Marc Cooper's Blog

As another wag put it, the mass clicking sound you hear is the noise made by thousands of Angelenos unbookmarking the L.A. Times from their browsers.

Starting next week, if you consume more than 15 web articles per month from the Times, you will have to become a digital subscriber to get any more.  The cost? Oh, just $3.99 a week.  z

Translation" $200 a year.

Some people think this is a great idea, a wonderful move to defend quality journalism.  I think it is a dumb move, clearly marking the Times as a dinosaur publication and a move that I believe is almost certainly doomed to fail.

Ah, but wait, say some others. When The New York Times instituted its own similar paywall, it lost almost no web traffic and almost 400,000 readers have made the move to paid digital.  True enough.  With one detail: The New York Times and the L.A. Times are not the same paper.  Whatever the value offered by the user by the NYT, its L.A. counterpart offers a whole lot less. Does anybody really think these two papers are still in the same class? Do you get up Sunday morning raring to rip through the L.A. Times Book Review, the Sunday Magazine, the Week in Review etc etc? What's that you say? They don't exist?

Oh.

The Times has spent the better part of this decade shearing off the content and sections that made it unique. The book section has been eviscerated. The wonderully-written Outdoors section was canned. The Sunday Opinion section has been made as much as invisible and the paper is too damn cheap to hire a single editorial columnist of national stature.  Amazing,

Having long ago given up on the hard copy edition of the paper, I must confess I have lost count of what other sections have been lopped off.  I know a handful of lifestyle sections were axed this month,

Even the news section has been mangled not only by the layoff of scores of reporters, but the Times puts the real and latest news in a second section supplement printed at the last moment because it decided to rent out its evening press run time to the WSJ.

So, the question here is not whether one values or not quality journalism. The question is, how much quality journalism remains at the core of the Los Angeles Times?  Enough to induce you to pay to $200 a year to access it on the Web?

How, then, is the Times to survive?  Good question. And I don't claim to necessarily have the answer. But I know for sure this paywall is not part of it.

Here's a radical idea for survival: how about really retooling the paper for the digital age instead of trying to charge a high premium for the Same Old Same Old?

Retooling would mean offering the reader VALUE-ADDED that might be worth four bucks a week.  This is where Jeff Jarvis axiom from five years ago comes into play: Do What You Do Best and Link To The Rest.

Why would I pay the Times to read its version of the same international, national or even local events that dozens of other outlets are covering pretty much the same way and that I can read for free? Does the Times really have something very different to report on the GOP debate, Jerry Brown's budget, or an earthquake in China that I can't just as easily get for free and instantaneously from hundreds of other sources?  Why should I pay for a Waahington Bureau that is going to crank out the same daily beltway gruel dished out by dozens of others in more or less equal proportions and quality?

What I MIGHT pay for is something unique, something that the Times "does best?"  How about recrafting the publication that offers real and hard-hitting analysis, interpretation and, yes, opinion on these breaking news stories that I can get anywhere else?  Why not dedicate its newsroom to piercing and interpretive local coverage that nobody else has the resources to do?  Why not invest more time and resources in investigative reporting?  And if your taste runs to lighter subjects, fine. Let's see some really exclusive celebrity interviews. Let's see some vigorous Hollywood reporting that blows TMZ and the horrific Nikke Finke out of the water?

In other words, let's see a completely new Los Angeles Times that vigorously competes in the marketplace by offering us content really worth something. I'm tired of being guilt-tripped that by not supporting the Times I am not backing "good journalism."

Bullshit. Fill that paper, or fill that web page with great content I really can't get elsewhere and then call me back. I might offer up a few bucks.

 

 

 

 

This is the first time in two decades that I was absent as a reporter covering both the Iowa Straw Poll and the Iowa Caucuses. Contemplating this issue over the last month, I have to admit to some moment of painful twangs of nostalgia and yearning. Over the last ten days, however, I must say I am absent with no regrets, Indeed, I am quite grateful that I am far, far away from it all.

First, the nostalgia. I confess to a certain frisson in racing through the ice and snow 12 hours a day, clocking 2-300 miles and covering maybe four or five different campaign events. During the last two cycles, with the boom of the web, it was quite a satisfying feat to cover an event, shoot some video, upload it to YouTube and while it's being processed you knock out your 6-700 words of copy and, zap, 30 minutes later it's all posted live.  It is a privilege (if not a horror) to witness all the presidential candidates up close and personal, often in venues of only 25 or 50 people.

It's heartening to see the level of engagement of the Iowans who take this stuff rather seriously as the window shop for a suitable candidate.  Though the MSM rarely report on it, it's a gas to watch the sausage making inside the various campaigns. There's no shortage of self-important twentysomething brown-nosers strutting around with clipboards and cell phones and quite obviously aping the behavior of the stereotypical campaign aide they have seen on movies and TV.

I readily admit to always choosing a campaign staff that I love to torment (I've always tried to make a fair choice, picking on those who most deserve it). Independent of my own biases, during the 2008 cycle the difference between the Clinton and Obama staffs were like night and say. Or hell and heaven. The polished Obama folks went out of their way to accommodate the media. Hillary's crew was a different story — a pack of beltway dipshits who seemed to be in a contest to be the most arrogant. A good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless and who is on a first name basis with Hill and Bill) and I had a devilish good time tormenting these folks after they had acted like the officious a-holes they were.  Nothing like getting in a shouting match with them in the middle of a hotel lobby where the Clintons were lodged and having the Secret Service break it up. Now, that's some real fun.

And then we'd cap off every evening at the Cero restaurant on Locust Street where ALL the staff of every campaign would ritually gather for dinner and drinks.  You could continue your reporting deep into the night by making the rounds of the tables. Biden's group over there. Obama's folks over there. Hillary's team at the bar and so on.

