Psyche, Science, and Society

Obama and the Chicago School of economics

Naomi Klein in the Nation reminds us that Obama is a prototypical “free market” defender, whose economic advisers include some of the most disturbing voices in American economics, including the “Chicago School.” Whatever positive outcomes we may expect from Obama’s Presidency, a break with that right-wing capitalist orthodoxy that dominates the US is probably not on the cards:

Obama’s Chicago Boys

By Naomi Klein

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart’s most prominent defenders, anointing the company a “progressive success story.” On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged, “I won’t shop there.” For Furman, however, it’s Wal-Mart’s critics who are the real threat: the “efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits” are creating “collateral damage” that is “way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing ‘Kum-Ba-Ya’ in the interests of progressive harmony.” Obama’s love of markets and his desire for “change” are not inherently incompatible. “The market has gotten out of balance,” he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama–who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade–is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School.

He chose as his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right. Goolsbee, unlike his more Friedmanite colleagues, sees inequality as a problem. His primary solution, however, is more education–a line you can also get from Alan Greenspan. In their hometown, Goolsbee has been eager to link Obama to the Chicago School. “If you look at his platform, at his advisers, at his temperament, the guy’s got a healthy respect for markets,” he told Chicago magazine. “It’s in the ethos of the [University of Chicago], which is something different from saying he is laissez-faire.”

Another of Obama’s Chicago fans is 39-year-old billionaire Kenneth Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. Griffin, who gave the maximum allowable donation to Obama, is something of a poster boy for an unbalanced economy. He got married at Versailles and had the after-party at Marie Antoinette’s vacation spot (Cirque du Soleil performed)–and he is one of the staunchest opponents of closing the hedge-fund tax loophole. While Obama talks about toughening trade rules with China, Griffin has been bending the few barriers that do exist. Despite sanctions prohibiting the sale of police equipment to China, Citadel has been pouring money into controversial China-based security companies that are putting the local population under unprecedented levels of surveillance.

Now is the time to worry about Obama’s Chicago Boys and their commitment to fending off serious attempts at regulation. It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, “President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy.”

Furman, a leading disciple of Rubin, was chosen to head the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, the think tank Rubin helped found to argue for reforming, rather than abandoning, the free-trade agenda. Add to that Goolsbee’s February meeting with Canadian consulate officials, who left with the distinct impression that they had been instructed not to take Obama’s anti-NAFTA campaigning seriously, and there is every reason for concern about a replay of 1993.

The irony is that there is absolutely no reason for this backsliding. The movement launched by Friedman, introduced by Ronald Reagan and entrenched under Clinton, faces a profound legitimacy crisis around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Chicago itself. In mid-May, when university president Robert Zimmer announced the creation of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute, an economic research center devoted to continuing and augmenting the Friedman legacy, a controversy erupted. More than 100 faculty members signed a letter of protest. “The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive,” the letter states. “Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world’s population.”

When Friedman died in 2006, such bold critiques of his legacy were largely absent. The adoring memorials spoke only of grand achievement, with one of the more prominent appreciations appearing in the New York Times–written by Austan Goolsbee. Yet now, just two years later, Friedman’s name is seen as a liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go Chicago retro?

The news is not all bad. Furman claims he will be drawing on the expertise of two Keynesian economists: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute and James Galbraith, son of Friedman’s nemesis John Kenneth Galbraith. Our “current economic crisis,” Obama recently said, did not come from nowhere. It is “the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.”

True enough. But before Obama can purge Washington of the scourge of Friedmanism, he has some ideological housecleaning of his own to do.

Naomi Klein is the author of many books, including her most recent, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.Visit Naomi’s website at www.naomiklein.org, or to learn more about her new book, visit www.shockdoctrine.com .

