FDR's Response to Pearl Harbor: Economic Freedom as Vital National Security Policy

Dec 7, 2011David Woolner

In the aftermath of the day which will live in infamy, President Roosevelt understood that ensuring human rights, particularly the right to economic wellbeing, was the only way to stave off extremism.

Mr. Vice President, and Mr. Speaker, and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan...

In the aftermath of the day which will live in infamy, President Roosevelt understood that ensuring human rights, particularly the right to economic wellbeing, was the only way to stave off extremism.

Mr. Vice President, and Mr. Speaker, and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan...

The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our Nation...

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory...

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. -Franklin D. Roosevelt, December 8, 1941

It was 70 years ago today that the myth of American invulnerability came to a sudden and dramatic end. On that day, wave after wave of Japanese bombers attacked the sleeping base at Pearl Harbor and in their destruction helped usher in a new era in American and world history.

Like virtually all other Americans, FDR was shocked and outraged at the events that occurred that Sunday morning. But in other respects, the events at Pearl Harbor confirmed what he and many of his advisors already knew about the state of the world in the mid-20th century: It was a much smaller place. In an "air age," the distances across seemingly vast oceans had been dramatically reduced. If one looked at a map of the world from the perspective of the North Pole -- as FDR was wont to do -- the continents of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres seemed to almost touch one another.

These observations may seem commonplace to us today with our satellite communications and intercontinental ballistic missiles. But in 1941, they were quite profound and to a large extent reflected, as the historian Alan Henrikson has written, the "mental map" that Franklin Roosevelt had developed over years of interest in geography, map reading, and even the collecting of stamps from far-off lands.

FDR, in short, had a profound understanding of the physical make-up of the planet. As such, he tended to see the world as a single community made up of neighboring states inhabited by peoples who shared many of the same hopes and aspirations. He also believed that "people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." One only had to look at the catastrophic decade of the 1930s, with its global economic crisis and the rise of fascism in Europe and Asia, for confirmation of this sad truth.

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For Roosevelt, then, the Second World War, as he called it, was as much about the perils of economic depravity as it was about blatant international aggression, for the latter was one of the by-products of the former. In a very real sense, therefore, the welfare of peoples living in the heretofore distant corners of the earth had a direct bearing on the welfare of the people of the United States. The war in fact proved beyond a doubt that the two were inextricably linked. The hardship suffered in one part of the world -- hardship that led to the creation of the most brutally aggressive regimes history had ever seen -- had now reaped its destruction upon America itself.

It was for these reasons that FDR implored the American people in their "righteous might" to not only help him "win through to absolute victory," but also to help create a world, as he said nearly a year before, founded on four essential human freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. For by helping to establish these rights, including the right to live free from hunger and fear -- "everywhere in the world" -- the United States would render itself far more secure and much less likely to have to face an even greater conflagration in the future.

In light of these revelations, FDR did all he could to convince the American people that the United States had to play an active role in world affairs. He felt it was critical that the "United Nations" -- the long forgotten name of the wartime alliance created just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor -- continue to strive for peace and prosperity after the war was over. He sought to work with our friends and allies to build the necessary institutions, such as the United Nations Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, to reorder the world's economic system and facilitate great power cooperation in the postwar world.

Of course, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, FDR also accelerated the build-up of American arms, including a massive expansion of the U.S. Army Air Force, and engaged in a significant restructuring of American defense and intelligence capabilities. This led to the creation of the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the postwar Central Intelligence and National Security Agencies -- all designed to transform American foreign policy into what might best be called National Security Policy.

But in the long run, FDR understood that American military and economic power were not enough to provide the kind of security the American people desired in the wake of the day of infamy. Equally important was moral leadership -- the promotion and adherence to the rule of law, democratic values, and basic human rights, including the all-important right of every person to enjoy basic economic security.

