This spring is a season of confrontation at the shareholders’ meetings of U.S. banks and other major corporations. And this week, Bank of America has been in the spotlight.

Cross-posted from the “Arguing the World” blog at Dissent magazine.

On Wednesday, around a thousand protesters rallied outside the bank’s annual meetings in Charlotte, North Carolina, brilliantly rebranding the event “Bank vs. America.” The demonstration was remarkable in uniting people across a wide range of issues. As Laura Gottesdiener wrote at Waging Nonviolence, protesters are targeting the bank for

funding mountaintop coal removal, perpetuating student debt that has now surpassed $1 trillion nationally, laying off more than 100,000 workers in the last few years and, of course, foreclosing on millions of homeowners across the country. In anticipation, the Charlotte City Council has already passed laws criminalizing protest, as well as camping and carrying permanent markers.

The latter part of the quote, about the great lengths officials have gone to truncate rights to free speech and assembly, is unfortunately less remarkable than the activists’ coalition-building. There is no doubt more to come, since Charlotte will host the Democratic National Convention in September–and Occupy activists have promised to target that event.

In addition to outside marches, there were also critics of BoA inside the annual meeting, with dissidents introducing shareholders’ resolutions challenging the bank’s overseas tax havens and its support of environmentally destructive mining practices. As Zach Carter of the Huffington Post reported, Bank of America CEO and public enemy number one Brian Moynihan

defended the company’s operation of subsidiaries in nations identified as international tax havens by saying, “We’re a global business,” suggesting that Bank of America needs its sub-companies in other nations because that’s where the business is.

“I don’t think there’s a whole lot of Bank of America operations in the Cayman Islands,” one disgruntled shareholder responded.

Later Bob Kincaid, president of Coal River Mountain Watch, spoke out:

“You are part of the poisoning of Appalachia and so is every one of your directors and so is every one of your shareholders,” Kincaid said. “You are part of the destruction of an entire region of the country.”

“Sir, our environmental team will take a look at it. We look at it all the time,” Moynihan said. The crowd responded with jeers.

The move to target corporate shareholders meetings is the outgrowth of an ad hoc coalition that is calling itself 99% Power. This umbrella campaign includes participation from community groups (National People’s Action, the New Bottom Line, the Unity Alliance), environmental organizations (Rainforest Action Network), and major unions (UNITE HERE, SEIU, USW)–and it overlaps very substantially with the groups that organized the 99% Spring trainings last month. Those trainings–an effort to provide 100,000 people will skills in nonviolent direct action–drew some over-the-top criticism. Adbusters magazine led the way with frantic cries of cooptation. It characterized the trainings as a scheme to make the Occupy movement a “reelection campaign for President Obama” and encouraged its readers to “Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!”

This was more paranoia than it was an actual effort to look at the 99% Spring agenda or to assess the range of groups involved in it. As I wrote in April, the trainings ended up getting some mixed reviews, but, on the whole, they could hardly be characterized as Camp Obama cheer sessions. Moreover, what some frame negatively as cooptation could easily–and more accurately–be framed positively as Occupy gathering needed allies and successfully setting the agenda for a far-reaching progressive movement.

In my view, the Bank vs. America protests provide more evidence for the baselessness of cooptation complaints. While the decision to focus attention on the spring meetings of major corporations did come out of a coalition of institutional left groups, you’d be hard pressed to argue that the actions we saw this week do not fit comfortably within the established ethos of Occupy. And even if joining those confronting Moynihan was not your cup of tea, it’s hard to see how the Charlotte protests were mutually exclusive with other Occupy-related organizing. If anything, they helped to keep the movement in the press and generate a continuing sense that activists are coming back strong after a winter of semi-hibernation.

The more valid criticism is that it does not appear that 99% Spring, despite trying to ready tens of thousands of people for escalating civil disobedience, resulted in particularly disruptive actions in Charlotte. The reports I’ve seen suggest that there were six anti-BoA protesters arrested there–with a handful of other arrests occurring at solidarity events in places like New York City. That’s hardly an avalanche of civil resistance.

On the plus side, there’s still more than a month of spring opportunities left, and there are upcoming protests at Sallie Mae, Chevron, Target, and WalMart–not to mention the NATO summit in Chicago. Worthy targets all, I’d say!

It is a myth that Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” But that old saying nevertheless carries a lot of truth when it comes to social movements. And it is always a pleasure to see a worthy target of activism move from disregard or mockery to going on the attack.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

Therefore, I was happy to see the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) release a half-defiant, half-pathetic statement bemoaning the “coordinated and well-funded intimidation campaign against corporate members of the organization.” Its statement reads:

ALEC is an organization that supports pro-growth, pro-jobs policies and the vigorous exchange of ideas between the public and private sector to develop state based solutions. Today, we find ourselves the focus of a well-funded, expertly coordinated intimidation campaign.

Our members join ALEC because we connect state legislators with other state legislators and with job-creators in their states. They join because we support pro-business policies that promote innovation and spur local and national competitiveness. They’re ALEC members because they’re more interested in solutions than rhetoric….

At a time when job creation, real solutions and improved dialogue among political leaders is needed most, ALEC’s mission has never been more important. This is why we are redoubling our commitment to these essential priorities. We are not and will not be defined by ideological special interests who would like to eliminate discourse that leads to economic vitality, jobs and fiscal stability for the states.

After about the third reference to “job creators,” it’s hard to miss that this is an operation nestled snugly within the depths of the far-right echo chamber, never passing over a chance to frame tax cuts for the top 1 percent as a moderate, bipartisan path to common bliss. In fact, far from sticking to promoting “improved dialogue,” ALEC has (with troubling effectiveness) advanced a slew of reactionary measures in statehouses throughout the country. Stand Your Ground? Check. Prison privatization? Check. Right to Work? Check. Discriminatory Voter ID laws? Check. The list goes on and on.

These legislative outrages have inspired a coalition of progressive groups to fight back. They are going after the companies that are paying $25,000 annual dues to this far-right outfit–exposing these brand-sensitive patrons for aligning themselves with the conservative fringe.

The tactic is proving very effective. On Wednesday, fast-food giant Wendy’s joined McDonald’s in ending its ALEC membership. Previously Pepsi, Coke, Kraft, Intuit, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation all announced that they were jumping ship.

