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Public Intellectual

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we talked to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz about his new book,*The Road to Freedom,* and his ideas about what it will take to build a more fair economy and good society after the collapse of neoliberalism.

The current so-called “polycrisis” — political, economic, and environmental — means the question of what comes next has been very much on the minds of today’s thinkers. Today we present an exclusive excerpt from economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler’s forthcoming book, Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society. Chandler, who directs the Programme on Cohesive Capitalism at the London School of Economics, offers a take on the future based on his reading of the philosopher John Rawls, the influential theorist of justice....

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joel rogers mcarthur genuis 100 most infl policy nader hour

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/522/

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-november-12-2018/

useful idiot:

https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/joel-rogers/

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A professor of law, political science, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Joel Rogers is an influential figure in progressive politics. He is the author of several books, works as a contributing editor for Boston Review and The Nation, and has founded some of the most powerful leftist organizations and coalitions in the United States. Newsweeknamed Rogers one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century, and Glenn Beck has called him “the man behind [Barack] Obama.” Van Jones, the revolutionary communist who served briefly as President Obama’s “green jobs czar,” haspraised Rogers’ “extraordinary set of achievements,” asserting that Rogers has given “three great gifts” to the progressive movement:

Rogers earned a B.A. from Yale College in 1972, a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1976, an M.A. from Princeton University in 1978, and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1984.

In 1992 Rogers founded the tax-exempt Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. COWS describes itself as “a national policy center and field laboratory for high-road economic development — a competitive market economy of shared prosperity, environmental sustainability, and capable democratic government.”

That same year, Rogers co-founded the New Party, a socialist coalition that endorsed and helped elect left-wing political candidates; one of its most noteworthy members in the mid-1990s was Barack Obama.

In the fall of 1994, Rogers was listed in a New Party publication that named more than 100 activists “who are building the NP.” Other notable names among the list of 100+ were: John Cavanagh, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Randall Forsberg, Maude Hurd, Manning Marable, Frances Fox Piven, Zach Polett, Wade Rathke, Mark Ritchie, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, Quentin Young, and Howard Zinn.

During the early years of the New Party, Rogers fought to institute, in the state of Minnesota, the practice of electoral fusion — where two or more political parties can support the same political candidate and thereby pool the votes for all the parties involved; this practice enables smaller parties to influence the agendas of big-party candidates. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against electoral fusion in 1997, the New Party shut down its operation. It was reincarnated in 1998, however, by Rogers’ partner, Daniel Cantor, as the Working Families Party, which became a powerful front group for ACORN.

As the ’90s progressed, Rogers remained intent upon building a progressive alliance to redress the supposed failure of liberalism in America. “All around us is the wreckage of unrestrained capitalism—falling living standards, families strained to breaking point, rising inequality,” he lamented in 1994. For Rogers, liberals were ill-equipped to save the U.S. from economic decline and stagnation, since they “lack […] confidence in ordinary people” and, therefore, cannot build “organized popular support.” Progressives, by contrast, “actually believe in democracy” and can “do the heavy lifting against entrenched and resourceful corporate actors,” said Rogers.

In 1995 Rogers won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, nicknamed the “Genius Award.” Meanwhile, his COWS group continued to flourish, receiving the funding of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Carolyn Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Garfield Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, Living Cities, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Wallace Global Fund, and the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.

In early 1995, Rogers published an essay in The New Left Review – a periodical whose content is largely Marxist/socialist – suggesting that the New Party represented an important new voice in American politics. Moreover, he derided liberals for their failure to gain “social control of the economy” or to put “serious constraints on capital.” With euphemism and convoluted language, Rogers carefully avoided making an open call for socialism. Rather, he advocated “economic democracy,” whose “biggest … barrier,” he lamented, was “capitalism” — an “undemocratic” system featuring “private ownership of the means of production.” Rogers pushed for “reforms” that would “facilitate greater popular control of capital itself, which would permit experimentation with different forms of ownership and production….” Toward this end, he proposed a new “bill of rights” consisting of a de facto guaranteed minimum income, wage controls, and “employment redistribution” – i.e., guaranteed full employment, which could be achieved by a mandated shortening of the work-week.[