Today, as we look around the globe, we can see that FDR's assessment of the basic hopes and aspirations of peoples the world over to live in a world based on his four fundamental human freedoms is as strong as ever. The evidence is clear in recent events in the Middle East, Moscow, and here at home in Zuccotti Park. The United States may face a future where our status as the world's leading economy may one day no longer be certain, but the values that inspired the valiant men and women who fought the Second World War can and should remain a beacon of hope to all those who aspire to live in a more prosperous and peaceful world.

As FDR reminded us seven decades ago: "Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them... To that high concept there can be no end save victory."

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book on U.S.-UK economic relations in the 1930s, entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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The New Guard

Would Eleanor Roosevelt Support Occupy Wall Street?

Dec 7, 2011Suzanne Kahn

She left clues in her advice columns about how she viewed activism aimed at changing entrenched policy.

In 1941, readers of the Ladies' Home Journal found out that Eleanor Roosevelt did not like mice, "but I do not shriek when I see one." In 1945, she told them that their husbands should help them with their dishes because, "I think anything connected with the home is as much the husband's work as the wife's." They learned all this and much more in Eleanor's monthly advice column.

She left clues in her advice columns about how she viewed activism aimed at changing entrenched policy.

In 1941, readers of the Ladies' Home Journal found out that Eleanor Roosevelt did not like mice, "but I do not shriek when I see one." In 1945, she told them that their husbands should help them with their dishes because, "I think anything connected with the home is as much the husband's work as the wife's." They learned all this and much more in Eleanor's monthly advice column.

Although it's not discussed nearly as often as her syndicated newspaper column, "My Day," Eleanor wrote an advice column for women's magazines from 1941 until 1962. For two decades, women asked her about how they should handle daughters who couldn't attract boyfriends, how she managed her budget, and what they should make of the major political issues of their day. By looking at some of the advice she doled out, it may be possible to piece together what she would have to say about the political issue of our day: Occupy Wall Street.

In 1962, she answered a question about another set of mass protests -- the anti-nuclear rallies of 1961 and 1962. Asked if she saw any value in women's groups marching in front of the White House for peace, she wrote:

The average person has a sense of frustration because he can think of no way to express to his government or to the world at large his desires for peaceful solutions to the difficulties that confront us. The demonstrations you mention are important if only because they dramatize the lack of more useful ways for people to show their devotion to the cause of peace. (McCall's, May 1962).

Similarly, in 1961 Eleanor also wrote about the frustration individuals felt about not being able to do more to prevent nuclear war. In "My Day" she wrote that the best an individual could do was "register...with our government a firm protest."

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OWS confronts massive inequality, not nuclear war and world peace, but Eleanor's take on the meaning and importance of protest in the face of overwhelming issues hits the nail on the head. OWS provides the average person with a way to express frustration and register a firm protest about an unfair economy. Critics have demanded that OWS propose solutions, but Eleanor might have pointed out that OWS makes clear the important point that there aren't easy, direct ways for the average person to fix the economy.

Viewed this way, OWS is doing something both Eleanor Roosevelt and the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s really understood: consciousness raising. Consciousness raising was a method of political mobilization developed by feminists in the late 1960s and 1970s. Formally begun by women's liberation groups, consciousness raising groups allowed women to share personal experiences and frustrations and come to understand that these were not isolated instances, but part of a larger pattern of political relationships that defined women's personal lives. Many feminists embraced consciousness raising methods because they hoped the realizations they inspired would move women to more concrete political action.

Consciousness raising came after Eleanor's time, but her advice column shows she understood the basic idea. Her column allowed women to see that their personal problems were shared. Eleanor urged her readers to take political action to address their concerns.

OWS similarly suggests that people consider how their personal challenges are rooted in political problems. "We are the 99 percent" invites people to identify with the protesters and think about how an unfair economy affects individual lives. Anyone who has been to an OWS rally has seen signs that do exactly that -- share their maker's own story about student debt, medical debt, etc. Consciousness raising is an important first step for many movements. The trick now is to find those more directly "useful" ways for people with raised consciousness to show their devotion to the cause.

Suzanne Kahn is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow and a Ph.D. student in history at Columbia University.