The caucuses themselves are quite a scene — particularly the Democratic ones. Each one is a mini-debate where neighbors, quite literally, attempt to persuade each other to stand for this or that candidate.  For nostalgia's sake, let's toss in steak and eggs at The Machine Shed on the west side of Des Moines. And, um, I've heard there's a poker room at the race track on the east side in Altoona.

I love the gritty eastern edge of the state. The union city of Dubuque and rusted out Davenport.  In between you can drop by the university in Iowa City and, for a moment, swear you're in Madison — or Berkeley. Along the way, stop by and check out the Amish.  Pretty cool.

So, why no regrets this time around? In short, I don't think I could stand watching repeated versions of the stump speeches of ANY of these Republican candidates. I saw Romney last time around and I can tell you that, like John Kerry, he's even more boring in person than he seems on TV (GW Bush was the opposite by the way).  I wouldn't really want to be in the same room, more than once, with Santorum, Gingrich or, God Forbid, a screaming meemee like Bachmann.  Ron Paul I have seen many times before and I find him — and mostly his supporters– really scary. He's a nice, sweet avuncular type whose program is a radical departure from any shred of human compassion.

Lefties and liberals who like his views on foreign policy and marihuana are completely muddle-headed and fail to see the big picture. (More about that later if he wins in Iowa — which won't matter in any case).

Ron Paul aside, none of these candidates have ANY significant political differences among them. Only different styles and tones. Their political records and positions are as much as identical.

Also, I don't want to be unfairly partisan here, but there is a difference, a big difference, between being immersed crowds of true believer Democrats and militant Republicans. The former have their own particular set of rather predictable illusions about their party and their candidates. At least it's theoretically about Hope or Change, no matter how hollow.

Republican activists, for the most part, are a different breed. How anybody can stand for an hour and actually resonate with or believe a word that, say, a Gingrich or, for that matter, a Romney says, is really a bit too hard for me to fully grasp.  There are certainly nice and sweet Republicans, they'd be fine as your granny or auntie.  But I shudder thinking of their political positions which have a whole lot more to do with fear and revenge than anything resembling hope. In no way has this always been the case.  I hated the Bush administration, but let's remember that George actually campaigned the first time around as a "compassionate conservative." Yes, it was a ruse. His rhetoric, however, evoked some of the better angels lurking among the GOP base. If those same spirits were to show up during any of this cycle's Republican events, they would be shot on the spot.

I want no part of that this year. Especially bundled in a parka and trying to keep my rental Focus from sliding into a snowbank.

One final observation, indeed, a personal lament about this year's caucus. Four years ago I was privileged enough to lead a team of citizen reporters working for the HuffPost's OffTheBus project as we covered Iowa for the final ten days leading to the caucuses. Project Director Amanda Michel did a superb job of online organizing and I can say, with no exaggeration, that because of our effort, HuffPost had the largest contingent of reporters covering the caucuses, peaking at about 25.  Our mandate was to be, in fact, off the bus and report from the ground level, avoiding the official spin and the  predictable horse-race conventional wisdom.

Well, that was then, this is now. In the intervening period I have moved on to become  a full time faculty member at the USC Annenberg School. Amanda moved to ProPublica and recently to the Guardian where she continues her web-based magic.  And the HuffPost, well, its citizen reporting project exists now mostly in name only. And it has merged with the Wal-Mart of media companies, AOL.  If you had told me four years ago that in 2012 the HuffPost would be represented in Iowa by that bottomless font of conventional wisdom, Howard Fineman, I would have told you that you lost your mind. I would have said that has about as much chance as happening as Ron Paul winning the GOP Republican nomination.

This is where I part company with at least one group of folks claiming to be part of the Occupy movement: the senseless and distasteful idea of  "occupying" Iowa campaign offices.  There have already been some scattered arrests but I don't think this part of the "movement" is going to go very far because it really makes absolutely NO sense. At least, I hope not. Indeed, I find it counter-productive and a rather piss-poor precedent.

I hate to sound like Jake Tapper, but even somebody as sympathetic as me cannot discern what the bottom-line point is of disrupting –albeit non-violently– the campaign operations of different candidates, including Barack Obama.  From what I can make out through the haze is that the "occupiers" are either protesting the shallowness of American elections and/or are upset that the candidates won't heed their message so they are bringing the message to the candidates. Or is there something I am missing?

I have a question: if elections are shallow and the candidates are deaf, then why bother with them at all? Why not bring your message directly to the people? As the campaigns themselves do, no matter how manipulative and cynical that message might be.  And what is a more perfect place than Iowa? Here's a small state, flooded with campaigners and canvassers, and with a politically engaged populace which — from my long experience there– sorta likes all the attention the caucuses bring them. This is a population that is not only accessible, but also quite open to retail politicking.  If you knock on their door, there is a good chance they will listen. If you hold a town hall on a Wednesday night in Indianola, they might just show up.

(Indeed, one of the most vivid moments I experienced during the 2008 Iowa caucus campaign was a Joe Biden meeting held on a freezing Friday night, the day after Xmas, at the Elks lodge in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Biden's staff consisted of his brother and one other young volunteer. Never at a loss of words, Biden stood there for 2 hours and took quite complex questions on foreign policy, no less, from the parka-clad locals. I'm no big fan of Biden's but it sure was a reassuring moment to see guys in jeans and John Deere caps dialogue with the future V.P. about Pakistan and the Palestinians).

