The Runaways: Five Girls Who Loved Rock'n'Roll

This past weekend, I dragged my two daughters and my wife with me to see The Runaways, the new film about the groundbreaking all-female rock band of the 1970s. Hopefully they learned that "Girl Power" was not a concept that started with the Spice Girls.

Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Lita Ford, Sandy West, and Jackie Fox were all teenagers when their eponymous debut album was released in 1976. The leadoff single, "Cherry Bomb", certainly grabbed the attention of those of us fortunate enough to hear it on the radio, although most critics dismissed the band as a novelty act offering more titillation than talent. The critics were wrong; band members wrote most of the songs, making an exception to cover Lou Reed's "Rock and Roll" from his Velvet Underground days, and the girls played their instruments better than most of their garage band peers.

The film is based on a book by Currie, and Jett is an executive producer, which probably explains why it focuses mostly on these two characters, played by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, respectively. When Stewart, as Jett, is told by a guitar teacher that "girls don't play electric guitar", that patronizing brushoff, combined with Jett's defiance, establishes the film's theme - don't tell girls they can't do something just because they're girls. But Ford's lead guitar playing and West's drumming also proved the point that girls could rock just as hard as boys, and their part of the story deserves more screentime. Fox's name isn't even uttered in the movie, partly for plot simplification (the band went through several bassists in their short lifetime) and partly due to legal disputes.

While Ford's musical style leaned towards heavy metal, Jett was more drawn to glam rock and the emerging punk rock movement, two sounds she combined and parlayed into a successful post-Runaways solo career with songs like "Bad Reputation" and "I Love Rock'n'Roll". Jett's attitude as well as her songwriting talent are still very much in evidence today. Her most recent album, 2006's "Sinner", encourages listeners to "Change The World", and bashes the then-reigning Bush administration in "Riddles" by sneering at the Newspeak names of Bush policies such as "Healthy Forests" and "No Child Left Behind", screaming "wake up, people!", and finally ending with non sequitur soundbites from Bush and Rumsfeld.

Joan Jett was also one of the first women in rock to start her own independent label, Blackheart Records, when she couldn't get a record deal after the Runaways' breakup (folk rocker Holly Near may have been the first with her Redwood Records). In addition to putting out Jett's new releases as well as CD reissues of her back catalog, Blackheart has a stable of new bands like Girl In A Coma and The Dollyrots.

The Runaways played an important part in rock history, paving the way for The Go-Go's, The Bangles, The Donnas, Hole, Veruca Salt, and The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde. The Runaways film captures the essence of their sound and attitude, and shows the difficulties this all-female band faced in a male-dominated industry. If this movie inspires a new generation of teenage girls to pick up guitars and drumsticks and start a band, or in fact express themselves in whatever way they feel inspired, it will have succeeded in its goal.

Four Strong Winds Of Change

In honor of Women's History Month, here are four American women who made history by standing up for their beliefs and principles, even in the face of strong opposition.

• Jeannette Rankin: The first woman in Congress, she was elected to two separate terms in the House of Representatives (1917-1919, 1941-1943). Her first election, in 1916, was four years before ratification of the 19th Amendment gave all women in the U.S. the right to vote; she had been a leader in the movement which led to women's suffrage in her home state of Montana in 1914. As a pacifist, she voted against U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, and again against entry into World War II in 1941, saying: "As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else." Both votes were unpopular and led to her failure to win re-election to consecutive terms. In between her two terms, she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). True to her principles, she spoke out against the Korean War in the early 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, leading an all-woman protest march in 1968 at the age of 88.

• Helen Keller: Most people know about this deaf and blind girl from the film The Miracle Worker, but she was also active on the political left. Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and supported Eugene Debs in his presidential campaigns on that party's ticket. She wrote frequently on labor struggles, and supported the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "wobblies") in contrast to what she saw as the AFL's conservative policies and its emphasis on skilled white male workers. Newspapers and prominent figures who had earlier praised her academic accomplishments, including earning a degree from Radcliffe, attempted to dismiss her socialist pronouncements by reminding people of her disabilities. Keller responded to these critics by observing that, while she was physically blind and deaf, they were "socially blind and deaf" for defending the system that she was working to change. Her activities earned her a thick FBI file, where Director J. Edgar Hoover described her as a "writer on radical subjects" who therefore needed to be monitored by the government.