This exodus is what prompted ALEC’s response. That organization complaining about a “well-funded, expertly coordinated” political operation surely merits placement in the pot-calling-the-kettle-black hall of fame. But these words serve as high praise for the organizations that have endeavored to expose the group’s corporate funders.

Prominent among them is ColorOfChange.org, which has quickly established itself as a leader in the field of corporate campaigning. I previously lauded ColorOfChange.org for its successful effort to strip Glenn Beck of advertisers after the demagogue (then at Fox News) said that President Obama harbored a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” among other batshit-crazy statements.

Few in the mainstream media wanted to give the boycott credit for ousting Beck, preferring to believe that the cable news personality had simply outstayed his welcome on the network. Beck himself was not about to acknowledge activists’ impact, just as Kraft now says that it is leaving ALEC for a “number of reasons”–none, of course, related to the tens of thousands of signatures pouring in from ColorOfChange.org and allies such as the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. This is exactly what you would expect. Wendy’s, for its part, says that it didn’t renew its ALEC membership not because of pressure but because it “didn’t fit our business needs.”

That, in the end, is a pretty good definition of the purpose of corporate campaigns–making businesses decide that it doesn’t “fit their needs” to attack workers, reinforce institutional racism, wreck the environment, or undermine the social safety net. In any case, it certainly doesn’t fit the needs of the rest of us.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

Can you be an environmentalist and support things like the Keystone XL pipeline and hydraulic fracking? Not likely, but it’s conceivable. Can you be an environmentalist and oppose the power of the environmental movement? I think not.

Recently, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera has written several columns defending some environmentally problematic projects. Although he indicates that he is someone who takes the challenge of global climate change seriously, he came out with two successive columns in support of the Keystone XL pipeline. Then, last week, he voiced a defense of the drilling method known as hydraulic fracking, used to extract natural gas.

Not long ago, I offered some praise for Nocera. I wrote that he was doing pretty well with his column—at least by the not-too-stellar standards of the Times op-ed page. Am I regretting this now? I still think that Nocera has had some redeeming moments, but his recent anti-environmental streak has definitely put him closer to the company of faux-liberals such as Thomas Friedman.

In his column on fracking, Nocera argues that the practice is going to happen whether we like it or not, and that the best we can do is to work with businesses to help them clean up their act. In the process, he inadvertently admits that methane leaks from fracking have an absolutely massive greenhouse gas impact—possibly accounting more than a quarter of all relevant U.S. emissions. Dean Baker notes that “if cutting the methane emissions from fracking in half would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 9 percent,” as Nocera contends, “then the methane emissions must come to close to 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.” Furthermore, if you accept some of the higher estimates (in reports Nocera cites) of how much methane is leaking as a result of this drilling technique, “then fracking would account for more than one quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.” Baker concludes:

Nocera may have his numbers completely wrong, but the implication of the evidence presented in his piece is that fracking is an incredibly dirty process from the standpoint of greenhouse gas emissions. If his numbers are right, he makes a compelling case for banning fracking unless it can be done far more cleanly than is currently the case.

Others have remarked that Nocera totally ignores the water contamination that can result from fracking—one of the biggest environmental controversies surrounding this drilling method. This oversight also looks conspicuous.

The environmental claims behind Nocera’s defense of the hotly contested Keystone XL pipeline have also been challenged. Most notably, Joe Romm at Climate Progress named Nocera part of the “climate ignorati.” Responding to the Times columnist’s first pro-Keystone piece, Romm noted that Nocera utterly failed to discuss the impact of the pipeline on climate change:

So far, it seems as if Nocera’s views on global warming derive from reading the likes of the widely debunked physicist Freeman Dyson and attending Exxon-Mobil shareholder meetings, which causes him to [dismiss] knowledgeable people who express science-based views…as trying to “push Exxon Mobil toward their belief system—their global warming religion.”

Romm subsequently argued:

Needless to say, folks who “believe that global warming poses a serious threat” do not generally use the phrase “global warming religion.” That was a key reason I called him a member of the climate ignorati. The science says that global warming is an existential threat (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization,” and literature review here)….Apparently Nocera wants us to think he is concerned about the global warming threat while simultaneously embracing full exploitation of unconventional oil and gas.

I’m thankful for these responses. At the same time, my biggest beef with Nocera isn’t his take on climate science. It’s the implicit theory of social change that he presents. In these columns, Nocera shows himself to be an apostle of liberal moderation. He appears to believe that calm, reasoned engagement with the oil and gas industry will lead to an amicable resolution of any regrettable differences of opinion over the environment.

In this vein, he condemns social movement-oriented environmental groups for being too pushy, and he instead praises the Environmental Defense Fund. Nocera writes:

One thing I’ve always liked about the Environmental Defense Fund is its hardheaded approach. Founded by scientists, it believes in data, not hysteria. It promotes market incentives to change behavior and isn’t afraid to work with industry. Utterly nonpartisan, it is oriented toward practical policy solutions….Unlike others in the environmental movement, [EDF President Fred Krupp] and his colleagues at the Environmental Defense Fund don’t want to shut down fracking; rather, their goal is to work with the states where most of the shale gas lies and help devise smart regulations that would make fracking environmentally safer.

Heaven forbid that those seeking to defend the environment be “partisans” skeptical of working with Republicans or with industry flacks! After all, how could any right-thinking moderate be so cynical about our brothers and sisters on the conservative side of the aisle and their long-established commitment to “practicality” and reasoned compromise?

It’s nice that Nocera calls for “better, more uniform regulation and tougher enforcement” to make fracking cleaner. But he’s in for a sore surprise when he sees that any effort to secure this—no matter how non-“hysterical” the proposal—will be met by firm stonewalling, big-money counter-lobbying, and rabid denunciation in the right-wing think tank/Fox News echo chamber.

Anyone who claims to be following the climate debate with concern, but who still believes that the industry can be swayed by careful consideration of the data, is living with their head stuck in the tar sand. The oil and gas interests that Nocera defends have made a mockery of climate science, denying and obfuscating at every opportunity. Sure, there’s plenty of hysteria in the debate. But environmentalists—and climate scientists not paid for by industry who have steadfastly stood by their studies—are hardly its leading proponents. To suggest that they are is to join with Rick Santorum in his through-the-looking-glass denunciation of the liberal war on science.