Hundreds, thousands of volunteers– mostly Republicans– are gong door to door as I write this bringing all sorts of cockamamie messages into many more times the number of living rooms and kitchens. Why can't the Occupy folks do the same? I could be snarky and say they can't because they themselves are not sure what the concrete message is. Talking about inequality and the 99% are not enough. To be politically serious, you must propose concrete actions that people should take and I'm not sure at all that Occupy has a clue what that might be.

I don't purport to have the recipe either, but then again I am not occupying anybody's campaign office. But whatever the message is, shouldn't the Occupy folks be organizing the 99% around these issues rather than claiming, rather falsely, that they are the embodiment of the 99%?  If pudonk, doomed candidates from Santorum to Gingrich to Bachmann along with interest groups from the NRA to home-schoolers can turn out volunteers to go door-to-door throughout Iowa, can't the so-called 99 percenters do likewise?

By staging small, disruptive demos in and around campaign headquarters all these folks to is tick people off and demonstrate in full living color their relative impotence (and their rather anemic numbers).

I also said above that I find this to be a somewhat alarming precedent. Look, I know very what a circus these caucuses and much of these elections are at their core. Does someone have, however, a better idea?  Excuse me for being a sap, but I find the campaigning and electoral process to be a rather sacred (if corrupted) part of democracy. If you don't like what the other side is doing, or saying or if you don't like any of the sides, fine by me. Then, it seems, your job would be to out-organize them, to being a message that more deeply engages them than the hooey we hear at the hollow town halls and in the attack ads.  But what you DO NOT do is interfere with the citizens' rights to organize and campaign, no matter how far their heads might be up their asses.

If there were no Occupy movement at the moment (and there might not be), how many liberals and lefties would feel OK about right-to-lifers and gun-rights people occupying the campaign offices of Democratic candidates?

This is a moment in history when Republicans are undertaking an unprecedented effort to block voter participation and discourage civic activism. The last thing we need right now is to have folks from Occupy aiding their cause by clogging up campaign offices.  Bad, bad idea.

I first met Christopher Hitchens when we were both in our early 30′s  in the early 1980′s. Together we produced a day of fundraising for The Nation magazine on the local Pacifica station, I think it was in late 1981, and over the next three decades we remained as friends –  and as colleagues when we overlapped for a half-dozen years at The Nation.

When I learned of his death, I was fairly upset, even though I knew it was coming. As fate would have it, I got the news moments after his demise as my daughter and I were sitting in the Fireside Lounge in Las Vegas — the last place we had seen Christopher together (and a bar that Hitch consecrated as surely one of the ten best in the world).

I had been thinking a lot about him lately. Not only because of his terminal illness. But also because staring at me from the top of my desk is his just published 2 lb. anthology of columns and essays that I was commissioned to review some weeks ago. Writer's block is something I have rarely suffered but something was holding me back from writing the review (which I hope to surmount this coming week).  All I could do since Thanksgiving was mentally mull over what I knew would be the first line of the piece: "How do you review an encyclopedia?"

The breadth and depth of Christopher's knowledge was absolutely stunning, though that descriptor falls way short. His editor at The Atlantic (and my friend and my editor when I have written there), Ben Schwarz, has written one of the best sketches of Hitch, also marveling at his super-sized scope of knowledge, his amazing memory and his rock-solid discipline as a writer. No, his drinking habits, which were formidable, did anything but impair his abilities. Indeed, he was fueled by drink, perhaps cursed by it, but it was, nevertheless entwined with his soul.

I will mention only two anecdotes in this regard. Back in 2002, after the quit The Nation and was excoriated by what passes for an American Left, he came out to L.A. for the Times Book Festival and Arianna Huffington threw him a party.  Feted by scores of admirers and friends, Christopher was knocking back copious quantities of his favored Johnny Walker Black Label all night.  Around 1 a.m., Arianna called the remaining guests into her spacious living room to toast him and Hitch was visibly supporting himself up against the fireplace mantle. Oh shit, I thought. He's gonna fall over.  But no. After Arianna's intro, Hitch — without so much as a stammer or a slur– recited about six stanzas of poetry from an author, I am embarrassed to say, I cannot remember.

A few years earlier, we were together on a Nation fund-raising cruise in Alaska that began with rounds of what he called morning "hand-steadiers" and that progressed until lunch time at which point we made a port stop and were bussed to a salmon bake. After a few more libations, and after a barefoot Hitch chased a bear down a river bed (and I temporarily passed out), we took a long walk to the boat under a misty, cloudy and rather magical sky. He told me he knew 10,000 limericks by heart and I believed him as he reeled off at least three or four dozen in the space of 10 minutes. That night he was lucid enough to write a column on the Balkans war in which, he alone on the Left, called for armed intervention to protect the Bosnian Muslims.

I suppose that brings us to the issue of  his politics.  I offer no hesitation in affirming that he has greatly informed and influenced my views. And while I claim no special insight into his soul, I will say that we have common political roots and therefore I do make the claim of understanding his political trajectory a bit better than your average mope. Hitch was a serious militant in the British section of the International Socialists, a strand of Trotskyism. My own trajectory took me from anarcho-syndicalism in the late 60′s into similar Trotskyist politics when I was active in Salvador Allende's Chilean Socialist Party (which as an amalgam of currents, including Trotskyists).

This sort of Marxism is fiercely internationalist and fiercely anti-totalitarian (that's what made it easy for me as a former anti-authoritarian anarchist to join up with anti-authoritarian Marxists).

There's no need to get too deep into the weeds here so I will cut to the chase. Hitchens' trajectory since 9/11 and his support for the war in Iraq was much more one of continuity than of any radical shift or lurch. Unlike Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz liberals, Hitchens did not see the world as only a domestic struggle between nasty Republicans and weak Democrats. His view was that of an internationalist, a revolutionary (albeit of the cafe persuasion)  who passionately identified with those fighting for liberation, be it against the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships or the totalitarian Stalinist regimes in Poland or Czechoslavakia.