• Angela Davis: This philosopher, academic, and activist was involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the Communist Party (CP). When she started teaching at UCLA in 1969, California Governor Ronald Reagan fired her because she was a CP member. She eventually was able to return to teaching, and is still today on the faculty of the University of California in Santa Cruz. In the early 1970s, Davis was arrested and put on trial for her alleged role in a failed attempt to free a convict. She was acquitted by the jury, and many felt she had been targeted because of her radical politics, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who wrote and recorded their song "Angela" about her. Davis ran for Vice-President of the U.S. on the CP ticket in 1980, four years before the Democratic Party nominated their first female VP candidate (Geraldine Ferraro) and twenty-eight years before the Republican Party nominated their first female (Sarah Palin). When her 1980 running mate, Gus Hall, sided with the Soviet Union's reactionary old guard in their 1991 attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, Davis and others who had supported Gorbachev's reforms left the CP and founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, where she continues to serve on its Advisory Board.

• Dolores Huerta: This labor leader was a co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) along with Cesar Chavez. Huerta led the UFW's nationwide grape boycott in the 1960s which pressured the California grape industry into negotiating a collective bargaining agreement. She is credited with coming up with the UFW's slogan "Si, se puede", which roughly translates to "Yes, it can be done" or "Yes we can". Barack Obama used the "Yes, we can" version as the slogan of his successful 2008 Presidential campaign, although Huerta officially nominated Hillary Clinton for President at the Democratic National Convention. She currently serves as President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and serves as an Honorary Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Working Class to Banks: We're 'Mad As Hell'!

On March 19, my wife Susan and I used our lunch breaks to attend a labor rally in Philadelphia. Over a thousand of us cheered as several speakers pointed out the stark contrast between bank executives, who used taxpayers' money to rescue their companies from their high-risk actions and are now rewarding themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses, and the average American worker, many of whom have lost their jobs and the health insurance that goes with them.

Several speakers paraphrased the slogan delivered by Peter Finch's character in the 1976 film Network ("We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!"). A minister called these bankers sinners, and told us it was just as much of a sin for us to vote for their enablers in Washington. Republican-turned-Democratic Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA), who must have thought his mere presence on the stage would help his re-election campaign, looked nervous. Bill George, head of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, spoke of revolution.

Following the speeches, I marched with the rallyers as national AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka led us to the nearby Bank of America office building. A small group of us entered the lobby with Trumka as he asked to speak to the management, then we marched through the lobby to another set of doors after his request was denied. As Trumka explained to the crowd outside, "I guess they're too busy counting the money to speak with us."

This was a perfect example of how to channel the palpable populist rage that's out there into a progressive proposal: instead of making rich bankers richer, let's tax the banks and use that revenue to build and repair infrastructure, thus putting people back to work. It's a message that could redirect peoples' anger away from government, where the tea baggers have focused it, to corporations as the real root cause of the economic collapse, and more of our elected Democratic representatives should be leading this charge.

Instead, we get President Obama saying, in a February 10 interview with Bloomberg, that he doesn't "begrudge" JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon his $17 million bonus, nor Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein his $9 million bonus. “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen", he said. Well, President Obama, you should get to know some of the workers who charged through the Bank of America building in Philly, instead of hanging out with CEOs (is this what Sarah Palin was thinking of when she accused Obama of being pals with terrorists?).

Filmmaker Michael Moore was on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann a few nights ago, and observed that Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) had said, in reference to his proposed financial reform bill, that "we don't want to punish Wall Street". Actually, Moore said, "yes we do."

Moore and Trumka have the right idea about how to react to Wall Street greed. Are any of our elected Democrats in Washington listening?

A Hunting We Will Go

During a House committee's questioning of Attorney General Eric Holder on March 16, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) complained about using law enforcement tactics and civilian trials for alleged terrorists, explaining: "Texans understand that when you are at war the goal is to hunt down your enemy and either kill them or capture them."

Be very, very quiet, everyone...we're hunting rabbits...er, I mean, terrorists...