To me, the most telling moment in Nocera’s two pro-Keystone XL columns is when he bemoans that Obama caved to environmentalists on the issue:

I realize that President Obama rejected Keystone because, politically, he had no choice. My guess is that, in his centrist heart of hearts, the president wanted to approve it. But to give the go-ahead before the election was to risk losing the support of the environmentalists who make up an important part of his base.

Even if you’re not convinced that stopping this particular pipeline should have been the environmental movement’s top priority, you should be aware of a basic reality: any genuine solution to the crisis of global climate change will require a robust movement that is able to flex its muscle and compel politicians to stand up to the influence of the energy lobbies. Characterizing such a movement as symptomatic of the country’s “poisoned politics” is both naïve and wrong-headed. The oil barons and climate denialists could hardly ask a bigger favor of our nation’s “moderates.”

Over the past decade, Reverend Billy has become a familiar face in social justice circles. He can often be found at protest events in his trademark white suit, priestly collar, and dyed-blond pompadour. When he’s performing, he speaks with the fervor of an evangelical preacher. Yet his message is, as he has put it, “post-religious.” He is focused on saving souls not from otherworldly hellfire, but from wanton consumerism and the ecological ravages of unrestrained capitalism.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

I wrote a profile of Reverend Billy back in 2005, when his New York City-based performance troupe/congregation was still called the “Church of Stopping Shopping.” (It has subsequently been renamed the “Church of Earthalujah,” and the reverend has increasingly immersed himself in the fight against global climate change.) I noted then:

Reverend Billy, the charismatic leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, is the creation of New York performance artist and avant-garde theater veteran Bill Talen. His Jimmy Swaggart-like persona may be rooted in parody, but Talen–who draws inspiration from ACT UP, the Guerrilla Girls, Lenny Bruce, and Abbie Hoffman–approaches his work with unusual seriousness. The reverend is his main focus year-round; he even earns a modest living from the character, doing lectures and residencies with arts organizations. When his choir belts out lyrics like “So it’s Christmastime, now let’s stop our shopping / Consumer confidence, yes oh yes it’s dropping,” it shows off vocal chops honed in weekly rehearsals. And when Talen delivers his sermons he is genuinely red-faced and beaded with sweat.

“We really are trying to figure out the addiction of consumerism,” Talen says. “Why do Americans shop this way? The advertisements persuade us that consumerism itself is democracy. They persuade us that it’s normal. But we think it’s unprecedented.”

Lately, Reverend Billy has been active as a participant and popular speaker at #Occupy movement encampments. This past week, he visited Occupy London, addressing the demonstrators gathered outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, near the London Stock Exchange. He celebrated the spirit of crowd, lauded those assembled for “not living the product life,” and encouraged campers to persevere in cold weather: “Let’s remind ourselves all through the winter to be radically patient,” he called out, drawing cheers and hallelujahs in reply.

The London performance highlighted something I’ve thought about ever since first meeting Talen. On the one hand, Reverend Billy’s routine is easy to understand. It’s a campy appropriation of the costume and vocal inflections of the old-time revival preacher, put in the service of anti-corporate street theater. And it works. The performances are fun to watch. If you’re in New York over Thanksgiving, it’s even more fun to join one of the reverend’s marches through Manhattan shops on “Black Friday” (a.k.a. “Buy Nothing Day“), when he leads a festive flock in performing “retail interventions” at corporate chain stores.

At the same time, as someone who grew up on the Catholic left, there is something about Talen’s act that’s always been a bit confusing to me. When you think about it, we shouldn’t need an ironic borrowing of church mannerisms in order to hear a sermon against corporate greed. After all, why should railing against the evils of consumerism have to be done as a half-in-jest parody by a fake preacher? Shouldn’t our real preachers be doing the same thing in earnest?

In this respect, Reverend Billy’s act is an indictment of Christian religious leaders–a routine that points to that failure of most mainstream ministers to join with movements for social and economic justice, to champion public demonstrations, and to be outspoken and unafraid in denouncing the idolatry of the market. If greater numbers of actually ordained ministers were stepping up to give their own rousing speeches to protest encampments–and bringing their own gospel choirs with them–Talen’s shtick would hardly be necessary.

To their credit, some religious leaders have spoken out. Some 300 congregations and religious officials signed a statement in October supporting the values of Occupy Wall Street. A variety of clergy members have offered religious services at Zuccotti Park, and others have helped with donations of food or tents from their organizations. On the part of the Catholic Church, a few weeks ago the Vatican released a document calling for regulation of the financial sector, declaring support for a “Robin Hood” tax on speculation, and warning against the “inequalities and distortions of capitalist development.”

More dramatically, at the very place Reverend Billy was speaking last week, a prominent member of the clergy resigned over the Church of England’s treatment of the Occupy London encampment. As the Guardian reported, “The canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser, has resigned in protest at plans to forcibly remove protesters from its steps, saying he could not support the possibility of ‘violence in the name of the church.’”

The Guardian further reported that “a part-time cleric also resigned” in protest, and that the events have thrown the leadership of the cathedral into turmoil. The controversy has resulted in criticism of the Anglican establishment–not only for mishandling the protest camp, but also for being insufficiently vocal in denouncing financial sector recklessness before having the spotlight shined on them by the #Occupy actions.

The resignations by St. Paul’s dissidents are a bold statement about which side the churches should be taking in the fight against corporate greed. For the time being, there’s still plenty of space for Bill Talen’s act. But if more clergy members start following Giles Fraser’s courageous example and begin making significant personal sacrifices to support the #Occupy movement, the real preachers might just put Reverend Billy out of business.

This past Saturday was “Bank Transfer Day,” a day of action in which thousands of people moved their money from “too big to fail” banking titans into credit unions and smaller regional banks. While it’s hard to tell precisely how many people followed through on their threats to close accounts on Saturday itself, over the past month credit unions have added 650,000 new members (as opposed to 80,000 in a regular month), resulting in more than $4.5 billion in new deposits.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

As Sarah Jaffe at Alternet noted, ABC News aired a remarkable report calling the exodus of customers a “bank revolt” and stating, “as of today, 1 million consumers are hurling a lightning-bolt warning at the big banks, moving their money out in protest.”

