FIRMS WITH BAILOUT AID

--The New York Times

The government has moved to intervene

To make the pay scale slightly less obscene.

The Wall Street types consider this unfair.

Tney say they earned their money fair and square,

And 20 million, say, is only middling

For someone who's so good at money fiddling.

Of course, if things again go not as planned,

They're back to Washington with hat in hand.

These fiddlers do deserve some admiration:

They've found themselves a win-win situation. B3

Editorial: San Francisco's new police chief wants more authority to discipline problem officers. He's been talking about it since the day he arrived, and he's getting some political traction. Sup. David Chiu has called for a hearing in the next few weeks, and it's likely that the chief will seek a Charter Amendment next year to redefine how the top cop and Police Commission handle personnel issues.

We have no problem giving the chief the right to fire a bad cop. In fact, if George Gascón wants to quickly rid the force of the small number of violent and unprofessional officers who are responsible for most of the serious discipline problems, more power to him.

But Gascón isn't stopping there — he wants to reduce the power of the commission and possibly the Office of Citizen Complaints. And that's a very bad idea.

Police discipline is one of the biggest problems facing the force. The city has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements in police abuse cases. Rogue cops have beaten, harassed, intimidated, and sometimes killed innocent people. And because so few officers ever face serious penalties, the bad behavior goes on unabated.

Gascón recognizes that. He told us in an interview in October that he thinks there are 10 cops on the force who ought to be fired, right now. That would send a powerful message: in the past 20 years, fewer than five police officers have ever been fired for misconduct.

Right now only the Police Commission can terminate an officer; the most the chief can issue on his own is a 10-day suspension. And there's a huge backlog of discipline cases. That's partly the result of the system itself — commissioners are part-time appointees and discipline hearings are time-consuming. It's also partly the fault of the department — previous chiefs have shown little interest in expediting discipline cases and have worked to thwart the ability of the Office of Citizen Complaints to complete investigations.

If Gascón is serious about weeding out problem cops (and taking on the politically powerful Police Officers Association to do it), he'd be the first chief in decades to do so. His recent predecessors showed almost no interest in discipline, and even if Gascón turns out to be the toughest chief in history, he won't be here forever, and his successor might return to the bad old days.

That's why the current system allows the OCC to take cases directly to the commission if the agency director feels that the chief has failed to act. That ability is central to any civilian oversight process and must remain as part of any reform.

We don't see why there has to be any conflict here at all. We're fine with giving the chief the extra authority to fire cops — and leaving the rest of the system intact. Let the chief enact firm discipline — and if he doesn't, let the OCC and commission do it. That would preserve the checks and balances in the system and allow Gascón to clear up some of the disciplinary backlog and get rid of the worst problem officers.

San Francisco has long operated under the proposition that civilians, not police officers, should conduct investigations of complaints against cops — and should have the final authority on the disposition of those complaints. The supervisors should be open to giving Gascón what he wants — but not if it means dismantling the heart of a civilian-oversight program.

And if Gascón wants the voters to trust him with front-line discipline, let's see some action. Work with the commission to fire those 10 bad cops — now — and we'll all have a lot more faith in your reform credentials.

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV
Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half century.)

It's Nov. 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt
Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the
Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill, who stands before them straight
and stiff and proud.

"Fire!" he shouts defiantly.

The firing squad didn't miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, "ain't
never died." He lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of
American symbols.

Joe Hill's story is that of a labor martyr framed for murder by viciously
anti-labor employer and government forces, a man who never faltered in
fighting for the rights of the oppressed, who never faltered in his attempts
to bring them together for the collective action essential if they were to
overcome their wealthy and powerful oppressors.

His is the story of a man and an organization destroyed by government
opposition yet immensely successful. As historian Joyce Kornbluh noted, the
IWW made "an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American
society," laying the groundwork for mass unionization, inspiring the
formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents, prompting
prison and farm labor reforms, and leaving behind "a genuine heritage ...
industrial democracy."

Joe Hill's story is the story of perhaps the greatest of all folk poets,
whose simple, satirical rhymes set to simple, familiar melodies did so much
to focus working people on the common body of ideals needed to forge them
into a collective force.

Remember? "You will eat, bye and bye/In that glorious land above the
sky/Work and Pray, live on hay/You'll get pie in the sky when you die."

Ralph Chaplain, the IWW bard who wrote "Solidarity Forever," found Hill's
songs "as coarse as homespun and as fine as silk; full of laughter and
keen-edged satire; full of fine rage and finer tenderness; songs of and for
the worker, written in the only language he can understand."

Joe Hill's story is the story of a man who saw with unusual clarity the
unjust effects of the political, social and economic system on working
people and whose own widely publicized trial and execution alerted people
worldwide to the injustices and spurred them into corrective action.

It's the story of a man who told his IWW comrades, just before stepping in
front of the firing squad: "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize!"

Hill's comrades aimed at nothing less than organizing all workers into One
Big Union regardless of their race, nationality, craft or work skills,
calling a general strike and wresting control of the economy from its
capitalist masters. The revolutionary message was presented in the simple
language of the workplace, in the songs of Hill, Chaplain and others, in the
streetcorner oratory and in a tremendous outpouring of publications,
including a dozen foreign-language newspapers which were distributed among
the many unskilled immigrants from European nations where unions had similar
goals.

Workers were told again and again that they all had the same problems, the
same needs and faced the same enemy. It was they who did the work, while
others got the profit; they were members, all of them, of the working class.
To aspire to middle-class status, as the established labor movement
advocated, would mean competing against their fellow workers and chaining
themselves to a system that enslaved them.

Organized religion also was a tool of enslavement, to keep the worker's eye
on that "pie in the sky" while he was being exploited in this world.
Patriotism was a ruse to set the workers of one nation against those of
another for the profit of capitalist manipulators.

IWW organizers carried the message to factories, mines, mills and lumber
camps throughout the country, and to farms in the Midwest and California.

The cause of radical unionism to which Joe Hill devoted his life was lost a
long time ago. The call to revolution is scarcely heard in today's
clamorously capitalist society. Labor organizations seek not to seize
control of the means of production but rather to share in the fruits of an
economic system controlled by others. Yet Joe Hill's fiery words and fiery
deeds, his courage and his sacrifices continue to inspire political, labor,
civil rights and civil liberties activists.

They still sing his songs, striking workers, dissident students and others,
on picket lines, in demonstrations, at rallies, on the streets and in
auditoriums. They echo his spirit of protest and militancy, his demand for
true equality, share his fervent belief in solidarity, even use tactics
first employed by Hill and his comrades.

Hill emigrated to the United States from his native Sweden in 1902, changing
his name from Joel Haaglund, working as a seaman and as an itinerant wheat
harvester, pipe layer, copper miner and at other jobs as he made his way
across the country to San Diego, translating into compelling lyrics the
hopes and desires, the frustrations and discontents of his fellow workers.

In San Diego, Hill joined in one of the first of the many "free speech
fights" waged by the Industrial Workers of the World against attempts by
municipal authorities around the country to silence the streetcorner oratory
that was a key part of the IWW's organizing strategy.