When I heard Rep. Culberson's quote on NPR the following morning, my first thought was of Elmer Fudd singing "Kill The Wabbit" as he hunted down Bugs Bunny in an old cartoon. However, a little bit of research, such as entering the phrases "hunt down your enemy" and "kill them" into a search engine, reveals how popular this tempting base instinct has become, from Clint Eastwood's westerns and "Dirty Harry" movies to dozens of video and computer games in which the instructions to the player are no more complicated than Rep. Culberson's instructions to our soldiers.

The problem is, Rep. Culberson has got it wrong. Hunting down people as if they were animals is not our goal, nor should it be. A civilized nation, which is what we aspire to be, is supposed to be above that sort of thing, and the various attempts by nations to write down some rules of war have reflected that. For instance, the Hague Convention of 1907 included among a list of forbidden actions "to declare that no quarter will be given". But the document that Rep. Culberson and his fellow wabbit-hunters should really brush up on is the U.S. Army Field Manual on Operations, FM 3-0, which states the following:

"The disciplined and informed application of lethal and nonlethal force is a critical contributor to successful Army operations and strategic success. All warfare, but especially irregular warfare, challenges the morals and ethics of Soldiers. An enemy may feel no compulsion to respect international conventions and indeed may commit atrocities with the aim of provoking retaliation in kind. Any loss of discipline on the part of Soldiers is then distorted and exploited in propaganda and magnified through the media. The ethical challenge rests heavily on small-unit leaders who maintain discipline and ensure that the conduct of Soldiers remains within ethical and moral boundaries. There are compelling reasons for this. First, humane treatment of detainees encourages enemy surrender and thereby reduces friendly losses. Conversely, nothing emboldens enemy resistance like the belief that U.S. forces will kill or torture prisoners. Second, humane treatment of noncombatants reduces their antagonism toward U.S. forces and may lead to valuable intelligence. Third, leaders make decisions in action fraught with consequences. If they lack an ethical foundation, those decisions become much, much harder. Finally, Soldiers must live with the consequences of their conduct. Every leader shoulders the responsibility that their subordinates return from a campaign not only as good Soldiers, but also as good citizens with pride in their service to the Nation."

Fortunately, it is these words of guidance which our soldiers are obligated to follow, not the vigilante rantings of John Culberson.

Aside from playing video games, the other source for Culberson's bloodlust may be the following passage from Leviticus 26:7, in which God promises the people of Israel that if they observe his commandments, "You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword" (the New International Reader's Version puts it even closer to Culberson's language: "You will hunt down your enemies. You will kill them with your swords."). Conservative Christians love to quote from the book of Leviticus, because it seems to set up an easy-to-follow moralistic universe which they no doubt find comforting. However, they seem to forget that most of the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, which they claim to believe, refutes those older teachings. As Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew 5:43-45, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

If Jesus showed up today and tried saying things like that, he'd be accused of being soft on terrorism and run out of town quicker than you could say "kill the wabbit."

Obama's Flawed Consensus Model

President Obama's procedural approach to most issues so far seems to be a modified form of consensus decision making. This may be a holdover from his days working as a community organizer, and the idea, in theory, has a certain appeal. Unfortunately, several of the prerequisites for a consensus model to work are missing in the way Obama is using it, leading to narrow and dangerously flawed policy decisions.

Having served several years ago as the Clerk of my local Friends Meeting, I'm familiar with the Quakers' use of consensus and the reasoning behind it. When decisions are made by majority vote, those holding minority opinions can feel that their views are not reflected in the group's official position, and are therefore less likely to feel any investment in carrying out that position. The goal of consensus is to involve everyone in formulating a group position, so that each participant feels involved in the eventual outcome. Rather than settling a matter by taking a vote, discussion continues until everyone feels they can support what has emerged to be the sense of the group. The final decision may not meet all of the goals of any one of the individuals, but it should reflect the shared goals of the group.

For such a consensus model to work, however, two key elements are necessary. First, all of the community's views must be represented in the process. If the Friends Meeting decided to discuss a key budget issue, but didn't invite certain members with strong views on that topic, the result would not truly reflect a group consensus, and may fail to really solve the problem. Second, all of the participants must share a commitment to this consensus process. If a subgroup decides to wage a war of attrition by continuing to argue for their views until everyone else tires of the process and drops their opposition, they may prevail in getting their view approved, but they've missed the point of the consensus approach.

On too many issues, the administration is not inviting a broad enough spectrum of views to participate in the process, and they're allowing some voices to drown out others.

