SOCIOLOGY CULTURE BLOG

2011-05-28T22:52:00.002-04:00

Intro to Human Services Syllabus

2008-09-07T12:39:00.001-04:00

Post University
Student Syllabus

Professor Henry Schissler
203-430-1411, henryschissler@cox.net
Saturday Schedule, 8:30 – 11:25
Mod 1, North 109

HSV101.97 Introduction to Human Services

Course Description:
This survey course provides as overview of human services systems that are in place today. In addition, these systems are viewed from the historical perspective and critically analyzed around successes and failures in meeting objectives. A major focus is to analyze the categories of individuals that human service systems serve, and to assess, from the societal level, why these groups exist. Theory from human services, sociology, and psychology are the basis of assessment. Also, an overview of diagnoses most prevalent in human services settings will be reviewed.

Required Texts:
Burger, William, Human Services In Contemporary America, 7th Edition. NY: Thomson, 2008
Kozol, Jonathan, Amazing Grace. NY: Harper Collins, 1995

Class Schedule:

Sept. 6 – Student and Faculty Introductions; Syllabus and Assignment Review; Presentation on Key Concepts from Sociology, Psychology and Human Services; Biopsychosocial Perspective (referenced in Chapter 4); Chapter 1, Maslow: Hierarchy of Human Needs, Political Ideology & Human Services, Core American Values, Merton: Success Emphasis, Contemporary Problems on Needs: Natural Disasters, Poverty, Prejudice & Discrimination; Psychological Stress (Normal & Abnormal Stress Response), Health Care & Managed Care

Sept. 13 – Chapter 2, Groups in Need: Poverty, the Unemployed, Children in Need, Seniors, people with Disabilities, People with Mental Illness, Substance Abusers, Criminals, the Homeless, People with Mental Retardation, Domestic Violence Survivors; Assignment #1 Given, Due 9/20

Sept. 20 – Chapters 3 & 4, Historical Perspective, Theoretical Perspectives: Medical Model, Human Services Model, Psychoanalytic Viewpoint, Humanistic Perspective, Behaviorist Model, Systems Theory; Assignment #2 Given, Due 9/27

Sept. 27 – Chapter 5, Styles of Helping Relationships, Characteristics of Effective Helpers, Basic Counseling Skills, Advocacy & Community Organizing; Assignment #3 Given, Due 10/04

Oct. 04 – Chapter 6 & 7, Careers in Human Services, Social Policy: Identifying Social Problems, the Problem Solving Template

Oct. 11 – Chapter 8, Prevention in Human Services: Primary Prevention, Political & Economic Issues; Kosol Paper Due

Oct. 18 – Chapter 9, Current Controversies & Issues in Human Services: Values in Social Policies, the Role of Government, Successful Human Services Agencies

Oct. 25 – Final Class; Wrap-Up; Review of Key Concepts; Discussion of Human Services Field

Grading:

“Amazing Grace” Paper (in APA format) – This is a six page critical analysis of Kosol’s book –35%

Three (2 pages minimum per paper) Brief Writing Assignments (in APA format) / Informal Class Presentations – 35%

Participation – 20%

Attendance – 10%
Students are expected to attend all classes or request a makeup assignment for one missed class; there is no makeup assignment for a second missed class

Ethics Legal Issues Handout

2008-09-07T12:36:00.001-04:00

Ethics/Legal Issues in Human Services
Post University – Professor Henry Schissler

I.
The Human Service Professional's Responsibility to Self

Human service professionals strive to personify those characteristics typically associated with the profession (e.g., accountability, respect for others, genuineness, empathy, pragmatism).
Human service professionals foster self-awareness and personal growth in themselves. They recognize that when professionals are aware of their own values, attitudes, cultural background, and personal needs, the process of helping others is less likely to be negatively impacted by those factors.

Human service professionals recognize a commitment to lifelong learning and continually upgrade knowledge and skills to serve the populations better.

The Human Service Professional's Responsibility to the Community and Society
Human service professionals are aware of local, state, and federal laws. They advocate for change in regulations and statutes when such legislation conflicts with ethical guidelines and/or client rights. Where laws are harmful to individuals, groups or communities, human service professionals consider the conflict between the values of obeying the law and the values of serving people and may decide to initiate social action.
Human service professionals keep informed about current social issues as they affect the client and the community. They share that information with clients, groups and community as part of their work.
Human service professionals understand the complex interaction between individuals, their families, the communities in which they live, and society.
Human service professionals act as advocates in addressing unmet client and community needs. Human service professionals provide a mechanism for identifying unmet client needs, calling attention to these needs, and assisting in planning and mobilizing to advocate for those needs at the local community level.
Human service professionals advocate for the rights of all members of society, particularly those who are members of minorities and groups at which discriminatory practices have historically been directed.
Human service professionals provide services without discrimination or preference based on age, ethnicity, culture, race, disability, gender, religion, sexual orientation or socioeconomic status.
Human service professionals are knowledgeable about the cultures and communities within which they practice. They are aware of multiculturalism in society and its impact on the community as well as individuals within the community. They respect individuals and groups, their cultures and beliefs.
Human service professionals are aware of their own cultural backgrounds, beliefs, and values, recognizing the potential for impact on their relationships with others.
Human service professionals are aware of sociopolitical issues that differentially affect clients from diverse backgrounds.
Human service professionals seek the training, experience, education and supervision necessary to ensure their effectiveness in working with culturally diverse client populations.

The Human Service Professional's Responsibility to Colleagues
Human service professionals avoid duplicating another professional's helping relationship with a client. They consult with other professionals who are assisting the client in a different type of relationship when it is in the best interest of the client to do so.
When a human service professional has a conflict with a colleague, he or she first seeks out the colleague in an attempt to manage the problem. If necessary, the professional then seeks the assistance of supervisors, consultants or other professionals in efforts to manage the problem.
Human service professionals respond appropriately to unethical behavior of colleagues. Usually this means initially talking directly with the colleague and, if no resolution is forthcoming, reporting the colleague's behavior to supervisory or administrative staff and/or to the Professional organization(s) to which the colleague belongs.
All consultations between human service professionals are kept confidential unless to do so would result in harm to clients or communities.
The Human Service Professional's Responsibility to the Profession
Human service professionals know the limit and scope of their professional knowledge and offer services only within their knowledge and skill base.
Human service professionals seek appropriate consultation and supervision to assist in decision-making when there are legal, ethical or other dilemmas.
Human service professionals act with integrity, honesty, genuineness, and objectivity.
Human service professionals promote cooperation among related disciplines (e.g., psychology, counseling, social work, nursing, family and consumer sciences, medicine, and education) to foster professional growth and interests within the various fields.
Human service professionals promote the continuing development of their profession. They encourage membership in professional associations, support research endeavors, foster educational advancement, advocate for appropriate legislative actions, and participate in other related professional activities.
Human service professionals continually seek out new and effective approaches to enhance their professional abilities.

II.
Concerns outlined by the American Nurses Association represent the types of social problems that Human Services professions would work to change. The advocacy role in Human Services must remain an active piece of the “job description” of every individual in the profession.
Summary of Intent – American Nurses Association
Discrimination and racism continue to be a part of the fabric and tradition of American society and have adversely affected minority populations, the health care system in general, and the profession of nursing. Discrimination may be based on differences due to age, ability, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic by which people differ. The American Nurses Association (ANA) is committed to working toward the eradication of discrimination and racism in the profession of nursing, in the education of nurses, in the practice of nursing, as well as in the organizations in which nurses work. The ANA is further committed to working toward egalitarianism and the promotion of justice in access and delivery of health care to all people.

Background
Discrimination, as defined in the American Heritage Dictionary (1992), is "Making a difference in treatment or favor on a class or categorical basis while disregarding individual merit; (2) acting on the basis of prejudice; and (3) the denial of equal opportunity (i.e. for education, employment, promotions, loans, housing, and health care)". Discrimination of this nature is not always easy to prove, however its consequences are quite concrete. Prejudice, on the other hand, involves thoughts, attitudes, insensitivity, and ignorance, not actual behaviors or demonstrable denials of opportunity. Prejudice frequently leads to discrimination. A prominent and particularly negative form of prejudice in America is racism. Too often racism is manifested in the attitudes of nurses and other health care providers toward patients and their fellow professionals of different ethnic groups. Ethnicity is distinct but often confused with race, and discrimination occurs along ethnic as well racial lines. Racism has an adverse impact on the health care environment and on those receiving health care services. In the health care arena, differential access to resources limits basic and preventive health care to members of some groups. Unequal distribution of health care resources results in morbidity and mortality rates that vary substantially among racial and ethnic categories and economic classes. Health care, as a resource, must be distributed fairly and equitably. Nurses and other health care providers may be victims as well as perpetrators of racial discrimination. Selective mistreatment often undermines the work experiences of individuals who are identified with groups that are the targets of discriminatory behaviors. ANA believes that nurses and other health care providers have a responsibility for assuring a workplace which recognizes individual differences while being free of discrimination based on racial and ethnic distinctions.
According to the ANA "Code For Nurses" (1985), "the nurse provides services with respect for human dignity and the uniqueness of the client unrestricted by considerations of social or economic status, personal attributes or the nature of health problems". All nurses should strive to create environments that encourage quality health care practices; all patients deserve quality care. Health care that is not sensitive to differences in race, specific health practices and needs of different groups is not quality care and can even be harmful. For instance, failure to provide preventive services, such as lead screening, for inner city children living in poverty, or for sickle cell disease in African American children may have life threatening consequences.
Differences in Health
Despite some recent improvements in health care delivery, many problems continue for most minority populations. There are persistent and sometimes substantial differences in the health of Americans. Minorities suffer from certain diseases at up to five times the rate of white Americans. For instance, cancer is the leading cause of death for Chinese and Vietnamese. Surveillance, Epidemiologic and End Results (SEER) data from the National Cancer Institute show that Korean stomach cancer rates are five times the rate for the total population. Vietnamese women suffer from cervical cancer at nearly five times the rate of white Americans. The number of Hepatitis B cases among Asian American and Pacific Islander children is two to three times higher than for children in the United States. Compared with the general population, Hispanics have a higher incidence of cancer of the stomach, esophagus, pancreas and cervix. There is a significant problem in the Native American population with diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome and congenital malformations. Despite some improvements in health care for African Americans since the 1960's, African Americans have a life expectancy that is six years shorter than the life expectancy for white Americans. African American men less than 45 years old have a 45% higher rate of lung cancer and ten times the likelihood of dying from hypertension than white men under age 45. Research is needed to better understand the epidemiology of these differences.

Differences in Research Needs
Efforts to address racial and ethnic disparities in health will require nurses, physicians and other health care providers to develop new approaches, in consultation with experts in minority communities, to ensure that research, treatment, and education programs for diabetes, cancer, tuberculosis, and other diseases which affect minorities disproportionately, are available in local communities and nationwide.
Every year hundreds of clinical trials for new drugs are conducted at medical centers throughout the country. Medical advances would not occur without clinical trials which help to determine if drugs work for a specific purpose. In addition participants have the opportunity to work with specialists who have the latest information on their disease. However, historically, minorities have been grossly under-represented in clinical trials conducted by federally funded institutions such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A major impediment for minority participation is a lack of trust in the medical establishment based on past experiments such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the South Dakota Hepatitis-A Vaccine Study on American-Indian babies.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972. This study intentionally withheld treatment from 399 poor African American men suffering from syphilis. The goal was to observe the long-term effects of syphilis. The participants were never made aware of or given treatment even though penicillin became widely available in the 1940s and later became a standard treatment for syphilis. Over three fourths of the subjects died from complications of syphilis. Many of those who survived became blind and crippled. The experiment was conducted without the benefit of the patients' informed consent.
In the South Dakota experiment, newborn Lakota Sioux Indians were injected with either an experimental hepatitis type-A vaccine or, as a control, with an approved hepatitis type-B vaccine. Indian babies were selected because many reservations, being poor, rural and crowded, experienced epidemics of hepatitis-A every five to seven years. An epidemic in 1990 and 1991 infected more than 500 people and resulted in numerous hospitalizations and one death. The goal of the program was to inject approximately 105 babies and, after studying the results, offer the vaccine to everyone. The Indian Health Service officials, who assumed responsibility for the trials, stated that Indians as a group stood to benefit from hepatitis-A vaccine. However, in a letter to doctors, the health service warned of anaphylactic reactions and such possible side effects as cancer, jaundice and death. Lawsuits filed by Indian families said the parents were not told of such potential risks when their permission to vaccinate was sought. They believed the experiments were racist and deceptive. This case highlights the animosity and intense suspicion with which many Indians still regard the Federal government.
ANA believes health care providers are professionally, morally and ethically obligated to explain the purpose, risks, potential side effects and benefits of each study before a patient agrees to participate. An informed consent document that includes all relevant information, in language the patient understands, should be thoroughly discussed with the patient, the patient's family and/or significant other. Safeguards must be put in place to ensure that prospective participants are given complete information on the nature of all research studies.
Other barriers to minority participation in clinical trials deal with culture and language. Often minorities feel more comfortable with minority health care providers and researchers who have an understanding or appreciation of their culture.
Differences in Representation in the Health Profession
The March 1996 Sample Survey of Registered Nurses by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reveals that the profession of nursing continues to be 90% white female. As American society is evolving into one of increasing diversity, this lack of diversity in the nursing workforce is potentially harmful to the profession and the population it serves. ANA believes greater and better use of the diverse human resources of our country is a national imperative. The under-representation of minorities in the health professions is but one indicator that we have failed to recognize and develop fully the human resources of our diverse population. Our ability to maintain a position of global leadership depends on our willingness to recognize, stimulate, and develop capacities of all segments of society and to acknowledge the needs of those segments currently under represented in health careers. ANA is concerned about future productivity across most U.S. industries, including health, unless we can adopt policies that support the development of all individuals within our diverse ethnic and racial populations.
Differences in Access and Prescribed Treatments
Underlying some of the racial disparities in the health among Americans are differences in both need and access: minorities are more likely to need health care but are less likely to receive health care services. For example, recent studies have shown that even when minorities gain access to the health care system and even when there is a comparable ability to pay for services, they are less likely than whites to receive surgical or other therapies. ANA believes that disparities in health care based on personal characteristics such as race must be avoided. Whether such disparities are caused by differences in income and education, socio-cultural factors, or inequitable treatment decisions by the medical and nursing professions, they are unjustifiable and must be eliminated. Nurses, physicians, and other health care providers should examine their own attitudes and practices to ensure that prejudice based on race and ethnicity does not affect their clinical judgments in health care.
Conclusion
The United States has been undergoing racial change throughout its history but never at the pace and manner occurring now. Within the next fifty years, whites as a share of the total population will decline from 75% to under 50%. In many localities so called minorities are now, in fact, the majority. The African-American population will increase in size but remain at about 12% of the total. Depending upon immigration trends, intermarriage and racial self-identity, the Hispanic population may increase to more than one-quarter of the total while Asians may increase from their present 4% to 8%. Given these trends, ANA believes it is critically important for Americans to come to a shared understanding of the negative consequences of discrimination and racism which still pervades our society and be willing to take individual as well as collective actions to bring America closer to our ideal of equality and justice.
Equality and justice must also extend to other minorities such as the aged and disabled. Health care that is individualized to the health practices and specific needs of each person and/or population group is vital to maintain and improve the health of all Americans. Nurses must work to include diversity within the health professions, processes of health care delivery, and desired patient outcomes in order to deliver the holistic care we profess is our primary goal.
ANA abhors the recent rise in racist and discriminatory behavior in this country including hate crimes, church burnings and the resurgence of groups advocating white supremacy. ANA believes that action is necessary to halt this trend. The ANA position statement on "Ethics and Human Rights" (1994) is based on the following beliefs:
Human beings deserve respect as ends in themselves, and therefore, deserve health care services that are equitable in terms of accessibility, availability, affordability and quality;
Justice requires that the differences among persons and groups are to be valued. When those differences contribute to the unequal distribution of the quality and quantity of health care, then remedial actions are obligated;
Because nursing care is an essential but sometimes limited commodity, allocation of care is a pressing issue that cannot be effectively addressed when specific individuals are excluded or when the burdens of limited access are borne by particular groups;
The principle of justice applies to nurses as providers as well as to nurses as recipients of care. ANA is committed to addressing the need for racial and ethnic diversity among nurses. Such diversity is a critical element in providing fair and equitable care.
It is therefore timely for ANA to assume a greater leadership role in developing both internal and external policies and programs to end discrimination and racism in the profession and in society.

2008-06-27T08:39:00.001-04:00

Vagina Anxiety: The Rise of the Labialplasty

By Jennifer Armstrong, Sirens MagazinePosted on June 24, 2008, Printed on June 27, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/89328/

This is what I've now been forced to think as I peruse my Wall Street Journal, and then again as I read my New York Times Magazine, and then again as I watch a special CNN report. As if the era of the Brazilian bikini wax hadn't made me nervous enough, with its laying bare of things that used to be covered, now there's this: Labial plastic surgery and hymen reattachment are apparently all the rage in some circles. Circles with too many resources, to be sure, but also circles that end up foisting their twisted insecurities upon me via esteemed news sources, where I am supposed to be safe from such things.

I am an intelligent, well-adjusted woman with slightly above-average self-esteem (there are plenty of parts of me I don't like, but I'm unabashedly fond of my legs and abs). So upon hearing about such idiocy, I summoned the requisite outrage. What pigs plastic surgeons are, giving women another source of insecurity! What a travesty, kicking us girls, so to speak, where it counts! Not to mention the risk of losing some of the precious nerve-laden square inches that make that part of us so special to begin with. And the fact that some women in less fortunate parts of the world are forced into genital mutilation ... and here some women are paying for a form of it? Ladies, come on.

But women, throughout time, have been afraid to look at themselves too closely down there, and not just because it requires some serious flexibility or the old Our Bodies, Ourselves-era exercise with a hand mirror. Nowadays we talk a good game when it comes to sex -- and might even indulge in some graphic analysis of guys' parts -- but we're still pretty mortified to give our own much thought.

Vaginas, historically, are not beloved. Women's sexuality has been deemed evil since the days of Adam and Eve, and, hell, even recently the University of Notre Dame president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, questioned whether his institution should sponsor an annual staging of "The Vagina Monologues" -- a play whose express purpose is to turn women's source of sexual shame into a source of power -- wondering what it said about the school's "character." At least he cleared up one thing: We still need "The Vagina Monologues."

The fact is, this labialplasty "trend," reprehensible as it may be, dredges up centuries-old insecurities in all of us. What I took away from all those recent stories about it wasn't my outrage, it was a nagging fear: Oh my god, what if I don't have a pretty punani?

At least I'm not alone (though I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing). A sexy friend can traipse around in teeny pieces of cloth and not feel a twinge of self-consciousness, but when it comes to self examination ... well, her words kinda say it all: "Eww! I don't want to look down there at all." I find this confusing. She's a consummate Brazilian waxer. "Yeah," she says, "but I never see it! Waxing is for technical reasons, but I honestly don't know what it looks like, and, frankly, I don't want to."

So, great. Even enviably beautiful women are totally freaked out by their vaginas. Maybe that means labia are the great equalizer. Or maybe it means we all need some serious help.
The problem with this variety of anxiety, though, is that it's tough to assuage. Guys have grappled with genital insecurity since penises were invented, but at least there's a yardstick by which they can measure their adequacy -- literally, a yardstick. Bigger is better, the end. Bummer if you're on the smaller end of that one, but at least you know where you stand and can make up for it by buying big cars or lifting weights or becoming a real-estate mogul or whatever. With this dilemma, I don't know where I stand: What is the ideal here?

It's tough to find a standard, realistically speaking, not only because we don't spend a lot of time staring into other women's vaginas, but also because labia vary about as much as snowflakes. "Compared to other body parts, vulvas look totally insane," says Sarah Mundy, who has compiled a staggering amount of information for her website, All About My Vagina. "They have a billion parts, they're very diverse, and semi-internal, which can seem a bit foreign."
How to remedy that is a quandary, though. I'm not dying to spend my evenings out with my girlfriends discussing the intricacies of our equipment -- or, god forbid, spreading our legs for each other to compare. Nor am I psyched about getting dirty spam for the rest of my life thanks to an evening trolling porn sites to see what's out there.

But, yes, it's true: If you want to feel better about your own labia, you need to check out others', one way or another. This is the only way you're gonna know how you compare, and most of the time, this engenders relief, not competitive anxiety. (After all, we're not guys.) "Looking at vulvas is the fastest way to understand that we aren't freaks," Mundy says. "It doesn't take years of intense study or anything -- I spent about two minutes looking at vintage porn before I had my realization."

Some XXX-free resources: All About My Vagina has some great links to photos that don't require you to sift through orgy scenes and girl-on-girl action; and there are even whole books of tasteful vulva art, like Femalia by Joani Blank and Petals by Nick Karras. ("Vulva," incidentally, is the technically correct way to refer to the visible stuff. The vagina is just the birth canal, though I'm reserving the right to use that word here to refer to the whole shebang, since everybody else does.) Put it this way: Which would you rather do, look at some vulva art or let some overpaid Beverly Hills surgeon play with knives millimeters from your clitoris?

You can also consider a makeover of the non-extreme kind. It's not for everybody, but a hair trim, (gulp) vulva jewelry, or (seriously) even a dye job (there are special kinds ... do NOT reach for the Feria here) might make you feel prettier down there. "Really, doing anything that makes us feel happy, good, and beaming with pussy pride is going to help," says LaSara Firefox, whose book Sexy Witch includes extensive, detailed activities for upping your vulva esteem. Yes, it's a little touchy-feely ... but that doesn't mean it won't work.

Most importantly, however, we need to remember that we're not 12-year-old girls. Some of the consternation seems to come from the preponderance of waxing these days -- we expect everything to look just like it did back in the days when we were naturally hairless. "The concerns that come up over and over are inner labia that are long or big or wrinkly or asymmetrical, outer labia that are plump or that make a bulge in swimsuits, what to do about hair, and darker skin around the vulva and labia," Mundy says. "In short, anything that is different between an adult woman's vulva and a little girl's vulva."

Certain segments of the male population fetishizing teen girls doesn't help matters: "The only images women get to see is in men's magazines," Karras says. "That has a lot to do with men having power over women, men wanting women to feel like little girls." But that's the subject of a whole other bitter, rant-like essay. Besides which, plenty of other guys are probably willing to help. If you have one already, tell him you're feeling a little insecure, and ask for the boost you need -- remember, men deal with genital anxiety from the first junior high gym class shower, so they understand. "Women don't talk about that part of themselves the way men do," Karras says. "Female genitalia, it's like it's suppressed."

Both of you benefit in bed if he tells you he loves your woman parts (which he most likely will ... and if he doesn't, I have some bad news for you). And, hey, even a good one-night stand with a penchant for cunnilingus can make you feel better. I'm not recommending hitting that dude with your deepest anxieties, but just think: He wouldn't spend all that time down there if he didn't love what you have going on. "Helping women with genital body image is obviously an activity that has feminist credentials, and I really love the idea that guys are often in the best position to do it," Sarah says. "Co-ed feminism feels like utopia."

And co-ed feminism that involves orgasms feels awfully good to me ... is there such a thing as "better than utopia"?

Jennifer Armstrong is the co-founder/editorial director of SirensMag.com.
© 2008 Sirens Magazine All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/89328/

EXCELLENT ARTICLE: The Rise Of The Corporate State: America's Democratic Collapse

2008-06-04T16:37:00.002-04:00

America's Democratic Collapse
By Chris Hedges, TruthdigPosted on June 3, 2008,

Printed on June 4, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/86973/

Note: Chris Hedges gave this keynote address on Wednesday, May 28, in Furman University's Younts Conference Center. The address was part of protests by faculty and students over the South Carolina college's decision to invite George W. Bush to give the May 31 commencement address.

When it was announced in May that Bush would deliver the commencement address, 222 students and faculty signed and posted on the school's Web site a statement titled "We Object." The statement cites the war in Iraq and the administration's "obstructing progress on reducing greenhouse gases while favoring billions in tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies that are earning record profits."

"We are ashamed of the actions of this administration. The war in Iraq has cost the lives of over 4,000 brave and honorable U.S. military personnel," the statement read. "Because we love this country and the ideals it stands for, we accept our civic responsibility to speak out against these actions that violate American values."

I used to live in a country called America. It was not a perfect country, God knows, especially if you were African American or Native American or of Japanese descent in World War II, or poor or gay or a woman or an immigrant, but it was a country I loved and honored. This country gave me hope that it could be better. It paid its workers wages that were envied around the world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions and champions of the working class in the Democratic Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It offered good public education. It honored basic democratic values and held in regard the rule of law, including international law and respect for human rights. It had social programs from Head Start to welfare to Social Security to take care of the weakest among us, the mentally ill, the elderly and the destitute. It had a system of government that, however flawed, was dedicated to protecting the interests of its citizens. It offered the possibility of democratic change. It had a media that was diverse and endowed with the integrity to give a voice to all segments of society, including those beyond our borders, to impart to us unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to explain ourselves to ourselves.

I am not blind to the imperfections of this America, or the failures to always meet these ideals at home and abroad. I spent 20 years of my life in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent reporting in countries where crimes and injustices were committed in our name, whether during the Contra war in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. But there was much that was good and decent and honorable in our country. And there was hope.

The country I live in today uses the same words to describe itself, the same patriotic symbols and iconography, the same national myths, but only the shell remains. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father and his father's father, stretching back to the generations of my family that were here for the country's founding, is so diminished as to be nearly unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return. The "consent of the governed" has become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science are obsolete. Our state, our nation, has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations and a narrow, selfish political elite, a small and privileged group which governs on behalf of moneyed interests. We are undergoing, as John Ralston Saul wrote, "a coup d'etat in slow motion." We are being impoverished -- legally, economically, spiritually and politically. And unless we soon reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be sucked into the dark and turbulent world of globalization where there are only masters and serfs, where the American dream will be no more than that -- a dream, where those who work hard for a living can no longer earn a decent wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweatshops in China or the decaying rust belt of Ohio, where democratic dissent is condemned as treason and ruthlessly silenced.

I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's leadership, had virtual fundraising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats get more. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms, it was a betrayal.

The North American Free Trade Agreement was sold to the country by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico. NAFTA would also, we were told, staunch Mexican immigration into the United States.

"There will be less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home," President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he was lobbying for the bill.

But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the curious effect of reversing every one of Clinton's rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans for Mexican farmers, they had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. The Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994. And guess where many of them went? This desperate flight of poor Mexicans into the United States is now being exacerbated by large-scale factory closures along the border as manufacturers pack up and leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China's totalitarian capitalism. But we were assured that goods would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA was great if you were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.

Clinton's welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill. And today we stand in shame with 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, most for nonviolent drug offenses. More than 1 in 100 adults in the United States is incarcerated, and 1 in 9 black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. The United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

The growing desperation across the United States is unleashing not simply a recession -- we have been in a recession for some time now -- but the possibility of a depression unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. This desperation has provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. This is good news if you are a corporation. It is very bad news if you work for a living. For the bottom 90 percent of Americans, annual income has been on a slow, steady decline for three decades. The majority's income peaked at $33,000 in 1973. By 2005, according to New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in his book "Free Lunch," it had fallen to a bit more than $29,000, this despite three decades of economic expansion. And where did that money go? Ask ExxonMobil, the biggest U.S. oil and gas company, which made a $10.9 billion profit in the first quarter of this year, leaving us to pay close to $4 a gallon to fill up our cars. Or better yet, ask Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Rex Tillerson, whose compensation rose nearly 18 percent to $21.7 million in 2007, when the oil company pulled in the largest profit ever for a U.S. company. His take-home pay package included $1.75 million in salary, a $3.36 million bonus and $16.1 million of stock and option awards, according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received nearly $430,000 of other compensation, including $229,331 for personal security and $41,122 for use of the company aircraft. In addition to his pay package, Tillerson, 56, received more than $7.6 million from exercising options and stock awards during the year. Exxon Mobil earned $40.61 billion in 2007, up 3 percent from the previous year. But Tillerson's 2007 pay was not even the highest mark for the U.S. oil and gas industry. Occidental Petroleum Corp. CEO Ray Irani made $33.6 million, and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. chief James Hackett took in $26.7 million over the same period.

For each dollar earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5 cents. That was the top tenth's greatest share of the income pie, Johnston writes, since 1929, just before the Roaring '20s collapsed in the Great Depression. And within the top 10 percent, those who made more than $100,000, nearly all the gains went to the top tenth of 1 percent, people like Tillerson or Irani or Hackett, who made at least $1.7 million that year. And until we have real election reform, until we make it possible to run for national office without candidates kissing the rings of Tillersons, Iranis and Hacketts to get hundreds of millions of dollars, this rape of America will continue.
While the Democrats have been very bad, George W. Bush has been even worse. Let's set aside Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in American history. George Bush has also done more to dismantle our Constitution, ignore or revoke our statutes and reverse regulations that protected American citizens from corporate abuse than any other president in recent American history.

The president, as the Boston Globe reported, has claimed the authority, through "signing statements," to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, whistle-blower protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ''to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." George Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ''execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional. The Bush administration has gutted environmental, food and product safety, and workplace safety standards along with their enforcement. And this is why coal mines collapse, the housing bubble has blown up in our face, and we are sold lead-contaminated toys imported from China. Bush has done more than any president to hand our government directly over to corporations, which now get 40 percent of federal discretionary spending.

Over 800,000 jobs once handled by government employees have been outsourced to corporations, a move that has not only further empowered our shadow corporate government but helped destroy federal workforce unions. Everything from federal prisons, the management of regulatory and scientific reviews, the processing or denial of Freedom of Information requests, interrogating prisoners and running the world's largest mercenary army in Iraq has become corporate. And these corporations, in a perverse arrangement, make their money off the American citizen. Halliburton in 2003 was given a no-bid and non-compete $7 billion contract to repair Iraq's oil fields, as well as the power to oversee and control Iraq's entire oil production. This has now become $130 billion in contract awards to Halliburton. And flush with taxpayer dollars, what has Haliburton done? It has made sure only 36 of its 143 subsidiaries are incorporated in the United States and 107 subsidiaries (or 75 percent) are incorporated in 30 different countries. Halliburton is able through this arrangement to lower its tax liability on foreign income by establishing a "controlled foreign corporation" and subsidiaries inside low-tax, or no-tax, countries known as a "tax havens." They take our money. They squander it. And our corporate government not only funds them but protects them. Halliburton -- and Halliburton is just one example -- is the engine of our new, rogue corporate state, serviced by people like George Bush and Dick Cheney, once the company's CEO.

The disparity between our oligarchy and the working class has created a new global serfdom. Credit Suisse analysts estimates that the number of subprime foreclosures in the United States over the next two years will total 1,390,000 and that by the end of 2012, 12.7 percent of all residential borrowers in the United States will be forced out of their homes. The corporate state, which as an idea is an abstraction to many Americans, is very real when the pieces are carefully put together and linked to a system of corporate power that has made this poverty, the denial of our constitutional rights, and a state of permanent war inevitable. The assault on the American working class -- an assault that has devastated members of my own family -- is nearly complete. The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer jobs today than it did when George Bush took office, including 2.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs. In the past three years, nearly 1 in 5 U.S. workers was laid off. Among workers laid off from full-time work, roughly one-fourth were earning less than $40,000 annually. A total of 15 million U.S. workers are unemployed, underemployed, or too discouraged to job hunt, according to the Labor Department. There are whole sections of the United States which now resemble the developing world. There has been a Weimarization of the American working class. And the assault on the middle class is now under way. Anything that can be put on software -- from finance to architecture to engineering -- can and is being outsourced to workers in countries such as India or China who accept a fraction of the pay and work without benefits. And both the Republican and Democratic parties, beholden to corporations for money and power, allow this to happen.

Take a look at our government departments. Who runs the Defense Department? The Department of Interior? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? Who runs the Department of Labor? Corporations. And in an election year where we are numbed by absurdities, we hear nothing about this subordinating of the American people to corporate power. The political debates, which have become popularity contests, are ridiculous and empty. They do not confront the real and advanced destruction of our democracy. They do not confront the takeover of our electoral processes.

We have watched over the past few decades the rise of a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a network of arrangements within subsectors, industries, or other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish outside control and oversight. These corporations have neutralized national, state and judicial authority. They dominate, for example, a bloated and wasteful defense industry, which has become sacrosanct and beyond the reach of politicians, most of whom are left defending military projects in their districts, no matter how redundant, because they provide jobs. This has permitted a military-industrial complex, which contributes lavishly to political campaigns, to spread across the country with virtual impunity.

Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions on the planet. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the Second World War even as we have more than $400 billion in annual deficits. More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to defense. This will not end when Bush leaves office. And so we build Cold War relics like $3.4 billion submarines and stealth fighters to evade radar systems the Soviets never built and spend $ 8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense that will be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb. The defense industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and research talent and squander the nation's resources and investment capital. These defense industries produce nothing that is useful for society or the national trade account. (Seymour) Melman, like

President Eisenhower, saw the defense industry as viral, something that, as it grew, destroyed a healthy economy. And so we produce sophisticated fighter jets while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule, and our automotive industry tanks. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and starve technologies to fight against global warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This massive military spending, aided by this $3 trillion war, is hollowing us out from the inside. Our bridges and levees collapse, our schools decay, and our safety net is taken away.

The corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed forward by every president since, has destroyed the public and private institutions that protected workers and safeguarded citizens. Only 7.8 percent of workers in the private sector are unionized. This is about the same percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called "near poverty." Our health care system is broken. Eighteen thousand people die in this country, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can't afford health care. That is six times the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks, and these unnecessary deaths continue year after year. But we do not hear these stories of pain and dislocation. We are diverted by bread and circus. News reports do little more than report on trivia and celebrity gossip. The FCC, in an example of how far our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox's celebrity gossip program "TMZ" and the Christian Broadcast Network's "700 Club" as "bona fide newscasts." The economist Charlotte Twight calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and democratic collapse "participatory fascism."

How did we get here? How did this happen? In a word, deregulation -- the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state. Our political decline came about because of deregulation, the repeal of antitrust laws, and the radical transformation from a manufacturing economy to a capital economy. This understanding led Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 29, 1938, to send a message to Congress titled "Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power." In it, he wrote:

The first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

The rise of the corporate state has grave political consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early part of the 20th century. Antitrust laws not only regulate and control the marketplace, they serve as bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are gone, now that we have a state that is run by and on behalf of corporations, we must expect inevitable and perhaps terrifying political consequences.

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." In depressed former manufacturing towns from Ohio to Kentucky it was the same. There are tens of millions of Americans for whom the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability has plunged the working class into personal and economic despair, and not surprisingly into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we re-enfranchise these Americans back into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.

As the pressure mounts, as this despair and desperation reaches into larger and larger segments of the American populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. It is not accidental that with the rise of the corporate state comes the rise of the security state. This is why the Bush White House has pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of "extraordinary rendition," the warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. It is part of a package. It comes together. It is not about terrorism or national security. It is about control. It is about their control of us.

Sen. Frank Church, as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, investigated the government's massive and highly secretive National Security Agency. He wrote:

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. Telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

When Sen. Church made this statement, the NSA was not authorized to spy on American citizens. Today it is.

... We are fed lie after lie to mask the destruction the corporate state has wrought in our lives. The consumer price index, for example, used by the government to measure inflation, has become meaningless. To keep the official inflation figures low, the government has been substituting basic products they once measured to check for inflation with ones that do not rise very much in price. This trick has kept the cost-of-living increases tied to the CPI artificially low. The disconnect between what we are told and what is actually true is worthy of the old East German state. The New York Times' consumer reporter, W.P. Dunleavy, wrote that her groceries now cost $587 a month, up from $400 a year earlier. This is a 40 percent increase. California economist John Williams, who runs an organization called Shadow Statistics, contends that if Washington still used the CPI measurements applied back in the 1970s, inflation would be in the 10 percent range. The advantage to the corporations is huge. A false inflation rate, one far lower than the real rate, keeps equitable interest payments on bank accounts and certificates of deposit down. It masks the deterioration of the American economy. The Potemkin statistics allow corporations and the corporate state to walk away from obligations tied to real adjustments for inflation. These statistics mean that less is paid out in Social Security and pensions. It has reduced the interest on the multitrillion-dollar debt. Corporations never have to pay real cost-of-living increases to their employees. The term "unemployment" has also been steadily redefined. This has rendered official data on employment worthless. In real terms, about 10 percent of the working population is unemployed, a figure that is, over the long run, unsustainable. The economy, despite the official statistics, is not growing. It is shrinking. And as the nation crumbles, we are awash with the terrible simplicity of false statistics. We confuse our emotional responses, carefully manipulated by advertisers, pundits, spin doctors, television hosts, political consultants and focus groups, with knowledge. It is how we elect presidents and those we send to Congress, how we make decisions, even decisions to go to war. It is how we view the world. Four media giants -- AOL-Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch's NewsGroup -- control nearly everything we read, see and hear. This growing disconnect with reality is the hallmark of a totalitarian state.

"Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines," Hannah Arendt wrote, "totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda -- before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world -- lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world."

