Tag Archives: democracy

A Note on the Latest No-Platforming

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There are currently a number of arguments being made on both sides of the question whether the no-platforming of Peter Tatchell constitutes censorship. I won’t say they are all good arguments; but I’d like to suggest there’s more at stake in all this than the speech rights of one very outspoken person. This thought was brought home to me by a turn of phrase in Jerry Coyne’s very thorough post on the Tatchell affair:

If someone is invited to an event and then is disinvited, or someone who’s already agreed to speak at an event withdraws because they don’t like the views of another invited speaker, then that is a kind of censorship, as it constitutes breaking an agreement previously made in an effort to prevent someone’s views from being expressed and heard.

Censorship might well have been the intended outcome of Fran Cowling’s childish refusal to take part in a debate with someone who had signed a letter defending the free speech of Germaine Greer and other writers whose views she found unsavory. I don’t know for certain that she meant to do anything other than stomp her feet in public (some people call this behavior “virtue signaling”) or if she had thought her actions all the way through.

All that involves very complicated questions about her intentions and so on, and it’s beside the simpler point I want to make. Before jumping into questions of what Cowling intended or what were the intended or unintended consequences of her actions, I suggest we pause to consider the simple fact that (as Coyne puts it, or almost puts it) Cowling broke an agreement. Full stop.

Of course, we make and break agreements all the time, sometimes reaching and then rescinding an agreement jointly with others, and sometimes in violation of commitments we’ve made, or without fulfilling the explicit or implicit terms of the agreement. It’s in making and breaking agreements where we come up against questions of what we owe each other.

In this instance, the breaking of the agreement could stand at least as much discussion as the censorship question or the question what Cowling hoped to accomplish by breaking the agreement. It’s not simply that Cowling broke or withdrew from the agreement she’d made to appear alongside Tatchell. He’s even said that he’s ok with that (“She has a right to refuse to speak alongside me, but not to make witchhunting, McCarthy-style, untrue allegations.”). It’s her denouncing him as a “racist and a transphobe” that really bothers him.

But there was a much much more basic agreement in place even before the invitation to either speaker was made, and that’s something like a shared commitment to debate, or the very idea that it’s worth talking things over and listening to what others have to say — as opposed to, say, might makes right or some equally ugly proposition. It’s hard to believe that this even needs saying: when we deny others who share a commitment to talking things over the standing to talk, we wrong them and invite all sorts of abuses against them and against ourselves.

This is one reason why Cowling’s actions appear to be unethical and dangerous even if it can be argued that they are not, as her supporters insist, a violation of Tatchell’s individual rights.

The First CEO: A Political Revolution?

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I’ve been associating the cultural icon of the CEO with big changes in America, most of which were well underway in the 1970s, when the acronym “CEO” first comes into wide use: the collapse of manufacturing, the financialization of the economy, the emergence of the neoliberal order. David Graeber offers yet another way to characterize these changes: “total bureaucratization.”

An excerpt from Graeber’s new book in the latest issue of Harpers lands us in familiar territory:

What began to happen in the Seventies, which paved the way for what we see today, was a strategic turn, as the upper echelons of U.S. corporate bureaucracy moved away from workers and toward shareholders. There was a double movement: corporate management became more financialized and the financial sector became more corporatized, with investment banks and hedge funds largely replacing individual investors. As a result, the investor class and the executive class became almost indistinguishable. By the Nineties, lifetime employment, even for white-collar workers, had become a thing of the past. When corporations needed loyalty, they increasingly secured it by paying their employees in stock options.

What Graeber at first characterizes as “a strategic turn” and the merging of the corporate and financial sectors, he then goes on to call “a political revolution”:

At the same time, everyone was encouraged to look at the world through the eyes of an investor — which is one reason why, in the Eighties, newspapers continued laying off their labor reporters, while ordinary TV news reports began featuring stock-quote crawls at the bottom of the screen. By participating in personal-retirement and investment funds, the argument went, everyone would come to own a piece of capitalism. In reality, the magic circle only widened to include higher-paid professionals and corporate bureaucrats. Still, the perceived extension was extremely important. No political revolution (for that’s what this was) can succeed without allies, and bringing along the middle class — and, crucially, convincing them that they had a stake in finance-driven capitalism — was critical.