Let's look at the health care debate. The Obama administration as well as the congressional committees brought together "policy experts" from the health insurance industry (both individual corporations as well as their lobbying group AHIP), hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies (again, individual corporations as well as PhRMA) to forge a consensus. Locked out of these discussions was anyone advocating a single-payer system, such as Physicians for a National Health Program, California Nurses Association, or House sponsors of the single-payer H.R. 676 such as John Conyers (D-MI) or Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). Also absent from these discussions were any representatives from other industrialized countries with decades of experience in administering various types of national-level healthcare systems, such as Canada, England, or France; think of the valuable lessons learned they could have shared, so that we could have constructed a system that took the best aspects from all these different real-world models. Instead, Obama established ground rules saying that this country's existing practice of employment-based healthcare coverage, using private health insurance companies, would remain unchanged. Imagine if the country's chicken farmers insisted that the foxes be a part of any new improved plan for guarding the henhouse, and refused to look at what farmers in other countries had done about the problem, because we need to find a uniquely American solution. That probably wouldn't work out too well for the chickens.

Another example is our regulation (or lack thereof) of the financial industry. Two of Obama's key economic advisers are Lawrence Summers, Director of the National Economic Council, and Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury. Yet both of them were high-ranking officials in the Clinton Treasury department, where they worked with the Republican majority in Congress to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. That law, which repealed key provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, is being held largely responsible for creating the financial collapse that led to a near-repeat of the Great Depression - precisely what Glass-Steagall was intended to prevent. Inviting Summers and Geithner to help create a consensus on financial regulation is a bit like reacting to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska by asking the builders of that single-hull ship to design the next generation of oil tankers.

To be fair, the primary sponsor of the 1999 financial deregulation, former Republican Senator (and current employee of Swiss bank UBS) Phil Gramm, was the top economic adviser to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign - another reason these policies seem like a "consensus".

Finally, there's Obama's military surge in Afghanistan, announced last December after soliciting expert views. But how wide did he cast his net in looking for those views? As CENTCOM Commander Petraeus explained his plan to "clear, hold, build" Afghan territory, did anyone point out that this is essentially a rebranding of our "strategic hamlet" program in Vietnam, and ask why we expect it to work any better this time? Was there anyone in the room comparing our plans to identify and assassinate Taliban leaders with the notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam? Did Obama ask Norodom Sihanouk for his advice on whether our CIA-led "secret war" along the Af-Pak border might destabilize neighboring Pakistan - precisely the same type of actions which destabilized Sihanouk's Cambodia and led to the rise of Pol Pot? Even if Obama wanted to limit the debate to the specific case of Afghanistan, without looking for parallels with Southeast Asia, he would have done well to have consulted historians of the British Empire and the Soviet Union, to ask them why Afghanistan is referred to as the "graveyard of empires". Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, offered some unique insights based on his country's 1979-1989 military occupation of Afghanistan during an interview last fall with The Nation magazine; it's not at all clear that Obama read that issue.

In 1964, writer Abraham Kaplan formulated his "law of the instrument": "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." Obama's approach seems to demonstrate what I'll call the Consensus Corollary to Kaplan's law: if you try to find consensus on an issue by only inviting hammers to the meeting, your solution will be to increase the amount of pounding.

What we seem to keep getting, in every policy debate, is a roomful of hammers. And it's the people who wind up getting pounded.

Stupak On Af-Pak

My fellow progressives have been mercilessly dumping on Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) lately, due to the way he's been using his opposition to abortion to hold up health care reform bills in the House. His name first came to prominence last fall as co-author of the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the House version of the health care bill, which appeared to go beyond merely prohibiting federal funds from being used for abortions to actually preventing any private health insurance plan which paid for abortion from participating in federally-sponsored health insurance exchanges. He's back in the news now as the badly-watered-down health care bill (aka the "No Health Insurance Company Left Behind" Act) is nearing final passage, warning again that it had better not permit any federal funding for abortions (which, apparently, it already doesn't, a fact that has so far escaped him).