Not long afterward Hill hopped a freight for Salt Lake City, where he helped
lead a successful construction workers' strike and began helping organize
another free speech fight. But within a month, he was arrested on charges of
shooting to death a grocer and his son and was immediately branded guilty by
the local newspapers and authorities alike. Ultimately, Hill was convicted
on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

Hill had staggered into a doctor's office within an hour after the
shootings, bleeding from a chest wound that he said had stemmed from a
quarrel over a woman. The prosecutor argued that the wound was inflicted by
the grocer in response to an attack by Hill, although he did not introduce
into evidence either the grocer's gun or the bullet that allegedly was fired
from it. He did not introduce the gun that Hill allegedly used and did not
call a single witness who could positively identify Hill as the killer. But
he easily convinced the jury that the murders were an example of IWW
terrorism and that since Hill was an IWW leader and had been arrested and
charged with the crime, he was guilty.

As Hill's futile appeals made their way through the courts, Gov. William
Spry of Utah was swamped with thousands of petitions and letters from all
over the world asking for a pardon or commutation. But he would not even be
swayed by the pleas for mercy from the Swedish ambassador. Not even by the
pleas of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

The governor paid much greater attention to the views of Utah's powerful
Mormon Church leaders and powerful employer interests, particularly those
who controlled the state's dominant copper mining industry. They insisted
that the man they considered one of the most dangerous radicals in the
country be put to death.

Joe Hill's body was shipped to Chicago, where it was cremated after a hero's
funeral, the ashes divided up and sent to IWW locals for scattering on the
winds in every state except Utah. Hill, with typical grim humor, had
declared that "I don't want to be caught dead in Utah."

Even in death, Hill was not safe from the government. One packet of his
ashes, sent belatedly to an IWW organizer in 1917 for scattering in Chicago,
was seized by postal inspectors. They acted under the Espionage Act, passed
after the United States entered World War I that year, which made it illegal
to mail any material that advocated "treason, insurrection. or forcible
resistance to any law of the United States."

The envelope, containing about a tablespoon of Hill's ashes, was sent to the
National Archives in Washington, D.C. It remained hidden there until 1988,
when it was discovered and turned over in Chicago to the men who presided
over what little remained of the Industrial Workers of the World, shrunken
to only a few hundred members.

The Post Office apparently had objected to the caption beneath a photo of
Hill on the front of the envelope. "Joe Hill," it said -- "murdered by the
capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915."

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV
Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half century.
You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com
, which includes more than 250 of his recent
columns.

By Norman Solomon

(Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”)

There's a significant new straw in the political wind for President Obama to consider. The California Democratic Party has just sent him a formal and clear message: Stop making war in Afghanistan.

Overwhelmingly approved on Sunday (Nov. 15) by the California Democratic Party’s 300-member statewide executive board, the resolution is titled “End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan.”

The resolution supports “a timetable for withdrawal of our military personnel” and calls for “an end to the use of mercenary contractors as well as an end to air strikes that cause heavy civilian casualties.” Advocating multiparty talks inside Afghanistan, the resolution also urges Obama “to oversee a redirection of our funding and resources to include an increase in humanitarian and developmental aid.”

While Obama weighs Afghanistan policy options, the California Democratic Party’s adoption of the resolution is the most tangible indicator yet that escalation of the U.S. war effort can only fuel opposition within the president’s own party -- opposition that has already begun to erode his political base.

Participating in a long-haul struggle for progressive principles inside the party, I co-authored the resolution with savvy longtime activists Karen Bernal of Sacramento and Marcy Winograd of Los Angeles.

Bernal, the chair of the state party’s Progressive Caucus, said on Sunday night: “Today’s vote formalized and amplified what had been, up to now, an unspoken but profoundly understood reality -- that there is no military solution in Afghanistan. What’s more, the vote signified an acceptance of what is sure to be a continued and growing culture of resistance to current administration policies on the matter within the party. This is absolutely huge. Now, there can be no disputing the fact that the overwhelming majority of California Democrats are not only saying no to escalation, but no to our continued military presence in Afghanistan, period. The California Democratic Party has spoken, and we want the rest of the country to know.”

Winograd, who is running hard as a grassroots candidate in a primary race against pro-war incumbent Rep. Jane Harman, had this to say: “We need progressives in every state Democratic Party to pass a similar resolution calling for an end to the U.S. occupation and air war in Afghanistan. Bring the veterans to the table, bring our young into the room, and demand an end to this occupation that only destabilizes the region. There is no military solution, only a diplomatic one that requires we cease our role as occupiers if we want our voices to be heard. Yes, this is about Afghanistan -- but it’s also about our role in the world at large. Do we want to be global occupiers seizing scarce resources or global partners in shared prosperity? I would argue a partnership is not only the humane choice, but also the choice that grants us the greatest security.”

Speaking to the resolutions committee of the state party on Saturday, former Marine Corporal Rick Reyes movingly described his experiences as a warrior in Afghanistan that led him to question and then oppose what he now considers to be an illegitimate U.S. occupation of that country.

Another voice of disillusionment reached party delegates when Bernal distributed a copy of the recent resignation letter from senior U.S. diplomat Matthew Hoh, sent after five months of work on the ground in Afghanistan. “I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan,” he wrote. “If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons.”

Hoh’s letter added that “I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan.” And he wrote: “Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made.”

From their own vantage points, many of the California Democratic Party leaders who voted to approve the out-of-Afghanistan resolution on Nov. 15 have gone through a similar process. They’ve come to see the touted reasons for the U.S. war effort as specious, the mission as Sisyphean and the consequences as profoundly unacceptable.

President Obama is likely to learn that the California Democratic Party has approved an official resolution titled “End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan.” But will he really get the message?

_________________________

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

By Dick Meister

It’s a time of celebration in Prague this month. A time to mark the November day 20 years ago when the “Velvet Revolution” erupted. A time to mark the beginning of the end of the Soviet rule that had crushed democratic reform movements in Czechoslovakia and its eastern and central European neighbors.

For two decades, Soviet troops and Soviet-controlled political leaders had been in charge. But then, on that November day in 1989, hundreds of protesting university students marched through downtown Prague. Riot police moved in to club and beat the peaceful marchers, prompting widespread outrage and a month of peaceful demonstrations -- the “Velvet Revolution” – that would soon lead to the end of Soviet domination.

It was a realization, at last, of the high hopes for liberation raised 20 years earlier. I was there in the hopeful summer of 1968, one of the journalists who had rushed over to record the miracle that was occurring throughout central and eastern Europe during what was known worldwide as ”The Prague Spring.”

Stalin is dead, their buoyancy seemed to say, Khrushchev is gone. We are our own masters. We will make it in our own time and in our own way.

Among the many hopefuls was Helena Svadlenka, a smiling, chubby Prager who was allowed to open her modest flat to my wife Gerry and me, two Americans full of curiosity and ideas about the freedom she had just begun to enjoy.

Materially, she didn’t have very much . But, for the first time in a long time, she had hope. And she had a bearded 19-year-old son full of spirit, dashing here and there across the city to meet with his young friends and speak excitedly of the future, to dream, to plan.

They walked with great animation along the dusty, cobblestone streets of their city, enthusiastic believers in the “democratization” they preached. Ideas flowed rapidly to them from the West, and they drew, too, on their country’s own long history of democratic socialism as a guide, one that other reformers lacking their history also could draw on.