The parenthetical affirmation — “(for that’s what this was)” — asks us to pause and really take the point. Having read only this excerpt, I don’t know whether Graeber goes on to explain why what he elsewhere calls a “shift” or “turn” counts as a “political revolution,” or how exactly he thinks this overturning of the political order was brought about. No doubt there was fraud, collusion and conspiracy, and “everyone was encouraged” to believe they were included; but the passive verb here leaves way too much unsaid. For one thing, the triumph and establishment of  the new order at home and abroad was really not so bloodless as Graeber (here, at least) makes it out to be.

The celebration and glamorization of the CEO — as a leader, a rule-maker and a rule-breaker, the agent and steward of shareholder value — was one of the things that duped ordinary, middle-class Americans into thinking “they had a stake in finance-driven capitalism.” It deserves a chapter in the story Graeber’s out to tell. The acronym “CEO” itself belongs to what Graeber calls the “peculiar idiom” of “bureaucratic techniques” and meritocratic myths — a language with origins in self-actualization movements of the 1970s, “full of bright, empty terms like ‘vision,’ ‘quality,’ ‘stakeholder,’ ‘leadership,’ ‘excellence,’ ‘innovation,’ ‘strategic goals,’ and ‘best practices.’” It’s good to see this language held up for scrutiny, especially since, as Graeber rightly points out, it still “[engulfs] any meeting where any number of people gather to discuss the allocation of any kind of resources.” To the victors go the spoils, and that’s not likely to change as long as we are speaking their language and playing by their rules.

Public Television and Public Life – A Note from the Road

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Cross-posted from my blog at 1913 Massacre:

We’ve just completed a short tour of the Upper Peninsula, taking 1913 Massacre from Houghton to Ontonagon to Marquette. After each screening of the film, we take questions and comments from the audience. All sorts of things come up in those conversations. People see themselves or their own town in the Calumet story. They make connections between the past and the present, between what happened in Calumet to what’s happening right now in the UP, in Michigan and all around the country. In Ontonagon, one audience member came away from the film thinking about garment factories in Bangladesh; in Marquette, we talked about courage, resilience and how long it takes communities to recover from social catastrophe, among other things. We learn something new with every conversation.

Though the questions, insights and topics may vary, the thing that most impresses me about all these Q&A sessions — no matter the size of the audience or the setting — is the most easily overlooked: the gathering of the audience and the shared experience of seeing the film, together, creates an opportunity for public conversation.

That’s why I’m always a little thrown when someone raises his hand in one of these public gatherings to ask whether we’ve approached PBS with our film or whether 1913 Massacre will air on public television. There are other versions of the same question. Will the film be at Sundance? Will it be on HBO? Wouldn’t it lend itself to feature film treatment? Have we approached Steven Speilberg or — name your favorite Hollywood mogul or celebrity. But the PBS question is the one we get most frequently.

The simple answer is, of course we approached PBS, Independent Lens, POV, and so on, repeatedly, for funding and grants while working on the film; and of course we are still making efforts to bring the film to wider audiences. PBS, or some part of the public broadcasting system, might offer an opportunity to do that.

That, at least, is an answer that gets us past talking about the movie business and the business prospects of our film and back to the film itself and the experience of the film we all just shared.

I realize that the PBS question and others like it show appreciation and support for the film: it’s a way of wishing us success, or a way of saying that other people, friends, family, lots of people, millions of PBS viewers should see our film. They should, with any luck they will, and it’s good to hear others hope they do.

At the same time it’s worth asking why the PBS question comes up so often, and more importantly why the question seems odd and entirely out of place at a public gathering and in a public forum. Would a PBS broadcast give our film a seal of approval it lacks? Would an Oscar? Would Steven Speilberg? Maybe, but why should any of that matter right now? We’re not approaching Speilberg: we’re approaching you. What do you say? What do others in the room have to say? Why look elsewhere? Why wait for permission? What about the approval 1913 Massacre already received, just now, right here in this room? What about the experience we all just shared? Surely we haven’t exhausted that — and surely that counts for something, for much more.

We’re here together, right now, in this room. Let’s appreciate and own it, and make the most of the opportunity we have. Let’s forget about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and every other kind of corporate gatekeeper. Let’s not await a word from our sponsor or even admit them into the room. Let’s not diminish the present moment and our experience — a public experience, an experience of being together, in public. Let’s not look for validation or value beyond this room: we have it all, right here.

