When I was born, my parents gave me three middle names: Emanuel, Samuel, and Levendel. The latter is my mother’s maiden name. The other two are for Mendl and Shmil, male relatives on my mother’s mother’s side of the family, who were killed during the Holocaust.

My sister and brother also have three middle names, for the same reasons.

My wife’s father has a list of 72 relatives who were killed.

If each of these people had lived out normal lives, how many of their descendants would walk the earth today? 200? 300? 400?

Our extended family is fairly large, with more than 30 first cousins, most if whom have married and raised families of their own. In all, we maybe number 150 or 200, scattered across the US, Israel, and, if you count the second and third cousins, Canada, South Africa, Belgium, and Italy as well.

So my first thought as I got ready to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau earlier this week is what a world we lost, just in my and my wife’s extended families.

Last Saturday, while in Warsaw, after our Personal Democracy Forum Poland conference ended, we took an informal walking tour of the nearby area, which happened to be close to the old Jewish Quarter of the city. Warsaw, it must be noted, was completely destroyed by the Germans before the end of WWII. In August 1944, the city rose up and managed to shake off German control for several weeks (while the approaching Russian Army held back, letting the Polish resistance deplete itself against the Nazis, which made the later Soviet occupation of Poland somewhat easier to imposed). In response to the rebellion, the Germans leveled Warsaw. A city that had 1.1 million inhabitants before the start of the war had barely one thousand living in its ruins at war’s end. The city looked like a nuclear bomb had hit it.

Near the auditorium where our conference was held stands an old row of decrepit buildings, some of the few that remained standing after the war. In their empty windows, someone has placed huge blown-up photograph portraits of the Jews who had once lived there. We walked past these buildings, crossed a few more streets, and then our guide pointed down to a line of bricks with an inscription in them: Warsaw Ghetto 1940-1943. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

This was it; we were walking on the last home of 400,000 Jews condemned to live within its confines; 100,000 who died inside its walls from starvation and illness; the rest who were nearly all killed in the camps.

When I was in my teens, I belonged to a Jewish youth movement called Hashomer Hatzair (“The Young Guard”). It was at heart a scouting movement like the many youth movements of the 1900s, with two additional ingredients: socialism and Zionism. Our heroes were the kibbutzniks who were rebuilding the Jewish homeland and doing so by creating a “classless society” (or so we imagined). Like all the Zionist movements, we believed that Jews couldn’t be passive, waiting for some God to take care of them; they had to take positive action to make a better world for themselves and others.

Among our heroes there might have been none greater than Mordecai Anilewicz, who led the “ken” (or “nest”) for Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto, and who was the leader of the 1943 uprising against the Nazis. Growing up in Hashomer, I went to a ken named for him: N’tiv Mordecai. Now, walking thru the cold and wet streets of a Warsaw that had been rebuilt, with no significant trace of the past left in view, I felt surrounded by ghosts.

These photos taken after the war was over, which happened to be displayed in the old town part of Warsaw while we were visiting, show nothing but a grave land of stones and bricks where the ghetto stood:

The next day we flew to Krakow, where we were met by a driver who took us the 45 minute drive to the camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau was two experiences in one day for me. First, we toured the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

Here, Jews were held along with Polish political prisoners, Gypies, and other persecuted groups. It reminds me very much of Dachau, which I had visited a few years ago with my brother David, also in winter. Barracks side by side for slave laborers who were tortured and starved. A small crematorium for the people who died on a daily basis. A cramped prison and public execution and hanging grounds, where people were killed on little more than an SS officer’s whim. The massive collections of hair, shoes, suitcases and other detritus left by the inmates are harrowing, but I knew they would be there.

Birkenau is different. It feels like a whole planet of death, not one plantation. Even though the crematoria and original barracks have all been destroyed, the remnants and the handful of reconstructed buildings are sufficient to establish Birkenau’s awful scale.