Now, a lot of the impact of closing accounts might have been symbolic, and $4.5 billion might not be all that much money relative to the size of the banking system as a whole. But, as Salon’s Andrew Leonard writes, riffing on an old joke, “$4.5 billion here, $4.5 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money, even for JPMorgan-Chase.”

All in all, Bank Transfer Day was a pretty powerful expression of collective disgust by Americans fed up with the goliath banks. Right?

Well, not everyone agrees. Leave it to the New Republic to publish a piece of smug nay-saying in which the writer shows himself to be far smarter than all those who had the nerve to take collective action.

In this case, Simon van Zuylen-Wood, a reporter-researcher for the magazine, penned an article entitled, “How Bank Transfer Day Will Help the Banks It’s Trying to Hurt.” He argued:

[I]f the executives at the country’s biggest banks have circled Bank Transfer Day on their calendars, it’s probably not out of anxiety. Whatever the intentions of its organizers, Bank Transfer Day may end helping the very one percenters they mean to punish.

At the root of the problem is that many Bank Transfer Day enthusiasts have overestimated their value to the banks they patronize: Ultimately, not all bank customers are made equal….According to Jennifer Tescher, President and CEO of the consultancy Center for Financial Services Information, banks typically earn at about 80 percent of their deposit revenue from the top 20 percent of their customers.

In his post, van Zuylen-Wood goes on to explain that maintaining small checking accounts can actually cost big banks more money than the accounts generate in profits. And, owing to the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill last year, banks are limited in the amount they can charge in overdraft or “swipe fees” that they previously used to make small customers worthwhile for them. He continues:

Bank of America’s early October proposal to supplement its lost “swipe fee” revenue using a five dollar per month charge to holders of debit cards should probably be understood in that context. It was designed to be a win-win proposition for the bank: either it earned $60 per year from each debit card customer with a checking count under $20,000…or it would drive unprofitable customers away from the bank entirely (or at least toward Bank of America credit cards, which have become more profitable than debit cards), to the benefit of the bank’s bottom line.

If the article were meant merely as an analysis of the business of handling small checking accounts, I would say that it makes some perfectly fair points. But it’s framed as something more than that–as a piece that analyzes the efficacy of a political action and that argues that those taking the action are naive. In that capacity, it is model of crap contrarianism. If I had a dollar for every self-satisfied commentary written (even by ostensibly sympathetic liberals) about protests being misguided and ineffective, I’d no doubt be able to join the wealthy elite that the #Occupy movement has been targeting. And I expect that I would earn about 80 percent of my deposit revenue from the New Republic.

The fact of the matter is that, if the big banks wanted to expel customers, they could easily do so. (Why not a $20 monthly fee for debit card use?) But far from receiving an eager farewell at bank branches impatient to shed small-time depositors, many of those who have descended upon institutions such as Citibank demanding to close their accounts report encountering bank managers who tried to convince them to change their minds.

Of course, the “move your money” effort is not only a matter of individuals’ decisions about their personal finances. In the context of larger Occupy Wall Street mobilizations, many people were coupling the closing of accounts with demands for political change. That’s why others who have swarmed in as part of group actions have encountered police threatening (or even conducting) arrests.

Overall, Bank Transfer Day was part of a wave of public outrage, defiance, and protest that is doing significant damage to the banks’ reputations–which they evidently value. As van Zuylen-Wood himself notes:

Ultimately, the Bank of America and its competitors chose not to go ahead with the five dollar charge, deciding that the hit to their PR wasn’t worth the potential gains to their bottom line. As Diane Casey-Landry, a former CEO of the American Bankers Association told me, the public outcry against BoA was enough of a “reputational kick in the chin” that its top competitors–Wells Fargo, Citibank, and Chase–abandoned their proposed debit fees as well.

What is a day of action in which thousands close their accounts and denounce the banks as greedy bastards if not another PR “kick in the chin”?

In his article, van Zuylen-Wood uses selective citation of a source to suggest that credit unions might not want the influx of new members:

Worse yet, by transferring their money to credit unions, Bank Transfer Day participants may also be harming the very financial institutions they mean to help. These not-for-profit banking co-ops are governed by their depositors and are generally more customer-friendly than banks–although too big a customer base could threaten that. Indeed, a little more than a week ago, in anticipation of Bank Transfer Day, the [Credit Union National Association] sent out a memo advising its federal regulators that a large influx of new customers could lead to long-term problems down the road, reminding them that credit unions are penalized if their retained earnings fall short of seven percent of their total assets. In other words, by inundating credit unions with a flood of capital they likely cannot profitably invest, the Bank Transfer Day participants may be pushing those institutions to abandon the perks that make them attractive, like free checking accounts.

Bank Transfer Day gets one basic thing right: Checking account holders have a right to take their business wherever they wish. What they forget, however, is that not everyone will want the business they have to offer.

Except that, the credit unions do want the new business–and they’ve been very vocal about that fact. The same source that van Zuylen-Wood cites, the Credit Union National Association, sent out a press release last week lauding Bank Transfer Day and celebrating the influx of new members. It includes exuberant quotes from the organization’s president, Bill Cheney:

“Many credit unions across the nation…are making special efforts to tap the surging interest in credit unions,” said Cheney.

“They are conducting advertising campaigns both individually and cooperatively with others, sending ’switch kits’ to existing members to share with family members or other prospective members, beefing up websites, extending hours and staffing for Bank Transfer Day, performing e-mail blasts to members, maximizing social media campaigns, putting up banners in lobbies or on their buildings, offering bonuses to members who bring in new members, and giving bonuses to members as well,” Cheney said.

The New York Daily News quoted another credit union executive basically saying the exact opposite of what van Zuylen-Wood wants to convey:

“These are very good times for credit unions,” said Kirk Kordeleski, CEO of Bethpage Federal Credit Union, one of Long Island’s largest with 24 branches and $4.4 billion in assets. “All this conversation about fees has led to a lot of opportunity for us,” said Kordeleski, who saw a 60% hike in new members in October, to 1550 from 925.

