whyroots

Every now and then, newspaper copywriters get their time in the spotlight. Evidence—

I'm especially fond of the play on "Yes We Can" in the section heading, "If They Can." The other captions and headlines are a little more obvious. I wish the article was as hard-hitting as the copywriting would suggest. That being said, though, it's the first article the Gray Lady has published that takes a look at just how many establishment wonks are set to populate Obama's Cabinet. It's got me thinking about how glad I am that I get my political analysis from other sources, because this is about two weeks behind.

On that note, I recommend you read OpenLeft's post on how three progressives will have a voice in the Obama White House. One of them is Gaspard, the labor operative I posted about on Friday. Unfortunately, as Chris Bowers points out, none of them are Cabinet-level. You know, because that's for people like HRC and acolytes of Larry Bummers.

-- Daniela Perdomo

I was telling a friend recently that all historical artifices aside, Thanksgiving is a pretty great holiday. After all, there aren't many these days that instead of manifesting themselves through the consumption of inane Hallmark cards and shopping mall trifles, call, instead, for communal thanks—and the company of those near and dear. I didn't grow up with Thanksgiving, so I've always viewed it through the (bemused) lens of an anthropologist. I admit I've never fully celebrated either—this is the first year I plan to actively participate. Bring on the stuffing!

The 12 months that have passed since this time last year have been rather momentous for me personally, and while there were certainly trying times, overall, this has been a pretty fantastic year. I'm particularly thankful for the hard-earned lessons I've learned in this first year of adult independence.

In this rather public forum, though, it's probably a better use of my time to share that which I am thankful for that has affected us all. This past year of political campaigning has brought to the forefront of national discourse a kind of civic engagement among all echelons of American society that's unparalleled in our generation, and from what I can tell, most other recent generations. There's something to be said about the fact that no matter which side you were on (and it must be said that I don't believe there are just two sides, divided along partisan lines; there are many more nuanced sides to align ourselves with) change, progress, and hope were defining mantras. I am thankful that America got caught up in a web of idealism. While I don't believe that's the web we want to be stuck in now that the election is over, allowing ourselves to cast cynicism aside for a short while, after these eight terrible years of Bush-Cheney, showed that at its core, America still yearns and is willing to work for the progress it so dearly needs.

I am thankful, then, that we know what the United States is capable of, idealistically. I am thankful for this because as we sit at the brink—or, more likely, the deepening depths—of an economic recession that has already knocked over every pillar that was expected to be among the last to fall, we're going to need to remember what we want and need so that we can actually fight for it to happen, particularly as a new president and Congress take the reins of our new course.

I wonder where the hell we're going to be in Thanksgiving 2009. I'd like to say the worst will be over by then, but my economically-inclined friends have given me little reason to believe that will be the case. I think this country, and every other nation in this increasingly interconnected world, is set to face trying times for quite a while.

I want to believe, however, that even though for many Thanksgivings to come, more of us will be giving thanks for things most of us haven't had to consider in the past—stable employment, for one—good will come from this. Just as the last eight years of governmental incompetence paved the way for the idealism of the 2008 presidential campaign and the election of Barack Obama, the economic recession will, I hope, breed the ingenuity necessary to redirect our efforts to the most pressing issues. We might just emerge from this crisis with many of our other long-brewing crises solved.

-- Daniela Perdomo

(Cartoon from nataliedee.com)

Ladies and gentlemen, if media speculation is correct, there's a very good chance labor will finally have a place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a labor organizer hasn't ever served in the White House, unless you count, um, Reagan, who was president of the Screen Actors Guild—but I hardly count Ron as a labor operative.

So who am I speaking of? Patrick Gaspard. Media reports indicate that the political director (left) of Obama's presidential campaign, is set to be tapped for the same position in the White House.

Before joining the Obama campaign, Gaspard was the lead political operative for the 1199 branch of the SEIU, an influential branch of the union that represents health care workers in New York.

Even as other expected appointments don't exactly smell like "change we can believe in"—keeping Gates in Defense, for one—the Gaspard pick, if true, is great news.

But how's this for a (sadly) novel idea: What about a labor person for the Secretary of Labor job? Yeah, chew on that.

-- Daniela Perdomo

I swear this is possibly the most pathetic thing I have ever seen. Here you see George W. Bush at last weekend's G20 Economic Summit, among all the other world leaders. Everyone is shaking hands and being amiable, but the President of the United States gets zero handshakes, zero smiles, and walks dejectedly across the stage, looking down at the floor. Eight years' worth of losing the rest of the world's respect, in one single shot—

-- Daniela Perdomo

OK, I just want to put this on the record before any announcement is made, as it seems that if it's the one the media is expecting, it's bound to be made very, very soon.

