Not interested in this post? I can’t blame you. Think this hypothetical job description exaggerates the real conditions under which Apple products are made? Prior to this year, a great many people would have agreed. Today, fewer can claim to be unaware of the truth.

Apple’s exploitation of workers in China isn’t unique. Other computer companies are likewise drawn like honey bees to the nectar of negligible wages, natural waterways open for dumping, and police forces conveniently watchful for union troublemakers. Nor are allegations of abuse at Apple suppliers new. This magazine, among others, has raised red flags since the company started exporting most of its manufacturing more than a decade ago.

But recent events – the death of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs, a fresh wave of investigative reports, and protests by Chinese workers themselves – have reopened discussion of a reality we regularly prefer to ignore.

Here in the US, after Barack Obama gave his annual State of the Union address, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels offered the Republican response. He celebrated the departed Apple executive: ‘The late Steve Jobs – what a fitting name he had – created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.’

That Apple employs only around 43,000 people in the US, while the 2009 stimulus created or saved 1.4 million jobs, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, is just the sort of irrelevant ‘reality-based’ detail that followers of this country’s politics know they are expected to ignore.

Yet, accepting that Jobs was a ‘job creator’, we can ask: ‘What kind of employment did he produce?’

Most Apple jobs are low-wage retail positions in the company’s cubed-glass cathedrals. Apple Store employees interviewed by labour journalist Josh Eidelson report being casually informed by managers that working non-union is part of the job. When several in the San Francisco Bay Area expressed concerns about pay, they were told, ‘Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple.’ Rather, according to management, serving at the altar of the Genius Bar™ ‘should be looked at as an experience’.

Last year Apple, with its attention to life-enriching experiences, earned $400,000 in profit per employee, exceeding such non-carpe diem corporations as ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs.

Beyond direct hires, some 700,000 people work for Apple’s suppliers, the majority at places like the Chinese Foxconn plant, where, sadly, making it to age 25 without crippling repetitive stress injury is an accomplishment.

Sweatshop apologists contend that such facilities are legitimate stepping-stones on the path to market prosperity. This presumes that the grimmest workshops of the industrial revolution will never be abolished – that there will always be some hyper-exploitable country in need of ‘development’, whose young people can be sacrificed to our desires for inexpensive gadgets. These manufacturing jobs will never come with dignified standards, their argument suggests, so why try to improve conditions at all?

The good news is that most people are not so blasé about human rights. Apple recognizes that demonstrations against oppressive working conditions could slow sales. Feeling the heat, it has agreed to release lists of suppliers and allow outside inspections of plants. The company is now trying to fashion itself into a good example, and it’s not the defenders of sweatshops who made this happen.

Those pushing for broader changes throughout the industry are not asking for congratulations. They know they have plenty more to do. It’s help that’s wanted.

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 with 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!

That proposition seems to fall pretty safely within a free market, vote-with-your-dollars paradigm. In fact, watchdogs who are providing consumers with full information about misbehaving corporations should be seen—again, within a free-market framework—as providing a valuable service, since informed consumers are supposed to be an important part of efficiently functioning capitalism.

But no. If you ask right-wing talking heads, campaigners who dare to suggest that consumers express displeasure with corporations are waging a war on “open thinking and discussion of legislation.”

The impetus for this debate is the effort to hold companies accountable for their memberships in the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, groups including ColorOfChange.org and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee have been encouraging consumers to tell corporations paying hefty dues to ALEC that not all of us approve of their behavior. The tactic has worked beautifully. More than a dozen institutions have dumped ALEC, with Blue Cross Blue Shield, Yum! Brands (owner of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut), and Procter & Gamble all joining the exodus since I last wrote.

While the campaign falls within the boycott tradition, in this case the groups involved have only been encouraging people to write letters to the corporations expressing their opinions. The threat that people might withhold their business (which is of course their right in a free market) has thus far been implicit. A ColorOfChange.org sample letter reads, in part:

I presume your company does not want to support voter suppression, nor have your products or services associated with discrimination and large-scale voter disenfranchisement. I urge you to immediately stop funding ALEC and issue a public statement making it clear that your company does not support discriminatory voter ID laws and voter suppression.

With sponsors rapidly jumping ship, ALEC has tried to do some damage control. Last week it announced that it would be “eliminating [its] Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues” such as Stand Your Ground and Voter ID. The purpose of the move, the organization said, is to focus more keenly on “free-market, limited government, pro-growth” priorities—read: destroying unions, eliminating environmental regulation, reducing taxes for the top 1 percent, and so forth. While they tried to spin this as a way to “redoubl[e] our efforts on the economic front,” it’s clearly a concession.

Yet, even while retreating on its policy agenda, ALEC has also launched a PR offensive. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) recently reported on ALEC Director of External Relations Caitlyn Korb appealing to a Heritage Foundation “Bloggers Briefing.” According to the CMD, Korb begged

conservative bloggers for help while prepping “a very aggressive campaign to really spread the word about what we actually do.”

….

Korb outlined ALEC’s PR counter-offensive. She told bloggers that ALEC will launch a website called “I Stand with ALEC” in the next few days. The phrase is familiar to Wisconsinites, as it tracks the Americans for Prosperity (AFP) campaign on behalf of the embattled governor, whose slogan is “Stand with Walker.” AFP is also an ALEC member.

Korb referenced the coalition-building and outreach being spearheaded by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR, another ALEC member) and asked the bloggers for “any and all institutional support.“

We already have a taste of the talking points the Right is deploying. One main thrust is that, although liberals have paranoid delusions about a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” ALEC is actually an innocuous group promoting open debate and freedom and apple pie. New Hampshire State Representative Jordan Ulery made this case in a column arguing that “the fringe left” is irrationally panicked about “legislators from across the country meeting together to discuss common problems and seeking common solutions.” He then goes on to explain that ALEC’s entirely unobjectionable agenda is merely to promote:

health care reform, re-examination of excessive environmental restrictions, constitutionally approved fair elections legislation, government accountability to the taxpayer, a balanced budget amendment, a deficit reduction amendment and similar commonsense proposals for the states to consider for their own implementation.