In general, “vote with your dollars” consumer actions are not my preferred model of organizing. Moreover, I have no illusions that the amount of money transferred by small account-holders, in itself, is going to cripple the banking giants. But my answer to people who raise that point is the same as my response to people who think that moving your money to a credit union is merely a lifestyle decision with no real political impact. The energy of something like Bank Transfer Day only feeds into other activist efforts and broadens the constituency supporting regulation of the financial sector. This weekend, activists got thousands of people to move their money. Next week they can find a new way to stick it to the big banks.

After all, protesters featured in the ABC News story weren’t just saying, “Close Your Account.” They had signs that said, “Make Banks Pay.” I think their detractors are going to have a hard time explaining how that demand ends up helping the one percent.

Conservative historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson has a funny habit. He asserts himself as a timely political commentator by weighing in on a debate about a hot contemporary problem. But then he proposes policy measures so dramatically inappropriate to the issue at hand that his comments become the opposite of timely. Antonyms such as untimely or inopportune don’t quite capture it. He is willfully, stubbornly wrong at exactly the right moment–when the wrongness of his thinking could hardly be more evident.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

I wrote of a few examples of this in a review of Ferguson’s work in the Spring 2009 issue of Dissent. Just as the United States was undertaking its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Ferguson stepped forward as an outspoken defender of empire. Then, in the wake of the most profound economic crisis in generations, he offered The Ascent of Money, which celebrated the market system, heaped praise upon Milton Friedman, and advocated the shifting of our pensions into private retirement accounts.

Ferguson has done it again with the #Occupy movement, with a commentary entitled, “Yes, Wall Street Helps the Poor.” In this piece, Ferguson discusses attending a charity poker tournament where a bunch of hedge-fund managers got together to raise money for charter schools in several impoverished New York City neighborhoods. He believes that such charity events could give “America’s financial elite…a compelling answer to Occupy Wall Street.”

Strangely, Ferguson devotes much of his article to presenting evidence that social mobility in America is declining:

Americans used to believe in social mobility regardless of the hand you’re dealt. Ten years ago, polls showed that about two thirds believed “people are rewarded for intelligence and skill,” the highest percentage across 27 countries surveyed….Yet the hardships of the Great Recession may be changing that, giving an unexpected resonance to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Falling wages and rising unemployment are making us appreciate what we ignored during the good times. Social mobility is actually lower in the U.S. than in most other developed countries–and falling.

Academic studies show that if a child is born into the poorest quintile (20 percent) of the U.S. population, his chance of making it into the top decile (10 percent) is around 1 in 20, whereas a kid born into the top quintile has a better than 40 percent chance. On average, then, a father’s earnings are a pretty good predictor of his son’s earnings. This is less true in Europe or Canada. What’s more, American social mobility has declined markedly in the past 30 years.

Could Wall Street’s excesses, its destructive speculation, and its adverse influence on our political system have anything to do with this decline in social mobility, or with the tremendous increase in economic inequality our society has witnessed in recent decades? (After all, just this week the Congressional Budget Office released new data about the rich getting richer at the expense of the rest of the economy.)

Nope. Ferguson doesn’t even consider the possibility that Wall Street might be part of the problem. He refers to the traders’ “ill-gotten gains” only in jest. Instead, he tells us, the decline in social mobility comes from a single source: “the stranglehold exerted by the teachers’ unions,” which “makes it almost impossible to raise the quality of education in subprime public schools.”

Bust the unions, promote “philanthropy, not confiscatory taxation” among America’s richest one percent, and our problems will be solved.

This stuff would be hard for lefties to make up if they tried. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the wealthy greeting demonstrations on Wall Street with a champagne toast from on high.

Notwithstanding the facts he cites about decreasing social mobility in America, Ferguson clearly believes that the top one percent has earned its station in life–that Wall Street traders have succeeded through grit, intelligence, and determination. If only we broke up the “public monopoly” of the American school system, his argument goes, more poor people would similarly have the opportunity to become winners.

Although not a direct response to Ferguson, I think Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi provided an important counterpoint this past week to several such strains of conservative thinking about Occupy Wall Street when he wrote, “Wall Street Isn’t Winning–It’s Cheating.” Taibbi argued:

When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.

Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich–after keeping it strategically hidden for decades–is crazy….

Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning–they’re cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

Taibbi goes on to review how Wall Street has received ridiculously generous public support, has been allowed to borrow against the government’s good credit rating, manages to pay lower tax rates than most Americans, and, on top of it all, gets a “get out of jail free” card when it comes to regulation.

Does showing up for a charity event absolve the bankers for the harm they’ve done to our economy? Ultimately, public sentiment will speak for itself. Ferguson may be “hugely cheered up” by the fact that the wealthy have adopted as their slogan, “educate Harlem…with our poker chips.” But I’m not so sure his following for that one will be vast. I, for one, will take “We Are the 99 Percent” any day.

Did the attacks of 9/11 end the movement against corporate globalization?

A number of reflections written for the ten-year anniversary of the attacks have raised this question. And I think it presents some interesting challenges for those of us who think about social movements.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

In an essay at Truthout journalist Dan Denvir, a friend and colleague, calls the global justice movement a “political casualty” of the War on Terror. Likewise, in the magazine’s ten-year-anniversary symposium on 9/11, fellow Dissent contributor Bhaskar Sunkara notes, “The attacks on September 11 had an unforeseen consequence for the Left. The ‘anti-globalization’ movement abruptly entered public consciousness after the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle and disappeared just as quickly.”

In their respective essays, Dan and Bhaskar consider the global justice movement as something that effectively existed for less than two years, and then had, in Dan’s words, a “quick and sudden end.” I think there is a kernel of truth to this idea–there is some reason to look at the period between November 1999 and September 2001 as a unique time. Yet this periodization, I would argue, also has some significant limitations. It skews how we think about the legacy and the impact of the movement–as well as its potential for revival.