They stood in lively knots, in squares and on street corners. They sang, sold their own hand-printed newspapers, shouted out their slogans of hope. They chalked signs on walls praising Alexander Dubcek and other Czech political figures who were leading them rapidly toward a bright future.

But then came a day in August of 1968 when Soviet forces swept in to destroy their hopes for liberalization, killing and wounding dozens of anti-Soviet Czechs. The young men still shouted in the streets, but they shouted no longer for the future. They shouted against the past. It had rolled into their city – but no longer their city – behind ugly, rumbling machines of war.

The tanks that destroyed their plans and hopes were dispatched, of course, by the USSR. But they were manned primarily by forces from Czechoslovakia’s fellow Soviet satellites nearby, whose leaders feared that if the Czech rebels prevailed, it would inspire the restless young in their countries to similarly challenge their rigid leadership.
For two decades they prevailed, the grim, gray, spiritless party bureaucrats of Czechoslovakia who moved in with the tanks to replace Dubcek and the others who had promised a bright future . They were among the most rigid of the satellite leaders, headed by Gustav Husak, who took over as premier in 1968. Stalinist to the core, Husak devoted much of his tenure to ferreting out “adventurers, revisionists and deviationists.”

But finally Husak and the others succumbed to the pressures for reform generated by the glasnost and perestroika policies of Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and, ultimately and most decisively, to the pressures generated by the “Velvet Revolution“ that began 20 years ago on a cold November day in Prague.

By Mikhail Gorbachev

MOSCOW – The German people, and the whole world alongside them, are celebrating a landmark date in history, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not many events remain in the collective memory as a watershed that divides two distinct periods. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall – that stark, concrete symbol of a world divided into hostile camps – is such a defining moment.

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought hope and opportunity to people everywhere, and provided the 1980’s with a truly jubilant finale. That is something to think about as this decade draws to a close – and as the chance for humanity to take another momentous leap forward appears to be slipping away.

Today, another planetary threat has emerged. The climate crisis is the new wall that divides us from our future, and current leaders are vastly underestimating the urgency, and potentially catastrophic scale, of the emergency.

People used to joke that we will struggle for peace until there is nothing left on the planet; the threat of climate change makes this prophesy more literal than ever. Comparisons with the period immediately before the Berlin Wall came down are striking.

Like 20 years ago, we face a threat to global security and our very existence that no one nation can deal with alone. And, again, it is the people who are calling for change. Just as the German people declared their will for unity, the world’s citizens today are demanding that action be taken to tackle climate change and redress the deep injustices that surround it.

Twenty years ago, key world leaders demonstrated resolve, faced up to opposition and immense pressure, and the Wall came down. It remains to be seen whether today’s leaders will do the same.

Addressing climate change demands a paradigm shift on a scale akin to that required to end the Cold War. But we need a “circuit-breaker” to escape from the business-as-usual approach that currently dominates the political agenda. It was the transformation brought about by perestroika and glasnost that set the stage for the quantum leap to freedom for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and opened the way for the democratic revolution that saved history. Climate change is complex and closely entwined with a host of other challenges, but a similar breakthrough in our values and priorities is needed.

There is not just one wall to topple, but many. There is the wall between those states that are already industrialized and those that do not want to be held back in their economic development. There is the wall between those who cause climate change and those who suffer the consequences. There is the wall between those who heed the scientific evidence and those who pander to vested interests. And there is the wall between the citizens who are changing their own behavior and want strong global action, and the leaders who are so far letting them down.

In 1989, incredible changes that were deemed impossible just a few years earlier were implemented. But this was no accident. The changes resonated with the hopes of the time, and leaders responded. We brought down the Berlin Wall in the belief that future generations would be able to solve challenges together.

Today, looking at the cavernous gulf between rich and poor, the irresponsibility that caused the global financial crisis, and the weak and divided responses to climate change, I feel bitter. The opportunity to build a safer, fairer, and more united world has been largely squandered.

To echo the demand made of me by my late friend and sparring partner President Ronald Reagan: Mr. Obama, Mr. Hu, Mr. Singh, and, back in Berlin, Ms. Merkel and her European counterparts, “Tear down this wall!” For this is your Wall, your defining moment. You cannot dodge the call of history.

I appeal to heads of state and government to come in person to the climate change conference in Copenhagen this December and dismantle the wall. The people of the world expect you to deliver. Do not fail them.

Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. Today, as the Founding President of Green Cross International, he is heading an international Climate Change Task Force.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org

EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, reeling from criticism of his disappearing act last week and his failure to quickly reengage with San Francisco, has an opportunity to repair some of his tattered image, particularly among progressives, and mend fences with the majority of the Board of Supervisors. It wouldn't even require a dramatic or groundbreaking step — all he has to do is agree to sign legislation by Sup. John Avalos extending eviction protections to roughly 20,000 vulnerable San Francisco renters.

The Avalos legislation clears up a lingering loophole in the city's rent-control ordinance, a leftover piece of a bad deal that tenants were forced to accept when the city first moved to limit rent hikes 20 years ago. Back in 1978, with greedy landlords taking advantage of a housing shortage to jack up rents by astronomical rates, the supervisors and then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein were under immense pressure to pass some kind of control. But the landlord-friendly mayor and at-large elected board were unwilling to do what Berkeley had done across the bay by setting permanent limits on how much landlords could raise prices. Instead, they approved a watered-down measure aimed largely at fending off a tenant initiative that would have gone further.

That housing is still exempt from rent control — and because the rent control law also includes eviction protections for tenants, the post-1979 housing stock is also exempt from those rules.

Most San Francisco tenants enjoy what's known as "just-cause" eviction rules — that is, you can't toss a tenant out on the streets without a reason. Failure to pay rent, of course, is legal grounds to send someone packing; it's also okay to force a tenant out if the owner wants to move in.

But for the roughly 20,000 renters living in newer units, evictions can happen on a landlord's whim — and one of the most dangerous problems is the lack of protection for people who live in a foreclosed building. Tenants in older, pre-1979 buildings have the right to continue to live in the property, under the same lease or rental agreement, after a sale or foreclosure. The Avalos bill would extend that protection (and the other just-cause protections) to all tenants in the city.

It's hardly a radical idea — and given the boom in high-end housing construction in this city over the past decade (slowed only by the economic crash), the claim that tenant protections will doom new housing is demonstrably false. It would save vulnerable residents from losing their homes, protect people who live (through no fault of their own) in foreclosed properties, and restore a level of fairness to the local housing market.

The measure will almost certainly get six votes on the board, so the only real obstacle is the threat of a Newsom veto. The mayor should state publicly that he supports the measure and will sign it — which could be the start of a new, more promising chapter in Newsom's political career.

By Dick Meister

Nothing is more basic to our democratic society than the principle of majority rule. But what if the eligible voters who fail to cast ballots were automatically recorded as voting “no”?

Ridiculous as it sounds, that’s exactly what the country’s airline and railroad workers face when they vote on whether they want union representation.

Imagine if every election had such a rule. President Obama wouldn’t be president, since less than half the eligible voters turned out for last year’s presidential election. Most, if not all, congressional candidates would also have lost last year -- or in any other election year -- since voter turnout for congressional elections has typically been less than 40 percent.