I left a stone on the metal ledge of a cattle car that stands halfway along the railway tracks that traverse Birkenau from its entrance to the site of the crematoria roughly 2km away. The car looks like it could have held maybe 8 cows. Instead, our guide tells us, it was probably packed with 80 humans. Every day, the Birkenau crematoria could process several transports of victims. Whole ghettoes numbering in the tens of thousands went to their deaths in a matter of days. It was the industrial production of mass slaughter, but it also was still very personal, and required deliberate deception at every step, to keep the people who were about to be gassed from understanding and then perhaps rebelling.

We didn’t have a lot of time on this visit, about four hours in all at the camps. So I wasn’t able to deviate much from the standard tour that our guide was taking us on in both camps. I managed to see a special special exhibit that the country of Belgium had donated, depicting the suffering of the 25,000 Jews who were deported from there to Auschwitz in 1942. Very few survived. My mother and her immediate family, thank goodness, were helped by the Belgian Resistance and were saved by going into hiding before the deportation began. There by the grace of good people, go I.

I also managed to walk through an exhibit that detailed all the ways people in the camps resisted the Nazis, and the heavy price they paid for such actions. Since the SS kept detailed records we know of a few of these incidents, but since the vast bulk of their records were destroyed as the SS prepared to close the camp in late 1944 as the Russian Army approached, we don’t know how many more times they happened. I was glad to be reading about the Sonder-commando unit of prisoners who rebelled and managed to blow up Crematorium 3, before all being put to death, in October 1944. Standing on the massive plaza that memorializes the killing grounds in Birkenau, near that crematorium, I felt a tiny glint of satisfaction. They fought back, even here.

Had I been with a group of fellow Jews, I think I would have wanted to chant Kaddish for the dead. I’m not religious, but I respect the ritual and know it is important to honor and remember the dead. Also, the Kaddish is a paradoxical mourning prayer. Its words make no mention of death or heaven, as might expect; they speak only of the glory of Creation. It is as if to remind the mourner, “You are in the world of the living, cherish it.”

Leaving the camps with my friends Andrew Rasiej and Jen Vento who shared the visit, I saw a sign for a synagogue and Jewish museum in nearby Osweicsim, and I asked them if we could make a quick detour to visit. It was unlikely, but I thought these might be a group of Jews there, enough to say a proper Kaddish. Unfortunately, I discovered that these is no living Jewish community there any more. Before the war, there were as many as 7000 Jews living in the town, a majority. But afterward the few survivors emigrated to Israel or America. The afternoon I visited, it was empty save for one employee of the museum. I left a donation for its upkeep. And then I said to my friends, like the mourners leaving a grave site, let’s return to the world of the living.

I first got to know Christopher when I began working at The Nation magazine in 1983, when he was then writing his Minority Report column. I started there as an intern, and slowly made my way up the publishing and editorial totem poles. By the fall of 1984, my job title was something like director of publicity and promotion, which meant that I was in charge of trying to get Nation writers and stories into the mainstream media.

It was a challenging time to be on the left in America. Ronald Reagan cruised to re-election against the hapless Walter Mondale. Just about everything I cared about–civil rights, human rights, ending the danger of nuclear war, economic inequality–none of that seemed to matter to the people in charge in Washington, DC. The New Right was ascendant and the left seemed powerless, or worse, divided amongst itself by identity politics. And these were the days before the Internet, when being in a minority meant being marginalized, seemingly shut out of the national conversation. A handful of major media outlets–the TV networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek–set the agenda. If you weren’t on their radar, it was as if you didn’t exist.

Here is where Christopher first made a deep impression on me. We had somehow gotten him placed on Firing Line, William F. Buckley’s long-running political talk show. He was there as the ostensible balance to R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., then the swashbuckling young editor of The American Spectator and Buckley protege, who had a new book out to flog called “The Liberal Crack-up.” The date was December 11, 1984.