Those lefties who were shocked and outraged by Hitchens in 2002 when he beat the drum for war in Iraq, those who felt somehow  personally betrayed, must be the same folks who had not been paying much attention to Hitchens' writings over the previous 20 years. In 1982, while still pretty much a card-carrying Marxist, Hitch supported Maggie Thatcher's war against the Argentine dictatorship which had tried to seize the British colony on the Falkland Islands. Yes, it was a colony. But the English-speaking inhabitants of the island wanted nothing to do with Argentina and rightly so. Hitch (and I will modestly include myself as sharing that position) saw this as a fight between an incomplete but functioning Tory-led western democracy and a barbaric, anti-semitic, openly pro-fascist Argentine dictatorship that was willing to risk the lives of its conscripts in a nationalist ploy to stay in power. Hitch wrote that if the Argentines were defeated the dictatorship would fall, and so it happened.

Fifteen years later, Hitchens was one of the very, very few voices on the Left urging a Western intervention against Milosevic. While knuckleheads like Ramsey Clark fronted for the butcher of Belgrade, Hitchens (and Susan Sontag and some activists like my pal Ian Williams), clamored for NATO to put an end to the killing fields salted by the Serbs.  When NATO finally did pull the trigger over Kosovo, I found myself on the other side of the issue, opposing the war. Indeed, I helped organize the country's largest teach-in against the war that drew some 1200 attendees and was broadcast live for 4 hours. I sympathized with the Kosovars but saw the war as a ploy to needlessly rehabilitate NATO.

In retrospect, I am not sure at all that I was right about that war. I can argue both sides of it, if forced to. And I can make the counter-argument to my position quite convincing precisely because I had listened quite carefully to Hitchens and I understood his vantage point even if not completely convinced,

The attack on the Twin Towers was, quite obviously, an accelerant in Hitchens' trajectory and that of many others, myself included. And how could it not be? What it told us was that Maoist simplicities that argued that the "primary contradiction" in the world was between "the people" and "U.S. Imperialism" were, well, for simpletons. An idealized socialism might, in fact, be preferable to capitalism, but in the meantime we were seeing a rise in armed religious fundamentalism actively engaged in a death cult. An attempt to kill 25,000 civilians in New York City is more than an asterisk in world history. And Western democracy, with all of its flaws, was not something to be sacrificed for "cultural differences."

When the Bush administration set its sights on Iraq, what Hitchens saw was an opportunity to take out one of the most odious dictatorships on the planet. I spent some time myself in Iraq days before the onslaught of the first Gulf War and I assure you it was one of the most terrifying places I had ever been (and had nothing to do with Michael Moore's depiction of it as a tranquil playground for kite flyers).  Take it or leave it, love him or hate him, but this was not Hitchens as a neo-conservative, but rather Hitchens as an Internationalist (willing to ally with the neo-cons).  He had long supported the Kurds in their struggle for national liberation and was greatly influenced by Iraqi leftists who had, in obscurity, fought for three decades against the fascist rule of Saddam.

On the eve of war, there was a magnificent live debate on Iraq held here in Los Angeles before an audience of several hundred at the Wiltern Theater. Bob Scheer and Mark Danner argued against the war. The pro-war side was offered up by Christopher and Michael Ignatieff (a liberal interventionist).  It was a wonderful couple of hours of the highest intellectual caliber. My heart was with Hitchens. My head was with Danner. I wrote at the time that if Hitchens and Ignatieff were the U.S. Secretaries of Defense and State I might support the war. But they were not and I did not.  I knew that the Bush administration were the wrong people to trust on this matter and I wanted no part of it.

This did not interrupt my friendship, nor my admiration, for Hitchens even though I knew he was wrong on the war. I felt, on the contrary, that his voice was needed then more than ever. Politics is not a tennis match in which you stand by the side, pick your favorite, and live vicariously through your champion's wins and losses. It's about thinking, making hard decisions, and understanding consequences.  Hitchens was wrong about the war in Iraq. But many of those in the anti-war camp were also wrong about Iraq. Jeremy Scahill, darling of the hard Left,  hosted on one of Saddam's dog-and-pony junkets, was doing radio reports about how fair Saddam's regional elections were. Ramsey Clark who was defending Milosevic at the time, was fronting for the ANSWER cult who were organizing the anti-Iraq war demos and simultaneously praising North Korea.

More to the point, there were (and are) way too many American lefties who argued that the U.S. had "no right" to intervene against totalitarian states under any circumstances because it would be a violation of national sovereignty of the dictator in question. Others refuse to believe that there could possibly be any evil greater, or any evil at all, other than Americam Imperialism. They believe that only a "police action" was necessary to crush Al Qaeda (I never understood that one. Were NYPD detectives supposed to serve search warrants on the Taliban?).  And, then there's the Truthers who, I am afraid to say, were never actively expelled from the ranks of the Left.  Hitchens voice was more necessary than ever as it was needed as a counter-balance to some of the more witless crap coming from the antiwar crap.

When Hitch quit The Nation a year before the war in Iraq, he said the straw that broke his back were the letters to the editor the magazine ran in the wake of 9/11. I remember reading those same letter and feeling sick. Way too many of them were laced at least with a tinge of trutherism, at least to the point of identifying the victim of 9/11, the U.S, as the deserving perpetrator of the event. If not materially, then at least morally. The Official Left was mired in the 60′s and would not budge. All roads lead back to U.S. Imperialism.

