OPINION: My Advice For The Occupiers

My first taste of activism was when I was just 12 years old in 1963 and I was visiting my brother’s freshman dorm at Harvard University. I saw people walking through Harvard Square with signs about ending our involvement in Vietnam. I certainly had knowledge of the sit-ins and the gathering on Aug. 28 (my birthday) of Martin Luther King on the Mall in Washington, D.C., but I had not seen a march of any kind until then.

The ’60s got my activism moving along, and I participated in all kinds of marches, conscience-raising groups, etc. I marched, I sang, I read, I joined. So, when I saw the Occupy Wall Street movement, I was curious about what they would do to make their movement as relevant as ours.

Initially, I was pretty critical of their tactics. I was dismayed that the millennial generation was relying on Twitter and the Internet and not as concerned with the visuals. My fellow former lefties, and a few right-wing activists I know, thought middle America would not relate well to tents in the middle of the city. The visuals just don’t quite cut it on people’s home television screens. I thought the Occupy movement had a lot to learn from us old folks.

Then last week I visited Boston. I stopped by the Occupy Boston group situated right at the edge of the financial district. There were the tents and also a newspaper that was handed out to passersby on foot, taxi or car. They were not just relying on the Internet or tweets. The Occupy Boston group was relying on the pamphlet method that had been in existence since the Boston Tea Party two centuries ago.

Not only had the Occupy Boston group started to reach beyond “social media,” they had taken a page right out of some of the most effective movements of the 20th century. They were “getting” it. One article in their newspaper talked about the Gandhi statue brought down from a Quakerg called The Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Mass. They had offered it to the lobby of Goldman Sachs to remind people of greed. It was quickly rejected.

The Occupy Boston folks had also made great headway in getting more visual depictions of their issues by inviting the Bread and Puppet Theater to be part of the endeavor. They are scheduled to perform today, Nov. 28. The theater’s history began with large puppets and giving out bread to form a sense of community around the time of the Vietnam War. The large puppets are hard to miss or ignore. They make much more compelling visuals than tents.

I wondered why the Occupy folks were not using the same techniques that spread the word in the 1960s. I remember as a high-school student going to a Vietnam “teach-in” organized by Howard Zinn at Boston University. The Occupiers had gleaned the lessons learned from those days, too, with “Howard Zinn memorial lectures,” including lectures on the “culture of debt.” Wow, I thought, they have started to glean what worked then, and they are applying it.

As I thought about the good and bad from my old activism days, I began to wonder what else they might do. Plays, I thought, do what even a few YouTube videos can’t. In the early days of the women’s movement, the Caravan Theater in Cambridge, Mass., had a play called, “How to Make a Woman.” Every Friday and Saturday night at the Harvard Epworth Church, this small theater group performed a play about women’s roles in relationships. After, volunteers ran small groups where people could talk about what they saw. Often the groups would meet again on their own. Men talked about what they learned about women, and women talked about being alone with housework and child care. That was in 1970. Things have changed, but small groups such as the Caravan Theater made a difference in middle-class life.

The Occupy people have been successful with the 99 percent meme. It has become part of the conversation and this year’s election discussion. In many ways, the Occupy movement has already been successful. If it is to stay as a movement, like the women’s movement and the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, it is will to have to do some things like theater and teach-ins that capture the hearts and minds of the middle-class youth and workers. We did it in the 1960s, and they can do it now.

OPINION: Good Touch, Bad Touch

On Friday, President Obama said in a radio interview that Americans should do some soul searching with regard to the developments at Penn State. He described what happened as heartbreaking, “especially for the victims.” He went on to say, “It’s a good time for the entire country to do some soul searching, not just Penn State. People care about sports, it’s important to us, but our No.1 priority has to be protecting our kids. And every institution has to examine how they operate, and every individual has to take responsibility for making sure that our kids are protected.”

President Obama is right on many fronts, the first being that we have taken sports and the people who run them as a new religion, and as new pope. Jon Stewart made fun of our obsession with this the other day, and it has garnered more than 300,000 views on his site. Clearly, what happened hit a nerve with not only the president but also with a viewing public. We have turned sports into something that is untouchable. The problem was that there was way too much touch by a sports hero. It is ironic that the focus of this scandal, Jerry Sandusky, wrote a book called “Touched.” His subconscious must have been working overtime when he named that book!

