Here’s how a definition gone wrong can lead to a debilitating public controversy. But hey, controversy drives traffic, so what the heck, right?

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

It’s been a long time, but the New York Times is back in the business of pumping up the traffic to its Website with news about itself.

Predictably, once again, it is doing the news organization’s reputation more harm than good in the long run. Will they ever learn from their own history? The documents are right there under their noses.

The problem is, it might cost them a massive amount of corporate advertising to tell the truth, and they would lose a few Republican readers in the process.

An explanation is in order. You came to the right place for this one.

On January 12, the new public editor at the Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, ran a column under the headline: Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

That was followed up pretty quickly by a scathing piece in the UK Guardian under the headline: The New York Times public editor’s very public utterance.

The lede?

‘Should the Times be a Truth Vigilante?’ asked Arthur Brisbane. ‘Yes,’ came the resounding reply.

In Brisbane’s column, he said he was looking for reader input “on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

Duh, right?

He cited an article on the Supreme Court in which a court spokeswoman said Justice Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. A Times reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood.”

The other example cited came from the Republican campaign trail, where Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Times columnist Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

In the Guardian piece, a couple of readers’ responses are quoted:

“Is this a joke? THIS IS YOUR JOB.”

“If the purpose of the NYT is to be an inoffensive container for ad copy, then by all means continue to do nothing more than paraphrase those press releases.”

“I hope you can help me, Mr Brisbane, because I’m an editor, currently unemployed: is fecklessness now a job requirement?”

You should look up the meaning of fecklessness, because apparently, it is and has long been a news business job requirement, precisely because of the argument about objectivity I am about to make in the end.

But wait, there’s more.

According to the Guardian, Brisbane had clearly not been expecting this excoriating and one-sided a reaction. He has since tried to clarify his views.

“What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing. I was hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question.”

“My inquiry related to whether the Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut ‘facts’ that are offered by newsmakers when those ‘facts’ are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.”

My response is don’t report it if you know it’s false. So what if you get beat on the story by Fox News? They have a million viewers. You have a million readers. It will all come out in the wash.

But according to the Guardian, which just had to get in on the traffic boom too, “This only added fuel to the fire.”

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post had a new, young liberal blogger weigh in.

What are newspapers for?

Arthur Brisbane, the New York Times public editor, has posted a remarkable piece that’s generating attention on Twitter, because it gets at a core question: What is the role of newspapers in a political world that’s awash in distortions and lies?

Greg Sargent points out that the Times itself amplified Romney’s false assertion about Obama three times without any rebuttal. And he concludes that “any Times customer reading them comes away misled. He or she is left with the mistaken impression that Obama may have, in fact, apologized for America, when he never did any such thing … in all those three cases, the Times helped the GOP candidate mislead its own readers — with an assertion that has become absolutely central to the Republican case against Obama. Whatever the practical difficulties of changing this, surely we can all agree that this is not a role newspapers should be playing, particularly at a time when voters are choosing their next president.”

The American Journalism Review has also weighed in on this in a piece under the headline: Real Time Fact-Checking.

All of this controversy caused Mr. Brisbane to come back with another post, in which he laments that his piece “generated way more heat than light.”

Here’s the Light

As my regular readers will recognize, this is a long-standing theme of this Web publication. I recently addressed the key question here in this piece: Rethinking Objectivity in American Journalism.

This is exactly the core problem we face not only in the news business in this country, but in the constant struggle to even attempt to have a coherent, informed public dialogue about politics, public policy or anything else. And here the guy who is in a position to potentially shed some serious light on the question is totally ignorant of the early history of the New York Times for which he writes, even though he has the prerequisite degree from Harvard to get hired by the paper.

It’s not his fault. Apparently there’s no one at the Times who actually knows what the term “objective journalism” was supposed to mean, because during the last half of the 20th century, the original meaning was lost and it was converted into a money-making device like snake oil was in 1898.