Add comment June 16th, 2008

Ewan MacColl: My Old Man

Who else to celebrate Fathers’ Day with than Ewan MacColl:

Add comment June 15th, 2008

Goodman: Utah Phillips Has Left the Stage

Amy Goodman devotes her weekly column to remembering Utah Phillips who died last Friday. [See my comments on Utah's death here.]:

Utah Phillips Has Left the Stage

by Amy Goodman

“Utah” Phillips died this week at the age of 73. He was a musician, labor organizer, peace activist and co-founder of his local homeless shelter. He also was an archivist, a historian and a traveler, playing guitar and singing almost forgotten songs of the dispossessed and the downtrodden, and keeping alive the memory of labor heroes like Emma Goldman, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World, “the Wobblies,” in a society that too soon forgets.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935, in Cleveland, by his midteens he was riding the rails. He told me of those days in an interview in 2004. By then, he was slowed down by congestive heart failure. His long, white beard flowed over his bow tie, plaid shirt and vest. We sat in a cramped attic of a pirate radio station that was frequently raided by federal authorities. In the early days, he met old-timers, “old, old alcoholics who could only shovel gravel. But they knew songs.”

In 1956, he joined the Army and got sent to postwar Korea. What he saw there changed him forever: “Life amid the ruins. Children crying—that’s the memory of Korea. Devastation. I saw an elegant and ancient culture in a small Asian country devastated by the impact of cultural and economic imperialism. Well, that’s when I cracked. I said: ‘I can’t do this anymore. You know, this is all wrong. It all has to change. And the change has to begin with me.’”

After three years in the Army, he went back to the state that earned him his nickname, Utah. There he met Ammon Hennacy, a radical pacifist, who had started the Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City, inspired by the Catholic Worker movement. Hennacy guided Utah Phillips toward pacifism. Utah recalled: “Ammon came to me one day and said, ‘You’ve got to be a pacifist.’ And I said, ‘How’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, you act out a lot. You use a lot of violent behavior.’ And I was. You know, I was very angry. ‘You’re not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives and hard angry words. You’re going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.’ If there’s one struggle that animates my life, it’s probably that one.”

Utah’s pacifism drove him to run for the U.S. Senate in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom ticket, taking a leave of absence from his civil-service job: “I was a state archivist—and ran a full campaign, 27 counties. We took 6,000 votes in Utah. But when it was over, my job would vanish, and I couldn’t get work anymore in Utah.”

Thus began his 40 years in “the trade,” a traveling, working musician: “The trade is a fine, elegant, beautiful, very fruitful trade. In that trade, I can make a living and not a killing.” He eschewed the commercial music industry, once telling Johnny Cash, who wanted to record a number of Utah’s songs: “I don’t want to contribute anything to that industry. I can’t fault you for what you’re doing. I admire what you do. But I can’t feed that dragon … think about dollars as bullets.” He eventually partnered with one of the most successful independent musicians in the U.S., Ani DiFranco, who created her own label, Righteous Babe Records. Their collaborative work was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Utah Phillips was a living bridge, keeping the rich history of labor struggles alive. He told me: “The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. You haven’t gotten it in your schools. You’re not getting it on your television. You’re being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. Mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we’ve been through and trivializing important events. No, our people’s history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions.” On his radio show “Loafer’s Glory,” he once said, work on this planet has been to remember.”

A week before he died, Utah Phillips wrote in a public letter to his family and friends: “The future? I don’t know. Through all of it, up and down, it’s the song. It’s always been the song.”

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America. Her third book, “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times,” was published in April 2008.

© 2008 Amy Goodman

Add comment May 30th, 2008

Boomers: Something is happening here…

Bob “Bobbo” Simpson, who describes himself as “an old fashioned labor socialist,” has an interesting piece on his blog, The BobboSphere, where he calls upon us boomers to return to our roots and join the younger generation of activists. While I echo the sentiments in general, sometimes I wonder when the younger generation will join. But, like Bobbo, I can feel a change and think “The Times They Are a Changin.”

In poor taste, I will post his conclusion:

Many of today’s young generation grew up on the Harry Potter books. They know that Harry and his pals could never have taken down Lord Voldemort and his legions without the help of Dumbledor and the other older characters. They also know that while not everyone comes out alive in a fight for freedom, doing the right thing no matter what the personal cost is always the right choice. Not only is J.K Rowling a pretty good story teller, but she’s also a pretty shrewd political analyst.

“There’s a storm comin,” as Rubeus Hagrid said, but no one should face it bereft of support and solidarity.

Now go read the whole piece.