The airline and railroad workers are covered by the Railway Labor Act. That law calls for the three-member National Mediation Board to set the rules for union elections.

As the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department has requested, the board is proposing to void the rule that has allowed non-voters to be counted as voting “no.” The board has scheduled public hearings on the proposal – and is certain to hear heated arguments on both sides of the question.

The unions should have no trouble arguing their case. As President Edward Wytkind of the Transportation Trades Department notes, the current voting system “defies logic … makes no sense.” The unions are asking merely that the system be made “to conform to the norms of American democracy.”

Which means, of course, that “the majority of those casting a vote will decide the outcome and those who do not vote are not counted.” Wytkind wonders “how we can justify imposing higher turnout standards for airline and railroad union elections than we can for the highest office of the land?”

The answer should be obvious – but not to airline and railroad executives, who want to keep unionization of their industries at a minimum. Under the current election rules that the executives prefer, the odds clearly are with them.
Suppose, as often happens, that a majority of the employees of a particular airline or railroad who turn out to vote opt for unionization. Their votes, even if overwhelmingly pro-union, can be nullified if a higher number of workers simply fail to vote.

It’s what Wytkind calls a “veto by silence.” And it’s usually the result of “employer –run voter suppression campaigns” that keep many workers from voting and are among the main reasons for the slowdown in airline unionization in recent years.

Some employers have increased their odds even more by including on their list of employees eligible to vote the names of employees who’ve resigned, been terminated or retired.

Employers can argue that if a worker doesn’t turn out to vote, it’s a sure sign the worker is not interested in unionization. But there can be no solid evidence of that unless the worker is allowed to actually cast a vote on the question.

Counting the worker’s non-vote as a “no” vote violates basic democratic principles and the basic union rights promised all American workers.

Failing the Midterms: Press overplays election results

Republican candidates won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday; meanwhile, Democratic candidates won two special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York and California. But it was very clear which set of elections corporate media wanted to portray as sending an important message about national politics--that voters were discontented with the White House and wanted Democrats to move to the right.

"By seizing gubernatorial seats in Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans on Tuesday dispelled any notion of President Obama's electoral invincibility," declared the Los Angeles Times (11/4/09)--as if Obama had previously been confused with Superman. On NPR, Mara Liasson reported (11/4/09): "There's already a feisty argument going on about what the election results tell us, but there's no argument about the score. The Democrats got a slap in the face. The Republicans a much-needed victory."

An Associated Press analysis by Liz Sidoti (11/4/09) similarly called the election results "a troubling sign for the president and his party" and a "double-barreled triumph" for Republicans--before noting that such conclusions "could easily be overstated. Voters are often focused on local issues and local personalities."

Another AP analysis by Beth Fouhy (11/4/09) began, "Voters nervous about the economy and fed up with the political establishment dominated the off-year elections, sending a strong message to President Barack Obama, who won the White House as a change agent but has himself become the face of political power and incumbency." How were the elections a "strong message" to Obama, exactly? Fouhy doesn't explain. According to exit polls (CBS News, 11/4/09):

"Majorities of voters in both states (56 percent in Virginia and 60 percent in New Jersey) said President Obama was not a factor in their vote today. Those who said Mr. Obama was a factor in New Jersey divided as to whether their vote was a vote for the president (19 percent) or against him (19 percent). In Virginia, slightly fewer voters said their vote was for Mr. Obama (17 percent) than against him (24 percent)."

The coverage's focus on the danger signs for Democrats is consistent with corporate media's traditional emphasis on the Democrats' need to move to the right (Extra!, 7-8/06). There was comparatively little discussion in post-Election Day commentary on the lessons to the Republican Party posed by New York's 23rd District, where national support for a far-right candidate led to a Democratic victory in an area that had voted Republican since the time of Ulysses S. Grant.

For some in the media, the important lesson was that the Democrats might have to put their agenda on hold. As the AP's Fouhy put it (albeit somewhat incoherently): "To be sure, each race was as much about local issues as about firing warning shots at the politically powerful. But taken together, the results of the 2009 off-year elections could imperil Obama's ambitious legislative agenda and point to a challenging environment in midterm elections next year."

And at the top of the media's list of what the Democrats should be rethinking: healthcare reform. On NBC's Today show (11/4/09), Meet the Press host David Gregory declared, "It's going to be a real fear within the White House that those moderate Democrats are going to now find it more difficult to cast a difficult vote on healthcare that could increase the deficit, that may be unpopular with key parts of their constituencies as they face voters next year." (According to the Congressional Budget Office, passing the House version of the healthcare reform bill would reduce the federal deficit by $104 billion over the next 10 years--CBO Director's Blog, 10/29/09.) On CBS Evening News (11/4/09), Bob Schieffer expressed a similar view about conservative Democrats and healthcare: "I think they're going to be more nervous about supporting it. If we do see any impact of these elections, I think it will be on the healthcare legislation and it may set it back a bit."

The AP's Sidoti wrote, "Democrats in swing-voting states and moderate-to-conservative districts may be less willing to back Obama on issues like healthcare after Virginia and New Jersey showed there are limits to how much he can protect his rank and file from fallout back home." Were Democratic gubernatorial candidates Jon Corzine and Creigh Deeds "rank-and-file" Democrats who were casting important healthcare votes?

The notion that the election will force Democrats to enact a healthcare reform bill with less healthcare in it is clearly an appealing one to corporate media. A Washington Post editorial (11/5/09) with the subhead "The Center Holds" concluded that the elections did

"signal to Democratic members of Congress--especially those who represent Republican-leaning states--that voters are getting nervous about the size and indebtedness of the federal government. If that fortifies centrist lawmakers and makes them more likely to insist that any healthcare reform come with a credible plan to pay for it, then that, too, would be a welcome consequence of Tuesday night."

By Norman Solomon
(Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America.)

In Washington, “healthcare reform” has degenerated into a sick joke.

At this point, only spinners who’ve succumbed to their own vertigo could use the word “robust” to describe the public option in the healthcare bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor.

“A main argument was that a public plan would save people money,” the New York Times has noted. But the insurance industry -- claiming to want a level playing field -- has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze the plan. “After House Democratic leaders unveiled their health care bill [on October 29], the Congressional Budget Office said the public plan would cost more than private plans and only 6 million people would sign up.”

What remains is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will launch this country into a new phase of healthcare apartheid.

People who scrape together enough money to buy health insurance will discover that they’re riding in the back of the nation’s healthcare bus. The most “affordable” policies will be the ones with the highest deductibles and the worst coverage.

We’re hearing that large numbers of lower-income Americans will be provided with Medicaid coverage in the next decade. Translation: If funding holds up, they’ll get to hang onto a bottom rung of the healthcare ladder. Many will not be able to get the medical help they need, from primary care providers or specialists.

Not long ago, we were told that the Obama administration was aiming for a public option that could provide coverage to one out of every four Americans. Now the figure is around one out of every fifty.

Not long ago, the idea was that taxpayer-funded subsidies were to be used only for the public option. But now the entire concept has been hijacked by and for the private insurance industry. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it on October 8, private insurance companies “are going to get 50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers.”