Christopher Hitchens on Firing Line, December 2004

This gets Buckley’s goat, and the old man (who was then very much in his prime) tries to argue that nothing Nixon did was worse than the Kennedys (John and Bobby) who secretly taped Martin Luther King Jr, or even FDR’s use of taping. But Hitchens keeps the upper hand, declaring that he had often criticized the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for their abuses of power, but “in Watergate quantity was turning into quality; that there was an attempt to institutionalize the use of agencies of the state as a private political police force.” Moments after making that point, he goads Tyrrell into declaring that he indeed thought that Nixon’s election in 1972 was a good thing.

The argument meanders for a while, with Hitchens making fun of Tyrrell’s feeble attempts to turn his opposition to feminism into some kind of old-fashioned gallantry. But all along it’s clear that Tyrrell is completely outmatched by Hitchens, who has turned the discussion of the Liberal Crack-Up into a roaring defense of the left, and Buckley keeps stepping in to try to save his protege, to little effect. The two men of the Right think they have god and the facts on their side, since Reagan and Reaganism are at their heights, this being December 1984, but Hitchens refuses to do what just about every liberal was doing back then, which was to bow his head and accept that this meant the battles of the 1960s were wrongheaded and futile.

The high point comes when he declares:

“The American left–American radicals and American liberals, many of them–in starting the civil rights movement for black Americans, in combatting an unjust war in Indochina and in beginning the emancipation of women–the way we think about sex–changed the way everyone thinks and the way everyone lives far beyond the borders of the United States. It was a tremendous time, and the whole world is in debt to the American left–I’d rather call it–for those three enterprises. Now it’s true that they’re all now in rather low water, those movements, but I see not reason to sneer at them now or to forget the grand contribution they made, unsurpassed by any conservative rival.”

Later he adds:

“I’ll just remind you I began by saying that when I still lived in England before I became an emigrant, I was, as many, many millions of people were, very inspired by the American examples, in particular Dr. King, but also, later, the movement to arrest the unjust war in Indochina and, as I say, it was American women who really began to show women in the advanced countries that they needn’t live on the assumptions that had dictated their lives up till then. These were the examples that stirred me and that I still am inclined to defend….attitudes of my peer group–other people like me who are white and male, I mean by that–towards women have undergone a vast improvement in the last 15 years or so. I think one of the good things about the civil rights movement was how it improved the moral standards of white people, and I think one of the great things about the women’s movement, or the feminist movement, if you like, is that it’s changed the way that men think. And I think that’s been good for our sake as well as theirs. That’s what’s good about reform movements is that they’re not what are now called interest groups or selfish, narrow, contained things.”

Hearing that said back in 1984 left a strong impression on me. Here was this young guy, outnumbered two to one, producing a ringing defense of the biggest liberal causes of our time. The American left, he was saying, mattered in the lives of millions of people. There was no need to apologize for it.

Fast forward to April 11, 2000. Working with political science professor Frances Fox Piven, I helped put together a conference on “Third Parties and Independent Politics” at the CUNY Graduate Center. I had been doing a lot of reporting and writing about third party efforts ranging from Ralph Nader and Ross Perot to Jesse Ventura and the New Party (which later took root in NY as the Working Families Party), and for this event we managed to get a terrific array of speakers from inside these movements as well as from the left wing of the Democratic Party. Hitchens was a featured speaker, though the moment I remember most had nothing to do with his time on stage. (You can listen to an audio recording of the plenary session here.)

It had been a number of years since I had seen Christopher (I left the Nation in 1997), though we kept in light touch throughout. For example, he had gladly contributed a fantastic essay of his for The Gulf War Reader, an anthology I co-edited with Christopher Cerf back in 1991. Christopher’s essay, “Realpolitik: A Game Gone Tilt,” was a tour-de-force critique of America’s disturbing pattern of cozying up to dictators in the Persian Gulf, and then in tilting one way or the other, letting our allies launch foolish wars like Iraq’s 1980 attack on Iran, its genocidal assault on the Kurds and then its 1991 attack on Kuwait.