You see where this is heading. There are lessons in all this about the power people and communities have and the power we surrender, every day and for no good reason, to outside authorities, influencers and exploiters — to powerful institutions, brand names, celebrities, big money. These gatherings in small towns, in classrooms, halls and clubs, in local theaters and public libraries may look modest, but they give us a chance to exercise our habit for democracy.

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People gather in the Community Room at the Peter White Library in Marquette for a screening of 1913 Massacre.

That’s why, in the end, television broadcast can’t hold a candle to public screenings like the ones we’ve had and will continue to have. Television is not just a poor substitute for community gatherings and public life. It pulls us away from those things and from each other. Watching television is a retreat from public gathering — a withdrawal into the privacy of one’s own. In this sense, “public television” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

There’s an aesthetic dimension to this as well. Our film, all film, plays best on a big screen, with a live audience. People laugh and cry together, some gasp, some cough (somebody always coughs), others sigh, shift in their seats. Applause brings everyone together at the end. (Booing and jeering would do the trick, too, but with 1913 Massacre we’ve so far been spared that experience.) These emotions, actions and reactions are an under-appreciated but essential part of the motion, or kinesis, of the cinematic experience. Films come alive — that’s the right word, alive — when people gather to see them; and when people share in public conversation what they’ve seen, they have a special chance to see each other, anew, on the other side of a new experience.

A woman in the audience in Houghton seemed to understand all this when she rose from her seat and exclaimed: “this film should be shown in every small town across the country!” If only we could make that happen.

Three Reasons Why the Election is Running on Empty

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It’s fitting that a freakish storm (or fears of a freakish storm) should interrupt a presidential campaign that has shied away from discussing climate change. As the New York Times noted after last week’s third and final debate, neither candidate broached the subject in the course of the debates; nor did the vice-presidential candidates or moderators or the model citizens in the made-for-TV town hall.

Those who fear some conspiracy of silence on this issue, or think our candidates are cowards only when it comes to climate change, should be reminded that on nearly every issue before the country, the 2012 campaign has been almost entirely devoid of substance. Both sides have offered nothing more than zingers, soundbyte-sized bromides and unprincipled pandering.

You know things have gotten really bad when the TV pundits – who trade in platitudes and talking points – start complaining about the lack of substance in the campaign. That’s starting to happen, at least in the pseudo-serious world of public television. Last Friday on Newshour, Judy Woodruff asked Mark Shields and David Brooks why they thought the campaigns had been so lacking in real substance and so unwilling to engage on the issues. Neither correspondent gave the most obvious response – which is that this hollowing out is inevitable when you conduct politics on TV.

Instead, David Brooks fixed the blame squarely on the “consultants,” who have “taken over,” he said. This wasn’t much of answer, but – since this was TV – it sufficed; the segment was soon over and the discussion closed. Brooks could have easily implicated people like himself, the press and the punditry. He also could have added that what most of these consultants do, in one way or another, is package the candidates for TV audiences and attention spans.

At the very least, Brooks failed to go far enough. Consultants aren’t the only ones to blame. Off the top of my head I can name at least three other reasons why this election is running on empty.

First and above all, Citizens United: this is the first election held after the Supreme Court ruled, in 2010, that unions and corporations could spend without restriction in political campaigns, because they were entitled to the same free speech considerations as human persons. The consultants are simply following the money. So far, the glut of ads – someone the other day estimated that it would take 80 days to watch all the ads currently airing on TV in Ohio – has made even the candidates wince. The ads are superficial and offensive to anyone with a modicum of intelligence because they are always a ruse: they make up a cover story so that big money can pursue its aims through the electoral process.

Second, we’ve had no meaningful participation by third party candidates in the political process or the presidential debates. The two-party show airs without interruption and without challenge. This partly has to do with the control exercised over the debates by the Presidential Debate Commission, which produces the debates for TV. Run by lobbyists and sponsored by major corporations, the Commission approves questions, debate topics and moderators, and disapproves of outsiders who want something other than Coke or Pepsi, Red or Blue, Obamney or Romama. As Jill Stein (who is suing the Commission for keeping her out in 2012) remarked when she was arrested outside the debates: “It was painful but symbolic to be handcuffed for all those hours, because that’s what the Commission on Presidential Debates has essentially done to American democracy.”

