Our power failure

 Sam Smith – The moral, political and ecological collapse of elite power is increasingly part of the global story. Whether thanks to politics, corporatism, criminality or media manipulation we now have an elite that threatens us far more than gives us hope. And it’s not just Donald Trump, who is more a grim product than a creator of the problem. After all, Trump is primarily a media image, the collapse of our environment was created in part by an intellectual elite that did not give enough attention to things like the effects of human overpopulation, our elite colleges taught students how to rise to the top rather than share the world with others, and our businesses increasingly were prized by their size rather than their actual services.

The value of the individual, of communities and their non-profits has dramatically declined, symbolized in no small part by the downturn in local newspapers. We have put our faith in a self centered approach to achievement and are no longer able to even discuss it rationally or to find many to talk about it with.

I sense this increasingly because in two months I will become 87 years old. Increasingly, I look back over my life as being in part a clinging to behavior and places where humans might still make a difference – a concept that the intellectual, business and media elite increasingly reject in favor of increasing power.

Even the numbers of such an effort don’t work out that well. For example, if one is president of the United States, you have been assigned power over only 4% of the global population.

Starting in the mid Sixties, I was part of what was known as the underground press, beginning a neighborhood paper on Capitol Hill in DC. With our circulation area being one of the worst hit communities of the 1968 riots, we expanded our coverage citywide with the DC Gazette. We covered the local as well as the national, seeing them as deeply intertwined. For example, I helped start the DC statehood movement and became one of the city’s first elected advisory neighborhood commissioners.

Now continuing to publish Undernews online since moving to Maine, I remain close to the community side of humanity. I started a community online newsletter and with no effort found myself Facebook friends with a quarter of my town. The town is pleasantly devoid of Trump like characters. It would be a lousy way to impress anyone here.

When I look back over my life I find that the figures who remain largest in my mind and enthusiasm were strikingly absent in the pursuit of power. Improving things was far more important than controlling them. Among those I recall were teachers at my Quaker high school, the manager of my parents’ farm for whom I worked a number of summers, the staff of a radio station where I worked as a newsman, the crew of a Coast Guard cutter aboard which I was the navigator and operations officer, and the organizers of activist community groups. It was not their power that influenced me but their skill, values and character. As I tell folks, the only bullshit I found useful on the farm was that on a field or in barn, not from somebody’s mouth.

When I ask myself what powerful people had a similar impact on me, I come up with few answers, one being Eugene McCarthy of whom I once wrote:

- For a quarter century or so, Mark Plotkin and I would have occasional lunches with McCarthy. Plotkin had been McCarthy's campaign manager when he ran as an independent for president in 1976. The lunches were at such places as Duke Zeibert's - a haven for the untight powerful - and later at the Review conference room at La Tomate Restaurant - aka the table just southwest of the bar. Between lunches, Gene McCarthy would write poetry, books of essays, columns (which I happily published in my journal), drink coffee at the H&J Grocery in Sperryville, Virginia, and, when the mood struck him, run for president. During or after lunch I would invariably find myself scribbling a few words on a napkin or in my butt pilot, the small note pad I keep in my back pocket. Here are some the things these notes recall. . .

- On another occasion former Indiana Senator Vance Hartke sat down with us. and told us of visiting Governor Roger Branigan. The governor was on his second whiskey and said to Hartke, "You know, I never wanted to be governor, I just wanted to be elected governor."

- Gene took tennis lessons from Allie Ritzenberg at St. Alban's School in the shadow of the National Cathedral. Ritzenberg, when he wasn't winning titles himself, coached people like Jackie Kennedy, Katherine Graham and Robert McNamara. Gene told Ritzenberg that he was responsible for the Vietnam War because he kept hitting to McNamara's strength thereby boosting his ego. Then McNamara would go to the Pentagon and escalate the real battle.

- Someone asked what Gene would do if he were to become pope. He replied that he would cut the Ten Commandments down to four and reorder them.

- Gene and I both owned property in Rappahannock County, Virginia, about two hours away. If DC had the population density of Rappahannock, it would have only 2,000 people living in it. I bought the place in the early 1970s from G. Brown Miller, who once told me, "You know, partner, your friend Erbin is a mighty fine fellow." I agreed. "He gave me one of them marijuwana cigarettes the other day." "How'd you like it, Brown?" I asked. "Well, it seems like to me, for a man who's lived on moonshine all your life, it don't do much."

- I once went entered the H&J Grocery store and found a group of men drinking coffee, including a fully uniformed and armed game warden holding his coffee in one hand and a copy of Foreign Affairs in the other. It was explained to me that Gene McCarthy had been in earlier.

I am now at an age when most of what I lived through, even at the US Capitol, doesn’t matter much anymore, while the pleasure and appreciation of good people and their useful groups helping others remains strong as does having coffee at places like H&J Grocery.

Donald Trump facts

Really American  -  Trump: "I took care of our economy like I would take care of my own company.” Trump went bankrupt six times, his university and foundation were closed for fraud. He lost almost 3 million jobs as President, added $8 trillion to the debt.

Diane Ravitch -  During an interview on a podcast, Trump let slip that he lost the 2020 election. He claimed he lost the election “by a whisker.” In fact, he lost the popular election by 7 million votes. Perhaps he was thinking of the electoral vote, which he might have won if a few thousand votes in battleground states like Georgia had gone his way. 

David Doney

 

 

Stephanie "LB"

ProPublica - One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country. The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

ProPublica - One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country. The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

 

Via Mayra Photography

 A Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes 

 Independent UK - Donald Trump has pushed millions of dollars of funds from campaign donations into his family businesses, a new report reveals. The former president and associated political groups have spent $28m in campaign funds at Trump-owned businesses throughout his three presidential bids, a report from CNN revealed.

