Bay Book, Two Bobs & A Work of People
I can’t be a book reviewer in the East Bay without praising Cherilyn Parsons’ Bay Area Book Festival that celebrated in downtown Berkeley the weekend of June 3 – 4th, a brilliant and defiant collective wave of “Staying Sane, Awake and Engaged in Dangerous Times.” Ms. Parsons and her staff’s organization of BABF deserve whatever East Bayers present as a combined Oscar and Nobel Prize, second only to the Oakland Women’s March for courageous challenge to authority and East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest for panelists’ audacious non-traditionalism.
I co-organized two very small (75-125 participants) artsy-fartsy-politico conferences in my youth, managed lots of poetry readings and a couple of performances; and the prior planning, multitasking, schmoozing and follow-up; even in the non-digital age; were daunting and exhausting. This person is a consummate event and media organizer and juggler of artistic temperaments with a burnished brain of brass and nerves of steel, I am sure.
BABFs’ resulting quality and quantity of speakers and events were so pungent, diverse, supportive and enlightening that I only had time to briefly marvel at the vast kids’ play and publishers’ areas that accompanied and surrounded them. I was there 9 – 9 Saturday and 10 – 6 Sunday, attending “Witness and Testimony,” “The Long 60s,” “Showdown,” Lindy West (author of Shrill,) “Radical Hope,” “On Power,” “Race and Resistance in the Trump Era,” “Who Is American Poetry?” and most of “Forces of Nature” with Susan Griffin, Starhawk and Joanna Macy; missing many wonderful other concurrent events. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Bob Scheer was only one of The Nation's “Trump vs. The Deep State” panelists, but really caught my ear as the editor of Truthdig online and author of They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations And Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy. I’d been bullied by both a violent burglary gang and the nascent Surveillance State when cops & robbers’ computer games bungled through my life while I was on jury duty in 1994; and then accidentally educated in the egregious logical, moral and factual flaws of computer profiling when I went for a Masters in Library, Archives and Information Studies in 2002, and studied HIPAA health data security in IT for Health Care in 2010 in Seattle.
Now “the business model” guys and gals really have their hands on everything; domestically through deregulation of “database marketing,” and data mining everything from vehicle licenses to Facebook posts and every online or “member services” purchase, making them into instantly integrated and interoperable systems for evaluation of our worth and gullibility as consumers. When one of my daughters bemoaned the price of some online boots being “exactly what I have left in my checking account until my next paycheck,“ I said, “You do online checking and banking, right? They do know not only what style and size you buy and wear, but how much you have to spend, too.” And where you live, of course, for FedEx, Amazon and UPS’ “free delivery,” as well as through the DMV and TSA.
If the crooks in Minneapolis were doing this by phone and observation from their diaper-service truck in 1994, just think of how easy it is now that police budgets, salaries and equipment are fueled by arrests made and jail cells filled through “high tech.” “America First” speed and greed are “public policy” streamlined into the military-industrial complex of the era, parallel Mussolini’s “estato corporativo.” Fascism? What? Where? Not here! Not US! And, of course, criminals aren't using high tech! Oh, no! And who are the criminals if "it's all about MONEY down here?"
“The default,” “opt-in” that we thoughtlessly “AGREE” to becomes “warrantless general searches by the government” and “clear violation of Fourth Amendment protections,” to say nothing of “the ability to alter the thinking or emotions of large numbers of people” nationally or internationally. The differences between “misguided patriotism” (Putin’s phrase re: hacking our election), “terrorism and political activism…” are thin, aiming “at understanding how to control or prevent public dissent inside the United States through surveillance and manipulation of information flows.” This leans hard on “global security,” propaganda and “tactics to engineer public consent for government policies.” (p. 58, 92, 68, 88-89)
The spread of tech-snooping for profit in Silicon Valley hasn’t gone unnoticed in the local press, just published in the back business section or editorial pages on weekends. Palantir’s stealth in devouring Palo Alto real estate as well as “GOP obscures stripping of privacy rights” are touted in the free-market business model to be “for the public good,” (p.129).
If you put $20-200 in somebody’s bank account every time they geo-located “suspicious” license plate numbers or facial recognition identifications, (notice who's advertising this link) you can bet it makes surveillance into a fun game, if not a full-time job. Why you could get an army or a flashmob together in a day and a half. Funky spies from Google.com or the Dept. of Education who don't even know they're bankrupting people, throwing them out of their homes, jobs and putting the wrong people in jail or SWAT-Teamed a la Brazil!
Robert Reich identified this slippery slope as one of many coming on from his tenure Locked in the Cabinet as Secretary Of Labor with Bill Clinton 1993-97. During his tenure, college chums Bob and Bill went to Washington with little understanding of how the political machine there would chew up, irretrievably distort and bullet back their and the voters' egalitarian, democratic ideals within months. The cheerful cohorts came in with a Democratic Congress and liberal Court, Hillary started wanting to reform health care on the federal level. They all got trounced by the Republican "get tough" and get "Religious" Right in the 1994 midterm "Republican Revolution" election, got branded as out-of-touch "tax and spend liberals" by a public relations style of campaign avalanche.