There's a fascinating if somewhat stilted essay that was published by the small neo-Marxist "Platypus" group a couple of years ago that while not wholly uncritical of Hitchens, certainly takes pains to understand his political positioning from a Marxist view.  I recommend you read it.  It's not fair to sum its complex arguments in a few sentences. But I would say this much. In many ways, Hitchens' desertion from what passes for the Left tell us more about the latter than the former. There is no credible American Left. And it's not so much that Hitchens left the Left as the Let left him (notwithstanding his mistaken position on Iraq).  I think more salient, as the Platypus essay argues, the Left has no self-awareness that the continuity between the progressive and socialist movements of the 20th century, especially the first part of it, have been ruptured and severed. The world has changed and continues to change. U.S. imperialism, if you prefer, certainly continues to exist. But so does Chinese Imperialism. India and Pakistan have nukes and millions of adherents to a religious nihilism. Russia has spiraled into a beligerant and dictatorial nationalism. Iran IS building nukes. Israel has 300 of them and this little problem will not be erased by chanting "Whose streets? Our streets!"

Hitchens voice was necessary because so much of what was left of the Left, both liberal and radical, has turned so insular and myopic.  Consider this passage from the Platypus essay. The quoted material is from Hitchens:

Those on the Left who tacitly defended Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein did so because of an inherited moral and intellectual rot. A consequence of this was that "instead of internationalism, we find among the Left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism" [108], one manifestation of which was the anti-war movement's willingness to bracket out of consideration the fate of Iraqi Leftist or oppositionist parties and trade unions, if not to condemn them outright as U.S. "stooges." For their part, groups like the ISO and Spartacist League,  by simply dusting off the slogans of earlier struggles, ignore the historical gulf that separates the current anti-war movement from, say, the movement that opposed the Vietnam War. The claims of such groups that, as they would put it, blows struck against American imperialism are blows in the interests of workers and the oppressed worldwide, have become unmeaning mantras by the muttering repetition of which such groups on the left withdraw into insensibility. Others on the Left are more vulgar, hoping that an Iraqi quagmire would allow for the emergence of Europe as a substantial counter-hegemonic force (as, for instance, in Habermas and Derrida's joint letter of May 31, 2003). Regarding such Leftism, Hitchens remarks, "I am very much put in mind of something from the opening of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It's not the sentence about the historical relation between tragedy and farce. It's the observation that when people are learning a new language, they habitually translate it back into the one they already know" [55]. Unable to so much as describe the present, the Left has lost its currency for an entire generation. "Members of the Left, along with the far larger number of squishy 'progressives,' have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought" [57]. Today's conservative leftism, with a long pedigree stretching back into the 1960s, first became dominant by couching itself in anti-imperialist language. But, as Hitchens comments, "My Marxist training tells me things don't remain the same. [These new, openly] reactionary-left positions won't hold for long. They will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones" ["'Don't Cross Over if You Have any Intention of Going Back'" Interview with Danny Postel The Common Review 4:1, 7]. The merits of this critique stand, regardless of Hitchens's position on the Iraq War.

How prescient. I have been revolted this last week by the number of liberals and "progressives" who are running around saying how much they love, just love Ron Paul's "anti-interventionism." I believe this is precisely what Hitch meant when he said: "My Marxist training tells me things don't remain the same. [These new, openly] reactionary-left positions won't hold for long. They will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones." Hmmmm.

Well, Hitchens needs no defense from me. As I thumb through this daunting, final anthology of his, he does a far superior job even from his fresh grave.

What has nauseated me the most over the last decade is the vile calumny and endless bile heaped upon him because he chose to divert from the party line on Iraq. That's an odd reaction from a rag-tag and impotent Left that willingly allows all sorts of screwballs, sectarians and rather unstable elements in its ranks (as does the organized Right, quite obviously).  The reaction that Hitchens' position on Iraq evoked from those who thought he left the team tells you exactly that. These are the folks unable to stand up on their own, incapable of challenging or defeating Hitchens (or likely anybody else) in debate. These are the poor, wretched souls who affirm their very self-identity by and actually believe it is a political act to read a tract by Chomsky, see a Michael Moore movie or listen to Amy Goodman plead for money.  They collect political heroes as if they were hoarding baseball cards. And God help them if one of their favorites fumbles a ball or whiffs in the 9th.

I knew Christopher not only as a startling and prolific writer and thinker but also as a compassionate, generous and loving friend.  He was a ruthless debater and he was ready to dish it out rather savagely. He loved to overwhelm his opponents and he relished the oratorical victory. What he loved more, however, was the process, the debate, the tussle, the engagement. He loved it because his mind never shut off, never shut down and never entered into a drunken stupor as his more petty critics contend.  If I knew I could write a tenth of what he had, if I could argue at 10 percent of his strength,  I would gladly sign a deal tonight with the Devil to drink a quart a day of booze and to check out a year from now when I reach his age of demise.

Christopher leaves a large hole in his passing. He leaves behind, quite literally, millions of admirers (the English edition alone of 'God Is Not Great' has sold something like 400,000 copies). He leaves behind probably thousands of friends in concentric circles of relative intimacy and degree.

I miss him sorely and it's hard for me to imagine the world without him. I am heartbroken for his children and for his wife Carol who so many of us in L.A. have known forever.

And, damnnit,  I can't remember a single one of the dozens of limericks he recited that beautiful, cloudy afternoon in Alaska. I am left only with a near empty glass of Johnny Walker Black.

 

 

 

 

There's something about American politics and the way it plays out that is downright befuddling.

Or, better said, aggravating. Maybe "insane" is a better descriptor.

As you have probably heard, the big news story coming out of the recent GOP presidential debate is that Mitt Romney offered to make a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry over a dispute about what is and what is not in one of Mitt's massively-ignored books.