If this is the kind of inane conversation we are going to be subjected to at this late juncture in our history, we might as well all go bathe ourselves in snake oil.

I mean, what good is a college education if you don’t comprehend the point?

To reiterate my argument here in as simple a way as possible: Objectivity is a term from science. The idea is to come up with theoretical questions to test with hypothesis by gathering evidence and subjecting them to testing.

It is not the average daily newspaper reporter’s job to do this as the “business” is structured today. As the Ben Bradlee character said in the “All the King’s Men” movie, the film about Watergate, “It is not our job to print the truth. It is our job to print what people tell us.”

Therein lies the rub.

Readers want newspaper reporters to tell them the truth. But it takes a lot of brains, hard work and experience to be able to pull this off on deadline. So readers should rightly seek out people with the brains and experience who are willing to work at it to actually find out what the truth is and tell it like it is.

In fact, there are documents that if unearthed and written about could show that the original idea for objective journalism, at the New York Times no less, was about science, not capitalism. We are decades down the road from this and living our entire lives based on one big gigantic meme. It is a virus that plagues our culture and pollutes every conversation we have.

If we do not come up with a great big antidote for this, and soon, it could literally kill the world, or at least the human species. In my view this bad information is a bigger threat to our health than cancer or heart disease. If we form public policy on the basis of someone’s opinion that “there is no such thing as global warming,” for example, then we are freaking doomed.

The way I handle it is to deride the liars when they say something wrong and stupid, and the news organizations that report the lies, like I did the other day talking about the Republicans in Alabama. Of course the Birmingham and Huntsville papers cannot do this. They would have been out of business a long time ago if they even tried.

But if more news organizations would do that, perhaps politicians and others would not be so willing to tell lies in public. Liars like Mitt Romney know that whatever they say will make it onto television and be reported in newspapers too, because that is the nature of competitive capitalist news.

The unstated motto is: “Give people what they want, and let every moron decide for themselves what to believe.”

In this world, all opinions are equal — even if they are based on false community gossip, or a book written before there was a field of inquiry called science.

We used to say, “You have every right to your opinion, but not your own set of facts.”

I don’t know if they teach this at Harvard or not, but I learned in Philosophy 101 at the University of Alabama that there are “matters of opinion,” and there are “matters of fact.”

It seems to me that if President Obama never once in any speech actually apologized for America — and believe me if he did we would know it, because it would be all over Google – then for any news organization to report that without immediately pointing that out as a lie is not serving its audience well, only its advertisers. These days, that means corporations for the most part. And these days, the corporate CEOs lean Republican, so it serves their interests to have lies printed in newspapers like the New York Times. From there, they can be picked up by cable news commentators, bloggers and local politicians who repeat them to even win seats on the local school board.

Thus the vicious cycle of lies continues to destroy us.

As it happens, before I learned about this story last night, I happened to catch the movie Quiz Show on cable. If you want to become totally cynical about America and the media, watch that and see what happens in the end.

Kill the Meme

I have said this before and I will say it again, and again, and again, until enough people finally pick up on it and it becomes the antidote to the information virus. The only way to stop a meme is for someone who knows what they are talking about to post the truth online and let it travel around the Web until it kills the bad disease and destroys the career of the person willing to spread it.

I think it is pretty safe to say at this juncture that we pretty much destroyed the reputation of George W. Bush in this way, even though it was not in time to prevent his reelection in 2004.

As long as President Obama stays on course and keeps telling the truth, we will destroy his competition in 2012. We have that power now on the Web Press. We are about to eclipse Rush Limbaugh on radio and Fox News on TV. In fact, I think we have already.

Anybody want to bet me a 12-pack of Sweetwater Georgia Brown on that? I’m still looking for one or more takers for the presidential election of 2012.

These changes might not come about in Alabama just quite yet, but give it time. We will prevail in the end — unless they kill us first.

by Glynn Wilson

Bush’s illegal and ill-fated war in Iraq is finally over. All of the U.S. troops are coming home after eight long years.