But a little-noticed vote in the House on March 10 reveals another side of Rep. Stupak.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced House Concurrent Resolution 248, which would have invoked the War Powers Act to direct President Obama to withdraw all U.S. Armed Forces from Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the bill was rejected 356-65. The roll call vote shows that the 65 "Yea" votes include the usual suspects of progressive Democrats (e.g., Barbara Lee, Keith Ellison, John Lewis, Lynne Woolsey, Peter Welch, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Chellie Pingree) and libertarian/isolationist Republicans (e.g., Ron Paul, Walter Jones). But there's another name in that honorable list of 65 members of the House who went on the record in favor of ending our country's disastrous military intervention in that "graveyard of empires" - Bart Stupak.

In fact, Rep. Stupak has a fairly consistent voting record in favor of avoiding these quagmires. In addition to yesterday's vote to get our troops out of Afghanistan and its border region with Pakistan ("Af-Pak"), he also voted against our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

So while many progressives are getting excited about a possible challenger to Bart in the primary election, hoping to rid the House of this pro-life Democrat who dares to hold up health care reform, I'm thinking the world might actually be better off if we had more representatives like this pro-peace Democrat who dares to try and stop our military adventures around the world so we can keep our troops safe and sound here at home.

In other words, a single issue does not completely define any candidate.

Update: Nothing in the above post should be interpreted as minimizing the importance of protecting a woman's right to choose a safe, legal abortion. While I agree with Rep. Stupak's vote to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, I deplore his attacks on abortion services. And while I'd like to see more members of Congress vote the way Stupak did on Afghanistan, better yet would be more members of Congress who are progressive on a wide spectrum of issues, not just that one. For example, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) voted "Yea" on Resolution 248 to withdraw from Afghanistan, but has opposed Stupak's efforts to restrict health insurance policies' coverage of abortion; she's also a co-sponsor of the single-payer H.R. 676. We definitely need more people like her in Congress!

Elections in Iraq: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

National elections were held today in Iraq to elect members of the Council of Representatives (Majlis an-Nuwwab). The news is filled with pictures of smiling Iraqis casting their ballots (using an "open-list" form of proportional representation), along with comments from U.S. officials about this "key milestone" in the development of post-war Iraq.

Elections are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a democratic society.

After all, while Saddam Hussein held the title of President of Iraq, elections for the National Assembly were held regularly. Of course, the government found various reasons to disqualify potential candidates, and so the winners tended to be members of the ruling Ba'ath Party. These elections were rightly recognized by most other nations as neither free nor fair.

For today's election, however, over 500 potential candidates were disqualified from being listed on the ballot, allegedly due to their past ties to the Ba'ath Party. Is this a legitimate barring of antidemocratic elements, or just a role reversal of who's on the ballot and who's off? One of the key figures behind this move is the infamous former political exile Ahmed Chalabi, the darling of the neocons who pushed the Clinton and Bush administrations to invade Iraq and overthrow the Hussein government. Chalabi, who is still wanted in neighboring Jordan for bank fraud, is one of today's candidates on the Iraqi National Alliance party list, so you could say he had a vested interest in keeping some of these other candidates off the ballot.

Time will tell whether today's election was relatively free and fair, or merely another in a long history of U.S.-sponsored "demonstration elections" meant to show progress and stability in a client state. It was many years before we learned how we manipulated the first elections in Italy after World War II by funding the Christian Democratic Party, paying voters to show up and vote our way (following the tried-and-true practice of "walking around money" in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia), and keeping left-of-center parties off the ballot. Our quick recognition of questionable election results has a long history, including South Vietnam in the 1960s and El Salvador in the 1980s. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now trying to convince the Organization of American States (OAS) to readmit Honduras because, after all, their new government is in place as a result of an election; the OAS, noting that the election in question was conducted by the leaders of an illegitimate military coup, is so far unconvinced.

So let the U.S. administration chalk up today's Iraqi election as another key milestone that allows us to withdraw our troops from that country, because, let's face it, no country can truly have anything remotely resembling a free and open society so long as it's occupied by foreign troops. However, even after our troops leave, the Iraqi people will be dealing with the aftermath of our invasion and occupation for years to come. Reports surfaced this week of sharply increased rates of birth defects - heart defects, missing or deformed limbs, head abnormalities - in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, possibly as a result of drinking water contamination from the U.S. military's use of depleted uranium (DU) and white phosphorus.

I wonder which achievement future generations of Iraqis will most remember us for - "spreading democracy", as former President Bush liked to say, or spreading birth defects.