In a 1996 speech](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxYvYfx2rE) at Columbia University, Rogers said that “profit-seeking business” was characterized by “swaggering ruthlessness,” immense “greed,” and “a blank indifference to all that is good and human.” He described capitalism as “monstrous.” He accused “the right in the early 1970s” of having commissioned intellectuals to “produce just tons of junk … books and case studies and made-up studies and empirical studies and fake studies.” Then he declared, “We [progressives] should do the same.” Moreover, he proposed that the U.S. should “double the minimum wage within three years.” He said that every child in America “should be fed, clothed, housed, decently fed, and insured, and eventually they’ll grow up and then vote for national health insurance.” And he made reference to Christian fundamentalists as “ungodly.”

In 1997 Rogers was a guest speaker at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City.

On September 20, 2001, Rogers spoke at a New York City gathering to honor the work of Richard Cloward (co-creator of the Cloward-Piven Strategy), who had died a month earlier. Other speakers included such notables as Barbara Ehrenreich,  June Jordan, Gus Newport, Frances Fox Piven, Miles Rappaport, Tim Sampson, Cornel West, and Howard Zinn.

Also in 2001, Rogers co-founded EARN, a self-described “poverty group” whose board of directors includes executives from AJW Inc., Citibank, Covington & Burling LLP, Goldman Sachs, Sotheby’s International Realty, and Wells Fargo. In addition, he became an advisor to the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF). Soon after 9/11, Rogers’ COWS partnered with CAF’s sister organization, the Institute for America’s Future, and with the Tides Center, to create the Apollo Alliance (AA), where Rogers served as the nascent group’s first chairman. At the AA, Rogers was able to lay out a strategy for green economics, which, as longtime AA board member Van Jones claimed, became the immediate model for the Obama administration’s environmental policy.

In addition to AA, Rogers’ COWS also developed a host of other progressive projects, most notably the Emerald Cities Collaborative, a major player in the push for Cap-and-Trade legislation, and Green For All (with Van Jones as founder).

In the August/September 2004 issue of The Nation, Rogers lamented that “the dismantling of the New Deal welfare state, twentieth-century American liberalism’s greatest domestic achievement” had already taken place, with the Bush Administration representing the culmination of America’s “devolution” and posing “the greatest internal threat to our democracy in our history.” Progressives, Rogers argued, needed a new strategy to wrest power away from conservatives:

“[I]n no state are there functional majorities of self-consciously progressive elected officials, working together off a visible, coherent program of progressive economic, social and political reform, linked systematically to outside progressive forces. That is what the right is building on its side, and what we need to build on ours.”

Rogers calls for progressives to place their own candidates inside government, candidates who will “systematically” follow the agendas of “outside progressive forces” to engineer radical change in America. Such change, Rogers hopes, will cause the U.S. not only to become more judicious in its use of military force overseas, but also to begin to make amends for its “four hundred years’ racism.”

Along with his other duties and affiliations, Rogers is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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public historians like mculloch,

https://www.c-span.org/video/?449746-18/doris-kearns-goodwin-discusses-leadership-turbulent-times

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https://www.alternet.org/heres-how-right-wingers-have-gotten-away-ridiculous-lies-decades

This week, in a sudden bout of atypical decency and common sense, a cavalcade of social media companies and content platforms — including YouTube, Spotify, Apple and Facebook — finally banned Alex Jones and his media empire Infowars.

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The move was long overdue, as Jones has spent his whole career peddling not just right-wing disinformation, but the worst kinds of conspiracy theories, demonizing innocent people and running cover for legitimate villains. Jones has used his platform to terrorize the families of shooting victims, even parents of the Sandy Hook children, by suggesting they are "crisis actors" participating in a massive hoax. On the flipside, he's denied violence committed by actual murderers, claiming that Timothy McVeighwas a "patsy" and that arguing that David Koresh, who impregnated 12-and-13-year-olds and almost certainly ordered a mass suicide that killed multiple children, was an innocent victim.