It was the longest war in American history, although the news media is not covering the war’s end as much as it did the “Shock and Awe” campaign that started it all on March 20, 2003.

President Barack Obama marked the occasion in a low-key, solemn fashion, by saluting the troops upon their return at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but with “little fanfare,” according to the AP headline.

The wire service did report that Obama never tried to declare victory in this war, as Bush did with a “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Although it is doubtful that story made the front page of many newspapers or the top 10 minutes of many local news broadcasts in this country. It is a war we wish would just go away quietly, and for good reasons. It was started under faulty pretenses based on bad intelligence about a non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction program on the part of Saddam Hussein.

“It was a war that (Obama) opposed from the start, inherited as president and is now bringing to a close, leaving behind an Iraq still struggling,” the wire service reported.

Will Obama Get the Credit?

Will the American public give credit to this president for ending a war started by his totally corrupt predecessor? Should this president not get credit as well for finally finding and killing Osama bin Laden, the master mind and funder of the 9/11 attacks that still has this country living in Post Traumatic Stress and in fear of “terrorism?”

What, you don’t believe me? Look around.

Will the American left give Obama credit? Many won’t, because Congress just passed a massive $662 billion defense authorization bill Thursday after months of wrangling over how to handle captured “terrorist” suspects without violating constitutional rights of American citizens, according to AP.

A monumental struggle has been going on for months over this issue with most Americans apparently not aware of or willing to face the hard truth about a law that would allow suspected terrorists, even citizens on domestic soil, to be detained indefinitely without due process. The media paints the battle as one between the White House and Congress, with measures that have divided Republicans and Democrats and “drawn the wrath of civil rights groups.”

The White House had threatened to veto the legislation, but that warning was dropped on Wednesday with a statement saying that last-minute congressional changes no longer challenge the president’s ability to “prosecute the war on terror.”

The most controversial measure would deny suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens seized within the nation’s borders, the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention, reaffirming the post-9/11 authorization for the use of military force that allows indefinite detention of “enemy combatants.” It includes a Senate compromise that says nothing in the legislation may be “construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”

Conservative Republicans, some Democrats and civil rights groups have warned that the bill would allow the government to hold U.S. citizens indefinitely, but what is a president to do who has received more death threats than any president ever, and a Democrat who is already being accused of being “soft” by the Republicans running against him?

The hawk verses dove issue has long been key to the calculus of running for president in this country, and President Obama made the bet some time back that prosecuting the war in Afghanistan aggressively and going after bin Laden would inoculate him against this criticism in his 2012 reelection battle.

Will that tactic work?

We will see.

According to a new poll out Friday, the AP gives Obama a 50-50 chance at winning a second term. A slight majority of Americans say the president deserves to be voted out of office even though they have concerns about the Republican alternatives, and
his standing suggests he could fail to win re-election even though the public’s outlook on the economy is improving.

“For the first time since spring, more people said the economy got better in the past month than said it got worse. The president’s approval rating on unemployment shifted upward – from 40 percent in October to 45 percent in the latest poll – as the jobless rate fell to 8.6 percent last month, its lowest level since March 2009.”

But according to recent polls by NBC, the Wall Street Journal and Gallup, it is the Republicans who face an uphill battle to unseat this incumbent president. Incumbency is still a huge advantage in this country.

The Republican field appears to have narrowed to a two-man race between Mitt Romney and New Gingrich.

Romney faces a challenge with the Republican primary electorate, trailing Gingrich nationally by 17 percentage points as nearly two-thirds of Republicans view him as either liberal or moderate, according to the NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll. Gingrich, meanwhile, faces a challenge with the general electorate, as half of all voters say they wouldn’t vote for him in November. He trails President Obama by more than 10 percentage points in a hypothetical contest, while Romney’s trails the Democratic incumbent by 2 points.