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The New Guard

Diversity is About More Than Numbers and Elections

Dec 5, 2011Jen Chau

Adjusting to life in the most diverse generation in American history will require us to change the way we think about race.

Adjusting to life in the most diverse generation in American history will require us to change the way we think about race.

The last U.S. Census tells us that 46.5 percent of people under 18 are nonwhite, and America is on track to become a majority-minority country within a few decades. With this kind of dramatic cultural shift taking place, political conversations about diversity that focus on numbers and what they might mean for the next election are only scratching the surface.

These conversations feel similar to those that I had while studying at Wellesley, where students argued that the administration needed more than just a rainbow of faces on our brochures -- that we had to actually do something with our diversity. (While I was there between 1995 and 1999, the college boasted 51 percent of its study body was of color.) I've also worked with organizations over the years that focused on filling desks with people of color because it was the "right thing to do," without any meaning or action beyond that.

These past experiences reflect a larger conundrum with which the country has been grappling. We are becoming an increasingly nonwhite country. (I'm tempted to write that we are becoming more "diverse," but the more accurate statement is that we are becoming less white). What does this mean for us? What do we do with this fact?

Inherent in this shift are questions about power and privilege. And when the rise of "minorities" comes up, I sometimes note a tinge of anxiety -- not surprising given our very fraught history as a nation in which the amount of power, resources, and rights you had were based on your race. White meant power and privilege; anything else meant disadvantage and discrimination if not outright oppression.

We have made progress since the days of Jim Crow, but we still struggle to create a society in which everyone has the same opportunities regardless of race and socio-economic class. Looking at recent data on incarceration rates by race is just one example of how inequity plays out in our society. We need to take inventory and be willing to confront the hard questions: Where do we continue to create inequity in our structures, institutions, and communities? How are we raising our children? How do we as individuals deal with our own biases?

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My vision of a culturally competent citizenship means that each of us is taking the time to reflect on our own beliefs, values, and biases. Cultural competence is defined as the "ability to understand, communicate with, and effectively interact with people across cultures." Even when working on cross-cultural interpersonal skills, the self is the starting point. How do our beliefs play out in the ways we interact with others in our personal lives and in the workplace? Do we engage in the practice of reflection and challenge ourselves when we uncover problematic thinking or behavior? We can talk about institutional racism (and we should), but if you boil it down, institutions are built and maintained by individuals. If the individuals involved shift their thinking, the institutions will change along with them.

The question then becomes, "How?" How do we make this shift in thinking happen? What are our first steps? The problem of racism sometimes feels overwhelming; it has loomed over us for generations. We wonder if we will ever see a country where race is not a determining factor of success. But there are ways to take small steps that turn into larger actions.

Beyond engaging in continuous self-reflection and questioning our own biases, we must realize how those biases affect others and determine where we can make positive changes in our words and actions. We have to find opportunities to reach across cultural, ethnic, and racial lines to expand our understanding of others and practice having difficult conversations about race. If we see injustice anywhere, we must speak out. This means taking a critical look at our institutions. What do they do to create opportunities for all? How does they knowingly or unknowingly create inequities? Once we start asking these questions, we can develop strategies to interrupt the negative impacts of racism. And then we should do it all over again, and again, and again until we get it right.

The ongoing work to create communities, institutions, and, on the broadest level,  a country that is fair and equitable starts with the individual. Let's acknowledge the numbers, sure. And then let's make more meaning out of it for all of us. Once we figure out what race means to the most diverse generation in American history, we might be able to truly tackle some of our country's largest problems around inequality.

Jen Chau is a Roosevelt Institute | Pipeline Fellow and founder and executive director of Swirl, Inc.

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The Real Media Bias: The Police Force's Disproportionate Power

Nov 22, 2011John Stoehr

occupy-journalTo say Occupy Wall Street has "clashed" with police is to pretend they have equal power and weaponry.

occupy-journalTo say Occupy Wall Street has "clashed" with police is to pretend they have equal power and weaponry.