Add comment May 30th, 2008

In Memoriam: Utah Phillips 1935-2008

The legendary folksinger, activist, and anarchist Bruce “Utah” Phillips, “the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest,” died this week in his sleep. For me this is extremely sad. I first heard Utah in 1970 or 1971. For a number of years I saw him once or twice yearly. I felt like he was a part of the family. It was important for my wife to see him, and my son once had the opportunity. His songs and stories were part of my tradition. They were about ordinary people, loggers and cowboys, and those who needed a little help.The people he talked and sang about came to life, so that, after a few years, I almost believed I personally knew them.

The songs and tales were an amazing mixture of funny and sad, expressing intense longing and the ability to shrug at life and cope. He also emphasized the struggle for a better life and against arbitrary authority. As an anarchist, and IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] member, Utah believed in ecouraging independent thought and personal moral responsibility, combined with social solidarity and community.

This week CounterPunch published a moving article on Utah by singer David Rovics: In Praise of Utah Phillips. And Amy Goodman rebroadcast a 2004 interview with Utah. Go there and listen or watch.

In order to remember him, I’ve selected a couple of videos from those on YouTube. These give a sense of his presence and spirit, but, alas, they don’t demonstrate his great guitar playing before arthritis interfered. There are many more there, so, if you too loved him, or if you’ve never heard him before but are enthralled, go check them out.then check out the web site created by friends and listen to his CDs. But, most important, embody his spirit, his love of life, and his call to resist illegitimate authority.

The song of his which has most stuck in my brain. I loved singing it to my son: Daddy What’s A Train?

His funniest story: Moose Turd Pie

And, finally, two parts [#1 & 7] of what appears to be an 8-part full concert performance. The first shows how he started concerts for almost 40 years:

And: Get rid of the bum on the plush! [also includes Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!]

Catch that great boxcar in the sky, Utah. And remember, there’s starlight on the rails!

2 comments May 28th, 2008

Ackerman on Longshoreman’s antiwar strike

Spencer Ackerman has written a detailed piece of the May Day West Coast Longshoreman’s strike against the war. This was one of the most important events in recent years:

Longshoremen Union Protests Iraq War
Some Say Walkout Signals a Working-Class Weary of War

By Spencer Ackerman

According to virtually every poll this election year, the working class voter — particularly the white working class voter — is most concerned about the economy, to the exclusion of almost all else. It’s through that prism, according to a parade of television pundits, that the working-class views the war in Iraq. Perhaps the war is unpopular to the working class, as it is to approximately 70 percent of Americans, but the greater danger, they believe, comes from overzealous opposition to the war.

If that was the case, the walkout in California earlier this month should not have happened. Across 29 California ports, as many as 25,000 longshoremen — members of the firebrand International Longshore & Warehouse Union — refused to show up for work in protest of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Activity at the ports was significantly diminished on May 1 — the international day of labor solidarity. Labor historians interviewed by The Washington Independent were hard-pressed to remember the last anti-war labor strike of this magnitude.

(Matt Mahurin) The ILWU tied the war to the turbulence in the global economy to explain their action. “Big foreign corporations that control global shipping aren’t loyal or accountable to any country,” said Bob McEllrath, president of the union, in a prepared statement. “For them it’s all about making money. But longshore workers are different. We’re loyal to America, and we won’t stand by while our country, our troops, and our economy are destroyed by a war that’s bankrupting us to the tune of 3 trillion dollars. It’s time to stand up, and we’re doing our part today.”

Few outside analysts believe that the ILWU action is the vanguard of any large-scale labor action against the war. For one thing, the ILWU has traditionally had a strident aspect: it was the home of legendary labor firebrand Harry Bridges in the 1930s. Bridges was the union’s charismatic and radical spokesman during the 1934 longshoremen’s strike that brought shipping in the West Coast to a halt and the force of the police down on San Francisco longshoremen on the infamous “Black Thursday” events of July 5, 1934. But some see it as a sign that working-class Americans are increasingly fed up with the war.

According to the union, the push for the May 1 strike came from its locals, not union headquarters. The union duly notified the Pacific Maritime Assn., a conglomerate that owns the California ports. But ILWU said the organization did not accommodate the request for a work stoppage. As a result, as many as 25,000 ILWU members did not show up for work on May Day.

The strike affected 29 ports along the California coast, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, two of the country’s largest. A spokesman for the maritime association told AFP that the strike wouldn’t have a lasting economic impact but was nonetheless important. “It does come at a time when people are relying on U.S west coast ports operating smoothly,” Steve Getzug from the Pacific Maritime Assn. said. “These kinds of stoppages aren’t helpful.”