Iraq War Costs

The Iraq war has had traumatic consequences at home and abroad. Nearly 4,500 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis were killed. Another 32,000 American and tens of thousands Iraqis were wounded. The war cost the U.S. Treasury at least $800 billion, and a sizable chunk of that just disappeared into the sands of the Middle East somewhere with no accounting for what happened to it. So much for the war paying for itself, as proclaimed by Vice President Dick Cheney at the outset of the war.

Does anybody believe the Republicans about anything anymore? If so, they have not been paying attention.

Is President Obama perfect? Absolutely not.

But as far as I’m concerned, he has conducted himself with class and dignity in office, something you cannot say about President Bush, who was the goofy idiot in the room on most occasions who not only had no idea what he was talking about most of the time. He even had trouble reading what they wrote for him on the teleprompter.

Obama’s problems in office are not of his own making. The tea party Republicans in Congress have fought him at every turn. If you want to blame someone for this country’s troubles, blame Bush and the Republicans in Congress.

Most of the American people do. Public assessment of Congress hit a new low in December of last year and it has not recovered. Only 13 percent say they approve of the way Congress is handling its job. The 83 percent disapproval rating was the worst the Gallup Survey has measured in more than 30 years of tracking congressional job performance.

If you want to fix the problems in this country, reelect President Obama for another term and vote in a larger majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress. Let’s give them more time and a chance to fix the problems inherited by anti-government Republican rule. That is our only hope, people.

Hey, it may not work. But it has a better chance than letting the Republicans back into power for another four or eight years. They fucked this place up. You want to go down that road again? Not me.

A new Gallup poll has some heartening results for the Occupy Wall Street movement, in that more Americans approve than disapprove of the protests, although it shows that the lack of an effective communications strategy and coherent goals could jeopardize the movement’s effectiveness (see Further Analysis below).

Less than half of Americans express an opinion about the Occupy Wall Street movement’s goals or the way it has conducted its protests. Those with an opinion are more likely to approve than disapprove, however, according to the latest Gallup poll on the subject.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has attracted significant alternative and mainstream media attention for its nearly month-long protest of major U.S. financial institutions in New York, with similar demonstrations taking place in other cities across the country in recent weeks.

“But the American public does not seem to be very familiar with the movement or its goals,” according to Gallup’s analysis of public opinion.

Part of that may stem from the below-average level of attention Americans are paying to the news story, according to Gallup, which found that only 56 percent of the public say they are following the story closely, and only 18 percent who say “very closely.” This compares unfavorably to the average news story. Out of 200 news events Gallup has tracked since the 1990s, the average tends to show 61 percent paying attention, with 22 percent saying they are watching “very closely.” Only 57 percent of Republicans and Democrats and only 55 percent of independents say they are following news about Occupy Wall Street closely.

Additionally, the lack of knowledge about the movement’s goals may be because the movement has not had clearly defined leaders or goals, according to Gallup.

“Rather, it appears to be united by grievances against the wealthiest Americans — in particular, those who run major Wall Street financial institutions,” Gallup says in its analysis.

Those who are closely following the news about Occupy Wall Street are more likely to approve than disapprove of the movement’s goals, but even among this more attentive group there is a substantial degree of uncertainty. Forty-four percent say they are uncertain about the movement’s goals. Among the most highly attentive group, those who are following the story “very closely,” 45 percent approve of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s goals, while 29 percent disapprove.

Americans paying attention to the news about the Occupy Wall Street movement are more inclined to have an opinion about the way the protests are being conducted, and are somewhat more likely to approve than disapprove of those methods. Republicans are more likely to disapprove than approve of the movement’s goals and methods, while Democrats tend to favor the protests. But half or more of Americans regardless of party affiliation do not have an opinion on either Occupy Wall Street’s goals or its actions.

Public Largely Neutral Toward the Movement

Given Americans’ apparent lack of knowledge about the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is not surprising to find a minority of Americans describing themselves as supporters (26%) or opponents (19%) of the movement. A majority, 52 percent, say they are neither supporters nor opponents, while another 4 percent have no opinion at all.