Something had happened to him, though, despite the continued brilliance of his writing. To put it frankly, he looked like shit. At CUNY, he showed up bedraggled and wearing open-toed shoes, which I think he said he needed because he had some kind of skin condition. The drinking and smoking and terrible eating habits showed. I felt badly for him but didn’t bother saying anything; we all knew Christopher wanted to live this way and wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s a moment though, from the conference, that made me start to wonder about Christopher’s independence of mind. My friend Dan Cantor, who had just gotten NY’s Working Families Party off the ground a few years earlier, was on stage making a nuanced point about how progressives could attract the support of white working class people, mainly by emphasizing common economic concerns. Christopher ambled up to the mike to ask a question: “Well,” he declared to Cantor, “you surely must think you have your finger on the clitoris of the working class.”

It was a shocking statement. Why would he choose such language? And why attack Cantor, a fundamentally decent and hardworking political activist, in such a coarse way in public? It was at this point that I decided I didn’t really understand Hitchens at all, and wouldn’t try to engage with him further. While he could be incredibly charming and friendly to people he knew–and I always felt that he related to me honestly and with respect–his apparent need to show off and top everyone else in public could have some very ugly effects.

In later years, we only crossed paths twice if memory serves, both times by email. The first, as recounted here on my blog, was over a minor point that I took him to task over, and as you can see, he was fairly gracious in admitting a mistake, albeit a modest one. The second was about a year ago, after I started reading his memoir Hitch-22. The fact that he was terminally ill had recently become public. Somewhere early in the book he has a line about not waiting until too late to send a note.

So I wrote him:

Dear Christopher:
Though I know we haven’t seen each other in many years, and thus our friendship is one of those “weak ties” things that some people think don’t matter, I first and foremost appreciate that you were always unfailingly decent and kind to me when we were both colleagues at The Nation. And then later, when I asked you for a favor or to show up at some conference or another that I was doing or appear in one of my anthologies on the Gulf/Iraq Wars, you were always a gentleman. That for me counts enormously. You know this already but that has always been your most redeeming quality, whatever your political choices. Life is too fucking short to live it any other way. Thank you for always being a mensch to me. Now, get well!

He wrote back:

Dear Micah,
That’s very generous of you.
Many thanks.
I hope you thrive.
As always
Christopher

I could never finish reading his memoir. While I enjoyed learning about his early life and in particular was deeply moved by the impact of his mother’s suicide, by the middle of the book where he brags about becoming a citizen of the United States under the watchful eye of then Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, I started to give up. When I arrived at his long chapter on the Iraq War, which I knew would be full of his defense of that terrible mistake, I put the book down. It was too narcissistic for me. The Hitchens I knew and respected so highly from 1984 was no longer the Hitchens of the present. I realize that they are both part of the fuller picture and that we are all entitled to our contradictions. But I prefer to remember him the way he was when he was younger and not after success, booze and the other demons in his life took him to where he ended up.

Money is a double-edged sword, Ariely argues, it’s a motivator and a stress-inducer. People who are completing a task that offers them a huge reward turn out to be too stressed to work as carefully and well as they would otherwise. So much for the theory that we need to allow for unlimited incomes to motivate innovators.

Now, according to this fascinating essay in the Atlantic, we learn that people who are ultra-rich ($25 million and up) and supposedly ultra-secure, turn out to be deeply unhappy. So much for the theory that money buys happiness.

That said, I wanted to post this item, from my experience at the February 2004 Digital Democracy Teach-in held at E-Tech in San Diego. The Howard Dean campaign had just fallen apart, but there was a lot of talk in the air of what comes next to this net-powered movement. As you can see from the post, I was a bit frustrated by how much emphasis people seemed to be putting on tools rather than organizing. There also was this endemic problem of seeing movements from afar, and thus not really understanding how much they are actually organized by people and institutions with real names and structures. Today, with all this talk of “Twitter Revolutions,” I think the arguments I made seven years ago are still relevant.