So what do we do? Voting is not enough. If voting was that effective, to quote the activist Philip Berrigan, it would be illegal. And voting in an age when elections are stolen by rigged ballot machines and a stacked Supreme Court willing to overturn all legal precedent to make George Bush president, will not work. I am not saying do not vote. We should all vote. But that has to be the starting point if we want to reclaim America. We must lobby, organize and advocate for the dissolution of the World Trade Organization and NAFTA. The WTO and NAFTA have handcuffed workers and consumers and stymied our efforts to create clean environments. These agreements are beyond the control of our courts and have crippled our weakened regulatory agencies. The WTO forces our working class to compete with brutalized child and prison labor overseas, to be reduced to this level of slave labor or to go without meaningful work. We need to repeal the anti-worker Taft-Hartley law of 1947. The act obstructs the organization of unions. We need to transfer control of pension funds from management to workers. If these pension funds, worth trillions of dollars, were in the hands of workers, the working class would own a third of the New York Stock Exchange.

The working class has every right to be, to steal a line from Obama, bitter with liberal elites. I am bitter. I have seen what the loss of manufacturing jobs and the death of the labor movement did to my relatives in the former mill towns in Maine. Their story is the story of tens of millions of Americans who can no longer find a job that supports a family and provides basic benefits. Human beings are not commodities. They are not goods. They grieve and suffer and feel despair. They raise children and struggle to maintain communities. The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of statistics or the absurd, utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.

George Bush, who will be here on Saturday, has done more to shred, violate or absent the government from its obligations under domestic and international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons, and defied the Geneva Convention and human rights law. He has set up offshore penal colonies where we deny detainees basic rights and openly engage in torture. He launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. And if we as citizens do not hold him accountable for these crimes, if we allow the Democratic majority in Congress to get away with its refusal to begin the process of impeachment, which appears likely, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that will have terrifying consequences. For a world without treaties, statutes and laws is a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation -- largely put in place by the United States -- destroy our own constitutional rights and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. We are one, maybe two, terrorist attacks away from a police state.

Time is running out.

We must not allow international laws and treaties -- ones that set minimum standards of behavior and provide a framework for competing social, political, economic and religious groups and interests to resolve differences -- to be discarded. The exercise of power without law is tyranny. And the consequences of George Bush's violation of the law, his creation of legal black holes that can swallow American citizens along with those outside our borders, run in a direct line from the White House to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and military brigs in cities such as Charleston. George Bush -- we now know from the leaked Downing Street memo -- fabricated a legal pretext for war. He decided to charge Saddam Hussein with the material breach of the resolution passed in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. He had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was in breach of this resolution. And so he and his advisers manufactured reports of weapons of mass destruction and disseminated them to a frightened and manipulated press and public. In short, he lied. He lied to us and to the rest of the world. There are tens of thousands, perhaps a few hundred thousand people, who have been killed and maimed in a war that has no legal justification, a war waged in violation of international law, a war that under the post-Nuremberg laws is defined as "a criminal war of aggression."

We have blundered into nations we know little about. We are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us as well. We can either begin an orderly withdrawal or watch the mission collapse.

A rule-based world matters. The creation of international bodies and laws, the sanctity of our constitutional rights, have allowed us to stand pre-eminent as a nation -- one that seeks at its best to respect and defend the rule of law. If we demolish the fragile and delicate domestic and international order, if we permit George Bush to create a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation, democracy and law are worthless, if we allow these international and domestic legal safeguards to unravel, our moral and political authority will plummet. We will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies. We will lose our country. And we will, in the end, see visited upon us the evils we visit on others. Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules or Thucydides' history. Read how Athens' expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens destroyed itself. For the primary instrument of tyranny and empire is war and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand the poison of war -- if we do not understand how deadly that poison is -- it can kill us just as surely as the disease.

Hope, St. Augustine wrote, has two beautiful daughters. They are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and the courage to see they do not remain the way they are. We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. We are waging a war that devours lives and capital, and that cannot ultimately be won. We are told we need to give up our rights to be safe, to be protected. In short, we are made afraid. We are told to hand over all that is best about our nation to those like George Bush and Dick Cheney, who seek to destroy our nation.

A state of fear only engenders cruelty -- cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis. In the center of Dante's circle, the damned remained motionless. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage, indeed the militancy, to challenge those in the Democratic and Republican parties who herd us toward the corporate state, we will have squandered our courage and our integrity when we need it most.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.

© 2008 Truthdig All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/86973/

How Our Sexuality Is Being Restricted One Bad Law At A Time

2008-06-04T16:35:00.002-04:00

How Our Sexuality Is Being Restricted One Bad Law at a Time

By Dr. Marty Klein, AlterNetPosted on June 4, 2008,

Printed on June 4, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/87015/

With anxiety and anger about sexuality reaching a noisy crescendo, Congress members and state legislators are responding with laws that placate the mob du jour -- laws restricting sexual expression that have little chance of surviving even the lightest Constitutional scrutiny.
For example, Congress has passed law after law attempting to rid the Internet of pornography. Texas recently passed a law requiring strip clubs to pay a special tax of $5 per head (no jokes, please). This spring, Indiana passed a law requiring vendors of "sexually explicit" materials to register with the state and pay a $250 fee.

But every federal law censoring the Internet has been derailed by a court. The Texas law was overturned by their Supreme Court just two months ago. The Indiana law, you can be sure, will be overturned before Labor Day.

All because of "activist judges." You know what an "activist judge" is -- a judge who decides that a law you like happens to be illegal. And more often than not, that illegal law concerns sex.
Most people understand that Congress can't pass a law reinstituting slavery -- and that if it did, a court would overturn it. Similarly, most Americans understand that their state legislature can't authorize murder, or require all its residents to eat beef to qualify for a driver's license.
Unfortunately, most Americans can't actually explain why certain laws cannot be established, no matter how much the public supports those laws.

The explanation is that we live by a set of rules -- the Constitution and its Bill of Rights -- that elected officials simply cannot violate, even when implementing the people's will.
Unfortunately, many Americans think their representatives should be allowed to trample these Constitutional rules when they're upset about sex. Sexual danger. Sexual fear. Sex panics break out, the people moo loudly. The Republic's in danger: there's a nipple on TV. Teens are getting birth control. There are lesbians in the Army. Sexuality is considered a public health menace, and many people want tough (albeit illegal) laws to battle the epidemic.

Legislators acquiesce, passing laws in response that break the larger, Constitutional rules.
When these laws are successfully challenged, counties and states face huge legal bills (Florida's municipalities spent over $10,000,000 last year fighting for bans on strip clubs, thong bikinis, adult bookstores, and the like), and everyone's time is wasted. But legislators win big even when their laws are losers.

"Don't blame me," they tell the angry electorate, "I voted for a law you demanded that would protect our children, but those snooty judges decided you citizens couldn't have the laws you asked us to pass. You might as well live in Russia."

This is legislative cowardice. Most lawmakers are lawyers. They can generally guess which new laws won't stand up. They vote for the laws anyway, watch them (predictably) get overturned, then blame the courts, the ACLU, and "liberal" plaintiffs (bookstores, strip clubs, a student who simply wanted birth control). Doing this with "porn," for example, has been good for many legislators' careers; Kansas Senator Brownback and California state senator Calderon, for example, both made their political fortunes from violating their oath of office.

Passing popular but constitutionally suspect laws can also be part of a testing process. If a questionable law survives a state court challenge, allied sponsors try to get them passed elsewhere (a popular strategy with laws restricting abortion). If a law is overturned, sponsors attempt to learn from the experience, reshaping the law and trying it elsewhere. This has been popular with theo-conservative legal groups like the American Center for Law & Justice and the Community Defense Council, who promote model ordinances designed to eliminate adult entertainment and to diminish church-state separation.

Americans frightened about sex and angry about "activist courts" need a civics lesson: what exactly is the role of our courts, and why do they sometimes challenge or negate the obvious will of the majority?

The answer is a 2,000-year-old concept called the Separation of Powers. A centerpiece of American government, we didn't invent it -- the Romans had it in their constitution. This revolutionary idea gives an independent judiciary responsibility for reviewing laws made by an executive or legislative branch. Under this system, courts are mandated to judge whether individual laws break the ultimate law -- the Constitutional rules of the legal system itself.
Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Some opponents reject the idea that the majority's will can be wrong. Other opponents dislike the idea that a minority (say, a religious or ethnic group) has institutionalized rights distinct from those granted it by the majority.

Proponents of the system believe that the Separation of Powers protects democracy and prevents tyranny.

So hey America, democracy does not mean the majority can create any laws they want. It means they can pass any laws they want within our Constitution's wonderful, far-sighted limits. Democracy is not three wolves and a lamb voting on who gets eaten for dinner.

Legal analyst Mark Kernes notes that our Constitution doesn't deal with morality -- it only deals with rights and privileges. "And morality often conflicts with rights and privileges," he notes. Morality says 'you may currently have the right to do X, but you shouldn't do X.' But in relying on morality for governance, however, some people then make the leap that if you shouldn't do X, you shouldn't have the right to do X. Contemporary examples include virtually anything relating to sexual expression: abortion, pornography, "sex words" on TV, swingers' clubs, productions of The Vagina Monologues.

That kind of thinking leads to exactly the kind of laws that will be overturned by a clear-thinking court.

Many Americans are too civically immature to understand that their alarm, anxiety, and anger about sex do not justify suspending the Constitution. Predictably, they also get the lawmakers they deserve. These elected charlatans pander to their constituents' fear, pretend to do something efficacious, and when it predictably fails Constitutional scrutiny, argue "hey, I tried to do what you wanted, but due to a flaw in the system, we both end up victims."

California Chief Justice George, of course, sees the opposite: "Basically, it comes down to the question of when is a judge shirking his or her responsibility by not acting," he said about his decision to overturn California's ban on same-gender marriage.

No, judges overturning bad laws isn't a flaw in the system; it's the success of the system.
The adult fruits of democracy require that people be able to comfort themselves when their emotions want something their political system can't -- and shouldn't -- provide. And with the continuing polarization of the country (many people no longer believe there's such a thing as objective news), Americans are finding it harder to imagine objective judges. This makes it especially good for the nation that so many recent decisions with progressive impacts (California's gay marriage ban, Lawrence v. Texas, Internet censorship) were issued by conservative Republican judges.

It's good for the nation because too many people now suspect ideological motives when judges overturn popular laws. James Dobson, Phil Burress, Robert Peters, and other conservative leaders consciously encourage this awful notion. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, for example, ludicrously says "The federal courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, have systematically attacked Christianity." By undermining faith in our judiciary, he is undermining democracy in America.

But because Perkins and other policy conservatives complain about sex-related issues, they get a free pass on their civic crime.

Too many decision-makers, and the mass media that support them, seem to feel that no law is too extreme if it addresses Americans' anxiety or anger about sexuality. As this anxiety and anger increase, so do the number and intensity of the laws passed in response: the punitive, fear-mongering Adam Walsh law; restrictions on fantasy online conversations; bribes to public libraries that would censor their computers; record-keeping laws for porn distributors that no hospital, car company, or nursery school would ever be expected to meet.

The courts have protected Americans from their own frightened, bloodthirsty demands by ruling against various state, federal, and local laws restricting sexual behavior, education, health, and speech.

But not nearly enough of these laws have been nullified as unconstitutional. Because America simply doesn't have enough "activist" judges to go around.

Dr. Marty Klein is a California-based policy analyst and author of the recent book America's War On Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust, & Liberty.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/87015/

TOO MUCH STUFF! AMERICA'S LOVE AFFAIR WITH 'SELF-STORAGE'

2008-06-04T16:34:00.002-04:00

Too Much Stuff! America's New Love Affair With Self-Storage

By Martin John Brown, AlterNetPosted on June 4, 2008,

Printed on June 4, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/86998/

A strange new shadow land has grown up in America. It's a world of cinderblock villas and plywood hallways, garish under halogen security bulbs. It clings to the underside of Western towns like Roman catacombs, pushes up funereal fault blocks in urban centers, and festoons suburban freeways with palaces styled after castles and forts. If you could peer inside those locked rooms, you'd see, well, practically any object you could imagine: a pair of skis, five toadstool-style cookie jars, twelve years' back issues of Martha Stewart Living, a single broken bed frame, all waiting like Egyptian tomb dressing to serve in some afterlife. But you'd rarely see a person, because all these new, gray places are for stuff.

The "self storage" business started small three or four decades ago, as a few "mini-warehouses" around military bases in the Southwest, according to industry legend. Now it's a $22 billion-per-year industry, and maybe a whole way of life. Like VCRs and cell phones, self-storage is a product Americans didn't need until they discovered it, and now they can't live without.
The numbers are astounding. According to the Self Storage Association, an industry advocacy group, square footage of rentable storage has increased 740 percent in the past two decades; a billion square feet of storage space was created between 1998 and 2005; and there are now 6.8 square feet of storage for every man, woman and child in America. Chris Sonne, a storage expert at Cushman & Wakefield Inc., estimates there are 45,000 storage facilities today compared to zero 50 years ago.

"That's a pace of two or more self-storage facilities opening every day for 50 years," he says.
"That beats McDonald's."

It's been a great ride for savvy investors, who watched the business produce impressive rents from inexpensive buildings. Industry giant Public Storage Inc. had total returns of 41 percent, 33 percent, 25 percent and 47 percent for the years 2003-2006, according to Morningstar. Though growth has slowed recently, due to high supply and tight credit, it hasn't stopped, with new development continuing in little-served areas like urban centers. What the hell is going on? Why do Americans crave all this space when they apparently lived fine without it 30 years ago?
There aren't many answers in the press. Storage tends to make the news only when something criminal or titillating happens -- like when a murderer stores body parts in his unit, or Paris Hilton forgets to pay her rent, and her purported party photos and Amsterdam drug notes are auctioned off to the highest bidder.

I walk into the office of a Public Storage facility and talk to "Jack," the manager on duty. (He tells me he could get fired if I used his real name.) With his beard neatly trimmed and his shirt tucked in, he seems grounded and efficient. I ask why demand for his service is so big.

"I guess there are just a lot of pack rats out there," he says without skipping a beat.

That's the same initial reaction I got from the majority of the 20 people I talked to for this story, from Wall Street analysts to everyday customers. But draw those conversations out a bit, and those pack rats "out there" start looking like everyone you know. The problem isn't just with the crass and slavish mob; more thoughtful types use self-storage too.

Building on Inertia

Part of the storage boom comes from use by business: Self Storage Association President Michael Scanlon says that perhaps 30 percent of customers are businesses storing records, equipment, inventory and the like. Still, the lion's share of the expansion has come from plain old folks storing their possessions. And every one of them has a story when they show up at Jack's desk.

"When people come in here, they are stressed out," he says. "Maybe their grandma died and left some furniture. Maybe they're moving. Maybe they got a new job."

These are "life events" in the parlance of industry analysts, and they're a gateway into the self-storage universe. Whether the event is good or bad, its high emotions come loaded with the job of dealing with a small mountain of stuff. That's where Jack can step in. A big part of a storage manager's job is unlicensed crisis counseling -- talking the client down a bit, figuring out their plans for the next few hours or months, and getting their possessions off their hands so they can move on with their lives.

"When they leave the office," Jack says, "I want to make sure at least this one thing is resolved for them." Like all of the self-storage managers I met, he is a down-to-earth, no-nonsense person who seems truly interested in helping.

Getting into self-storage is so easy it can be a big relief to someone in the throes of a "life event." There is no need to bother friends or family. There are few, if any, credit checks, reference checks, deposits or long-term leases. The service looks cheap, with typical monthly rents from 50 cents to 2 dollars per square foot. It's getting out that can be the challenge.

Consider a customer like Raeven (yes, her real name), now a preschool worker in Portland, Ore. Nine months ago she was in Ann Arbor, Mich., having a "life event." Her marriage was going to pieces. She retreated to her parents' home in Salem, Ore., and got her stuff into storage there. After a few months, she moved to Portland to start a new life. Now she occasionally goes down to Salem to retrieve things. On a recent visit she extracted some kitchen gear, some books on Jewish studies and 50 pairs of shoes. (There are more.) Her idea is to extricate the rest of the stuff and be out of the unit in a few months. It's a typical plan -- and if Raeven is a typical client, she won't succeed.

"You start off by asking, 'how long do you plan on renting it for?'" says Scanlon. "Almost everybody says 'a month or two.'"

They end up staying a lot longer. Average tenancies nationwide are somewhere between one and two years, say Scanlon and Sonne, and some renters simply never leave.

"I have one renter who's been here since we opened -- in 1990," says Dawn Spencer, a manager at Clackamas River Mini Storage outside of Portland. "He pays automatically, by credit card, never comes in. Lives in another state now."

"It's an industry that builds on inertia," says Paul Adornato, an analyst for BMO Capital Markets. "People would much rather have $150 withdrawn automatically out of their checking account every month than have to wake up on a Saturday morning, rent a truck, move out the stuff, do something with the stuff … see what I mean?"

Incident in the Garage

One factor that does not explain the storage boom is lack of space in American houses. Over the last three decades, the average new American home has grown by about 900 square feet, according to Census data, while the number of people per household has declined slightly.
"Most of the people we rent to have a garage, an attic and a basement -- can you believe that?" says Scanlon. Seventy-five percent of them own their own homes, he says. They simply have more and more stuff to wrangle. Rick, a real estate agent in Macomb County, Mich., is one such "premium residential customer," as Scanlon calls them. He's familiar with self-storage from his job, where he encourages customers to use storage to remove nonessential items and "stage" their homes for sale. He even plays a "decluttering" game with customers a few months later, after the sale, when they're ready to reclaim that excess. Can they even remember what's in there? Almost never, he says.

Rick had his own storage-inducing life event when he moved his father-in-law, who has "a touch of Alzheimer's," into assisted living.

"His house was a nightmare when we moved him out," relates Rick. "His basement was full of crap. His garage was full of crap. His extra bedrooms were full of crap. It's like, 'What do you need this stuff for?'" There wasn't room for it all in his assisted-living apartment, but Rick says his father-in-law couldn't distinguish between irreplaceable items, like old pictures, and replaceable junk like a prefab shelving unit. He wanted to keep it all.

Still, Rick and his wife couldn't exactly throw that crap away. On occasion, the father-in-law asked for specific things -- an old picture, or a book -- and they could hardly deny him such wishes. Rick didn't want to clutter up his own house. A storage unit was the logical solution. Getting a second unit seemed logical, too, when Rick's college-age son went abroad to study and left some things behind -- furniture for his future apartment.

Finally, there was an incident in Rick's garage, which was getting a little crowded with his own stuff. A pile of it fell over and nearly damaged his prized MG roadster. Rick broke the mental seal and put some of his own stuff -- some sports gear and old business papers -- in his father-in-law's unit.

"I've encroached on it 30 percent," he says. Then he works out some math about his storage expenses.

"There's a bit of me that says -- gosh, I'm paying, combined, about $100 a month. … I've been doing this for three years …"

He trails off before he gets to the surprisingly large total.

I ask if the stuff in his two units is worth anything near $3,600.

"Nope."

Will he keep a storage unit when his father-in-law passes on and his son gets an apartment?
"
Probably," he says, after some fumbling. "Just a smaller one."

The Future Beach House

I can't help but get the impression that, like Rick, a good many Americans are in danger of literally getting pushed out of their houses by stuff. It seems odd in a time when eBay, craigslist, freecycle.org and charity pickup services make getting rid of possessions easier than ever.
Adornato has been thinking about those services too.

"All of that helps us to rotate our personal inventories," hey says, "but ultimately, we like to accumulate."

The deluge of stuff springs from a combination of instinct and economics, says Cindy Glovinsky, a psychotherapist and author of "Making Peace With the Things in Your Life" (St. Martin's). Humans are programmed to hoard, she says, and "things have gotten cheaper, and more widely available, and more quickly available than ever in history."

It hasn't helped, she thinks, that so many households now have two wage earners. Homemakers used to have time to sort through things and edit them. "But when you work all day," she says, "it seems like a huge burden." Especially when those two wage earners might have completely different ideas about their possessions.

For Eden, a hi-tech sales rep in Boston, her life event came two years ago when she moved from Idaho to Boston so her husband could go to grad school. It meant downsizing from a big suburban house to a standard apartment. There was no way all her husband's things, including a full cocktail bar setup -- he is a mixing aficionado -- could come with them.

"My impulse was to get rid of all that stuff and simplify," she says, "but he just has this gene that makes him accumulate stuff."

The compromise was leaving the bar, some furniture, tools and other miscellany in storage in Idaho, a place they weren't likely to live again, ever. It's still there today, rent prepaid, waiting to be rediscovered and reanimated. On some days, thinking about it bothers Eden a lot.

"People in third world countries couldn't even fathom this," she says. "Their houses aren't even as big as our storage unit."

Nonetheless, the storage unit has its usefulness. It prevents a major relationship crisis. And it makes a little down payment on a dream she and her husband have of building a beach house in British Columbia. When they get around to doing that, Eden says, all that stuff could be really useful.

People Substitutes

What's in storage, says Scanlon, doesn't often have great cash value. "It's mostly stuff people have an emotional attachment to," he says. "They think, 'I might need this someday, or the kids might want this.'… That's really what is motivating this."

It doesn't matter if such ideas are patently unrealistic, says Glovinsky: "Parents ought to ask, how much is the kid really going to want?" Rather, she says, they're powerful impulses, tied to instincts about survival and relationships.

"It's normal for people to be attached to objects," she says. "We tend to make do with them as people substitutes, like children with teddy bears, or Tom Hanks with his volleyball (in "Cast Away"). We all do some of that; it's really just a matter of degree."

The first step in addressing a problem with stuff, she emphasizes, is not hiring a dump truck, but acknowledging the powerful emotional interactions everyone has with things. Once you do that, it's easier to be selective -- to pick some objects that represent memories or people or plans for the future, and get rid of the rest.

The Ugly Un-American
I
t seems so easy to blame the ugly, consuming American for the storage boom, to see spending $50 or $150 a month to store junk as a spiritual failing unique to the United States. But Americans aren't storing junk, they're storing dreams -- of days when there will be a better house to move in to, of days with time to read all those magazines and make all those recipes; of kids who honor family ties by keeping grandma's dresser; of doing things they once did again, if only they could get interested again. And it could be those kind of dreams aren't American, they're simply human.

That's what industry pros like Adornato are thinking. The business is already firmly established in Australia and Europe, and Adornato has been talking with storage executives about the experience there.

"The executives said over and over again that once people are aware of the product, their habits were indistinguishable from Americans," Adornato reports. "That is, they like to accumulate stuff; they had more stuff than they wanted to keep in their residence; and they had the same inertia about taking it out."

Sonne is bullish on that mother of all markets, China. "One of the developers in China told me the idea of self-storage works everywhere, because people aren't that different." While it might take time to introduce the concept of storage to Chinese consumers, Sonne says, "once it gets in the psyche of people … it sort of becomes part of their life."

That means on my next trip to Beijing I might be able to glimpse two Forbidden Cities. The ancient one, full of treasures of jade and calligraphy and hand-wrought bronze, is a museum now, open to the public. But the brand new storage palace, full of magazines and junky bed frames -- or the Chinese equivalent -- will be walled off and secret. I wonder what dreams will lie in state there.

Martin John Brown is a writer and researcher specializing in historical and environmental topics. His work has appeared in Air & Space, Smithsonian, E/The Environmental Magazine, SAIL, Cat Fancy, American Spirit and elsewhere.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/86998/

Visual Sociology: Photography and Sociology

2008-05-19T19:34:00.002-04:00

PHOTOGRAPHY AND SOCIOLOGY

HOWARD S. BECKER
Northwestern University

Photography and sociology have approximately the same birth date, if you count sociology's birth as the publication of Comte's work which gave it its name, and photography's birth as the date in 1839 when Daguerre made public his method for fixing an image on a metal plate 2. From the beginning, both worked on a variety of projects. Among these, for both, was the exploration of society.

While sociology has had other ends, moral and metaphysical, sociologists have always wanted to understand how society worked, to map its dimensions and then look into the big sectors and little crannies so mapped. They ordinarily wanted to find things out rigorously and scientifically, and to develop general theories. But some sociologists have made it their main business to describe what has not yet been described, in the style of the ethnographer, to tell the big news, in the style of the journalist, combining these (more or less) with the desire for rigor and general theory.

Sociologists' choice of theories, methods, and topics of research usually reflect the interests and constraints of the intellectual and occupational communities to which they are allied and attached. They often choose research methods, for instance, that appear to have paid off for the natural sciences. They frequently choose research topics which are public concerns of the moment, especially as those are reflected in the allocation of research funds: poverty, drugs, immigration, campus or ghetto disorder, and so on. These faddish tendencies are balanced by a continuing attention to, and respect for, traditional topics and styles of work.

The efforts and projects of photographers have been much more various. In order to understand how photographers go about exploring society when they undertake that job, it will be useful to remember the melange of other jobs photography does. Think of a camera as a machine that records and communicates much as a typewriter does. People use typewriters to do a million different jobs: to write ad copy designed to sell goods, to write newspaper stories, short stories, instruction booklets, lyric poems, biographies and autobiographies, history, scientific papers, letters . . . . The neutral typewriter will do any of these things as well as the skill of its user permits. Because of the persistent myth that the camera simply records whatever is in front of it (about which I will say more below), people often fail to realize that the camera is equally at the disposal of a skilled practitioner and can do any of the above things, in its own way. Photographers have done all of the things suggested above, often in explicit analogue with the verbal model. Different kinds of photographers work in different institutional settings and occupational communities, which affect their product as the institutional settings in which sociologists work affect theirs (Rosenblum 1973).

Photographers have worked to produce advertising illustrations. They have made portraits of the rich and famous, and of ordinary people as well. They have produced pictures for newspapers and magazines. They have produced works of art for galleries, collectors and museums. The constraints of the settings in which they did their work (Becker 1974) affected how they went about it, their habits of seeing, the pictures they made and, when they looked at society, what they saw, what they made of it and the way they presented their results.

From its beginnings, photography has been used as a tool for the exploration of society, and photographers have taken that as one of their tasks. At first, some photographers used the camera to record far-off societies that their contemporaries would otherwise never see and, later, aspects of their own society their contemporaries had no wish to see. Sometimes they even conceived of what they were doing as sociology, especially around the turn of the century when sociologists and photographers agreed on the necessity of exposing the evils of society through words and pictures. Lewis Hine, for instance, was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation in connection with the early surveys of urban life (Gutman 1967). The American Journal of Sociology routinely ran photographs in connection with its muckraking reformist articles for at least the first fifteen years of its existence (Oberschall 1972:215).

Another kind of social exploration grew out of the use of photographs to report the news and to record important social events. Mathew Brady (Horan 1955) and his staff, which included Timothy H. O'Sullivan (Horan 1966) and Alexander Gardner (1959), photographed the Civil War, and Roger Fenton the Crimean War. But it was not until the 1920's that the development of the illustrated weekly in Europe produced a group of photographers who made the photoreportage or photoessay into an instrument of social analysis (Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon are among the best-known graduates of these journals) (Gidal 1973). Later, the Picture Post in England and Time, Life, and Fortune in the United States provided outlets for serious photojournalists who worked with the photoessay form: Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa.

The impulse to photographic social exploration found another expression in the work produced by the photographers Roy Stryker assembled for the photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration during the 1930's (Hurley 1972, 1973; Stryker and Wood 1973). Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, and others made it their business to record the poverty and hard times of Depression America, their work very much informed by social science theories of various kinds.

More recently, political involvement has had a hand in shaping the use of photography to explore society.

Photographers participated actively in the civil rights movement of the 1960's and brought back photographs which effectively stirred people just as Hine's photographs of child laborers had. They then used those skills in somewhat less immediately political kinds of essays-exploring communities, occupations, subcultures, institutions-that have a sociological intent. These essays combine a journalistic and ethnographic style with a self-conscious and deliberate artistic purpose.
Photography from the beginning strove toward art just as it did toward social exploration. To be sure, earlier photographers in this tradition understood that what they did had an artistic component. They worked hard to produce images that measured up as art. But the artistic element of photography was held at a substantial distance from photography carried on for more mundane purposes, including journalism. Such influential photographers as Edward Weston conceived of their work as something more like painting-they produced for galleries, museums, and private collectors as much as they could-and did very little that could be interpreted in any direct way as an exploration of society.

Art and social exploration describe two ways of working, not two kinds of photographers. Many photographers do both kinds of work in the course of their careers. And even this is an over-simplification since many photographs made by someone whose work is predominantly of one kind have strong overtones of the other. Paul Strand is clearly an art photographer; but his pictures of peasants around the world embody political ideas, and any number of socially concerned photographers do work that is personally expressive and aesthetically interesting quite apart from its subject matter - as, for instance, in Danny Lyon's The Destruction of Photography has thus, like sociology, displayed a shifting variety of characteristic emphases, depending on the currents of interest in the worlds of art, commerce and journalism to which it has been attached. One continuing emphasis has been the exploration of society in ways more or less connected with somewhat similar explorations undertaken by academic sociologists. As sociology became more scientific and less openly political, photography became more personal, more artistic, and continued to be engaged politically. Not surprisingly, then, the two modes of social exploration have ceased to have very much to do with one another.

Sociologists today know little of the work of social documentary photographers and its relevance to what they do. They seldom use photographs as a way of gathering, recording, or presenting data and conclusions. I want to acquaint them with this tradition and show them how they can make use of the styles of work and techniques common in photography. Many social scientists have already been active photographically, and what I say will not be news to them (Barndt 1974).

Many photographers have undertaken projects which produce results that parallel those of sociology, and make claims that in some ways parallel the claims to truth and representativeness of sociology. Insofar as their work has this character, I intend to show them how a knowledge of some of the ideas and techniques of academic sociology can be of help to them.

I do not want to make photographers of social scientists or impose a social science imperialism on photographers (not that there is any chance such attempts would be successful). Many sociologists will find the work and methods I describe hopelessly unscientific, although I hope that this discussion will cause them to reconsider their own methods. Many photographers will find my suggestions academically arrogant; satisfied with the way they now work, they will see no advantage in alien ideas and procedures.

What I say is most directly addressed to those social scientists and photographers who are sufficiently dissatisfied with what they are doing to want to try something new, who find difficulties in their present procedures and are interested in seeing whether people in other fields know something that might help. Ideally, it is directed to the growing number of people, whatever their professional background, who are concerned with producing photographic explorations of society.

In addition, I have tried to show how even those sociologists who have no interest in photographic work can learn something from the light shed on conventional research methods by a comparison with photographic methods. Some generic problems of social exploration profit from the light the comparison generates.

I will not be concerned with every aspect of the use of visual materials in social science in this paper. Specifically, I will not consider three major areas of work to which social scientists have devoted themselves: (1) the use of film to preserve nonverbal data for later analysis, as in the analyses of gesture and body movement by such scholars as Birdwhistell, Ekman, Hall, and Lennard; (2) the analysis of the visual productions of "native seers" for their cultural and social meanings, as in the Worth-Adair (1972) study of Navaho filmmakers; (3) the use of photographs as historical documents, whether they have been taken by artless amateurs and preserved in family albums, as in Richard Chalfen's work, or by professional photographers, as in Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). All three are interesting and important areas of work, but differ from the use of photographs to study organizations, institutions, and communities that I have in mind. There is considerable overlap, of course, and I do not insist on the distinction.

Anyone who gets into a new field must pay some dues. Photographers who want to pursue the matter further will have to read some social science prose, and many will probably find that too steep a price; some will find a viable solution in a working partnership with a social scientist (as in the fruitful collaboration of Euan Duff and Dennis Marsden in an as yet unpublished study of unemployed men and their families in Britain).

The price to social scientists is less painful. They must acquaint themselves with the extensive photographic literature; I have reproduced some examples here and will provide a brief guide to more. In addition, they will have to learn to look at photographs more attentively than they ordinarily do. Laymen learn to read photographs the way they do headlines, skipping over them quickly to get the gist of what is being said. Photographers, on the other hand, study them with the care and attention to detail one might give to a difficult scientific paper or a complicated poem. Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer's responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and respond to it. To put it another way, the statement the image makes-not just what it shows you, but the mood, moral evaluation and causal connections it suggests-is built up from those details. A proper "reading" of a photograph sees and responds to them consciously.

Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that "language" themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way. The following exercise, taught to me by Philip Perkis, is a way of seeing what is involved:

Take some genuinely good picture; the ones reproduced in this article will do. Using a watch with a second hand, look at the photograph intently for two minutes. Don't stare and thus stop looking; look actively. It will be hard to do, and you'll find it useful to take up the time by naming everything in the picture to yourself: this is a man, this is his arm, this is the finger on his hand, this is the shadow his hand makes, this is the cloth of his sleeve , and so on. Once you have done this for two minutes, build it up to five, following the naming of things with a period of fantasy, telling yourself a story about the people and things in the picture. The story needn't be true; it's just a device for externalizing and making clear to yourself the emotion and mood the picture has evoked, both part of its statement

When you have done this exercise many times, a more careful way of looking will become habitual. Two things result. You will realize that ordinarily you have not consciously seen most of what is in an image even though you have been responding to it You will also find that you can now remember the photographs you have studied much as you can remember a book you have taken careful notes on. They become part of a mental collection available for further work. (When you do this exercise a number of times you will acquire new habits of seeing and won't have to spend as much time looking at a new print).

I hope this does not sound mystical. Black and white still photographs use visual conventions that everyone brought up in a world of illustrated newspapers and magazines learns just as they learn to talk. We are not ordinarily aware of the grammar and syntax of these conventions, though we use them, just as we may not know the grammar and syntax of our verbal language though we speak and understand it. We can learn that language through study and analysis, just as we can learn to understand music and poetry by making technical analyses of harmony and counterpoint or of prosody. We don't have a large amount of such photographic analysis available, especially as it relates to the concerns of social scientists. But it is absolutely prerequisite to any analysis and discussion that you practice looking at photographs long and hard, so that you have something to analyze.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC LITERATURE

Topics of Study

One reason sociologists should be interested in the work of social documentary photographers is that photographers have covered many of the subjects that are persistent foci of sociological concern. Some have done their work for the government, some on assignment, or speculatively, for magazines and newspapers, some supported by foundations, some as the "private" work they do between paying jobs, or as a hobby. Describing the variety of topics photographers share with sociologists will provide the opportunity to acquaint those unfamiliar with the photographic literature with some of the most interesting and important work.

In dealing with the topics they share with sociologists, photographers say what they have to say in many ways. Without giving many examples, or offering an extended description of the various forms of photographic statements, I'll simply suggest the following as among the possibilities now in use. A photographer may make his statement in the form of an aphorism or witticism, a photographic one-liner that may be no more than a joke (in the case of EIliot Erwitt 1972, for example) or may be of considerable depth (as in the work of André Kertész 1972). He may produce slogans. He may be saying "Look at that!" in wonder at some natural phenomenon (Ansel Adams' pictures of Yosemite seem to say that), or in revulsion from some disgusting work of man (McCullin 1973). He may tell a story or, finally, he may produce something that implicitly or explicitly offers an analysis of a person, an artifact, an activity or a society. It stretches ordinary usage to speak of these projects as "studies," as though they were sociological research projects; but the exaggeration emphasizes, as I want to, the continuity between the two kinds of work.

Both photographers and sociologists have described communities. There is nothing in photography quite like such major works of social science as Warner's Yankee City Series, Lynd 's Middletown and Middletown in Transistion , and Hughes' French Canada in Transition . Photographers have recently produced more modest efforts, such as Bill Owens' Suburbia (1973) and George Tice's Paterson (1972), both describing smaller communities through a hundred or so images of buildings, houses, natural features, public scenes and (in Owens' book) family life. A number of photographers have accumulated massive numbers of negatives of one city, as Eugéne Atget (Abbott 1964) did in his attempt to record all of Paris or Berenice Abbott (1973) or Weegee (1945), the great news photographer, did, each in their way, of New York; but only small selections from the larger body of work are available, and we usually see only a few of the images at a time.

Like sociologists, photographers have been interested in contemporary social problems: immigration, poverty, race social unrest. In that great photographic tradition, one typically describes in order to expose evils and call for action to correct them. Lewis Hine, who called himself a sociologist, put credo succinctly: "I want to photograph what needs to be appreciated; I want to photograph what needs to be corrected." His greatest project showed conditions of child labor in the United states in a way that is thought to have helped the passage of remedial legislation. Somewhat earlier, Jacob Riis (1971), a reporter, photographed the slums of New York and exhibited the results in How the Other Half Lives. I have already mentioned the photographs of rural poverty by the members of Stryker's FSA photographic unit and might add to that the collaboration of Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell (1937) in You Have Seen Their Faces. Life in Black ghettoes has been photographed, from the inside, by men like James Van Der Zee (DeCock and MeGhee 1973) (among other things the official photographer for Marcus Garvey) and Roy de Carava (de Carava and Hughes 1967); from the outside, by Bruce Davidson (1970) and many others. Dramatic confrontations of the races make news, and many photographers have covered such stories (Hansberry 1964) and gone on to more extended explorations of the matter. W. Eugene Smith (1974) has recently published a major essay on pollution, its victims, and the politics surrounding it in Japan.

Other photographic work deals with less controversial problems, in the style of the sociological ethnography. Sociologists have studied occupations and the related institutions of work, and photographers have too: Smith (1969) did major essays on a country doctor and a Black midwife; Wendy Snyder (1970) has a book on Boston's produce market, and Geoff Winningham (1971) produced a book-length study of professional wrestling. Photographers have also investigated social movements, as in Paul Fusco's (1970) book on Cesar Chavez and the UFW, Marion Palfi's (1973) work on civil rights, or Smith's classic essay on the Ku Klux Klan (1969). They have shared with sociologists an interest in exotic subcultures: Danny Lyon's (1968) work on
motorcycle gangs and Brassai's (Museum of Modern Art 1968) studies of the Parisian demi-monde, for instance.