You don’t have to do much decoding of conservative buzzwords to know that this is not middle-of-the-road stuff, and some other right-wing commentators have admitted as much. But that didn’t stop the always-reactionary Wall Street Journal editorial board from accusing progressives of “Playing the race card to silence a free-market policy voice.”

Humorously enough, Michelle Malkin, writing over at National Review Online, has called upon right-wingers to withdraw their business from companies that quit ALEC: “It’s time for conservatives to stand their ground and stop showing these corporate cowards their money,” she contends. So, apparently, boycotting is only unfair suppression of open debate if advanced by the left—and a perfectly legitimate tactic if you want to compel corporations to continue coughing up money for the conservative policy machine.

A lot of this reeks of desperation, and it should be taken as encouragement by those exposing the corporations that still present themselves as community-friendly vendors while backing an agenda that makes the Malkins and Wall Street Journal editorialists of the world swoon. Rarely do activists get the satisfaction of seeing union busters or environmental despoilers testify to a campaign’s effectiveness so clearly as Korb did when pleading for the aid of right-wing bloggers.

According to the CMD, she complained, “We’re getting absolutely killed in social media venues—Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest (I didn’t even know Pinterest was a forum for a lot of political opposition, but now it is).”

Sounds like a job well done to me. Tweet it far and wide, folks!

Starting this week, many of these same groups will be rallying their members and supporters to use newly honed skills to confront the shareholder meetings of corporations across the United States—charging executives with abusing workers, the environment, and communities in pursuit of profits for the 1 percent. They are calling the drive 99% Power. With prominent actions gearing up this week—starting with major protests at Wells Fargo meetings in San Francisco—the campaign may soon be coming to a city near you.

The Genesis of the 99% Spring

Although this month’s 99% Spring trainings have taken place in the shadow of the Occupy movement, the coalition building behind them actually predated the emergence of Occupy Wall Street. Last summer, a handful of organizers from groups such as Jobs with Justice, NPA, and NDWA had discussions in which they lamented the lack of direct action in recent years. As NPA Executive Director George Goehl explains, “We felt what was missing in terms of organizing and in terms of the broader fight was that there wasn’t enough energy pointed towards challenging corporate power: That’s not going to government and saying, ‘Rein these guys in,’ but actually going toe-to-toe with big corporations.”

The groups envisioned bringing together organizations to work across single-issue lines, using more confrontational strategies. For the fall, they planned overlapping weeks of action in eight major cities—which resulted in arrests from Boston to Los Angeles of activists demanding accountability for the big banks and protesting foreclosures. Since the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park exploded into a nationwide phenomenon at the same time, these protests were largely covered in the media as part of the Occupy movement. Participants from the Occupy encampments joined in the demonstrations, and actions that had been organized by community groups, in turn, helped to create a sense of national scope and escalating drama for the movement.

The idea for spring trainings as a follow-up to these efforts coalesced early in 2012, and a wide range of groups signed on to make them happen in a remarkably short period of time. During the week of April 9-15, more than 980 trainings took place, covering communities throughout the country.

Coalition or Cooptation?

The plan for the 99% Spring was ambitious in several respects. First, the organizers aspired to train a massive number of people: 100,000 total, roughly half in person and half through an Internet version of the curriculum. (Final numbers are not in, but more than 40,000 had signed up for the mid-April events. Online trainings continue.)

Second, the curriculum for the full training covered seven hours of material. It combined elements that might typically be presented in three different sessions: By way of introductions, participants started with a version of the public narrative exercises developed by Marshall Ganz. Public narrative provides a method for talking about one’s own experiences that motivate participation in collective action and for identifying a common story of struggle. Next, the trainings included a teach-in about inequality in the American economy and about the growing power of the 1 percent. This information was similar to that commonly provided by groups like United for a Fair Economy. Finally, the events featured a brief history of nonviolence in the United States and instruction in some skills that might be used in direct action—the type of material that is often covered by groups like Training for Change.

As the 99% Spring trainings neared, they attracted some controversy. Significant debate arose about whether the drive was an attempt by established organizations to co-opt the Occupy movement. In particular, the involvement of MoveOn.org, which some occupiers consider part of the mainstream political establishment, drew fire from more radical activists.

The magazine Adbusters warned that the trainings were an attempt to “neutralize our insurgency with an insidious campaign of donor money and cooptation,” and that the goal of the effort was to “turn our struggle into a… reelection campaign for President Obama.” Occupy Oakland activist Mike King similarly charged that the true motivation of the campaign was to neuter the movement and divert it into electoral efforts. “We should not have our tactics determined by the Democratic Party,” he wrote.

Joshua Kahn Russell, a trainer and action coordinator with the Ruckus Society and 350.org, responds, “I think it’s healthy for grassroots movements to question involvement of bigger organizations. At the same time,” he says, “we need to see that groups like unions who might support the Democrats are not our enemies. We need to be building across some of these differences if we’re really going to be talking about the 99 percent.”

The large number of trainings offered, and the fact that different local groups were responsible for hosting different events, meant that the tone of the trainings varied. While one participant reported seeing Obama buttons for sale at an Upper West Side Manhattan training, many other events, including one in downtown Philadelphia, featured vocal criticism of Democrats and open airing of disappointment with the current administration. For its part, the 99% Spring curriculum did not include electoral material, and the economic education video used at trainings showed Bill Clinton repealing Glass-Steagall regulations on banks—an act depicted in a profoundly negative light.