Gasp!  The cavalry of Conventional Wisdom Pundits have come galloping out of the bars and cafes to tell us how much potential damage Mitt has probably inflicted on himself by flaunting so much dough.  Here's just one random example of such genius as quoted in Politico:

 

ABC correspondent Jake Tapper noted after the debate how Romney's bet, while safe, left him looking out of touch.

"The bigger issue, I think, was the fact that Mitt Romney was trying to wager a $10,000 bet in a debate in Iowa," Tapper said. "The median income in this country means that $10,000 is roughly three months income. Even though he was just joking around, I think that probably did not help him. Even if he won the letter of the bet, by making the bet … he probably lost the bet."

Wow, will Iowans really be shocked by those numbers? They didn't know before this debate that Romney was rich? They hadn't heard he was worth about $200 million?



Let's do the numbers here. The average American family net worth is about a half-million dollars. That would make Mitt worth about 500 times more than the family average. But this is misleading. That average includes zillionaires like Mitt and that skews the numbers. The median accumulated wealth of an American family is more like $100,000 –that means half the families in America have accumulated less than 100K and that includes equity in homes and cars.
Translation: Mitt Romney is two thousand times richer or more than half of American families.
This all boils down to a couple of conclusions. Either the heads of Iowa voters are full of snowflakes — or — Jake Tapper's and the 4,334 other journalists and analysts who made the same observation as he did have their heads full of  a similarly useless substance.  In addition, the pundits have to get their story straight. Hasn't the conventional wisdom been, to date, that Romney's greatest presidential allure has been, precisely, his material assests? Haven't we been told $200 million times that he is to be taken seriously because he is, indeed, a successful entrepreneur, CEO, businessman, job creator, private sector genius etc. etc?
If that's true, then why should anyone be shocked, surprised or put off by the the offer of a wager equivalent to his petty cash purse?
Just for kicks, I wonder how much Jake Tapper makes and if her thinks it "hurts" his credibility that his monthly salary is a whole lot more than 3 times the average Iowan? As chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and as someone who hosted ABC's This Week for several months last year, I have to suppose –very conservatively– that his salary is probably 30-50 times or more than that of a Des Moines school teacher. No?
Just to be clear, I am not saying that this wager offer won't hurt him. A lot of voters are dumb.  There's probably just as many, though, who admire Mitt as a great guy because he is able to throw around that much cash.  If you're that rich, you must deserve it somehow or another. It's The American Way, chump.

The rise of Newt Gingrich as a very possible and I would say probable nominee of the Republican Party tells us many things. In a sentence: just about everything we've been spoon fed about and by the Republican Party over the last three years is little more than one heaping, steaming pile of shit.

It means that there is NO split between the so-called Republican Establishment and the Tea Party. The Tea Party is the Republican Establishment.

Likewise, as Newt is now the favorites of the GOP/Tea Party, it means that every excuse, apologia and rationale for the Tea Party has been dead wrong.

The Tea Party hates insiders? But the Tea Party is now backing a former House Speaker whose entire commercial-political enterprise has been based in Washington for the last 25 years.

The Tea Party is for clean government? Gingrich was charged with nearly three dozen ethical violations as Speaker, fined $300,000 and was forced out of his post by the rank and file of his own party.

The Tea Party hates hypocritical pols and prefers candidates of high personal integrity? Newt is a serial philanderer whose divorce request posed to his cancer-stricken wife is now legend.

The Tea Party shuns big-spending celebrities and stands for fiscal austerity and prudence? New apparently spent his disposable income running up half-million dollar tabs with the most elite jewelry store in the world. More to the point, he has constructed a successful multi-million dollar merchandising empire that would be the envy of any huckster televangelist. Six figure speaking fees, videos, bullshit books, posters and CD's.  His notorious K Street-based scam based on blast-faxing businesses and offering them Newt-signed certificates for a $5000 fee now owes $20,000 in back rent, has closed its doors and is the target of eviction from its landlord.

The Tea Party hates lobbyists? Newt pocketed almost $2 million front for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Capitol Hill while his own front groups made many more millions in lobbying.

The Tea Party shuns social issues and is concerned over solely economic issues? Newt has played every social conservative card in the deck and most recently has retooted his racist dog whistle about putting ghetto kids to work as janitors (if not put into orphanages as he once prescribed).  He has climbed up the ass the overtly xenophobic birther-in-chief, NBC clown, banruptcy artist and all-around sonofabitch, Donald Trump.

Truth is, Newt Gingrich is the perfect and most appropriate candidate for the modern Republican Party.  There is no search for any real alternatives to the policies of Barack Obama. There is a search, instead, to reside in the alternative universe the Republicans have constructed for themselves. Nominating the mephistophelean Gingrich would be the way to most vigorously endorse the hurricane of propaganda that has passed for Republican discourse for the last 4 years. Nominating Newt would mean that Obama REALLY is a socialist. That Obama really embodies the horrid "anti-colonial" ethic of Kenyan Mau-Maus. That Obamacare is really a Soviet-like plan. That the oppressors in current America are the lazy and un-deserving poor (and some unionized teachers and firemen) and that the truly persecuted among us are tax-paying White Men, especially those preyed-upon "job creator" multi-millionaires  whom Gingrich has relentlessly and loyally served.

Newt is the candidate of blind rage and revenge. He's perfect.

He also guarantees the re-election of Barack Obama.

Charles Horman

A Chilean judge has indicted the former U.S. military group leader in his country for being linked to the murder of two Americans in the days immediately after the 1973 coup.  I am VERY pleased to say that the official indictment and request to extradite retired U.S. Navy Captain Ray Davis cites testimony I gave to a Chilean judge and homicide detectives in 2003.