Photographers have been as alert as sociologists and cultural commentators to call attention to the rise of new social classes or to forgotten groups in society. Two recent books try to do this, using Detroit as the laboratory. Alwyn Scott Turner's (1970) Photographs of the Detroit People concentrates on the working class, in front of their homes in the parks, streets and churches, at parades and rallies. Enrico Natali's (1972) New American People does something similar for the rising middle class.
vMany photographers have worked at depicting the ambiance of urban life in a way reminiscent of the long tradition of theorizing about cities by sociologists from Simmel to Goffman. Walker Evans' (1966) Many Are Called consists of portraits made on the New York subway with a hidden camera. Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand (Davidson et al. 1966) and a host of others have photographed "behavior in public places," creating in the mood of their images a sense of alienation and strain, maybe even a little anomie. Euan Duff's (1971) How We Are systematically covers major aspects of urban British life.

In addition to these relatively conventional analogues of sociological investigation, photographers have also been concerned with the discovery of cultural themes, modal personalities, social types, and the ambiance of characteristic social situations. Thus, Robert Frank's (1969) enormously influential The Americans is in ways reminiscent both of Tocqueville's analysis of American institutions and of the analysis of cultural themes by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Frank presents photographs made in scattered places around the country, returning again and again to such themes as the flag, the automobile, race, restaurants - eventually turning those artifacts, by the weight of the associations in which he embeds them, into profound and meaningful symbols of American culture.

The long tradition of the photographic portrait has led photographers to attempt, in a way sociologists have seldom tried (despite the tradition of the life history document), to depict societies and cultures by portraits of representative types. The most systematic attempt must be August Sander's Men Without Masks, which characterizes Germany in hundreds of portraits of Germans of every social class, occupation, ethnic, regional, and religious group. Paul Strand's (1971) portraits of peasants from France, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, Canada, and elsewhere, though surrounded by other images of places and artifacts, attempt the same thing, as to Elaine Mayes' (1970) portraits from the Haight-Ashbury.

Photographers have seldom, constrained as they are by time limitations built into the institutions they work in, attempted longitudinal studies. One recent project of this kind suggests how it can happen. Larry Clark's (1971) Tulsa tells the story of a group of young men in that city who begin using intravenous amphetamine. It follows them from an idyllic hunting and fishing youth into drugs, police trouble, and death. Clark was one of the group and visited his old friends periodically as the story unfolded, thus producing a unique inside view of an exotic subculture.
Photographers like to capsulize their understanding of people, situations, even countries, in one compelling image.

Cartier-Bresson (1952) coined the phrase "the decisive moment" to refer to that moment when things fall into place in the viewfinder in such a way as to tell the story just right. It sounds mystical, but many of his pictures (e.g., "Exposing a stool pigeon for the Gestapo in a displaced persons camp", Dessau 1945) accomplish just that.
Modes of Presentation
Photographers present the results of their explorations of society in a variety of ways, using varying quantities of images to make different kinds of statements. One might, at one extreme, present a single image, capturing in it all that needs to be shown about something from some point of view. Stieglitz' "The Steerage," for instance, seems to make a self-sufficient statement about the experience of European immigrants, showing both the masses Emma Lazarus wrote about, crowded onto the deck of the ship, but also a brilliantly lit gangway that seems to lead to better things. (lronically, the ship was actually headed east, to Europe.)
Usually, however, photographers exploring society give us more than one striking image. They explore a topic more thoroughly, sometimes in one concentrated burst of attention and activity, sometimes (on a timetable more like that of the social scientist) over a period of a few years, sometimes as the preoccupation of a lifetime. The concentrated burst occurs when the conditions of work-a magazine assignment, for instance-make it unlikely that you will be able to return to the subject again 4. It may occur when circumstances make a brief visit possible to an ordinarily inaccessible place (Bourke-White's visit to Russia). Photographers can seldom get the support for more long-term projects, certainly not on a routine basis, so a great deal of important work has been done in this concentrated way and many prized photographic skills consist of doing good work despite the lack of sufficient time.

Probably because of the connection with magazine work, such photographic studies typically saw publication as a photoessay. The form, pioneered in Europe, reached maturity in Fortune and Life. Bourke-White, Smith, and others developed a form in which a few to as many as thirty photographs, spread with an accompanying text over four to eight or ten pages, explored a subject in some detail, giving more space and attention to a subject than a conventional journalistic treatment allowed. Photoessays often, like good sociological studies, showed the great variety of people and situations involved in the subject under study. Of course, magazine editors played a decisive part in the selection and arrangement of the materials, and photographers frequently objected to their interference. Gene Smith resigned from Life over this issue.

When a photographer finds it possible to pursue a subject for a longer time-a year or more-he may accumulate sufficient material for a more extended presentation. Guggenheim grants and other fellowship and foundation funds have supported many such projects (Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street, many of Marion Palfi's studies, Smith's work on Pittsburgh). The government has supported others: the FSA projects, Hine's exposes of child labor. Or the project may be the photographer's private affair, supported by work of an entirely different kind.

In any event, photographers who work over a more extended period accumulate a large pool of images from which they can choose those that best express their understanding of their topic. Choices are made from that pool of images for specific uses, often in consultation with or entirely by others: editors, curators and the like. The selection so made may have more or less organization and coherence. The work of the FSA photographers, for instance, typically appears simply as a collection of variable size and made up of a variety of combinations from the entire body of work they produced.

Larger selections of work usually appear either as books, museum exhibits or both. They may contain anywhere from thirty to four or five hundred prints. Especially when they appear as books, the projects often take on a more organized and sequential format. Such formats allow, and almost require, a more analytic stance than a simple collection, and suggest statements that overlap considerably with those found in sociological ethnography.
The function of text in a photographic book is not clear. Photographic books may contain no text at all (e.g., Davidson's East 100th Street). In others, photographs are presented with a brief identifying label, often no more than a place and date, as in Frank's The Americans. Some contain a paragraph or so of commentary on many of the images, as in Leonard Freed's (1970) Made in Germany. Still others contain large chunks of independent text-as in Danny Lyon's Bikeriders (1968) or Conversations with the Dead (1971) or Winningham's studies of wrestlers (1971) and rodeos (1972)-taken from extant documents or tape-recorded interviews. Finally, as in Smith's essay on pollution in Minamata, the photographer may include an extensive explanatory and analytic text

THEORY IN PHOTOGRAPHY

Close study of the work of social documentary photographers provokes a double reaction. At first, you find that they call attention to a wealth of detail from which an interested sociologist could develop useful ideas about whose meaning he could spin interesting speculations. A collection of photographs on the same topic-a photographic essay or book-seems to explore the subject completely. Greater familiarity leads to a scaling down of admiration. While the photographs do have those virtues, they also tend to restrict themselves to a few reiterated simple statements. Rhetorically important as a strategy of proof, the repetition leads to work that is intellectually and analytically thin.

Many sociologists and photographers will find those judgments irrelevant. Some sociologists work with equally simple ideas; but those who are responsive to the tradition of ethnographic fieldwork will want photographic explorations to provide results as rich and interesting as their own descriptions. Some photographers are content to produce a few compelling images. But many of the book-length projects just described aspire to more than that, whether they make the aspiration explicit or not. Their authors are sensitive to the currents of thought and interest in the larger cultural community, and want to do work that is thought of as more than a beautiful illustration. Photographers and sociologists who don't share these traditions and sensitivities will find what follows of little use.

The problem, then, is why photographic exploration of society is so often intellectually thin. A subsidiary question of interest to photographers and to sociologists who may take a photographic approach to their work, is: what can be done to make that work intellectually denser?

The answer to these questions lies in understanding the role of theory in making photographs of social phenomena. Most sociologists accept the folk notion that the camera records objectively what is there for it to record, no matter what the ideas of the person who pushes the button. Laymen may believe this, but photographers know better. To be sure, something real has to emit light rays in order to produce an image on film or paper, and whatever is real that is emitting light rays where they can go through the lens will make some kind of image. That constraint exists, so that John Collier, Jr. (Friends of Photography 1972:49) is right to say that "The camera constantly trips up the artist by loyally going on being a recorder of reality."

Nevertheless, the photographer exerts enormous control over the final image and the information and message it contains. The choice of film, development and paper, of lens and camera, of exposure and framing, of moment and relation with subjects-all of these, directly under the photographer's control, shape the end product. The way he controls it-what he decides to make it into-depends in the first instance on professional traditions and conditions of work. The kind of photograph he has learned to value and the possibilities for making them provided by the institutions he works in influence his decisions in general. Thus, for example, the short time periods magazine editors allotted to projects meant that photographers could not produce pictures that require lengthy acquaintance with the subject. Newspaper photographers do not, as a rule, make pictures that contain large blurred areas, because editors prefer pictures sharp enough to look good in newspaper reproduction (Rosenblum 1973).

A second influence on the image the photographer produces is his theory about what he is looking at, his understanding of what he is investigating. Saul Warkov says: "The camera is a wonderful mechanism. It will reproduce, exactly, what is going on inside of your head." That is, it will make the picture (given a modicum of technique) look just the way the photographer thinks it should look. Think of it this way: as you look through the viewfinder you wait until what you see "looks right," until the composition and the moment make sense, until you see something that corresponds to your conception of what's going on. Similarly, when prior to making the exposure you choose a lens and film, an f-stop and a shutter speed, you do so with the same considerations in mind. If you make exposures that look some other way than what makes sense to you, you probably will not choose them for printing or exhibition. Thus, what you expect to see and what, even if you did not expect it, you can understand and make sense of-your theory-shape the images you finally produce.
Since the skilled photographer can make the image look as he wants it to, and knows he can, photographers should be aware of the social content of their photographs and be able to talk about it at length. As a rule, they are not. One of the foremost recorders of the urban scene, Lee Friedlander, asked to verbalize the explicit social criticism his pictures seem to make, answered by saying, "I was taught that one picture was worth a thousand words, weren't you?" (Friends of Photography 1972:10). (And the recorder of the exchange adds that the audience of photographers and photography buffs burst into applause.) It is as though the criticism is there, but the photographer doesn't want to verbalize it directly, preferring to rely on intuition. In my limited experience with photographers, I have found that Friedlander's attitude, while not universal, is very common.
If the above remarks are accurate, then when social documentary photography is not analytically dense the reason may be that photographers use theories that are overly simple. They do not acquire a deep, differentiated and sophisticated knowledge of the people and activities they investigate. Conversely, when their work gives a satisfyingly complex understanding of a subject, it is because they have acquired a sufficiently elaborate theory to alert them to the visual manifestations of that complexity. In short, the way to change and improve photographic images lies less in technical considerations than in improving your comprehension of what you are photographing your theory. For photographic projects concerned with exploring society it means learning to understand society better. Insofar as sociology possesses some understanding of society (a very large if), then a knowledge of sociology, its theories, and the way they can be applied to specific situations might improve the work of both photographers and photographic sociologists.

A sociological theory, whether large scale abstract theory or a specific theory about some empirical phenomenon, is a set of ideas with which you can make sense of a situation while you photograph it. The theory tells you when an image contains information of value, when it communicates something worth communicating. It furnishes the criteria by which worthwhile data and statements can be separated from those that contain nothing of value, that do not increase our knowledge of society.

The work of social documentary photographers suffers then from its failure to use explicit theories, such as might be found in social science. This does not, of course, mean that their work embodies no theory at all. If they had no theory, they would have no basis on which to make the choices through which they produce their images. They have a theory, one which, because it is not explicit, is not available to them for conscious use, criticism, or development. Since they do not make explicit use of a theory designed to explore the phenomena they are interested in, they end up relying implicitly on some other kind of theory. The arguments that have attended the publication of some of the major works of obvious social import (e.g., Davidson's East 100th Street) indicate that the theories photographers rely on are, not surprisingly, lay theories, the commonplaces of everyday life in the intellectual and artistic circles they move in. Since photographers, for all their public inarticulateness, tend to be in touch (via their connections in journalism and art, and increasingly, through their location in academia), with contemporary cultural currents, they use the ideas and attitudes that are making the rounds in order to organize their own seeing.

That is probably overly harsh, since often enough photographers contribute images that help to shape those attitudes. Nevertheless, photographs of Harlem residents tend to revolve around such ideas as "Look how these people suffer" and "Look how noble these people are in the face of their suffering" (it might be argued that the latter was the twist Davidson relied on for the originality of his work). It is not that these things are incorrect or that for any reason they should not be said. But they are not sufficiently complex to sustain the weight of a real exploration of society, which will inevitably show that things are more complicated. In fact, the complications provide a great deal of the interest and points of active growth for social science thinking.

Training in social science, which presumably fills your head with social science theories, will not necessarily improve the social science content of your photographs. Knowledge does not automatically shape what you do, but works only when it is deliberately put to work, when it is consciously brought into play. Ruby (1972) argues that the pictures anthropologists take in the field are really vacation pictures, no different from the ones they take on any other vacation or that non-anthropologist vacationers take, focusing on what seems exotic and out of the way. Anthropological thinking does not affect the pictures. Photographic sophistication does. An unsophisticated photographer will produce a lot of isolated images while a sophisticated one will go after sequences of action.

Sociologists are probably like anthropologists. As they become more photographically sophisticated they will produce more interesting images, but not necessarily ones that have sociological content. Similarly, giving photographers a course in sociology or a list of suggested readings will not make their pictures sociologically more sophisticated. Learning some of what sociologists know will be necessary for improving the sociological content of their work, but it will not be sufficient.

How can sociological ideas and theory be brought to bear, in a practical way, on photographic explorations of society? The example of sociological fieldwork, as that has been described by a number of writers, (e.g., Lofland 1970; Schatzman and Strauss 1973), provides a useful model in the procedure of sequential analysis. I'm not referring to anything very esoteric, just to the procedure which allows you to make use of what you learn one day in your data-gathering the next day.

In some social science and photographic styles of work, you defer analysis until all the materials have been gathered. In a large-scale survey or experiment, the researcher can seldom change the way he gathers his data once he had begun; the inability to apply knowledge gained to the gaining of more knowledge is the price of standardized precision. (To be sure, one can apply the lessons of one survey or experiment to the next one, and workers in these styles usually do.) Photographers' failure to apply the lessons they learn at the beginning of a project to its later phases is more likely due to the photojournalistic emphasis on short intense trips to places one would not otherwise ordinarily be in, or getting the shooting done as rapidly as possible to cut down on expenses, and the great value placed on personal intuition, all of which have been elevated in some versions of photographic work to operating norms. (Like sociologists, photographers of course bring what they have learned in previous projects to bear on the next one.) Working in this style, photographers take advantage of their temporary presence in a situation to shoot a great deal, waiting until they have left the field to develop film, make contact sheets, and edit their results.

Fieldworkers work differently, in a way immediately adaptable to photographic projects. As they write up the descriptions and verbatim accounts that constitute their field notes, they simultaneously or shortly thereafter make preliminary analyses of that information (Lofland 1970; Schatzman and Strauss 1973). What is there in what they have recorded that they don't understand? How can they find out more about it? What ideas does it suggest about the organization they are studying and the people's experience in it? What patterns of interaction, of cause and effect, of interrelationship are suggested by what they now know? If the rest of what they observe is like this, what generalizations will they be able to make? Where should they look to find evidence that these preliminary ideas are wrong (or right)? In short, they develop tentative hypotheses about the object of their study, setting it in a context of theories and other data, and then orient their next day's observations and interviews along the lines suggested by the analysis. They try out different observable indicators of various sociological concepts. The concepts, embedded in theories, suggest links with other concepts and hence with other events observable in the situation, which can then be searched for, to provide both confirming and disconfirming evidence relevant to these provisional ideas. The analysis is continuous and contemporaneous with the data-gathering.

The photographer can do the same thing. To do so requires a longer time perspective than many photographic projects envision: certainly as much as the two years Davidson spent in Harlem, probably more than the seven months Winningham spent with wrestlers, or the couple of weeks that are even more common. To spend that much time requires establishing relationships with the people being photographed of a different order than those that photojournalists usually establish; it requires something akin to the research bargain sociologists make with the people they study. It means that the photographer has to find some way to support the long-term effort he is going to undertake.

Supposing that all this has been taken care of, let us consider how a sociologist photographer might go about such a sequentially organized project. He could begin by shooting almost anything he sees in the situation (the community, organization, or group), trying to cover whatever seems in a common-sense way to be worth looking at. The result is likely to be incoherent, visually as well as cognitively. The investigator will be learning how to work in the spatial arrangements and light situations in which what he is studying occurs. He will also be learning what is occurring, who the people are, what they are doing, why they are doing it. He learns the first by intensive study of his contact sheets and work prints; he should make plenty of work prints, in order to have something to study and hypothesize about. He learns the second in part in the same way. He looks at his work prints in a careful, detailed way, asking who all those people are and what they are up to. (Photographers tend to be satisfied with quick answers to these questions, and I think sociologists who would otherwise know better are just as likely to do that when they start working with a camera.) He should pay careful attention to details that don't make sense. For example, if people seem to be dressed in several distinctive ways, it pays to find out what status differences that marks, and then to ask in what other ways those groups differ. If people get into an argument which makes for a visually exciting image, it pays to find out why they are arguing. What is worth arguing about in that organization? What breach of expectations led to this argument? Do those circumstances occur frequently? If not, why not? BourkeWhite (1972:26), on photographing Ghandi, notes: "If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding is as important for a photographer as the equipment he uses. In the case of Ghandi, the spinning wheel is laden with meaning. For millions of Indians, it was the symbol of their fight for independence."

The photographer pursues these questions with his camera, but also by asking people about what he has seen and by observing closely and listening carefully as the everyday activities of the group go on around him. He should not keep away from the people he is working with, shooting from a distance with a long lens, but rather should get up close and establish a working relationship with them, such that they expect him to be there and accept that he has some sort of right to be there which he will probably exercise most of the time. (Aside from the visual considerations, photographers doing this kind of research might want to use a wide-angle lens, perhaps 35mm, as standard equipment, because it will force them up close where they ought to be.)

The photographer can also get more data by showing people the pictures he has already taken. He probably will have no choice, because people will want to see what he's up to. This will give him the chance to use the photo elicitation technique Collier (1967) describes so well: showing the pictures to people who know the situations under study and letting them talk about them, answer questions, suggest other things that need to be photographed, and so on. 5

If the photographer has some sociological ideas available, he can apply them to these more or less commonsense questions and answers. Much of what I've described so far is only what any reasonable curious person might want to know. Nevertheless, basic sociological theory is involved, one compatible with most varieties of sociology in current use. Let me put it in the form of a list of questions to be answered in the field, cautioning that the answers don't come all at once, but through a process of progressive refinement and constant testing against new information. This formulation of the questions a sociological-photographic study could usefully orient itself to is not original; it has been heavily influenced by Everett Hughes (1971).

(1) What are the different kinds of people in the situation? They may or may not look different; they will certainly be called by different names.
(2) What expectations does each kind of person-members of each status group-have about how members of other groups ought to behave? What are the recurring situations around which such expectations grow up?
(3) What are the typical breaches of those expectations? What kinds of gripes and complaints do people have? (A complaint is a sign of a violated expectation; "He's supposed to do X and he hasn't.")
(4) What happens when expectations are violated? What can people do to those who do the violating? Is there a standard way of settling these conflicts?

These questions put in a commonsense way ideas integral to almost any sociological analysis. (1) refers to what a sociologist might call status groups; (2) to norms, rules, or common understandings; (3) to deviance or rule violations; (4) to sanctions and conflict resolution. The advantage of the translation is that these concepts are linked in such a way that if you identify something you have seen as an instance of one of them you then know that you ought to look for other things that will embody the ideas it is connected to in the theory. If, for instance, you see someone reward or punish someone else, the theory directs you to look for the expectations that have been violated in this case, and for the status groups to whom those expectations apply. Anyone exploring society photographically can ask these questions, both visually and verbally. Each day's data provide some provisional answers and some new questions, both discovered by careful inspection and analysis of the material.

The photographic investigator can supplement his visual material with a running verbal record. Depending on his intentions, this might be a full set of field notes such as a sociologist doing a conventional field study would keep, complete with verbatim conversations, or a record of a few outstanding thoughts and remarks. Some photographers (e.g., Winningham and Lyon) have tape recorded interviews with the people they photograph. Some (e.g., Owens) have recorded the responses of people to their photographs.

As the work progresses the photographer will be alert for visual embodiments of his ideas, for images that contain and communicate the understanding he is developing. That doesn't mean that he will let his theories dominate his vision, especially at the moment of shooting, but rather that his theories will inform his vision and influence what he finds interesting and worth making pictures of. His theories will help him to photograph what he might otherwise have ignored. Simultaneously he will let what he finds in his photographs direct his theory-building, the pictures and ideas becoming closer and closer approximations of one another. Like the sociological fieldworker, who finds much of his later understanding latent in his early data (Geer 1964), he will probably find that his early contact sheets, as he looks back through them, contain the basic ideas that now need to be stated more precisely.

The photographer, like the sociologist who builds more and more comprehensive models of what he is studying (Diesing 1971), will arrange the visual material into the patterns and sequences that are the visual analogue of propositions and causal statements. He will consider the problems of convincing other people that his understanding is not idiosyncratic but rather represents a believable likeness of that aspect of the world he has chosen to explore, a reasonable answer to the questions he has asked about it

SOME COMMON PROBLEMS

Whether they start as sociologists or photographers, anyone who undertakes the kind of project I have just described will run into certain problems, which are common both in being frequent and ubiquitous and in being shared by the two vocations. In some cases, sociologists have ways of dealing with problems that photographers might find useful; in others, the way photographers deal with those problems will throw a new light on sociologists' troubles.

Truth and Proof

Insofar as a photograph or group of them purports to be "true," the particular meaning of that ambiguous claim needs to be specified. Once we know the kind of truth a picture claims, we can assess how far we accept the claim and how much of the statement it makes we want to believe.
Photographs (barring those that have been obviously manipulated to produce multiple images and the like) minimally claim to be true in that what they show actually existed in front of the camera for at least the time necessary to make the exposure. Photographs in the social documentary style claim more than that, presenting themselves as pictures of something that was not done just for the photographer's benefit, but rather as something that occurs routinely as part of the ordinary course of events. Or the photograph suggests that what we see is, if not ordinary, characteristic in some deeper sense, portraying some essential feature of the phenomenon photographed. When people speak of a photograph having "captured" something, they generally mean that it displays some such characteristic feature. Frequently, though not always, the photograph suggests that what it shows, while characteristic, is ordinarily hidden from view, so that we might never know its particular truth if the photographer did not show it to us. Many photographers make no such claims, at least explicitly, preferring to avoid the responsibilities that accompany the claims by describing their pictures as containing only the truth of "how it felt to me." This makes the photograph the visual analogue of something like a lyric poem, its author's sole responsibility to have rendered honestly his own feelings and responses. Such work can be interesting and moving; we often feel that, because we trust and feel some empathy with the lyricist's sensibility, we have learned something about the world from his response to it. The lyric poem or photograph need not give us that bonus, however, and its maker needn't satisfy any requirements of truth or objectivity.

Photographers frequently find themselves troubled because, after they have shown us some way of seeing a part of society, someone else accuses them of not having told the truth. Perhaps the photographs are not what they claim to be: though they appear to be "candid" portrayals of everyday events, the people or objects in the picture never really appeared that way, and only did so at the time of the photograph because the photographer posed them (as in the case of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima or the controversy over Arthur Rothstein's picture of a skull on parched Dust Bowl earth (Hurley 1972:86-92), where opponents said he had made an old skull appear to be the product of the recent drought). Photographers often feel the accusation that they set up a shot, rather than photographing something that occurred naturally, to be damaging. When they do, they reveal the degree to which they are claiming something more than subjective truth for their work.
In a commonsense way, people make judgments about that threat to the validity of a photograph (to paraphrase Donald Campbell's useful notion of the threat to the validity of a hypothesis). We may base the judgment on evidence contained in the photograph, recognizing that we have seen similar things elsewhere, so that their existence is not in question; the photographer has simply called our attention to something we already know. The photograph may have been made in a place so public and accessible to independent checks that we reason the photographer would not fake something whose phoniness could so easily be discovered. We may rely on the established reputation of the journal the photograph appear in, being sure that Life would not risk its reputation for accuracy just for the sake of this one picture. How we establish the credibility of a photograph is a problem in commonsense reasoning I won't pursue further here.

When the validity of the individual photographs is not in doubt, a more serious question about the "truth" of a presentation remains. Couldn't someone else have photographed the same people, places or events and produced a quite different statement about that social reality? Any collection of photographs is a selection from a much larger population of photographs that have been or could be taken, and the answer to the question is necessarily yes, that reality could have been presented in another way. I don't know why photographers are as sensitive as they are about this, since they have a simple counter available to the accusation of "bias." The answer lies in distinguishing between the statement that X is true about something and the statement that X is all that is true about something. Thus, Neal Slavin's photographs of Portugal prompted one critic to complain that he couldn't believe that, as this portfolio suggested, no one ever smiled in Portugal. If photographs indicate that other phenomena, even though not central to the statement being made, exist, much of this difficulty could be avoided. Sociologists typically plaster their work with such caveats. Statements so qualified lose something in dramatic impact, but they gain in credibility over the long run; you can choose which you'd like, but you can seldom have both.

Sampling

Another version of the same problem arises when, having assured ourselves that the photographs are valid and that, while they claim to be true, they do not claim to be the whole truth, we ask: if we had gathered our data at some other time, or from some other part of the universe our assertion applies to, would we get essentially the same result? Put it another way: if I know what I do about these people and places at this time, what else can I be reasonably sure I know about? Sampling problems have two aspects: (1) what procedures shall I follow to maximize the generality of my findings? and (2) how can I convince others that my findings have that generality? The first question is procedural, the second rhetorical. Social scientists often deal with the two questions simultaneously. They use a certified technique whose logic is well known; by asserting that the appropriate procedure has been used, they assure readers that their conclusions follow logically. For photographers, the two questions more frequently arise separately.
Social scientists deal with threats to the generality of their propositions by a variety of sampling techniques. If they are concerned with whether certain quantitative distributions or relationships found among those they have observed approximate those in the larger universe from which their observations were drawn, they may use some version of probability sampling. If they want to make sure they have covered all the major aspects of a group's activities or of a social organization, they may rely on what Glaser and Strauss (1967) have called theoretical sampling, choosing units for observation because some theory suggests they would be strategic.

Photographers are seldom concerned with quantitative generalizations, or with covering some theoretical map adequately. But they often present their material in a way that suggests they believe that what they show us applies to a far wider area and population than the one they have covered, that were we to look at a different part of the same whole, we would see more of the same. I don't know what procedures photographers use to assure themselves about these matters. Sociological fieldworkers use some simple procedures that would serve the double function of maximizing generality and thus responding to such queries, and simultaneously enlarging the possibility of getting unanticipated and possibly exciting material (both sociologically and visually). Following some of these suggestions might produce a lot of dull pictures, but so do most procedures; exciting and informative photographs are always hard to come by.

Fieldworkers may use crude time-sampling devices: checking up on someone or someplace every half-hour, or on different days of the week, or different times of the year. Some avoid "leaving things out" by attaching themselves to one person at a time and following that person through his entire daily (and nightly) round. They may ask people under study who else they ought to talk to or observe. As they become aware of categories or situations that deserve special study, they can systematically choose some to observe or they can observe all of them. Fieldworkers follow the discipline of recording everything they see and hear while making these observations.

Photographers could do all of these things, but they would need to observe some discipline equivalent to incorporating everything into the field notes, for a photographer's data do not exist unless they expose some film. In following someone around for a day, they might for instance adopt some such convention as exposing at least one roll of film every hour or so, adapting the time period to the character of what they were observing. They would thus avoid waiting until "something interesting" happened, and increase the chance that things that don't as yet fit into the photographer's developing understanding would nevertheless get into the record. They might similarly photograph certain activities or places on some schedule that interferes with their tendency not to shoot what does not seem visually interesting. Any kind of theory of the kind discussed earlier would likewise direct the photographer to things his intuition and visual sense might not call to his attention. Remember that theory is itself a sampling device, specifying what must be incorporated into a full description.

Shooting what seems interesting usually satisfies the photographer's need for a method. However, they often realize, if they are sensitive to their own work, that they are producing essentially the same pictures in a variety of settings, because their notion of what is visually interesting has become divorced from the social reality they are working in. If they are not sensitive to that possibility, others might point it out. A technique that breaks up their established visual habits guards against this. In addition, photographers often find that they are slow to discover and shoot things they later realize they need for a more complete visual understanding. The same techniques of randomized and theoretically informed sampling may help. The object of all this is not to turn photographers into sociologists or enslave them in mad sociological rituals, but rather to suggest how sociological tricks might solve problems of photographic exploration.

Sociologists try to convince their readers that generalizations from findings are legitimate by indicating that they have used a conventionally approved technique. The scientific community has already inspected the logic of that technique, so it is sufficient to indicate that it has been appropriately used. Readers who accept that convention are automatically convinced.
No photographer uses such standardized devices, and I'm sure that none would be interested in pursuing such techniques as probability sampling. They have their own devices, however, worth exploring because these produce conviction in the viewers of photographic work similar to that produced by sampling designs in sociological readers. Since sociological procedures are, to quote Campbell again, "radically underjustified," it is worth considering photographers' methods, even though they may appear even more underjustified to sociological readers.

The chief device photographers use is to identify their photographs by place and sometimes by date. The photographs in Frank's The Americans are identified simply by a generic organizational type and a town: "Bar-Gallup, New Mexico," "Elevator-Miami Beach," "Bank-Houston, Texas." Dennis Stock's (1970) California Trip identifies the individual images by town and/or neighborhood: "Sunset Strip," or "North Beach, San Francisco." These labels, coupled with a reiteration of themes, so that one sees the same kind of place or thing or person from half a dozen widely scattered places in the country, imply the conclusion that if you can find it in that many places, it is really very widespread. Thus, when Frank shows you luncheonettes, diners, and coffee shops from Indianapolis, Detroit, San Francisco, Hollywood, Butte, and Columbia, South Carolina, all of which share a gritty plastic impersonality, you arc prepared to accept that image as something that must be incorporated into your view of American culture. The logic of this deserves further analysis, since it is convincing (there are other such devices which need to be described and analyzed).

Reactivity

The problem of the reactivity of data-gathering procedures is very similar in ethnographic and photographic work. Does the sample of behavior observed and recorded accurately reflect how people ordinarily act or is it largely a response to the observer's presence and activities? Both sociologists and photographers frequently deal with this by cultivating the art of being unobtrusive. Many people know how to manipulate their bodies and expressions so that, in the absence of any reason to pay special attention to them, the people they are observing ignore them; how they actually do this is not explicitly known, and deserves investigation. It is probably easier to be unobtrusive in public places where you are not known as an investigator and it may or may not be easier if you are carrying a camera. In many situations carrying a camera validates your right to be there; as a tourist, as a member of the group recording the scene for their purposes, or as a representative of the media. Under many circumstances, observing or photographing is commonplace and expected; many other people are doing it. Your presence does not change anyone's behavior since observers and photographers are part of the situation. You should, of course, include their presence in your observations and photographs.

In many situations, the people being observed are engaged in activities of considerable importance to them and cannot change what they are doing for an observer's benefit even if they would like to. Reactivity depends on the freedom of those observed to respond to the observer's (or photographer's) presence. If they are enmeshed in the constraints of the social structure in which they carry on their normal activities, they will have to carry on as they ordinarily do for whatever reasons cause them to do that ordinarily (Becker 1970). They may be well aware that they are being observed or photographed, but not be free to change what they do. Photographers routinely make use of this possibility. I once watched Michael Alexander photograph a woman fighting with her small child in a playground. Alexander was practically on top of her, but the child was kicking and screaming and, though she had no idea who he was, she felt she had no choice but to deal with her child despite the unwelcome recording going on.
A third solution recognizes that the reactivity often reflects fears about what will be done with the information or photographs. If the observer gives evidence that these will not be used to harm the people he is observing, they may decide to ignore him, or to cooperate, for instance, by pointing out things that need to be investigated or photographed, or by keeping him up to date on things that have happened while he was not around.

Photographers make use of a fourth possibility that sociologists seldom employ, though it is the chief element in studies of experimenter bias and similar problems. They encourage reactivity and make it the basis of their exploration of people and events. The photographs become a record of their relationship with the people they photograph, and the reaction of the people to being photographed becomes the chief evidence used in analyzing them. Sociologists make use of this possibility when they look at the difficulties of gaining access as revelatory of the social structure to which access is sought (e.g., Gardner and Whyte 1946).

Getting Access

Sociologists have increasingly worried about the conditions under which they will be allowed to gather data and then make their research results public. Science requires that data and operations be open to public inspection and independent verification. Unconstrained, scientists would (and should) make all their data public. But they are constrained by both legal and moral considerations from doing so, and ordinarily take substantial precautions to avoid harming anyone by revealing who furnished information for or are the subjects of research. They may simply change the names of people, organizations, and places, or use elaborate coding procedures to preserve the anonymity of survey respondents.

People sociologists write about seldom sue them (though my colleagues and I were once threatened with a libel action by the administrator of an organization we studied). Consequently, they worry more about ethical than legal problems. Though a substantial literature debating these problems has grown up, the situation is confused and sociologists do not agree on procedures or relevant ethical principles. They tend to agree on generalities-"We should not do harm to the subjects of our research"-but not on the application of such crucial terms as "harm." To take one example: Are organizations, and especially such public ones as governmental agencies or schools, entitled to the same privacy as individuals, or is not social science research part of the public review to which they are necessarily subject? Another: Where do you draw the line between inconvenience or embarrassment and substantial harm?

Photographers have been considerably more interested in legal problems. When they make simplified analyses of the problems they explore, they can take an equally simplified view of the ethical problems. Having no trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys, they have not had to worry so much about ethical questions. If their work hurts the bad guys on behalf of the good guys-well, that was the point. But they have had to worry about being sued for invasion of privacy, and libel. The law here seems to be as ambiguous as the ethical standards of sociologists. Photographers know they can be sued and often take the ritual precaution of having people sign standard release forms, though these may not be as useful as supposed. 6 They also try to maintain friendly relations with the people they photograph, in much the same spirit as the advice I heard given to medical students: if you are good friends with your patients they won't sue you for malpractice. Alternatively, they rely on this being a large, differentiated society in which it is relatively unlikely that anyone will see the picture of him you put in a book or exhibit.
Everett Hughes' (1971) idea of the research bargain provides the terms for a useful comparison. What bargain do investigator and investigated make? In both photographic and sociological investigations, it is fair to say, the people investigated probably do not know what they are getting into. They may give their consent, but it is not an informed consent. From an ethical and perhaps a legal point of view, the bargain is not fully valid. Sociologists are generally very cautious about this, at least in public discussion, and I think they might consider seriously a view more common among photographers: people can and should take care of their own interests and once the investigator has honestly described his intentions he has fulfilled his obligations. I don't propose that we accept this view uncritically, but we might think hard about why we should not. Journalists have long operated with a different ethic and there is perhaps as much reason to adopt their practice as that of physicians, which has tended to be the one sociologists orient themselves to.

Photographers have probably taken a tougher line because they can't use some of the devices sociologists do. Unless you block out faces and other identifying marks, everyone in a photograph is identifiable and there is no possibility of preserving anonymity. That is the strength of the medium, and no one would sacrifice it for ethical considerations. The strength of photographic work may not depend on the people and organizations studied being identified specifically, since the implicit argument is that what you see is characteristic of a large class; so the people in the individual prints are in effect anonymous, though they might be known to some who see the pictures and others could conceivably find out who they are if it seemed important. (But see Alwyn Scott Turner's Photographs of the Detroit People, in which a great many people photographed are not only named but their approximate addresses are given, too.)

The other aspect of the photographer's situation that leads him not to worry so much about ethical considerations is that when he is not photographing anonymous people who will be made to stand for some more general aspect of the human condition he is usually photographing people who, because they are public figures, expect to be photographed and only complain when it is grotesquely overdone, as in the case of Jacqueline Onassis. These people epitomize the rationale I mentioned earlier: perfectly capable of defending their own interests, they accept their photographic burden as one of the costs of being a public figure, whether they like it or not.

Both these strategies offer possibilities for social researchers. Sociologists frequently disguise names of people and organizations without thinking why, and might often be able to identify them, particularly when what they have said or done is no more than ordinarily discreditable and when (as is inevitable in social research) a long time elapses between getting the information and putting it into print. Studs Terkel has done that in his books on Chicago and on the Depression to good effect and without doing anyone harm.

Similarly, we might treat public figures as just that, justifying our observations, interviews, and quotations on the grounds that we are entitled to them as citizens and need no special social science warrant for our actions. A good example appears in a study by a combined legal and social science research staff of public access to information (Northwestern University Law Review 1973). As part of an elaborate experiment, researchers visited a number of public offices in search of information to which their access was guaranteed by law. Information holders often refused them or evaded their requests with transparent devices; the researchers in providing evidence for their conclusions, described their encounters with public officials, identified by name and office. I see no reason why that device should not be used more often than it is.