What is more amazing is that the book raised money for the charity he founded, the Second Mile. His alleged abuse is of the children who were part of his Second Mile program. Of the eight children listed in the grand jury indictment, at least three of them claim that inappropriate touching and more occurred at the Sandusky home. Where was Mrs. Sandusky? Was she at home? The executive director was supposedly told years ago about a possible abuse situation. Was his job and the money he raised more important than the mission of the organization? How about the president of the school? What was in place to let the two janitors who saw things know that their jobs would be protected? Where was the education of staff and faculty as to their responsibilities as an educational organization? There are so many questions left to be answered and so many lessons to be learned from this.

If this were only an isolated case. The Boy Scouts have had cases filed against them, as has the Catholic Church. When President Obama talked about soul searching, I think he was talking about our reverence for sports and sports figures. But, there is something greater here.

Many schools teach about good touch and bad touch and educate children to report “bad touch.” That is a great start, but we need to do more. We need to teach children about power relationships, about what can happen to other children if they don’t say anything. Many children want to protect themselves and often the abuser. There needs to be something more than good touch, bad touch. That might work for younger children, but things get complicated for a child or teen who relies on the adult for stability or direction.

For many years, Talkers Magazine, working with Liz Claiborne Inc., has provided a way that talk-show hosts from across the country can promote “It’s Time to Talk Day.” Originally designed to promote an end to domestic violence, it expanded to discuss abusive dating and other issues of relationship abuse. It has worked wonders, and schools all over the country have used their suggestions to get kids talking.
It is a start, but if Congress can promote the abstinence model of dating with lots of money that it did during the Bush years, then why not take on this issue?

It’s a lot more than “good touch, bad touch.” It’s also about abuse of power. It’s time to talk about that, too, and to get the public sector involved in what the private sector has taken on. Our kids’ lives depend on it.

OPINION: Welcome To Cyber War

During the mid-nineties, a talk-show host and friend of mine went to a seminar about how to make money from the brand-new Internet. She came away from the seminar not thinking about how she was going to make money but convinced that the next big war was going to be fought on that big black box sitting on your desk. She should have taken bets. This week, a new government report, “Foreign Spies Stealing U.S. Economic Secrets in Cyberspace,” was released. It got a bit of a mention in print, and NPR did a short piece about it, but other than that it got a yawn. It is too bad. We are putting hundreds of billions of dollars fighting conventional wars and our most valuable resource – innovation – is being taken away by Russia and China.

The governments involved are doing this in much the same way they have run spy operations. They are using third countries, hackers who supposedly have no association with the government in question and sharing of cyber tools. According to the report, the Chinese are the “most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage.” Detection has put the spying directly at computers based in China, but finding the responsible parties has been difficult, if not impossible.

The concern is that our intellectual property, which has the fueled the U.S. economy (think Apple and Microsoft and Silicon Valley), will be used by these countries desperate to be at the top of the economic ladder. According to our government, there are four targeted areas: information and communications technology, which supports the Internet and is the “backbone” of what we do, business information, which points to scarce natural resources and the private negotiations for these and civilian technologies, such as in pharmaceuticals. The one that jumped out, however, was the military technologies in marine systems, drones and other aeronautic technologies.

The problem is also that the technology is making it easier to spy. One former conventional spy, who is now doing a long sentence after working for Boeing for years, was found with 250,000 pages of documents in his possession. Now, says the report, he could purchase one CD for $.75 or a flash drive for $13, making it easy to hide and easy to share.

The concern is also about direct economic loss. Companies and the government spend 2.8 percent of the gross domestic product on research and development. Three Chinese employees of American companies were convicted of taking corporate trade secrets. One took secret paint formulas, costing the company $20 million. Another took information on light-emitting diodes and another stole 4,000 documents from Ford.
These people are the ones who got caught. There are countless more who do not get caught. This kind of theft represents a huge amount of our growth rate. If technology developed by our companies is “given” away by out-and-out theft, it represents a huge loss to our economy. If all the R&D went overseas by theft, it is the equivalent of the entire proposed jobs program of President Obama. Or, if you want to be bipartisan about it, it would pay for the Republicans’ “job creators program.” China has an entire program, called the 863 program, to acquire technologies so it can advance.

To be fair, there are some moral issues in hacking. The moral question we were all asked in school: Is it moral to steal a drug from a pharmacy if someone’s wife is dying? That could now be translated to drug formulas. There is also the question of governments lying and the release of information such as Wikileaks. Those are reasonable questions, for sure. However, the overall issue is that we are fighting with blood and bodies in wars that may be not winnable or not relevant to our countries security. We need to pull our attention to a greater long-term threat: cyber war. If we don’t, we could lose our greatest asset – our ability to invent and our intellectual prowess.