The two Americans murdered, whom I both knew, were Charlie Horman and Frank Teruggi.  Horman's story was the basis for the award-winning Costa Gavras film, "Missing."

As the Telegraph reports:

According to the indictment, a US government agency had told the FBI that Mr Teruggi had close links to an organisation called the Chicago Area Group on the Liberation of the Americas.

Frank Teruggi

He was said to have been producing leftist propaganda to be distributed in the US. Mr Zepeda alleges that the two killings took place as US officials conducted a secret investigation into "activity that US agents considered 'subversive'" by Americans at home and in Chile.

Justice Zepeda said Horman may have also been killed because he inadvertently found out about US "collaboration during the military events unfolding" with the coup.

Davis is now in his mid-80′s and is reportedly suffering from Alzheimer's in a D.C.-area rest home.  I see no way he would be extradited, but the investigation by Judge Zepeda in Santiago is shedding new light on this four decade old unresolved case. If you can speak Spanish, you can read the full text of the indictment here, including reference to my testimony.

Here is the excerpt from that indictment that refers to my testimony on file:

TOMO IX del proceso.-

m) Orden de investigar de la Policia de Investigaciones de Chile, de fojas 2.843, en cuanto contiene las circunstancias relatadas por ciudadanos estadounidenses, de que la vi?ctima Charles Edmund Horman Lazar, antes de ser sustrai?da y muerta, estuvo acompan?ada por Ray E. David, Capita?n de la U.S. Navy; que Charles Edmund Horman Lazar, antes de su sustraccio?n concurrio? y pidio? auxilio para salir del pai?s sin resultados a la Embajada y Consulado de los Estados Unidos de Ame?rica en Santiago y las circunstancias que rodearon su posterior privacio?n de libertad e inmediata muerte; para ello, en la orden se tomo? declaracio?n a Terry Ann Simon, a fojas 2.890; a Joyce Horman, a fojas 2.896; a George Irving Platt, a fojas 2.929; a Patricia Marie Garret, a fojas 2913; a Marc Errol Cooper a fojas 2.922; y a Frank Manitzas, a fojas 2932;

I have no personal knowledge of what Capt. Davis' role may or may not have been in the death of the Americans.  The testimony I offered focused on the refusal of all American Embassy officials refusing to provide any assistance to threatened Americans living in Chile at the time of the coup. My appearance before the judge resulted in a face to face confrontation (careo in Spanish juridical terms) with the former U.S. Consul Frederick Purdy. Purdy has the misfortune of retiring and living in Chile and therefore was forced to respond to a subpoena and offer counter-testimony to mine.  In the middle of the process, he was interrupted by then-Judge Guzman Tapia who upgraded his status from "witness" to "suspect." He was never indicted, however.

The current indictment clearly suggests that the evidence gathered over years of investigation establishes a clear clink between the murders and collaboration between U.S. and Chilean military intelligence with Capt. Davis in the chain.  My reading of the indictment is that the investigating magistrate believes that at a minimum, Captain Davis could have prevented the murders carried out by Chilean military officers. Also indicted is a former Chilean Brigadier General already serving time for human rights abuses.

When I have been asked about American involvement in the killing of the two Americans I knew, I have always said the Nixon administration bore moral guilt for feeding and oiling Pinochet's death machine and, specifically, for turning a blind eye to the fate of Americans living in Chile at the time of the coup. I leaned toward NOT believing that any U.S. officials, including Davis, were somehow directly involved in the assassinations as it would take only a drop of common sense for them to have understood that it was politically volatile to do so and, frankly, not worth it (from their perspective). At least that second part has turned out to be true as this case lives on in infamy 38 years later.

Perhaps, now, we will learn about the first part of that equation. Were some American functionaries, including Davis, actually craven and stupid enough to stand by and watch two young Americans senselessly murdered in Santiago?

 

 

Too busy working to blog. Here's a great Storify aggregate from Neon Tommy co-editor Paresh Dave.

View the story "Occupy L.A. Shut Down" on Storify]

The end seems to be near for the Los Angeles leg of the Occupy movement.  On late Friday afternoon, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, flanked by LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, told the press that the encampment around City Hall must be taken down by Sunday midnight or the LAPD will take over the task,

To be fair, the Mayor's tone was anything but threatening or aggressive. A former trade unionist and former head of the local ACLU board, the Mayor paid warm homage to the goals and sentiments of the OWS movement but said it was "unsustainable" to maintain the encampment of a few hundred protesters indefinitely. In his view, two months was enough.

There was an immediate reaction from inside the L.A. camp as documented here. I had a couple of friends who listened in on Friday's General Assembly and they basically told me you need to be an Sanskrit interpreter to figure out what was really decided. These folks aren't kidding about this being a leaderless movement. Directionless might also apply.  What could be garnered is that some protesters are just gonna quietly split when the cops show up. Some will sit down, passively resist, and hopefully no knuckleheads from the RCP or the Black Bloc will start chucking bottles and rocks at the cops.

The city and the LAPD, to date, have treated the OLA camp pretty much with kid gloves and it seems to be a point of pride among them that they are going to avoid the sort of Cops Gone Wild stuff we've seen in NY, Oakland, Atlanta and Davis.  The Mayor has promised there will be no surprise "raid," that the shut down will be calm and patient, and the social workers will be on hand to provide public services for those in need. The city is also providing free parking so people can gather up their tents. And 50 to 100 beds are being made available for the homeless who have joined the camp, which numbers about 3-400 or so.

All in all, it's not a bad deal. Indeed, I think the city may be giving these folks a graceful exit strategy. Okay, you can gather your rotten tomatoes and jagged rocks to throw my way, but if **** I **** were a leader of this local, movement, I would declare victory, go home and abandon the camp before the cops even arrive.