Other Republicans have similarly used campaign funds to make big purchases at Mar-a-Lago, Trump hotels and other affiliated businesses, according to CNN, which translates into profit for the former president.

Via Jackson

 

 

Washington Post, 2021 - When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.

Newsweek -  Nearly half of former President Donald Trump's financial assets returned no income—or income measured at less than $201—new financial filings show. Inactive assets accounted for 67 of Trump's listings that returned no income or less than $201. Thirty-three of the listings returning no income were dissolved in 2023.

ArtVoice - During his four years as President of the United States, Donald Trump was remarkably active and often successful in sabotaging the health and safety of the nation’s workers. Trump, as the AFL-CIO noted, targeted Medicare and Medicaid for $1 trillion in funding cuts, eroded the Affordable Care Act (thereby increasing the number of Americans lacking health insurance coverage by 7 million), and “made workplaces more dangerous by rolling back critical federal safety regulations.” Trump’s administration not only refused to publicly disclose fatality and injury data reported to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, but slashed the number of federal workplace safety inspectors and inspections to the lowest level in that agency’s 48-year history. According to one estimate, with these depleted numbers, it would take 165 years to inspect every worksite in the United States.

Furthermore, the administration repealed rules requiring employers to keep and report accurate injury records, proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and cut workplace safety research and training programs. The Trump administration also proposed revoking child labor protections, weakened the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement of mine safety, and reversed a ban on chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide that causes acute reactions among farmworkers and neurological damage to children.

Trump’s laundry list of increasingly bizarre claims  

  

Via House Judiciary Dems

Axios - Of the 42 people who served in former President Trump's Cabinet, just over half — 24 — of them explicitly support his re-election bid, The Washington Post reports.

• Three former Cabinet members — John Bolton, Mark Esper and former Vice President Pence — have explicitly said they won't vote for Trump.
• 15 others have declined to state their positions.

 

Dealing with despair

Excerpts of a talk your editor gave at Congregational church in New York 20 years ago. 

Sam Smith, 2004 - Empires and cultures are not permanent and while thinking about the possibility that ours is collapsing may seem a dismal exercise it is far less so than enduring the frustrations, failures, damage and human casualties involved in constantly butting up against reality like a boozer who insists he is not drunk attempting to drive home.

Peter Ustinov in Romanoff and Juliet says at one point: "I'm an optimist: I know how bad the world is. You're a pessimist: you're always finding out." Or as GK Chesterton put it, "We must learn to love life without ever trusting it."

Happiness, courage and passion in a bad time can only be based on myth as long as reality does not intrude. Once it does, our indifference to it will serve us no better than it does the joyriding teenager whose assumption of immortality comes into contact with a tree.

But this does not mean that one must live in despair. There are other stories - true stories of real people - that can lead us elsewhere.

Like the former LA narcotics detective I know who learned to face danger while investigating corruption and the involvement of intelligence agencies in the drug trade. He had two bullet holes in his left arm and one in his left ear. He said he had borrowed a trick another cop had taught him; when in danger he simply considered himself already dead. Then he was able to move without fear.

Such an ability to confront and transcend -- rather than deny, adjust to, replace, recover from, or succumb to -- the universe in which you find yourself is among the things that permits freedom and courage. This man, with Buddhist-like deconstruction and Christian-like rebirth, had taken apart the pieces of his fear and dumped them on the ground -- a mercy killing of dreams and nightmares on behalf of survival.

I grew up with someone like that. Ann had come to our house during World War II as a nine year old child from Britain. It hadn't been easy for her to get to Washington in July of 1940. Sixty years later she wrote me about it:

I set sail in the Duchess of Atholl in convoy. There was a slight skirmish with a submarine. I remember feeling the ship shudder as depth charges were dropped but we were unscathed and pressed on, though I remember seeing icebergs and wondering. My mother told me we might well be sunk. If I was dragged underwater, not to struggle. I would come to the surface naturally, then not to strike out to England or America but float on my back, as I had learned at school, until I was picked up.

Within two months, no more British children were sent to America because the Nazis had started torpedoing the ships and even machine gunning the children in the water.

After the war, Ann came back and lived with us, becoming a virtual sister. She would marry man, quite a bit older, who had been a young doctor during the Battle of London. The doctors were given colored tags to attach to the feet of air raid victims. Each tag represented one bed and each color one hospital in London. When the tags were gone so were the beds. Think about that when you worry about your flu shot.

Ann was one of the first people I thought about as I watched the World Trade Center go down because she had learned to face the grim with stolidity but the rest of life with passion and pleasure. I was in my home when it happened, six blocks from another intended target, the US Capitol, and I recalled how much I had learned from her, even as a child, about getting through the bad times.

To view our times as decadent and dangerous, to mistrust the government, to imagine that those in power are not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture suggests otherwise.

But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer is this: despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us, there still remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its possibilities To despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut. The task is to bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves and to challenge the wrong without ending up on its casualty list. "You don't have to change the world," the writer Colman McCarthy has argued. "Just keep the world from changing you."

Oddly, those who instinctively understand this best are often those who seem to have the least reason to do so - survivors of abuse, oppression, and isolation who somehow discover not so much how to beat the odds, but how to wriggle around them. They have, without formal instruction, learned two of the most fundamental lessons of psychiatry and philosophy:

• You are not responsible for that into which you were born..
• You are responsible for doing something about it.