Notes on the Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego. [Originally posted on IraqWarReader.com February 10, 2004]

Reality check
It’s wonderful to be immersed in a welcoming community of searching minds, to meet a lot of new and interesting people, and to get such an intriguing peak over the horizon at what’s ahead. (And to bask in the glow of good will generated by my little brother, on top of that!) Thus it’s a little hard maintain distance, and even worse, to have some critical things to say. But this community seems to thrive on strong debate, so here goes. For all the intense discussion going on online and in the hallways about what the Dean campaign did or didn’t do right, and on how social software tools can empower people, I’m amazed by how little interaction this community seems to have with people who actually know something about social movements, political organizing and power analysis. Perhaps that’s a reflection of how new to politics so many of the people here seem to be, and that’s ok. After all, DeanforAmerica (my shorthand for the decision to try to run an “open-source”-style campaign, as opposed to Howard Dean the candidate for President) clearly inspired many people both in and outside of the hacking community and the A-list blogging community to get excited about personal political participation, and hopefully that will be a lasting thing.

But people here talk like all that’s needed is better tools, and then people will pick them up and take back their country from the powers-that-be. There’s almost no sense of how hard organizing actually is, or why. Britt Blaser, who I’m getting to know and like a whole lot, is talking about “one-click politics,” as if mobilizing people for collective action might be made as easy as buying a book on Amazon. Last night at the open participant session on continuing the Dean campaign, someone said something about how change can take place in an instant, as if it were simply a matter of spreading the right meme or something.

Umm, sorry, but change is hard. There are no shortcuts. If this–empowering average people to have a genuine say in the decisions that affect their lives–were easy, it would have been done already. (More on that thought below.) And this isn’t simply because Howard Dean wasn’t what folks hoped he was. (My pal Doug Ireland has a characteristically tough take on that notion here [Note: Unfortunately, TomPaine.com's archive from 2004 appears gone.]) That is, no doubt, a big part of the reason his campaign foundered, but there was also an awful lot of wishful thinking going on about what was happening at the base, too. For example, I keep hearing about the magic of Meetups, how 80,000 people supposedly showed up at Dean Meetups at the beginning of February, and how empowering all this is. There’s almost no empirical backing for these assertions, but they’re accepted anyway. I know for a fact that the number of people RSVPing to go to the Meetups in my area in Westchester, N.Y., dropped dramatically this month, and my local Meetup group was significantly down in attendance, according to the young woman volunteer coordinator who I’m in touch with. Names on a list, even people in a room, do not equal well-organized change agents. The Iowa caucuses were just another example of this, come to think of it.

Also, there’s no discussion or analysis of how you build a coalition to alter power relations in America. The closest we get is general criticism of “broadcast politics”–the webocrats catchphrase for top-down, capital-intensive politics, where the main goal is having or raising enough money to buy broadcast power to send a message to the passive masses. We’re all against that, for sure. But that isn’t the WHOLE problem. If we don’t talk about the enduring facts of racial and class division and act as if they’re not critical to the maintenance of the status quo, any movement for change these well-intentioned folks are going to construct is also going to founder well before it achieves critical mass.

A wise organizer friend of mine, Becky Glass, who runs the Midwest States Center, once told me, “It’s awfully hard to be invited to dinner after the first course has been served.” What she meant was, if you want your movement to be inclusive and diverse, it has to be so from the very beginning. You can’t invite blacks and Latinos and working-class people to join you later, as so many well-intentioned middle-class white progressives so often do. The Dean campaign’s social base was white well-educated boomers and their college-age kids (Jay Rosen and his nephew Zack Rosen, if you will). This isn’t a huge surprise, as high-intensity Internet users are disproportionately whiter, younger and better educated than the general population, and antiwar activists were also very white, middle-class, etc (a truism of antiwar movements in America going back quite a ways). Yet no one seems at all worried about plunging ahead with grand plans and visions, without stopping to think that they haven’t got everyone you need on board this ship, not yet, anyway.