Repeated efforts to contact union representatives were unsuccessful. But Gene Bruskin, one of the leaders of U.S. Labor Against The War, a coalition of unions opposed to the war in Iraq that includes the ILWU’s Oakland chapter, said that the union made an attempt to coordinate with its brother workers in the Iraqi port of Basra to shut down that crucial oil-exporting port on May 1.

“That communication was a really powerful thing,” Bruskin said. “Port workers were talking to to port workers, as well as the oil workers who are very close to them, because Basra is the main port there. There were messages sent up and back… I fully understand why that didn’t happen — sometimes it’s complicated and over there you can’t always say what’s on their mind. But I think that was really powerful.”

While Basra did not shut down, some Iraqi labor groups issued a statement in solidarity with anti-war U.S. workers. “On this day of international labour solidarity we call on our fellow trade unionists and all those worldwide who have stood against war and occupation to increase support for our struggle for freedom from occupation — both the military and economic,” the Iraqi Labour Federation stated.

But the particular ethos of the longshoreman’s trade make exporting such an action to different U.S. unions difficult, labor historians say. “It’s part of the maritime culture,” said Pete Hoefel, an instructor in labor studies at the AFL-CIO’s National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md. “It’s very internationally minded. That union staked out positions on the civil war in Spain in the ’30s, the Hungarian revolution, Cuba, that sort of stuff. Unloading vessels, they talk with other maritime workers [from around the world]. It’s part of their own work culture.”

Indeed, building on the momentum of the strike would not be easy, said Gene Bruskin. “The longshoremen have a somewhat unique situation,” he said. “Their contract allows, under the right conditions, for them to take these kind of actions. But 90 percent of the contracts in the U.S. explicitly prevent this kind of action from happening. It’d be very difficult for most workers in the U.S. to join with the ILW even if they wanted to.”

Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University, pointed to the ILWU’s radical roots as reason to be skeptical that the strike will spread to other unions. “They were one of the first [unions] to come out against the Vietnam War, and I believe one of the first to come out against this war,” Kazin said. “I’m not sure how much of a harbinger it is.”

Still, it is hard to remember the last anti-war labor action of this magnitude. Hoefel recalled a demonstration in Washington in the 1980s of mostly public-sector unions against U.S. involvement in Nicaragua. But that was not an on-the-job action against a war. Bruskin remembered on-the-job actions of a similar size against Apartheid South Africa around the same time — undertaken, then as now, by the ILWU. Aside from those examples, there is little recent precedent for the action. “Iraq is big,” said Hoefel, “and within labor, it’s significant.”

Bruskin said a potential next step is to increase ties with Iraqi workers. A coalition of Iraqi unions — there is no unified labor movement in Iraq, a remnant of Saddam Hussein’s crackdown on civil society — is attempting to hold a labor conference against the U.S. occupation of Iraq in the relative safety of the Kurdish north, he said. “The relations between the labor movement here with USLAW, and even the official parts of the labor movement here, and the Iraqi unions are itself very historic,” Bruskin said. “In a time of war, when our country has invaded and occupied another country, to be in solidarity with those workers against the occupation, it’s important to provide [that] kind of support.” If the Iraqis hold the conference, Bruskin said he and representatives of U.S. Labor Against The War would attend.

As recounted in Rick Perlstein’s new book “Nixonland,” ever since the Vietnam War, the American right has used cultural issues to divide labor from liberals on foreign policy, a development capped in New York’s 1970 “Hardhat Riot,” in which stockbrokers and construction workers joined in attacking hippies demonstrating against the Vietnam War.

While the port strike remains, for now, an isolated incident, some believe it signals that such cultural appeals might be wearing thin. “The anti-war movement is very strong in the labor movement,” Hoefel said. “Like Vietnam, [Iraq] is a working-class war. Look at socio-economic background of the troops. Many are from a part of country where the economy has left them.”