Concepts and Indicators, or Ideas and Images

Sociologists tend to deal in large, abstract ideas and move from them (if they do) to specific observable phenomena that can be seen as embodiments, indicators, or indices of those ideas. Photographers, conversely, work with specific images and move from them (if they do) to somewhat larger ideas. Both movements involve the same operation of connecting an idea with something observable, but where you start makes a difference. Granting, and even insisting as I already have, on the conceptual element in photographs, it still is quite different to start with something immediately observed and try to bend ideas to fit it than to start with an idea and try to find or create something observable that embodies it. Sociologists have something to learn from photography's inextricable connection with specific imagery.

Many sociological concepts, whose meaning seems intuitively clear, would he very hard to portray visually. Consider the notion of status integration. Defined as a congruence (or lack of it) between two or more indicators of social rank (education and income, for instance), its human meaning seems obvious. A man who made $100,000 a year but had never finished grade school would, we can imagine, have troubles another man with the same income who had completed college would never know. Does it have a visual counterpart? Can we imagine what a person in either of those states would look like, what we might see him doing, what his possessions and environment would consist of? The answer, to both questions, is probably no.

We cannot imagine the visual counterpart of status integration, I think, because the concept has been defined by the rules for calculating a status integration score from numerical indicators of specific ranks. The human meaning of the concept has been left to be evoked intuitively from the label applied to the results of that operation. As a result, no one can be sure what an instance of status integration would look like and thus no one can photograph it.

Obviously, every sociological idea need not be connectable to a visual image to be valid or useful. On the other hand, consider this. Some sociologists describe a basic problem of empirical research as one of finding empirical indicators (things observable in real life) to measure a concept whose meaning they have already decided. A sizable literature discusses the logic by which the two can be defensibly connected. But, as the example of status integration suggests, a third element is involved: the basic imagery we intuitively supply to fill out the meaning of an abstract concept operationally defined. We seldom consider the logic by which we connect concepts and indicators to that basic imagery, or the procedures by which we can develop that imagery explicitly and connect it defensibly to concepts and indicators. While, to repeat, sociological ideas needn't evoke a clear visual image to be defensible, considering the processes by which photographic imagery arises may help us understand what is involved.

The gap that develops between concept and indicator, on the one hand, and basic underlying imagery, on the other, is nicely illustrated by a device Blanche Geer uses in teaching fieldwork to graduate students. They are given to talking in rather grand theoretical terms when asked to describe what they have seen, and she counters this by asking if any of them have observed a status (or norm or social structure or whatever). When someone claims to have observed such a thing, she asks what it looked like, what it said, how it acted. She thus hopes to make students understand that such terms are shorthand for a class of observable phenomena that can be described, and have no more reality or meaning than they get from the collection of phenomena so described and the resemblance's among them.

The imagery underlying a sociological concept implies, if it does not state explicitly, a picture of people acting together. It may picture them engaged in familiar forms of social interaction, or it may imply a more mechanistic vision (as when people are conceptualized as members of an aggregate rather than an interactive group, in which case the imagery may be of something like social molecules engaged in an analogue of Brownian movement). In either case, the concept and its indicators evoke (even when they use the language of operationally defined variables) an image of social life. The fidelity of that imagery to the realities of social life is, as Blumer (1969) has emphasized, an important issue in assessing the utility of a concept.

When the imagery underlying a concept is explicit, it can more easily be criticized and revised. Durkheim (1951) for example, gives very explicit and vivid descriptions of the collective and individual States which he defines abstractly as embodying the theoretically defined quality of anomie. We can easily judge for ourselves how well the abstract concept and the empirical indicators mesh with the imagery. Where the underlying imagery is left implicit, the reader invents his own and the critical assessment of that relationship tends not to occur.

We might expect, as a result, more dispute over the meaning of theoretical concepts than there is, because differing underlying images lead to a different understanding of a concept's meaning, use, and appropriate measure. One reason for the lack of dispute is the sociologist's tendency to discuss concepts in a purely verbal and logical way divorced from any close relation to empirical materials. When they do that they play on the underlying imagery without taking responsibility for it. Several generations of psychologists have played that game with the concept of intelligence, defining it operationally, saying "Well, let's call it X" when its validity was questioned, but never calling it X because they would then lose the meaning imparted by the imagery associated with "intelligence." (They thus paved the way for the excesses of Jensen, Herrnstein, and Shockley.) If we cannot imagine or discover a visual image that embodies our understanding of a concept, we might take that as a warning that the concept is not explicitly related to its underlying imagery. Looking for an appropriate visual image might help clarify the relationship.

Photographers, of course, do not have this problem. They work in the opposite direction, needing to find concepts that adequately convey what is important in what they give us to see, the explicit conceptualization working for both photographers and viewers to provide a framework for their joint work of making sense of what they see. I've already discussed how the failure to use explicit concepts and theories hampers the development of photographic analyses and how sociological ideas might be brought to bear on the development of photographic projects. What photographers do very well, however, is to refine over a period of time the image they create of something. They may photograph people, places, and situations again and again, seeking to make the resulting image express more clearly, concisely, and unambiguously their basic understanding of those things. They tend to approach this task visually, stripping away extraneous elements so that the statement the image makes communicates its substance efficiently and emphatically to the viewer.

Sociologists might well work at the job of continuously refining not only their concepts and measures but also their basic imagery, relying on that refinement more than they have to clear up theoretical and technical muddles. Blumer has often recommended something like this, though he hasn't been very explicit about what is involved, so his advice sounds mystical. I don't at this time have any less mystical and more specific suggestions. The basic idea, however, is to clarify how you think things really are, using the imagery you develop as a touchstone against which to test concepts and indicators as these develop.

Boundaries, Limits, and Framing
No intellectual or artistic enterprise can include everything. Scientific studies tend to make clear that they have a limited area of responsibility, that they are only studying these phenomena, this area, the relationship between these variables and those; while other things may be important too, they will be left out, since you can't study everything at once. Scientists often contrast their practice in this respect with that of artists or novelists who they caricature as striving to include "everything" in their works, as though most artists were super-realists or as though even super-realists actually included "everything" or thought they did. In fact, artists leave things out too. But their selectivity is more conscious, and they often use as an artistic resource the necessity to choose between what will be included and excluded. They make the selection itself an artistic act. They rely on the viewer's tendency to supply in imagination what is not present to make allusion work in the total statement, so that what lies beyond the frame becomes an integral part of the work. For photographers, "framing"-choosing what will go inside the bright line of the viewfinder-is one of the key decisions.
The choice of the boundaries of a study has an enormous effect on the results. For social science, it has among other things a strong political effect. What we choose not to study becomes a given in our research. We rule out the possibility of taking its variations into account (though we can of course focus on them in some other study, so the tendency I am talking about is only a tendency, not a rigid constraint). We may thus come to regard what we choose to see as fixed as being in fact unchanging. We see this tendency at work, for instance, in any statement which suggests that an organization must do some particular thing (e.g., satisfy some particular need or requirement) if it is to survive. The statement is misleading unless we interpret it as shorthand for the cumbersome proposition that it will change from its present form of organization and level of performance in various ways if the particular need or requirement is met at some other level or in some other way than that specified. When we put it that way, we recognize that survival, which the simpler statement treats as a given, can be made problematic and variable.

The political effect comes about when we take what we have defined, for scientific convenience, as unchanging, as in fact, unchangeable. We thus, implicitly or explicitly, suggest to those who think that some particular change is the way to solve a pressing problem, that their solution is utopian and unworkable. What we are really saying, in such a case, is that the phenomenon in question can only be affected by changing something so difficult to change that only extraordinary effort and power can accomplish the feat. The mobilization of effort and power might be accomplished, if only in a way that the analyst might think unlikely or distasteful (e.g., violent revolution).

Likewise, when sociologists fail to consider some people and some aspects of a situation and do not gather data about them, they forego the possibility of finding out that some things said by or about those people are not true, that their informants' descriptions of their own actions may be self-servingly misleading. For social scientists, this choice usually results in studying subordinate echelons in an organization or community, while taking the descriptions by superiors of their own activities as adequate and trustworthy and therefore not needing any investigation. This lack of scientific skepticism is a political choice and has political consequences (Becker 1967; Blumer 1967; Becker and Horowitz 1972).

Since photographers seldom produce explicit analyses of social problems, they are less likely to confront this problem directly. But their idea of who should be photographed and who should not may have the same consequence's as the sociologist's decision about who is to be studied, the photographer thereby giving us great informational detail about some people, and suggesting that others either do not exist or can be filled in from the viewer's imagination. How, for instance, would Hine's documentation of the problem of child labor have been affected had he included among his portraits of exploited children portraits of the men and women who owned the factories, profited from that exploited labor, and lived in extravagant luxury on the profits? It might have given a more damning indictment of the entire system, though it is questionable that his work would then have had greater effect. One could also argue that the machines and factory buildings present in his pictures convincingly evoke the owners and their power (though not the luxury of their lives), or that other photographers provided that material, e.g., Steichen's (1963:31) portrait of J. P. Morgan.

Another aspect of framing is that we can either include all of what we do show within the picture's frame, and thus indicate that it is self-contained, or include parts of things that extend beyond the frame and thus evoke the world into which they extend, or things that stand for and evoke worlds and situations which lie beyond. Portraits, for instance, can contain all of the person's body and thus indicate that it is not necessary to know more, or they can contain only parts and thus indicate that there are other parts the viewer must supply from his imagination. Likewise, a portrait can contain some chunk of the person's ordinary environment-an artist's studio, a scientist's laboratory which evokes a world of activity not pictured, but there. Or it may simply show some setting (home or whatever) in such a way as to suggest more about the person. André Kertész (1972:118-119), for instance, has a portrait of Mondrian that faces a picture of Mondrian's house, which arguably conveys a more Mondrianish spirit than the portrait of the artist himself.

In any event, photographers do understand and use what lies beyond the portion of reality they actually show. In this they differ from social scientists who prefer not to discuss explicitly what they cannot claim to have studied scientifically. In that sense, social scientists make themselves ignorant about matters that lie beyond their frame, ignoring even what they do know by casual observation or in some other informal way. Instead of building such partial knowledge into their analyses, they rely on time-honored verbal formulae (e.g., "all other things being equal") to limit and frame their analyses. These formulae, like legal formulae, have been revised and refined so as to say exactly what is meant, what is defensible, and no more. A large number of these conventions exist, part of the rhetoric of contemporary science.

In any event, when social Scientists fail to deal with the reality that lies beyond the frame they placed around their study, they do not get rid of it. The reader, as with photographs, fills in what is hinted at but not described with his own knowledge and stereotypes, attaching these to whatever cues he can find in the information given. Since readers will do this, whatever verbal formulae are used to attempt to evade the consequences, sociologists might as well understand the process and control it, rather than being its victims .

Personal Expression and Style

Sociologists like to think of science as impersonal. However, they recognize that people work differently, that some have easily recognizable styles of work, that some work has an elegance missing in other research. In short, they recognize a personally expressive component in sociological research and writing. They seldom discuss that component (I suppose because it contradicts the imagery of impersonal science). When they do discuss it, they usually describe it as a flaw. For instance, critics frequently complain of Erving Goffman's jaundiced view of the world, of modern society, and especially of personal relationships. They characterize that view as overly calculating, as cynical and even as paranoid. Similarly, some critics of so-called "labelling theory" criticize it for being overly skeptical about established organizations, their operations and records.

Both Goffman and labeling theorists have the elements these criticisms single out. So does every other theory and style of work. The critical analysis errs only in suggesting that some theories and studies have such components while others are properly impersonal, as befits scientific activity. But Blau and Duncan's (1967) study of the occupational structure of the United States, to take a random example, likewise contains a personally expressive element, both in its view of the nature of people and society and in the way it handles and presents data, even if we see that element minimally, as a nonsharing of the Goffman view. The style of scientific impersonality is also a style.

Photographers typically accept responsibility for the personally expressive component in their work as a natural accompaniment of its status as art. Accepting that status also allows them the quasi-mystical retreat from analyzing the social components of their work and the emphasis on intuitive inarticulateness I criticized earlier. Nevertheless, they understand something sociologists need to learn more about, so they can work with it consciously and control it.

We can approach the serious analysis of the personal component in sociological work by looking at specific devices through which it is expressed. There is a dictionary of the expressive language of photography yet to be compiled; at present, I can only find occasional ad hoc discussions.

Here is an example of the stylistic devices that express the personal component in photographs. Paul Strand (1971) is famous for his portraits of peasants from all over the world: Mexico, Morocco, Egypt, Romania, the Gaspe, the Hebrides. The portraits overwhelmingly convey an attitude of respect for the people portrayed, describing them as strong, sturdy, enduring, good people who have the traditional virtues despite the difficult circumstances of their lives. This is quite a different description from that of ethnographers as various as Tax and Banfield, who depict people who are meaner, more cunning, more spiteful. Strand has chosen to portray them that way. He has not simply conveyed the reality of peasant life. He conveys his view by habitually photographing his subjects at eye level, directly facing the camera, thus treating them as equals. He does not suggest that he has caught them in an unguarded moment; on the contrary, he has allowed them to compose themselves for the occasion, to put their best foot forward. The stability implied in their formal postures, the honesty suggested by the openness with which they gaze into the camera, all help to suggest peasant virtues. Likewise, by photographing them in natural light and utilizing a wide tonal range, Strand conveys an attitude that respects their reality, that makes them look fully human.

Frank Cancian's (1971) photographs of Mexican peasants use different devices to convey a view of peasants which is (not surprisingly, since Cancian is himself an anthropologist) much more like that of earlier ethnographic descriptions. His Zinacantecos occasionally show the nobility Strand emphasizes, but more frequently seem less noble and more human. They grin, smile slyly, bargain shrewdly, drink hard. The photographs view them from a variety of angles, show them in blurred motion, in a variety of light conditions, all of which express somewhat less respectful distance and some-what more knowledgeable familiarity than Strand's pictures. The difference in knowledge of and attitude toward the people being photographed is conveyed by the choice of topics too, of course, but the stylistic elements play an important role.

I'm not sure where we might find the expressive devices characteristic of sociological work. One place is in the use of adjectives. Sociologists frequently, perhaps in an attempt to achieve a little literary grace, apply adjectives to the people and organizations they write about, these adjectives implying judgments and generalizations not justified by the data they present or required for the scientific points they are making. A variety of other devices known to literary analysts likewise convey attitudes and moral evaluations. Goffman, for instance, often achieves ironic effects by using perspective by incongruity, and many people use a Veblenesque deadpan translation of evaluative statements into mock-objective academese to the same end.

Sociologists use a variety of devices, interestingly, to hide the personal attitudes, evaluations, and other components in their work. Chief among these are the incessant use of the passive voice and the first person plural to blur recognition of what is obvious: that one person is in fact responsible for the research and results being reported. Even more interesting to me is how do various styles of handling quantitative data contribute to a rhetorical effect of impersonal fact? What are the aesthetics of tabular presentation? These questions, to which I have no answers, lay out an area of work still to be done.

CONCLUSIONS

This paper is made up of notes from work in progress, and what I have said is necessarily preliminary and incomplete. The kind of work it intends to encourage barely exists as yet, though the common and converging interests of social scientists and photographers, often in the same person, suggest that we don't have long to wait. I hope the paper will provoke further discussion and work on the problems it proposes.

Sex & The American Mom: 1 In 3 Report Having Affairs

2008-05-18T09:37:00.000-04:00

Sex And The American Mom: 1 In 3 Report Having Affairs on the Side
By Colleen Dealy and Taylor Baldwin, Huffington Post
Posted on May 16, 2008, Printed on May 18, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/85531/

You or someone you know is having an affair. We know, it sounds surprising, shocking even, but apparently that is the case. Cookie Magazine and "AOL Body" did a survey on the subject and 30,000 people responded. As far as surveys go, that is a big number, and it's even bigger when you consider that their questions were aimed solely at married women with children. Yep, lots of mommies are getting action on the side.

The survey, "Sex and the American Mom," revealed that 34% of these married moms is in the midst of, or has already had, an affair. Think of three married moms you know and ask yourself, "Which one is cheating?" We tried this and Colleen came up empty. Taylor could think of one or two, but not one out of three -- that number seems staggering. Are we just naïve? In the dark? Out of touch? Which of our friends has managed to stray without anyone knowing (and when do they find the time and where they hell do they go?)

Another somewhat mind-blowing result of this survey was that 77% of the respondents said they want more sex. That's more than three quarters of the 30,000 women asked who said they aren't getting enough. Again, we ask, who are these people? And are we to conclude that so many stray because they are not sexually satisfied?

Cheating seems to be a direct result of not getting what you need, be it sex, attention, openness, what have you. If there is a void, and it can be filled by someone else, chances are it will be. Affairs used to almost guarantee a trip to divorce court. Today, however, the "cheatee" might experience a sense of betrayal, but the "cheater" is not necessarily stigmatized socially, and often both agree to at least attempt reconciliation. It has even been viewed as a "wake-up call" -- one that can actually save a marriage, with each person expressing a sense of shared blame.

As a society, it seems as though we've become less judgmental about affairs in general. Maybe we've realized how hard marriage is and have simply gotten more realistic. But, maybe the scope of the issue is bigger, and what's happening is that we're in the midst of redefining marriage as we have known it.

The stereotype, of course, is if there's someone sneaking around in a marriage, it's the guy. In general, no one is surprised to hear that men cheat on their wives. However, when it comes to wives cheating on their husbands, while not entirely new, it is much more common than we thought. When we told men that one in three married moms cheat (or have cheated) on their husbands, and that a solid majority are actually looking for more sex than they're having at home, most mens' eyes light up with surprise and certainly curiosity. Some even joked about where they might find one of these gals. But, what we didn't hear was "Yes, I can understand that. I'm not in the mood very often and I'm probably not satisfying my wife's sexual desires."

Could the American male be suffering from a proverbial "headache?" Maybe the insatiable male sex drive is just a myth? After hearing what Michelle Weiner-Davis, an internationally recognized relationship therapist and the Director of The Divorce Busting Center, had to say in an interview with Psychology Today, this may not be far-fetched. She thinks we don't hear a lot about the man's lack of sexual interest because, "Men are so ashamed of speaking up about [it]." Estimating that it affects, "at least 20 to 25%" of adult males," Michelle adds, " ... low desire in men is America's best-kept secret."

Please don't confuse our effort to understand what's going on here with male-bashing. When a couple's sex life changes, for better or worse, generally both parties are complicit. For the record, we love men and we're aware that sex is complicated. Let's face it, marriage is complicated, and it only becomes more so after having kids. If mom or dad feels rejected by the other, he or she may cheat. And if you're married and you've got kids, you know that sex, or lack there of, can be loaded with a lot of other emotions and agendas that don't have anything to do with lust, or even love.

As the Hook-Up Generation grows up and gets married, chances are affairs may even go mainstream. It's hard for us to believe that this won't lead to hurt feelings and collateral damage (remember the kids), but maybe that's because we're from a different generation.

We understand that the person who lies just outside of the daily grind -- the one who's not figuring out how to pay the mortgage that month; the one who isn't angry about spending too little time with the kids -- can seem like a vacation worth taking -- at least once.

We're glad to hear that women want more sex, because frankly, it's good news that the female libido is alive and well. As for the affairs ... If we could add one question to the poll it would be this: "Is/Was the Affair Worth It?"

© 2008 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/85531/

Bill Moyers On Democracy In America

2008-05-18T09:34:00.001-04:00

Moyers: 'Democracy in America Is a Series of Narrow Escapes, and We May Be Running Out of Luck'
By Bill Moyers, Doubleday

Posted on May 17, 2008, Printed on May 18, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/85521/

The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyers' new book, "Moyers on Democracy" (Doubleday, 2008).

Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is "better" than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, "The system works."

Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country -- a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as "believing the dogma of 'democracy' on a superficial public level but not believing it privately." We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.

The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children's children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like "liberty" and "individual freedom" invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to "promote the general welfare" have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn't necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam's palace grounds wailing "The Greeks are coming." Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what's happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft's essential imperatives: connect the dots.

The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments -- genuine savings -- in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.

And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek "bundlers" who turn the spigots of cash on and off.

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly "veneration for wealth" are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. "Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us." Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.

Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our triumphant reactionaries' campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing -- while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.

Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists: "No one can eliminate prejudices -- just recognize them." Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln's sacred belief in "government of the people, by the people, and for the people"; mocks the democratic notion of government as "a voluntary union for the common good" embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that "freedom" simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege -- the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs -- is as subversive as Benedict Arnold's betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary Lease: "The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining the foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from tramping its plain provisions underfoot."

Our democracy has prospered most when it was firmly anchored in the idea that "We the People" -- not just a favored few -- would identify and remedy common distempers and dilemmas and win the gamble our forebears undertook when they espoused the radical idea that people could govern themselves wisely. Whatever and whoever tries to supplant that with notions of a wholly privatized society of competitive consumers undermines a country that, as Gordon S. Wood puts it in his landmark book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, discovered its greatness "by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness" -- a democracy that changed the lives of "hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people."

I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to speak truth to power -- a modest risk compared to those of some journalists in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the identical "crime." But our journalists are not in control of the instruments they play. As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, news organizations -- particularly in television -- are folded into entertainment divisions. The "news hole" in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights.

Bill Moyers is the author of "Moyers on Democracy" (Doubleday, 2008) and the host of the PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.

© 2008 Doubleday All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/85521/

Propaganda and the Media

2008-05-18T09:19:00.000-04:00

Published on Friday, May 16, 2008 by the McClatchy Newspapers
Propaganda and the Media

by Joseph L. Galloway

Once upon a time, it was widely believed that one of the greatest sins the U.S. government or its temporary political masters could commit was to turn a propaganda machine loose on the American people.

Congress viewed this so seriously that every appropriations bill passed since 1951 has contained language that says no public money “shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States” without the lawmakers’ prior approval.

The Bush administration has been caught violating the propaganda ban before, notably in 2005 in the case of radio host Armstrong Williams, who was paid to endorse President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.

Particularly abhorrent to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which oversees compliance with the ban, is an agency’s use of “covert propaganda” or “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.”

This is why alarm bells should be ringing all over Washington about The New York Times’ disclosure that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld encouraged a secret Pentagon program to care for and spoon-feed more than 50 retired senior military officers whom the administration deemed reliable friends who could be counted on “to carry our water” on the television and cable networks.

Feeding the military analysts “key and valuable information” in secret briefings by Pentagon and White House officials, the idea went, would make them the go-to guys for the networks and encourage the networks to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts . . . .”

This 2005 memorandum, addressed to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry DiRita, added: “This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter.”

Asked about the case of Col. Bill Cowan, who says he was fired as a military analyst for Fox News and cut off from the briefings for criticizing the war effort, DiRita told Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com: “I don’t know anything. I saw that in the story. I’ve heard other assertions to that effect. It was certainly not the intent.”

In a follow-up e-mail exchange between DiRita and Greenwald, Rumsfeld’s former mouthpiece - now Bank of America’s chief spokesman - elaborated on what he said he didn’t remember: “I simply don’t have any recollection of trying to restrict him (Cowan) or others from exposure to what was going on.”

DiRita added: “There are plenty of examples to the contrary - reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us. One example I recall is Joe Galloway - a persistent critic and apparently popular with military readers. He came in and met Secretary Rumsfeld and we had other interactions.”

Now that’s a real knee-slapper: Me as a poster boy for how Rumsfeld and DiRita “reached out” to their harshest critics even as they stroked and promoted and schemed to embed the old reliables to wax enthusiastic about a war that was going from bad to worse.

Let the record show that Rumsfelds’ folks reached out to me on these few occasions:

* In early summer of 2003, half a dozen of us were invited to an off-the-record lunch with Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. The defense secretary seemed to have a poor grasp of the reality on the ground in Iraq and was still declaring that we’d do no nation-building there. He saw no insurgency, only a handful of “dead-enders”.

* In October 2005, DiRita called to invite me to travel with Rumsfeld to the Middle East and Australia. I declined because it conflicted with a long-booked graduation speech I was to give at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz. to a class of new Air Force F-16 fighter pilots that included my nephew. DiRita was stunned that I wouldn’t drop a bunch of fighter pilots to be schmoozed by his boss.

* In November 2005, DiRita invited me to a “one-on-one” lunch with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. This one I accepted. I arrived to find across the table Rumsfeld, the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace; Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody; Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp and DiRita. We went at it hammer and tongs for an hour and a half over their conduct of the war and the errors that were costing the lives of American soldiers. As I left, I told Rumsfeld that I’d continue to point out those mistakes every week in my column.

* In April 2006, DiRita sent me an e-mail telling me that my most recent column was “silly”. That column had discussed an expensive war game the Pentagon conducted about a U.S. attack on a thinly disguised country that obviously was Iran.

A retired Marine general, Paul Van Riper, had been the commander of the “enemy” forces, and he used unconventional tactics to destroy the U.S. Navy flotilla in the Persian Gulf, leaving thousands of sailors and Marines dead. At that point, the commanders stopped the war game, reset everything and imposed new rules forbidding Van Riper from employing those tactics.

Van Riper walked out, furious, and requested an investigation. DiRita complained in his e-mail that I was silly to blame Rumsfeld for this and for covering up the investigators’ report. After all, he wrote, Rumsfeld couldn’t be expected to know retired generals several levels below him or to bear responsibility for such matters. His complaint sparked an escalating e-mail war that most reckon DiRita lost. The entire exchange was posted on the Internet and can still be found there.

So much for the Rumsfeld/DiRita outreach to their critics. They were much too busy hand-feeding horse manure to their TV generals, who in turn were feeding the same product to the American public by the cubic yard.

There’s little doubt that this program violated the laws against covert propaganda operations mounted against the American public by their own government. But in this administration, there’s no one left to enforce that law or any of the other laws the Bush operatives have been busy violating.

The real crime is that the scheme worked. The television network bosses swallowed the bait, the hook, the line and the sinker, and they have yet to answer for it.

Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.

© 2008 McClatchy Newspapers

Senate Votes To Revive Ban On Media Cross-Ownership

2008-05-18T09:11:00.000-04:00

Published on Friday, May 16, 2008 by Associated Press
Senate Votes To Revive Ban On Media Cross-Ownership

The Senate voted Thursday night to nullify a Federal Communications Commission rule that allows media companies to own a newspaper and a TV station in the same market.

The unusual “resolution of disapproval,” sponsored by Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and 24 other senators, was approved on a voice vote.

Republican FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin has described the agency’s action as a “relatively minor loosening” of media ownership restrictions. The FCC approved the rule on a 3-2 vote in December with both Democrats dissenting.

The FCC decision allows one company to own a newspaper and a broadcast station in the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas. The TV station may not be among the top four in the market and, post-transaction, at least eight independent media voices must remain. The rule replaced an outright ban on cross-ownership.

Dorgan said the FCC action opened a “gaping loophole for more mergers of newspapers and television stations across the country.”

Martin has said any exception to the ownership rule would face a “very high hurdle.”

The House also is considering a nullification of the rule, but even if supporters are successful, President Bush would probably reject the measure.

On April 1, Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez wrote Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) saying the administration “strongly opposes any attempt to overturn these rules by legislative means” and that senior Bush advisors would recommend that he veto any bill presented to him.

Gutierrez said the FCC’s order “modernizes outdated media ownership regulations to appropriately take into account the plethora of news and information outlets that exist today.”

The FCC’s cross-ownership decision has been met with opposition on both sides. The newspaper industry has complained that the FCC did not go far enough, while activists who want to keep big media companies from getting bigger said the agency went too far.

Among those affected by the regulations is Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times and KTLA-TV Channel 5 in Southern California, as well as both print and broadcast operations in four other major markets.

To allow Tribune to close its deal to go private in December, the FCC granted it a permanent waiver for its combination in Chicago and two-year waivers for operations in Los Angeles, New York, South Florida and Hartford, Conn.

© 2008 Associated Press

He's Outraged Over The Steroid Outrage

2008-05-17T20:32:00.001-04:00

Posted 3/21/2005 7:38 PM

Outraged over the steroids outrage
By Robert Lipsyte

As a longtime steroid user, I'm confused by the frenzied reaction to the juicy news coming out of baseball these days.

Why should we care what those players do, as long as they entertain us? Who wouldn't expect pro athletes, like the rest of us, to try to be the best they could be? And how has this become a chance for yet more face time for flabby moralists instead of an opportunity to gather some necessary information?

Here's what I want to know: Exactly which performances are enhanced — and how — by which anabolic steroids, androgens, human growth hormone and whatever else athletes shoot, swallow and sniff? What are the long-term and short-term effects? Are those enhancements and side effects different for adolescents and adults, men and women?
I have ethical questions, too. How different is steroid use from cosmetic surgery for the male TV newsies reporting these stories, from Botox for actresses, beta blockers for public speakers and all the new psychological drugs for well people with the willies — the shy, the anxious, the fidgety and the sexually apprehensive?
Speaking of which, consider the tomcat fight between two of baseball's best-known sluggers and congressional testifiers, Jose Canseco and his childhood pal, Rafael Palmeiro. In his best seller, Juiced, Canseco claims he personally injected steroids into Palmeiro when they both played for George W. Bush's Texas Rangers. Palmeiro denies it. Of course, Palmeiro, as baseball's most famous pitchman for Viagra, is no stranger to performance-enhancing drugs.

"Performance-enhancement is in a gray area," says Robert Klitzman, co-director of Columbia University's Center for Bioethics. "Would you include new technologies to improve cognitive abilities? How about access to SAT prep coaching? Assisted pregnancies?"

Meanwhile, athletes certainly have no ethical dilemma about using steroids, says Michael Miletic, a psychiatrist whose Detroit-based practice includes high school, college and professional athletes. "Steroids are totally embedded in the sports culture. We need to get past the finger-pointing. There's been a wholesale abandonment of critical analysis."

My steroid use

Analyze this: I've been shooting steroids for almost 15 years, since a third cancer operation left me unable to produce testosterone naturally. Once a month, I nail one of my quadriceps with a 22-gauge needle and pump in the oily yellow fluid. Without it, my prescribing surgeon tells me, I would be physically fatigued and mentally sluggish, lose my sex drive, be achy and depressed. No question, I'm taking a performance-enhancing drug.

Yet, even with it, I can't hit a major-league fastball, sack a moving NFL quarterback or bench-press 500 pounds. Using steroids, most people can train harder and recover more quickly from breakdown and injury. But to reach all-pro you have to be what athletes call a "freak" with those potentially all-pro genes to tweak.
But chemicals also help high school boys pump themselves into beach studs, put on extra pounds for the football team and gain strength and stamina for the campaign to win a college scholarship and a pro contract. This is the danger zone, says Miletic, who is far less concerned with the middle-aged Barry Bonds' possible career choices than with unsupervised drug use by kids.

"This is where we should be paying attention," Miletic says. "First of all, there is adult complicity here. Some parents and coaches are actively helping kids get drugs, others are looking the other way. How could you not notice the dramatic changes in your child's body?

"I don't believe kids are taking steroids because they think it helped Mark McGwire. They're taking it because teammates, opponents, a strength coach, a gym owner, is telling them it will make them better," he says.

Performance-enhancers have been around for a long time, and as our games, from Little League to Super Bowl, became less classrooms for character building and more stages for spectaculars, the pressure to enhance performance swelled like Popeye's biceps (his drug was spinach, remember?). We expect our sports heroes to do anything to win for us, to find the edge, to take risks, even to play hurt. If they don't, they're replaced by those who will.

'Where does cheating begin?'

At the same time, the self-help movement made the concept of improvement, of reinvention, of taking charge of body and psyche, a kind of mandate for everybody. To refuse to at least try to find a way to feel better, look better, do better was regarded as almost a crime. Is self-help from a mind-numbing mantra more moral than self-help from the tip of a needle?

"It's going to get even more complicated," says Klitzman, the Columbia bioethicist, "as techniques for screening embryos and scanning brains become more sophisticated. Scientists will be looking for stupidity genes and smart pills. Cosmetic psycho-pharmacology is an area where people with money will have advantages over people who don't. Is that fair? In an ideal world, there would be a level playing field. Exactly where does cheating begin?"

I'll be watching baseball this season for guys who look less bulked-up than they did last season. How many are using newer, riskier, test-proof drugs? That's probably not fair.

The pundits and politicians will declare a moral victory and move on, leaving our questions unanswered. That's cheating.

Robert Lipsyte, a former New York Times sports columnist, wrote about cancer in his memoir, In the Country of Illness. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-03-21-steroids-edit_x.htm

The Income Divide: Gap Between Rich & Poor Continues To Widen

2008-05-17T20:26:00.001-04:00

The Income Divide
The gap between rich and poor in the United States has widened exponentially over the past three decades. The Congressional Budget Office reports that since 1979, the average income for the bottom half of American households has grown by 6 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners have seen their incomes shoot up by a 229 percent during that same period. Under the Bush administration, the average income of most Americans has fallen, but the average income of top wage earners (those above the 95 percentile range) has increased from $324,427 in 2001 to $385,805 in 2006. Only one other year has seen a comparable income gap: 1928, the year before the Great Depression. Inequality has not been confined to one region or sector but has spread all across the country. North Carolina and Indiana, two geographically and economically disparate states whose upcoming presidential primaries have brought them to the forefront of the national media, are no exception. With the average income of the richest 20 percent of families 7.2 and 6.7 times larger than the poorest 20 percent of families, respectively, North Carolina and Indiana are a microcosm of a larger national trend. Both of these states are looking for relief from declining wages, sinking job security, and falling benefits.
WHY THE DIVIDE?: The reasons for this rise in income inequality can be split into three basic components: government policies, tremendous wage inequality, and high investment income. The federal government under Bush, which provides the fundamental rules that guide how economic gains are distributed around the country, has embraced deregulation and an unstructured financial system. Consequently, huge corporations have raked in profits while the economy sags. The administration's tax policies, which lower taxes on the wealthy rather than the middle class, have furthered the problem. As billionaire Warren Buffett explained, "The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you're in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent." CEO pay, which has increased by 20.5 percent over just the past 12 months, dwarfs the mere 3.5 percent salary increase for American workers. To put this in perspective, the top 500 American corporate executives earned a combined total of $6.4 billion in 2007, about $12.8 million each and roughly 10 percent of all company profits. An absence of laws protecting collective bargaining has removed the leverage that unions once had on companies to increase wages quickly. Wage inequality, the shrinking value of the minimum wage, and the all-around decline in manufacturing jobs only intensify the problem. The New York Times' Steven Greenhouse explains, "A little-known secret is that, over the past seven years, the United States has lost one in five manufacturing jobs. ... Those are usually jobs that pay good wages, middle-class wages, usually provide middle-class benefits on health and pensions."

WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?: With less money available, Americans are increasingly forced to make tough choices on how to spend their diminishing disposable incomes. Consumer spending and confidence have fallen to record low levels, causing families to skimp on discretionary spending. U.S. consumers, up until recently the most powerful force on planet Earth, are in retreat," wrote Joseph Quinlan, a chief market strategist for Bank of America. A recent report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the largest increases in consumer spending between 2006 and 2007 was on necessities: fuel, food staples, and medical bills. Not surprisingly, the largest decreases were in a newly defined category of "luxury" goods: electronics, toys, home decor and fresh fruits, and vegetables. "People are not not spending, but they are changing how they spend," said Marshal Cohen, chief analyst at the NPD Group, a consumer and retail market research organization.
HEALTH INSURANCE PERILS: The decline in the average middle class wage means that Americans who were once financially comfortable are now feeling the sting. Approximately 158 million Americans enjoy employer-provided health care benefits. More and more workers, however, are opting out of their health insurance because they simply can't afford it. The average cost of those benefits to employees has increased by $1,500 -- from $1,800 to $3,300 -- since 2001. For a middle class worker, that amount is an entire month's paycheck, which is particularly troubling as national incomes rose only one-tenth that amount during that same period. Due to a combination of bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments, higher premiums, and less extensive coverage, medical bills now account for almost one-fifth of average family income

Earth Day: History, Strategies For Change

2008-04-15T17:26:00.004-04:00

Earth Day Presentation
Professor Henry Schissler

THE FOUNDING OF EARTH DAY

Gaylord Nelson, who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, founded Earth Day to be celebrated on April 22 every year. The reason for choosing the April 22nd date remains unclear. Most people believe that it has to do with the annual Arbor Day celebration that takes place around the same time.

The first Earth Day event was a teach-in on April 22, 1970. It dealt with environmental issues as well as opposition to the Vietnam War.

Many laws were passed in the shadow of the first Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act, laws that protect the oceans, and clean drinking water, as well as the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

KEY ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS IN AMERICA

The Sierra Club (1892)
The Sierra Club's members are more than 750,000 of your friends and neighbors. Inspired by nature, we work together to protect our communities and the planet. The Club is America's oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization." --- from the Sierra Club website

National Wildlife Federation
"National Wildlife Federation inspires Americans to protect wildlife for our children's future." four million members in 47 states, with conservation, education and public service programs to protect all forms of wildlife, from national parks and natural resources to all manner of animals, fish and bird.”

The Nature Conservancy
“The mission of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and its 4 million members is to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by using science-based programs to protect the lands and waters they need to survive. TNC is a major organizer and sponsor of Earth Day.”