(Slideshow by Alan Mittelstaedt shot Friday night)

As I have said repeatedly, the OWS and OLA movements have had quite a positive impact on pubic consciousness.  Chalk up that victory and now CAPITALIZE on it by doing some real organizing instead of beating on drums.

My fear, is that the rump group left at the City Hall steps may be determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  What is to be gained at this point by standing the ground against the cops and the city? More people show up to a well-organized wedding than the number currently camped out at OLA.  The "masses" are not participating.

What would be the point of even mass arrests? What principle is being defended?  This is not the Woolworth counter or Apartheid South Africa we're talking about where the fight for physical space is central to the core struggle. This is a public lawn on City Hall in the middle of the city which is theoretically open to everybody. I repeat, everybody.  OK, taking it over for a few weeks or in this case a few months might make sense to dramatize the issue of economic inequality. But the space itself means nothing. Well, it means a little bit. Like, how sympathetic would we be if the Tea Party decided to appropriate this public, common space for itself for an indefinite period? Not very.

Now we run the chance of a pointless confrontation on Monday morn when the LAPD will probably begin moving in. If it turns violent, it will grab headlines and polarize the public but will do nothing to help solve the underlying issue.  That issue is, of course, a complicated one and will take a generation or two sort out, if ever.  But you begin somewhere.

OWS was a great beginning. The end of that beginning is now at hand.

Nobody said it was going to be easy to change the world. Beating drums and turning the focus on cops is but a sideshow.

 

Ok, so a few inquiring minds want to know what I think of OWS?

Answer: A lot of things.

That some Americans have finally woken up to the fact that we are living through the most radical transfer of wealth upward in history is a very, very good thing.  That some people are willing to do something about, even if it is only pitching a tent, well that is also a really good thing.

That OWS has informed the entire national debate and all of a sudden everyone from politicians to a sleepy MSM has discovered that there's a growing wealth divide threatening a new generation is very good news.That it is no longer cool to be a Gordon Gekko-type a-hole is refreshing,  All of these should be chalked up as victories by OWS.

Now, comes the hard part. When engaging in politics, one should never confuse a tactic with a strategy. And that's the danger facing OWS. Here's an historic case in point:

Let's go back to The Battle in Seattle around the WTO in 1999. Here's a giddy piece I wrote for The Los Angeles Times from the scene if you can't remember exactly what happened. Rather magically, the first great mass demonstration against "globalization" materialized in the streets of Seattle and unionists and greens stood shoulder to shoulder through the tear gas as the police predictably over-reacted.

For the next number of years, young activists replicated these tactics by massing every time the WTO or G8 met and the symbols of the movement became handcuffs and tear gas masks. But what was the strategy? A few hundred or even a few thousand protesters clashing with cops from Cancun to Seoul to Toronto and back was a pain in the butt for the global elite but it hardly impacted their own strategies. What made some difference, however, were those less dramatic but more effective campaigns (usually unsuccessful) to stop the onrush of free trade agreements and preferred trading status for China.

Certainly, there was some overlap among the street fighter and the legislative crusaders as there damn well should have been ( a suites/streets strategy).  When it came to free trade, Seattle and some of the other protests put the issue on the map, but it took a much larger and strategic coalition to try and actually do something about the issue. Back in those early days of the of anti-globalization fight, I attended a ton of the street heat meetings as a reporter and I am sorry to say that the discussion rarely, if ever, went beyond tactics i.e. how to get arrested, how to sit-in, whether or not it was OK to smash windows (thanks to the so-called Black Bloc anarchists and so on).  It was mostly the trade unions, however, working with some populist politicians who did the heavy lifting on the policy front.

I think we are now at that same crossroads with OWS.  It was an absolutely necessary eruption that forced the central but unspoken issues of our time on to the center stage. Indeed, what has been achieved is so important that it is now imperative that the victory not be sacrificed by continuing to focus on tactics. Translation: letting this movement descend into a prolonged cat and mouse battle over physical space, tents and parks would be tragic. The fight for physical space is not only unsustainable, it is also politically insufficient and ineffective.  The more OWS becomes about itself, the more it looks inward, the more pointless it will become.

OWS must look outward. It must build real coalitions.  To say it represents the interests of 99 percent of Americans might be a political truth. To say, however, that OWS is the 99 percent is ridiculous and only serves to self-mock the movement.  In New York, a few of the protest marches might have involved 20-30,000 people. But in most cities, and certainly here in Los Angeles, the campers and overnighters rarely reach beyond the hundreds.

If OWS aspires to embody the 99 percent then it is going to have to do the dirty work of reaching out to that other 98.9 per cent who have not yet participated. OWS is going to have to make itself more accessible to folks who are NOT full-time activists. The tribal aspect of OWS, the concentration on camp kitchens, libraries, etc. are quaint but wholly irrelevant. They are ingrown and exclusionary.

As Lennon and McCartney said, "if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you're not gonna win anyone over anyhow." For OWS, this means, yes, mainstreaming itself some more. It means not insisting that you join a tribe and participate in a human microphone to be part of it. It means looking for allies and meeting them half-way or at least part of the way.

This is not a covert suggestion, by the way, that OWS convert itself into some sort of electoral vehicle — at least not exclusively one. Who can have faith in the political system? Yet, it happens to be the only one we have. So figuring out how to influence and impact that system of power is a looming question for OWS.  It cannot just be ignored. After all the system is the power. And we are talking about power, aren't we?

I have no prescriptions or paint-by-numbers scheme for OWS. I can't tell you exactly what it should do next. I only know what it shouldn't do. It must not close in on itself and make itself the issue. The parks don't matter.

Power matters.