These individuals move through life like a skilled mariner in a storm rather than as a victim at a sacrifice. Relatively unburdened by pointless and debilitating guilt about the past, uninterested in the endless regurgitation of the unalterable, they free themselves to concentrate upon the present and the future. They face the gale as a sturdy combatant rather than as cowering supplicant.

In Washington we have a neighborhood known as Shaw where for decades just such a form of survival thrived. It has been a particular interest of my historian wife. Until the modern civil rights movement and desegregation, this African-American community was shut out without a vote, without economic power, without access, and without any real hope that any of this would change.

Its response was remarkable. For example, in 1886 there were only about 15 black businesses in the area. By 1920, with segregation in full fury, there were more than 300.

Every aspect of the community followed suit. Among the institutions created within these few square miles were a building & loan association, a savings bank, the only good hotel in the Washington where blacks could stay, the first full-service black YMCA in the country, the Howard Theater (opened with black capital twenty years before Harlem's Apollo became a black stage) and two first rate movie palaces.

There were the Odd Fellows, the True Reformers, and the Prince Hall Lodge. There were churches and religious organizations, a summer camp, a photography club, settlement houses, and the Washington Urban League.

Denied access to white schools, the community created a self-sufficient educational system good enough to attract suburban African-Americans students as well as teachers with advanced degrees from all over the country. And just to the north, Howard University became the intellectual center of black America. You might have run into Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, or Duke Ellington, all of whom made the U Street area their home before moving to New York.

All this occurred while black Washingtonians were being subjected to extraordinary economic obstacles and being socially and politically ostracized. If there ever was a culture entitled to despair and apathy it was black America under segregation.

Yet not only did these African-Americans develop self-sufficiency, they did so without taking their eyes off the prize. Among the other people you might have found on U Street were Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston, laying the groundwork for the modern civil rights movement.

Older residents would remember the former neighborhood with a mixture of pain and pride -- not unlike the ambivalence found in veterans recalling a war. None would voluntarily return to either segregation or the battlefield but many would know that some of their own best moments of courage, skill, and heart had come when the times were at their worst.

Last summer, I went to Umbria, a section of Italy north of Rome remarkably indifferent to 500 years of its history, where even the homes and whole villages seem to grow like native plants out of the rural earth rather than being placed there by human effort. It was as if I had been transported back several centuries while still being allowed to take along a car and my Diet Coke. I hadn't felt such stability for a long time, certainly not since September 11.

Yet the Umbrians have been invaded, burned, or bullied by the Etruscans, Roman Empire, Goths, Longobards, Charlemagne, Pippin the Short, the Vatican, Mussolini, the German Nazis, and, most recently, the World Trade Organization. Umbria is a reminder of the durability of the human spirit during history's tumults, an extremely comforting thought to an American these days.

We don't have to go that far back, though. Consider the increasingly cited novel, 1984. Orwell saw it coming, only his timing was off. The dystopia described in 1984 is so overwhelming that one almost forgets that most residents of Oceana didn't live in it. Orwell gives the breakdown. Only about two percent were in the Inner Party and another 13% in the Outer Party. The rest numbering some 100 million were the proles.

It is amongst the latter that Winston Smith and Julia find refuge for their trysts, away from the cameras (although not the microphones). The proles are, for the most part, not worth the Party's trouble. Says Orwell:

From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is . . .

As we move towards - and even surpass - the fictional bad dreams of Orwell and the in many ways more prescient Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, it is helpful to remember that these nightmares were actually the curse of the elites and not of those who lived in the quaint primitive manner of humans rather than joining the living dead at the zenith of illusionary power.

This bifurcation of society into a weak, struggling, but sane, mass and a manic depressive elite that is alternately vicious and afraid, unlimited and imprisoned, foreshadows what we find today - an elite willing, on the one hand, to occupy any corner of the world and, on the other, terrified of young men with minimal weapons.

In the wake of September 11, this trend became even more prominent. Our country's policies and budgets have been strongly skewed in the interest of protecting New York and Washington (and the natural resources and economic machinery that support their activities). There has not been much mention of a terrorist threat to St Louis or Des Moines, at least in the national media. After all, St. Louis and Des Moines are in the countryside that is filled with persons who, if left to themselves, will, in the words of Orwell, "not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is."

This is not to say that St. Louis or Des Moines won't be a target, only that it is far from what the war on terrorism is really about, which is to defend those things, people, and places that the elite hold most dear - starting with themselves. Six blocks from my house, for example, they are building a bunker for congressmen at the cost of $1 million a member, congressmen already guarded by the most expensive police force per capita and per acre in the world. A friend who works a block away must go through several roadblocks a day. But walk east just a bit towards my house and nothing has changed.

Strange as it may seem, it is in this dismal dichotomy between countryside and the political and economic capitals that the hope for saving America's soul resides. The geographical and conceptual parochialism of those who have made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still free in which to nurture hopes, dreams, and perhaps even to foster the eventual eviction of those who have done us such wrong.

Eric Paul Gros-Dubois of Southern Methodist University has described Orwell's underclass this way:

The Proles were the poorest of the groups, but in most regards were the most cheerful and optimistic. The Proles were also the freest of all the groups. Proles could do as they pleased. They could come and go, and talk openly about whatever they felt like without having to worry about the Thought Police. . .[Orwell] also concluded that the hope for the future was contained within this group."

As a Washington native I often find myself thinking of part of my city as occupied and robotic, and part still free and human. I roughly define the free portion as that having buildings I can enter without having to prove in some direct way that I am not a terrorist. While the occupied city encompasses much of downtown Washington, the consumptive fear of those in power is so concentrated on their own safety that they leave the better part of us alone.