It's a sign of how trollish and amoral conservatives have become that their instinct was to rush forward and claim that it was an assault on free speech for online platforms to refuse to distribute the steady stream of lies and defamation that pours out of Infowars. Most of these folks didn't even pause for breath between trying to get writer Sarah Jeong fired from the New York Times for jokes mocking racists to declaring that "free speech" requires private companies tosignal-boostan amoral monster like Jones. Such bad faith isn't merely a tool of the right. It's the central organizing feature of the troll lifestyle that they've created for themselves.  What's going on here is not a mystery. American conservatives long ago decided that nothing mattered more than winning. They won't hesitate to support harassment, defamation, disinformation or, as we're now learning, possible treason, if they feel the end result will be a few more votes for the Republican party.

But the whole Jones debacle highlights a very real problem that social media and other content platforms have to contend with: Where do you draw the line?Jones may be on the fringe, but his show was linked to the Republican mainstream in the sense that most of the American conservative movement functions by peddling disinformation and, in many cases, conspiracy theories. Banning all disinformation from these sites would mean wiping out the vast majority of right-wing content, which would no doubt result in even more squalling that we're hearing now. But the current situation, where some lies cross the line but others don't, is a muddled mess that allows for all the bad-faith posturing about "free speech" that's going on now.

It's not quite fair to blame Mark Zuckerberg personally for this particular problem, because misinformation isn't just about "fake news" or the blatant fictions of Infowars. It goes straight to the heart of Republican politics, even before the party nominated a conspiracy theorist and con man to be their presidential candidate. Making false claims, intentionally or otherwise, has been a central Republican tactic for decades, and it's just getting worse. [ yes, but DNA is max engagement, leads to addiction, megaphone for rw lies/conspiracy]

Take climate-change denial as the primary example. There's a widespread, tacit acceptance in the mainstream media that it's normal for Republican politicians to "believe" that climate change is a hoax. (Even though that wasn't universally true even 10 years ago.) This is taken as somehow categorically different and less awful than, say, claiming that a mass shooting of children is a hoax.

But is it really all that different? In both cases, the person is apparently claiming that a widespread fiction has been created to trick the public into embracing certain policies, and that the hoaxers are so powerful they are able to hoodwink the media, the government and the public at large into believing them. In both cases, the conspiracy being posited would require literally thousands of people to pull it off and then to be quiet about it for decades. With climate-change denialism, there's even the suggestion that the conspiracy is worldwide, requiring a level of organization and secrecy that is frankly impossible for real-world human beings to pull off.

In both cases, the impact of the conspiracy theory is so horrible it's hard to contemplate. With conspiracy theories about mass shootings, surviving family members are harassed and hounded, even forced to move to escape their tormenters. With Pizzagate, we've already seen an armed vigilante holding a restaurant hostage because he believed lies about pedophiles organizing there.

But with climate change, a more socially acceptable conspiracy theory, the cost of indulging the lie is death. People are dying from heat, people are dying from floods and people will die from resource wars — all because we were too crippled by a conspiracy theory to take action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions when that could have prevented or mitigated this catastrophe.

The reason we have Infowars, and have conservatives defending it, is becausewe — the public, the media, politicians — didn't do enough to stand up to the rising tide of right-wing lies a decade ago. We politely agreed to treat empirically false claims on everything from climate change to economic policy as if these were matters of opinion on which reasonable people could disagree, rather than a question of one side flat-out denying actual reality. So we shouldn't be surprised now that conservatives feel emboldened enough to back up the guy who accuses innocent people of being pedophiles or faking children's deaths.

Kicking Infowars off social media is a good start, but to get our disinformation epidemic under control, more drastic measures need to be taken. Gatekeepers of all sorts, journalists in particular, need to become more active in fighting back and challenging conservatives on their lies, including those that have been falsely categorized as differences of opinion. We gave them an inch and they took a mile. It was a massive mistake that should never be made again.

amanda marcotte

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