Brian Stelter wrote last weekend about the news coverage of Occupy Wall Street and of its 1,000 or so offshoots here and abroad. Stelter reports that the Pew Center's new survey found that OWS captured just 10 percent of national news coverage (presumably liberal, moderate, and conservative media combined) starting in October. Coverage fizzled to 1 percent until last Tuesday, when the NYPD prepared to muscle protesters out of Zuccotti Park. No surprise: At that point, news coverage soared.

With a few exceptions, the general tendency has been to ignore OWS. It doesn't have obvious leaders or an obvious agenda, both of which make it hard to understand if you don't put in the effort. So it gets a pass from most newsrooms -- unless the cops get involved. Then you have a story that lends itself to the genre of news writing. It has characters, conflict, chronology, drama. Every reporter wants to cover such news. But it's this habit of waiting for the cops that leads me to my point.

The media has a bias, but not the one everyone talks about. The media's bias favors cops.

This has always been true. Journalists need access to power. Those in power provide information that cannot be obtained otherwise. Reporters trade access for favorable coverage. The best reporters succeed without compromising their integrity. But most of this means interacting with everyday, run-of-the-mill manifestations of power, and for most journalists, and Americans generally, that means law enforcement.

Media's natural tendency is to sympathize with the police. They are the good guys, criminals the bad guys. And I think this is the right presumption until facts compel us to think otherwise. But I also think this habit of deference is so ingrained in the minds of journalists that even when it's very obvious that the cops are the bad guys in a story, the media still can't avoid false equivalency.

False equivalency is a term coined by James Fallows. It has other names. Eric Alterman calls it on-the-one-handism. Paul Krugman calls it the cult of balance. In any case, it means the journalistic convention of representing two sides of a story equally, no matter how unequal they may in fact be. For Krugman, this means putting Republicans and Democrats on the same plane, even though Tea Party Republicans have been far more radical than Democrats. For the media coverage of OWS demonstrations, this means portraying non-violent civil disobedience as if it were the same as outright acts of police violence.

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By far the most exasperating example I can think of is contained in one word: "clash." Google this: "protesters clash with police." Many of those links will lead you to stories with pictures of cops armed with rifles and batons, wearing body armor and face shields, and squaring off with unarmed and peaceful protesters. In many of those photographs, you will see cops blasting pepper spray into the faces of Americans whose only crime appears to be exercising an inalienable right. Pepper spray is one of those "non-lethal" weapons, like rubber bullets and sonic grenades, that have come into widespread use in the past 15 years. You'd think police would deploy them sparingly, only in cases in which officer safety is endangered. But OWS has revealed what observers have known for some time - that police, with the approval of courts, have used them increasingly to intimidate, coerce, and terrorize crowds. What else explains the horrible stories of police officers casually pepper-spraying an expectant mother, an 84-year-old woman, and hundreds of students at UC Davis?

These are not conflicts between rivals of equal proportion, as "clash" connotes. These are incidents of police violence and media should start calling then what they are. With so much amateur video out there, the media has little choice but to set aside convention, examine bias, and report what's happening.

Worse, the type of police violence used against protesters appears to be institutionalized. According to the Associated Press, what we saw at UC Davis -- a campus police officer, who did not appear in any way to be in danger, casually doused students who were peacefully protesting -- is considered "fairly standard police procedure." Though the UC Davis chief was put on leave and the chancellor has called for a review, that doesn't address how police forces nationwide have become increasingly militarized, according to Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief. As he writes in The Nation, "It's showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD 'white shirt' coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for 'trespass.'"

And let's not forget the two dozen journalists arrested during the evacuation of Zuccotti Park. Some have said the media landscape has changed so much that cops can't tell who's a professional reporter and who's an amateur. That's why they ended up arresting reporters and photographers. But another reason for so many arrests is that the cops are increasingly militarized and indifferent to the First Amendment.