Those of you who read my old blog know that throughout the Democratic primaries, I was not a fan of Hillary Clinton's campaign. That being said, ever since Obama clinched the nomination, I've warmed to her a little more. Let bygones be bygones, as they say. After all, despite the fact that she let Mark Penn drive her presidential bid into the gutter, I would rather have her on our side than on the GOP's. She is driven, smart, and I genuinely believe she wants the best for the country, even if I don't agree with her on a number of issues.

That being said, then, I have no problem with her playing a role in the Obama Administration—be it as a senior adviser, or even a member of the Cabinet. But there's one position I was always so sure she would never really be a serious contender for, it's the spot as Obama's top diplomat—the Secretary of State—given how antiquated her stance on speaking to Iran (and others) with no preconditions was. And, of course, how she ridiculed Obama for saying he would be open to that kind of diplomatic conversation.

If speculation is right and Obama is considering her over other candidates, there is hardly a doubt in my mind that she'll say no to the offer. Hillary is nothing if not incredibly sure of power in her own hands. If she is offered and accepts the position, she has some serious public explaining to do. For one: Does she now see the value of speaking to Iran without preconditions? Does she see the diplomatic value of speaking to "rogue" leaders like Ahmadinejad even if she doesn't get to set the exact, stringent terms?

You know, now that I think of it, Obama himself would need to very deliberately explain the decision because it seems to me that despite the fact that HRC and Obama are very similar on most policy issues and approaches to governance, diplomatic relations was the one where the ideological difference between them was most stark.

(Oh, and before you ask: Who if not Hillary? Because I still believe that Hillary has been self-aggrandizing regarding her foreign policy experience (as if First Lady visits count), I figure someone who actually has genuine diplomatic and foreign policy experience should get the nod. Among viable, establishment candidates, I am a fan of Bill Richardson, who in addition to being Secretary of Energy under Bubba, was also the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., where he negotiated meetings between Israel and the PLO.)

-- Daniela Perdomo

I readily admit it: I don't know how to do it. Perhaps it's because I live four blocks from The Gayest Place on Earth; or because I went to a top 20 gay-friendly college; or because homosexuality—like everything pertaining to sex—was explained to me early on in purely biological (and rational) terms by my parents. No matter the reason, the fact of the matter is that I don't understand how to reason with people who vote against granting equal marriage rights to all citizens on moral grounds.

I can rationalize the legal reasons for why these bans may have passed. (For example: Why should government involve itself in "marriage," an institution born of religion? Marry no one in City Hall—grant only civil partnerships!) So that's no problem. My issue is I don't know how, or even whether it's possible, to argue with someone who holds such extreme moral views about homosexuality. I can say the same thing, really, for someone who believes a zygote to be a human being; or someone who literally interprets the Beatitudes.

It's one thing to dismiss extreme moral views as the result of ignorance, it's another to try to grapple with an otherwise well-informed individual who holds these sorts of views. I read, recently, a blog post by a smart, college-educated girl who went to grade school with me. A week before Election Day, in a blog post titled "What I Stand For," she wrote—

"I believe that legal marriage should only be between a man and a woman. I do not believe it discriminates against homosexual people to defend that time-honored definition. I do not dislike homosexuals; I will not stop being any of their friends. I will not call them names; I will not belittle them. But I will do all that I can to stop them and those who are for it from changing the definition of marriage that is the very basis of society and everything I believe in. A person does not have the right to marry anyone he or she wishes to. We do not have the right to choose anything or anyone. Men cannot marry men. Women cannot marry women. People cannot marry animals. A 40 year-old cannot marry a 12 year-old. A man cannot marry more than one woman, and a woman cannot marry more than one man. Marriage is a privilege, not a right. It is a word with a definition that I do not want to have changed."

The equating of consensual, mature, homosexual love to pedophilia, polygamy, and bestiality! The irrational fear that another person's marriage defines your own! I'm at a loss.

Some have asked me why I trouble with trying to decipher such views, and the reason is that I have been trying to decide whether it's of any use to even try to argue with such people, so as to try to get them to vote differently. Perhaps we ought to explain to them that a gay marriage ban is not really a ban on gay marriage, it's a rejection of marriage equality and a dismissal of human rights.

Over the past few days, I've decided that I will not try to argue with these people. Fortunately for all those who embrace rational thinking and who not only laud but actually enshrine equality, the arc of history and progress is bending in the right direction. The younger generation—my generation!—is overwhelmingly, by 2 to 1, for marriage equality. Every day, more people who grew up ignorant of or prejudiced towards homosexuality are turning around and either discarding those views, or simply acknowledging that this is a human rights issue. While this year California, Arkansas, and Florida did not move forward with the tide of progress, they will. Soon.