Let’s start with how that period was indeed a special one–particularly for activists within the United States. As Bhaskar writes, “for a moment, radical politics appeared pregnant with possibility.” Dan elaborates:

A rapid-fire series of mass demonstrations forced secretive financial institutions, corporations (and political parties) to make their case to the American people for the first time in a very long time, and there was a sense of incredible optimism and power. Older activists were amazed to see people back in the streets and I felt like it was an incredible time to be a young activist. We expected major social change and so did everyone else.

I think both writers are correct that anyone involved in global justice activism at the time felt that it was an exciting and exceptional moment. Importantly, it was the time in which the fickle mainstream media in the United States and Europe paid attention to the protests against corporate globalization as a new and significant force. This attention helped the different groups mobilizing for protests think of themselves as part of a single, collective effort. And it helped create the momentum needed for any mass movement to grow. After 9/11, the mainstream media sent its spotlight elsewhere, and global justice advocates would have to struggle to draw attention to their campaigns.

Dan’s piece is, in large part, a personal reflection about being radicalized as a student activist during this time. And his experience points to another way in which the period immediately prior to 9/11 was distinctive. Young people coming to left politics in the late 1990s and very early 2000s–particularly on campuses in the United States–were likely to be exposed to critiques of neoliberalism, to campaigns targeting multinational corporations as dominant actors on the world stage, and to challenges to the Democratic Party’s acceptance of a new “free trade” orthodoxy. After 9/11, student activists were more likely to be radicalized around a different set of issues–war, torture, and the elimination of civil liberties–and were likely to direct their anger at Bush administration neoconservatives. The dominant tone changed from possibility to despair. As Dan writes:

[T]he anti-globalization was not just a movement against. It was a statement that, as the World Social Forum puts it, Another World Is Possible. The movements that followed were defensive maneuvers against a Bush administration that was truly more dangerous than anything we could have envisioned.

Bhaskar adds, “A common sentiment among those who took part in the [anti-globalization] movement is that of a historical moment cut short.”

In a variety of respects, the beginning of the “War on Terror” created real changes for activists, and I think that noting these is valid. Yet while there were some unique qualities of the period between N30 and 9/11, trying to contain the global justice movement entirely within this timeframe involves replicating some of the mainstream media’s bad habits. Since social movements neither appear as instantaneously nor disappear as abruptly as news reports would regularly seem to suggest, it’s worth taking the longer view.

Those who joined in protests against corporate globalization around the turn of the millennium frequently invoked the slogan, “It didn’t start in Seattle.” Although the November 1999 actions against the World Trade Organization meetings in the Pacific Northwest seemed to the mainstream media to come out of nowhere, protest participants identified with a lineage of activism that had been brewing for years and that was very internationalist in nature. Antecedents included mobilizations against NAFTA and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico, the rise in the 1990s of anti-sweatshop activism and culture jamming, and numerous protests in the global South against privatization and corporate exploitation. Bhaskar nods to this when he notes, “While the fight for Seattle’s streets caught the media by surprise, it was the result of months of planning and organizing, and underpinned by broader historical shifts.”

Just as there are important reasons to point out that “It did not start in Seattle,” I think there’s value in the argument that “It did not end on 9/11.”

I have written before about the important impact of global justice mobilizations on the trade and development debate. Here I would just add a few notes about timeframe that run contrary to the “ended on 9/11″ storyline.

The World Social Forum, which is considered a key institution of the global justice movement, was only in its infancy in 2001. The first global forum, held in January of that year, drew around 12,000 people. In contrast, the first post-9/11 forum back in Porto Alegre, which took place in late January and early February of 2002, drew many times more–somewhere around 60,000 attendees. By the mid-2000s, several incarnations of the World Social Forum brought in as many as 150,000 participants. Such crowds were significantly larger than the one that amassed at the Seattle protests (estimates for which range between about 30,000 and 90,000 people). Although U.S. groups were not dominant at the social forums, they were decently represented.

While focus in the United States did shift to anti-war activism during this time (and away from globalization-focused campaigns), there were efforts to link critiques of corporate power with an analysis of U.S. militarism. Highlighting the connections between movements, the call for a February 15, 2003 global day of action against war in Iraq originated at the November 2002 European Social Forum.

Following 9/11, some meetings of multilateral bodies were relocated to remote or repressive locales (such as Doha) to preclude protests. Nevertheless, activist gatherings continued to form outside G8 and WTO meetings, with notable dissident contingents confronting the latter organization in Cancun in 2003 and in Hong Kong in 2005.

Within the United States, significant protests gathered in Miami around negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)–a protest in many ways comparable to the pre-9/11 protests at the IMF and World Bank on A16, although not nearly as well covered in the press. (Indicative of the ongoing radicalism at the gatherings, I had the pleasure of watching a major U.S. union leader in Miami publicly denounce the city’s security deployment as a “police state”–something you don’t see every day in labor circles.)

The FTAA subsequently collapsed altogether, a major movement victory. Dan notes that this was “thanks in large part to Latin America’s leftward swing.” I agree, and I would contend that this swing was not wholly unconnected to global justice constituencies. (Furthermore, I would disagree with Bhaskar if he suggests that the example of Lula da Silva’s left-leaning government in Brazil necessarily delegitimizes the arguments made by critics of corporate globalization.)

Looking at a single issue central to the anti-corporate globalization movement, we can see debt relief–the demand that countries in the global South should have their international debts eliminated–follow a promising trajectory in the wake of 9/11. The debt relief movement gained momentum through July 2005, when it scored a breakthrough win with an international agreement signed at the Gleneagles, Scotland meeting of the G8. For the occasion, as many as 250,000 protesters (many times the number present in Seattle) marched in favor of eliminating unjust debts.

Now, looking at this activity, one could argue that the global justice movement continued internationally after 9/11 but ceased to exist within the United States. My response there would be that we need to look more carefully at the groups that made up mass mobilizations such as N30 or A16. The global justice movement has long been described as a “movement of movements.” One of the exciting aspects of the gatherings outside WTO or World Bank or FTAA meetings was the ability of a common enemy to bring together a broad range of constituencies–labor, environmentalists, indigenous rights groups, family farmers, anarchists, pro-immigrant advocates, faith-based groups.