Moreover, while the coalition that backed 99% Spring includes MoveOn.org and major labor unions, which have significant involvement in electoral politics, it includes many scrappier groups as well, such as the Ruckus Society, the Rainforest Action Network, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, and NPA. “As an organization that’s been taking over bank lobbies and doing direct action for 40 years, some of the criticism is a little tough to hear,” says NPA’s Goehl. “We’ve been as critical of the president as basically any progressive group.”

“Our main message is, ‘We’re all in this together,’” adds Tracy Van Slyke, co-director of the New Bottom Line. “This is about working across geography, race, creed to build an economy and democracy that works for the 99 percent. There’s a lot of appreciation for Occupy, and a lot of people from Occupy are participating. But there’s a really wide range of groups involved. We’re focused on what we can all do together.”

In many locations, Occupy activists were involved in organizing or were active participants in the trainings. “This is not an Occupy project,” Kahn Russell says of 99% Spring. “At the same time, there’s obviously a lot of crossover because our movements are interdependent. I personally have done trainings in support of occupations in many parts of the country since well before the 99% Spring, and I identify with the Occupy movement tremendously. I think there’s a lot of people who are playing that bridge role.”

In an election year, it is highly unusual to see many of the larger, established progressive organizations investing in training members for wide-scale direct action instead of in electoral campaigning. Given this, some have commented that it might be more accurate to see Occupy as having co-opted MoveOn.org, instead of the other way around. Particularly striking, as Josh Harkinson at MotherJones noted, is an e-mail that MoveOn.org Executive Director Justin Ruben sent to his staff earlier in the month. “It’s clear that the sorts of tactics we’ve engaged in in the past are no longer enough,” Ruben wrote. He subsequently stated, “We know that whoever wins in November, they are still going to be listening more to the 1 percent than to the rest of us because our political system is completely broken. So we don’t have the luxury of not engaging in this kind of action.”

Next Up: 99% Power

Apart from its engagement with Occupy, the 99% Spring brought together a remarkably diverse collection of organizations. Many of these rarely have occasion to see their work as part of a common cause. As Kahn Russell notes, “The thing that’s most exciting to me is that 99% Spring is putting union members together in the same room with environmentalists, with domestic workers, with peace and justice people, and they’re talking with each other for the first time.”

“Big alliances like this are challenging,” he adds. “So seeing so many different groups agree on the need for street heat, to act directly without having power-holders dictate to us the rules of engagement—all that is remarkable to me.”

Owing to the wide range of coalition members, organizers decided that the 99% Spring trainings would not be intended as preparation for any specific action, but rather to give skills that could be applied to a range of campaigns. In some sessions, participants felt that the actual nonviolence training provided seemed truncated (especially since it came at the end of a long agenda) and that next steps seemed unclear. This contributed—as one report back from a training in lower Manhattan described it—to a sense of “aimlessness.”

Yet, in other cases, the trainings led immediately into action. As one example, in Des Moines, Iowa, more than 100 people—including a large contingent of family farmers—marched directly to the house of Mike Heid, a top official at Wells Fargo, to oppose the bank’s investment in private prisons and its mistreatment of immigrants.

“For some people, that’s a pretty big step,” says Goehl of the rally at the banker’s home. “It’s not getting arrested. But it is breaking the ‘be nice’ rule.”

While the 99% Spring itself did not agree on a common agenda for action, many of the same groups are involved in 99% Power. This campaign will involve confrontations at more than three-dozen shareholder meetings taking place between now and May. The New Bottom Line’s Van Slyke calls it “the largest mobilization around shareholder meetings in U.S. history.”

Describing the campaign’s goals, she says, “We want to go directly to the board members and executives of the 1 percent who are behind these corporations. We want to bring a unified set of demands that they stop pillaging our environment, that they create good jobs, that they get their corporate money out of our democracy.”

Things will get started in earnest at Wells Fargo meetings in San Francisco this week. There, Occupy activists and community groups alike will be coming together to confront the corporate gatherings and possibly even shut them down. Subsequently, major targets will include meetings of General Electric in Detroit; of Verizon in Alabama; Bank of America in Charlotte, NC; Walmart in Arkansas; and Sallie Mae in Delaware—which student activists are making a special focus. “At a lot of the meetings you’ll see a thousand-plus people doing actions, and at almost all the meetings there will people inside the meetings as well as outside,” Goehl explains.

Since these efforts are not exclusive with other spring protests, such as Occupy’s May 1 actions, the coming weeks promise to be a busy season. Trainings will also continue, but some of the most pertinent lessons may be gained through direct experience. “I believe the best way to train people to do nonviolent direct action is to go do nonviolent direct action,” says Goehl. “And that’s what’s going to happen.”

Back in 2009 and 2010, Tax Day protests were a high-water mark for the Tea Party; they were the mass actions that really put the right-wing movement on the map. But by 2011, as I wrote at the time, that was already changing. The Tea Party still had plenty to be happy about: it was coming off of midterm elections that gave Republicans control of the House, with a rabidly reactionary class of congressional freshmen. And through the summer the supposed imperative to cut back government spending—never mind the country’s ongoing crisis of joblessness—would dominate Washington debate.

Yet by Tax Day 2011, a shift had started. Tea Party leading light Glenn Beck was on his way out at Fox News, having been the subject of a boycott from the left. A group called US Uncut, modeled on a British counterpart, was getting great press by going after corporate tax cheats and businesses that had managed to avoid taxes altogether. (GE, in particular, was having a very bad PR month.) Protests taking place that April were as likely to be against draconian social service cuts as against “big government” tyranny.

All of this presaged the emergence of the Occupy movement in the fall, which went much, much further in shifting the debate. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman commented on the transformation:

[S]ix weeks ago, before [Occupy Wall Street] started, we were basically having an insane national discussion. Here we were with 14 million people unemployed, and with the government able to borrow at the lowest interest rates in history and with enormous increase in inequality—with a few people at the very top prospering immensely, and most people having made no headway, even before the crisis hit. And yet—what were we talking about? Deficits, austerity, ‘Let’s cut Medicare and Social Security.’