If this were a war zone, the OWS protesters would be called innocents or victims of war. Police violence would be described as a crackdown, a suppression. As it is, protesters are "clashing" with police, as if they have anywhere near comparable weaponry to what the police have. As if they have weapons at all. Most are just engaging in acts of civil disobedience. Perhaps, with enough people being traumatized by this violence, the media will start talking about the police in terms that actually convey the experiences of those who "clash" with them.

John Stoehr is the editor of the New Haven Advocate and a lecturer at Yale University.

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Dorian Warren: Police Brutality is Reigniting the Occupy Movement

Nov 22, 2011Dorian Warren

The shocking police brutality at UC Davis last week was just the latest example of authorities reacting to the Occupy movement with violent contempt. But as Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren tells CNN's Don Lemon, these overbearing attempts to silence protesters might only be helping their cause. "Every time there's a lull in the protests, there's a spark of something that happens, usually police brutality of some kind, that gets people energized again and gets them motivated and recommitted to the Occupy movement," Dorian says.

The shocking police brutality at UC Davis last week was just the latest example of authorities reacting to the Occupy movement with violent contempt. But as Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren tells CNN's Don Lemon, these overbearing attempts to silence protesters might only be helping their cause. "Every time there's a lull in the protests, there's a spark of something that happens, usually police brutality of some kind, that gets people energized again and gets them motivated and recommitted to the Occupy movement," Dorian says.

As for the police's actions, Dorian thinks the public will agree that the blithe use of pepper spray is "not very different from firehoses, frankly." And though Mayor Bloomberg seemed to score a major victory by evicting protesters from their home base at Zuccotti Park, Dorian believes that being untethered from a specific location or organizational hierarchy may actually work in the movement's favor. He argues that this nullifies complaints about conditions at the parks and "makes it so that there aren't any particular targets that opponents of Occupy can really focus in on." Ultimately, these crackdowns may simply be giving the movement an opportunity to prove its power and durability.

For more of Dorian's take on the Occupy movement, check out his early reflection on what's driving the protests and his analysis of their populist message, co-authored with Joe Lowndes for Dissent.

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Taking Back the Right to Vote

Nov 21, 2011Dante Barry

By passing voter ID laws, conservative legislatures are denying the franchise to those who have fought hardest for it.

By passing voter ID laws, conservative legislatures are denying the franchise to those who have fought hardest for it.

Last week, I participated in the New Organizing Institute BlackRoots NewMedia BootCamp. I had the privilege of joining 31 organizers representing communities of color from across the country to be trained in online organizing. As part of the training, each organizer was placed on a team to develop an online fictional campaign over the course of the week. For this boot camp, we developed a campaign around the issue of voter suppression.

My team took on a situation where the fictional "State X" legislature was considering a plan that would require the state's voters to present two forms of identification in order to protect against voter fraud. The state senator who represented my team's community was on the fence as he recognized that his rural constituency would have difficulty obtaining the additional identification.

Sadly, this scenario reflects a regressive trend that is all too real. Since 1920, the United States has expanded voting rights in three significant ways: the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended racial barriers to voting; and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18. Now, conservative legislatures throughout the U.S. are passing voter identification laws that disenfranchise women, young people, and communities of color.

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FDR once said, "We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out." I am a Millennial and at least 24 percent of the voting age population in 2012 will be under 30 years old. Approximately 14 million adults between the ages of 18 and 29 will be enrolled in degree-granting institutions in 2012. But instead of trying to bring these potential young voters to the polls, legislators are making every effort to turn them away. In states such as Indiana, voters must present photo identification with an expiration date issued by the state or U.S. government. This prevents students who are attending private institutions from using their school identification. Legislators claim that such laws are intended to prevent voter fraud; however, there is little evidence that voter fraud is a problem in the United States.

Houses have been burned down; families have been torn apart; people have fought, gone to jail, and died for the right to vote. Voting provides the opportunity to decide, and that is powerful. Suppressing voters and denying them the power to decide excludes them from the political and policymaking process. We need to take back that power and make our voting system more inclusive.

I'd like to extend special thanks and recognition to the #blackroots11 team. You can follow the campaign on Facebook and Twitter.