Those closely following the news about the movement are more likely to describe themselves as supporters (38%) than opponents (24%). The percentage of supporters increases to 52% among those following the news “very closely.”

Democrats are much more likely to say they are supporters (42%) than opponents (8%) of the Occupy Wall Street movement, with the remainder neutral (47%) or not having an opinion. Most Republicans, 55 percent, are neither supporters nor opponents, though Republicans are much more likely to oppose the movement (34%) than support it (9%).

The poll sought to contrast support for Occupy Wall Street with another prominent American movement, the Tea Party.

In the poll, 22 percent describe themselves as Tea Party movement supporters, 27 percent as opponents, and 47 percent as neither. Gallup has typically found that about equal percentages of Americans are Tea Party supporters or opponents, with the greatest percentage remaining neutral.

“Thus, the current level of public support for Occupy Wall Street is similar to that for the Tea Party movement,” Gallup concludes.

Implications

“Protesters have demonstrated in and around Wall Street for a month, with the movement spreading and appearing to gain momentum around the U.S. At the same time, Americans are not highly familiar with the movement’s activities or its goals,” Gallup summarizes. “Those who are familiar with the movement tend to be more approving than disapproving of Occupy Wall Street, though with limited public knowledge about it, its supporters represent roughly a quarter of Americans. It is unclear what the future course of Occupy Wall Street will be, and to what extent it will try to influence the outcomes of the 2012 elections or try to force changes in U.S. policies more generally.”

Further Analysis

Gallup’s results in this survey are backed up by a number of mainstream media stories with headlines showing that newspaper reporters do not have a clear idea what the goals are. Take this Washington Post story, for example, which ran under the headline: “‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests gain steam, but movement’s goals remain unclear”.

If you Google the terms Occupy Wall Street goals, however, you will find many discussions of the movement’s goals, especially on the official Website for the Occupy Wall Street group.

While the goals all fall into the general categories of “economic justice” and “social justice,” other more specific goals include a desire for “free and fair elections” with public financing and limits on corporate money and influence on American politics, and a full investigation into the financial meltdown that has caused so much misery throughout the land.

Perhaps the real problem is the same as suffered by a number of amateur and professional non-profit organizations these days, that is, the lack of an effective communications strategy for promoting the group’s goals. What strikes me about this movement as opposed to the tea party movement is something I have written about before. The tea party, like the Republican Party, has very simple goals based on a black and white view of the world. They tend to hold a “faith-based” view of the world as opposed to a “reality-based” view based on science.

The simpler view is easier to communicate, especially to anti-intellectual reporters and members of the mass public, than the more complicated goals of creating a more fair and balanced economic system that fosters the American middle class — rather than destroying it.

The financial meltdown as well as unfair economic policies for the past three decades are clearly at the root of the frustration that led to the protests.

Wall Street Occupation the Culmination of Years of Rage at Displacement

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens’ United v. the FCC is also involved.

Justice Stevens Says U.S. Supreme Court ‘Profoundly Wrong’

What can people and organizations do about it? Continue protesting, but consider this as a theme to influence American voters to start voting on the basis of their economic interests, rather than their prejudices.

Why Do Working Class People Vote Against Their Economic Interests?

It would also be great to see more groups get involved in this movement, including non-profit environmental groups and unions. While some members of the movement clearly blame president Obama for not dealing with some of the key problems, my advice for the president and his campaign would be to join the movement, not fight it.

The people need leadership, and it is clear the Republicans have no clue about how or any interest in fixing any of these problems through government. Sorry to break their bubble, but that is what it’s going to take. A more involved, more competent government, spending money to put people back to work, not reducing the deficit at this time. That’s Keynesian economics 101 people. Get over it and on with it.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Oct. 15-16, 2011, on the Gallup Daily tracking survey, with a random sample of 1,026 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme as Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry claims? Noted author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich debunks that claim and five other lies the right-wing tells about taxes, government and the economy. Reich was speaking at the “Summit For A Fair Economy” in Minneapolis, Minnesota on September 10, 2011.