Add comment May 21st, 2008

Huge strikes shuts ports in war protest

I was busy on Thursday and succeeding days. But I want to at least acknowledge the momentous event that occurred on May Day. The West Coast longshoremen shut down all West Coast ports in protest of the Vietnam Iraq war. If you haven’t already, go Watch, listen to, or read the Democracy Now! interview with union official Jack Heyman. We can only hope that this strike is portent both of a revitalized labor movement and of increasing engagement of labor in attempts to end this war. After all, the vast resources spent on this war are depleting the resources available for all the other vital needs in this country. And it is workers who do most of the fighting. Further, the threat of internal resistance to the war is one of the best brakes the populace can put upon the war-makers planning the next war.

Add comment May 5th, 2008

Thomas Frank: Obama’s touch of class

Thomas Frank, of What’s the Matter With Kansas fame, on the Obama comments and what’s the matter with America. [From the Wall Street Journal, where Frank will soon have a weekly column.]:

Obama’s Touch of Class

By Thomas Frank

Allow me to introduce myself. According to the general clucking of the national punditry, my 2004 book – “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” – is supposed to have persuaded Barack Obama to describe the yeomanry of Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or . . . anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Mr. Obama’s offense is so grave that the custodians of our national consensus have elevated it to gatehood: “Bittergate.”

In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama’s tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch guns and irrationally oppose free-trade deals. In point of fact, I oppose many of those trade deals myself.

But I know one thing with absolute certainty. The media flurry kicked up by Mr. Obama’s gaffe powerfully confirms an argument I actually did make: That as they return again to the culture war, what the soldiers on all sides are doing is talking about class without actually addressing the economic basis of the subject.

Consider, for example, the one fateful charge that the punditry and the other candidates have fastened upon Mr. Obama – “elitism.” No one means by this term that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn’t until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

“Elitism” is thus a crime not of society’s actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has “a dash of Harvard disease,” proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of “supercilious” Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here’s a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers’ organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton’s own sins, when these are our standards? Didn’t he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes’ folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?

That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That “bitterness” is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That “divisiveness” is a thing to be shunned at all costs.

Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement’s job is to “organize discontent.” And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.

Consider the shower of right-wing love that descended in February on small-town newspaper columnist Gary Hubbell, who penned this year’s great eulogy of the “angry white man,” the “man’s man” who “works hard,” who “knows that his wife is more emotional than rational,” and who also, happily, knows how to “change his own oil and build things.”

This stock character, unchanged since his star turns in the culture-war battles of the last few decades, is said to be as furious as ever, and still blaming the same villains for his problems: namely intellectuals, in the guise of “judges who have never worked an honest day in their lives.” But what he really wants is a chance to vote against Hillary Clinton, and “make sure she gets beaten like a drum.” I guess our angry toiler didn’t yet know about the Crown Royal.

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they’ve got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don’t care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I’ll fly the plane myself.

Mr. Frank is the author of “The Wrecking Crew,” forthcoming from Metropolitan Books.

Add comment April 21st, 2008

Waterboarding as team building excercise

Torture isn’t just for the CIA or White House any more. In another sign of the moral degradation of our country, a manager waterboarded an employee as a “team building” exercise, as the Washington Post reports! The legacy of Bush administration torture will run very deep through our culture. No word yet if Richard Cheney or Alberto Gonzales are on the board of this company:

Team-Building or Torture? Court Will Decide.

By Karl Vick

PROVO, Utah — No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”

What’s at issue in the lawsuit Hudgens filed against his former employers — just as in the ongoing global debate over the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorism suspects — is the question of intent.

Prosper Inc. maintains that what the supervisor did, while unauthorized, overzealous and misguided, falls far short of torture, and in fact was not nearly as bad as Hudgens makes out in his quest for damages.

“We’re not the mean waterboarding company that people think we are,” said George Brunt, general counsel for the firm, which sells a combination of online and personalized instruction — packaged as “coaching” and running $3,000 to $15,000 — to customers who are solicited by telephone.

The morning Hudgens said he thought he was going to drown, his team was calling on behalf of “Trump University,” pitching real estate instruction to people who had attended a Trump seminar. Prosper is doing well, with 500 employees and clients in 70 countries, senior executives said in an interview.

“I don’t know if this would even be an issue if it weren’t for Guantanamo Bay,” Brunt said.

“How many times did the CIA even do waterboarding? Three times?” added Dave Ellis, the company president.

“But look at the damage it did to America’s reputation,” Brunt pointed out. “And it’s going to hurt our image.”