Third and finally I would point to the deliberate, regular and daily conflation of the election with the popular vote. This helps perpetuate the illusion of a tight race and distorts people’s choices. It also makes the election a choice between candidates rather than an opportunity to talk about issues on a local, state and national level. The emphasis ought to be on the issues people bring to the election – which is where democratic elections begin – and not exclusively on the candidates or even their platforms. Polling focuses on how people feel about the candidates from one day to the next instead of providing data and insight about changing attitudes toward the enduring and emerging questions we, as a people, face. Who’s going to win? is the last question we should be asking ourselves in an election year. Or in any year. And it only gets worse the closer we get to election day.

The list could go on. But when all is said and done, the consultants and the pundits and the pollsters aren’t really to blame: we are. That may not be something you can say on TV, but if there’s a real battleground this election year, or in any year, it’s American democracy itself. It’s something we have to fight for and claim for ourselves and for every citizen, against politicians, powerful forces and against all odds. That’s not just highfalutin talk. Ben Franklin was right: we will have a republic, if we can keep it. I wonder if we can. I know the consultants have taken over only to the extent that we have surrendered.

Can CEOs Ever Get The Political Fix They Need?

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There have recently been plenty of shareholder proposals asking companies to disclose political spending. In fact (as noted in an earlier post), the share of proposals to the Fortune 100 focusing on political spending increased 84 percent in 2011 from the three previous years. Last week, to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision (on January 17th), Trillium Asset Management and Green Century Funds took things up a notch.

Urging “corporate leaders to heed the call of shareholders and citizens,” the two social investment firms filed shareholder resolutions at Bank of America, 3M, and Target Corporation asking those companies to stop political spending altogether. This was the first time institutional shareholders have formally asked corporations to refrain from political spending.

The chances of these resolutions winning approval are slim to none, of course – at least right now. The hope is that over time support will build around these proposals, until they reach a threshold where boards of directors can no longer ignore them. (That’s around 30 percent of shareholder approval.) That day seems a long way off. Still, a slim chance is better than no chance, and — let’s face it — there is simply no chance of legislative remedies to Citizens United, especially from the current Congress, and definitely not in an election year.

“We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do… whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward,” David Stockman tells Bill Moyers in an interview that will air this weekend. “As a result,” Stockman says, “we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.”

That sounds about right, though I would ask whether Stockman and others who take this view have really put their finger on what’s novel or unique about the present moment. Entitlement and cronyism are not exactly new in America; some would say the game has been rigged all along.

But that’s a historical discussion. The more pressing question is one these new shareholder resolutions would have us address. Is corporate political activity good for business? Is the corporate plan to capture government sound? Are corporations really getting what they pay for? Can those entitled CEOs and Wall St. financiers win the game, or are there rules to the game they don’t understand? In other words, how well does crony capitalism work? Those broad questions frame the question posed in the title of this post.

There’s some compelling evidence to suggest that corporate political activity is not only bad for democracy but also bad for business. The Trillium and Green Century announcements cite the research of Michael Hadani, who sets out to “question the standard narrative that political spending is an unmitigated good for firms.” Hadani, a Professor of Management at Long Island University, concludes that despite spending extravagant amounts of money – AT&T, for instance, “officially” spent over 219 million dollars between 1998 and 2008 “on achieving political success” (and that was before Citizens United!) — corporations are not achieving the political outcomes they want.

What’s worse, corporate political activity generally does not appear to increase shareholder value.

This chart tracks a negative correlation between firm market value and PAC activity:


And that is just one lens. The research Hadani presents tells a pretty consistent story: the profligate pursuit of illusory goods, usually without the requirement to disclose where the money goes, or what companies and their investor-owners get for it (apart from heightened risk and reduced transparency). It should therefore alarm all shareholders – not just socially-conscious ones — that Citizens United makes it possible for executives to plunder the corporate treasury in pursuit of those same uncertain ends, without any limits or any real accountability. A new kind of barbarian may already be inside the gates: the CEO in search of the ever-elusive political fix.