Dante Barry is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's Chapter Services Coordinator and Summer Academy Coordinator.

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Millennial Pulse

How Occupy Wall Street Can Help Revitalize Environmental Justice

Nov 16, 2011David Weinberger

earth-150By sparking a national dialogue about inequality, Occupy Wall Street is highlighting the link between economic and environmental justice.

earth-150By sparking a national dialogue about inequality, Occupy Wall Street is highlighting the link between economic and environmental justice.

It would seem that progressives have finally found in the Occupy movement the kind of populist momentum for which they have long hungered. Health Care for America Now, Green for All, MoveOn.org, and a number of unions have come out in support of Occupy Wall Street, fashioning different narratives that would tie their organizations' various missions to the values espoused by the protesters.

No sector of the progressive movement has yearned for this change more than the environmental movement, whose claims to populist underpinnings have long been met with skepticism. The arrival of populism on the left and the attention that is now being paid to institutionalized inequality align well with the heightened priority that environmentalists in and out of Washington are now placing on environmental justice issues.

Environmental justice is premised on a simple notion: that everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background, is entitled to a healthy environment. In the United States, the majority of hazardous waste sites, power plants, and truck depots are sited in low-income neighborhoods, where the land is cheap and the communities' political capital is weak. As a result, these communities are subject to heightened frequencies of chronic illnesses, including asthma and obesity, that most often preclude long-term economic mobility. Environmentalists, seeing these historical inequities that have come with traditional, market-based patterns of infrastructure distribution, advocate for land-use solutions that account for externalities in the host communities and ensure equality of opportunity across class lines.

Though there is still much more to be done, the environmental justice movement has made strides. Environmental justice assessments, through which the federal government evaluates particular policies' impacts on equal access to clean air, clean water, and green space, are now commonplace. At the same time, there is a growing understanding that access to ecological services and natural resources is directly related to the populist notions of economic mobility and opportunity.

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Despite this progress, neither the 112th Congress nor the Obama administration has given environmentalists many victories. Election promises of a climate bill and renewed focus on alternative energy have gone unfulfilled. The State Department's decision on the Keystone XL tar sands oil project was delayed, but plans to reroute the pipeline are imminent. Yet with the world's attention turned to Zuccotti Park and the hundreds of tent cities across the country, environmentalists are now perfectly poised to have their agenda items thrust onto the map.

Occupy Wall Street presents a perfect opportunity for proponents of environmental justice. In fact, the General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street held a Climate Justice Day last Sunday to explore opportunities for injecting environmental justice concerns into the policy conversations taking place in Zuccotti Park every day. The event, titled "Capitalism and the Roots of the Ecological Crisis," was one of many interest-specific conversations, including a number of series on financial reform and access to health care.

Occupy Wall Street protesters come from a variety of backgrounds and carry a number of different "pet" interests. Environmental justice is simply one of the concerns on the minds of the protesters. Yet the overarching concerns of Occupy Wall Street -- economic inequality, exploitation of the masses, and economic immobility -- are epitomized by the environmental justice movement. As such, the environmental community should do everything in its power to ensure that environmental justice remains a significant part of the protesters' agenda.

The legacy of Occupy Wall Street, more than a list of concrete policy demands, will likely be a shift in decision-making paradigms of governments and businesses. It was just this summer that national political discourse centered on deficits and the risk of government default. In the two months since protesters took Zuccotti Park, policymakers at all levels and in both parties have been forced to confront the frustrations of the 99%. Civic dialogue is being altered and the battle for economic opportunity is taking center stage. It is now up to environmentalists to seize on this new populist momentum and finally give environmental justice the attention it deserves.

David Weinberger is the Senior Fellow for Energy and Environment at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a senior at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

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The City's Attack on Information

Nov 15, 2011Bryce Covert

Books dumped in the garbage. Press intimidated and shut out. These are not the signs of a functioning democracy.

Books dumped in the garbage. Press intimidated and shut out. These are not the signs of a functioning democracy.