And the whole issue of, ‘What about jobs? What about doing something for the vast majority of Americans?’ was completely ruled out of the discussion. And now some of us—you know, I tried to write about it, other people have tried to write about—but somehow, that was not making a dent in the conversation. And then a group of people started camping out in Zuccotti Park, and all of a sudden the conversation has changed significantly towards being about the right things. It’s kind of a miracle.

This year, if you say “Tax Day” and “social movement,” the Tea Party isn’t necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. And if you go looking for a protest, you’ll likely find folks protesting against the tax evaders of the top 1 percent. As one example, members of Stand Up Chicago have been delivering faux tax bills to corporations including Boeing, Exelon, and Bank of America. A release from the group reported:

Despite making $3.3 BILLION in profits in 2010, Boeing paid no taxes for the year and even received a tax refund of $1.56 BILLION. Since 2008, Boeing has received $6 billion in total tax subsidies.

Under CEO Brian Moynihan’s leadership, Bank of America paid NOTHING in taxes the past three years, despite hauling in $5.5 BILLION in profits. Bank of America didn’t just dodge taxes, they received a $5 BILLION tax refund for the year 2009. Moynihan has been amply rewarded, receiving a $10 MILLION salary in compensation.

Despite making $2.5 BILLION in profits in 2010, Exelon received a tax refund of $914 MILLION for the year. Exelon received $2.24 BILLION in tax breaks between 2008 and 2010, placing it among the 25 companies with the largest total tax subsidies (otherwise known as corporate welfare) during that period.

In the Senate, Democrats will be voting this week in favor of the “Buffett Rule” to raise taxes on the wealthy. The measure won’t go anywhere (having no chance of passing in the House), and it hardly makes up for the abhorrent so-called “JOBS Act” that President Obama signed into law last week. (“Boss Tweed himself couldn’t have done any worse,” wrote Matt Taibbi in the first of two powerful denunciations.) But it’s at least good to know that when the Dems decide to posture, they’re now doing it by advocating a more progressive tax system. For just last summer they were rallying behind the inspiring motto of “let’s cut a little less than the Republicans want to.”

As for politics beyond posturing, the Tax Day protests have more potential. Let’s hope that they will be the start of a fine Occupy Spring.

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 a href=”http://politicalhumor.about.com/b/2009/10/28/the-10-craziest-glenn-beck-quotes-of-all-time.htm”>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.

By tradition, the World Bank president has been a political appointee named by the White House. Europe has gone along with this arrangement, with the tacit agreement that a European, in turn, would be named as director of the International Monetary Fund. As for the rest of the world…well, the IMF and World Bank haven’t traditionally put too much weight on what the global South thinks.

This year things have been a bit different. For the first time, there’s been a concerted—and effective—effort to intervene in the nominating process and prevent a crony coronation. To this end, a variety of developing countries and progressive leaders got behind the candidacy of economist Jeffrey Sachs, who in recent years has refashioned himself as an anti-poverty crusader.

But other critics of the status quo were skeptical of this pick. Although Sachs now tries to highlight his anti-poverty credentials, he was previously known as a neoliberal “doctor shock,” advising on “stabilization” programs in countries such as Bolivia, Poland, and Russia in the 1980s and 90s. This history earned him a place as a leading villain in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

Sachs has never been big on apologizing. And many followers of Latin American politics, including me, find his lack of remorse for his role in Bolivia to be a big problem. But, in a debate hosted at the Nation (in which John Cavanagh and Robin Broad made the case against Sachs), progressive economist Mark Weisbrot—an outspoken defender of Latin America’s “New Left”—wrote in the nominee’s defense. Weisbrot contended:

Sachs has a reform agenda for the Bank, including having the Bank focus more on treatment and prevention of infectious diseases, support for small farmers, education and primary health care, and renewable energy (as opposed to fossil fuels). He also has a track record of having fought for debt cancellation, an end to the World Bank’s policies of imposing user fees for primary health care and education, for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (which has saved millions of lives), increased access to essential medicines, and having been outspoken against war and other abuses by the US government.

Weisbrot and others also made a few arguments on the strategic level. First, they contended that Sachs was far preferable to Larry Summers, who was seen prior to the Kim announcement as Obama’s likely pick. (I can hardly argue with them on that point.)

Second, they emphasized that putting forth a credible opposition candidate would throw open what is usually a closed process and pave the way for more progressive candidates in the future. Indeed, as the Sachs nomination gained steam, two candidates from the global South also entered the fray: Colombian José Antonio Ocampo, a former finance minister and UN official, and Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, also a finance minister of his country and a former managing director at the World Bank.

In the end, Obama did not nominate Summers. And, ultimately, Jim Yong Kim might be a better pick than anyone for whom critics of the World Bank could have realistically hoped. Kim’s main progressive credential—and it’s a compelling one—is having served as executive director of Partners in Health (PIH), co-founded by Paul Farmer. If you haven’t picked up Tracy Kidder’s excellent book about Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, there’s no point in delaying any longer. Farmer’s work is remarkable by all accounts and, grounded in liberation theology, it shows a deep preference for the world’s poor against the Washington Consensus.

Kim has been lower-profile than Farmer. But there are some good signs that he will bring a very different perspective to the job of World Bank president than his predecessors. One is the fact that Kim is now drawing heat from the right for writing in a 2000 book, Dying for Growth, that “the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

Then again, the Wall Street Journal writes, “Over Dr. Kim’s three years at Dartmouth he has proved to be higher education’s Paul Ryan. He decisively resolved the school’s financial problems that he inherited on taking office—with real budget cuts, over the objections of the faculty.”