The lies Reich debunks:

1. Tax cuts to the rich and corporations trickle down to the rest of us.

(No it does not and it never has.)

2. If you shrink government you create jobs.

(No, you get rid of jobs.)

3. High taxes on the rich hurts the economy.

(No, the economy grew when the US did this under Eisenhower a Republican president.)

4. Debt is to be avoided and it is mostly caused by Medicare.

(No, if debt is properly used to grow the economy, it becomes a smaller part of the budget because of increased revenue and Medicare has the lowest overhead of any health insurance plan out there.)

5. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

(No, its solid for 26 years. Social Security is solid beyond that if the rich pay the same percentage in social security taxes as the rest of us do.)

6. We need to tax the poor.

(This is what Republicans have been proposing when they say any “tax reform” needs to involve all Americans because poor people pay no income tax. The poor have no money and taxing them will not solve our budget problems.)

by Glynn Wilson

AUBURN, Ala. — In a state where intellectuals are generally scorned as “elitists” — or as former governor and presidential candidate George Wallace liked to call them for his own opportunistic political reasons, “pointy-headed liberals” — retired Auburn History professor Wayne Flynt is one expert who is widely known around Alabama. He is someone who people seem to listen to, at least those who pay attention.

Since moving back to my home state and city a few years ago after many years of chasing a journalism career and then an academic career elsewhere, and struggling to figure out what’s wrong with this place, a key question comes up over and over again in conversation. No one seem to have a simple, satisfying answer.

Why do working class people in the South so frequently vote against their own economic self-interest?

As a historian and author, Dr. Flynt tackled this question in great detail a little more than 20 years ago in a book called Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites.

Due to the sweep in state elections by the Republican Party in 2010, and in the wake of labor events from Wisconsin to Birmingham, I recently visited Dr. Flynt at his church, the First Baptist Church of Auburn, and conducted an interview captured on video. We talked for nearly an hour.

In answering the question a little more than 20 years after his book came out, Flynt said some things you will never see reported by any newspaper or television news station in Alabama, because economic imperatives prevent total candor with readers and viewers.

Why do poor people and the working middle class vote for Republicans who are obviously anti-worker and anti-labor and who are clearly bought and paid for by big corporations and their lobbyists?

Since World War II, and especially since the cultural wars of the 1960s, social “wedge” issues related to race and religion now play a more important role in voting habits than pragmatic economic concerns.

“It’s partly because preachers tell them that the Democratic Party is a godless party,” Flynt said. “It’s party because the Democratic Party is made up of a large number of African-Americans, and working class whites just won’t vote that way.”

If you go back and take a look at the history before the 1960s, Dr. Flynt said, you won’t find much discussion in families of such social wedge issues as birth control, abortion, prayer in the schools, obscenity in the media, gay rights, etc.

“Now what you get, after the 1960s, is the promotion of (social-wedge issues) as an alternative agenda,” Dr. Flynt said. “That is one of the major things that divided the labor movement. Now you don’t just have ethnicity and race. You have all these culture war issues that make it even more difficult to bring workers together, just on behalf of the quality of life that they’re going to have and their kids are going to have. They are not going to be much affected by these other issues.”

After the culture wars of the ’60s, Dr. Flynt said, “Unfortunately, there is a division, not along class lines, which had been the case before.”

But even in churches, he said, people are “polarized,” not around theology. “They are being polarized by culture war issues.”

So people like former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, a.k.a. the “Ten Commandments Judge,” who is now talking about running for president even though he can’t even win a Republican primary for governor in Alabama, argue that the “real issue” is abortion, and the solution is posting the Ten Commandments in public places such as courts and schools. As if, Dr. Flynt said with a wry smile, “suddenly, everything is going to be good in America. All our problems are going to be solved. There will be no more illegitimacy, no more divorce, everything’s going to be fine.”