Pelosi was making the argument that the least the insurance industry could do, in return, would be to accept a higher level of taxation. But her comment was a telling acknowledgment that all the “public option” proposals now provide a massive funnel from the U.S. Treasury to the insurance conglomerates. The individual mandate is a monumental giveaway to private insurance firms.

The specter of “healthcare reform” that requires individuals to stretch their personal finances for often-abysmal insurance coverage is the worst of all worlds -- government intrusion for corporate benefit without any guarantees of decent health coverage.

In effect, the individual-mandate requirement tells people that obtaining health coverage is ultimately their own responsibility -- and the quality of the coverage is beside the point. In essence, when it comes to guaranteeing quality healthcare for all, the gist of the policy is: “Let’s not, and say we did.”

The predictable result is reinforcement of vast -- and often deadly -- inequities in access to healthcare.

With Washington making such a corporate mess of “healthcare reform,” the best way to get what we need -- healthcare for all as a human right -- will be to enact single-payer healthcare in one state after another.

But the House Democratic leadership has not been content to serve up a grimly pathetic “healthcare reform” bill. Speaker Pelosi has used her political leverage to quash Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s amendment -- approved months ago by the Education and Labor Committee -- that would grant waivers so that states could create their own single-payer system. Pelosi removed the Kucinich amendment from the House bill.

The California legislature has twice passed a strong single-payer bill, both times vetoed by the state’s current execrable governor. The official position of the California Democratic Party is unequivocally in favor of single-payer healthcare. And yet Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, did what she could to sabotage the single-payer position of her own party in her own state.

Sickening.

__________________________________

Norman Solomon is co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

EDITORIAL It's possible that Mayor Gavin Newsom took a long look at himself, his life, and his future last week and decided that politics — intense, 24/7/365 politics — wasn't what he wanted right now. It's possible (as Randy Shaw noted in Beyondchron.org) that Newsom "now joins longtime adversary Chris Daly in putting family relationships ahead of one's political career." It's possible that he never really wanted a future in electoral politics and was driven to run for governor less by personal ambition than by the desire of his advisors to see him in a higher political role.

In that case, Newsom has a responsibility to do the best job he can over the final two years of his term as mayor, then step away and find something else to do with his life.

But since it's also possible — even likely — that Newsom still hopes to have a political career, and that his decision to drop out of the governor's race was as much about his failure to gain any traction as it was about his family obligations, it's worth talking about why his campaign failed and what he can and should do next.

For starters, Newsom never expected to beat Attorney General Jerry Brown in the big-donor fundraising battle. He was hoping to put together a grassroots operation, to mobilize the Obama constituency, and build a war chest with tens of thousands of small donors organized through social media and technology. And that kind of effort could have worked — Brown has name recognition and money, but not much else. It's hard to imagine large masses of young activists donating time and energy to his primary campaign.

The problem was, those legions of California activists weren't terribly excited about Newsom either. And there are good reasons for that — reasons Newsom needs to understand if he wants to run for statewide elected office in the future.

If the real Gavin Newsom had been anything like the campaign picture his handlers tried to present, he would have been a serious candidate. Newsom the candidate was a leader who brought San Franciscans together to get things accomplished. He was a progressive thinker who created universal health care and an effective budget process with a rainy day fund that prevented teacher layoffs. He was bold enough to challenge federal and state law on same-sex marriage and demand equality for all.

But Newsom the mayor was actually a snippy politician who refused to work with the Board of Supervisors and would never engage his opponents. He was great at press releases but short on accomplishments — universal health care and the rainy day fund were projects put together by Tom Ammiano, one of the supervisors the mayor disdained, who is now a state Assembly member. He refused to take a lead role fighting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to promote clean energy and public power. And for all his success in moving same-sex marriage forward, he never once managed to bring that kind of progressive energy or policy-making to economic issues. His budget this year was the same as Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget — cuts and fees only. No new taxes.

As a result, the progressives and independent voters in his own town didn't support his campaign — and without the environmentalists, labor, tenants, and progressive elected officials from San Francisco behind him, there was no way he could generate an honest grassroots movement in a Democratic primary.

Now he's back from the campaign trail — and he has two years to pick up on the lessons of his ignominious political collapse. If he wants any kind of a political future, he needs to change. First, he needs to start engaging and working with the supervisors — even the ones who disagree with him. (Showing up for "question time" would be a huge step). He needs to take the city's structural budget deficit seriously and present plans for progressive taxes to help close it. He needs to show he can take on big powerful local interests — PG&E, for example — by opposing the utility's anti-public power initiative and putting his political capital on the line to support community choice aggregation.

Newsom the imperial mayor has, we hope, been a bit humbled. Let's see if he comes out of this chapter as an embittered, angry (and ultimately unsuccessful) mayor committed to punishing his enemies — or a serious city leader who can live up to his own hype. *

Photo by Jim Block

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Special note: read Barnett's scathing indictment of Examiner/Chronicle/JOA news coverage in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (9/31/1970)

Steve Barnett would have been highly amused with the way the Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle handled the obituary of his death on Oct. 13 of cardiac arrest. He was 73.

The AP and the Chronicle ran respectful obituaries of his illustrious career as a UC Berkeley law professor, prominent First Amendment advocate, critic of the California Supreme Court, a director of the California First Amendment Coalition, and widely published legal scholar on media, antitrust, and First Amendment law.

The Chronicle even tossed in a couple of paragraphs pointing out that Barnett was "a frequent commentator on the Newspaper Preservation Act, the 1970 federal law that allowed papers in the same market to cut costs by merging some of their operations."

In those days, the JOA combine had some serious antitrust and monopoly problems that were red meat for Barnett. The Chronicle and Examiner moved into a JOA monopoly in 1965 under the guise of preserving newspaper competition. They killed the third daily in town and then merged the Ex and Chron business functions to fix prices, pool profits, and share markets under a combination called a joint operating agreement (JOA.)

The big problem: the JOA was a violation of federal antitrust law and a U.S. Supreme Court decision in the famous Tucson JOA case that declared an existing JOA illegal. The Ex and Chron publishers were forced to work with the other JOA publishers to get a special act of Congress to legalize the merger retroactively, a most embarrassing position for the big daily newspapers. The San Francisco JOA was the latest and biggest JOA of them all and thus ought to have been the most newsworthy.

Barnett went to Washington in 1969 as an expert witness and testified against the special interest legislation before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. It was his first major volley against JOA journalism. He drew on his newspaper background (president of the Harvard Crimson, the daily paper at Harvard University, and reporter for small town dailies), his legal experience as a clerk for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr., and his UC legal credentials to put forth one of the most powerful statements against JOA journalism in San Francisco and against a total of 22 similar arrangements of 44 papers in 44 cities throughout the country.

He summed up the pre-merger Chronicle/Examiner position: "The Chronicle and Examiner presumably had competent legal advice, and any antitrust lawyer would have advised them in September 1965 that the Government had an excellent chance of winning the Tucson case (challenging an existing JOA); that their proposed combination was likewise vulnerable; that suit could be brought against it by a private plaintiff if not by the Justice Department; and that if they went ahead with the combination they were doing so at their own risk."

Barnett argued that JOAs were designed to protect monopolies, not competition, and should abide by federal antitrust law and the Supreme Court decision barring price-fixing, pooling profits, and sharing markets.