I called up Mark Weisbrot to talk more about the Kim nomination, about the debate around Sachs, and about what difference having a new World Bank president might make. Some edited excerpts from our conversation follow:

Engler: Are you happy with the nomination of Jim Yong Kim?

Weisbrot: Yes, I think it’s great. To have somebody who cares about health issues is completely different. Look at the past eleven presidents. They’re all bankers, war criminals—not the kind of people I’d want to run my restaurant.

Engler: By “war criminals,” you’re referring to…

Weisbrot: McNamara and Wolfowitz. I don’t know if Wolfowitz is technically a war criminal, but he was one of the architects of the Iraq War. Can you imagine? This is what annoys me when leftists complain about Sachs.

Engler: I’m one of those people who complains about Sachs. True, he’s not as bad as Larry Summers. But I was surprised to see you get behind him.

Weisbrot: Well, do you ever vote in elections?

Engler: Sure…

Weisbrot: I respect the position that the World Bank should just be abolished. I think that’s an argument that people can make. But if you’re going to have a World Bank, there’s more of a difference between Sachs and anybody that Obama was going to appoint than there is between, I don’t know, [former Brazilian President] Lula [da Silva] and his predecessor. There’s a huge difference between Sachs and Summers. That’s what I go by.

Engler: Especially as someone who watches Latin America, as you do as well, I’ve felt that Sachs is inadequately repentant for his past.

Weisbrot: I really don’t care about his immortal soul. That’s for the Pope to judge or whoever else wants to judge that. That’s not my job.

Engler: How much of a difference do you think the World Bank president makes?

Weisbrot: That’s an interesting question. We don’t know because we’ve never had a president there who was anything but a crony. We’ll see what he can change. He has a bully pulpit too if that’s something he wants to use. That’s something I think Sachs would have used a lot, and it would have been hard to fire him. I don’t know if Kim is going to do it.

Engler: What are some of the things that you see a more independent World Bank president promoting, using this bully pulpit?

Weisbrot: The Bank publishes Global Economic Prospects, and they comment on the world economy. So the World Bank president could speak out on the big economic questions that the G20 is dealing with: how to handle the next global economic crisis; how to handle the European crisis, because it affects the developing world. They could speak out on spending priorities for the Bank itself.

But if Kim wants to change anything, he’s going to have to fight. He’s still going to have the Bank’s board [of directors] to deal with. And that board is dominated by the United States and its allies.

It’s not just a question of votes. It’s the fact that developing countries don’t fight. They just don’t fight within the IMF and World Bank the way they do within the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the WTO they form blocs, they fight, and they win. And they’re going to have to get used to doing the same thing in these two institutions.

I think that was a positive part of developing countries supporting Sachs. There were about a dozen of them by the end. That made a difference. I’m not sure the other nominations would have happened if Sachs hadn’t gone in there first. He was the one who busted up the normal process.

Engler: In your mind, what would be a desirable set of spending priorities for the Bank?

Weisbrot: I want them to do more about the things that they can do, like disease prevention and treatment. Kim will do that. And if he does nothing else, that’s still a huge improvement. I think [people at the Bank] can do more in education. They can do more to support small-scale agriculture.

But once you get into their economics, their economics are usually bad. One of the Financial Times reporters today asked me, “What if Kim doesn’t know that much about development economics?”

I said, “I don’t think that’s a handicap. I don’t think the Bank should be involved in that anyways. Let them do what they can do, because they usually get the economics wrong.”

Siamo nel 2012.
La prigione di Guantanamo, al cui interno si trovano centinaia di prigionieri detenuti senza processo e nella quale sono state messe in atto torture e abusi, resta aperta.
A dicembre il presidente Obama ha rettificato, rendendolo effettivo, il National Defense Authorization Act.
Tale atto, secondo quando riferito dal N.Y.T., permetterà che “detenzioni a tempo indeterminato e processi militari divengano parte integrante della legge statunitense”.

Siamo arrivati alla fase in cui i nostri buoni propositi di fine anno restano incompiuti.
Sembrano solo pochi “facebook updates” fa che dichiaravamo fiduciosi quanto saremmo stati migliori.
Quelle promesse mancate che sembrano ormai già antiche.

Naturalmente sappiamo che prima della fine dell’anno pagheremo le conseguenze per quanto non abbiamo fatto.
Lo scopriremo quando non saremo tornati in forma, quando non avremo smesso di fumare, quando il cambiamento che cercavamo di realizzare sarà restato in fondo alla lista delle cose da fare.

Nella vita politica anche Obama non ha mantenuto le promesse.
Il punto è: a fine dovrà renderne conto?

Non è solo la questione Guantanamo.

Il candidato Obama si spese contro il devastante impatto del NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).
Eppure solo lo scorso autunno, come presidente, ha firmato accordi NAFTA con Panama, la Corea del Sud e la Colombia (paese questo che vanta storiche e innumerevoli violenze perpetrate nei confronti dei sindacati).
Ha dismesso il Employee Free Choice Act, una delle priorità del partito democratico.
Ed ha lasciato sgomenti i verdi ritardando la conversione in legge di norme che, se rese effettive, avrebbero “messo in difficoltà” chi inquinava.

Segnalare tutto questo non equivale a dire che Obama sia identico ai suoi avversari repubblicani.
Sarebbe superficiale affermare che i due schieramenti abbiano sostenuto le multinazionali nello stesso modo o che le loro differenze in ambito sociale non generino conseguenze differenti.
I repubblicani hanno spinto con aggressività per limitare le libertà civili ed hanno tentato in ogni modo di ostacolare Obama nel perseguimento dei suoi impegni elettorali.
Se avessero avuto l’opportunità avrebbero abolito l’Agenzia di Protezione Ambientale ed avrebbero riempito la Corte Suprema di reazionari.
Allo stesso modo però non possiamo accusare chi avesse grandi attese rispetto a questa amministrazione.
Forse saremmo dovuti essere più cinici, più consapevoli dei limiti che vigono a Washington, più scettici rispetto ai consiglieri di Obama.
Ma Obama, ricordiamolo, ci ha detto di non farlo.