Same song, different verse – Bill Moyers on Woody Guthrie, Right Now

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Cross-posted from my blog over at 1913massacre.com:

In the most recent essay for his new “On Democracy” series, Bill Moyers picks up on the news that the George Kaiser Family Foundation has acquired the Woody Guthrie Archives for 3 million dollars. Plans to open a new center in Tulsa are already underway. Woody’s papers, drawings and things will be returning to Oklahoma. The irony is not lost on Moyers:

What he wrote and sang about caused the oil potentates and preachers who ran Oklahoma to consider him radical and disreputable. For many years he was the state’s prodigal son, but times change, and that’s the big news. Woody Guthrie has been rediscovered, even though Oklahoma’s more conservative than ever – one of the reddest of our red states with a governor who’s a favorite of the Tea Party.

Times change, and the scene may change; the cast of characters remains essentially the same. In 1913 Massacre, the Oklahoma oil barons and their patsy preachers play the parts of Michigan mining captains, Boston stockholders and the thugs they hire to do their dirty work.

Woody saw right through their change of costume. He knew that the man who robs you with a six-gun is likely to be more honest than the man who uses a fountain pen. In Oklahoma, in Michigan, in California, all around the country, he sang about the beauty of ordinary people whose undoing he witnessed. And the simple message at the heart of his songs is just as radical today as it ever was.

You just have to listen.

Moyers discovers it in This Land Is Your Land:

This land is mostly owned not by you and me but by the winner-take-all super rich who have bought up open spaces, built mega-mansions, turned vast acres into private vistas, and distanced themselves as far as they can from the common lot of working people – the people Woody wrote and sang about.

So in the video essay he produced about Woody Guthrie and the prospects for democracy in America now, Moyers might as well be describing Calumet in 1913 or Tom Joad’s California: “gross inequality,” he says, is “destroying us from within”. The question is what we’re going to do about it, this time.

2011 Proxy Season: Social Investment at the Threshold

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Ernst & Young estimates in a new publication [pdf] that half of all shareholder proposals in 2011 will deal with environmental and social issues, and support for these proposals is growing. In fact, “83 percent of investors now believe environmental and social factors can have a significant impact on shareholder value over the long term.”

Last year, E & Y finds, approximately one quarter such social investment proposals won 30 percent support –which E & Y calls a “threshold” number, where “many boards take note.”

Perhaps they’d better. Typically, when proposals reach a second threshold — garnering 50 percent support– directors who oppose them start losing their seats.

Things may not yet have reached a tipping point, but these are promising developments. With the enactment of Dodd-Frank in 2010, mandatory say on pay provisions became law; that means fewer executive compensation proposals are on the table, and it’s easier to introduce social issues into the conversation.

There are even some early indications of the trend toward social investment in the 2011 data reported so far on ProxyMonitor.org. (ProxyMonitor – the Manhattan Institute database I relied on in a previous post about why boards say they don’t back human rights proposals — is keeping a “scorecard” of the 2011 proxy season.)

Now the ProxyMonitor data is special, and there might be reason to expect it to tell a unique story. ProxyMonitor documents only proposals made to Fortune 100 companies. Can we reasonably expect Fortune 100 shareholders to set the trend or lead in the area of social investment? On the one hand, investors in the Fortune 100 might tend to be more conservative –and risk averse — than the average shareholder. On the other, these high-visibility public companies with strong brands are likely to attract activist investors and funds with a social agenda. The likely outcome is more proposals, less traction.

Be that as it may, so far, a clear majority of shareholder proposals made to Fortune 100 companies in 2011 target social investment issues.

And there is another encouraging trend here. More and more shareholder proposals ask boards of directors to report on corporate political spending and contributions. The Findings page on ProxyMonitor notes that among Fortune 100 companies, “the share of social policy proposals focusing on political spending has increased 84 percent in 2011 from the three previous years (2008-2010)” [emphasis mine].

A few examples give some sense of where things are heading. Two proposals requiring Valero Energy Corporation to report on its political contributions received 26 and 27 percent support, edging closer to the 30 percent threshold of boardroom visibility. A proposal by AFSCME asked IBM to disclose “direct and indirect spending to influence legislation as well as grassroots lobbying communications to influence legislation”; it received 28.5 percent support in the 2011 vote. It will be hard for the IBM board to ignore or resist this much longer.