His most illustrative point came when he caught then Chronicle publisher Charles de Young Thieriot in a damning contradiction in testimony to the congressional committee in 1967.

Thieriot took the poverty oath when he testified on July 27, 1967. He said that he agreed to the merger with Hearst because he feared that Hearst might force the Chronicle out of business with its larger resources. In the same spirit, then Hearst publisher Charles Gould testified that San Francisco was a case of "three failing newspapers." Neither publisher bothered to produce financial statements to back up their claims of galloping poverty.

The day after the JOA publishers testified, J. Hart Clinton, publisher of the San Mateo Times and an antitrust attorney, blasted the two publishers by saying that the "failing status" of Hearst newspapers was the result not of "destructive competition" in Thieriot's phrase, but of the Chronicle's use of its profits from its government-licensed TV station, KRON-TV, to buy up expensive circulation in the suburbs and thereby gain the top position in the morning market and driving the Examiner "to the wall."

Clinton also placed in the record the July 1965 balance sheet of the Chronicle which showed, 60 days before the merger, that the Chronicle had $7 million in cash, of which $4,600,000 was cash on hand and $2,400,000 was in certificates of deposit. He said the Chronicle was making 15 per cent on its investment.

On Dec. 17th, backpedaling furiously, Thieriot responded to Clinton's charges in a letter to the subcommittee. The Chronicle's fortunes had taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the better. Instead of those "constant losses" from 1957 to 1963 that had prompted his fears for the Chronicle's survival, Thieriot now claimed that the Chronicle showed a profit for each year from 1959 to the time of the merger, with the exception of 1962.

Barnett pounced and summed up the contradictions in his 1969 testimony to the subcommittee. "The question arises," he said. "What kind of man, what kind of company, would submit to Congress, within the space of six months, two affirmations so fundamentally at war with each other?"

Barnett's point that JOA journalism kills competition was made clear back in San Francisco when the JOA partners blacked out his eminently newsworthy testimony. His point was made even more clear when the JOA partners either blacked out or watered down the JOA story for the duration. The other JOA papers and their chain papers performed in virtual lockstep.

In the spring of 1970, Barnett became a newspaper media critic. The FCC was holding hearings in San Francisco on whether to renew the lucrative television license of KRON-TV, owned by the Chronicle. It was an unprecedented and highly significant event in television history and was enormously important to the Chronicle and its JOA partner. The hearing was prompted by an explosive complaint to the FCC from Al Kihn, a KRON-TV cameraman, who charged that the station had slanted its news and programming to favor the Chronicle's ownership interests. Kihn provided many KRON memoes and specifics to back up his complaint and he testified at the hearing.

Barnett went every day to the 32 days of hearings, read the entire transcript of 6,396 pages, and then compared the coverage in both papers. He wrote a long, detailed story for the Guardian (10/31/1970) on his findings. He reported that he was hard put to realize the hearings and the Ex/Chron coverage were of the same event and that they came out as if directed by the Chronicle's family law firm.

"In sum," he wrote, "the hearing coverage was characterized by suppression, bias, obfuscation and just plain bad reporting. Of particular note: the Examiner and Chronicle both pitched in to slant and suppress the story to protect the interests of the Chronicle." He noted that the lengthy hearings went by without a word from the Chron/Ex star columnists Herb Caen, Charles McCabe, Art Hoppe, Ralph Gleason, Dick Nolan, Guy Wright, and others. And, he pointed out, the two television columnists, Terence O'Flaherty for the Chronicle and Dwight Newton for the Examiner, can point to "18 months of unblemished silence on the KRON case, the biggest story on their beat."

The hearing, he concluded, exemplifies JOA journalism. "The Chronicle and Examiner do not compete with each other with respect to news content. They have got what they wanted from their monopoly pact: the rich, quiet life of a journalistic leisure world."

Then, on July 25, 1970, one day after then President Nixon signed the Newspaper Preservation Act, Barnett dropped the bomb on the Ex/Chron/JOA. Barnett filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Bay Guardian challenging the constitutionality of the act. Barnett put forth an unusual argument: that the combination had taken the lion's share of print advertising in San Francisco through its monopoly-inflated joint rate, thereby leaving only crumbs for the Guardian and other papers in town. And this, he argued, violated the free press provision of the First Amendment.

It was a landmark case, pitting the four-year-old Guardian against the combined resources of the Chronicle and Hearst, with their family fortunes, and the resources of the largest and most powerful JOA chains in the country (Hearst, Knight-Ridder, Cox, Scripps-Howard, Block et al). Billions of dollars of JOA monopoly profits were at stake as well as the potential of serious fines and penalties for massive antitrust violations for years.

Barnett , an indefatigable adversary, recruited several attorneys along the way to keep the uphill battle going for five years. Alas, despite Barnett's magesterial briefs and legal maneuvers, the judge tossed out his First Amendment argument early on and the case was damaged. But he soldiered on with compelling federal antitrust arguments.

In 1975, the Ex/Chron/JOA forces had enough of Barnett and the Guardian and, concerned about their legal liability and bad publicity from the case and four related treble damage cases, threw in the towel. Barnett, with the valuable help of his latest co-counsel, the Joseph Cooper law firm, settled the case for the Guardian.

Barnett kept up his criticism of media monopoly through the years. "Steve became the leading critical commentator" on JOA legislation operating "under the umbrella of antitrust immunity," said Berkeley law professor Richard Busbaum in a UC Berkeley press release. "In legislative hearings, participation in litigation, and innumerable op-ed pieces, he kept the problematic exception under constant scrutiny." He was last heard blasting the Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News JOA for violating antitrust law when the Rocky Mountain News went out of business.

Barnett took on a lot of other battles and causes during his career, but to us at the Guardian his courageous JOA fight and his lawsuit were the most important and most enduring. He helped us define the Guardian as a real alternative paper and got us the money with the settlement to make the necessary move from bi-weekly to weekly circulation.

Barnett is survived by his wife, Karine, their son, Alexander, his stepson, Levon, and a sister, Linda Beiser of Avon, Connecticut. "Steve was a wonderful stepfather to Levon," his sister said. "As he pondered his accomplishments at retirement he rued the fact that he had never fathered any children of his own. He became a father for the first time at age 69 and they spent virtually every waking hour together and enjoyed a very close relationship."

Karine told me she and Steve had for months planned a party for Alex's fifth birthday. Steve had bought and wrapped a gift for him.

Karine decided to have a combined event of the birthday and a life celebration for Steve. It was held on Sunday, Oct. 25th in the Barnett home in the Montclair hills.

"The idea sounds strange," Karine said. "But it was good for everyone. Steve's old friends (faculty, neighbors, outside law school friends, family)and Alex's schoolmates with their parents and teachers with the kids came. All turned out to be very good. I had cooked all night the night before, so there was plenty of good food and drinks.

"All the guests went home with peace inside, seeing Alex, running around and carrying the life and the liveliness around, keeping his father's home alive. Steve would have loved seeing all the people around and especially his only son happy."

The family suggested donations in Barnett's memory to the Parkinson Association of Northern California, 900 Fulton Ave., Suite 100-5, Sacramento, Calif. 95825-4516.