Not that we shouldn’t plunge ahead. But a little more humility and a little more exploration of the insights of others couldn’t hurt.

Why Social Movements are So Rare

I love that Joe Trippi keeps talking about getting two million Americans to each pitch in $100 to build an independent organization to take back the country from wealthy special interests. It’s a valuable echo of Ross Perot’s United We Stand America (1.2 million people who gave $15 each, until they realized what a scam that was), and of Ralph Nader’s call for a million organizers each willing to put in 100 hours and/or $100 to change the country. But Trippi, who I’m sure knows better, talks as if all it would take is people waking up one morning and doing this. Poof! Actually, he’s not thinking big enough.

What I have in mind is something like Solidnarsc (Solidarity) in Poland, which emerged from within the totalitarian Communist system and signed up 10 million members out of a population of 40 million around the demand for a “free and independent trade union,” something they built–in the face of fierce repression. Try to wrap your minds around that!

One of my intellectual mentors, Lawrence Goodwyn, the great historian of American populism, has a book about Solidarity called “Breaking the Barrier,” in which he unearths the real history of that movement’s construction. I wish I could point to a link for what follows, but believe it or not, it ain’t on the web! (The horror, the horror!) The questions he asks are, or at least ought to be, central to the question of the moment,IMHO.

How do people move from thought to action? Goodwyn’s answer is deceptively simple. “Protest moves from idea to action when it becomes social–that is, when it is organized so that people are acting rather than writing or talking about acting.” [hello, fellow bloggers!] But, Goodwyn points out, large-scale social movements for change are extremely rare beasts:

Societies are not routinely afflicted with ‘movements.’ Things are usually ‘normal’ and people behave in conventional ways. A relatively small number of citizens possessing high sanction move about in an authoritative manner and a much larger number of people without such sanction move about more softly. Some among the multitude may be seen energetically to be doing all they can to acquire a measure of status, but in the meantime, they join their less-energetic neighbors in behaving with conventional deference.

Movements disrupt this normal order. A considerable number of unsanctioned people appear publicly in a new guise; they present petitions or voice demands; they suddenly arrogate to themselves the right to criticize inherited customs and may even issue manifestos proclaiming the precise way they intend to rearrange received habits. Moreover, they have a pronounced tendency to conduct activity out-of-doors where everything is visible. People march, they strike, they demonstrate, and they may even suddenly riot and burn down or otherwise dismantle certain physical signs of established tradition.

How do we get large-scale protest?–what Goodwyn calls “unusual acts of unsanctioned assertion by previously little-known persons.” This is where our ignorance begins. We have been trained by decades of received historical tradition to not understand this crucial issue. Our observers–journalists, academics, etc–rarely explain how social movements are created and sustained. As Goodwyn notes, they borrow heavily from the weather school of writing. “Movements ‘flare up’ and ‘gather steam.’ They ‘boil.’ They can then ‘burst into flame’ and ‘burn like a prairie fire’ before, in time, ‘flickering’ out. A social movement can also be understood as a ‘gathering storm’ that when gathered ‘sweeps like a cyclone’ through vulnerable regions.” This, he says, is “a view from afar.” It is, for all the talk of “granularity,” the primary view we’ve been taking of the DeanforAmerica phenomenon.

“Large scale democratic movements do not happen in any of these easily characterized ways,” Goodwyn writes. “Democratic forms are ordered. To function well, they must be experientially tested. Their construction requires overcoming many culturally based hierarchical impediments. They happen, then, when they are organized. They happen in no other way.”

That’s why I think we’ve got our work cut out for us.