In recent weeks, one of Occupy Wall Street's perhaps greatest victories became crystal clear: since the protests took off, the number of news stories talking about inequality has skyrocketed. This is perhaps one of the movement's greatest strengths: the spreading of information about issues that were previously ignored, if felt viscerally by most Americans. Growing income inequality has been no secret, but few were talking about it on a national scale until the movement put it on the radar.

The discussion and dissemination of information is a hallmark of the movement. On any given trip down to Zuccotti Park, by far the most common activities I observed were teach-ins on various issues surrounded by smaller, informal conversations ranging from crony capitalism to bank bailouts to student debt. The way most illustrious thinkers got involved with the movement was to visit the encampment and share their wisdom. This love of information was also embodied in Occupy's call for transparency. Protesters seek a government whose operations are open to the public and not just to lobbyists, one that is accountable and accessible to its citizens. Signs like this said it simply:

transparency

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But perhaps no greater embodiment of this love of information and knowledge was the People's Library. The first time I went to donate books it consisted of a dozen or so bins neatly arranged by category and title; the last time I was there it had grown to become one of the largest pieces of infrastructure in the park, insanely well organized and beautifully displayed:

library

It's perhaps most chilling to me, then, that when I awoke to news of the evacuation it quickly became clear that police simply threw all of those carefully donated and organized books in the trash. The symbolism of a militarized police force piling thousands of incarnations of our country's knowledge and history into dumpsters is hard to escape today.

To top it off, the press was barred from entry and the few who snuck their way in were treated terribly. Those who tried to reason with the police that they had media credentials and therefore should be allowed access to cover events in a public space were rebuffed. As Rosie Gray of the Village Voice tweeted, "Me: 'I'm press!' Lady cop: 'not tonight.'" Those who were able to find their way past the barricades were purportedly arrested and roughed up. Freedom of the press is ingrained in the DNA of our country. Why? Because without it, citizens remain in the dark. Opacity reigns. Corruption can fester and citizens become less engaged.

Mayor Bloomberg claims the raid was to protect people, including the protesters, from supposed dirtiness and violence. But who is protected when information is blocked or destroyed? Only those doing deeds that can't stand up to the scrutiny of transparency. Information is one of the most powerful tools of a functioning democracy. It suffered a blow last night.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

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A Ticking Time Bomb: The Arab Spring and America's Lost Generation

Nov 14, 2011Mike Konczal

High unemployment pushed young people in the Middle East and North Africa to revolt. Why wouldn't it happen here?

Is it useful to think of the Occupy movement more as a "left" movement or a "youth" movement? To answer that question, it's worth looking into data on the young, particularly as it relates to unemployment.

High unemployment pushed young people in the Middle East and North Africa to revolt. Why wouldn't it happen here?

Is it useful to think of the Occupy movement more as a "left" movement or a "youth" movement? To answer that question, it's worth looking into data on the young, particularly as it relates to unemployment.

To leave the United States for a minute, one way people are trying to understand the Arab Spring is through the lens of massive youth unemployment and inequality. Given how high unemployment has been in these MENA (Middle-East and North African) countries, what else could we expect besides revolution?

For instance, in early February then-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn told a conference, "this summer I made a speech in Morocco about the question of youth employment including Egypt, Tunisia, saying it is a kind of time bomb" and "such a high level of unemployment, especially youth unemployment, and such a high level of inequality in the country create a social situation that may end in unrest." Here is the "youth unemployment" blog tag at the IMF to give you a sense of what people there have been saying about it. In particular, they point out that it should be a major concern for the MENA and African regions.

Interestingly enough, it was even a concern before the mass protests broke out. Regional IMF officials Ratna Sahay and Alan MacArthur gave a presentation on January 23rd, "Challenges for Egypt in the Post Crisis World," at the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies in Cairo (h/t WSJ). Protests would begin a few days later. Here's a key slide from that presentation:

Part of you may want to immediately start pointing out differences between this country and those. Maybe you are furious at terrible, unresponsive, corrupt governments ignoring the plight of their populations. Maybe you think that if these countries only had neoliberal, "flexible" wage contracts and a leakier safety net like we have in the United States, then unemployment would be much better.