All is not sunshine. It’s worth noting that when AFSCME advanced similar proposals with Prudential and Bank of America, both proposals met with zero support. [Update 5/16/11: this is incorrect. Please see this post.] Prudential made the case that the information is already available; Bank of America complained that it would be burdensome and redundant, and, besides, “our company does not engage in grassroots lobbying.”

Make of that statement what you will. It’s clear that forcing disclosure of so-called “indirect” and “grassroots” spending will be an uphill battle, in part because it is difficult to define or track grassroots spending, or distinguish it from legitimate trade association activity.

But the focus now on corporate political spending brings welcome relief. As I suggested in an earlier post, some social investors are trying to do what Congress is unable or too cowardly or too compromised to do: take back some of the ground that was lost or – as I prefer to put it – given away by the courts in Citizens United. The boldest of these proposals, requiring Home Depot not only to disclose its political expenditures, but also to submit those expenditures to a shareholder advisory vote, will come to a vote on June 2nd. Maybe this measure will make it past the threshold.

Citizen Investors and Citizens United

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Home Depot’s Spring 2011 proxy report will include a proposal seeking shareholders’ say on political spending done by the corporation. This proposal is the first of its kind. Chances are it will not be the last.

If shareholders approve the resolution, where and how Home Depot funnels money into the political process and influences elections will be subject to shareholder approval.

Home Depot did not exactly welcome this development. According to documents filed with the SEC[pdf], the company resisted the proposal, arguing that such a resolution would impinge upon and restrict “ordinary business of the company.”

More specifically, Home Depot took three legal tacks, all involving various clauses of SEC rule 14a-8, governing proposals of security holders. First, they invoked SEC rule 14a-8(i)(3), “that the proposal is [too] inherently vague or indefinite…to determine with any reasonable certainty exactly what actions or measures the proposal requires.” Second, they tried rule 14a-8(i)(7), that the proposal seeks “to micromanage the company.” Last, they tried invoking rule 14a-8(i)(10), “that Home Depot has substantially implemented the proposal.”

These are hardly original arguments – we don’t know what you’re asking, you’re trying to tie our hands, we’re already doing this — and they did not carry the day. Writing on behalf of the SEC, Attorney Bryan J. Pitko found all three arguments to be without merit.

“In ruling in favor of allowing the proposal,” writes Sanford Lewis, an attorney who defended the proposal on behalf of Northstar Asset Management, “the [SEC] has essentially determined that after Citizens United, corporate political spending is a significant social policy issue and shareholders can seek to have input on management’s decisions.”

How this will all turn out remains uncertain. As Lewis admits, “a majority of institutional investors typically support whatever the management of a company thinks is appropriate.” But in the absence of any new law restraining corporate speech, “citizen investors” like those Lewis represents may be able take back some of the ground that was lost – or given away by the courts — in Citizens United.

Wikileaks, Democracy, and Diamonds in Zimbabwe

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Christopher R. Albon has published a provocative piece on theatlantic.com, arguing that democracy in Zimbabwe has suffered “a major setback” due to WikiLeaks’ activity, and that one of the leaked cables may have placed Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in serious political, if not legal jeopardy.

Without recourse to the silly fear-mongering we’ve heard from other quarters, Albon’s account serves to remind us just how disruptive WikiLeaks really is and will continue to be to the current world order and, perhaps more importantly, how disruptive it can be to a democracy movement like the one in Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe still runs the show, despite a 2008 power-sharing agreement between him and Tsvangirai.

Albon documents the immediate political fallout from a leaked cable reporting that in 2008 Tsvangirai privately urged the United States and other western nations to continue stiff economic sanctions against his country. Publicly, Tsvangirai had denounced them. First imposed in 2003, the sanctions had been — and still are — crippling. But according to the diplomatic report, Tsvangirai thought they were the best way to force Mugabe’s hand and bring much-needed political reforms.

Mugabe’s Attorney General Johannes Tomana has labeled Tsvangirai’s double-dealing on the sanctions “treason” and is preparing a case against him. “The WikiLeaks,” Tomana says, “appear to show a treasonous collusion between local Zimbabweans and the aggressive international world, particularly the United States.” The charge probably won’t stick. But now Mugabe can paint the democratic reformer Tsvangirai as a Western stooge, and, in Albon’s view, “Zimbabwe’s fragile coalition government could collapse completely. Whatever happens, democratic reforms in Zimbabwe are far less likely now than before the leak.”