But then I thought about it, and realized that in fact it would be really useful to place WikiLeaks in context, as part of a much larger transparency movement, one that I know quite a bit about. Time to connect the dots, as it were. So, consider this a placeholder of a note on the book’s progress. More details soon.

Until then, if you’re in NYC and interested in this topic, set aside Jan. 24 and/or Feb. 9 on your calendar, when PdF is doing two more WikiLeaks-themed public events with folks like Clay Shirky, Floyd Abrams, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Gabriella Coleman, Evgeny Morozov, John Perry Barlow and Deanna Zandt.

“Have the poor suckers of this world ever lived in an age that offered such entertainment? Costly, to be sure, and they are the ones who are going to pay for it, but at least they are getting to watch some wonderful burlesque–first the pirates of a fraudulent system of communism forced to scuttle their own ship, and then the pirates of a fraudulent system of capitalism beginning to do the same.
So long as their focus was on Eastern Europe, our press and politicians couldn’t talk enough about ‘the triumph of capitalism and democracy.’ But now that they begin reluctantly to concentrate on piracy at home, they are–perhaps because so many of them are part of that piratical crew–understandably reluctant to admit the obvious: that our system is just as bogus and corrupt and irrelevant and defeated in its own way, offering neither the risks of true capitalism nor the safeguards of true democracy. Our system is a hoax.
If anyone still had faith in the system, the savings and loan adventure surely must have brought him to his senses and to his knees. The gambling debt of $500 billion ($150 billion plus interest and other incidentals)–or will it be, as some economists predict, a trillion four?–that the S&L industry left with the taxpayers has prompted even that deadpan Tory, George Will, to remark in wonderment, ‘We seem to have a capitalism here in which profits are private and we socialize the losses. Why are we, in effect–if you’re big enough, if you’re a huge bank or a savings and loan–why, in effect, are we guaranteeing everything?…What I’m asking is isn’t there a way to reform the system so that the taxpayers don’t get stuck with what happens when you have deregulation and risk taking that goes wrong?”
The answer to his question is: No, there is no way to reform the present system, because the system is owned and controlled by those who are ruining it. Voters, ordinary taxpayers, have nothing to say about it.”

That is from the opening paragraphs of Robert Sherill’s majestic, troubling essay “The Looting Decade: S&Ls, Big Banks, and Other Triumphs of Capitalism,” which was published as a special issue of The Nation back on November 19, 1990. I was assistant editor of The Nation then, and I had the privilege of working closely with Sherrill on that essay, along with a great group of intern/factcheckers (who amazingly enough included one Nicholas Clegg, who is now the leader of the British Liberal-Democratic Party!).
I’ve been asking my old friends at The Nation to get the full text of The Looting Decade up on their website, but they have their hands full at the moment. So, I’m posting the .pdf here for your downloading pleasure, and making an appeal: if you can help me get the text converted into .html and posted, please let me know asap.

Get your own – Open publication

In the meantime, as I have time I will post more choice excerpts. If you want to understand today’s Wall Street meltdown, you have to start at the beginning, in the 1980s, when the deregulators first started running amok.

I also love my wife, Leslie, and her optimistic and compassionate view of daily life. She responded to that photo with this mashup:

Maybe she should start the SUCCESS blog?

For example, Rep. Barney Frank admits that it wasn’t until sometime last year that he realized that all the deregulation pushes of the 1990s had loosed the creation of a “shadow banking system” that was undermining the whole financial system. “Not only did Wall Street have so much freedom, but it gave commercial banks an incentive to try and evade their regulations,” Mr. Frank says. When it came to Wall Street, he says, “we thought we didn’t need regulation.”

And then there was this episode, described in the article:

A milestone in the deregulation effort came in the fall of 2000, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill effectively kept much of the market for derivatives and other exotic instruments off-limits to agencies that regulate more conventional assets like stocks, bonds and futures contracts.