Some Key Environmental Causes
• Global Warming
• Clean Air (increasing asthma rates)
• Clean Water
• More Recycling Projects (including Water Bottles)
• Alternative Energy Sources
• Increased Funding for Public Transportation Systems
• Fuel Efficient Automobiles (but the Bush Administration Blocked California, Connecticut & Other States from Passing Laws Requiring Higher Miles Per Gallon Rates for Cars)
• No Return to Nuclear Power Plants or Coal (Both Supported by Bush)
• “Green” Buildings & Homes: Increased use of Solar Energy, Garden Composting; Decreased Use of Pesticides, Non-Organic Fertilizers, Etc.

SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENTAL STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

It is our responsibility to protect America's extraordinary natural resources. The health of our families and the strength of our economy depend on our stewardship of the environment. Farming, fishing, tourism, and other industries require a healthy environment.

• We must reject the assertion that we must choice between a healthy economy and a healthy environment. New technologies that protect the environment will create new high-paying jobs.

• A cleaner environment means a stronger economy. Far too many Americans live with unhealthy air or water quality. We must strengthen and enforce the laws that ensure we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink
• We must commit to the next generation of affordable and renewable energy and to conservation measures that will immediately reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Energy independence aims to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil by developing alternative energy sources and technologies and encouraging energy efficiencies.
• We must eliminate billions in subsidies for oil and gas companies and use the savings to provide consumer relief from higher gas and fuel costs, which also drives up costs for food and other consumer products
• Energy independence puts America in the driver's seat to pursue affordable and efficient energy solutions that will benefit all Americans, improve America's security, reduce the burden on American families, and help clean our environment.

(1) Cut Oil Demand: 50% by 2020
That means reducing oil imports from around 65% to 10-15%. We can do this in part by getting the 100 mile per gallon (mpg) car into the marketplace. We must work to double the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE, to 50 mpg by 2020. And we will set a life-cycle low-carbon fuel standard that reduces the carbon impact of our liquid fuels by 30% by 2020.
(2) New Efficiencies, Energy Sources in Electrical Sector: 50% by 2040
We must call for a national renewable portfolio standard of 30% by 2020 that will rise to 50% by 2040. This is aggressive, but necessary as we start using more electricity for automobiles. We must push for an energy productivity law requiring a 20% improvement in energy productivity by 2020. We could save customers $21 billion a year by 2020.
(3) Dramatically Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 90% by 2050
20% by 2020, 80% by 2040 -- ten years faster than scientists say is necessary because we must lead the world, and we can't afford the possibility of backsliding and inaction. We will start with a market-based cap and trade system for greenhouse gas emissions to create incentives for the electric and industrial sectors to make significant reductions in their carbon emissions. Economists say the world can protect itself from drastic climate change at a cost of 1-3% of our economic activity. We can afford to protect the climate. Given the risks of catastrophic climate change, we can't afford not to do it.
(4) Lead By Example, Restore America as the World's Leader
We must return to the international negotiating table and support mandatory world-wide limits on global warming pollution. We will work closely with fast-growing nations, and cooperate with the European Union, the World Bank, and other allies to help finance the incremental cost of "doing it right." We must create a North American Energy Council with Mexico and Canada, which supply about 20% of our oil, and make sure our relations with these neighbors are firm and friendly. As we reduce our demand for foreign oil, we should work with the Persian Gulf nations and our partners at the UN, to create a multilateral system for protecting the Persian Gulf so that within ten years, the U.S. presence there could be sharply and safely reduced.
(5) Get It All Done Without Breaking the Bank
We will raise some revenue, from the sales of carbon permits, for example. Further, We must get out the "green scissors" to cut back on wrongly-placed tax subsidies. Over time, this program will yield huge productivity increases in our economy, as well as significant budget savings and revenues. We will create more than ten times as much value in the American economy by reducing our oil imports as we spend to make this program happen.
(6) Invite the Oil Companies to Become Energy Companies
People love to hate the oil companies. They have been raking in huge profits. But we must work with them and encourage them to become energy companies, and invest in our thriving new energy economy. They are invited to the table, but they aren't going to run the table any more.
(7) The Bottom Line...
Americans need energy to get to work; we need heat and electricity in our homes, schools and workplaces. We are hurt by unpredictable energy price cycles, and by our nation's energy policy failures. The way out of the cycle is to create competition, to support energy productivity, new technologies and alternative fuels. And everyone -- every American -- must make an effort to make us energy independent and combat global warming. Our national security and our planet depend on it. It's about creating a new energy economy here in the United States, and doing it quickly, with broad, bold strokes. It's the way to a bright, strong, prosperous future for the United States -- and for the world.
Specific Environmental Strategies Are Excerpted From New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s “Plan For An Energy Revolution”

Grassroots Organizing: "Bottom-Up" Change

2008-04-15T17:22:00.003-04:00

Earth Day 2008 Presentation: Grassroots Organizing – “Bottom-Up” Change
Professor Henry Schissler

All materials (pages 1-6) are from: ORGANIZE TO WIN - A GRASSROOTS ACTIVIST'S HANDBOOK: A GUIDE TO HELP PEOPLE ORGANIZE COMMUNITY CAMPAIGNS by Jim Britell, 2001 (available at no cost on the Internet)
ASSUMPTIONS AND MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGNS
(You can be universally popular in your community or you can run successful campaigns to eliminate threats to it, but you can't do both.)
1. Any campaign can succeed if it has enough community support. But most people who are not active in environmental work or political activity have no idea how the political process works; let alone that they can speak directly to their elected representatives or attend meetings and speak up on issues.
2. Community support, essential for any campaign, is effective only to the extent that the concern of the community is specifically introduced into and expressed in the political process.
3. Elected representatives can control, modify, and cancel the proposals, activities, and actions of a government agency. Your elected representative may lack the power to begin things, but usually has the power to stop them.
4. "Time-windows" for campaigns are longer than you think. ANY project can be stopped until the trees are on the ground, the holes are dug, or the physical structures actually built.
5. Agencies will align their reports and recommendations to reflect the views of the elected officials who have authority over their staff and budget.
6. When you cannot develop enough community support to get your own elected officials on your side, you can often get elected representatives from other jurisdictions to support you.
7. Any citizen can create and successfully implement a grassroots campaign - if he or she has the will.
8. Campaigns succeed or fail based on how much "action" occurs. Action consists of phone calls to decision makers, written material they actually read or physically handle and personal contacts with and comments expressed by people at meetings. Everything else: alerts, videos, TV coverage, advertising, posters, email, etc. are mere precursors and facilitators to action; not, in themselves, action.
9. Regardless of what action a person promises to take on an issue, most are too timid to actually contact their public officials unless you properly prepare them to do it. Ninety percent of those who agree to take action, don't until your second or third follow-up.
10. Good TV and press coverage alone won't win campaigns. Coverage for your issue should be sought, but information on TV generally does not create action. Often when people see an issue on television, they assume others are taking care of it.
11. No campaign can be won by sending out two thousand or two million alerts, emails and calls for action. The test of any lobbying campaign is how many letters and phone calls are actually received by decision makers, not by how many alerts, appeals and other exhortations to take action are spammed out.
12. Elected representatives never do more than represent their constituents. That's why they are called "representatives." They aren't teachers or change agents. Elected representatives will bend themselves into pretzels to keep their ear to the ground. What representatives do is a function of who they talk to and what information and lobbying they have been exposed to directly.
13. You can't lobby another person without being lobbied yourself. Anytime you lobby another, you are lobbied back or counter-lobbied. If the person on the other side of the table is better at it than you are, you may find the person whose mind you seek to change, has changed your mind.
14. Projects that stink environmentally, invariably also stink politically, financially, and ethically. Lift the lid from most bad projects and you invariably find public funds used to enrich bad actors with political connections.
15. Environmentally bad schemes usually create windfall profits for someone. When you try to stop bad projects, some people will get angry with you. And the more they benefit, the madder they will get. Machiavelli said that people may eventually get over your killing of their relatives, but not the taking of their money.
16. If you turn the other cheek when you encounter personal intimidation in public meetings, you just encourage more of it. Bring people to meetings who are emotionally and psychologically capable of dealing with intimidation. If you don't have any people like that in your organization, find some.

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGNS
o Decide on the goal of your campaign.
o How to assess community attitudes.
o Choose one person to be your spokesperson.
o Do your homework.
o Find an angle that motivates people to take action.
o Know who owns the land.
o Build your campaign on a sound foundation. (Checklist).
o Create a well-designed one-page Alert.
o Seize unexpected opportunities.
o Civil disobedience - nonviolent and otherwise.
o Preparation for public meetings:
Formal meetings set up by public bodies.
Meetings setup by your campaign. (Checklist).
Dealing with confrontations in meetings.

Other Chapters:
HOW TO MOTIVATE OTHERS TO HELP YOU
o Getting help at a distance:
Enlisting distant environmental groups. (Checklist)
The initial phone call. (Checklist)
Follow-up. (Checklist)
o Mobilizing and motivating local people:
How to verify mail and phone campaigns.
o Issues with professionals.
THE SECRET OF USING EMAIL

THE SECRET OF SUCCESSFUL LOBBYING
o Misconceptions about elected representatives and agencies.
THE MEDIA (See Chapter Below)
o Use the media effectively.
o Don't assume decision makers will see good press. (Checklist).
o Misconceptions about television coverage.
HANDLING CONFLICTING GROUPS AND AGENDAS

DIFFERENT KINDS OF ORGANIZERS

EXAMPLES OF SUCCESSFUL COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
APPENDIX A: SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Chapter on THE MEDIA
(Getting lots of good press is not as important as making sure decision makers see every piece of good press you do get.)
Use the media effectively.
Publicize your issue as much as possible and use announcements, press releases, and press conferences to generate news about your campaign. Letters to the editor are effective if they are from as many people as possible, with each Letter focusing on different aspects of the issue. Letters in the newspaper keep your issue alive. Op-Ed pieces are always more effective than letters. To maintain momentum, your campaign needs to constantly be in front of the public. Don't ignore anti-environmental letters to the editor criticizing your efforts. Respond promptly to each one in the next edition. Do not attack the person who writes the negative letter - focus on the issue.
Placing your alerts in other organizations' newsletters is a good way to reach an audience of environmentally-friendly people. Most organizations will print well-written copy from other groups. But you should write the piece and not depend on others to do the writing for you.
Editors never know how much room they have until their newsletter is being laid out. To make your material newsletter/editor friendly, prepare alerts and "calls to action" that are camera-ready or electronically-ready to print as is in various formats: one page, half-page, and quarter-page so that whatever space is available, you have furnished just what the editor needs. If the editor wants a paper version, give them your copy on heavy print stock and laser printed. If the copy calls for local officials to be contacted, include those local officials' phone numbers and addresses in your copy so the editor won't have to look them up. The less work for editors, the more likely they are to use your material. Make it easy and avoid placing them in a situation where they have to edit and cut your material so it will fit. Increasingly editors, want material as copy-ready email attachments.
For public events and for general public information have a video made. A video can be one of your most effective tools. Send it to newspapers, other organizations, public officials, and libraries. At a booth or table at public events, you can show it and sell it. It can be used at fund raisers too. Send it along with grant applications. If you are trying to get other organizations to help your cause ask them to show your video at one of their regular meetings.
A good video always finds many more uses than you can imagine. A video gives your campaign weight, provides an organizational focus, and enhances the seriousness of your issue. Decision makers will often not sit still for presentations, but will seldom interrupt a video. A good friend of mine made several unsuccessful attempts to give a presentation to a decision maker who lacked the attention span to sit through more a than a few minutes of any presentation without interrupting, taking phone, calls etc. Finally my friend videotaped his presentation and showed it to the decision maker. They both sat there and watched, and his entire presentation was uninterrupted. People worship television. It is America's national religion and most houses provide a shrine to it in the most prominent place in the house. Most people have more respect for, and attach more probative value to someone on TV telling them something, than if the same person told them the same thing in person.
Don't assume decision makers will see good press.
If you get a good story written about your issue, that is only a good first step. Step two: send it to your representative with a cover letter. If it is a TV piece, put it on videotape and send it to them. But just because you send an article or video to a decision maker, don't assume it will ever be seen by anyone other than the mailroom staff who will send you a routine response. To make sure a decision maker actually reads/views your material, do three things.
1. Phone the staff person with lead responsibility for the issue and tell them an important piece has been created and you are sending it to their attention. Then send it addressed to them. Confirm their exact address, as this step creates a sort of implied commitment to open and read/view your material.
2. A week later, phone again and ask if they received it. Since mail arrives in legislators' offices in hand trucks, and it piles up on staffer's desks in foot-high piles, it will probably be sitting on the staff's desk unopened. They will probably tell you it's there but they haven't got to it yet. Tell them you will phone in a week to get their reaction.
3. Telephone in a week and ask them if they have had a chance to read it. They probably will have. If not, repeat the last step. At that point, you can ask them if they will forward it to the decision maker. Elected representatives generally only read or watch material their staff has screened and forwarded to them. And even that much pre-screened material will consist of large stacks of material.
You might assume that major prime time TV coverage of your issue will automatically come to the attention of decision makers without any further action on your part. Not so.
Misconceptions about TV coverage
TV coverage, by itself, seldom results in any concrete action. For example, a one-hour powerful documentary about a beautiful place under threat of clear-cut logging was seen by ten million people. That documentary resulted in less than thirty letters protesting the proposed destruction. Specials about the wonders of, and threats to, a pristine and precious place mostly generate calls and letters from vacationers who want to add that place to their itinerary before it's destroyed and other inquiries from retirees looking for a nice place to retire, NOT cards and letters to save it.
Have you ever watched a hard-hitting expose' on TV and afterwards written a letter of complaint? Probably not. No one else does either. When folks see an issue on television, they assume that because the problem was on TV, it is no longer a problem they need to attend to because now everyone knows about it. Most people are in a trance when they watch TV and don't get up from their couches to write letters and make phone calls.
On the rare occasion when a TV viewer is motivated to phone an agency and complain, the call is often of a very peculiar type. They will address their concerns in such a tentative, circular and tepid way that the agency will not even know what they really want or why they called.
Nevertheless, good TV coverage of your issue can be helpful. It educates and informs, and does occasionally lead to important victories. But more importantly it provides hard, primary lobbying material that can be reproduced and delivered, preferably in person, to the legislators' offices to bolster a personal visit where you deliver a pitch.
Good television coverage is an important tool and a precursor to action, but it is not a substitute for action.

All materials (pages 6-13) are from: Social Change Activism and the Internet: Strategic Online Activities by Rory O’Brien, 2003 (available at no cost on the Internet)

Elements of Social Action
The Role of the Internet
Philip Kotler (Kotler, 1973), writing in a time of reflection following an intense period of social dissatisfaction that fostered social change movements for peace, the environment, social justice, and women's rights, developed a framework of social action that is still applicable today. After studying the ways that social problems were approached in a wide variety of social situations, he postulated five elements common to all interventions, which he called
"...the five C's of social action:
Cause. A social objective or undertaking that change agents believe will provide some answer to a social problem.
Change Agency. An organization whose primary mission is to advance a social cause.
Change Targets. Individuals, groups, or institutions designated as the targets of change efforts.
Channels. Ways in which influence and response can be transmitted between change agents and change targets.
Change Strategy. A basic mode of influence adopted by the change agent to affect the change target." (Kotler, 1973, p. 172)
The following are brief descriptions of each of the first four elements. The fifth, change strategy, will be taken up in greater detail in the next section.

Cause
According to Kotler, causes can be classified into three categories: helping causes, which seek to aid the victims of a social problem, but rarely attempts to attack the problem at its roots; protest causes, which seek to alter the behavior of the institutions that contribute most to the problem; and revolutionary causes, which strive to eliminate those institutions who very existence is thought to be the primary source of the problem. Causes generally progress through four stages: a crusading stage, in which a few individuals attempt to raise awareness of a problem; a popular movement stage, where many followers are attracted by the original, often charismatic, leaders; a managerial stage, that sees the leadership shifting to people with organizational skills in order to better manage the activities of the growing movement; and finally, a bureaucratic stage, in which the original zeal is lost and the movement is operated in a more rigid and bureaucratic manner, with well-established policies and procedures, and functional specialization. (Kotler, 1973, pp. 173-174)
Change Agency
A change agency is comprised of two main types of change agents, leaders and supporters. Leaders include: the directors, who start or head the organization; the advocates, who promote the cause through media advocacy; the backers, who finance the agency; the technicians, who provide expert advice or service to the directors; the administrators, who run the daily operations of the organization; and the organizers, who ensure that the agency's supporters and campaigns are well-organized. Those who are supporters of the cause have three roles: workers, who give their time to conducting the activities organized by the agency; donors, who contribute money; and sympathizers, who espouse the beliefs of the movement, but who otherwise remain inactive. Individuals have many different motives for participating in a cause - they may desire affiliation with zealous people, seek to acquire respect from others and improve their status, have power over others, or need to believe in something to give meaning to their lives. Due to the numerous set-backs and ups-and-downs of any social movement, those involved in the change effort can expect to pass through several psychological states over time - from initial enthusiasm, to frustration and reduced expectations, and finally, to adjusted participation. (Kotler, 1973, pp. 176-178)
Change Targets
Change targets vary according to the nature of the cause. Helping causes target victims, often referring to them as clients. Protest causes target institutions of power, such as corporations, the military, and government, seeking to change them in ways that will eliminate or mitigate the problem. Revolutionary causes target these same institutions of power, but attempt to destroy rather than change them. In order to have the most impact on direct targets, change agencies often strive to influence intermediate targets: the general public, the professional establishment (e.g., educators, scientists, lawyers), government regulators, and the business establishment. In mounting an effective campaign, target segmentation is important. Rather than stereotyping all members of a target system, the change agents must be aware "that any target group contains persons at different stages of accessibility and susceptibility to the cause. The change agency must pay attention to these differences and search for the most meaningful dimensions of effective segmentation. The change agent can draw on demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioral, and social structural variables for segmenting target individuals and institutions." In choosing particular segments, three conditions must be satisfied: accessibility, or the degree to which channels exist to reach the target; substantiality, the degree to which the target is worth the effort; and susceptibility, the degree to which the target will respond to the initiative. (Kotler, 1973, pp. 179-182)
Channels
For effective communication with the change targets, agencies must carefully select the appropriate channels of communication, of which there are two types, the influence channels and the response channels. Influence channels, by which targets are reached, are subdivided into media and personal influence channels. Media influence channels are further broken down into the mass media (e.g., television, radio, newspapers), which sends messages to a mass audience, and specialized media (e.g., niche magazines, newsletters, reports), which distributes communications among particular audiences. In general, the mass media is used to reach the public and outside targets, while specialized media is often used within a change agency system, such as from leaders to supporters. Personal influence channels are predicated on a face-to-face basis, ranging from mass meetings (e.g., rallies, demonstrations, conferences), to small groups (e.g., negotiation teams, committees), to individual visits or phone calls (e.g., lobbying). Overall, the higher the status and the more similar to the targeted individuals the change agents are, the more effective they will be. Response channels are the venues for obtaining feedback from the change target. Like the influence channels, response channels can be divided into media response channels and personal response channels, each used in a similar way to their influence channel counterparts. By increasing the number and accessibility of response channels, the likelihood of receiving a positive response is enhanced. (Kotler, 1973, pp. 182-184)

Internet Activism
Although the proliferation of the Internet in mainstream society only happened after the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1994, there have been several commentators, researchers and activists who had discussed electronic communications as a means of enhancing public action on political and social issues prior to that time. Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz, in 1978, first sparked people's imaginations with their visionary scenarios of the social uses of computer messaging systems in the seminal book The Network Nation (which won the 1978 award of the Association of American Publishers as the outstanding technical publication of the year). (Hiltz & Turoff, 1978)
Social theorists such as Alvin Toffler (Toffler, 1980), Yoneji Masuda (Masuda, 1981), and Ithiel de Sola Pool (Pool, 1983) wrote of the benefits that computer communications would bring to society. Later, Nicholas Negroponte, head of the Media Lab at MIT, continued this techno-optimism in Being Digital (Negroponte, 1995), a re-compilation of his columns in Wired Magazine, one of the more widely-read journals of the new communications media.
Assessing how networks were being used to foster grassroots movements, Howard Reingold wrote The Virtual Community (Reingold, 1993), in which he devoted a chapter to describing the early activities of early online activists involved in community development, civil rights and the environmental and peace movements. Rory O'Brien (O'Brien, 1992) and Howard Frederick (Frederick, 1993) were more explicit in their explanations of the workings of the Association for Progressive Communications, the world's largest umbrella organization of computer networks for social change activists.
As the popularity of the Internet increased, the genre of writing moved from the theoretical to the descriptive to the practical. Mark S. Bonchek (Bonchek, 1995) studied how the Internet changes the way people participate in political affairs. In NetActivism (Schwartz, 1996), Ed Schwartz showed his readers how to use the functionalities of online networks to revitalize communities and engage in political activism. Maureen James and Liz Rykert (James & Rykert, 1997) wrote Working Together Online, a 'how-to' book on facilitating nonprofit groups seeking to collaborate on projects. That same year, "An Activists' Strategy for Using Email and the World Wide Web", was published online by the One Northwest (One Northwest, 1997) organization. This was followed in 1998 by another online document, "The Virtual Activist", in which the authors stated their beliefs in the effectiveness of the Internet for enhancing change efforts:
"So you want to be a Virtual Activist!
The Internet makes it possible for activists to expand our networks by identifying and contacting activists in other communities who have similar interests and concerns. If you're a grassroots activist, chances are you already know the people in your own community who share your concerns. By joining the appropriate discussion lists and news groups, you can identify and communicate with activists in other communities who are working on similar issues. By sharing information, strategies, and/or advice, you may be able to enhance the effectiveness of your efforts. Even activists who have the resources to broaden their networks by attending conferences and meetings outside our own community will benefit from the additional networking opportunities provided by the Internet. " (Krause, Stein & Clark, 1998)
More and more, facilitators of network activism are themselves using the net as a way of guiding the organizations they serve. Websites and e-mail lists are increasingly preferred over the book or the journal article, as is evidenced by several such initiatives. Audrey Krause, one of the writers of "The Virtual Activist", operates a virtual organization called NetAction, whose website [http://www.netaction.org/] is a popular one for those who wish to keep abreast of the latest cyber-policy issues. Besides a listing of related online resources, the site offers a distance education training course in Net activism, and visitors can sign up to an e-mail list to receive periodic articles and notices of events.
Another organization that is dedicated to promoting the use of the net by grassroots organizers is the Benton Foundation. An important part of their website is Benton's Best Practices Toolkit [http://www.benton.org/Practice/Toolkit/], which is frequently updated to provide the best examples of effective uses of the new media. The Toolkit contains hyperlinks to advice and examples categorized into the following headings:
• Announcements
• Planning, implementation & evaluation
• Organizing & advocacy tools
• Publicizing your efforts
• Technology funding for nonprofits
• Fundraising on the Internet
• Technical assistance
• Web Stuff
• Nonprofit-related electronic newsletters
• Nonprofit-related electronic discussion lists
• Related publications
• General & miscellaneous
These last two examples are just some of the many instances of activist groups making good use of the Internet to keep people informed as well as help them get organized. As techniques are developed that prove useful, they are quickly copied and modified to suit particular constituencies. The last decade has seen a profusion of new ways of using the Internet to improve the operations of social change activists. Such innovations have been commensurate with the communal modus operandi of most advocacy groups, which itself is uniquely designed to achieve the goal of fostering changes to the social status quo.
The Internet, being an unprecedented and still experimental communications medium, is being used in a myriad of novel ways by change agencies. It can act as a single channel of communication with change targets that assumes the functions of Kotler's influence and response channels, or as a mass medium, with a single online event or document attracting large numbers of the participating public. It can also behave as a specialized medium, with the capability for many-to-many interaction, useful for sharing information among a geographically and temporally dispersed group.
The Internet is becoming the common platform for digital communications, with the Web browser the common user interface. These platforms support many different types of software tools for information manipulation, such as hypertext links on web pages, online databases, e-mail, sound and video clips, chat rooms, and virtual reality modeling. Many of these tools are in common use by change activists, eager to get their message out to the public, engage people in their cause, and improve their organizational communications. In the following sections, we will explore a general typology of online techniques and activities currently used by social change agents based on the facilitative, persuasive, re-educative, and power types of change strategies, and link them with some examples of their application within the online environment.

Facilitative Activities
Organizational Maintenance
Facilitative strategies are used mainly to support other types of strategies, but there is one type of facilitation that is paramount to the change agency - the facilitating of organizational maintenance, without which there would be no organized strategy. Maintenance activities include fundraising, personnel development, project management, and intra-organizational communication.
Fundraising is being increasingly conducted online, with searchable databases of foundations now available, linked to their websites for downloadable application forms. Donations are not only solicited, but are being processed electronically. E-commerce is also enhancing online fundraising, allowing sales of information products and organizational memberships. Intranets are becoming popular, helping personnel be better organized with the help of online directories, group forums for project management, and sign-up forms for volunteer recruitment. For larger groups, with offices in several locales, the intranet has become the online office filing cabinet, making important organizational documents such as policies, reports, schedules, announcements available on an insider-only website, and even serving as an informal 'water cooler' via private computer conferences.
Information Sharing
The real power of the Internet lies in its ability to allow information to be shared by anyone online, almost anywhere, relatively quickly and inexpensively, A website, even if it is just an 'on-line brochure' is becoming de rigueur for non-profit organizations. Many go beyond just posting public information about their operations, and enhance their sites with newsletters, events calendars, and job postings. Information is now fairly easy to put online, making it relatively simple for even the poorest of grassroots organizations to keep the world informed about their issues. Compilations of related sites help some groups find others that share their problems, leading to closer collaborations. Some organizers provide daily summaries of presentations and workshops held at conferences, permitting non-attendees to keep abreast of things. In some cases, video streaming technologies allow the viewing of the actual presentations made. Reference materials are no longer relegated to brick-and-mortar libraries - researchers now search online repositories of documents, and the contents of websites, quite easily, with the problem of overload being handled by specialized non-profit online services that filter and aggregate specific information content.
Coordination
The coordination of action between and among several change groups is greatly assisted by the Internet. Rallies, demonstrations, and other forms of public protest are increasingly conceived, planned, implemented and evaluated with the help of the Internet. Computer conferences and mail lists are good ways for activists to suggest ideas, decide upon particular actions, publicize the activity, and engage a wider public in an on-line discussion of the issues. In Toronto, for example, Citizens for Local Democracy made extensive use of online communications to coordinate a number of demonstrations against the policies of the provincial government, as well as facilitating the organizing of citizen workshops on issues of local governance. (Citizens for Local Democracy, 1998) Internationally, the Council of Canadians used the Internet to publicize the dangers of the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), and coordinate a world-wide campaign of hundreds of groups opposed to it. (Council of Canadians, 1999)
In addition to coordination of actions, the Internet has proven useful for the joint development of policy. The major international policy summits of the United Nations since 1992 have included representation from non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The unprecedented involvement and participation by the thousands of NGOs and other stakeholders has been made possible only with the use of the new communications tools. The tracking via Internet of the series of regional and global meetings leading up to the development of the Kyoto Protocol to establish binding national targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, is a good example of a greater participation in joint public-policy making by civil society organizations. (IISD, 1997)
Re-educative Activities
The purpose of re-educative strategies is to create an awareness of a problem, and to teach people skills and knowledge required in order to create the needed changes. The Internet is now a preferred venue of alternative news sources, many of which act as a balance to the offerings of the mainstream media. In certain instances, mail lists and computer conferences maintained by change agencies provide a wealth of information about particular issues and problematic situations. Websites are occasionally enhanced with geographic information systems (GIS) that help people get information about their local environment, such as the location of nearby toxic waste dumps. Social issues are also being addressed online in a more formal distance-education mode, in which educators link students with online resources, or help them share local data with classes in other countries. Online research, often conducted by means of searches through scientific databases, promotes learning about solutions to problems as well. Finally, in order to use the technology, it helps to be taught by those who know. There are many non-profit organizations teaching others how to make the best use of the Internet, through hands-on training, or by providing advice via online documents.
Persuasive Activities
Much social change advocacy follows a persuasive strategy, and this is mirrored in the online world. A good many of the non-profit organizations with websites seek to promote their cause by means of web pages designed to be persuasive. Often, single issue websites will contain hundreds of supportive articles and reports that argue their position on the matter at hand. Pictures, or video clips, are frequently chosen for online presentation on the basis of their emotional appeal. Most of these kinds of websites do not allow for public interaction, eliminating any immediate potential for the audience to publicly respond to the host's assertions.
One interesting case of online persuasion is akin to an educative function, though its bias toward the negative precludes it being classified as a balanced educational activity. This is the case of the 'watchdog' organizations. Though they existed prior to the Internet, the new digital capabilities have allowed them to proliferate. Anyone interested in knowing about any harmful, unethical, or wasteful activities of companies or governments can now locate websites that contain a constantly updated historical record of transgressions against the public interest.
Power activities
Power strategies are coercive, with the aim of making the target respond positively or else risk jeopardizing the satisfaction of its needs. The use of the Internet has helped make activities derived from a power strategy more efficient. Economic pressure on corporations, for example, is heightened by the easy availability of information on boycott issues via websites maintained by consumer advocates. The social investment movement has also begun to use the net to amass and disseminate data on corporate social responsibility, to dissuade potential shareholders from investing in companies that offend the public interest. Political pressure is brought to bear in an online environment through such things as action alerts on breaking issues, online petitions, and mobilizing supporters to participate in electronic mail or fax campaigns targeting politicians. Though such use has followed from the more traditional forms of non-electronic advocacy, the ease and speed of the Internet has encouraged more public involvement in political action.

Civil society organizations and social change groups in particular, choose activities strategically in order to accomplish their aims. Since these activities often involve different forms of communication, whether it is with their colleagues, supporters, the public, or the change targets themselves, the new communications technology of the Internet has had a major impact on the operations of non-profits. Many such groups have adopted a variety of Internet-based tools and techniques for enhancing their effectiveness. Because the number of non-profits using the Internet is increasingly rapidly and there has been very little written regarding the strategic implications of Internet use by social change organizations, it is an opportune time to look further into the subject of strategic uses of the net.

2008-04-15T17:21:00.000-04:00

Class Notes
Professor Henry Schissler
Chapter Nine

Demography: The Study of Population

Various elements of population are profoundly affected by the norms, values, and social patterns of a society.
• Fertility, the level of reproduction in a society, is influenced by a person’s age of entry into sexual unions & by their use of contraception. Social and/or religious values define these influences
• Mortality, the number of deaths, is shaped by a society’s level of nutrition, acceptance of immunization, and provisions for sanitation, as well as its general commitment to health care & health education.

Then...

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 – 1834) published Essays on the Principle of Population in 1798. He held that the world’s population was growing more rapidly that the available food supply. He advocated population control to close the gap, yet explicitly denounced artificial means of birth control because they were not sanctioned by religion.

Instead, Malthus advocated the postponement of marriage. If couples did not show restraint, he warned, the world would face widespread hunger, poverty, and misery.

Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), agreed that the world population growth is outstretching natural resources. However, he and other neo-Malthusians insist that birth control measures are needed, and developed nations must use less of the world resources.

...Now

The suffering Malthus spoke of is a reality for many people of the world. Malnutrition remains the largest contributing factor to illness & death among children in developing countries. Almost 20% of these children will die before the age of five. In the United States, one child under the age of twelve dies every fifty-six seconds from the effects of malnutrition.

Combating world hunger may require reducing human births, dramatically increasing the world’s food supply, or perhaps both at the same time. But the United States will not send birth control of any kind to these countries because, like Malthus in 1798, artificial means of birth control are not sanctioned by certain religions. Since 2000, the U.S. has, instead, sent literature promoting abstinence.

How Did Communities Originate?

A community is a unit of social organization, either spatial or political, that gives people a sense of belonging. How did this social arrangement come into being? The transition from subsistence to surplus represented a critical step in the emergence of communities and cities. The surplus was first agricultural, but gradually it evolved to include all types of goods & services.

The surplus allowed for expansion of goods & services, leading to greater differentiation, a hierarchy of occupations, and social inequality. It was a precondition not only for the establishment of cities but for the division of members of a community into social classes.

City – permanent settlement of people who depend on others for the production of food; usually a legally incorporated urban settlement.

Suburb – a catchall term for any urban development that occurs outside a city.

Rural – any human settlement of fewer than 2,500 people.

Metropolis – a large urban (people engaged in non-agricultural activity) area comprising one or more central cities and their surrounding suburbs, and forming a more or less integrated regional economy.

Megalopolis – continuous stretch of metropolitan area containing cities and suburbs.

Industrial Cities (18th – mid-20th century)

Industrialization had a wide range of effects on people’s lifestyles as well as on the structure of communities. Emerging urban settlements became centers not only of industry but of banking, finance, and industrial management.

The factory system led to a much more refined division of labor; the many new occupations that were created produced a complex set or relationships among workers.

The key characteristics of the industrial city were:
• Open class system – mobility based on achieved characteristics
• Relatively open competition
• Elaborate specialization in manufacturing of goods
• Influence of religion limited to certain areas as society becomes more secularized
• Standardization enforced by custom and law
• Emergence of communication through posters, bulletins, and newspapers
• Formal schooling open to the masses & viewed as a means of advancing the social order; the social construct called “adolescence” emerged

Postindustrial Cities (beginning late 20th century)

• Global finance & the electronic flow of information dominate the economy
• Production is decentralized (often taking place outside urban centers), but control is centralized in multinational corporations
• Wealth is based on ability to obtain & use information, corporate power dominates
• Religion becomes more fragmented; greater openness to new religious views
• Conflicting views of prevailing standards ad customs and laws change
• Professional, scientific, and technical personnel are increasingly important as more extended electronic networks emerge

Gentrification – upper-income professionals (“the gentry”) buying low-cost city housing, renovating it, moving in and converting low income neighborhoods to high income neighborhoods; poor people are typically displaced.

Urban Renewal federal grant programs that provided funds to cities for revitalizing (often by knocking down) “blighted areas.”

Health and Illness

Health – a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity

Because health is relative, we can view it in a social context & consider how it varies in different situations or cultures. We can critically analyze the social context that shapes definitions of health & the treatment of illness.

Sick Role – the cultural definition of the appropriate behavior of and response to people labeled as sick.

Typical Sick Role behaviors include taking sick days off from work, going to the doctor, obtaining prescription medicines, purchasing over-the-counter products at the local pharmacy. These behaviors help our economic system tremendously.

Typical responses to people labeled as sick are sending get well cards, flowers or other small gifts; helping the family while the sick person recuperates.

The social role of being “sick” is closely allied to the medical model of treatment (when an individual displays symptoms of abnormality, the cause is physiological). This model requires medical establishment involvement, including pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and various other ancillary businesses. This is also referred to as the Medicalization of Society.

Like chiropractors, holistic or naturopathic medical professionals are attempting to enter the mainstream medical model. This legitimacy will raise their status, allowing them to participate in insurance plans and receive patient referrals. University degree programs will increase to meet the demands of persons going into this newly recognized field. There are many economic issues involved.

Examples of Sick Role definitions:

• Not long ago, a person addicted to alcohol was viewed as weak and of questionable character. Today alcoholism is called a “disease”, an illness. They are, therefore, deserving of help.
• While heroin and cocaine addiction are also called diseases, addicts are typically viewed as lacking morals and of questionable character – unlike their alcoholic brethren.
• Why the distinction? Most Americans (statistically) identify addicts as African American or Latino men, members of the urban poor. This inaccurate stereotype fuels the Sick Role differentiation

• When HIV and AIDS were first being reported on, it was widely viewed as a gay male affliction. Persistent rumors (reported in media) were that gay men contracted the disease after sexual contact with blacks men from Central America.
• This stigma caused funding for HIV and AIDS research to be minimal until heterosexuals became infected. Ryan White and Elizabeth Glasser (founder of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation) were two “heterosexual faces” that began to change public opinion. Federal funding increased rapidly after that point.

The Family’s Influence on the “Sick Role” –

Some families maintain a work ethic where they won’t miss work for what they consider to be a minor illness. Other families are focused on sickness, encouraging members to “be sick” at the slightest hint of a minor health problem.
This example illustrates the “Sick Role” as a social construct because the family, the first Agent of Socialization, can dramatically differ on the socialization of the “Sick Role” to its members.

Psychology and Mental Health –

It is the role of psychology professionals to provide the “measuring stick” for what is normal or abnormal behavior in culture. Abnormal behavior is typically viewed as a mental health problem. It requires a label (a diagnosis), and a specified medically and psychologically based course of treatment. Successful treatment means a return to normal behavior.

Psychology, as an Agent of Socialization lists all “behavioral disorders” in their text The Diagnostic and statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association.

Interestingly, behaviors viewed as both normal and abnormal have changed as culture has changed. Further, behaviors viewed as abnormal in Western society are not necessarily viewed as abnormal in other countries. Examples –
• Homosexuality was a label (a diagnosis) until it was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual over thirty years ago
• Veterans who exhibited abnormal behavior after returning from war had “shell shock” until the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual formalized it as a label (or diagnosis) called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Veterans from the Vietnam Conflict were instrumental in advocating for this “recognition” from psychology.
• Just six years ago, psychology added a new label (or diagnosis) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual called Acute Stress Disorder. Too many persons were exhibiting some of the abnormal behaviors associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but not enough to fit that label. The new one, Acute Stress, was, therefore, added.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is, therefore, a social constructed vehicle for codifying mental illness, just as laws codify (and reaffirm) abnormal behavior and spell out the consequences if someone persists in the behavior.