This is indeed a grim outlook. Albon clearly sees Tsvangirai as Zimbabwe’s last best hope, its only hope, for democracy — not just the lesser of two evils.

But then others distrust Tsvangirai’s commitment to true democratic reform, or see him as a mere proxy for Western interests.

It’s also worth noting that the leaked cables are having other disruptive effects in Zimbabwe as well, and it strikes me as odd – or telling — that Albon fails to give them even the slightest nod in his piece.

There is, after all, another big Wikileaks story about Zimbabwe. This one came out just about a week before the Tsvangirai story broke.

The Prime Minister and his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, seized on another leaked cable and urged that “the government should investigate charges arising from WikiLeaks documents that senior officials close to Mugabe, including his wife Grace, have benefited from illicit diamond trading from the Chiadzwa Mine in the eastern part of the country”. In fact, Grace Mugabe has filed suit against The Weekly Standard for publishing diplomatic cables in which a British mining executive is quoted as saying Grace Mugabe and central bank governor Gideon Gono “have been extracting tremendous profits” – hundreds of thousands of dollars a month — from Chiadzwa’s blood diamonds.

You can imagine how this story, true or false, might play in a country with widespread poverty, 90 percent unemployment and cholera epidemic that kills young and old alike. Mrs. Mugabe and her lawyers understand this better than anyone. Grace Mugabe denounced the report in the Standard as “an imputation of criminality and association with violations of human rights. Whatever it prints,” she continued, “is regarded as gospel truth by those people in Zimbabwe and abroad.”

I suppose, then, that not everybody in Zimbabwe knows that U.S. diplomatic cables are full of imperialist lies and cannot be trusted.

Ron Paul Didn’t Just…No, He Didn’t

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For a brief moment yesterday, I thought that Ron Paul had introduced one of the most brilliant and important pieces of legislation in the past decade, maybe in the past two or three decades.

That turned out to be my misreading. Paul’s American Traveler Dignity Act is a single paragraph, carefully crafted response to the stupid, abusive and bullying practices of the TSA. And I like that it puts the emphasis where it belongs, on human dignity – which is exactly what airport security takes away from the people it is supposed to protect, even if there is no touching of junk or x-rated x-ray imagery. Take off your shoes, take off your belt, stay in line, take orders, don’t joke, show your papers, give us your keys, give up your toiletries, answer the question, empty your pockets: submit.

The text of Paul’s Dignity Act (H.R. 6416) reads as follows:

No law of the United States shall be construed to confer any immunity for a Federal employee or agency or any individual or entity that receives Federal funds, who subjects an individual to any physical contact (including contact with any clothing the individual is wearing), x-rays, or millimetre waves, or aids in the creation of or views a representation of any part of a individual’s body covered by clothing as a condition for such individual to be in an airport or to fly in an aircraft. The preceding sentence shall apply even if the individual or the individual’s parent, guardian, or any other individual gives consent.

But that wasn’t exactly the way the bill was advertised, and this isn’t the language that got me excited. “Ron Paul,” wrote one blogger, “has introduced a bill saying the government can not do to us what would be illegal for us to do.” This turned out to be a paraphrase of something Paul himself said when summarizing the bill on Wednesday evening. “The bill I’ve introduced… It’s very simple. It’s one paragraph long. It removes the immunity of anybody in the Federal government that does anything that you or I can’t do.”

Now that would be a great act. Imagine a bill that stated, simply, that the Federal government and its agents cannot do anything citizens cannot do. Or, more precisely, that the Federal government and its agents are subject to the very same laws to which you and I are subject. That would be the equivalent of saying that the law applies equally to citizens and those elected to govern their affairs. The bill would have a great leveling effect, introducing what is, without exaggeration, a revolutionary idea – that all are equal before the law, that citizens can stand toe-to-toe with the people who govern them, and that government is no longer the refuge of tyrants and scoundrels.

But would anyone in Congress ever support such a revolutionary bill? As of this morning, just two Republicans, Walter Jones (North Carolina) and and John Duncan (Tennessee), had joined Paul as co-sponsors of his act. It seems unlikely anyone in the current Congress would want to support anything so radical as the measure I thought Paul was introducing.