Supported by Phil Gramm, then a Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, the legislation was a 262-page amendment to a far larger appropriations bill. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton that December.

Mr. Gramm, now the vice chairman of UBS, the Swiss investment banking giant, was unavailable for comment. (UBS has recently seen its fortunes hammered by ill-considered derivative investments.)

“I don’t believe anybody understood the significance of this,” says Mr. Greenberger, describing the bill’s impact.

Oh come on! Back in the fall of 1999, here’s what I wrote in a bulletin I was writing with my colleague Nancy Watzman, for Public Campaign, on the deleterious effects of money on politics. We didn’t come up with this analysis on our own, either, but were relying on many outspoken critics of financial deregulation, who unfortunately were completely outgunned in the one currency that buys attention in Washington.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Friday, October 22, 1999 should go down in history as the day that big money in politics won its biggest victory ever. That was the day that White House and Senate negotiators worked out a final, late-night deal engineering the repeal of a critical Depression-era law, the Glass- Steagal Act, that for six decades has kept the banking, securities and insurance businesses separate from each other.

The ramifications of this change are huge. First, insurance companies, brokerage houses, banks and credit card companies will be allowed to merge, a process that has been already taking place in dribs and drabs through regulatory waivers, but now will be vastly accelerated. Glass-Steagal had forced commercial banks out of the hyper-risky business of stock speculation and set up the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect individuals from bank failures. Now, despite promises otherwise, the U.S. Treasury and the taxpayers will be in the position of bailing out speculators in the event that their risky plays in the securities business threaten the solvency of the soon-to-be-formed mega-banks. [emphasis added]

….

And, the least-remarked-upon result of the new law: political money will become concentrated to an unprecedented degree. From 1997 to present, contributions from the banking, insurance and securities industries in the form of PAC money, soft money and large individual donations ($200+) to federal candidates and party committees totaled more than $175 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These three industries reported spending another $163 million on lobbying in 1997-98.

Key players in the final deal are also top recipients of campaign cash from the financial sector. Senator Gramm has raised $2.07 million from it from 1993-98; Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), $1.71 million; Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) $1.38 million.

And who are we relying on now? As Paul Krugman points out today, Phil Gramm is one of John McCain’s top economic advisers. And, he notes,

In retrospect, it’s clear that the Clinton administration went along too easily with moves to deregulate the financial industry. And it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that big contributions from Wall Street helped grease the rails.

Last year, there was no question at all about the way Wall Street’s financial contributions to the new Democratic majority in Congress helped preserve, at least for now, the tax loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

Now, the securities and investment industry is pouring money into both Mr. Obama’s and Mrs. Clinton’s coffers. And these donors surely believe that they’re buying something in return. Let’s hope they’re wrong.

UPDATE: My old pal Tom Ferguson (working with a new collaborator, Robert Johnson–formerly of Soros Fund Management), extend the story here:

It is high time for someone to start raising questions about the public interest here. The caterwauling from Bears’ shareholders about price is overshadowing a critical point: Since the first deal was announced, J.P Morgan Chase’s stock has rallied smartly. With its enormous market capitalization, that translates into a gigantic increase in market value. If the deal unravels, the stock price might — indeed, almost certainly will — fall again, but that is precisely our point: markets considered the deal that the Fed and Morgan tried to cut a very good one for Morgan.
The question that needs to be asked is why none of that increase in value is ever to flow back to the public, whose money is critical to the deal. This would be easy to arrange and it does not risk reviving the Soviet Union’s Gosplan: the Fed or the federal government could simply have taken some stock in J.P. Morgan Chase. Or, as in the Chrysler bailout, there could have been warrants issued, guaranteeing the government the right to buy stock at a low price. At some point in the future, when J.P. Morgan Chase’s management and investors are again comfortable lecturing the rest of us about the magic of the marketplace and the urgent need to cut the size of government, the stock or the warrants could be sold off or redeemed, to pay for the rescue.