2008-04-15T17:20:00.000-04:00

Class Notes
Professor Henry Schissler
Chapter 8 – Part B

The Economy

A society’s economic system for producing, distributing, and consuming goods and services will depend on both its level of development and its political ideology.

Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are held largely in private hands and the main incentive for economic activity is the accumulation of profits. Capitalist systems vary in the degree to which the government regulates private ownership & economic activity

The prevailing form of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution was what is termed laissez-faire (“let them do”). Under this principle, businesses could compete freely with minimal government intervention.

Private ownership and maximization of profits still remain the most significant characteristics of capitalism. But contemporary capitalism features extensive government regulation of economic relations. Examples are monitoring prices, setting safety standards for industries, protecting the rights of consumers, and regulating collective bargaining between labor unions and management.

Contemporary capitalism tolerates monopolistic practices. A pure monopoly exists when a single business firm dominates an industry. Buyers have little choice but to yield to the firm’s decisions about pricing, standards of quality, and availability.

Partial monopolies exist when a few businesses control an entire industry and, often, keep other companies from entering the marketplace. Media, for example, is controlled by fewer and fewer businesses. Cable television, wireless communications, and personal computer operating systems are other examples.

The United States attempts to outlaw monopolies through antitrust laws. They are meant to prevent a business from gaining control of a particular market. The government intervenes to attempt to preserve competition in the marketplace.

Socialism is an economic system where the means of production and distribution are collectively rather than privately owned. The basic objective of the economic system is to meet people’s needs rather than to maximize profits. Competition, they believe, does not help the general public. The central government, acting as the representative of the people, should therefore make basic economic decisions.

Communism (commune) is an economic system under which all property is communally owned and no social distinctions are made on the basis of people’s ability to produce for the collective. It eliminates class systems, hierarchy, and any strong governmental role in people’s lives. Because there are no social distinctions, there is an equality among people that eliminates status as a part of career or any other public endeavor (the arts, for example).

Clearly, this communist ideal was not the societal and governmental system in the many communist countries that fell during the late 1980’s and 1990’s. Further, current communist countries (China, Cuba, and Vietnam) remain socialist economic systems ruled by a strong often repressive central government (dictatorship). They refer to themselves as communists.

Industrial Democracies

Private ownership and free market competition coexist with some democratic controls over business (including possible regulation) and the public provision of basic social services. These are called Industrial Democracies. In most, health care is available to all citizens. Also, housing support, education, and other key services are available for each individual and family.

In the United States, these examples of available services are limited. Social Welfare Policy would, therefore, not be considered socialist per se. However, the Social Security system, Medicare and Medicaid programs would qualify as limited socialist policy for segments of the U.S. population.

Formal Economy – all work-related activities that provide income and are regulated (taxed, subject to minimum wage, worker safety laws, etc) by government agencies.

Underground Economy – those income-generating activities that are not reported to the government; some are illegal, others are overtly criminal.

Informal Economy – those income-generating activities that escape regulation by the governmental institutions which ordinarily regulate similar activities; examples are restaurant employees, vendors, tag sales, babysitters.

Economic Changes

• There is more concentration of ownership by giant corporations, especially multinational ones, in the U.S.

• The U.S. economy is increasingly intertwined with & dependent upon the global economy as more foreign companies acquire U.S. firms.

• The workforce is increasingly more diverse with over 60% of women and increasing numbers of minorities employed.

• More women and minorities are securing managerial positions. White males continue to dominate upper management in all industries.

• Over 75% of businesses have instituted some type of cultural diversity training program because of relationships between workers are more and more likely to cross gender, racial, and ethnic lines.

• Deindustrialization, the systematic withdrawal of investment in basic aspects of productivity (such as factories and plants), has become more widespread throughout the U.S. As businesses relocate, more and more are building new facilities outside the country. Some are moving part of their operations outside the country (General Motors, for example).

• Downsizing, reductions in a company’s workforce, has been occurring for over a decade in the U.S. New technologies, “restructuring”, and decreasing profits are all reasons for downsizing

• E-Commerce, the numerous ways that people can do business from their computers, continues to grow. Internet-based businesses continue to chip away at traditional “bricks-and-mortar” establishments. This new marketplace continues to be viewed as “volatile.”

• A “contingency workforce”, workers who are hired only for as long as they are needed, has emerged in the U.S. This is a direct result of downsizing and cost cutting practices, and includes a growing number of part-time employees. One problem for this workforce is the lack of healthcare benefits.

Globalization – process by which the lives of all people around the planet become increasingly interconnected in economic, political, cultural, and environmental terms, along with the awareness of such interconnections.

2008-04-15T17:18:00.001-04:00

Class Notes
Professor Henry Schissler
Chapter Eight – Part A

Social Institutions – organized patterns of beliefs and behaviors that are centered on the fulfillment of basic human needs

Functionalist Perspective

Five Major Functions of Social Institutions – tasks that a society or relatively permanent group must accomplish if it is to survive

(1) Replacing Personnel – accomplished through takeover of neighboring groups of people, normal sexual reproduction, immigration, acquisition of slaves; any group or society must replace “personnel” when they die, leave, or become incapacitated.

(2) Teaching New Recruits – group or society must encourage “recruits” to learn & accept its values and customs (through education, peer interaction, etc.); no group or society can survive it many of its members reject established values, behaviors, and responsibilities.

(3) Producing and Distributing Goods and Services – group or society must satisfy the needs to most members to some extent, or it will risk the possibility of discontent, and ultimately disorder; each society establishes a set of rules for allocation of financial & other resources.

(4) Preserving Order – group or society must preserve order and protect itself from attack; if not, the group risks extinction.

(5) Providing and Maintaining a Sense of Purpose – people must feel motivated to continue as members of a group or society in order to fulfill the previous four requirements; such motivation must be relatively consistent with opportunities for “achievement” or “success”.

Conflict Perspective

Social Institutions help to maintain the privileges of the most powerful individuals & groups within a society, while contributing to the powerlessness of others.

Social Institutions are inherently conservative; it has been difficult, for example, to implement educational reforms that promote equal opportunity (school desegregation, similarly equipped & staffed schools) for all students.

Social Institutions operate in gendered and racist environments. Inequality based on economic status, ethnicity, age, physical disability, and sexual orientation are also common.

Interactionist Perspective

Our social behavior is conditioned by the roles and statuses we accept, the groups to which we belong, and the institutions within which we function. Social behavior is conditioned within Social Institutions that are gendered and racist, and covertly promote various other types of inequality.

Core American Values

Values are collective ideas about what is right or wrong, good or bad, and desirable or undesirable. Values do not tell which behaviors are appropriate, but they provide evaluative criteria. Values are the core of organized patterns of beliefs found in Social Institutions.

Ideal Culture refers to the values & standards of behavior that people in a society profess to hold.

Real Culture refers to the values and standards of behavior that people actually follow. For example, “morality and humanitarianism” may conflict with “individual achievement and success.”

Some of the core American values are –
• Individualism (independence)
• Achievement and success (status)
• Activity and work (work ethic)
• Progress and material comfort
• Efficiency and practicality
• Equality and opportunity
• Morality and humanitarianism (good character)
• Freedom and liberty
• Science and technology

Individuals are socialized through such Social Institutions as family, education (the “hidden curriculum”), religion, media, and government, to believe in the purposefulness of these core values. Through this socialization, individuals also learn what beliefs and behaviors are considered “deviant” in society.

Government: Power and Authority

A cultural universal (common to all societies) is the exercise of power & authority. The struggle for power & authority typically involves politics. Sociologists are concerned with social interactions among individuals and groups and their impact on the larger political and economic order.

Power is the ability to exercise one’s will over others; it is at the heart of a political system.

Three basic sources of power within any political system are force, influence, and authority.

Force is the actual or threatened use of coercion to impose one’s will on others.

Influence refers to the exercise of power through a process of persuasion.

Authority refers to power that has been institutionalized and is recognized by the people over whom it is exercised. The term refers to those who hold legitimate power through elected or publicly acknowledged positions.

Max Weber identified three ideal types of authority –

Traditional Authority – legitimate power is conferred by custom & accepted practice; authority rests in custom, not in personal characteristics, technical competence, or even written law; authority is absolute when the ruler has the ability to determine laws and policies. (Royal families)

Legal-Rational Authority – power is made legitimate by law, by the written rules & regulations of a political system. (Democracies)

Charismatic Authority – power is made legitimate by a leader’s exceptional personal or emotional appeal to his or her followers; charisma lets a person lead or inspire without relying on set rules or traditions; charismatic authority is derived more from the beliefs of followers than from actual qualities of leaders; followers perceive a leader as having qualities setting him or her apart from others, and they give the leader unquestioned authority.

Often, charismatic leaders become well-known by breaking with established institutions & advocating dramatic changes in the social structure & economic system. At times, their strong hold over followers enables them to build protest movements that challenge dominant norms & values of a society. Examples are Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. Adolph Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, and Jim Jones are examples of charismatic authorities who advocated for and turned followers toward violence, destruction, and, in some cases, suicide.

Weber stressed that individual leaders and political systems often combine two or more of these forms. Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan are examples of U.S. Presidents with both legal-rational and charismatic authority.

Who Hold Power in the United States?

Elite Model of Power Relations – society is ruled by a small group of individuals who share a common set of political and economic interests.

The Power Elite (C. Wright Mills) – power rests in the hands of a limited number of individuals, both inside and outside government. They operate as a self-conscious, cohesive unit; they regularly interact with one another and have essentially the same political & economic interests. The Power Elite is not conspiratorial and not necessarily diabolical or ruthless.

A pyramid illustrates this power structure. At the top are the corporate rich (perhaps the most powerful), leaders of the executive branch of government, & heads of the military. Directly below are local opinion leaders, members of the legislative branch of government, and leaders of special-interest groups. At the bottom are the unorganized, exploited masses

Today, it appears that some legislative branch members hold as much power as executive branch members. Further, some Supreme Court Justices and others in the legislative branch appear to be power elite members (or supporters).

Many leaders of special-interest groups were members of either the legislative or executive branches of government. Their influence and power can, therefore, be substantial. Also, as special-interest group leaders, they might work for or represent corporate interests, and typically have access to large amounts of money targeted as donations to specific executive and legislative branch politicians as well as the political party power structure.

G. William Domhoff’s model (2001) of the power elite takes Mills’ general thesis and makes certain adjustments. He finds that the Power Elite is still largely White, male, and upper class. He stresses the role played both by elites of the corporate community and by leaders of policy-formation organizations such as chambers of commerce and labor unions.

In the electoral arena, two different coalitions exercise influence. A corporate-conservative coalition opposes a liberal-labor coalition. Both are well financed, ally with certain candidates, and promote specific agendas. With each election cycle, there are many new or evolving elements to these two overarching coalitions.

(Please refer to previous notes on the Social Institutions of family, religion, and education, presented as part of class discussions on the Agents of Socialization.)

2008-04-15T17:17:00.000-04:00

Class Notes
Professor Henry Schissler
Chapter Seven – Part B

Human Sexuality – Key Concepts

Sex – anatomical or other biological differences between males & females that originate in the human gene

Gender – is the socially constructed aspects of differences between women & men; the cultural ideals of and stereotypes of masculinity & femininity

Gender Identity – how individuals come to think of themselves as male or female and learn to act accordingly

Gender Roles – expectations regarding the proper behavior, attitudes, and activities of males & females; they are evident not only in our work and behavior but in how we react to others.

Traditional gender-role patterns continue to be influential in socialization of children. Boys must be masculine – active, aggressive, tough, daring, and dominant. Girls must be feminine – soft, emotional, sweet, and submissive. Children’s toys reinforce these patterns of socialization.

Homophobia (fear of or prejudice against gays/lesbians/bisexuals) contributes significantly to rigid gender-roles. Because many still associate gay men with “femininity” and lesbians with “masculinity”, persons who deviate from their traditional gender role may be considered gay. Despite growing acceptance of the gay/lesbian/bisexual community, continuing stigma attached to homosexuality places pressure on all men (whether gay or not) to exhibit only narrow “masculine” behavior and on all females (whether lesbian or not) to exhibit narrow “feminine” behavior.

Socially constructed men’s roles influence how a boy or a man comes to view his role in society. Five typical aspects of the male gender role are –
1. Anti-Feminine Element – show no “sissy stuff,” including any expressions of openness or vulnerability
2. Success Element – prove one’s masculinity at work and sports
3. Aggressive Element – use force in dealing with others
4. Sexual Element – initiate and control all sexual relations
5. Self-Reliant Element – keep cool and unflappable

Social Construction of Sexual Activity

Sexuality – the ways in which people construct their erotic or sexual relationships, including the norms governing sexual behavior

Sexual Scripts – culturally learned ways of behaving in sexual situations

(A Cultural Universal is that all societies have restrictions on sexual activity)

Societal expectations concerning sexual behavior are defined in the culture’s values and norms, and reinforced by its Social Institutions:
Psychology (sexual disorders)
Religion (purpose of, restrictions around sexual activity)
Law (polygamy, interracial marriage, gay marriage)

Societal statements about sexuality affirm that:
Sex is wrong unless............
Sex is wrong until...........

These societal statements portray sex as destructive, as deviant, unless certain conditions are met. They affix negative labels onto sexual expression and, specifically, on “the sex act” (which is a socially constructed belief about what “real sex” is).

Sex is deviant first, and OK second (when certain conditions are met).

This can be viewed as a form of social control, and the containment of “pleasure seeking behavior” in society.

But it can also be viewed as socializing individuals to believe that sexual expression is only conditionally OK. It sends a powerful macro-level message about human sexuality that may be a cause of the many sexual disorders identified by psychology and of other types of sexual acting out behavior (pornography, prostitution, adultery).

Sexual Attractiveness – Social Construct that determines what constitutes a sexually attractive individual in a particular culture; this varies greatly from culture to culture and throughout history

• Adults react more leniently to the “bad behavior” of attractive children.
• Teachers evaluate cute children of either gender as “smarter” than unattractive children.
• In mock jury trials, attractive male or female defendants consistently receive lighter sentences.
• Adults who are perceived to be sexually attractive are consistently viewed as more trustworthy, honest, and competent.
• An early criminal justice theory stated that an “ugly” person was the most likely suspect to have committed the crime

Societal & cultural values account for our perception of and our attitude towards what is appropriate and accepted behavior in many areas of “human sexuality” –

• Appropriate level of sexual activity and varieties of sexual expression

• Appropriate degree of experimentation, including variations on traditional couplings

• Women as “sex objects” and men as “sex objects”

• The Denial of Pleasure-Seeking Behavior

Reality Principle (Freud) – members of a society renounce a substantial part of desire for immediate pleasure in order to do the kind of work necessary for society to operate smoothly.

The Cultural Landscape: What’s Morally Wrong

Divorce 26% - Morally Wrong
Death Penalty 28%
Gambling 30%
Sex between an unmarried man & woman 36%
Stem cell research, from human embryos 37%
Homosexual behavior 39%
Doctor-assisted suicide 41%
Having a baby outside of marriage 45%
Abortion 47%
Suicide 79%
Cloning humans 86%
Married men & women having an affair 91%
Polygamy 91%

Gallup Organization 7/04

Aspects of Human Sexuality

Social Interaction: The Formation of Pairs
(friendships, romances, and sexual pairings)

We have powerful desires to be with other humans. We spend 75% of our time with other people.

We have a strong need for affiliation (a consistent interest in establishing & maintaining relationships with other people). It has been likened to imprinting, the complex process of human infant attachment. There are overriding biological (instinctual) and some socio-environmental factors involved in this process.

Interpersonal Attraction is a nonspecific positive response toward another person. It is a factor of day-to-day interaction & varies from mild attraction (such as thinking your Personal Trainer is a “nice person”) all the way to deep feelings of love.

Falling In Love and Building Relationships

Macro-level society represents love as a purely emotional experience that cannot be predicted or controlled. But persons you fall in love with (and those who you are attracted to on many levels) can be predicted beyond chance by the following factors:

1) Proximity – A strong determinant of attraction toward others is whether you live near them, work with them, or have frequent contact with them.

2) Mere Exposure Effect – Your attraction to a person is strongly impacted by how frequently you see the person. Attraction can increase, sometimes dramatically, by the Mere Exposure Effect. Conversely, “overexposure” can have the opposite effect.

3) Perceived Physical Attractiveness – The attractions we feel toward people of either gender are based on our perception of their physical attractiveness. While standards of attractiveness vary a great deal between cultures and subcultures, considerable agreement exists within a culture about who is attractive.

Physical attractiveness predicts only early stages of the various types of relationships. When one measures relationships that last a while, other factors come into play, primarily religion, political attitudes, social class background, and race.

4) Similarity – We are attracted to those who are similar or even identical to us in socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, religion, perceived personality traits, and general attitudes and opinions.

There are exceptions. Some of us are not in the majority when it comes to predictability of relationship choices. Psychological needs, attraction to “difference”, Reactive Attachments, and other factors come into play.

Some Of the Other Aspects Of Human Sexuality Include –

• Expectations of desired Body Image in both men and women

• Increasing acceptance of Gay, Lesbian & Bi-Sexual Community

• Gay Marriage

• Interracial Coupling and Recognition of Growing Bi-Racial Community

• Increasing Understanding of Transgender Community

• Needs of Intrasexed Children

• HIV and AIDS, Sexually Transmitted Diseases

• Condom Distribution & Needle Exchange Programs

• Sex Education in Public Schools vs. Abstinence-Only Programs

Definitions of Deviant Sexual Behavior differ greatly from society to society, culture to culture. Macro-level values and norms also differ in sub-cultures and other groups. Western society attempts to categorize many of them as Sexual Disorders in Clinical Psychology (agent of socialization). A few of the many other examples of “deviant sexual behavior” are –

• Swingers

• Prostitution (legal in two Nevada counties)

• Polygamy (legal in certain African & Middle Eastern countries)

• Variations on Monogamy

2008-04-15T17:15:00.001-04:00

Class Notes
Professor Henry Schissler
Chapter Seven

Inequality by Gender

The ascribed characteristic of gender creates privilege for men & discrimination for women. Like differences in race, differences in gender are visible, and they are socially constructed. Women may be a majority in terms of their numbers, but they are treated more like a minority group. For minority women, the intersection of gender & race creates a double jeopardy of discrimination that no other minority group faces.

Gender Roles – expectations regarding the proper behavior, attitudes, and activities of males & females; they are evident not only in our work and behavior but in how we react to others.

Traditional gender-role patterns continue to be influential in socialization of children. Boys must be masculine – active, aggressive, tough, daring, and dominant. Girls must be feminine – soft, emotional, sweet, and submissive. Children’s toys reinforce these patterns of socialization.

Homophobia (fear of or prejudice against gays/lesbians/bisexuals) contributes significantly to rigid gender-roles. Because many still associate gay men with “femininity” and lesbians with “masculinity”, persons who deviate from their traditional gender role may be considered gay. Despite growing acceptance of the gay/lesbian/bisexual community, continuing stigma attached to homosexuality places pressure on all men (whether gay or not) to exhibit only narrow “masculine” behavior and on all females (whether lesbian or not) to exhibit narrow “feminine” behavior.

Socially constructed men’s roles influence how a boy or a man comes to view his role in society. Five typical aspects of the male gender role are –
1. Anti-Feminine Element – show no “sissy stuff,” including any expressions of openness or vulnerability
2. Success Element – prove one’s masculinity at work and sports
3. Aggressive Element – use force in dealing with others
4. Sexual Element – initiate and control all sexual relations
5. Self-Reliant Element – keep cool and unflappable

Functionalist View

Gender differentiation contributes to overall social stability. Traditional gender roles arose out of the need to establish a division of labor (and specialized tasks) between women and men, particularly in a family system. Studies by anthropologist Margaret Mead demonstrate that our traditional gender roles may not be relevant in a different type of society. In fact, Mead showed that traditional roles did not exist when they would be detrimental to the culture’s stability or survival.

Conflict Perspective

The relationship between females & males has been one of unequal power, with men occupying the dominant position. Gender differences are a reflection of the subjugation of one group (women) by another group (men). Women’s subordination is institutionally structured & culturally rationalized, exposing them to conditions of disrespect, dependency, powerlessness, and poverty.

Feminism – refers to both the belief that social equality should exist between the sexes, and the Social Movement aimed at achieving that goal.

Liberal Feminism – women’s inequality is primarily the result of imperfect institutions, which can be corrected by reforms that do not fundamentally alter society itself.

Socialist Feminism – women’s inequality is the result of the combination of capitalistic economic relations and patriarchy; both must be fundamentally transformed before women can achieve equality.

Radical Feminism – equality for women has never been achieved under any political or economic system; it, therefore, underlies all other forms of inequality, including economic inequality.

Multicultural Feminism – focuses on understanding and ending inequality for all women, regardless of race, class, nationality, age, sexual orientation, or other characteristics.

Sexism – the ideology that one sex is superior to the other; the belief that one sex is innately inferior, and that therefore its domination is justified.

Gender Stratification – inequality toward women in a stratified (class) society.

Patriarchy – any set of social relationships in which men dominate women.

Sexual Harassment – behavior that occurs when work benefits are made contingent on sexual favors, or when touching, lewd comments, or the appearance of pornographic material creates a “hostile environment” in the workplace.

Status of Women Worldwide

• Despite advantages in higher education, women still face major barriers when they attempt to advance in the workplace. Women rarely hold more than 1 or 2 percent of top executive positions.
• The feminization of poverty has become a worldwide phenomenon. Single-parent households headed by women are on the rise in many countries.
• Women worldwide are underrepresented politically.
• Women almost always work in occupations with lower status and pay than men. In both developing and developed countries, many women work as unpaid family laborers. While they grow half the world’s food, they rarely own land.
• Despite social norms regarding support & protection, many widows find they have little concrete support from extended family networks.
• In many African & a few Asian nations, traditions mandate the cutting of female genitals. This often leads to serious & immediate complications from infection & eventually to long-term health problems.
• While males outnumber females as refugees, women have unique needs, such as protection against physical & sexual abuse.

Gender Bias in the Workplace

Women are underrepresented in occupations historically defined as “men’s jobs,” which often carry greater financial reward and prestige. Women entering the job market are often subjected to occupational segregation, or confinement to sex-typed “women’s jobs.”

Women accounted for 95% of all secretaries, 10% of all engineers, 98% of all dental assistants, 20% of all dentists, 96% of all child care workers, 93% of all registered nurses, and 29% of all physicians.

Women earn less money than men, about 78 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Second Shift – describes the double burden of work outside the home followed by child care & housework at home.

Double Jeopardy – refers to women who belong to minority groups experiencing discrimination based on both their gender and their race or ethnicity; they typically earn less than white women and are more likely be classified as “working poor.”

Notes Toward A Definition Of Culture

2008-03-29T21:24:00.003-04:00

NOTES TOWARD A DEFINITION OF CULTURE
Marshall Soules

In 1871 E.B. Taylor defined culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and many other capabilities and habits acquired by...[members] of society."

"Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation. It thus refers to the norms, values, standards by which people act, and it includes the ways distinctive in each society of ordering the world and rendering it intelligible. Culture is...a set of mechanisms for survival, but it provides us also with a definition of reality. It is the matrix into which we are born, it is the anvil upon which our persons and destinies are forged." (Robert Murphy. Culture and Social Anthropology: An Overture. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1986: 14)

THE PREDICAMENT OF CULTURE

In the opening chapter of his influential book on the practices of anthropology, James Clifford claims that the modernist age is marked by a sense that "all the beautiful, primitive places are ruined," that there is a kind of "cultural incest, a sense of runaway history" haunting us, and giving us the feeling that cultural authenticity has been lost. (4)

Traditionally, change has been interpreted as disorder, as chaos, as loss of authenticity. But in the global intermixture of cultures that we have witnessed in this century, the authenticity of former cultures may not be lost in quite the ways we imagine them to be: "local authenticites meet and merge in transient urban and suburban settings," according to Clifford. This complex process of acculturation, of meeting and merging, poses a predicament for the contemporary student of culture: the student of culture must consider both "local attachments"--regional dialects and traditions, for example--and "general possibilities."

This predicament is based on the observation that "there is no going back, no essence to redeem" once authentic traditions yield to the attractions of global culture. Clifford's book does not see the world as populated by "endangered authenticities." Instead, the world "makes space for specific paths through modernity." He concludes from this that "the time is past when privileged authorities could routinely 'give voice' (or history) to others without fear of contradiction" (7).

Clifford proposes that the student of culture is faced with a series of important questions which challenge traditional assumptions of "ethnographic authority":
Who has the authority to speak for a group's identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and other clash and converse in the encounters of ethnography...? What narratives of development, loss, and innovation can account for the present range of local oppositional movements? (8)
A question that Clifford does not ask: Who will document and publish these narratives of "local oppositional movements" when the status quo is the first order of the media's business? While we wait for the media to tell our stories accurately, local cultures attempt to find ways of living with invasive cultures without abandoning all their traditional ways.

Ethnography, which cannot be separated in practice from anthropology, is the "systematic description of a culture based on firsthand observation" (Haviland 1989), requiring "participant observation." For Clifford, the predicament of culture involves the difficulty of being in a culture while looking at it, "a form of personal and collective self-fashioning." (Anthropologist Ted Carpenter was fond of quoting John Culkin's remark: "We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish.") A modern ethnographer must move between cultures: "[Ethnography] is perpetually displaced, both regionally focused and broadly comparative, a form both of dwelling and of travel in a world where the two experiences are less and less distinct" (9).

In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford approaches ethnographic texts as "orchestrations...constructed domains of truth, serious fictions" (10). As such, in many ways they resemble those art forms which make use of collage, juxtaposition, and other forms of extended comparison.

In defining culture, then, it is important that we locate ourselves (and our beliefs, ethics, and assumptions) in relation to the culture we are studying, since culture is context-specific. It is also important to keep in mind, according to Clifford, that local cultures (sub-cultures) are often established in opposition to what might be termed the official culture--the status quo--defined by those with significant access to the media. In many cases, this opposition is between the individual, or small group, and the larger cultural body used as a sign of social cohesion and control. While popular culture is often defined as mass culture--the culture of the majority--it can also be seen as a site of continual change, adaptation, and subversion.

(James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.)

FISH OUT OF WATER

"We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish."
John Culkin (qtd. in Edmund Carpenter's
They Became What They Beheld )

We've been born into a world where most of what passes for reality is mediated for us. Even before television, radio, newspapers, computers, and books begin telling us stories about what is happening out there, our parents or caregivers speak to us about the perils and joys of the world. As human beings we intuit that there is something out there that exists, undeniably, apart from us and our perceptions.

Who in North America doubts that media play a significant role in our lives? Think of politics, commerce, education, recreation, art and culture, or social interaction--it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discuss any of these activities without some acknowledgement of the medium through which we "know" about these things.

We are inundated by messages speaking about technological determinism: the belief that technology must be adopted as it becomes available if we are to evolve as a species (or at least as a global corporate culture!). Where are the perceptive critics of the media who can balance this wave of technological promotion on the one hand, with the cynicism of the common people on the other? The real test for a student of the media is to find the middle path--the path free of ideology and rhetoric, at the mid-point between a technological utopia and the irrational fear of technological change--to arrive at a clear-eyed and knowledgeable assessment of the way we communicate with one another.

We're on the edge of the (former) empire, and that gives us a certain vantage point. The Canadian media theorist Harold Adams Innis created a philosophical niche for the media analyst who lives on the margins of powerful nations. Along with his disciple, Marshall McLuhan, Innis established strategies for investigating both the medium and the message. We need a model for investigating the media which provides a perspective, a place to stand, without removing us too far from the centre of the action. Like the fish in water, we are so immersed in our (mediated) environment we forget it's even there.

FISH OUT OF WATER

"We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish."
John Culkin (qtd. in Edmund Carpenter's
They Became What They Beheld )

We've been born into a world where most of what passes for reality is mediated for us. Even before television, radio, newspapers, computers, and books begin telling us stories about what is happening out there, our parents or caregivers speak to us about the perils and joys of the world. As human beings we intuit that there is something out there that exists, undeniably, apart from us and our perceptions.

Who in North America doubts that media play a significant role in our lives? Think of politics, commerce, education, recreation, art and culture, or social interaction--it would be difficult, if not impossible, to discuss any of these activities without some acknowledgement of the medium through which we "know" about these things.

We are inundated by messages speaking about technological determinism: the belief that technology must be adopted as it becomes available if we are to evolve as a species (or at least as a global corporate culture!). Where are the perceptive critics of the media who can balance this wave of technological promotion on the one hand, with the cynicism of the common people on the other? The real test for a student of the media is to find the middle path--the path free of ideology and rhetoric, at the mid-point between a technological utopia and the irrational fear of technological change--to arrive at a clear-eyed and knowledgeable assessment of the way we communicate with one another.

We're on the edge of the (former) empire, and that gives us a certain vantage point. The Canadian media theorist Harold Adams Innis created a philosophical niche for the media analyst who lives on the margins of powerful nations. Along with his disciple, Marshall McLuhan, Innis established strategies for investigating both the medium and the message. We need a model for investigating the media which provides a perspective, a place to stand, without removing us too far from the centre of the action. Like the fish in water, we are so immersed in our (mediated) environment we forget it's even there.

Time To Reject Corporate Influence On Washington

2008-03-29T21:22:00.002-04:00

Published on Friday, March 21, 2008 by CNet News

Larry Lessig: Time To Reject Corporate Influence on Washington
by Anne Broache

WASHINGTON–Iconic Internet law professor Larry Lessig may have cast off plans for a congressional bid of his own, but he still wants to turn the political process as we know it upside down.

No more money from corporate political action committees and lobbyists. No more earmarks to fund pet projects in federal spending bills. Public financing for all
congressional campaigns. And throughout it all, transparency.

Those are the four pillars of Lessig’s “Change Congress” movement, which he unveiled, along with a beta Web site, which he describes as a “mash-up applied to politics,” at an event here Thursday afternoon. For the project, he has teamed up with Joe Trippi, best known as the national campaign manager for Democrat Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and its pioneering use of online organizing.

None of his ideas, of course, are particularly new, which Lessig himself readily acknowledged. A number of organizations–including Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen and the Sunlight Foundation, which sponsored his talk on Thursday–dedicate themselves exclusively to promoting government transparency. Projects like Open Secrets offer more readily searchable databases of political campaign contributions, while groups like Citizens Against Government Waste have made it a mission to expose congressional pork-barrel spending.

And even some politicians are already displaying interest in those topics. A number of congressional Republicans have been rallying for an earmark freeze. On the Democratic side, Senators Barack Obama (and, when he was in the race, former Sen. John Edwards) pledged not to accept presidential campaign contributions from registered lobbyists and PACs.

Lessig, who briefly flirted with running this year for the Silicon Valley seat vacated by the late Rep. Tom Lantos, said he’s not trying to compete with existing efforts but to “complement” them.

“My claim here is not some simple claim against money or the importance of money,” Lessig said, as he paged through slides containing key words (”dependence”) and an occasional image (dollar bills, the U.S. Capitol). “We just need to recognize that money in certain places is destructive of trust.”

It’s not “personal corruption” he’s after, either, as he said he considers the current Democratic Congress to be one of the least corrupt in history. Rather, it’s an “institutional” corruption, which he said is exemplified, to name a few examples, by the sugar lobby’s alleged influence on government nutritional guidelines, the pharmaceutical lobby’s influence on federal drug approvals, and the energy lobby’s influence on global warming policy. Key policy errors are being made because of this “economy of influence” and “improper dependence on money,” Lessig charged.

“It’s not a dependence that reveals itself in the way evil people act, but a dependence that corrupts even the way good people solve the problems they come to Washington to address,” he said. “We need to solve this problem now.”

Lessig even hit out at unnamed law-professor colleagues for “accepting money, hundreds of thousands of dollars to write these expert reports,” saying he eschews discussing public policy matters “related to anyone who has ever compensated me.” He recounted feeling more than a little resentment when, in an e-mail exchange with Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.), the senator implied that Lessig’s support for Net neutrality regulations stemmed from monetary nudging from the likes of Google, which was not the case.

The first “layer” of the Change Congress project is now live at its Web site. It allows politicians and citizens alike to sign up in support of one or more or the movement’s four tenets and nab an icon and code to broadcast their support on their Web sites. The approach is modeled after Lessig’s own Creative Commons licensing arrangement, in which content creators are free to customize the extent to which others can share and remix their works.

The site also houses a “sludge-colored” map on which users can click congressional districts and learn how much of an elected politico’s political donations come from PACs.

In a second phase, Lessig plans to use Wikipedia-style tools to attract collaborators who work on discerning where various candidates and members of Congress stand on the movement’s four principles. Those citizens will also ask the politicians to pledge their support formally, and they’ll use that information to plot out, district by district, who’s in and who’s out. Lessig said he’s going after the Wikipedia model of amassing information, mobilizing lots of people to share the research and advocacy in a “manageable, digestible, segmentable” way.

During the final phase, people will be asked to pledge money to candidates who have supported the Change Congress movement’s priorities.

Lessig likened his vision to what an alcoholic’s struggle for recovery. Sure, that person has to worry about resolving problems with his family, or his job, or his liver, but before he can face those things, he has to confront the alcoholism itself.
The way Lessig sees it, the nation’s most important problems–global warming, education, and the Iraq war, to name a few–can’t be remedied until “we solve this first problem, this dependence on money.”

© 2008 CNet News

Let America Be America Again.

2008-03-29T21:20:00.001-04:00

Three Words Progressives Can Use to Win Elections

By Bernie Horn, Berrett-Koehler Publishing

Posted on March 27, 2008, Printed on March 28, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/79769/

This excerpt was adapted from Chapter One of Framing the Future: How Progressive Values Can Win Elections and Influence People.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

In this poem, Langston Hughes famously evokes the spirit of the American dream. It is our soaring common vision -- a portrait of an America without tyranny, without injustice.

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed --
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

The American dream is not about a society where government secures the greatest good for the greatest number. Our dream is personal. It's about a poor child delivering newspapers and one day ending up as the publisher. It's about an unskilled worker attending night school and becoming a successful manager. It's about individuals and families practicing their religion without interference, getting ahead through hard work, and being able to retire in security and comfort. The American dream is a prayer, a vision, a fervent hope that every individual may be given a fair chance to build a successful life.

The progressive-liberal-Democratic base of voters would gladly accept a communitarian philosophy. I, too, wish that American culture were more oriented toward altruism and community. But it isn't. A realistic progressive philosophy is one that accepts our national culture of individualism and -- nevertheless -- seeks to make the American dream accessible to all. How can we envision such a philosophy?

Balance Is Justice

Imagine a balance scale -- the old-fashioned kind with two pans, one suspended from each end of a bar. It's the kind of scale that symbolizes equal justice under law. In a progressive world, the role of government is to help balance the scale when powerful individuals or organizations compete against weaker ones. Government should function as a counterweight on the scale of justice. The greater the disparity of power between competing interests, the greater weight the government must provide to the weaker side.

It is not government's job to ensure that everyone wins every competition -- that would be a logical impossibility. Instead, government must ensure that, whenever possible, competition is both fair and humane. In other words, justice is the purpose of government, and in an individualistic society, balance is the means of achieving justice.

A system in balance rewards hard work, efficiency, and innovation -- which benefit all of society, and discourages crime, corruption, and schemes to game the system -- which rob all of society. But isn't balance an awfully broad principle? How do we apply it? Let's break down public policy into three situations, where: (1) government has no proper role; (2) government acts as a referee; and (3) government acts as a protector.

Freedom

Where government has no proper role, because public action would violate individual rights, progressive policy should be based on freedom. By freedom, I mean the absence of legal interference with our fundamental rights -- freedom of speech, religion, and association; the right to privacy; the rights of the accused; and the right of all citizens to vote. Compared to an individual, government wields tremendous power, so a progressive policy adds great weight -- in the form of strong legal rights -- to the individual's side of the scale.

Freedom is the cornerstone of America's value system. For two centuries, America has been defined by its commitment to freedom. One poll found that Americans believe -- by a margin of 73 to 15 percent -- that freedom is more important than equality. But because it's so popular, freedom is the most misused of all political terms.
Neoconservatives have incessantly proclaimed to Americans that both the war in Iraq and the "war on terror" are in defense of our freedom. Don't believe it. Our freedom is not in jeopardy -- neither the Iraqis nor al-Qaeda are attempting to invade America and control our government. U.S. military and police actions might be said to protect our security, but not our freedom. So don't use the word freedom when discussing terrorism or Iraq -- it just provides a false justification for war.
Similarly, conservatives equate freedom with capitalism. Don't believe it. Our nation's market economy is not free from government control -- actually, it is dominated by government. Markets are based on a dense web of laws enforced by multiple layers of federal, state, and local agencies. Businesses are not free to sell diseased meat, make insider stock trades, pollute our air and water, or discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity. So don't be fooled by the terms free market, free enterprise, or free trade, because they all support right-wing policies.

Most astonishing, I think, is the way religious extremists use the word freedom to mean the very opposite. They argue that freedom gives them the right to use the power of government to impose their religious views on the rest of us. When they pressure school boards to mandate the teaching of intelligent design in schools, when they erect monuments to the Ten Commandments in courthouses, when they work to ban all abortions, when they seek to promote prayer in public schools, right-wingers assert it's an exercise in religious freedom. Please, don't believe it. Freedom is the absence of government intervention.