By Dick Meister

It was 20 years ago this month that the Berlin Wall finally fell, one of the last vestiges of the Cold War. But though it's long gone, I and I'm sure many others, have not forgotten that Soviet-erected barrier which had stood for 28 years as a nearly impenetrable divider between the Soviet East and the West.

I especially remember the first time I saw the wall, just after it went up in 1961. The atmosphere was incredibly tense, a tension I and other reporters had found almost too acute to describe.

West Berliners sat at sidewalk cafes downtown, chatting amiably but without gaiety. Genuine relaxation seemed impossible because of the newly-constructed wall that stood just a few miles away. Out there the crowds were greater, but almost no one was talking.

The night before, an East Berliner had tried to get beyond the wall. Police chased him from rooftop to rooftop, but he reached a drainpipe on a building fronting on West Berlin.

West Berlin police fired across the wall, hoping to give the young man the chance to reach the sidewalk and the freedom he had shouted for. But he lost his grip and fell to his death.

Wreaths lay on the spot that fall afternoon, placed there by some of the West Berliners who stood in the large, quiet crowds lining the streets that bordered the wall. Twice before, their vigil had been broken. That had come earlier in the day, when the East Berlin police had fired across the wall, though without doing damage.

What would be next? Would it be just pistol fire? The crowd didn't know, so it waited. Here was the East-West confrontation in a single frightening capsule.

Rows and rows of red flags and the flags of the East's German Democratic Republic waved overhead. The wall below was a crude structure hurriedly constructed of used brick, but sturdy and topped with wicked-looking barbed wire and jagged chunks of broken glass.

Above the wall, caps of the East Berlin police standing guard were everywhere evident. Here and there a guard in bright green uniform showed himself -- always with at least two comrades. Their grimness contrasted sharply with the outward ease of the gray-uniformed West Berlin police standing across the street from them. They smiled as they chatted with the curious onlookers.

At one spot, East Berlin workmen were heightening the wall, placidly gazing now and then at the intently staring West Berliners. A young woman on the West Berlin side sauntered to within a few feet of the spot and casually pointed a camera into the face of a guard peering over. For what must have been the thousandth time, he allowed his photo to be taken. Then, for just a moment, the crisis was forgotten.

Other guards popped up to catch a glimpse of the woman, and one bantered with her suggestively. A nervous titter started through the crowd, but no one laughed out loud. The onlookers seemed embarrassed. The titter died away quickly and nerves were once more drawn taut. A West Berliner shouted insults at the East Berlin guards. His dog barked at them.

Then it was quiet again, save for the occasional roar of military jeeps as they sped through the city's western sector, constantly patrolling the wall.

On some street corners, West Berliners stood on ladders, looking across and above the wall through binoculars, waving at East Berliners in far-off buildings. In the upper floors of buildings on either side, people leaned from windows to view the scene below.

On both sides, the buildings mirrored desolation. Most showed heavy scars from the bombs of World War II, and piles of rubble lay near them. In the West, however, there were some new apartment houses, and laden fruit stands and bright shops. But there was a great difference, far beyond shops, buildings and the attitude of police. Whatever else was felt on the western side of the wall, it was not the helplessness and desolation that hovered on the eastern side.

Just beyond the wall in East Berlin stood a church, with a figure of Christ out front, beckoning. But close by the church stood armed men in bright green uniforms, there to keep people from the simple act of crossing from one side of a street to another.

Let A Hundred Theories Bloom

By George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz

BUDAPEST – The economic and financial crisis has been a telling moment for the economics profession, for it has put many long-standing ideas to the test. If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.

But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics are two scholars whose life work explored alternative approaches. Economics has generated a wealth of ideas, many of which argue that markets are not necessarily either efficient or stable, or that the economy, and our society, is not well described by the standard models of competitive equilibrium used by a majority of economists.

A long line of research has shown that even using the models of the so-called “rational expectations” school of economics, markets might not behave stably, and that there can be price bubbles. The crisis has, indeed, provided ample evidence that investors are far from rational; but the flaws in the rational expectations line of reasoning—hidden assumptions such as that all investors have the same information—had been exposed well before the crisis.

Just as the crisis has reinvigorated thinking about the need for regulation, so it has given new impetus to the exploration of alternative strands of thought that would provide better insights into how our complex economic system functions – and perhaps also to the search for policies that might avert a recurrence of the recent calamity.

Fortunately, while some economists were pushing the idea of self-regulating, fully efficient markets that always remain at full employment, other economists and social scientists have been exploring a variety of different approaches. These include agent-based models that emphasize the diversity of circumstances; network models, which focus on the complex interrelations among firms (such as those that enable bankruptcy cascades); a fresh look at the neglected work of Hyman Minsky on financial crises (which have increased in frequency since deregulation began three decades ago); and innovation models, which attempt to explain the dynamics of growth.

Much of the most exciting work in economics now underway extends the boundary of economics to include work by psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists. We have much to learn, too, from economic history. For all the fanfare surrounding financial innovation, this crisis is remarkably similar to past financial crises, except that the complexity of new financial products reduced transparency, aggravating fear about what might happen should there not be a massive public bailout.

Ideas matter, as much or perhaps even more than self-interest. Our regulators and elected officials were politically captured – special interests in the financial markets gained a great deal from rampant deregulation and the failure to adapt the regulatory structure to the new products. But our regulators and politicians also suffered from intellectual capture. They need a wider and more robust portfolio of ideas to draw upon.

That is why the recent announcement by George Soros at the Central European University in Budapest of the creation of a well-funded Initiative for New Economic Thinking (INET) to help support these is so exciting. Research grants, symposia, conferences, and a new journal – all will help encourage new ideas and collaborative efforts to flourish.

INET has been given complete freedom – with respect to both content and strategy – and one hopes that it will draw further support from other sources. Its only commitment is to “new economic thinking,” in the broadest sense. Last month, Soros assembled a remarkable group of economic luminaries, from across the spectrum of the profession –theory to policy, left to right, young and old, establishment and counter-establishment—to discuss the need and prospects for such an initiative, and how it might best proceed.

For the past three decades, one strand within the economics profession was constructing models that assumed that markets worked perfectly. This assumption overshadowed a wide body of research that helped explain why markets often work imperfectly – why, indeed, there are widespread market failures.

The marketplace for ideas also often works in a way that is less than ideal. In a world of human fallibility and imperfect understanding of the complexity of the economy, INET holds out the promise of the pursuit of alternative strands of thought – and thereby at least ameliorating this costly market imperfection.

George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize, served as Chairman of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org

By Bruce B. Brugmann

As I was preparing to update my annual Halloween blog, I checked the Guardian politics blog to see what the action looked like for tomorrow night on Halloween Eve.

Two years ago, Mayor Gavin Newsom shut down the Halloween celebration in the Castro, killing off one of San Francisco's most famous party events. But this year, as Melanie Ruiz reports, a local flash mob operator by the name of Amandeep "Deep" Jawa is organizing an unauthorized "Take Back Halloween" party in front of the Ferry building.He has arranged for at least two mobile DJs to spin and more than 300 people have signed up on Facebook.
But he says that he has no permits and the police may shut down the event.