The extent to which all of these groups were united into one seamless movement was probably overhyped by hopeful activists in the post-Seattle moment, radicals who might have imagined that long-standing ideological divisions could be overcome and differences in organizational cultures bridged. On the other hand, it would be equally wrong to assume that all cooperation between the diverse constituencies ended promptly upon the launch of the “War on Terror.” Labor, for one, remained far more internationalist in its stances on trade than it had been in the early 1990s and before, and its connection to immigrant rights groups were very relevant when that movement exploded into public view in 2006. Something like “slow food” was a very rare idea in 1999, but movements around food issues have only grown since then, and they continue to make fruitful links with indigenous rights activists and anti-corporate campaigners.

Institutions are important. During their heyday, the global justice activists were criticized for merely hopping from summit to summit, not building local structures. In his essay, Bhaskar rightly criticizes Seattle-era excitement over ad hoc spokes-councils and movement spaces that emerged seemingly spontaneously and left “virtually no trace behind.”

But there’s a certain “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” quality to some of these arguments. During the time activists were able to capture media attention with mass summit actions, their movement was considered viable. When the summit stalking died down, it was taken as evidence of the movement’s demise. Those who took on the difficult task of creating lasting activist vehicles–take, for example, anti-sweatshop organizers’ development of the Worker Rights Consortium, an impressive and largely post-9/11 institution–got little credit for their efforts.

The constituent groups of the global justice movement did not disappear. Nor did they lose their ability to come together as a creative, unified, and internationally minded force to challenge corporate power and oligarchic privilege. The landscape of American politics and the state of the global economy have changed plenty in the past ten years. They have changed in ways that do not always favor such unity. But the great potential, and great need for it, remain.

Over the past month, The Help, a movie adapted from a best-selling 2009 novel by Kathryn Stockett about African-American housekeepers in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, has had a strong showing at the box office. This has created consternation among many who object to the film’s politics.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

Having recently seen the movie, I’m having a hard time thinking that its success is such a bad thing. Sure, The Help wasn’t a masterpiece of civil rights cinema. But I would argue it had some significant redeeming qualities. And I didn’t think it was nearly as bad as online discussion among progressives had led me to believe it might be.

Certainly, the story has some problematic aspects. At Entertainment Weekly, novelist Martha Southgate describes as “cringeworthy” the premise of the film: “A young white woman encourages black housekeepers to tell their truth through the vehicle of a book the white woman writes.” Southgate found this “both implausible and condescending to those maids.”

At Colorlines, Akiba Solomon wrote about why she is “Just Saying No to The Help and Its Historical Whitewash,” expressing concern that, by making a well-meaning white woman the central agent for change, the movie replicates many of the bad habits of films like The Blind Side.

I take their point. (The Blind Side’s repellent trailers have been enough to keep me avoiding that movie for two years now.) But, in this case, I don’t think the premise ends up being fatal. I agree with David Denby’s assessment at the New Yorker that strong performances by Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer overcome some sketchy source material, placing the housekeepers’ experiences and their decisions squarely at the center of the story’s moral drama.

(I get the sense that the book, which does not benefit from such performances and is written partly in dialect, has been the greater source of ire for critics of The Help.)

I also think that some of the criticisms miss the point. Solomon, noting filmmaker and author Nelson George’s piece in the New York Times, argues that viewers are better off watching Eyes on the Prize. Of course, she’s right. But people going out for a Friday night show aren’t choosing between The Help and a fourteen-hour civil rights documentary. The actual alternatives they are considering are movies like The Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Shark Night 3D. In a review at Dissent, Leonard Quart concluded of The Help: “The film eschews realism in its settings and its characters. But in a summer of the usual special effects-ridden blockbusters and forgettable romantic comedies, it’s good to see a Hollywood film deal with a significant subject, however adulterated.”

Unlike the typical multiplex fare, The Help passes the Bechdel Test. It also contributes to a useful discussion about the ongoing exploitation of domestic workers–a workforce still predominately made up of women of color, and one that (outside of New York state, which passed a landmark Domestic Workers Bill of Rights last year) still receives scant protection under labor law.

For this reason, the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) is putting a positive spin on the film. Describing The Help as a “powerful story about courageous domestic workers in the Civil Rights era,” the group is using it as an opportunity to highlight their ongoing organizing.

I recently spoke with NDWA Director Ai-jen Poo, who explained:

It’s not every day that a major motion picture actually puts the experiences of women of color in general–and particularly of domestic workers–center stage. To me that’s a huge opportunity to actually lift up the fact that there’s a continuance of these stories. Not much has changed structurally for this workforce. Many of the dynamics and the vulnerabilities and the injustices that the characters deal with are still prevalent today. And there’s something we can do about it.

Among other campaigns, the NDWA is currently pushing to pass a version of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in California. (You can learn more by watching the organization’s video, “Meet Today’s Help,” available here.) Whether you’re taken by The Help, or you’re holding out for Hollywood to create better civil rights movies, domestic workers fighting for labor rights deserve your support.

President Obama now has a clear choice on climate change. Major energy corporations are seeking to build a 1700-mile oil pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas. The Keystone XL Pipeline would itself carry social and environmental costs: cutting through fragile ecosystems, creating risk of spills, and negatively affecting indigenous communities. But, most significantly, it would be a boon to efforts to exploit the tar sands.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

The Canadian tar sands are a particularly dirty source of fossil fuels that could produce egregious carbon emissions. As Elizabeth Kolbert reported at the New Yorker:

[B]ecause tar-sands oil is so heavy, it has to be very heavily processed, which requires tremendous amounts of energy, usually in the form of natural gas. It’s been estimated that, on what’s known as a well-to-tank basis, tar-sands oil is responsible for eighty percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than ordinary crude.

Prominent climate scientist James Hansen has argued (in a now oft-quoted statement) that “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix, it is essentially game over” for the climate.

Before the end of the year, Obama’s State Department must choose whether to approve or deny the pipeline project. To dramatize the president’s choice, environmentalists have commenced two weeks of civil disobedience. On August 20 they began daily waves of sit-ins in front of the White House. As of this writing, near the end of week one, 322 people have been arrested.