I'm not so naïve as to think that the government or its enemies couldn't at any moment suddenly expand their interests. Still, upon leaving Washington I'm quickly struck by the question: where did the war on terror go? The further I get from this supposed democratic apex the more I feel as if I'm in a democracy again.

There is nothing new in this. Almost all great changes in American politics and culture have had their roots either in the countryside or among minorities within the major cities. From religious 'great awakenings' to the abolitionist movement, to the labor movement, to populism, to the 1960s and civil rights, America has been repeatedly moved by viral politics rather than by the pyramidal processes outlined in great man theories of change promulgated by the elite and its media and academies.

Successfully confronting the present disaster will require far more than attempting to serially blockade its serial evils, necessary as this is. There must also be a guerilla democracy that defends, fosters, and celebrates our better selves - not only to provide an alternative but to create physical space for decent Americans to enjoy their lives while waiting for things to get better. It may, after all, take the rest of their lifetimes. We must not only condemn the worst, but offer witness for the better. And create places in which to live it.

We have, as in all authoritarian regimes, become increasingly dependent upon those who hold us down and back. But the potential is always there, even under the worst circumstances.

We tend to discount the importance of unplanned moments because of our fealty to the business school paradigm in which change properly occurs because of a careful strategic plan, an organized vision, procedures, and process. During the past quarter century when such ideas have been in ascendancy, however, America has demonstratively deteriorated as a political, economic, and moral force. In reality, many of the best things happen by accident and indirection. While it may be true, as the Roman said, that "fortune smiles on the well prepared" part of that preparation is to be in the right place at the right time. In other words, it is necessary to create an ecology of change rather than a precise and often illusory process.

The beat generation understood this. Unlike today's activists they lacked a plan; unlike those of the 60s they lacked anything to plan for; what substituted for utopia and organization was the freedom to think, to speak, to move at will in a culture that thought it had adequately taken care of all such matters. To a far greater degree than rebellions that followed, the beat culture created its message by being rather than doing, rejection rather than confrontation, sensibility rather than strategy, journeys instead of movements, words and music instead of acts, and informal communities rather than formal institutions.

The full-fledged uprisings that followed could not have occurred without years of anger and hope being expressed in more individualistic and less disciplined ways, ways that may seem ineffective in retrospect yet served as absolutely necessary scaffolding with which to build a powerful movement.

One of these ways, for example, is music. Billie Holiday was singing about lynchings long before the modern civil rights movement.

Another way is found in the magic of churches. During the 1960s I edited a newspaper in a neighborhood 75% black and mostly poor in which I came to assume that churches were the sina qua non of positive change. We had over a 100 of them in a two square mile area and you just came to rely upon them as part of the political action, including the Revolutionary Church of What's Happenin' Now and the Rev. Frank Milner, part-minister and part-taxicab driver who would come to community meetings in an outfit complete with clerical collar and a metal change-maker on his belt.

How important one church can be is illustrated with a little known story from Birmingham Alabama. Responding to Rosa Parks' mistreatment, sleeping car porter E.D. Nixon called up a young preacher and asked if he could use his church for a meeting. The minister said he would think about it. A few days later, Nixon called back and the minister agreed. E.D. Nixon's reply was something like this, "Thank you Reverend King, because we've scheduled a meeting at your church next Monday at 6:30 pm."

It is for such reasons we must learn to stand outside of history. Quakerism, for example, prescribes personal witness as guided by conscience - regardless of the era in which we live or the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And the witness need not be verbal. The Quakers say "let your life speak," echoing St. Francis of Assisi's' advice that one should preach the gospel at all times and "if necessary, use words."

There are about as many Quakers today in America as there were in the 18th century, around 100,000. Yet near the center of every great moment of American social and political change one finds members of the Society of Friends. Why? In part because they have been willing to fail year after year between those great moments. Because they have been willing in good times and bad -- in the instructions of their early leader George Fox -- "to walk cheerfully over the face of the earth answering that of God in every one "

The existentialists knew how to stand outside of history as well. Existentialism, which has been described as the idea that no one can take your shower for you, is based on the hat trick of passion, integrity and rebellion. An understanding that we create ourselves by what we do and say and, in the words of one of their philosophers, even a condemned man has a choice of how to approach the gallows.

Those who think history has left us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, or the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it.

Would we have been abolitionists in 1830?

In 1848, 300 people gathered at Seneca Falls, NY, for a seminal moment in the American women's movement. On November 2, 1920, 91 year-old Charlotte Woodward Pierce became the only signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions who had lived long enough to cast a ballot for president.

Would we have attended that conference in 1848? Would we have bothered?

Or consider the Jewish cigar makers in early 20th century New York City each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with them as they worked - reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish literature. The leader of the cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers, would later become the first president of the American Federation of Labor. And those like him would become part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came from native populists and immigrant socialists. It is certainly impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left.

These are the sort of the stories we must find and tell each other during the bad days ahead. But there is a problem. The system that envelopes us becomes normal by its mere mass, its ubiquitous messages, its sheer noise. Our society faces what William Burroughs called a biologic crisis -- "like being dead and not knowing it." Or as Matthew Arnold put it, trapped between two worlds, one dead, the other unable to be born.

We are overpowered and afraid. We find ourselves condoning things simply because not to do so means we would then have to -- at unknown risk -- truly challenge them.

Yet, in a perverse way, our predicament makes life simpler. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time.

It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but as a frontier.