Top left: My Election Day voting stickers, unintentionally placed next to a photobooth reel depicting a happy time with friends, one of whom is a queer activist; Directly above: My "No" on Prop 8 vote.

-- Daniela Perdomo

Surely I am not the only one who has been recently barraged with Chevron's "I will" PR campaign, right?

I come home from work, open the New Yorker (above), and it's there. My friend goes to an independent café near our place in San Francisco's Mission District, and her latté is delivered in a "Human energy" coffee sleeve. I see ads on decidedly lefty websites.

The "human energy" campaign isn't new—it's been around since September last year, but the "Will you join us?" ads are only about a month old. I hardly believe that the new influx of Chevron ads is a coincidence, especially here in San Francisco, where the completely under-publicized Bowoto v. Chevron Corp. case started a few weeks ago at the Supreme Court of California. (Full disclosure: My roommate is a lawyer in the case. Guess which side.)

It's a landmark human rights case. Earth Rights International—one of the non-profit organizations representing the plaintiffs in the case—describes their case succintly:

"Chevron was complicit in gross human rights abuses committed against [Nigerian] villagers who peacefully protested environmental abuses and other harm caused by Chevron's oil production activities. The protest took place at a Chevron drilling platform. Chevron paid and ferried members of the notorious Nigerian military and 'kill and go' mobile police to the platform in Chevron-leased helicopters and Chevron personnel supervised the operation. Two protesters were shot and killed in the brutal attack – including one who was shot in the back - and others were injured."

You might wonder why I'm bringing this up seeing as how this is not the first time a corporation has tried to cover up its spotted past with a friendly publicity push. (In fact, it's definitely not the first time for Chevron.) See, for example, BP's "Beyond Petroleum" roll-out, or ExxonMobil's new "Fuels Marketing" ad (which features The Postal Service's music). I'm sure there are other clever power/energy puns I've missed.

I'm writing this post because I'm perturbed by the fact that there hasn't been a single word in the media—mainstream or otherwise—about this new campaign coinciding with the start of this trial. It's not like the trial is a secret. Yet despite this, I personally know a New York magazine reporter who was sent to write about the "cool, new" Chevron campaign this month and didn't even know about the trial! Talk about wool over the eyes.

Earlier this week, fellow Whyrooter Nathan and I discussed the socially responsible trend in corporate America. I said that if there was any corporate trend I could stand behind, it was one where for profit ventures are forced to be of true benefit to greater society. (Nathan argued that they need only be regulated more stringently, and I replied that what we were saying need not be mutually exclusive.)

This new Chevron "I will" ad campaign is part of this corporate social responsibility trend, but its timing is clearly an attempt to pre-emptively deal with a potentially heinous PR situation when the trial ends later this month. They ought to be called out on it.

-- Daniela Perdomo

The problem with a word like progress, and its derivatives, is that it's necessarily relative. While I believe in the significance of progressivism, I worry about the congratulatory, doe-eyed mood that's taken over the electorate. I worry that we'll settle and fall short of the most progressive progress possible.

The code word for progress in today's political lingua franca is, of course, change. It's been the theme of the past two years of presidential campaigning, as Barack Obama re-framed partisan politics into a choice between Washington-as-usual and Washington-as-it-could-be. After eight years of cronyism, bellicosity, and the debasement of civil liberties, Obama's resounding electoral success last week was as much a rejection of political sameness as it was a genuine confirmation of the need for change.

Yet despite messianic "Change Has Come" headlines, it is not enough to have voted in the first black president, or to be satisfied that Obama's White House will be more progressive than the one the neo-conservatives are about to vacate. (The former is, indeed, progress; the latter is simply obvious.) We can't accept the mainstream definition of progress as simply better-than-Bush. We need to demand that our elected officials seize this unique opportunity in American political discourse to progress significantly further to the left, and quit pandering to the center-right.

This is necessary because there's a stark difference between change we can believe in and change I believe will actually be enacted—

I believe in universal health care; but I believe what we'll get is an opt-in system that still panders to insurance companies' profit margins. I believe in energy independence; but I believe that we'll continue to heed inefficient, home-grown corn ethanol and so-called "clean coal" lobbies on our way there. I believe in the separation of church and state; but I believe that taxpayers' money will continue to be funneled to faith-based initiatives. The list goes on.

I harbor no illusions that all my progressive ideals will be met under an Obama presidency. He is, pundits' claims notwithstanding, decidedly not the herald of American progressivism (See: stances on death penalty, marriage equality, etc.), but he is the most liberal politician ever elected to the highest executive office. The political capital garnered by this election is an ideological mandate for progressivism that we've never had before. Gone is the need for Clintonian incrementalism—we can actually bet big.