Ha fatto appello al nostro idealismo, ha basato la sua campagna elettorale sulla speranza.

Il giorno 11 gennaio 2012, il decimo anniversario dell’apertura della prigione di Guantanamo, mi sono unito ai manifestanti che si sono radunati, sotto la pioggia, davanti alla Casa Bianca.
Eravamo molto coinvolti ma non dalla rielezione di Obama.

Una settimana prima invece mi trovavo insieme ai repubblicani nei caucuses dello Iowa.
In quella sede ho visto una Destra appassionata.
Newt Gingrich ha affermato con determinazione: “Queste elezioni sono le più importanti dal 1860″
Romney ha detto che è questione di “salvare l’anima dell’America”.

Coloro che difendono Obama credono che il sostegno per il presidente tornerà a crescere una volta individuato l’avversario politico ufficiale.
Forse andrà così.
Per adesso però le promesse infrante restano sgradevolmente sospese.

Non credete a tutta questa mancanza di entusiasmo?
Allora spendete un po’ di tempo con qualche repubblicano e poi parlate con uno dei molti delusi sulla questione Guantanamo.

In risposta all’ordine, varie centinaia di persone vestite con tute arancione e cappucci neri si sono girati contemporaneamente verso destra in Pensylvania Avenue, e hanno cominciato una lenta marcia verso l’edificio del Campidoglio.

Mercoledì era il decimo anniversario del primo trasferimento di prigionieri nella Baia di Guantanamo, come parte della “Guerra al terrore”. Per ricordare quella data, una coalizione di gruppi che operano in difesa dei diritti umani e che comprende: Testimoni contro la tortura, Code Pink, Amnesty International, e la Campagna nazionale religiosa contro la tortura hanno svolto una protesta a Washington, D.C. La processione solenne di dimostranti vestiti di arancione si è snodata attraverso vari isolati e questa protesta è diventata la più imponente di quelle fatte per il problema di Guantanamo dall’inizio dell’Amministrazione Obama.

“Guantanamo è un fallimento di un intero sistema”, ha annunciato al microfono una persona, un quando la marcia è cominciata. Come se volesse riflettere la distribuzione della colpa, la dimostrazione è passata davanti alla Casa Bianca e al Congresso, ha superato il Dipartimento della Giustizia, prima di finire davanti alla Corte Suprema. Gli organizzatori miravano ad avere almeno 171 dimostranti con i cappucci e le tute, uno per ogni prigioniero ancora detenuto a Guantanamo e invece hanno distribuito molto più di cento tute per facilitare l’obiettivo. Ma un numero molto maggiore di persone si sono presentate con le uniformi arancione e si sono aggiunti alla fila. Inoltre, i “prigionieri” silenziosi erano seguiti da una folla di altre centinaia di dimostranti che portavano striscioni e scandivano slogan. Avvantaggiandosi della rima extra che l’argomento presta al vecchio slogan delle proteste, gridavano, “Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Guntanamo has got to go!” (In italiano la rima non si può fare e si può tradurre: Hey, Hey, Ha.Ha. Guantanamo deve sparire!”)

Prima della marcia, a una dimostrazione di fronte alla Casa Bianca, persone che parlavano a un microfono, spiegavano i molti motivi per cui il famigerato luogo di detenzione deve davvero sparire. Tom Parker di Amnesty ha delineato “dieci potenti messaggi contro i diritti umani che la prolungata esistenza di questa struttura detentiva invia al mondo.” Il procuratore Martha Rayner ha letto una dichiarazione di più di 1000 avvocati che hanno rappresentato o attualmente rappresentano gli uomini prigionieri nella Baia di Guantanamo nei procedimenti federali per l’habeas corpus. (Legge inglese risalente al 1679, che tutela i cittadini da arresto e detenzione arbitrari. Ogni accusato ha il diritto di essere ascoltato nelle ventiquattro ore che seguono il suo arresto e di rimanere in libertà dietro cauzione fino al processo. Questa stessa procedura è in vigore negli Stati Uniti. L’espressione Habeas Corpus è l’inizio della frase latina “habeas corpus ad subiiciendum” che esprimeva l’ingiunzione di presentarsi di persona davanti al giudice. (da www.wordreference.com. n.d.T.)

La dichiarazione elaborava i modi in cui il governo degli Stati Uniti, fin dall’inizio del 2002, ha “tentato di rendere il campo di prigionia un “buco nero legale” dove la luce del processo regolare e della supremazia della legge che l’avrebbe resa accettabile non sarebbe penetrata.”

Gli oratori hanno perorato bene la causa, come ha fatto anche in un recente contro-editoriale sul New York Times l’ex-detenuto Murat Kurnaz che nel 2001 era stato preso in una retata con accuse pretestuose, portato a Guantanamo, quasi annegato da coloro che lo interrogavano, appeso per le mani per vari giorni, esposto a maltrattamenti prolungati, e detenuto per anni prima di essere rilasciato nel 2006, senza aver avuto un processo.

Quello, però, che mi ha colpito, mentre marciavo verso la Corte Suprema, era la ridicolaggine di questa situazione: dieci anni dopo l’installazione della struttura si deve ancora perorare la causa della chiusura di Guantanamo.

Quando Obama era candidato alla presidenza, prometteva costantemente che avrebbe posto fine agli abusi dell’amministrazione Bush e giurava:”Chiuderemo Guantanamo. E ristabiliremo l’habeas corpus. Faremo da guida con l’esempio, non soltanto con le parole, con i fatti. Questo è il futuro che ci immaginiamo.”