How one does this can vary markedly, but one of the bad habits we have acquired from the bullies who now run the place is undue reliance on traditional political, legal and rhetorical tools. Politically active Americans have been taught that even at the risk of losing our planet and our democracy, we must go about it all in a rational manner, never raising our voice, never doing the unlikely or trying the improbable, let alone screaming for help.

We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. Unitarian church basements. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers.

Above all, we must understand that in leaving the toxic ways of the present we are healing ourselves, our places, and our planet. We must rebel not as a last act of desperation but as a first act of creation.

Superculture and community culture

 Sam Smith - Thanks in no small part to modern media, we all live these days in two cultures: a superculture of the powerful and one defined by our actual community. There is a huge difference in the two yet we don't discuss it much. 

The superculture includes our national government and, thanks to mass media, national and international institutions, values and habits. Our mass media trains us in this information and habits and decreasingly attends to views and behavior of real groups of people with whom we live and experience each day.

To get a feel for how different these two communities are, check your TV and newspapers for the lack of news and information about things that directly affect you and your friends on a daily basis. Is news of a potential new cabinet member really so important that there is little time and space for news of things that might change your daily life.

I have long lived with this contrast having been involved with national news while also starting a neighborhood newspaper on Capitol Hill in the 1960s and much later a web site for my Maine town's news. I was also an elected neighborhood commissioner in my DC 'hood.

When I started as a journalist the difference was clear. As a radio reporter in DC I covered everything from White House news conferences to fires and local labor crises. Lately, however, I've become increasingly aware of the media's increased disinterest in the human, the community, the individuals and small groups that define so much of our lives. Instead we are informed of things in major government, huge institutions, and the tiny community of the highly powerful as well as other news predominantly from that far above us in size or strength.

We need to reclaim our community cultures, respect and be proud of them more, and make those who prefer the artificial intelligence of power more aware of what they have thrown away.

Why we don’t do better with folks who don’t look like us

 Sam Smith - I'm constantly reminded these days of something that rarely gets discussed in the coverage and debates about people of different ethnicity or gender, namely that we live in a multicultural world that even the virtuous among us more often treat more as a problem to be resolved rather than an asset to be absorbed and enjoyed. 

I early discovered the differences in the world. I had five brothers and sisters, which has become rare these days. I learned early in life that others near you don't necessarily see the world in the same way. I had a liberal father and brother, and two quite conservative sisters. My brother lived in Puerto Rico and married a Puerto Rican.  One of my sisters lives in Great Britain  and I have four Puerto Rican nephews and nieces, one of whom I'm close to in part because he's the only other journalist in the family. In short, I was introduced to multiculturalism early in life. 

Then in ninth grade I took one of two high school courses in the country in anthropology. As I wrote about it later:

In the middle of the stolid, segregated, monolithic 1950s, Howard Platt showed us a new way to look at the world. And what a wonderful world it was. Not the stultifying world of our parents, not the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, not the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of fantastic options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways.

Mr. Platt did not exorcise racism, and he did not teach ethnic harmony, cultural sensitivity, the regulation of diversity or the morality of non-prejudiced behavior. He didn't need to. He taught something far more important. Mr. Platt opened a world of variety, not for us to fear but to learn about, appreciate and enjoy. It was not a problem, but a gift.

It was such a powerful course that when I got to Harvard University, I decided to major in anthropology. As I described it in a speech I gave at the 100th anniversary conference of the Berkeley School of Anthropology:

If I had chosen one of the conventional majors, I might never have made it through. Fortunately, or inevitably, I found my way -- academically and geographically -- to a backwater of the university: the anthropology department, which lived like an Amazonian tribe well off the main campus in the dusty, dim recesses of the Peabody Museum. Out of some four thousand undergraduates, only about 20 majored in anthropology, five of them former students of Howard Platt.

Thanks to the distractions of my interest in journalism I graduated from Harvard magna cum probation. As the sainted anthropologist Cora Dubois wrote of my analysis of the Nagas, "This is pretty good journalism but it is bad anthropology."

But anthropology would aid my journalism for decades to come, making me realize that while many of my colleagues treated news as though it was mainly about the powerful I had learned how the true complexity of cultures was a major force of change.

Upon graduation I started my work as a Washington journalist. One of the things about DC that gets little attention is its history as an ethnically diverse city. For example, within a decade of my arrival the city had become 70% black. I ended up providing media assistance to a young activist named Marion Barry, head of the local SNCC chapter, which I continued until the national chair, Stokely Carmichael, announced that whites were no longer welcomed in SNCC, at one point arguing that ""integration is an insidious subterfuge for white supremacy."

This was deeply alien from what I had learned in a majority black DC where I met people like Chuck Stone - former aide to Adam Clayton Powell Jr - who said you should treat everyone like they were a member of your family. It doesn't mean false sensitivity or false harmony, but it does mean a sense of reciprocal liberty, underlying solidarity, and a willingness to share the window seat.

I sometimes think of good politics as the art of turning selfishness into virtue and I think good multicultural relations often work the same way - which is why ethnic restaurants are so popular. It's a good deal for everyone.

Just like living in DC's ethnic minority had been a good deal for me. Among the reasons:

- Black Washingtonians understood loss, pain, suffering and disappointment. They helped me become better at handling these things.

- Teachers, artists, writers and poets are highly respected in the black community. As a writer, I liked that.
- As a writer, the imagery, rhythm and style of black speech appealed to me far more than the jargon-ridden circumlocution of the white city.
- White Washington always seemed to want me to conform to it; black Washington always accepted me for who I was.