Well, back where I come from in the Halloweens of my youth, we didn't get permits, didn't have authorization, and the police tried and failed to shut us down our events. This was in my hometown of Rock Rapids, a small farming community nestled along the Rock River in northwest Iowa. But we did have some fast times and created some almost famous urban legends on Halloween. I can speak for a generation or two back in the early 1950s when Halloween was the one night of the year when we could raise a little hell and and hope to stay one step ahead of the cops.

It was all quite civilized. The Casjens gang would gather (no girls allowed) and set out about our evening's business, being careful to stay away from the houses of watchful parents and Shinny on patrol. Dave Dietz and I specialized in finding cars with keys in the ignition and driving them to the other end of town and just leaving them. We tipped over an outhouse or two, the small town cliche, but one time we thought there was someone inside. We never hung around to find out. There was some mischief with fences and shrubs and lawn sprinklers and potted plants on porches.

After an evening of such lusty adventures, we would go home about ll p.m. and tell our parents what we had been up to and how we evaded Shinny the whole evening and they would (generally) be relieved. Shinny would just drive around in his patrol car and shine his lights here and there and do some honking. But somehow he never caught anybody or made any serious followup investigation. And the targets of our pranks never seemed to make police complaints. I once asked Paul Smith, the editor of the Lyon County Reporter, why he never wrote up this bit of zesty small town lore. "Bruce," he said, "I don't want things to get out of hand." During my era, they never did.

Nonetheless, the city elders decided to keep Halloween devastation to a minimum and scheduled a dance in the Community Building, with the misbegotten idea the pranksters would give up their errant ways and come to the dance. The Casjens Gang would have none of this. In fact it was the year of the dance diversion that we made our most culturally significant contribution to Halloween lore in Rock Rapids. We happened upon a boxcar, loaded with coal, parked on a siding a block or so from Main Street, which also served as a busy main arterial highway for cars coming across northwest Iowa.

It is not clear to this day who came up with the idea of rolling the boxcar across Main Street and blocking all traffic coming from both directions. We massed behind the car and pushed and pushed but it wouldn't budge. Then Bob Babl came up with a brilliant stroke: to use a special lever his dad used to move boxcars full of lumber for his nearby lumberyard. Bob slipped through a fence behind the yard and somehow managed to find the lever in the dark.

We massed again, now some 20 or so strong, behind the car and waited for the signal to push. Willie Ver Meer climbed to the top of the car and wrenched the wheel that set the brakes. We heaved in unison and the car moved slowly on the tracks until it reached the middle of Main Street. Willie gave a mighty heave and ground the car to a dead stop, bang, square in the middle of the street. Almost immediately, the cars started lining up on both sides of the car, honking away. Grace under pressure. An historic event. Man, were we proud.

We slipped away and from a safe distance watched the fruits of our labor unfold. Shinny, the ever resourceful police chief, soon came upon the scene. He strode into the dance in the nearby Community Building and commandeered enough of the dancers to come out and help him move the car back onto its siding. We bided our time and then went back and pushed the car once again into the middle of the street. Jerry Prahl added a nice touch by rolling out a batch of Firestone tires onto the street from his Dad's nearby store. Suddenly, Main Street was a boxcar- blocked, tire-ridden mess. Again, the cars started lining up, honking away. Then we fled, figuring we were now wanted pranksters and needed to be on the lam.

The Casjens gang and groupies have retold the story through the years at our regular get togethers at the Sportsmen Club bar at Heritage Days in Rock Rapids and at our all-Rock Rapids Cocktail Party and Beer Kegger held in the back lawn of the Mary Rose Babl Hindt house in Cupertino. We would jokingly say that the statute of limitations never runs out in Rock Rapids and so we needed to be careful what we said and ought not to disclose fully the involvement of Dave Dietz, Hermie Casjens, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Jerry Prahl, Bob Babl, Romain Hahn, Willie Ver Meer, and lots of others, some who were there working in peril, others who declared they were there safely after the fact.

Two years ago, just before Halloween, I was invited back to Rock Rapids to speak to a fund-raising event for the local high school. It was a a crisp clear night just like the night of Halloween in l95l and a perfect setting to tell the story publicly in town for the first time. The event was at the new community building, on Main Street, just a block or so from the old Community Building, and a block or so from the siding where we found the boxcar. I told the audience that Shinny had assured me the statute of limitations had run out in Rock Rapids and that I could now, 54 years later, tell the boxcar- across -Main -Street caper with no fear of prosecution. And so I did, with relish.

Chuck Telford was in the audience and I recalled that he had driven up to us that night, as part of a civilian patrol, and inquired as to what we were doing. When he could see what we were doing, he just quietly drove off. "Very civilized behavior," I said. Afterward, I told Chuck I would back him for mayor, on the basis of that incident alone. Craig Vinson, then the highway patrolman for the area, came up to me and said he remembered the incident vividly because he was on duty that night and came upon the boxcar blocking the highway with long lines of honking cars. "I got ahold of Shinny that night and told him it was his job to move the boxcar and get it off the highway," he said. Others said they had gotten a whiff of the story but were never able to pin it down. The high school principal and superintendent didn't say much and, I suspect, were worried my tale might lead to the Rock Rapids version of the movie "Ferris Buhler Takes A Day Off."

For years, I said in my talk, I didn't think that Shinny ever knew exactly what happened or who was involved in the caper or how we pulled it off, twice, almost before his very eyes. Shinny retired in Rock Rapids and I saw him twice a year when I came back to visit my parents. But I never said anything and he never said anything but finally a couple of years ago I found the right moment and cautiously filled him in. He chuckled and said, "Let's drink to it." We did. And we have been drinking to it ever since.

This year, for our reunion of the famous Dream Class of l953, I invited Shinny to sit in with us. He was still going strong at 89. He assured us once again that the statute of limitations had run out and we could speak openly about the Halloween caper in his presence and in front of witnesses. So Dave Dietz and I retold the story with expansiveness and gusto. Shinny supplied some key missing details. For example, he said that he didn't get his troops out of the dance but out of the nearby movie theater with the threat that he would arrest them if they didn't help him move the boxcar.

So there we were, 57 years later, working to make the fast times even faster on Halloween in Rock Rapids. Did he ever arrest anybody on Halloween? "No," he said. "I would just shine my car lights and everybody would run."
Any hard feelings? Shinny chuckled. "Naw," he replied. "Let's drink to Halloween in the good old days." And so we did. Shinny still calls me now and then in my office in San Francisco and he always tells the receptionist, "Tell Bruce, it's Shinny. I'm his parole officer in Rock Rapids." Alas, Shinny died earlier this year but I am glad that we were able to confess properly to the top cop of Rock Rapids in l951 and to hear Shinny's side of the story.

Those were the days, my friends. The days of fast times and safe Halloweens in Rock
Rapids, Iowa. B3

P.S.: Ted Fisch, one of the conspirators, called me the other day. He was the center when I was the left-handed quarterback on our 195l team. He became a colonel in the Air Force and loved to say that he was the only field grade officer he knew of who was a solid Democrat. We went over the Obama prospects and the campaign in detail. And then he said, Bruce, a friend of mine googled my name the other day and found that I was mentioned in your Halloween story. How could that be? Does that mean I am up there forever? Somehow, it made me feel good.

P.S. I love smalltown lore and will from time to time lay out the life and fast times and wild adventures of my hometown, the best little town in the territory. I invite you to contribute your smalltown stories and lore.