The difference between progress I believe in and the progress I believe is most likely to actually occur under the forty-fourth presidency and one-hundred-eleventh Congress need not be so stark. More-than-better-than-Bush progress requires action: We must demand the most progress, not just enough progress.

-- Daniela Perdomo

There were two items published recently which offered different insights into how the Internet has affected our brain functions. The first was an Atlantic cover story titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in which Nicholas Carr wrote of how avid web use has eroded his ability to read long stretches of prose where it was once easy and pleasurable. (The irony being, of course, that the essay in which he argued this point was nearly 5,000 words long.) The other was a study by UCLA memory specialist Gary Small, where he had participants read books and perform web searches while undergoing cognitive brain imaging. The result? Searching the web sped up decision-making and complex reasoning.

Carr's ruminations, however, are not mutually exclusive from the results produced in the lab at UCLA. In fact, I would argue that while I believe my expert handling of hundreds of RSS feeds every day has made me an incredibly skillful and efficient consumer and digester of information, I, like Carr, also find deep, novel-length reading harder than it once was. My pithy hypothesis, then, is that the Internet has made me both smarter and dumber. So be it. I'm not fighting it—instead I'm embracing it as the evolution of human intelligence in an increasingly technology-laden world.

All this to say that I think about the Internet and how it affects me and the world I live in on a consistent basis. I am on the computer every day, for hours on end. It's both my livelihood and a personal obsession. Even when I worked at a major national newspaper, I never read news and analysis in broadsheet form. This morning's paper is no longer just tomorrow's fish-market wrappings—it's already this morning's old news. The Internet, on the other hand, thanks to constant refreshment and the advent of 2.0, is exciting, relevant, and interactive.

And so because I think so much about how the information I garner from the Internet affects me and how I act and react in the real world, I started to think about what I thought was missing from my web life, which increasingly blurs with my real life. Here's what I discovered: I spend a lot of time reading policy and cultural analysis by the established "netroots." And then I spend a lot of time discussing it—online and in person—with other smart, engaged young people. I have had ridiculously stimulating discussions on incredibly important issues with friends on Gchat. On Gchat! From here on, one question lead to the next: Why are we letting these intellectually-charged exchanges waste down an untapped reservoir? Is it because we're in our twenties and don't fit the "netroots" model of middle-aged (possibly gay, possibly male) progressive intellectuals and therefore don't think we could attract the readership they do? How is it that a grassroots movement doesn't have young people at or near its helm?

That's when the Whyroots idea was born. I wanted a place where smart, curious writers and thinkers in my age demographic could share their voices and challenge each other to consistently think about the most important policy and cultural issues. Individually, at most, we are over-educated, plugged-in, driven twentysomethings with a lot of potential. Collectively, at the very least, we will make more of an impact than any of us could on our own. Further, writing with a team will force our ideas to develop and progress, in a way that a solo project wouldn't really allow. I know we have something to add to what's already happening in the netroots, and something new to introduce to it as well. (For more, you can read the mission statement I wrote for our project on the About page.)

What can you expect from my page on Whyroots? I like to think my interests are vast, but I know they are concentrated mostly in politics, so let's start there. I don't think the netroots does enough. "Progressive" netrooters are just as much blind cheerleaders for the Democratic Party as FOX News is for the GOP. Over the past 20 month-long presidential campaign season, I saw a lot of liberal voices forgo their core ideals in the name of political expediency. Some argue that such allowances are necessary in a binary partisan political system such as ours, where our choice is artificially narrowed to Blue or Red, and we might as well fully support the lesser of two evils one-hundred percent or else we might end up with more of the last eight years. I disagree: I think we'll only move the power-wielding center further to the enlightened left by calling them on it, even before an election is won. So you'll see that kind of writing by me here. (One issue I'll start tracking, for example, is the commitment Obama made to the SEIU and other core allies about instituting health care and environmental reform within the first 100 days of his presidency.)

I'll throw in, too, analysis and thoughts about others' writing; ideas about books and technology; and I imagine I'll busy myself with quite a bit of social commentary. And I hope to learn about myself, my thought process, and where my ideas might take me.

As I said earlier, the web has certainly changed the way my brain accepts and processes an enormous array of information on a daily, even hourly basis. With the ever-expanding breadth of information available to us it's become increasingly important to make connections between a multitude of issues, events, and analyses thereof. My hope is that while the Internet may spread us thinner in some ways, a project like Whyroots may give us the opportunity to counter-act those effects and give focus to the many soundbites and headlines that hurdle, incessantly, our way. I suppose, then, that the motivation for Whyroots is a search for both a demographic shift in the netroots and a paradigmatic one, too.

-- Daniela Perdomo