Congress: Still Up For Grabs In 2012

In a year and eight days, the 2012 presidential election will be over.

Speculation on who is join got win has replaced the NBA games as the featured sport in Washington, D.C.
Will Obama win? I believe he will, but the more important question is who will win the congressional races.
With congressional ratings being at a low point (between 9-13 percent approval rate), it is interesting that so many people hate Congress but like “their” member of Congress.

Why? It is hard to not like the person who you see in your district, showing up at school events, having town halls or even handing out literature at the local grocery store. Congress as a whole may be terrible, but “your” member is someone who cares. It may be hard to vote someone out who seems likable in your neighborhood.

Real Clear Politics, a site which holds the attention of the political establishment every four years, currently has the Senate in a tossup as to who holds the majority and the House as still firmly staying in Republican hands. However, as Ben Franklin supposedly said, “A week is a long time in politics.”

The economic problems of our country are huge, and the solutions are not easy to reach. If you look at Ohio as a microcosm of our country, you are seeing exactly of how fluid the elections might be. First, Ohio has yet to fully finalize the redistricting from the 2010 Census. With the election 53 weeks away, it is hard to really know who might run and, therefore, who might win.

It looks like Ohio may be subject to a voter referendum on the redistricting map. That changes things considerably, making primaries closer to the election and, depending on the outcome, changing what would be a delegation that favors Republicans a very unsure thing. This week, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, Chris Redfren, said, “The certification of the signatures and petition language should give Republicans even more reason to sit down with Democratic leadership right away to draw new and fair maps. If they refuse to compromise, there is no doubt that we can collect the number of signatures necessary to send this unfair, gerrymandered map to the voters.”

Ohio is also having labor fights relating to public unions and collective bargaining. Although not quite the fight we have witnessed in Wisconsin, it has been pivotal to state policies and the political process. It has taken its toll on the John Kasich, the governor. One poll had his approval rating at 33 percent. That means that the registered Republicans support him, but the guy in the middle and the Democrats do not. You can’t win an election with just your base. A state government that does not have support of its citizens is going to make it difficult for members of that party to get re-elected. People voting may like their member of Congress and vote for him or her, even if they don’t like Congress. However, a state government of the same party that is disliked can lead to someone staying home or not voting for an unpopular party candidate.
If Ohio is any example, the makeup of Congress is far from decided. It is a situation that can change at a moment’s notice. Ohio has had the reputation of “So goes Ohio, So goes the nation.” One recent article said,

“So goes the nation, so goes Ohio.”

Whichever way you put it, Ohio is a bellwether state. It means that no matter what the polling says, Ohio can change in everything from its district lines to who is going to win its elections. Congress is by no means a done deal in 2012. If Ohio is any indication, we have a long year ahead of us.

Notes From Today's White House Briefing

From Thursday’s briefing with White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

Europe:
Headwinds from the European crises? We need to control the things that we control. We believe that their challenge is significant and needs to be dealt with.

Super Committee:

The committee needs to act. The President has put forward a plan and he hopes that the Congress will take that up. He wants everyone to get a fair shake with prosperity and the long term burden. We can’t take off the table revenues. We can’t say that the burden should be borne by the middle class. Independents and Republicans have this view anywhere but in Washington.

Afghanistan:

He will keep his commitments including the draw down in Afghanistan. By 2014 there will be a transfer. We are working towards a goal of security in Afghanistan by use of the Afghan forces. We anticipate keeping the schedule.

Oakland Police:

Don’t know that he has seen the footage. We understand the frustrations that have led to these demonstrations. There is concern that the perception is that Wall Street acted in way that these protests are about. We insist that everyone behave in a lawful manner even as they protest. We understand the frustrations that are being expressed. Main street and Wall street should operate with the same set of rules. We have long and noble tradition of free expression and free speech but laws should be obeyed. 

The Speaker on Laura Ingraham: (watching things the President does carefully) 

We have been within the law. They are issuing coins for baseball and they are leaving in a couple of hours. Congress should act. They have the President’s plan. They should do things that create jobs. 

On the budget: 

The House did pass a provision for the 3% withholding to withhold that money from contractors. It was part of the President’s plan. Look at what independent economists say about the plan. Most Democrats are voting for it. 100% of the Republicans are voting against it. The President had been around the US in Red, Blue and Purple states. Republicans are going to have to explain to their constituents why they are saying that millionaires and billionaires can’t pay a little bit more. Maybe will get the 60 and pass a measure on infrastructure.