Billed as the “biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years,” the two weeks of sit-ins and arrests in summer-recessed Washington, D.C., have thus far had difficulty in creating the tension that, at times, allows acts of civil disobedience to explode into mass public spectacles. The protests have not had a single, climactic date around which many thousands might mobilize. And since the deadline by which Obama must make his call is months away, administration officials have been able to drag their feet.

That said, the two weeks of action are creating many opportunities for press coverage of the issue. Protest leaders such as author Bill McKibben, who was arrested early on, have been using the ongoing actions as reason to make the rounds in the media.

The protests don’t need to become front-page news in order for them to have an impact. McKibben correctly notes that the primary effect of this advocacy is to raise the stakes for Obama in terms of his support among his base in the environmental community. The fact that prominent individuals (McKibben, along with Hansen, Wendell Berry, Naomi Klein, Danny Glover, Gus Speth, Jane Hamsher, and others) have devoted their energies to highlighting this cause—and have rallied hundreds of others to make the sacrifices entailed in getting arrested while speaking out against the pipeline—has turned what might have been an easy-to-ignore bureaucratic decision into a line-in-the-sand issue for environmentalists.

Obama’s credibility as a leader concerned about climate change is now publicly in question; he has the power to please corporate sponsors or environmentalists, but not both.

Whether the president will make the right choice given his recent track record is, shall we say, doubtful. If he did, Andrew Leonard pointed out at Salon, Republican opponents would no doubt paint him as a job killer insensitive to high gas prices. Nevertheless, the week of protest has helped to make clear what the right choice is. The actions in Washington have given trade unionists such as Joe Uehlein the opportunity to make the case that “’jobs vs. the environment’ is a false choice.” And, in a nice media coup for the arrestees, they gave the New York Times occasion to editorialize that the administration “should acknowledge the environmental risk of the pipeline and the larger damage caused by tar sands production and block the Keystone XL.”

The protests point to an increasing militancy among climate change activists that has been developing steadily in recent years. All those concerned about the planet should very much hope that the tar sands pipeline is halted before it is ever approved. But if the project does go forward, it will not be the end for those organizing civil disobedience on this issue. Should pipeline construction be approved, it is not hard to imagine arrests involving much more than symbolic acts of protest. Instead of sit-ins at the White House, we may well see bodies before bulldozers on the Western plains.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

When it comes to columnists at the New York Times, there’s plenty to complain about. I’ve recently written in frustration at Nicholas Kristof’s boneheaded paean to the economics profession and in disgust at several aspects of David Brooks’ journalistic output. Fellow Dissent contributor Lindsay Beyerstein questioned Frank Bruni’s qualifications last week after the columnist’s inane piece touting his ignorance of Harry Potter. And don’t get me started on Thomas Friedman.

Given all the negativity, I thought I’d take a moment to register a relatively positive sentiment: I’ve been pleased to see Joe Nocera land some solid columns over the past several months.

Nocera’s not a new face at the Times. He’s been writing a column for the Saturday business section since 2005. But, following Frank Rich’s resignation in March, Nocera was promoted to the main op-ed page’a significant rise in visibility. I’d say he’s stepped up pretty nicely.

Nocera’s no radical, and I disagree with him often enough. (He supports hydraulic fracking in the Marcellus Shale, for one. And, even in rejecting it, I think he was unduly kind to Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan.) That said, he’s followed Wall Street for a long time, knows the players, and is not in awe of them. (Warren Buffett take note.) He believes in government regulation of the banking industry, and—notwithstanding having the kind of long experience that would breed thorough cynicism in many—he still gets pissed off when he sees watchdog agencies in bed with the executives they’re supposed to oversee and watches white-collar criminals avoid justice.

Some noteworthy columns that come to mind from the past few months include a piece encouraging Obama to fight for Elizabeth Warren:

Yes, the nomination would spark a partisan fight, and, yes, there is a high likelihood that she would not win confirmation. But it would redound nicely to the president’s advantage. Americans would be able to see, in the starkest way imaginable, who’s trying to help them—and who’s not.

That was good advice, not taken.

Nocera also offered an interesting, compact history of the 1933 Glass-Steagall act—the “Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks,” the Clinton-era repeal of which helped spur the recent economic crisis. He opened his column with a passage about businesses crying wolf way back then:

The president of the American Bankers Association was railing against excessive regulation in a speech at the Waldorf Astoria. The banking reform bill, he complained, “would destroy a substantial part of our bond-distributing machinery.” He added, “Can anyone expect that a step of this kind will improve the quality of our long-term investments?“

Business protests aside, the regulations did improve the long-term economic health of the country. Nocera notes: “although the modern reform bill, Dodd-Frank, surely does some good, it’s not even comparable.”

Finally, the columnist made a nice, commonsense defense of the prosecutors who went after Dominique Strauss-Kahn on rape charges:

[Bernard-Henri] Levy, himself a member of the French elite, seems particularly incensed that [Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus] Vance wouldn’t automatically give Strauss-Kahn a pass, given his extraordinary social status. Especially since his accuser had no status at all.But that is exactly why Vance should be applauded: a woman with no power made a credible accusation against a man with enormous power. He acted without fear or favor. To have done otherwise would have been to violate everything we believe in this country about no one being above the law.

As for Strauss-Kahn’s humiliation, clearly something very bad happened in that hotel room. Quite possibly a crime was committed. Strauss-Kahn’s sordid sexual history makes it likely that he was the instigator. If the worst he suffers is a perp walk, a few days in Rikers Island and some nasty headlines, one’s heart ought not bleed. Ah, yes, and he had to resign as the chief of an institution where sexual harassment was allegedly rampant, thanks, in part, to a culture he helped perpetuate. Gee, isn’t that awful?

In the past week or two, Nocera has written a couple of columns slamming Rupert Murdoch, writing as a sober newspaperman sad to see the once-lauded non-editorial side of the Wall Street Journal go to crap. One of those columns included a mea culpa: “Four years ago, when Murdoch was battling recalcitrant members of the Bancroft family to gain control of The Journal, which he had long lusted after and which he viewed as the vehicle that would finally allow him to go head-to-head against The New York Times, I wrote several columns saying that he would be a better owner than the Bancrofts.”

Nocera says he is now “hanging [his] head in shame” at the mistake. This could be a most valuable quality for Times columnists: being able to see when they’ve been wrong.