When defined too broadly, freedom becomes an empty platitude that can be wielded as a bludgeon to pummel any side of any political argument. My freedom to operate a monopoly tramples on your freedom to buy cheaper products. My freedom to drive an unsafe vehicle tramples on your freedom to travel the same roads in safety. My freedom to smoke in a bar tramples on your freedom to breathe clean air. "Freedom to ..." and "freedom from ..." gets us nowhere.

Besides, progressives have had plenty of opportunities in the past few years to rally for freedom solely in defense of individual rights. To name just a few:

• When the National Security Agency conducts warrantless eavesdropping on the phone calls and e-mails of innocent Americans, it's a violation of our freedom.

• When the FBI's TALON database shows that the government has been spying on peaceful domestic groups, including Quakers, the Campus Antiwar Network, and Veterans for Peace, it's a violation of our freedom.

• When the federal government arrests an American citizen, Jose Padilla, on American soil and holds him for years without the most basic rights afforded the accused, keeping him in almost complete isolation and preventing him even from talking to a lawyer during his first twenty-one months in a military prison, it's a violation of our freedom.

• When, just forty-five days after the September 11 attacks, with almost no debate, Congress approves the USA Patriot Act, broadly increasing government power to search medical, tax, and even library records without probable cause, and to break into homes to conduct secret searches, it's a violation of our freedom.
After years of warrantless wiretapping, illegal imprisonments, and torture, we should all be saying the F-word with regularity. No, no, I mean freedom. Why do progressives seem allergic to this word?

Opportunity

Where government acts as a referee between private, unequal interests, progressive policy should be based on opportunity. By opportunity, I mean a level playing field in social and economic affairs -- fair dealings between the powerful and the less powerful, the elimination of discrimination, and a quality education for all. Competing interests usually hold unequal power, so progressive policy adds weight -- guarantees of specific protections -- to the weaker interest. For example, unskilled low-wage workers have no leverage to bargain for higher pay. That's why it is up to the government to impose a reasonable minimum wage. Quite simply, when social and market forces do not naturally promote equal opportunity, government must step in.
Opportunity means, more than anything, a fair marketplace. Although progressives tend to stress the rights of consumers and employees against businesses, opportunity also means fairness between businesses -- especially helping small enterprises against large ones -- and fairness for stockholders against corporate officers. Individual ambition, innovation, and effort -- harnessed by the market system -- are supposed to benefit society as a whole. But that can happen only when the competition is fair.

The concept of opportunity is an easy sell to progressives. Hubert Humphrey said, "The struggle for equal opportunity in America is the struggle for America's soul." Amen to that.

And yet, since the Reagan years, we've been losing that struggle:

• Wage inequality has grown. From 1979 to 2003, income for those in the bottom tenth of wage earners increased less than 1 percent, and millions actually earn less today than they did then, adjusting for inflation. During that same period, salaries for Americans in the top tenth increased 27 percent.

• The richest have gained the most. Between 1996 and 2001, the richest 1 percent of Americans received 21.6 percent of all the gains in national income. CEO pay, especially, has skyrocketed. Today, the richest 10 percent of Americans own 71 percent of all the wealth -- the top 1 percent own 33 percent of all assets.

• Poverty has increased. Although the number of Americans living in poverty steadily declined from 1993 to 2000, at least five million have fallen below the poverty line since George W. Bush took office.

• Educational inequality has worsened. Economic (and often racial) segregation of schools has increased, with schools in poorer areas having less money per student and paying less per teacher while dealing with larger class sizes, crumbling facilities, and inadequate equipment. Students who need more resources are given less.

Equal opportunity has taken it on the chin. The gauzy mist of the American dream is being blown away by a gust of savage reality. That's because the right wing opposes opportunity.

Conservatives have fought against ending discrimination, even though equal treatment is a precondition for equal opportunity. They don't even pretend to support equal opportunity in commerce; instead, conservatives lobby for government favors, no-bid contracts, and economic development giveaways. And right-wingers seek to destroy anything that allows individuals to stand up to larger economic forces, with labor unions, consumer protections, and antimonopoly policies under constant attack.
Our mission is clear. It is to guarantee that all Americans are able to realize their goals through education, hard work, and fair pay. We must provide every person, not just the privileged few, with an equal opportunity to pursue a better life -- equal access to the American dream.

Security

Where government acts to protect those who cannot reasonably protect themselves, including future generations, progressive policy should be based on security. By security, I mean protecting Americans from domestic criminals and foreign terrorists, of course, but also insuring the sick and the vulnerable, safeguarding the food we eat and products we use, and preserving our environment.
There is always a threat that larger or unexpected forces will attack any one of us, so progressive policy adds weight, in the form of government institutions and programs, that helps protect us from harm. For example, society has a responsibility to protect the elderly, the disabled, widows, and orphans and that's why an aptly named federal program has functioned in that role for more than a half-century --

Social Security.

Progressives support the concept of security, of course. But as I've traveled around the country giving workshops to progressives, I notice that we usually detour around the word. To ignore security is to lose the argument.
And this is an argument we want to have. To quote the President, "Bring it on."

Since 2001, conservatives have devastated national and individual security:

• The Bush Administration's doctrine of preemptive war, its utter contempt for our traditional allies, its violations of the Geneva Conventions, and its refusal to comply with important treaties have sacrificed America's moral standing in international affairs. As a result, our nation is now far less able to protect Americans and American interests worldwide.

• The right-wing attack on Social Security is just one small facet of a coordinated, cold-blooded plan to dismantle New Deal and Great Society programs that protect our health, our safety, and our environment.

• The profligate spending and massive tax breaks for the wealthy enacted by a conservative-controlled Congress greatly restrict our nation's ability to deal with threats to our security -- from emergency preparedness to protection of the vulnerable in our communities.

In every important way, the right wing has made our country less secure. So let's keep the upper hand in this debate. Whether we're talking about Iraq or drug-related crime, progressives are for commonsense policies that will make Americans safer.

The All-American Philosophy

Now that you think about it, don't the principles of freedom, opportunity, and security sound kind of familiar?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This famous line from the Declaration of Independence is more than a set of high-sounding platitudes -- it is an assertion of American political philosophy. And it's a progressive philosophy.

By "Life," Thomas Jefferson did not mean simply the right to survival, which would suggest that being beaten almost to death is OK. He meant a right to personal security. By "Liberty," Jefferson was referring to the kinds of freedoms that were ultimately written into federal and state Bills of Rights, blocking the government from infringing upon speech, religion, the press, and trial by jury, as well as protecting individuals from wrongful criminal prosecutions. And how do we translate Jefferson's "pursuit of Happiness"? It cannot mean that everyone has the God-given right to do whatever makes them happy. Read "happiness" together with the earlier part of the same sentence, "all men are created equal." Jefferson is not saying that people have an unbridled right to pursue happiness; he is saying they have an equal right to pursue happiness. In today's language, we'd call that equal opportunity.
We progressives haven't forgotten the principles that inspired our nation. But we have misplaced them. And worse, we've allowed right-wing extremists to hijack our ideals and wave them like a flag, rallying Americans to their distinctly un-American cause.

It is time to right that wrong. Let's fit our progressive policies with a classic (and popular!) philosophical frame: freedom, opportunity, and security for all.

© 2008 Berrett-Koehler Publishing All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/79769/

Pot Prisoners Cost Americans $1 Billion A Year

2008-03-29T21:17:00.004-04:00

Pot Prisoners Cost Americans $1 Billion a Year
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet

Posted on February 10, 2007, Printed on February 10, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/47815/

American taxpayers are now spending more than a billion dollars per year to incarcerate its citizens for pot. That's according to statistics recently released by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

According to the new BJS report, "Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004," 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are serving time for marijuana offenses. Combining these percentages with separate U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners suggests that there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county and/or local jails for pot-related offenses.

Multiplying these totals by U.S. DOJ prison expenditure data reveals that taxpayers are spending more than $1 billion annually to imprison pot offenders.

The new report is noteworthy because it undermines the common claim from law enforcement officers and bureaucrats, specifically White House drug czar John Walters, that few, if any, Americans are incarcerated for marijuana-related offenses. In reality, nearly 1 out of 8 U.S. drug prisoners are locked up for pot.
Of course, several hundred thousand more Americans are arrested each year for violating marijuana laws, costing taxpayers another $8 billion dollars annually in criminal justice costs.

According to the most recent figures available from the FBI, police arrested an estimated 786,545 people on marijuana charges in 2005 -- more than twice the number of Americans arrested just 12 years ago. Among those arrested, about 88 percent -- some 696,074 Americans -- were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,471 individuals were charged with "sale/manufacture," a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use.

These totals are the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. Nevertheless, self-reported pot use by adults, as well as the ready availability of marijuana on the black market, remains virtually unchanged.

Marijuana isn't a harmless substance, and those who argue for a change in the drug's legal status do not claim it to be. However, pot's relative risks to the user and society are arguably fewer than those of alcohol and tobacco, and they do not warrant the expenses associated with targeting, arresting and prosecuting hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

According to federal statistics, about 94 million Americans -- that's 40 percent of the U.S. population age 12 or older -- self-identify as having used cannabis at some point in their lives, and relatively few acknowledge having suffered significant deleterious health effects due to their use. America's public policies should reflect this reality, not deny it. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/47815/

Million Acres Of Rainforest To Be Saved

2008-03-29T21:13:00.001-04:00

Published on Thursday, March 27, 2008 by The Independent/UK
Million Acres of Guyanese Rainforest To Be Saved In Groundbreaking Deal
by Daniel Howden

A deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests - paying, for the first time, for their upkeep as “utilities” that provide vital services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation.
The agreement, to be announced tomorrow in New York, will secure the future of one million acres of pristine rainforest in Guyana, the first move of its kind, and will open the way for financial markets to play a key role in safeguarding the fate of the world’s forests.

The initiative follows Guyana’s extraordinary offer, revealed in The Independent in November, to place its entire standing forest under the protection of a British-led international body in return for development aid.

Hylton Murray-Philipson, director of the London-based financiers Canopy Capital, who sealed the deal with the Iwokrama rainforest, said: “How can it be that Google’s services are worth billions but those from all the world’s rainforests amount to nothing?” The past year has been a pivotal one for the fast- disappearing tropical forests that form a cooling band around the equator because the world has recognised deforestation as the second leading cause of CO2 emissions. Leaders at the UN climate summit in Bali in December agreed to include efforts to halt the destruction of forests in a new global deal to save the world from runaway climate change.

“As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide rise, emissions will carry an ever-mounting cost and conservation will acquire real value. The investment community is beginning to wake up to this,” Mr Murray-Philipson added.

Guyana, sandwiched between the Latin American giants Venezuela and Brazil, is home to fewer than amillion people but 80 per cent of its land is covered by an intact rainforest larger than England. The Guiana Shield is one of only four intact rainforests left on the planet and at its heart lies the Iwokrama reserve, gifted to the Commonwealth in 1989 as a laboratory for pioneering conservation projects.
Iwokrama, which means “place of refuge” in the Makushi language, is home to some of the world’s most endangered species including jaguar, giant river otter, anaconda and giant anteater.

Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo, a former economist, has appealed for state and private sector help for the country to avoid succumbing to the rampant deforestation currently blighting Brazil and Indonesia, in an effort to raise living standards in one of Latin America’s poorest countries.

“Forests do much more for us than just store carbon … This first significant step is in keeping with President Jagdeo’s visionary approach to safeguarding all the forests of Guyana,” said Iwokrama’s chairman, Edward Glover.
The deal, drawn up by the international firm Stephenson Harwood, is the first serious attempt to pay for the ecosystem services provided by rainforests.
“We should move beyond emissions-based trading to measure and place a value on all the services they provide,” said Mr Glover.

In addition to providing shelter to half the world’s terrestrial species and one billion of the earth’s poorest people, forests such as Iwokrama act as pumps, drawing water from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Amazon and Guiana Shield where they help to seed clouds and deliver moisture over vast distances.

The Amazon generates the rain that falls on the vast soya estates of Sao Paulo, helping to make Brazil the second biggest agricultural exporter in the world.
Guyana’s attempt to secure its entire standing forest has received the backing of the British environment minister Phil Woolas and Downing Street has told The Independent that it is “considering the offer”. President Jagdeo met with Gordon Brown on the sidelines of a recent Commonwealth Summit in Uganda where they discussed the proposal. The UN road map to a deal to replace the Kyoto protocols foresees payments from wealthy climate-polluting nations to developing countries to compensate for potential income lost through avoiding deforestation. But there are fears that this formula may simply displace the demand for timber and cheap agricultural land.

Andrew Mitchell, head of the Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of rainforest scientists, said: “The decision on forests at December’s conference in Bali is a major step in tackling climate change but it fails to reward countries such as Guyana that aren’t cutting down their forests.”

© 2008 The Independent

How The Media Defines Masculinity

2008-03-29T21:09:00.001-04:00

Media Awareness Network www.media-awareness.ca

How the Media Define Masculinity
Families, friends, teachers, and community leaders all play a role in helping boys define what it means to be a man. Mainstream media representations also play a role in reinforcing ideas about what it means to be a "real" man in our society. In most media portrayals, male characters are rewarded for self-control and the control of others, aggression and violence, financial independence, and physical desirability.
In 1999, Children Now, a California-based organization that examines the impact of media on children and youth, released a report entitled Boys to Men: Media Messages About Masculinity. The report argues that the media’s portrayal of men tends to reinforce men’s social dominance.
The report observes that:
• the majority of male characters in media are heterosexual
• male characters are more often associated with the public sphere of work, rather than the private sphere of the home, and issues and problems related to work are more significant than personal issues
• non-white male characters are more likely to experience personal problems and are more likely to use physical aggression or violence to solve those problems
Children Now conclude that these dominant trends in the media’s portrayal of men reinforce and support social attitudes that link masculinity to power, dominance and control.
In Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, Jackson Katz and Jeremy Earp argue that the media provide an important perspective on social attitudes—and that while the media are not the cause of violent behaviour in men and boys, they do portray male violence as a normal expression of masculinity.
In a roundtable discussion that appeared in Châtelaine Magazine, TV journalist Denise Bombardier underlined the difference in the way the media treats violence, depending on the sex of the aggressor. "In Quebec, when a man kills his son, the headlines read ‘Another Case of Domestic Violence,’ she notes. If it’s a woman who kills her son, it is reported 'A Woman Depressed.'"
The portrayal and acceptance of men by the media as socially powerful and physically violent serve to reinforce assumptions about how men and boys should act in society, how they should treat each other, as well as how they should treat women and children.

Common Stereotypes of Men in Media
Various media analysts and researchers argue that media portrayals of male characters fall within a range of stereotypes. The report Boys to Men: Media Messages About Masculinity, identifies the most popular stereotypes of male characters as the Joker, the Jock, the Strong Silent Type, the Big Shot and the Action Hero.
The Joker is a very popular character with boys, perhaps because laughter is part of their own "mask of masculinity." A potential negative consequence of this stereotype is the assumption that boys and men should not be serious or emotional. However, researchers have also argued that humorous roles can be used to expand definitions of masculinity.
The Jock is always willing to "compromise his own long-term health; he must fight other men when necessary; he must avoid being soft; and he must be aggressive." By demonstrating his power and strength, the jock wins the approval of other men and the adoration of women.
The Strong Silent Type focuses on "being in charge, acting decisively, containing emotion, and succeeding with women." This stereotype reinforces the assumption that men and boys should always be in control, and that talking about one’s feelings is a sign of weakness.
The Big Shot is defined by his professional status. He is the "epitome of success, embodying the characteristics and acquiring the possessions that society deems valuable." This stereotype suggests that a real man must be economically powerful and socially successful.
The Action Hero is "strong, but not necessarily silent. He is often angry. Above all, he is aggressive in the extreme and, increasingly over the past several decades, he engages in violent behavior."
Another common stereotype...
The Buffoon commonly appears as a bungling father figure in TV ads and sitcoms. Usually well-intentioned and light-hearted, these characters range from slightly inept to completely hopeless when it comes to parenting their children or dealing with domestic (or workplace) issues.

Children's Perceptions of Male Stereotypes
In 1999, the research group Children Now asked boys between the ages of 10 and 17 about how their perceptions of the male characters they saw on television, in music videos and in movies. From the study, the group concluded that the media do not reflect the changing work and family experiences of most men today—and that this fact is not lost on the boys, who noticed the discrepancies between the media portrayals and the reality they knew.
Some of the study’s main observations:
• on television, most men and boys usually keep their attention focused mostly just on women and girls
• many males on TV are violent and angry
• men are generally leaders and problem-solvers
• males are funny, confident, successful and athletic
• it’s rare to see men or boys crying or otherwise showing vulnerability
• male characters on TV could not be described as "sensitive"
• male characters are mostly shown in the workplace, and only rarely at home
• more than a third of the boys had never seen a man on TV doing domestic chores
The study also revealed that the boys were quite aware that these male characters on television differed from their own friends and fathers, and from themselves. They had also noticed that media portrayals of success do not necessarily reflect their own ideas of real-life success.
The work of French sociologist Pascal Duret sheds a different light on the subject. In his 1999 study Les jeunes et l’identité masculine, Duret attempted to analyze young peoples’ perceptions of male "virility." Though responses varied according to sex and social class, most kids saw virility in terms of physical strength and a muscular body. Courage, and the ability to protect, were also considered to be virile traits.
When young people were asked to name models of virility from the movies, actors like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger were common choices. But it wasn’t just the actors’ physical appearances that made them virile in the eyes of the young people; it was also the context in which they appeared. What these actors had in common was violent scenes in their films, and Duret concluded that even though the young people may have been unaware of their bias, for them violence was an essential aspect of virility.
As well, social class had a major impact on perceptions of virility: young people from disadvantaged backgrounds viewed virile characteristics much more positively than youths from more advantageous backgrounds. Duret attributed this difference to the value poor people can give to the idea of the "self-made man," who can become what he (or she) wants by dint of hard work.
This research, and the Children Now study, both suggest that the media should take the opportunity to reach beyond these stereotypes—and to present a fuller and more realistic picture of the lives, experiences and identities of men and boys today.

Men's Magazines and the Construction of Masculinity
Although most contemporary research on the portrayal of masculinity in the media has focused on violence, research has also begun to examine the portrayal of masculinity in men’s magazines such as Playboy, Maxim, GQ, and Esquire. These magazines, which focus on matters such as health, fashion, sex, relationships, and lifestyle, play a part in defining what it means to be a modern man.
Some critics argue that these magazines represent an improvement in media portrayals of gender since they focus on topics previously thought to be solely the concern of women. But others argue that such magazines still rely on stereotypical portrayals of men and masculinity, featuring handsome, white, well-built and well-dressed men, interested only in acquiring the finer things in life.
Media commentators argue that these magazines continue to relegate women to the background and, in doing so, are examples of social backlash directed against specific gains made by women in the paid labour force, mass media industries and other professions. They say that it is no coincidence that as women are achieving greater social, political and professional equality, these magazines symbolically relegate them to subordinate positions as sex objects.
While magazines such as Playboy and Maxim are criticized for objectifying women’s bodies, recent discussions about men’s magazines are focusing on what these magazines say about men and masculinity. Academics argue that the recent popularity of these magazines is a reflection of men’s uncertainty over the roles they are expected to assume in society, at work, and in their relationships.
In her 1983 discussion of Playboy, Barbara Ehrenreich notes when the magazine emerged in 1953, American men were beginning to feel constrained by the demands of marriage, work and fatherhood—and Playboy unapologetically celebrated the bachelor’s lifestyle.
She argues that Playboy painted an idealistic picture of the well-educated, confirmed bachelor who appreciates the finer things in life: wine, jazz, scotch, art, and women. Playboy’s success was built on its celebration of male independence from the domestic responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood.

Masculinity and Sports Media
Sports media also contribute to the construction of masculinity in contemporary society. A study conducted by the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles reports that 98 per cent of American boys between the ages of 8 and 17 consume sports media. Since professional sports are virtually dominated by men—from the athletes and coaches to the commentators and reporters—sports media have the potential to transmit powerful ideas about manliness and masculinity.
Recent studies on gender and sports media find that sports commentary reinforces perceptions of "violent masculinity." By praising athletes who continue to play while injured, and by using language of conflict and war to describe action, sports commentary reinforces violence and aggression as exciting and rewarding behaviour.
Sports broadcasts focus heavily on violence in professional sports, often replaying and over-analyzing footage of graphic injuries, accidents and fights. A 1999 Children Now study points out that conflict between players of opposing teams is often created or inflated to promote upcoming games.
The studies conclude that this focus on personal rivalry, conflict, and fierce competition reinforces the social attitude that violence and aggression are normal and natural expressions of masculine identity.

Masculinity and Advertising
In its study of masculinity and sports media, the research group Children Now found that most commercials directed to male viewers tend to air during sports programming. Women rarely appear in these commercials, and when they do, they’re generally portrayed in stereotypical ways.
In fact, in his analysis of gender in advertising, author and University of North Texas professor Steve Craig argues that women tend to be presented as "rewards" for men who choose the right product. He describes such commercials as "narratives of playful escapades away from home and family." They operate, he says, at the level of fantasy—presenting idealized portrayals of men and women. When he focused specifically on beer commercials, Craig found that the men were invariably "virile, slim and white"—and the women always "eager for male companionship."
Author and academic Susan Bordo (University of Kentucky) has also analyzed gender in advertising, and agrees that men are usually portrayed as virile, muscular and powerful. Their powerful bodies dominate space in the ads. For women, the focus is on slenderness, dieting, and attaining a feminine ideal; women are always presented as not just thin, but also weak and vulnerable.
These critics and others suggest that just as traditional advertising has for decades sexually objectified women and their bodies, today’s marketing campaigns are objectifying men in the same way. A 2002 study by the University of Wisconsin suggests that this new focus on fit and muscled male bodies is causing men the same anxiety and personal insecurity that women have felt for decades.

Male Authority in the Media
"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth."
Simone de Beauvoir
The media’s voice of authority is most often that of a middle-aged, professional, white male. These men dominate the opinion-shaping forums of talk radio, newspaper journalism, and television news and commentary, and male voices are those most commonly heard in television and radio commercials.
In 1996, NewsWatch Canada, an independent organization that assesses the portrayal of diversity in Canadian news, conducted a study of the CBC’s flagship program The National. The study found that:
• 84 per cent of news sources were male (only 8 per cent of which were visible minorities)
• 89 per cent of commentators were men in "elite" occupations
The U.S. media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reported similar trends in the American media in the early 90s:
• 89 per cent of the guests on ABC's Nightline were male, 92 per cent were white and 80 per cent were professionals
• 87 per cent of the guests on PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour were male, 90 per cent were white, and 67 per cent were current or former government officials
These voices are presented as the voices of experts, and studies have indicated that experts often represent conservative points of view, favouring the interests of powerful individuals, social groups and institutions. Little attention is paid to the opinions and experiences of women, gays and lesbians, members of visible minorities, or the working classes.
Non-white or working class men are also marginalized. Men who are members of minority groups are typically called upon as experts only in response to minority community matters, drugs and crime. And, as Barbara Ehrenreich notes, news and current affairs programming portrays working class men as dumb, inarticulate and old-fashioned.

Although information media are often presented as informed and "objective," many commentators argue that white male dominance of these media helps perpetuate sexism, racism, and class privilege in society. It is also argued that such coverage presents white masculinity as the social and cultural norm.
Entertainment media reinforce the stereotypes of the rich white male and the working class buffoon. Richard Butsch argues that television programmes tend to exaggerate affluence, and portray working class men as immature, irresponsible, and requiring the supervision of their “betters.”

Makeup for Men: Rethinking Masculinity

2008-03-29T21:07:00.001-04:00

Makeup for Men: Rethinking Masculinity

By Andrea Bartz, Sirens Magazine

Posted on March 21, 2008, Printed on March 21, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/80142/

Way back in the early '00s, I was Chorus Member No. 11 in my high school musical.

During six weeks of rehearsals, I discovered two things that make men infinitely more attractive -- at least to me. The first was flared jeans. (By way of explanation, we were doing a rather trippy version of "Pippin." Enter the Men's Boot cut. Thank you, Buckle.) The second, lord help me, was makeup. I didn't want to like it. I like my men mannish -- five o'clock shadows, hunting vests, burly arms that can lift me off the ground and into a hug. But a little concealer, a little mascara ... and damn if those men didn't look sexier. Zits, gone. Undereye circles, erased. Cheekbones, chiseled. From on stage, anyway, these guys were the pinnacle of androgynous beauty.

Since then, makeup has made its way off the stage and onto straight men nationwide. A little eyebrow gel on the guy at Banana Republic. A stroke of charcoal around the eyes of a budding musician. It seems there's been a revival in recent years that makes dudes in makeup more acceptable. Perhaps it's so they can say, "Yo, I can wear makeup and women still swoon over me." Remember the pink shirt phenomenon a few years back? Confidence is always sexy, and being comfortable enough to do something feminine is, in some ways, the ultimate show of machismo.

And if that's the case, a lot of today's fashion-forward men must have enough extra testosterone to bottle it to sell at a profit (hey, we think we're onto a product line there). Because men's cosmetics are getting to be as sophisticated and diversified as ours. There are, basically, two major classifications: The first is makeup that is supposed to look like actual, visible makeup, girl-style; I'll get to that in a bit. The second is makeup that is supposed to look like Pretty Man. Witness Studio5ive. Witness Male Species. Witness Naturally Man and the Men Pen and 4VOO. That last one even puts it all out there on its homepage: "Using cosmetics is no longer exclusive to gay men. Makeup is an essential element in men's grooming."

Welcome to the wonderful world of beauty pressure, boys! This kind of dolling up appears to be an acute symptom of metrosexuality: It all started when shaving cream manufacturers convinced the public that the foamy white stuff men had been using for decades just wouldn't cut it. "Try this, it'll work better!" they shouted, thrusting forward specialty gels. Sensing no resistance, they took another step forward. "Hey, try this too! Your women will love it!" they cried, adding exfoliants, creams, masks, and scrubs to the men's drugstore aisles. Intoxicated by their image-control abilities, this new breed of shiny clean men walked right into marketers' trap, snatching up lash tint and lip enhancers. It's called mascara and gloss, bro. Don't lie to yourself.

Now witness the other, more paradoxical side of the male makeup boom -- cosmetics that don't make one's eyes look magically larger or one's skin look clearer, but rather that look like, well, cosmetics. This category belongs mostly to the Rocker, who somehow simultaneously pulls off black eyeliner, ridiculous bangs, and undeniable sexiness. To subdivide further, we might look at the emo rockers (just look at that pretty Pete Wentz above!). In this case, guyliner makes sense -- it gives him teary, dreary Sad Clown eyes. Emo boys, like girls, can show their pain, the logic goes. So it's okay for them to borrow cosmetic strategies from the milder sex.

A related but different group is the Glam-Rockers. Think of Kevin Barnes of Of Montreal -- he manages guyliner, stupid bangs, bizarre costumes, and face glitter, and he's still oddly magnetic. Note also the eye makeup on Poison frontman and "Rock of Love" star Brett Michaels (who, rather than wearing shaggy bangs, sports a perpetual bandanna to hide his hair loss: man-vanity at its finest). Although not an actual musician, Johnny Depp personifies the brooding artiste. As Captain Jack Sparrow, he scored major sex appeal with smoky eyes. Honestly, would the kick-ass-est pirate of the 19th century have been running around with smoky peepers outlined in charcoal? We're not sure, but we're swooning anyway. That hasn't been a million Halloween costumes across the country several years running for nothing -- those dudes are getting laid. By chicks with Johnny Depp-in-eyeliner fantasies.

Last, I must give a nod to the Goth, who would probably tell me he was doing this eyeliner thing way before it was trendy. Surprising factoid: The Goth poster boy isn't Marilyn Manson, as you young kids might think, or even the Cure's Robert Smith -- but Dracula. Theories on origin of the pale-skin-black-eyeliner drill point to the Big Bad Bat himself, who roamed around in a bloodless body with dark, haunting eyes. The Goth subculture started out as one component of the punk rock movement. The black uniform and sullen stares countered the chipper days of disco, and when the punk rock scene faded, the subculture lived on. It's possible the Goth's makeup, in grand Dracula tradition, is supposed to make him look as scary and threatening as possible -- or he might just be seeking shock value. Pay attention to me, but do not attempt communication, the entire look often screams. Most likely, he just doesn't want you to follow him into Duane Reade, where he will gaze for several minutes at the array of pale pressed powders at reasonable prices.

So how do women feel about men taking up more medicine cabinet space? I took an informal poll of my straight girlfriends. A sampling of responses:

"As long as it's on Zac Efron and he's dancing on a golf course." (Explanatory YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UGbIsFXRdk)

"Boys in makeup? Only if we're talking about boys in Chelsea."

"I'm okay with it, as long as it's Jared Leto, and only if it's Jared Leto, and not because of his crappy band, but because he once was Jordan Catalano. Ooh! I wonder if he decided to wear eyeliner because of Rickie!" [rushes to MSCL.com, a tribute site to "My So-Called Life," to bring up relevant script:]

Rickie: Okay, see, the Egyptians? They wore eyeliner to ward off evil spirits. They believed that if they outlined their eyes that the good spirits would spot them easier. I read it in a book. So that's why I tried it ... the eyeliner, I mean.

Brian: So, you believe in, like, evil spirits?

Rickie: Oh, no. I'm Catholic. Basically, I just like how it looks.

Brian: Oh, okay. That kinda makes sense I guess.

Actually, I think that's it -- for the most part men wear it if they like how it looks. It's not a way for guys to feel feminine or macho, but rather a way of saying, "I can wear whatever the 'F' I want and still rock out/commandeer ships/ have my own reality dating show ... " And if feminism is really about equality, we can't hold certain lifestyle choices sacred to only our gender. Remember when men got all up in arms about women trading skirts for pants? Wearing makeup is a choice, sort of like working full-time or carrying a purse or watching pro-wrestling. Leaving choices open to half the population means duress to the other 50 percent. And nobody wins when half the camp has its arms tied behind its back.

Which doesn't mean you have to like it. You already know my feelings on dolled-up dudes wearing flared jeans and singing "We've Got Magic to Do" on stage. In the real world, I think makeup can look good on guys if it's obvious (not metro makeup) and they're wearing it confidently to distinguish themselves from a crowd. If that's the case, more power to 'em. Bring on the guyliner.

© 2008 Sirens Magazine All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/80142/

Climate Change: The World's Biggest Security Threat

2008-03-20T21:13:00.001-04:00

By Nicole Itano, Christian Science MonitorPosted on March 18, 2008, Printed on March 18, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/79882/

Rising sea levels are what some nations fear most about global warming. But in Europe, climate change is likely to mean a new flood of immigrants from Africa and other poorer countries, according to a new report.

That was one of the issues before the heads of state from the 27-member European Union as they gathered in Brussels Thursday and Friday to address climate change and, in particular, the security threats it raises.

Unchecked climate change could not only cause a flood of new environmental migrants to Europe, it could spark instability in energy-producing states and lead to the collapse of fragile states around the world, says the report by EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European commissioner for external relations. Climate change, the report says, is a "threat multiplier" which "intensifies existing trends, tensions, and instability."
European leaders say they have an important role to play in leading the world towards an agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions -- and that's on this meeting's agenda, too. But increasingly, EU leaders are also seeing the need to prepare for the impacts of climate change at home. Meeting those challenges, analysts say, may require greater coordination of foreign policies.

"There's really a new approach and perspective developing," says Dirk Messner, director of the German Advisory Council on Global Change. "Climate change has been addressed until very recently as an environmental problem. ... But dangerous climate change, beyond 2 degrees or so, will result in a destabilization processes around the world."

In 2007, the Solana report notes, all but one of the emergencies for which the UN appealed for humanitarian aid had climate dimensions. And new trading routes are opening in the Arctic as the polar ice caps melt, shifting the balance of power in the region.

Little in the report is new. In fact, it echoes a widely cited 2007 study by 11 retired American admirals and generals issued by CNA Corporation, a Virginia think tank.

But the stark warning from such high-ranking EU officials is likely to invigorate the debate in Europe about the links between climate and security -- as well as highlight the urgency of coming to some sort of global agreement on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Europe, experts say, is not likely to experience climate-related instability within its own territory -- the brunt of the impact of global warming is likely to fall on the world's poor. But on the Continent's borders are regions, such as North Africa and the Middle East, that are both political fragile and acutely vulnerable to climate change.

"Migration is the real biggie," says Jeffrey Mazo, an expert on climate and security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "What's causing the migration is food insecurity and water insecurity and general insecurity in developing nations that don't have the infrastructure to cope with climate change impacts."

For countries like Greece and Spain, which lie on the edges of Europe and are already grappling with major illegal immigration crises, the threat of millions of environmental migrants is a worrying prospect. Already, the Greek government is planning to use development aid to address climate change-related problems in countries that are courses of illegal immigration, in hopes of pre-empting the problem.

Another effort that might help create jobs and stem migration is French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Mediterranean Union plan. On Thursday evening, he was scheduled to present the program intended to forge closer ties between Europe and North Africa and Middle Eastern countries. It includes the creation of a Euro-Mediterranean free trade area by 2010.

Critics of Mr. Sarkozy's efforts say that since 1995 the EU has given out $30 billion in grants and loans to 10 countries stretching from Morocco to Turkey, but with little result in terms of boosting democracy or ending poverty, reports the Associated Press.

Others argue that European officials are still uncertain of the scale of the potential problems caused by climate change. One often-cited estimate predicts that there will be 200 million climate migrants by 2050. But others put the figure nearer 20 million.

"It's taken people years to accept that climate change is actually true. Now it's a fact of life," says Jemini Pandya, a spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations organization. "Migration and climate change are two of the more pressing issues of the day. But until recently, there's been virtually no link between the two in terms of study and research."

Indeed, there's increasingly consensus that a crisis is looming, and experts say that a Europe-wide immigration policy -- taking into account the issue of environmental migration -- will have to be developed. The new EU foreign-policy representative, who will be appointed next year, will have to put climate issues at the top of the agenda.

"It's not just the European Union coming together," says Dr. Mazo. "Climate change is as much an opportunity as it is a threat on the security front, for strengthening all sorts of regional and global institutions."

Linking climate change to security is key to the issue being taken more seriously by Europe's political leaders. Dr. Messner says that until recently, climate change was the domain of environment ministers, who generally had relatively little power. Now, it's the realm of presidents and prime ministers.

"A wider community of the political class is seeing climate change as a serious issue," says Messner, who cites as an example the response of the German foreign minister to a recent report issued by his organization. "The political decisionmakers are now understanding what is going on."

Nicole Itano is an Italian correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.
© 2008 Christian Science Monitor All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/79882/

Appalling Spread of False Information Requires Stronger Media Accountability

2008-03-16T19:59:00.002-04:00

By Mark Weisbrot, AlterNetPosted on March 12, 2008,
Printed on March 14, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/79465/

"A free press is supposed to function as our democracy's immune system against . . . gross errors of fact and understanding," wrote Al Gore in his book, The Assault on Reason. But it doesn't - as Gore explains -- and that is what makes the mass media one of the most important obstacles to social and economic progress in the 21st century.

How the media treats repeated falsehoods is a key issue. For example, when the New York Times reports on the allegation -- spread by his enemies -- that presidential candidate Barack Obama is a Muslim, there is a sentence that follows immediately: "In fact, he is a Christian. . ."
The media didn't do this kind of "immune system" work when it reported on the run-up to the Iraq war. As a result, more than 70 percent of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein was involved in the massacre of September 11. More than 4,000 Americans and over one million Iraqis have been killed in the violence that perhaps could have been averted with better journalism.

A 2008 study by the Center for Public Integrity, "The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War," documents 935 false statements by President Bush and seven top officials of his administration. The report notes that "much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, 'independent' validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq."

The mass media fails us on many issues other than war and peace. Most Americans under 50 think they are never going to see their Social Security benefits. In fact, the probability that they won't get their Social Security benefits is about the same as the chance that there won't be a U.S. government when they retire - pretty close to zero. The media could correct this widespread false belief by merely inserting a few undisputed facts about Social Security when reporting false statements from politicians and interest groups. For example: "Social Security is more financially sound than it has been throughout most of its 71-year history"; or "Social Security's projected shortfall over the next 75 years is less (as a percent of national income) than what was fixed in each of the following decades: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s."

Millions of Americans are now "under water" on their homes -- that is, they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. The rate of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures is breaking records, and has much further to go. Many of these personal financial tragedies could have been avoided had the media reported on the obvious risks of buying a house while a record bubble in house prices was ballooning. Instead, the number one media source on the housing market was David Lereah, then chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, and author of the book Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit From It. Reporting on the stock market bubble of the late 90s was even worse.

Of course the media is not monolithic, and the TV media -- the main object of Gore's criticism -- tends to be worse than the print media. And some reporters break with current trends. In 2006 the New York Times used the Center for Economic and Policy Research (where I am Co-Director) as its most cited source on the housing market, and therefore was able to see the housing bubble before it broke. But it is surprising how uniform the major media is on many issues, given that there are competing news organizations. A herd mentality often prevails: journalists know that they will almost never get in trouble for reporting something that is wrong when everyone else is also saying it; but they do take a risk when they report something different, even if it is true.