“Well, obviously, posting the Ten Commandments is not going to make that happen,” Dr. Flynt said. “Prayer in the public schools is not going to make that happen.”

Dr. Flynt, a Baptist who understands the history of that protestant denomination’s role in promoting an American principle calling for a separation of church and state, puts the issue simply.

“If you are a truck diver, a plumber, an electrician or a steel worker and you live in Alabama, you say, ‘Well, I think my religion is the way everybody ought to think,” Dr. Flynt said. But, “let that same guy move to Salt Lake City, Utah (where the majority is Mormon) or New Jersey or Connecticut (where the majority is Catholic) or Dearborn, Michigan, (where the majority is Muslim), and he won’t think so highly of the idea that the majority of people ought to impose their religious values on the minority.”

Dr. Flynt says the political problem working people face is what he calls “hard support” for Republican and conservative politics, “from an awful lot of traditional power elites and lobbyist groups in Alabama (like ALFA, the old Farmers Bureau, now an insurance company), and individual voters.

“They don’t want to pay taxes. They don’t care about public schools,” he said. “They particularly don’t want to pay for black kids in public schools. They are not going to subsidize schools in Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery and Mobile, in the inner-city. And they are certainly not going to support schools in the Black Belt, where virtually all the kids are black.”

“Well, this is absolutely suicidal,” Dr. Flynt said. “Because white people are not having children. People of color are having children.”

Already, he said, 54 percent of the kids in public schools are on programs for free and reduced-priced meals. By about the year 2017, a majority of kids in public schools will be children of color. Nationally, they already are: US Census Shows Whites No Longer Have Majority of Babies.

“If you don’t educate them you’ve got no future in this state,” Dr. Flynt said. “You might as well move to Connecticut or Washington State or somewhere else. There is no future in the global economy for Alabama if you are not going to support the schools.”

Another part of the problem is what Dr. Flynt calls, “soft support” for Republican policies, generally from people who don’t like taxes of any kind, especially personal income taxes and corporate taxes. “They don’t like government,” he acknowledges.

While those in the extractive industries such as timber and mining want, especially in South Alabama, are not the same, however, as what more modern corporate leaders in North Alabama want. It doesn’t take much of an education to be a pulp wood worker or a coal miner, Flynt said. But for the modern auto factory manager, who needs skilled workers to run computerized robotics, they want “policy change,” including more accountability in education and better schools.

Dr. Flynt is not just an arms-length academic social scientist. Since he retired, he also calls himself an activist, and mostly gets involved in working with faith-based groups that aid the poor. He has been quoted as saying we cannot wait for top-down leadership to solve our problems. Solutions must come from the grass-roots up.

“If you wait for leadership groups to solve your problems, you will wait ’till hell freezes over,” he said. “We’ve just seen by what happened in Wisconsin what the real agenda is: To make the United States like Alabama was in the middle of the 19th century.”

People in Wisconsin were even talking about the so-called “Southern policy” toward economic development. “Of course above all else it is anti-union,” he said. Basically it means: “Keep unions out (and) stop regulation of business.”

He said people tend to support state-funded incentives to use tax money to recruit industry, companies that will be exempt from paying taxes for 30 years, even though that means “they will not be supporting the kind of infrastructure you need to build a modern state.”

“To me,” he said, “if that is the proper strategy for Wisconsin to follow, you would have thought that in 100 years, Alabama would be way, way beyond where Wisconsin is right now. If that’s the most appropriate strategy, why aren’t we the most prosperous, best educated place in America? Because Lord knows, we pursued that strategy longer and harder than any other region in the United States.”

One of the problems that results from decades of conservative voting by poor people and the working middle class is a corruption of the court system, which now slants in favor of corporations even at the highest level, the United States Supreme Court, because Republican presidents appoint conservative judges. In last year’s ruling in Citizens United vs. the FEC, the court reversed 100 years of American law. There have been limits on corporate contributions for that long, but not anymore. The high court removed those limits on First Amendment free speech grounds, but also talked about the role of unions in countering corporate influence on politics and government.