Indeed, Hudgens’s lawsuit, filed Jan. 17 in Provo, suggests the testosterone-poisoned setting of the David Mamet play “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Hudgens alleged that if the 10-person sales team went a day without a sale, members had to work the next day standing up; Christopherson took away their chairs. The team leader also threatened to draw a mustache in permanent marker on the face of sales people for “negativity,” Hudgens said. Christopherson kept on his desk a piece of wood, “the 2-by-4 of motivation,” he said.

Brunt and Ellis dispute all this. “When you meet Josh,” Brunt said, “he’s a nice, sensitive guy.”

Hudgens agreed that Christopherson was “an upbeat guy; everybody there likes him.” But he added: “It is a big pressure cooker in there, I’ll tell you.” He said low performers were threatened with “the Cure Team” — two weeks to improve or you’re fired.

Late last May, the all-male sales team was having “a rough week.” Christopherson called the men into the break room and announced, “We’re going to do an exercise.” He asked for a volunteer.

Hudgens raised his hand.

“Keep in mind,” he said, “the last time we did a team-building exercise outside, we did an egg toss.”

Prosper maintains that Christopherson explained what would happen next, and Hudgens knew what he was in for, even handing his cellphone and keys to co-workers before lying down. Hudgens insists he had no clue.

“So they held me down,” Hudgens said, “and the next thing I know, Josh has a gallon jug of water and he’s pouring it on my face. I can’t scream because the water’s going down my throat.

“And halfway through he stopped for a second. I tried to mumble the words, ‘Stop, knock it off.’ I tried to get that out and he continued to pour.”

“I’m not getting any air,” Hudgens said. “Toward the end, I’m starting to black out. I’m getting very dizzy, light-headed. The sensation that’s going through my head is, ‘I’m going to drown.’ ”

That is the oft-described whole point of waterboarding, though Hudgens said he was not then familiar with the word. He said that what he told a friend in the human relations office two hours later, after “coughing, choking, mucus” was: “My team just tried to kill me.”

Only later, after describing the experience to a former employer, was he told: “You’ve just been waterboarded.” “I said, ‘What’s waterboarding?’ And the only difference was, instead of lying on a board, I was lying on a grassy hill.”

Christopherson did not know the term, either, Brunt said: “He thought it had something to do with water skiing.”

He said Christopherson told the executives that he was inspired by reading about the Greek philosopher Socrates, who is said to have once held a student’s head under water, then told him he must want to learn as badly as he wanted air.

“We don’t know what he was thinking, but we know that he wasn’t thinking waterboarding, or torture,” Brunt said. Christopherson, suspended for two weeks while the company investigated the incident, is back on the job. The company declined to allow interviews with him or other employees.

“The sales team leaders are very focused here,” Brunt said. “There was an incident, so it’s not fabricated. There was a training exercise. He did lie down on a hill. The entire exercise lasted less than 20 seconds. A little bit of water was poured and then Josh would stop and say, ‘Are you okay?’

“I can’t say he wasn’t held down, but anybody holding him would have let him up if he’d held his hand up.”

Such details are crucial, not least because under Utah law the case could be relegated to a workers’ compensation claim absent an employer’s “conscious and deliberate intent” to inflict injury.

“And I’m absolutely sure that won’t be found,” Brunt said. “And it’ll be a workers’ comp case, and he’ll get what he needs. But we’re not going to pay to keep it out of the media, though it’s tempting.”

That’s because of the taint of the word, of course. “There’s a debate in the Supreme Court whether it’s torture or not,” Ellis said. “I don’t know, looking at the military filings, it looks pretty torturous.”

Interestingly, Hudgens’s Salt Lake City attorney differs on that. “I’m not an absolutist on that,” Sean Egan said. But “to take these kinds of techniques and apply them to anything but a national security environment is entirely inappropriate.”

And the plaintiff?

“I don’t know if the government should do it or not,” Hudgens said. “But I can tell you firsthand, because it happened to me, it definitely works.

“They didn’t tell me it was going to happen, but if they did, holy cow, I would’ve told them whatever they wanted me to tell them.”