The other thing that was different about Washington was that it had learned to  bring people together by shared issues. The first big local story I covered was about a planned freeway to go through the heavily white neighborhood of Georgetown. The two strongest groups involved were a white Georgetown organization and an all black group called Niggers Incorporated. The freeway was killed.

The lack of self government in DC was another issue that brought blacks and whites together. You learned in DC to organize by issues.

As a writer I value thinking independently but to do that I must live in a culture that  supports it. That not only respects cultural variety but enjoys it.

We need to stop dealing with our ethnic and gender differences as only a problem and treat it as something to appreciate. If I could learn this back in ninth grade, maybe politicians, academics and journalists could give it more of a try now.

Tales from the attic: Things my father never told me

 Sam Smith - After war broke out, my father, who had worked for the New Deal from almost the beginning and was then over 40, went to work for the Foreign Economic Administration in Dakar, buying things West Africa needed and buying from West Africa things the military needed such as fats and oils. Richard Saltonstall in a chapter on my father in Pilgrimages, wrote that he "conducted extremely high-level and sensitive business missions for the government, including the purchase of the fuel oil that got Patton's tanks rolling again across Germany." In a letter of recommendation in 1945, the Army's Adjutant General, James Ulio, said my father  had purchased $20 million in commodities for the U.S. Army, the equivalent about about $240 million in 2010. Among them: 90,000 Swiss watches.

Lawrence Smith also carried a noncombatant certificate which said that if captured he was to be treated as a field grade officer (major to colonel).

Nearly a quarter century after my father's death, I was tinkering with an old family desk that I knew had several hidden compartments. A piece of wood suddenly moved and I found myself staring at a small cache of typewritten letters between my parents in the last year of the war.

On March 2, 1945 my father wrote my mother from Bern. He described catching an 8:29 am train to Zurich: "There I talked three hours to the head, or one of the heads, of the Swiss National Bank, named Mr. Hirs and then took the train back here."

Then:

Tuesday I go to Paris probably - if so with the Currie Mission on their train. I come back in a day or two. No gestapo follows me, except possible the Swiss, for they have a wonderful one.

And at the end:

Tell mother that there are plenty of Swiss spies but not German and no female spies. I haven't time for them either.

Then on March 14:

Paris is cold and damp. We left in two 2 1/2 ton six wheel trucks and a jeep with six soldiers, all with guns to protect the load on the way back. . . German tanks and trucks burned up, and turned over off the road, wooden repairs to iron and steel bridges, German prisoners marching off to work, a warning by an MP that two German parachutists had dropped, a railroad locomotive off the bridge and beside the road. . . factories and oil plants destroyed. . .

Author's father on the way from Paris to Bern in March 1945. At his right is his driver carrying a pistol. He wrote home: “We had six tommy guns and plenty of ammunition.”

The photo of my father and the soldiers continued to puzzle me, especially since it was accompanied by another showing a Swiss moving van backed up to one of the Army trucks. Then in 2009, I was having some art appraised and in the course of a conversation with the appraiser's assistant, who also happened to be a member of an OSS history group. I recounted the story of my father's strange journey and other WWII materials I had found. She said, "It sounds like he might have been part of Operation Safehaven."

She took my materials to an OSS history group meeting and came back with a note from one of its oldest members: "It appears that Mr. Smith was indeed a member of the Safehaven mission."

My father had never used the phrase, there had never been a hint of any connection with OSS, but the more I investigated, the more it seemed that I had discovered something deliberately hidden all these years.

Operation Safehaven was a secret World War II project aimed at recovering stolen and hoarded Nazi gold, art and other valuables.  In the course of my research I came across an OSS summary stating that Safehaven's purpose was "above all, to deny Germany the capacity to start another war." A CIA report calls this purpose its "overriding goal."

The Safehaven operation was started by the Foreign Economic Administration, for which my father was working. But, while inventing the project, the FEA soon found itself over its head and called on the OSS for help. In classic government tradition the two agencies apparently alternately cooperated and competed. The State and Treasury departments' involvement helped to make it even more complicated.

The Currie Mission, with which my father was also involved in some manner, was headed by Laughlin Currie, head of the Foreign Economic Administration. According to one account, "In early 1945, Currie headed a tripartite (U.S., British, and French) mission to Bern to persuade the Swiss to freeze Nazi bank balances and stop further shipments of German supplies through Switzerland to the Italian front."

That was the trip my father had taken. The Currie Mission, according to the National Holocaust Museum, reached an agreement with Switzerland to stop cloaking enemy assets, gold purchases from Germany, assist in the restoration of looted property, and conduct a census of German assets in Switzerland. It adds that Switzerland "reneged on commitments."

Two weeks earlier, my father had "talked three hours to the head, or one of the heads, of the Swiss National Bank, named Mr. Hirs." Mr. Hirs, it turns out, was only the deputy head, of whom David Sanger of the NY Times would write decades later:

When the war ended, the Swiss offered a series of backtracking explanations of their behavior [with Nazi loot] . . When bank records or intelligence reports surfaced, it turned to legalistic defenses, arguing that under the rules of occupation the Nazis had clear title to anything they looted from central banks.

Lengthy negotiations were held in Washington over this prickly subject. A particularly duplicitous deputy head of the Swiss National Bank, Alfred Hirs, blurted out to the Americans, ''Do you want to take 500 million Swiss francs of gold'' -- worth roughly $1.25 billion today -- ''and ruin my bank?'' It was a telling moment, because until his outburst the Swiss had not acknowledged holding anywhere near that much looted gold.

The record of my father's role in all this remains blurred. He was a serious art collector and art was one of the things the Nazi had looted. He had also held a high position in the Justice Department so he was used to keeping his mouth shut.