You may then head over to our monthly unemployment numbers and note that American youth unemployment is in the same ballpark as these MENA countries.

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I've taken numbers from the IMF presentation slide above and compared them to the United States' youth unemployment averages from October 2010-October 2011 from the BLS's CPS data:

I can't find what constitutes "youth" for "youth unemployment" in the IMF's definition, and I'm not even sure if it is consistent across the different countries they estimated. As such, I'm including ages 16-19 and ages 16-24, though I believe they are looking at 16-24. For the 16-19 age group, we are at the same level of unemployment as Egypt and well above the region as a whole. At the broader 16-24 range, we are above Syria and Morocco, which both saw large-scale movements in the Arab Spring.

One potential explanation for the high level of youth unemployment in MENA countries is that they have huge demographic issues to deal with -- they have a massive wave of people under 35 years of age to assimilate into their economies. What's our excuse, other than confidence fairy terror spells and a desire to go after public sector workers? And given this, how could we ever say youth unemployment in the United States' Lesser Depression isn't a "time bomb"?

I have to admit I'm a bit hardened to the various charts I'm able to put together from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' data, but this graph of the employment-to-population ratio for 16-24-year-olds going back to 1948 floored me:

Remember that the increase from the 1950s onward reflects women entering the labor force. And notice how it doesn't improve after the early 2000s recession. Every age group has seen a substantial drop in the employment-population ratio, but no other group I've seen comes close to this plummet. For the first time in half a century, a majority of young people aren't working.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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Millennial Pulse

The Veterans of the 99%

Nov 11, 2011Reese Neader

Our veterans fight for our country overseas. They shouldn't have to fight for a job when they come home.

It's Veterans Day 2011, and the Great Recession continues. Just as in years past, American veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home to a country that cannot provide them the basic dignity of having a job or a place to live. But this year something is different: they are marching for justice.

Our veterans fight for our country overseas. They shouldn't have to fight for a job when they come home.

It's Veterans Day 2011, and the Great Recession continues. Just as in years past, American veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home to a country that cannot provide them the basic dignity of having a job or a place to live. But this year something is different: they are marching for justice.

The status quo is grim. The unemployment rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is 12 percent, even higher than the unacceptable national average of 9 percent. In 2009, over 130,000 U.S. vets spent at least one night in a homeless shelter. Our veterans should be coming home to a country that honors and respects their sacrifice. Instead, our country's largest banks, including JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, have been accused of overcharging them on their mortgages.

Now veterans across the country are joining the Occupy movement to protest economic inequality, denounce corporate greed, and demand jobs. Many of these brave heroes have also challenged law enforcement in their local communities for attacking unarmed civilians. But some of these veterans have also been attacked by police for exercising their own freedom of speech.

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When Scott Olsen, an Iraq War veteran and Marine, demonstrated at an Occupy rally in Oakland, he was shot with a tear gas canister and sustained severe head injuries. In response, hundreds of veterans marched silently through lower Manhattan (from Vietnam Veterans Park to Zuccotti Park) to protest his mistreatment and show solidarity for the Occupy movement. Since then, another veteran has been hospitalized in Oakland, this time with a ruptured spleen from being beaten by the police. Despite this backlash, the Occupy Veterans movement is growing as men and women who have served in our armed forces continue their fight on behalf of American citizens and their constitutional rights.

Some progress has already been made. The Move Your Money campaign is taking money away from the multinational corporations that are putting our veterans out in the street and redirecting it to credit unions that will invest in our communities. A proposed Veterans Jobs Bill would provide tax breaks for companies that hire jobless veterans and veterans with service-oriented disabilities. But there is much more to be done. While we take today to honor veterans' service, we must remember that we cannot tolerate a financial and economic system that leaves them broke, homeless, and in debt.

Reese Neader is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network’s Policy Director.

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