Here in Washington, when one raises the issue of media responsibility, a common response - from policy analysts, political operatives, and journalists - is that the problem is with the American people, that they are just stupid. Interestingly, however, when one strays a bit from their own area of expertise or concentration, it appears that these professionals also believe a number of falsehoods on important issues -- apparently from having heard these things repeated in the media.

Of course the best counterweight to the media's transgressions is an informed and active citizenry. Part of the reason that the media treats Barack Obama more fairly than it treats Social Security is that Obama has millions of active supporters who would raise hell if the media were to engage in serious abuses of him or his candidacy.

Over the long run, we will need to subject the privately owned mass media to more competition. This will come increasingly from the Internet, but real competition will also require an expanded and better quality public media sector. But until this competition gets a lot bigger, it will be up to the citizenry to hold our highly concentrated media accountable as best we can.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/79465/

Bush Intervened For Weaker Smog Rule

2008-03-14T19:34:00.001-04:00

by H. Josef Hebert

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency agreed to weaken an important part of its new smog requirements after being told at the last minute that President Bush preferred a less stringent approach, according to government documents.

They show tense exchanges between the EPA and the White House Office of Management and Budget in the days before the smog air quality standard was announced Wednesday.
Changes directed by the White House were made only hours before the agency issued the regulation. The late activity forced the EPA to delay the announcement for five hours.
The disagreement concerned the amount of protection from ozone, or smog, that should be afforded wildlife, farmlands, parks and open spaces.

This “public welfare” or “secondary” smog standard is separate from a decision to tighten the smog requirements for human health, which the EPA decided to do by reducing the allowable concentrations of ozone in the air from 80 parts per billion to 75 parts per billion.

The revised human health standard has gotten all the attention. But the most contentious fighting involved the public welfare standard, according to papers inserted in the EPA regulatory docket Thursday.

The memos and documents indicate that EPA officials had wanted to make the public welfare standard more stringent than the health standard, although still not as protective as some scientists had recommended.

But the White House insisted on making both standards identical, according to the documents. When EPA officials balked, the issue went to Bush, who sided with his budget office.
The White House defended Bush’s action.

“This is not a weakening of regs (regulations) or standards,” White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said Friday. “But it was an effort to make the standards consistent. There’s no question we have an interest in how federal regs impact communities.”

Fratto said the new standards are the “most stringent smog standards in history” and that communities will have a hard time meeting them. He described the area where Bush intervened as ‘a technical matter’ and said he acted on the advice of the Justice Department.
The White House’s involvement was first reported by The Washington Post.

Susan Dudley, head of OMB’s Information and Regulatory Affairs, alluded to Bush’s involvement in a last- minute memo to EPA chief Stephen Johnson.

“The president has concluded that consistent with administration policy, added protection should be afford to public welfare by strengthening the secondary ozone standard and setting it to be identical to the new primary standard,” she wrote. It should not be weaker or more stronger than the human health standard, the OMB insisted.

Although the memo was dated Thursday, it was faxed to the EPA on Wednesday, hours before the agency announced the rule. Parts of the memo were included in the rule’s preamble posted on the EPA Web site.

“Never before has a president personally intervened at the 11th hour, exercising political power at the expense of the law and science, to force EPA to accept weaker air quality standards than the agency chief’s expert scientific judgment had led him to adopt,” said John Walke, clean air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private advocacy group. “It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference.”

Dudley, in a March 6 memo, had questioned the EPA’s justification for have a stronger smog requirement for public welfare than for human health.

The “public welfare” - or secondary - standard is fashioned in a way to protect against long-term harm to the environment. The limits on ozone under this standard are likely to have more impact on rural areas than urban centers.

Environmentalists and ecologists have argued that the standard should be more stringent than the human health ozone standard.

Last year the EPA staff and a scientific advisory panel on clean air concluded that protection of forests, agricultural lands and the ecosystem requires a “substantially different” ozone standard from the one for protecting human health.

In recent weeks the Agriculture Department has weighed in against making the public welfare ozone standard tougher. The department expressed concerns about the impact additional pollution controls might have on agriculture and development of biofuels, especially ethanol.
The department made its concerns known to OMB. EPA officials said the need was clear for a different standard for public welfare and that drifting ozone pollution has been found to cause “adverse effects” on agricultural crops, forests and vegetation.

© 2008 Associated Press

The Cult Of The Suicide Bomber

2008-03-14T19:27:00.003-04:00

by Robert Fisk

Khaled looked at me with a broad smile. He was almost laughing. At one point, when I told him that he should abandon all thoughts of being a suicide bomber - that he could influence more people in this world by becoming a journalist - he put his head back and shot me a grin, world-weary for a man in his teens. “You have your mission,” he said. “And I have mine.” His sisters looked at him in awe. He was their hero, their amanuensis and their teacher, their representative and their soon-to-be-martyred brother. Yes, he was handsome, young - just 18 - he was dressed in a black Giorgio Armani T-shirt, a small, carefully trimmed Spanish conquistador’s beard, gelled hair. And he was ready to immolate himself.

A sinister surprise. I had travelled to Khaled’s home to speak to his mother. I had already written about his brother Hassan and wanted to introduce a Canadian journalist colleague, Nelofer Pazira, to the family. When Khaled walked on to the porch of the house, Nelofer and I both realised - at the same moment - that he was next, the next to die, the next “martyr”. It was his smile. I’ve come across these young men before, but never one who so obviously declared his calling.

His family sat around us on the porch of their home above the Lebanese city of Sidon, the sitting room adorned with coloured photographs of Hassan, already gone to the paradise - so they assured me - for which Khaled clearly thought he was destined. Hassan had driven his explosives-laden car into an American military convoy at Tal Afar in north-western Iraq, his body (or what was left of it) buried “in situ” - or so his mother was informed.

It’s easy to find the families of the newly dead in Lebanon. Their names are read from the minarets of Sidon’s mosques (most are Palestinian) and in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, the Sunni “Tawhid” movement boasts “hundreds” of suiciders among its supporters. Every night, the population of Lebanon watches the brutal war in Iraq on television. “It’s difficult to reach ‘Palestine’ these days,” Khaled’s uncle informed me. “Iraq is easier.”

Too true. No one doubts that the road to Baghdad - or Tal Afar or Fallujah or Mosul - lies through Syria, and that the movement of suicide bombers from the Mediterranean coasts to the deserts of Iraq is a planned if not particularly sophisticated affair. What is astonishing - what is not mentioned by the Americans or the Iraqi “government” or the British authorities or indeed by many journalists - is the sheer scale of the suicide campaign, the vast numbers of young men (only occasionally women), who wilfully destroy themselves amid the American convoys, outside the Iraqi police stations, in markets and around mosques and in shopping streets and on lonely roads beside remote checkpoints across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iraq. Never have the true figures for this astonishing and unprecedented campaign of self-liquidation been calculated.
But a month-long investigation by The Independent, culling four Arabic-language newspapers, official Iraqi statistics, two Beirut news agencies and Western reports, shows that an incredible 1,121 Muslim suicide bombers have blown themselves up in Iraq. This is a very conservative figure and - given the propensity of the authorities (and of journalists) to report only those suicide bombings that kill dozens of people - the true estimate may be double this number. On several days, six - even nine - suicide bombers have exploded themselves in Iraq in a display of almost Wal-Mart availability. If life in Iraq is cheap, death is cheaper.

This is perhaps the most frightening and ghoulish legacy of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq five years ago. Suicide bombers in Iraq have killed at least 13,000 men, women and children - our most conservative estimate gives a total figure of 13,132 - and wounded a minimum of 16,112 people. If we include the dead and wounded in the mass stampede at the Baghdad Tigris river bridge in the summer of 2005 - caused by fear of suicide bombers - the figures rise to 14,132 and 16,612 respectively. Again, it must be emphasised that these statistics are minimums. For 529 of the suicide bombings in Iraq, no figures for wounded are available. Where wounded have been listed in news reports as “several”, we have made no addition to the figures. And the number of critically injured who later died remains unknown. Set against a possible death toll of half a million Iraqis since the March 2003 invasion, the suicide bombers’ victims may appear insignificant; but the killers’ ability to terrorise civilians, militiamen and Western troops and mercenaries is incalculable.

Never before has the Arab world witnessed a phenomenon of suicide-death on this scale. During Israel’s occupation of Lebanon after 1982, one Hizbollah suicide-bombing a month was considered remarkable. During the Palestinian intifadas of the 1980s and 1990s, four per month was regarded as unprecedented. But suicide bombers in Iraq have been attacking at the average rate of two every three days since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion.

And, although neither the Iraqi government nor their American mentors will admit this, scarcely 10 out of more than a thousand suicide killers have been identified. We know from their families that Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians and Algerians have been among the bombers. In a few cases, we have names. But in most attacks, the authorities in Iraq - if they can still be called “authorities” after five years of catastrophe - have no idea to whom the bloodied limbs and headless torsos of the bombers belong.

Even more profoundly disturbing is that the “cult” of the suicide bomber has seeped across national frontiers. Within a year of the Iraqi invasion, Afghan Taliban bombers were blowing themselves up alongside Western troops or bases in Helmand province and in the capital Kabul. The practice leached into Pakistan, striking down thousands of troops and civilians, killing even the principal opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto. The London Tube and bus bombings - despite the denials of Tony Blair - were obviously deeply influenced by events in Iraq.

Academics and politicians have long debated the motives of the bombers, the psychological make-up of the men and women who cold-bloodedly decide to undertake the role of suicide executioners; for they are executioners, killers who see their victims - be they soldiers or civilians - before they flick the switch that destroys them. The Israelis long ago decided that there was no “perfect” profile for a suicide bomber, and my own experience in Lebanon bears this out. The suicider might have spent years fighting the Israelis in the south of the country. Often, they would have been imprisoned or tortured by Israel or its proxy Lebanese militia. Sometimes, brothers or other family members would have been killed. On other occasions, the example of their own relatives would have drawn them into the vortex of suicide-by-example.
Khaled is - or was, for I no longer know if he is alive, since I met him a few weeks ago- influenced by his brother Hassan, whose journey to Iraq was organised by an unknown group, presumably Palestinian, and whose weapons training beside the Tigris river was videotaped by his comrades. Hassan’s mother has shown me this tape - which ends with Hassan cheerfully waving goodbye from the driver’s window of a battered car, presumably the vehicle he was about to ram into the American convoy at Tal Afar.

None of this addresses the issue of religious belief. While there is evidence aplenty that the Japanese suicide pilots of the Second World War were sometimes coerced and intimidated into their final flights against US warships in the Pacific, many also believed that they were dying for their emperor. For them, the fall of cherry blossom and the divine wind - the “kamikaze” - blessed their souls as they aimed their bombers at American aircraft carriers. But even an industrialised dictatorship like Japan - facing the imminent collapse of its entire society at the hands of a superpower - could only mobilise 4,615 “kamikazes”. The Iraq suicide bombers may already have reached half that number.

But the Japanese authorities encouraged their pilots to think of themselves as a collective suicide unit whose insignia of imminent death - white Rising Sun headbands and white scarves - prefigured the yellow headbands imprinted with Koranic script that Hizbollah guerrillas wore when they set out to attack Israeli soldiers in the occupied zone of southern Lebanon. In Iraq, however, those who direct the growing army of suiciders do not lack inventiveness. Their bombers have arrived at the scene of their self-destruction dressed as car mechanics, soldiers, police officers, middle-aged housewives, children’s sweet-sellers, worshippers and - on one occasion - a “harmless” shepherd. They have carried their bombs in Oldsmobiles, fuel trucks, garbage trucks, flat-bed trucks, on donkeys and bicycles, motor-bikes and mopeds and carts, minibuses, date-vendors’ vans, mobile recruitment centres and lorries packed with chlorine. Incredibly, there appears to be no individual central “brain” behind the bombings - although “groupuscules” of bombers obviously exist. Inspiration, imitation and the globalised influence of the internet appear sufficient to empower the bombers of Iraq.

On an individual level, it is possible to see the friction and psychological trauma of families. Khaled’s mother, for instance, constantly expressed her pride in her dead son Hassan and, in front of me, she looked with almost equal love at his still-living brother. But when my companion urged Khaled to remain alive for his mother’s sake - reminding him that the Prophet himself spoke of the primary obligation of a Muslim man to protect his mother - the woman was close to tears. She was torn apart by her love as a mother and her religious-political duty as the woman who had brought another would-be martyr into the world. When my friend again urged Khaled to remain alive, to stay in Sidon and marry - eerily, the muezzin’s call to prayer had begun during our conversation - he shook his head.

Not even a disparaging remark about those who would send him on his death mission - that they were prepared to live in this world while sending others like Khaled to their fate - could discourage him. “I am not going to become a ’shahed’ [martyr] for people,” he replied. “I am doing it for God.”

It was the same old argument. We could produce a hundred good ways - peaceful ways - for him to resolve the injustices of this world; but the moment Khaled invoked the name of God, our suggestions became irrelevant. Rationality - humanism, if you like - simply withered away. If a Western president could invoke a war of “good against evil”, his antagonists could do the same.
But is there a rational pattern to the suicide bombings in Iraq? The first incidents of their kind took place as American troops were actually advancing towards Baghdad. Near the Shia town of Nasiriyah, an off-duty Iraqi policeman, Sergeant Ali Jaffar Moussa Hamadi al-Nomani, drove a car bomb into an American Marine roadblock. Married, with five children, he had been a soldier in Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran and had volunteered to fight the Americans after Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. Shortly afterwards, two Shia Muslim women did the same.

In its dying days, even Saddam Hussein’s own government was shocked. “The US administration is going to turn the whole world into people prepared to die for their nations,” Saddam’s vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, warned. “All they can do now is turn themselves into bombs. If the B-52 bombs can now kill 500 or more in our war, then I’m sure that some operations by our freedom fighters will be able to kill 5,000.” Ramadan even referred to “the martyr’s moment of sublimity” - an al-Qa’ida-like phrase that ill befitted a secular Baathist - and it was clear that the vice-president was almost as surprised as the Americans. But only two days after the US occupation of Baghdad, a woman killed herself while trying to explode a grenade among a group of American troops outside the capital.

Throughout the five years of war, suicide bombers have focused on Iraq’s own American-trained security forces rather than US troops. At least 365 attacks have been staged against Iraqi police or paramilitary forces. Their targets included at least 147 police stations (1,577 deaths), 43 army and police recruitment centres (939 deaths), 91 checkpoints (with a minimum of 564 fatalities), 92 security patrols (465 deaths) and numerous other police targets (escorts, convoys accompanying government ministers, etc). One of the recruitment centres - in the centre of Baghdad - was assaulted by suicide bombers on eight separate occasions.

By contrast, suicide bombers have attacked only 24 US bases at a cost of 100 American dead and 15 Iraqis, and 43 American patrols and checkpoints, during which 116 US personnel were killed along with at least 56 civilians, 15 of whom appear to have been shot by American soldiers in response to the attacks, and another 26 of whom were children standing next to a US patrol. Most of the Americans were killed west or north of Baghdad. Suicide attacks on the police concentrated on Baghdad and Mosul and the Sunni towns to the immediate north and south of Baghdad.

The trajectory of the suicide bombers shows a clear preference for military targets throughout the insurgency, with attacks on Americans gradually decreasing from 2006 and individual attacks on Iraqi police patrols and police recruits increasing over the past two years, especially in the 100 miles north of Baghdad. Just as the Islamist murderers of Algeria - and their military opponents - favoured the fasting month of Ramadan for their bloodiest assaults in the 1990s, so the suicide bombers of Iraq mobilise on the eve of religious festivals. There was a pronounced drop in suicide assaults during the period of sectarian liquidations after 2005, either because the bombers feared interception by the throat-cutters of tribal gangs working their way across Baghdad, or because - a grim possibility - they were themselves being used in the sectarian murder campaign.

The most politically powerful attacks occurred inside military bases - including the Green Zone in Baghdad (two in one day in October 2004) - and against the UN headquarters (in which the UN envoy Sergio de Mello was killed) and the International Red Cross offices in Baghdad in 2003. By December 2003, British officials were warning that there were more “spectacular” suicide bombings to come, and the first suicide assault on a mosque took place in January of the following year when a bomber on a bicycle blew himself up in a Shia mosque in Baquba, killing four worshippers and wounding another 39.

Scarcely a year later, another suicider attacked a second Shia mosque, killing 14 worshippers and wounding 40. In February 2004, a man blew himself up on a bus outside the Shia mosque at Khadamiyah in Baghdad, killing 17 more Shia Muslims. Only a few days earlier, a man wearing an explosives belt killed four at yet another Shia mosque in the Doura district of Baghdad. The suicide campaign against Shia places of worship continued with an attack on a Mosul mosque in March 2005, killing at least 50, two more attacks in April that killed 26, and another in May in Baghdad.

While Shia mosques were being targeted in a deliberate campaign of provocation by al-Qa’ida-type suiciders, markets and hospitals frequented by Shia Muslims were also attacked. Almost all the 600 Iraqis killed by suicide bombs in May 2005 were Shias. After the partial demolition of the Shia mosque at Samarra on 22 February 2006, the “war of the mosques” began in earnest for the suicide bombers of Iraq. A Sunni mosque was blown up, with nine dead and “dozens” of wounded, and two Shia mosques were the target of suicide bombers in the same week. In early July 2006, seven suicide killers blew themselves up in Sunni and Shia mosques, leaving a total of 51 civilians dead. During the same period, a suicide bomber launched the first attack of its kind on Shia pilgrims arriving from Iran.

Bombers were to attack the funerals of those Shia they had killed, and even wedding parties. Schools, university campuses and shopping precincts were also now included on the target lists, most of the victims yet again being Shia. Over the past year, however, an increasing number of tribal leaders loyal to the Americans - including Sattar Abu Risha, who publicly met President Bush on 13 September 2007, and former insurgents who have now joined the American-paid anti-al-Qa’ida militias - have been blown apart by Sunni bombers.

Only about 10 of the suicide bombers have been identified. One of them, who attacked an Iraqi police unit in June 2005, turned out to be a former police commando called Abu Mohamed al-Dulaimi, but the Americans and the Iraqi authorities appear to have little intelligence on the provenance of these killers. On at least 27 occasions, Iraqi officials have claimed to know the identity of the killers - saying that they had recovered passports and identity papers that proved their “foreign” origin - but they have never produced these documents for public inspection. There is even doubt that the two suicide bombers who blew themselves up in a bird market earlier this year were in fact mentally retarded young women, as the government was to allege.

Indeed, nothing could better illustrate the lack of knowledge of the authorities than the two contradictory statements made by the Americans and their Iraqi protégés in March of last year. Just as David Satterfield, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s adviser on Iraq, was claiming that “90 per cent” of suicide bombers were crossing the border from Syria, Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, was announcing that “most” of the suiciders came from Saudi Arabia - which shares a long, common border with Iraq. Saudis would hardly waste their time travelling to Damascus to cross a border that their own country shared with Iraq. Many in Baghdad, including some government ministers, believe that the nationality of the bombers is much closer to home - that they are, in fact, Iraqis.

It will be many years before we have a clearer idea of the number of bombers who have killed themselves in the Iraq war - and of their origin. Long before The Independent’s total figure reached 500, al-Qa’ida’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was boasting of “800 martyrs” among his supporters. And since al-Zarqawi’s death brought not the slightest reduction in bombings, we must assume that there are many other “manipulators” in charge of Iraq’s suicide squads.
Nor can we assume the motives for every mass murder. Who now remembers that the greatest individual number of victims of any suicide bombing died in two remote villages of the Kahtaniya region of Iraq, all Yazidis - 516 of them slaughtered, another 525 wounded. A Yazidi girl, it seems, had fallen in love with a Sunni man and had been punished by her own people for this “honour crime”: she had been stoned to death. The killers presumably came from the Sunni community.

One of George Bush’s most insidious legacies in Iraq thus remains its most mysterious; the marriage of nationalism and spiritual ferocity, the birth of an unprecedentedly huge army of Muslims inspired by the idea of death.

–Robert Fisk

©independent.co.uk

How The Media Define Masculinity

2008-03-14T16:13:00.004-04:00

Media Awareness Network www.media-awareness.ca

How the Media Define Masculinity

Families, friends, teachers, and community leaders all play a role in helping boys define what it means to be a man. Mainstream media representations also play a role in reinforcing ideas about what it means to be a "real" man in our society. In most media portrayals, male characters are rewarded for self-control and the control of others, aggression and violence, financial independence, and physical desirability.

In 1999, Children Now, a California-based organization that examines the impact of media on children and youth, released a report entitled Boys to Men: Media Messages About Masculinity. The report argues that the media’s portrayal of men tends to reinforce men’s social dominance.

The report observes that:
the majority of male characters in media are heterosexual
male characters are more often associated with the public sphere of work, rather than the private sphere of the home, and issues and problems related to work are more significant than personal issues; non-white male characters are more likely to experience personal problems and are more likely to use physical aggression or violence to solve those problems
Children Now conclude that these dominant trends in the media’s portrayal of men reinforce and support social attitudes that link masculinity to power, dominance and control.

In Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, Jackson Katz and Jeremy Earp argue that the media provide an important perspective on social attitudes—and that while the media are not the cause of violent behaviour in men and boys, they do portray male violence as a normal expression of masculinity.

In a roundtable discussion that appeared in Châtelaine Magazine, TV journalist Denise Bombardier underlined the difference in the way the media treats violence, depending on the sex of the aggressor. "In Quebec, when a man kills his son, the headlines read ‘Another Case of Domestic Violence,’ she notes. If it’s a woman who kills her son, it is reported 'A Woman Depressed.'"

The portrayal and acceptance of men by the media as socially powerful and physically violent serve to reinforce assumptions about how men and boys should act in society, how they should treat each other, as well as how they should treat women and children.

Common Stereotypes of Men in Media

Various media analysts and researchers argue that media portrayals of male characters fall within a range of stereotypes. The report Boys to Men: Media Messages About Masculinity, identifies the most popular stereotypes of male characters as the Joker, the Jock, the Strong Silent Type, the Big Shot and the Action Hero.

The Joker is a very popular character with boys, perhaps because laughter is part of their own "mask of masculinity." A potential negative consequence of this stereotype is the assumption that boys and men should not be serious or emotional. However, researchers have also argued that humorous roles can be used to expand definitions of masculinity.

The Jock is always willing to "compromise his own long-term health; he must fight other men when necessary; he must avoid being soft; and he must be aggressive." By demonstrating his power and strength, the jock wins the approval of other men and the adoration of women.

The Strong Silent Type focuses on "being in charge, acting decisively, containing emotion, and succeeding with women." This stereotype reinforces the assumption that men and boys should always be in control, and that talking about one’s feelings is a sign of weakness.

The Big Shot is defined by his professional status. He is the "epitome of success, embodying the characteristics and acquiring the possessions that society deems valuable." This stereotype suggests that a real man must be economically powerful and socially successful.

The Action Hero is "strong, but not necessarily silent. He is often angry. Above all, he is aggressive in the extreme and, increasingly over the past several decades, he engages in violent behavior."

Another common stereotype...
The Buffoon commonly appears as a bungling father figure in TV ads and sitcoms. Usually well-intentioned and light-hearted, these characters range from slightly inept to completely hopeless when it comes to parenting their children or dealing with domestic (or workplace) issues.

Children's Perceptions of Male Stereotypes

In 1999, the research group Children Now asked boys between the ages of 10 and 17 about how their perceptions of the male characters they saw on television, in music videos and in movies. From the study, the group concluded that the media do not reflect the changing work and family experiences of most men today—and that this fact is not lost on the boys, who noticed the discrepancies between the media portrayals and the reality they knew.

Some of the study’s main observations:
on television, most men and boys usually keep their attention focused mostly just on women and girls
many males on TV are violent and angry
men are generally leaders and problem-solvers
males are funny, confident, successful and athletic
it’s rare to see men or boys crying or otherwise showing vulnerability
male characters on TV could not be described as "sensitive"
male characters are mostly shown in the workplace, and only rarely at home
more than a third of the boys had never seen a man on TV doing domestic chores

The study also revealed that the boys were quite aware that these male characters on television differed from their own friends and fathers, and from themselves. They had also noticed that media portrayals of success do not necessarily reflect their own ideas of real-life success.
The work of French sociologist Pascal Duret sheds a different light on the subject. In his 1999 study Les jeunes et l’identité masculine, Duret attempted to analyze young peoples’ perceptions of male "virility." Though responses varied according to sex and social class, most kids saw virility in terms of physical strength and a muscular body. Courage, and the ability to protect, were also considered to be virile traits.

When young people were asked to name models of virility from the movies, actors like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger were common choices. But it wasn’t just the actors’ physical appearances that made them virile in the eyes of the young people; it was also the context in which they appeared. What these actors had in common was violent scenes in their films, and Duret concluded that even though the young people may have been unaware of their bias, for them violence was an essential aspect of virility.

As well, social class had a major impact on perceptions of virility: young people from disadvantaged backgrounds viewed virile characteristics much more positively than youths from more advantageous backgrounds. Duret attributed this difference to the value poor people can give to the idea of the "self-made man," who can become what he (or she) wants by dint of hard work.

This research, and the Children Now study, both suggest that the media should take the opportunity to reach beyond these stereotypes—and to present a fuller and more realistic picture of the lives, experiences and identities of men and boys today.

Men's Magazines and the Construction of Masculinity

Although most contemporary research on the portrayal of masculinity in the media has focused on violence, research has also begun to examine the portrayal of masculinity in men’s magazines such as Playboy, Maxim, GQ, and Esquire. These magazines, which focus on matters such as health, fashion, sex, relationships, and lifestyle, play a part in defining what it means to be a modern man.

Some critics argue that these magazines represent an improvement in media portrayals of gender since they focus on topics previously thought to be solely the concern of women. But others argue that such magazines still rely on stereotypical portrayals of men and masculinity, featuring handsome, white, well-built and well-dressed men, interested only in acquiring the finer things in life.

Media commentators argue that these magazines continue to relegate women to the background and, in doing so, are examples of social backlash directed against specific gains made by women in the paid labour force, mass media industries and other professions. They say that it is no coincidence that as women are achieving greater social, political and professional equality, these magazines symbolically relegate them to subordinate positions as sex objects.

While magazines such as Playboy and Maxim are criticized for objectifying women’s bodies, recent discussions about men’s magazines are focusing on what these magazines say about men and masculinity. Academics argue that the recent popularity of these magazines is a reflection of men’s uncertainty over the roles they are expected to assume in society, at work, and in their relationships.

In her 1983 discussion of Playboy, Barbara Ehrenreich notes when the magazine emerged in 1953, American men were beginning to feel constrained by the demands of marriage, work and fatherhood—and Playboy unapologetically celebrated the bachelor’s lifestyle.
She argues that Playboy painted an idealistic picture of the well-educated, confirmed bachelor who appreciates the finer things in life: wine, jazz, scotch, art, and women. Playboy’s success was built on its celebration of male independence from the domestic responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood.

Masculinity and Sports Media

Sports media also contribute to the construction of masculinity in contemporary society. A study conducted by the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles reports that 98 per cent of American boys between the ages of 8 and 17 consume sports media. Since professional sports are virtually dominated by men—from the athletes and coaches to the commentators and reporters—sports media have the potential to transmit powerful ideas about manliness and masculinity.

Recent studies on gender and sports media find that sports commentary reinforces perceptions of "violent masculinity." By praising athletes who continue to play while injured, and by using language of conflict and war to describe action, sports commentary reinforces violence and aggression as exciting and rewarding behaviour.
Sports broadcasts focus heavily on violence in professional sports, often replaying and over-analyzing footage of graphic injuries, accidents and fights. A 1999 Children Now study points out that conflict between players of opposing teams is often created or inflated to promote upcoming games.

The studies conclude that this focus on personal rivalry, conflict, and fierce competition reinforces the social attitude that violence and aggression are normal and natural expressions of masculine identity.

Masculinity and Advertising

In its study of masculinity and sports media, the research group Children Now found that most commercials directed to male viewers tend to air during sports programming. Women rarely appear in these commercials, and when they do, they’re generally portrayed in stereotypical ways.

In fact, in his analysis of gender in advertising, author and University of North Texas professor Steve Craig argues that women tend to be presented as "rewards" for men who choose the right product. He describes such commercials as "narratives of playful escapades away from home and family." They operate, he says, at the level of fantasy—presenting idealized portrayals of men and women. When he focused specifically on beer commercials, Craig found that the men were invariably "virile, slim and white"—and the women always "eager for male companionship."

Author and academic Susan Bordo (University of Kentucky) has also analyzed gender in advertising, and agrees that men are usually portrayed as virile, muscular and powerful. Their powerful bodies dominate space in the ads. For women, the focus is on slenderness, dieting, and attaining a feminine ideal; women are always presented as not just thin, but also weak and vulnerable.

hese critics and others suggest that just as traditional advertising has for decades sexually objectified women and their bodies, today’s marketing campaigns are objectifying men in the same way. A 2002 study by the University of Wisconsin suggests that this new focus on fit and muscled male bodies is causing men the same anxiety and personal insecurity that women have felt for decades.

Male Authority in the Media

"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth."
Simone de Beauvoir

The media’s voice of authority is most often that of a middle-aged, professional, white male.
These men dominate the opinion-shaping forums of talk radio, newspaper journalism, and television news and commentary, and male voices are those most commonly heard in television and radio commercials.

In 1996, NewsWatch Canada, an independent organization that assesses the portrayal of diversity in Canadian news, conducted a study of the CBC’s flagship program The National. The study found that:

84 per cent of news sources were male (only 8 per cent of which were visible minorities)

89 per cent of commentators were men in "elite" occupations

The U.S. media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reported similar trends in the American media in the early 90s:

89 per cent of the guests on ABC's Nightline were male, 92 per cent were white and 80 per cent were professionals

87 per cent of the guests on PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour were male, 90 per cent were white, and 67 per cent were current or former government officials

These voices are presented as the voices of experts, and studies have indicated that experts often represent conservative points of view, favouring the interests of powerful individuals, social groups and institutions. Little attention is paid to the opinions and experiences of women, gays and lesbians, members of visible minorities, or the working classes.

Non-white or working class men are also marginalized. Men who are members of minority groups are typically called upon as experts only in response to minority community matters, drugs and crime. And, as Barbara Ehrenreich notes, news and current affairs programming portrays working class men as dumb, inarticulate and old-fashioned.

Although information media are often presented as informed and "objective," many commentators argue that white male dominance of these media helps perpetuate sexism, racism, and class privilege in society. It is also argued that such coverage presents white masculinity as the social and cultural norm.

Entertainment media reinforce the stereotypes of the rich white male and the working class buffoon. Richard Butsch argues that television programmes tend to exaggerate affluence, and portray working class men as immature, irresponsible, and requiring the supervision of their “betters.”

Virgin or Slut: Pick One

2008-03-14T13:56:00.001-04:00

By Courtney E. Martin, AlterNetPosted on December 20, 2007, Printed on March 14, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/71140/

As the middle-aged gym teacher in a track suit stands in front of the class and reads a health book out loud in a monotone voice -- "Intercourse can lead to unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, such as ..." -- a couple of girls swap the latest issue of US Weekly and a Gossip Girls novel, all the juicy parts underlined in pink pen. Welcome to contemporary American adolescence, where sexuality is either up for sale or moralized into nonexistence.
On the one hand we have a hypersexualized and pornified pop culture -- thongs marketed to tweens, Victoria's Secret ads with models who don't look a day over 13, and reality shows like A Shot at Love on MTV, where both men and women will do anything -- including jump in vats of chocolate and discuss their sexual histories on national television -- all for instantaneous love with a petite model. The message to young women is loud and clear: Your body is your power. Flaunt it. Use it. Get attention. The message to young men is also unmistakable: Your gaze is your power. Your role is to judge and comment on women's bodies. As a man, you are inevitably obsessed -- sometimes stupidly so -- with the female form.

On the other hand, we have a federally funded (over $1 billion thus far) abstinence-only sex education program in this country. According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half (46 percent) of all 15- to 19-year-olds in the United States have had sex at least once. According to the government's most comprehensive survey of American sexual practices to date, more than half of all teenagers have engaged in oral sex -- including nearly a quarter of those who have never had intercourse. Regardless of this reality, health teachers from Nacogdoches, Texas, to Newark, N.J., are taught to emotionlessly repeat -- as if pull dolls of the Bush administration -- "The only guaranteed way to avoid pregnancy and STDs is abstinence. The only guaranteed way to avoid pregnancy and STDs is abstinence. The only guaranteed way to avoid pregnancy and STDs is abstinence."

Here, the message to young women is also resolute: Your body is dangerous. Control it. Ignore it. Don't ask any questions. Teen girls are cast as asexual princesses happily trapped in towers, guarded by their Bible verse-spouting fathers. The message to young men is more subtle. In this fairy tale written, produced and directed by abstinence-only advocates, teenage guys are both potential villains -- the oversexed, hormone-crazed young men who must be refused continuously by good girls -- or potential knights in shining armor -- saving enough money from their summer jobs to buy sparkling rings that will save their sweeties from the hell of slutdom.
In between pornified culture and purity balls, in between the slut and the virgin, the stupid, lascivious dude and the knight in shining armor, in between the messages directed at young women -- your body is your power vs. your body is dangerous -- and young men -- your gaze is your power vs. your gaze is dangerous -- are real young people trying to develop authentic identities and sexual practices. And they are struggling mightily.

Too many of them are diseased, disordered, and depressed -- participating in inauthentic performances of sexual bravado, cut off from their bodies' true appetites and desires, and hurt because they can't seem to identify or communicate their own boundaries.
How could we be surprised? We've constructed a polarized culture that gives teenagers edifice, not education. We've sent them out into the wildly complex country of contemporary adolescence without the essential weapons -- sexual literacy, communication strategies, self-reflection exercises, and at the very least, accurate information about anatomy and contraception.

We've let the increasingly conglomerated raunchy mass media pollute the visual world with plastic, codified images of "sex" and the increasingly out-of-touch, religious and righteous federal government play Pollyanna -- deaf, dumb and blind. As the schools relinquish responsibility for educating American teens about sex, the advertisers and networks step in, providing an airbrushed, inauthentic, unrealistic view of sex and the bodies that are "doing it." They're happy to play sexy nanny while our government officials and educators are out to lunch; it guarantees ratings and the next generation eager to fork over cash on products marketed to their effectively socialized inadequacy.

And what kind of education do we provide to help negotiate this onslaught of messages? A curriculum based on three little empty words: "Just say no." Even federally funded studies of abstinence-only sex education confirm that it is ineffective. Half of those who have abstinence-only sex ed end up having sex by the time they're 15 years old. Multiple peer-reviewed studies also confirm that purity pledges actually lead teenagers into having more oral, anal and unprotected sex. Another longitudinal study of 13,000 teenagers found that 53 percent of those who commit to purity until marriage have sex out of wedlock within the year.
The consequences are devastating, diverse and rampant. According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, every two and a half minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted. About 44 percent of rape victims are under age 18, and 80 percent are under age 30. According to the Guttmacher Institute, of the 18.9 million new cases of STDs each year, 9.1 million (48 percent) occur among 15- to 24-year-olds. Seven million girls and women in this country have eating disorders; clinicians estimate that as many as 80 percent of those with anorexia, bulimia and binge-eating disorder are victims of sexual assault.

And harder to pin down with numbers, most college (and some high school) students experience campuses characterized by random, unsatisfying hookups, stunted emotional growth and the private hell of loneliness, guilt and shame. So many young adults don't know how to deal with the messiness of sex without being sloppy drunk.

We could make such a difference by doing so little. First and foremost, we must replace abstinence-only sexual education with comprehensive curriculum that teaches teenagers accurate, useful and wide-ranging information. They are welcome to save intercourse for marriage, of course, and should certainly be taught that -- indeed -- it is one of only two ways to absolutely prevent pregnancy, though not STDs. (The method of sexual exploration that guarantees both no STDS and no pregnancy is, of course, masturbation!) But they must also be given the tools -- informational, emotional, communicative -- they need should they choose otherwise. We need to teach both young women and men about sexual desire -- that it varies widely and is not shameful but can be overwhelming.

We must also provide our kids with the media and consumer literacy needed to face the pornified culture that we live in and advocate -- through letter writing, boycotts, and public pressure -- that schools, playgrounds, and other public spaces remain advertising-free. As artists, filmmakers, writers, actors, producers etc., we must strive to provide a more enlightened and inspiring view of human sexuality, to create work that involves love and sex without codifying both into unreality. Think Jane Campion.

And finally, we must stop treating teenagers as if they are either dangerous or idiots. When I was recently on The O'Reilly Factor with conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, she shouted, in response to my apparently blasphemous idea that girls deserve to be educated about their bodies: "Twelve-year-olds can't even pick out what color shirt they want to wear in the morning!" It made me wonder if Laura had ever met a 12-year-old, ever had a real conversation with one about her dreams, her thoughts, her desires.

I've had the pleasure of interacting with many teenagers -- 12 years old and older -- and I'm continually amazed at their insight, maturity and earnest need for more information. They aren't adults yet -- sure -- but they are aching in that direction. They need those of us who are done with the journey to provide some fundamental tools on how to make it through. We need to ask them about what they're experiencing and how we can be helpful as they make their way. Instead of luring them in, selling them out, condemning or indoctrinating them, we need to meet them face to face with compassion and information.

Courtney E. Martin is the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. You can read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/71140/