In fact, according to one news account, Operation Safehaven didn't even become publicly known until the mid-nineties, two decades after my father's death.

In 1997, Stuart Eizenstat compiled a report for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. In it, citing two countries in which my father operated, he wrote;

The overriding goal of Safehaven was to make it impossible for Germany to start another war. Its immediate goals were to force those neutrals trading with Nazi Germany into compliance with the regulations imposed by the Allied economic blockade and to identify the points of clandestine German economic penetration. . .

It is quite clear that Safehaven planners had a good idea of what they wanted to achieve, but it also is apparent that they did not have the slightest idea of how to do it. Although it was evident from the outset that Safehaven would be primarily an intelligence-gathering problem, it does not appear to have occurred to anyone to consult the intelligence services, which were excluded from the planning and implementation of Safehaven until the end of November 1944. Bureaucratic rivalries predominated. Indeed, Safehaven was nearly destroyed by internecine quarrels among the FEA, State, and Treasury, each of which wanted to control the program and to exclude the other two from any participation. 

The decision was finally taken to invite the formal participation of the OSS. Once the OSS was brought into the Safehaven fold, all the advantages of a centralized intelligence organization were brought to bear. . .

In Nazi Europe, neutral Switzerland carried out business as usual, providing the international banking channels that facilitated the transfer of gold, currencies, and commodities between nations. Always heavily dependent on Swiss cooperation to pay for imports, the Reich became even more so as the ultimate defeat of the National Socialist regime became obvious and neutrals grew more wary of cooperating with the Axis belligerents. . .

In this critical situation, the Swiss banks acted as clearinghouses whereby German gold--much of which was looted from occupied countries--could be converted to a more suitable medium of exchange. An intercepted Swiss diplomatic cable shows how, allegedly without inquiring as to its origin, the Swiss National Bank helped the German Reichsbank convert some $15 million in (probably) looted Dutch gold into liquid assets. . .

Fortuitously, the restoration of access to Switzerland through France in November 1944 made it possible for the first X-2 operative in Switzerland to enter the country by the end of the year. By January 1945, X-2 was up and running in Switzerland, and by April it was able to provide OSS Washington with an extensive summary of Nazi gold and currency transfers arranged via Switzerland through most of the war. . .

Despite its liberal democratic traditions, Sweden was Nazi Germany's largest trading partner during the war and almost the sole source of high-grade iron ore and precision ball bearings for the German war machine. . .

Another CIA report states:

Within the OSS, Safehaven fell largely under the aegis of the Secret Intelligence Branch, responsible for the gathering of intelligence from clandestine sources inside neutral and German-occupied Europe. But the unique character of Safehaven, which was both an attempt to prevent the postwar German economic penetration of foreign economies and an intelligence-gathering operation, meant that the OSS counterintelligence branch, X-2, also had an important role to play.

In view of the Monuments Men movie, my curiosity about my father’s role in all of this has been reignited.

The story, which was kept secret  a long time, remains extremely complicated and involved a number of agencies including Foreign Economic Administration, the OSS, the Treasury Department, the Army, and the Roberts Commission.

The Roberts Commission was chaired by Owen Roberts, who helped to found the law firm where my father had been employed before joining the New Deal. At one point, my father says he worked for Roberts, but looking at Robert’s bio, this could have only have been for a few months, if he was referring to his work as a lawyer. As a Robert’s biography notes:

In 1930 Roberts returned to his private practice but only for a few months, as President Herbert Hoover soon appointed him to the Supreme Court of the United States

The other period to which my father might have been referring was when he was with the FEA, working with the Roberts Commission. One account describes this commission thusly:

The Roberts Commission was established in 1943 to consolidate earlier efforts on a national basis with the US Army to help protect Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives in war zones. The commission ran until 1946, when its activities were consolidated into the State Department.

Elsewhere:

The name “Monuments Men” was shortened from the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Roberts Commission, a group approved by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943 and headed by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts.

Here’s what the National Archives has to say about the relationship between the Roberts Commission and the FEA:

The Commission also assisted the U.S. Foreign Economic Administration in writing and disseminating an extensive report on Nazi art looting and collecting in the spring and summer of 1945. The Roberts Commission cooperated with various agencies to prevent looted art from being used to fund a postwar Nazi state.

And

The Economic Security Division also cooperated with the American Commission and  with the Office of Strategic Services and the Foreign Economic Administration in the investigation of individual cases of suspicious art transactions in the western hemisphere.

My father was a key official in the FEA at that time in Switzerland – center of much investigatory concern.  But he also went to Sweden, another neutral country in which many dubious things were happening or suspected to have happened.

The commission’s own report states:

RELATION TO THE FOREIGN ECO­NOMIC ADMINISTRATION: Because of its concern with over enemy economic activities, the For­eign Economic Administration participated in the setting up of controls over the exportation of art objects from Europe.  The Enemy Branch, Blockade Division of the Foreign Economic Administration, prepared in May 1945 an extensive report on enemy art looting in Europe and art collecting by enemy nationals in tile western hemisphere…

Because much of the material was of necessity based on unevalu­ated evidence, it was necessary to revise the Foreign Economic Administration report in August 1945 in the .light of later evidence… Since this report contains citations of cases still under investiga­tion it is, of necessity, classified as "Secret" and is not available for distribution.