What that decision did, Dr. Flynt acknowledged, “was to load the political culture of the United States aganist working class people, because corporations have huge amounts of money and their leadership just decide how it’s going to be spent.”

“Unions,” on the other hand, he said, “have small and declining amounts of money to invest in politics, and they are going to be simply overwhelmed by what happens.”

After researching this history and watching the politics go bad over the years, does Dr. Flynt have some hope for turning things around in the future?

“I do,” he says. “At the heart of it is education.”

“Unions are going to have to educate their members better,” he said. “They are going to have to say, ‘We respect your religious views, we respect your cultural views. There are an awful lot of union leaders who agree with you.

“But that’s not going to help us very much in terms of keeping your job … or making sure your son can follow you into this profession. We are going to have to work on a separate set of issues that are about politics and economics,” he said. “And we are going to have to let these other issues be sorted out in other places besides American politics’.”

“If we don’t,” he said, “you may elect people who really agree with you on these culture war issues, but they’re not going to agree with you in terms of the quality of your life or your work.”

Dr. Flynt also has some hope for the next election cycle.

“I think you are going to see a lot of elections turn around in 2012 in places like Wisconsin and Ohio, where finally, apathetic voters discover that all those battles that were so painfully won by your mother and father, your grandmother and grandfather, are going to be taken away if you just apathetically sit there on your rear-end and don’t get out and register and vote. If you don’t get out there and organize, it’s going to be gone.”

He said the same thing is happening with younger African-American voters, who are beginning to understand that just because their forefathers like Martin Luther King Jr. won those battles for civil rights doesn’t mean they will stay won.

“Assuming that because these battles were won once, we don’t ever have to do anything more,” he said, “well that’s a fatal mistake.”

Part of the problem, too, Flynt acknowledges, is the national and local media in Alabama and other Southern states, where organized labor and the plight of workers is never given a fair shake, in spite of all the generalized claims by the press of being “objective” or “fair and balanced.”

“It has been a very long time since you read anything in any media, print media, that basically treats labor fairly or favorably,” Dr. Flynt said.

“It’s not that I think labor is always right. I don’t. I think labor is sometimes totally wrong,” he said. “But I’d just like to read somebody who tells me what I consider to be a fair and balanced view of a labor position on something, and you simply don’t get that in the national media or the local media. Especially you don’t get it in the local media,” he said, laughing.

That’s been the case since the 1880s, he said.

Even though he is a bit old fashioned in the way he works and does not participate in social networking on Facebook and such, he acknowledges that part of the solution is building an alternative media online.

“Advertisers in the Birmingham paper, the Mobile paper and the Huntsville paper aren’t interested in covering working class union issues,” he said with a smile. “Nor do they cover international issues. It’s very parochial.”

So, he said: “What labor’s going to have to do is find a way to communicate with their members who are interested in the economic issues and the future of their jobs, and their kids’ jobs, and using that media in order to educate themselves, educate their members, tell their members, ‘Hey! Have you watched this? Cause you really need to watch this. Because this is where you’re going to learn an awful lot of stuff … about regulations, about jobs and about the future.

“And if you don’t watch this,” he said, “you are not going to have a very good life for very long.”

Glynn Wilson

Retired Auburn History Professor Wayne Flynt (see video above)

Wayne Flynt is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University. He has won numerous teaching awards and been a Distinguished University Professor for many years. His research focuses on Southern culture, Alabama politics, Southern religion, education reform, and poverty. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Online Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Glynn Wilson is a veteran investigative reporter, freelance writer and Web Publisher whose work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and many other newspapers and magazines, including some of the best alternative weeklies in the country. Wilson is now spending most of his time building the alternative, independent, Watchdog Web Press. That includes building the economy to support it.

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