Sound familiar? The opposition agenda was the same then as now, but somewhat softer and couched in the saintly-sounding ideals of the "Contract with America" that systematically stripped the poor, disabled, women, children, unions, elderly, ill, people of color, immigrants(...) of the few remaining "New Deal" and "Great Society" public benefits, health care and jobs they/ we could get hold of and put shaming, blaming, suffering and prison time in their place. Reich was "Little Bob" to Bill's Robin Hood, but Speaker Newt of Nottingham and his gang of slithery thieves-in-official-clothing were too much for them.
This giving (more) to the rich and taking from the poor began with Reagan's "trickle down" economic policies and then again openly in U S government twenty years after Nixon left the White House. Reich shows us their dirty, all-too-human roots, the back-room banter that stopped grassroots democracy in its tracks.
Now everyone thinks they can be James Bond or some big wheeler-dealer just because they have a smartphone and a database telling them what to do with it when. It's like shooting fish in a barrel with the military industrial complex's big guns behind them. "Occupation: Government protection racketeer." I'll bet that doesn't show up on #45s or Steve Bannon's tax forms. (Not unless We The People put it there.)
I’d originally wanted to ask Professor Reich why there were so few women “public policy” expert writers well into 2016 in The American Prospect magazine he’d co-founded, but getting an interview was like Ocean’s Eleven in academia, without the well-oiled support team. Once I got up the hill and found the front door, I totally blew it, politically incorrectly pronouncing his name Milwaukee (German)-style RYK instead of RYSSHHH, and the jig was up. I waited in multiple foyers with his numerous (female) secretaries hinting for a free book or magazine, let alone an interview, but no dice. Policy at Public Policy is obviously tough, but polite. A business card and a smile were not enough.
I figured “public health” at least should have some former nurses or Health and Human Services female policy wonks floating around, but even since Hillary, Warren and Maddow, it’s taken talking heads a long time to say “racism, immigration AND MISOGYNY” as prime movers of the Alt-Right, to say nothing of knowing the difference between an Alt-right woman and one who’s not, letting her get up in front of a camera, be on a CNN panel or write an article in a serious journal. Donna Shalala was Secretary of HHS during the Clinton Administrations, and now we may not be CEOs, but there are lots of us working on / scrambling for decent policies for the public.
I gladly settled for reading Reich's memoir, much more accessible than his recent books and the person himself. Through stark vignettes and deft character studies, Locked proved to be a valuable insight into the threshold of The Era Of U.S. Political Meanness like we've never seen before, the basic outline of the "unimaginable level of cruelty" shriveling public programs of the most vulnerable Americans in the proposed federal budget.
He’s saying the same thing about restoring the middle class, reeducating blue-collar whites and people of color for modern jobs and respecting the poor, minorities, elderly, (women) and disabled as equal citizens as he was then. He just seems a lot more angry and fed up when they only give him 3 minutes on TV and we/ he’s still seeing the same crap going down over the past 20-something years ever since, with some dodos on split-screen next to him shouting him down and lying through their teeth.
Doublespeak is now a fine art practiced by almost everyone trying to make a buck, in government and out. Concepts of “free trade,” “tough love,” "alternative truth," “the banking industry,” “corporate welfare” and “tax cuts for the wealthy” are accepted as “America First” entirely legitimate public policies. Lobbyists’ stranglehold on government known as “Citizens United” seems to be the name of the game of wealth, resource and labor extraction through corporate control, at least ten times more viciously now than it was then.
Reich's kind wisdom and academic innocence in Locked In the Cabinet is endearing, but we know where it ends up. Problem is, for most people, it’s no game. If money is power or not, I’m ready for his new request, his “…there are many think tanks in Washington that need people to speak truth to power. In fact, even more so now than ever before, the public needs to know the truth…we’re blessed to be in the capital of progressive America – a nation within a nation called California.” [ii]
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” Fortune cookie from Long Life Vegi House. Go Cherilyn & Bay Books! Go Bobs! Go Berkeley! Go Warriors!
We may be a small and goofy-looking nodule on the West Coast; but we’re paying attention, focused and smart. And we know if we want to move forward, we're going to have to ALL play fair TOGETHER, and as a TEAM. RIGHT?
[ii](Robert Reich, edited by Beth Leuin, Celeste Middleton and Andrew Wilson, “A Conversation with Robert Reich,” Berkeley Public Policy Journal, Spring 2017) Reich, Robert B., Locked In the Cabinet, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 1997.
Scheer, Robert, with Sara Beladi. They know everything about you : how data-collecting corporations and snooping government agencies are destroying democracy. New York : Nation Books, [2015]