At least one of the ,Monuments Men also was working for the FEA. From his bio:

Merrill joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942 as assistant to the Navy liaison officer to the Board of Economic Warfare. In 1945 he transferred to the Foreign Economic Administration, assigned to the headquarters of the United States European Theater in Frankfurt. That same year he was recruited to assist with preparation and shipment of 202 German-owned paintings to Washington for safekeeping…. The paintings arrived at the National Gallery on December 8, 1945. They remained there in storage until 1948, when they began an exhibition tour of thirteen American museums.

Add to this the fact that my father had been significantly involved in the arts before the war - e.g. with the American Federation of Arts - and after the war was deeply involved with UNESCO, which took as one of its concerns how to prevent what the Nazis did from happening again, and this strange story starts to make sense.

The Trump legal problem

 Sam Smith – One problem I have with the current Trump controversies is that we have lawyers in charge. Communities, churches, politics, and social values seem to have no say which is too bad because if you want someone to live a good life going to lawyers is not often the best solution.  Lawyers are there to stop people from doing bad things but to create good values and a better society they’re not the best place to go.

While there’s no easy solution to this, a good place to start is to recognize the limits of law on our behavior. In Trump’s case, he’s clearly violated decent human values but stands a chance to get away with this thanks to the limits of the law. 

Journalism: What good old days?

From our overstocked archives 

Sam Smith, 1998 - Some journalists would have us believe that there was a time -- before Drudge and the Internet -- when journalism was a honorable activity in which no one went looking for a restroom without first asking directions from at least two sources (unless, of course, one of the sources was a government official), in which every word was checked for fairness, and in which nothing made the print without being thoroughly verified. There may have been such a time but it wasn't, for example, on January 20, 1925, when the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial declaring that:

A newspaper is a private enterprise, owing nothing whatever to the public, which grants it no franchise. It is therefore affected with no public interest. It is emphatically the property of the owner who is selling a manufactured product at his own risk.

Nor was it a decade or so later when a Washington correspondent admitted:

Policy orders? I never get them; but I don't need them. The make-up of the paper is a policy order. . I can tell what they want by watching the play they give to my stories.

Nor when George Seldes testified before the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of the Newspaper Guild which was then trying to organize the New York Times. The managing editor of the Times came up to Seldes afterwards and said, "Well, George, I guess your name will never again be mentioned in the Times."

Nor when William Randolph Hearst, according to his biographer David Nasaw, "sent undercover reporters onto the nation's campuses to identify the 'pinko academics' who were aiding and abetting the 'communistic' New Deal. During the election campaign of 1936, he accused Roosevelt of being Stalin's chosen candidate."

There was, too be sure, a better side, including those who hewed to the standard described recently by William Safire in a talk at Harvard:

I hold that what used to be the crime of sedition -- the deliberate bringing of the government into disrepute, the divisive undermining of public confidence in our leaders, the outrageous assaulting of our most revered institutions -- is a glorious part of the American democratic heritage.

In either case, though, Adam Goodheart, of Civilization magazine, wrote recently:

Journalism didn't truly become a respectable profession until after World War II, when political journalism came to be dominated by a few big newspapers, networks and news services. These outlets cultivated an impartiality that, in a market with few rivals, makes sense. They also cultivated the myth that the American press had always (with a few deplorable exceptions, of course) been a model of decorum. But it wasn't this sort of press that the framers of the Bill of Rights set out to protect. It was, rather, a press that called Washington an incompetent, Adams a tyrant and Jefferson a fornicator. And it was that rambunctious sort of press that, in contrast to the more genteel European periodicals of the day, came to be seen as proof of America's republican vitality.

In the late 1930s a survey asked Washington journalists for their reaction to the following statement:

It is almost impossible to be objective. You read your paper, notice its editorials, get praised for some stories and criticized for others. You 'sense policy' and are psychologically driven to slant the stories accordingly.

Sixty percent of the respondents agreed. Today's journalists are taught instead to perpetuate a lie: that through alleged professional mysteries you can achieve an objectivity that not even a Graham, Murdoch, or Turner can sway. Well, most of the time it doesn't work, if for no other reason than in the end someone else picks what gets covered and how the paper is laid out.

There were other differences 60 years ago. Nearly 40% of the Washington correspondents surveyed were born in towns of less than 2500 population, and only 16% came from towns of 100,000 or more. One third of Washington correspondents, the cream of the trade, lacked a college degree in 1937. Even when I entered journalism in the 1950s, over half of all reporters in the country still had less than a college degree.

In truth the days for which some yearn never existed. What did exist was much more competition in the news industry. If you didn't like the Washington Post, for example, you could read the Times Herald, the Daily News or the Star.

By the 1980s, most of what Americans saw, read, or heard was controlled by fewer than two dozen corporations. By the 1990s just five corporations controlled all or part of 26 cable channels. Some 75% of all dailies are now in the hands of chains and just four of these chains own 21% of all the country's daily papers.

Today's diuretic discourse over journalistic values largely reflects an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, namely the rapid decline of independent sources of information and the monopolization of the vaunted "market place of ideas.".

The basic rules of good journalism in any time are fairly simple: tell the story right, tell it well and, in the words of the late New Yorker editor, Harold Ross, "if you can't be funny, be interesting."

The idea that the journalist is engaged in a professional procedure like surgery or a lawsuit leads to little but tedium, distortion, and delusion. Far better to risk imperfection than to have quality so carefully controlled that only banality and official truths are permitted.

In the end journalism tends to be either an art or just one more technocratic mechanism for restraining, ritualizing, and ultimately destroying thought and reality.

If it is the latter, the media will take its polls and all it will hear is its own echo. If it is the former, the journalist listens for truth rather than to rules -- and reality, democracy, and decency are all better for it.