Obama ha è stato eletto con il mandato di operare proprio in questo modo e perfino molti conservatori si erano convinti di questo problema. Come ha notato Parker, “Nel suo memoriale “Decision points”, il presidente Bush ricorda che quando è stato rieletto nel gennaio 2005, era arrivato ad apprezzare il fatto che Guantanamo fosse diventato “uno strumento di propaganda per i nostri nemici, e una distrazione per i nostri alleati.”

E tuttavia il campo di prigionia rimane.

Un cartello di protesta distribuito da Amnesty alla dimostrazione, scritto a caratteri neri su sfondo giallo vivo diceva: “Basta con la detenzione indefinita: accusa o rilascio!”

Sono rimasto a chiedermi se era stata mai fatta una tale richiesta in una dimostrazione. Tutti i tipi di cose che sono abituato a vedere sui cartelli nelle dimostrazioni: Abrogare il NAFTA, (Trattato nordamericano di libero commercio), Fate pagare i CEO, (gli amministratori delegati); Assistenza medica per tutti – contengono almeno un accenno di utopia. Mentre non sono di per sé suggerimenti poco realizzabili, si sarebbe sorpresi di vederli realizzati completamente in qualsiasi momento futuro. Invece “ Accusa o rilascio”? E’ una richiesta che contro coloro che sono detenuti come criminali dovrebbero essere presentate delle accuse? Come siamo arrivati al punto dove questa è una cosa che ha bisogno di spazio su un cartello?

Il fatto triste è che fare richieste per avere principi molto essenziali nel campo della giustizia americana è veramente considerata una richiesta da estremisti, data la sistematica violazione di questi principi da parte del nostro governo,” mi ha detto Jeremy Varon, professore associato di storia alla New School for Social Research (Nuova scuola per la ricerca sociale). Varon è un amico e collega attivo nel gruppo Witness Against Torture (Testimoniare contro la tortura) e con il quale ho parlato durante la manifestazione. “Semplici affermazioni come: ‘innocente finché non si provi la colpevolezza’ o ‘accusa o rilascio’ – cose che dovrebbero essere il nocciolo di qualsiasi struttura processuale giusta –sono diventate argomenti per i quali si deve combattere con le unghie e con i denti. E, certo, può sembrare strano a qualcuno che è davvero molto estremista fare delle richieste che sono componenti così basilari del liberalismo – nel significato filosofico della parola. Questa, però, è la situazione politica nella quale ci troviamo.”

Varon ha aggiunto:” L’elemento di utopia è che vogliamo un mondo che superi la tortura, la coercizione, la tirannia e la negazione dei diritti umani e delle civiltà civili fondamentali. Non dovrebbero essere considerate proposte estremiste, ma è necessario difenderle.”

Gli ho chiesto come si è sentito per il modo in cui Obama ha affrontato il problema di Guantanamo.

“Completamente e totalmente tradito,” ha detto. “ Nel gruppo T estimoniare contro la tortura, diciamo che la sconfitta è stata strappata dalle fauci della vittoria. Con gli ordini esecutivi di Obama il primo giorno del suo governo, abbiamo pensato di aver raggiunto la maggior parte delle cose per cui avevamo lottato. Prendevamo in considerazione di smontare la nostra organizzazione e di ritirare lo striscione con scritto.”Chiudete Guantanamo”. Ma proprio per un fatto di diligenza normale, lo abbiamo tirato fuori a Washington nel 2008 e abbiamo fatto la campagna “100 giorni per chiudere Guantanamo”. La abbiamo elaborata nel senso di appoggiare il presidente nel suo sforzo di attuare i suoi ordini esecutivi. E poi tutto si è svelato in modo terribile.”

Come molti hanno detto, l’amministrazione Obama, da allora ha ristabilito l’apparato detentivo immorale e illegale del regime di Bush e gli ha dato una patina di legittimità bipartitica. La pratiche che una volta erano controverse sono state istituzionalizzate e normalizzate e questo è responsabilità diretta dell’amministrazione Obama.

Proseguendo nelle azioni, il gruppo Testimoniare contro la tortura, continua la sua settimana di protesta. Il gruppo ipotizza che giovedì ci saranno fino a trenta arresti davanti alla Casa Bianca. Inoltre, circa 45 persone interromperanno un digiuno di dieci giorni che hanno svolto in solidarietà con i prigionieri di Guantanamo.

Nel tardo pomeriggio ho parlato con un altro amico che è scrittore e insegnante, Matthew Mercier che si era unito a questo digiuno. Con mia sorpresa, dopo dieci durante i quali si è nutrito soltanto di acqua, succhi di frutta e tè, appariva lucido e pieno di energia durante tutta la dimostrazione. Mi ha comunque assicurato che spesso scopriva di sentirsi debole. La notte, prima, mi ha detto, aveva vegliato in piedi davanti alla Casa Bianca insieme a un altro digiunatore tra le 22 e l’1 di notte. “Abbiamo cominciato a parlare cercando di tenerci caldi,”; E abbiamo scoperto di essere incredibilmente eloquenti riguardo al cibo: che cosa avremmo messo su un tramezzino, il miglior tamal *, che avevamo mai mangiato, le virtù del lardo.”

“E’ una piccola cosa, però,” ha aggiunto un momento dopo, “negarci un piccolo qualche cosa per diventare consapevoli della sofferenza degli altri.”

Not long after it first aired in January, I offered high praise for Daisey’s story. I was hardly the only one who had been deeply moved. The episode became the most-downloaded in This American Life’s history, and it had a big impact in shaping the subsequent discussion of Apple sweatshops.

Unfortunately, in crafting an evocative narrative, Daisey took some serious liberties with the facts. And this has resulted in a sad situation that is sure to set back the cause of pro-labor activists.