Add comment April 14th, 2008

Palast: God Damn America — Especially Pennsylvania

Greg Palast, in his inimitable way, illuminated Pastor Wright’s relevance to Pennsylvania whites:

God Damn America — Especially Pennsylvania
by Greg Palast

[Sunday, March 23, 2008, Forest City, PA ]

The kids were snoozing so I drove along the back roads skirting the Lackawanna River on a dawn hunt for black coffee and a newspaper.

I think even Norman Rockwell would have found this place too sticky sweet, too postcard: the weathered barns, the fallow fields perfectly snow-frosted; red, white and blue flags already up on the clapboard farmhouses and the white-washed church in the valley already full for Easter prayers.

At a gas station, I scored the paper and coffee, spilled some on the front page – the closest thing I’ve got to a religious ritual – then parked in front of a row of insanely pretty salt-box houses shining like mad teeth on the river bank. One was missing a pick-up in the driveway; its screen door was left half-open, and there was a letter taped to the window. The Sheriff’s Notice of eviction. Another foreclosure.

God damn America.

I know that’s what Obama’s spiritual guide would say.

But why? It seems likes He’s already done a pretty good job of damning these United States.

And He seems to have really taken it out on this corner of Pennsylvania.

The gargantuan Bethlehem steel works have dwindled to a few robot-operated mills controlled from Mumbai, India. The only remainders of nearby Carbondale’s mining industry are in display cases at the ageing Coal Inn. But you could still get out by selling your home to ski tourists from New York – until this year when mortgage markets turned cancerous.

That leaves Forest City’s one industry, lumbering – which we can kiss goodbye since a recent ruling by the NAFTA board which allows the import of cheap Canadian wood.

Some local kid has made the paper having been thrown, helmet first, into the volcano called Iraq. The Scranton Times-Tribune, two pages after the photo of a priest blessing a bowl of who knows what, noted that three soldiers killed in yesterday’s bombing are, “pushing the death toll in the five-year conflict to nearly 4,000” – which is true if you don’t count Iraqi dead. But Someone must be counting them. (From way up in heaven, I wonder if we look like a nation of Christians – or an empire of Romans.)

Phil Ochs, before he killed himself, wrote,

“This is a land full of power and glory,
Beauty that words cannot recall.
But her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom.
Her glory shall rest on us all.”

Whatever. It’s a difficult place to be an atheist, in this America, surfeited as it is on every vista with signs of His overwhelming grace and His exasperated wrath. It’s as if the Lord Himself is just as confused and frustrated and disappointed as the rest of us by blessings so abused.

There’s one consolation. He has apparently granted Pennsylvanians the privilege, come April 22, of choosing which Democrat will lose in November.

Which may not mean much to Sandy Ryder on whom the spirit of Easter has landed like a ton of bricks. Sandy, says the flyer tacked up at the Bingham diner, was, “Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.” She’s a, “Single mother of two – Tony and Brandon – and Grandmother of one – Jason.”

And there they were in a photocopied portrait, the earnest elder son and little Jason to her right, the young slacker (Tony? Brandon?) slouched to her left. The town’s hawking a benefit for Sandy, $10 at the door, “including Food and Beverage” and a “Chinese auction.”

(I’ll bet Al Qaeda could pick up some recruits here – if Osama would offer health insurance.)

Whatever. This is, after all, Holy Week, which marks the anniversary of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, the day the giant oil corporation soaked 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coast with crude sludge. March 24 marks 19 years since the grounding and 19 years since Exxon’s promise to compensate the ruined fishermen. You should watch the 19-year-old video-tape of Exxon’s man in Alaska. I especially like the part where he tells the fishermen, “You have had some good luck – and you don’t realize it.”

I know some of the fishermen on the TV footage, like the Anderson family, Eyak Natives. I can tell you, the Eyak don’t feel so lucky, still waiting for the Supreme Court to act on Exxon’s latest stall on payment. They’ve seen plenty of Sheriff’s Notices these past 19 years.

So Happy Easter.

George Bush tells us he’s, “feeling just fine.” And we should be glad for him, I suppose.

Bush ends his most belligerent speeches by saying, “God bless America.”

So, why hasn’t He?

Maybe you can tell us, Mr. President: Why hasn’t He?

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Greg Palast is the author of the NY Times best-selling books Armed Madhouse and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com and sign up for the audio podcasts RSS here.

Add comment March 24th, 2008