't want to miss that one!
And if you missed it, check out his "Buying the War: How Did the Mainstream Press Get it So Wrong?" It is a 90-minute "special" that aired Wednesday, April 25, but is available in video, and as a transcript, at the site linked just above. I watched at a house party in Iowa City organized by Free Press -- a media reform organization very much worth checking out. (As I've been saying for 40 years: "Whatever is your first public policy reform priority, media reform has to be your second priority. With it you have a prayer; without it you don't.") Prior to the broadcast Free Press provided a telphone hookup to livingrooms all across America for an exchange between Moyers and media activisits. The Huffington Post report of that half-hour (Timothy Karr, "Moyers' Three Factors in the Media's Iraq Failure," April 26, 2007, with a link to the audio of the conversation) has been made available by Free Press.
As the title suggests the program deals with the Iraq War, and necessarily therefore the Bush Administration's handling of it. But it is much more in terms of its analysis of how the media, especially the Washington press corps, deals with government, corporations and advertisers generally. It's really a kind of "must see" for teachers and students of communications studies, First Amendment law, journalism, and political science.
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Two Old Rain Forests
There are two old rain forests kicking around these days. One, apparently misplaced some 300 million years ago, was recently found in Illinois. (As my mother used to say when I'd lost something, "Oh, don't worry about it. It will show up.") Sara Goudarzi, "Giant Fossil Rain Forest Discovered in Illinois,"National Geographic News, April 24, 2007.
The other seems like it's been around that long, but it's really only been 10 or 11 years. Variously called over the years "The Iowa Child Project of the Iowa Child Foundation," the "Iowa Environmental/Education Project," the "Iowa Environmental Project" (and occasionally just "The Environmental Project"), it has recently been renamed "Earthpark."
Joe Sharpnack, http://www.sharptoons.com, who holds the copyright on this editorial cartoon, captured the significance of the constantly changing names on this failing project with his usual sharp wit and insight. The cartoon appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on May 11, 2006. Standing next to the dead horse that is Earthpark CEO David Oman is saying, "Maybe if I change the name again & hit it some more . . .."
Now he's beating that poor old dead horse once again. Even the Des Moines Register, The Gazette, and Iowa City Press-Citizen -- having supported the projecdt over the years -- are now coming to their senses. And State29 is all over it.
The Press-Citizen's editorial put it most succinctly: "Earthpark's lack of private funding, its constantly shifting timetable and its leaders' near pathological inability to provide a straight answer to the most straightforward of questions has led us to discourage any further public support for this project." Editorial, "State lawmakers should just say no to Earthpark,"Iowa City Press-Citizen, April 26, 2007.
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UICCU and "Optiva"
The UICCU-Optiva story is essentially behind us. There may be occasional additions "for the record," but for the most part the last major entry, with links to the prior material from October 2006 through March 2007, is "UICCU and 'Optiva'" in Nicholas Johnson, "UI Held Hostage Day 406 - March 3 - Optiva," March 3, 2007. Since then there have been two major additions: Nicholas Johnson, "Open Letter to UICCU Board" in "UI Held Hostage Day 423 - March 20 - UICCU," March 20, 2007, and "'Open Letter': Confirmation from World Council of Credit Unions" in "UI Held Hostage Day 424 - March 21 UICCU," March 21, 2007.
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[Note: If you're new to this blog, and interested in the whole UI President Search story . . .
Wondering where the "UI Held Hostage" came from? Click here. (As of January 25 the count has run from January 21, 2006, rather than last November.)
For any given entry, links to the prior 10 will be found in the left-most column. Going directly to FromDC2Iowa.Blogspot.com will take you to the latest. Each contains links to the full text of virtually all known media stories and commentary, including mine, since the last blog entry. Together they represent what The Chronicle of Higher Education has called "one of the most comprehensive analyses of the controversy." The last time there was an entry containing the summary of prior entries' commentary (with the heading "This Blog's Focus on Regents' Presidential Search") is Nicholas Johnson, "UI President Search XIII -- Last Week," December 11, 2006.
Searching: the fullest collection of basic documents related to the search is contained in Nicholas Johnson, "UI President Search - Dec. 21-25," December 21, 2006 (and updated thereafter), at the bottom of that blog entry under "References." A Blog Index of entries on all subjects since June 2006 is also available. And note that if you know (or can guess at) a word to search on, the "Blogger" bar near the top of your browser has a blank, followed by "SEARCH THIS BLOG," that enables you to search all entries in this Blog since June 2006.]