It is important to understand the nature of the retraction. The exploitative working conditions in the Chinese factories discussed in the story were genuine. Long hours, repetitive stress injuries, military-style management, suicides, exposure to toxic chemicals—none of this is disputed. In fact, these conditions have been widely reported on and verified outside of Daisey’s story, including in a prominent two-part series in the New York Times in January.

What is disputed is how much Daisey witnessed directly. As the letter of retraction released by This American Life states:

Some of the falsehoods found in Daisey’s monologue are small ones: the number of factories Daisey visited in China, for instance, and the number of workers he spoke with. Others are large. In his monologue he claims to have met a group of workers who were poisoned on an iPhone assembly line by a chemical called n-hexane. Apple’s audits of its suppliers show that an incident like this occurred in a factory in China, but the factory wasn’t located in Shenzhen, where Daisey visited.

This past weekend, the radio program devoted an entire episode to discussing the retraction. There Ira Glass states:

As best as we can tell, Mike’s monologue in reality is a mix of things that actually happened when he visited China and things that he just heard about or researched, which he then pretends that he witnessed first hand. He pretends that he just stumbled upon an array of workers who typify all kinds of harsh things somebody might face in a factory that makes iPhones and iPads. And the most powerful and memorable moments in the story all seem to be fabricated.

Glass also notes:

We did factcheck the story before we put it on the radio. But in factchecking, our main concern was whether the things Mike says about Apple and about its supplier Foxconn, which makes this stuff, were true. That stuff is true. It’s been corroborated by independent investigations by other journalists, studies by advocacy groups, and much of it has been corroborated by Apple itself in its own audit reports.

But what’s not true is what Mike said about his own trip to China.

Daisey appears on the episode detailing the retraction, and he seems to feel truly sorrowful. At the same time, he offers only a sort of half apology. Before being adapted for the radio, his monologue about visiting the Chinese factories was a one-man stage show, a piece performed in theaters. Daisey defends the creative liberties he took as being acceptable within the context of theater. He doesn’t apologize for them. Rather, he expresses regret that he allowed his story to be put into a context where it would be seen as journalism, and also for lying to This American Life staffers trying to verify certain aspects of his story.

Glass doesn’t find this position to be very convincing, and I don’t either. Listening to Daisey try to defend it on the show gets pretty uncomfortable:

Mike Daisey: …I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes—has made—other people delve.

Ira Glass: So you’re saying the story isn’t true in the journalistic sense?

Mike Daisey: I am agreeing it is not up to the standards of journalism and that’s why it was completely wrong for me to have it on your show. And that’s something I deeply regret….

Ira Glass: Right but you’re saying that the only way you can get through emotionally to people is to mess around with the facts, but that isn’t so.

Mike Daisey: I’m not saying that’s the only way to get through to people emotionally. I’m just saying that this piece, in how it was built for the theater, follows those rules. I’m not saying it’s the only way to do things….

Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it?

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.

Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk—people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian [a producer], who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying “this happened to me.” I took you at your word.

Mike Daisey: I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater. And how people see it…

Ira Glass: I find this to be a really hedgy answer. I think it’s OK for somebody in your position to say it isn’t all literally true, know what I mean, feel like actually it seems like it’s honest labeling, and I feel like that’s what’s actually called for at this point, is just honest labeling. Like, you make a nice show, people are moved by it, I was moved by it and if it were labeled honestly, I think everybody would react differently to it.

Mike Daisey: I don’t think that label covers the totality of what it is.

Ira Glass: That label—fiction?

Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important.

Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says “this happened to me,” I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled as “here’s a work of fiction.”

Mike Daisey: I really regret putting the show on This American Life and it was wrong for me to misrepresent to you and to Brian that it could be on the show.

There’s a long-standing debate about what fidelity to the truth must be maintained in memoir, narrative essay, and other creative nonfiction writing—a debate that’s arisen around Annie Dillard’s bloody (and fictionalized) tomcat in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and around the accuracy of Rigoberta Menchú’s personal testimonial, among many other flashpoints. Essayist John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal recently released a fascinating and provocative book—The Lifespan of a Fact—about their battle over a plethora of fact-bending passages in one of D’Agata’s major essays. (A very entertaining sampling of their exchanges appeared in Harper’s.)

While the specifics of each case differ, I generally find myself on the side of the fact-checkers when it comes to questions about how fast and loose writers can play it and still retain a nonfiction seal. My take is that storytellers can be very artful in crafting a narrative for emotional effect. They necessarily select a small number of images and anecdotes from a world of possibilities, making any story only a partial representation of personal experience and public history. They can use flashbacks and foreshadowing to collapse or confound straightforward chronological timelines. They have all sorts of literary tricks at their disposal. But once you label something as nonfiction—as a true story, rather than “based on a true story”—then I think the bar for adherence to fact must be quite high.

I’m no insider in the world of live theater, so I can’t speak to what standards are accepted as norms in that community. But, especially given the mode of public storytelling that has been so effectively popularized by The Moth—tagline: “True Stories, Told Live”—I think that most listeners to a story like Daisey’s expect that when he says, “I met with a worker,” it means he actually met with that worker, not that he read about the relevant labor situation in the newspaper.

That’s what I expected anyway. And all the hedging about the norms of theater only makes me feel like a dupe.

It’s too bad, because I still think there are a lot of very powerful insights in Daisey’s story. Yet there is no doubt that his now-revealed deceptions will provide cover for sweatshop apologists, just as the “Climategate” scandal did for global warming deniers. This retraction is no vindication for Apple, but it will likely please defenders of corporate globalization.

***

On a final note, in my previous post, I took New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to task for expressing a gee-whiz admiration of Chinese manufacturing that utterly failed to include any concern for workers’ rights. Given that the recall of Daisey’s story does not at all change the reality of exploitation experienced by Chinese laborers, I stand by my assessment.

I believe I called Friedman a slimeball. No retraction necessary.