The 62,000 or so folks in that Upper East Side zip code who don’t rent live in domiciles worth, on average, just under a million bucks. And those people in 10128 have donated $1.7 million in the 2010 election cycle to federal candidates, national parties, or PACs. (Sorry, Rush: Your neighbors preferred Democratic entities.)

But the folks in 10128 are cheapskates compared with the real money farther south on Fifth Avenue. The 100,000-plus people who live in 10021 have given $3.3 million. In fact, eight zip codes surrounding Central Park rank in the top 20 zip codes nationally in political giving by individuals for this election cycle, their residents having coughed up $17.4 million. 10021, 10022 and 10024 are the top three individual donor zip codes in the nation.

I was going to tell you this a few months ago. I had intended to point out that zip codes in and around Washington, D.C., where the real money is, ponied up $22.9 million in this election cycle. I’d planned to tell you that individuals in the top 50 zip codes in the nation had so far contributed nearly $74 million to federal candidates or committees.

But these numbers summarizing individual donations direct to candidates or parties have become meaningless. That means I will likely end four years of writing about them.

The totals provided here, courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that aggregates Federal Election Commission records to make them easier to understand, represents donations exceeding $200 by individuals. Federal election law limits individual candidate contributions to $2,400, up to an aggregate total of $45,600 per election cycle. Individuals may also give an aggregated total of $69,900 to national parties and PACs per cycle. Bottom line: An individual may make $115,500 in campaign contributions per election cycle.

Well, that’s chicken feed now, so there’s no reason to write about campaign contributions by individuals any more.

You all know why: The Supreme Corporate Court of the United States struck down provisions of campaign-finance law in its 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, overruling precedents. (So much for stare decisis.) The bottom line: The government may not ban corporations from spending unlimited amounts of money on broadcast political ads prior to primary or general elections. (This is not the first episode of judicial activism by the “pro-corporate wing” of the Roberts Court.) Says The New York Times:

For the first time, though, as a result of the [Citizens United] ruling, corporations will be able to spend unlimited amounts of money on “electioneering communications” (i.e., broadcast advertisements) expressly advocating for a candidate’s election or defeat. While the court upheld the ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidates, it also clears the way, for the first time, for corporations to donate money to nonprofit groups that place advocacy advertisements.

But, because the Supreme Court has not yet struck down the remainder of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, corporations may spend limitless money on ads supporting or opposing candidates while individual contributors continue to face limits on their donations direct to candidates or parties.

That means all those donations by folks in the top 50 zip codes for this election cycle — $74 million and counting — are small change now. Those who used to be big players in the Election Power Grab Sweepstakes are now bit players. Corporations — those newly minted artificial beings with more power than individual human beings — can outspend them.

In fact, perhaps many of those well-to-do folks in the zip codes surrounding Central Park, those able to afford that $115,500 aggregate limit, might be high-ranking executives of corporations. Maybe they’ll just stop donating as individuals and leave it to the corporation to pay the advertising freight charges to influence election outcomes.

The Screw Democracy Game™ — spend large amounts of money on behalf of political parties and candidates with expectations of a beneficial return on that investment — has changed, it seems. We’ll know for sure as the 2010 mid-term elections near. To what extent will corporations pour money into television advertising to support candidates they prefer? Will they overtly or covertly threaten candidates holding positions unfavorable to business and corporations by dumping millions into advertising support for those candidates’ opponents?

Will Congress require full, public disclosure of direct corporate (or union) spending on “electioneering communications” (even though they may be unlimited financially) and include immediate online disclosure? Will Congress mandate a “I’m the CEO, and I approved this message” tag for corporation-funded, televised political ads? Will Congress close the door that allows corporations (and unions) to hide massive financial support of political entities by passing corporate (or union) money anonymously through nonprofit civic leagues and trade associations? Says The Times:

That means that those nonprofit groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, can now use corporate contributions to buy political commercials, and the corporations can potentially operate behind the anonymity of their donations. [emphasis added]

The Court’s ruling means it has become useless for me to continue to root through the records in the FEC’s database of individual donations to candidates, parties or PACs. Similarly, how useful will be such data aggregated by categories provided by the Center for Responsive Politics? True, the center is “a clearinghouse for data and analysis on multiple aspects of money in politics—the independent interest groups called 527s committees, federal lobbying, Washington’s ‘revolving door’, privately sponsored congressional travel and the personal finances of members of Congress, the president and other officials.” It will continue to provide an important public service. Perhaps it will find a way to track this new, unlimited spending on “electioneering communications.”

But in light of five men’s decision to dramatically change the face of election financing, the role I’ve played — finding out what individuals gave how much to whom with what effect — appears pointless.

Political advantage is gained or lost through television advertising. Corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money on such advertising to influence the outcome of elections with more effect than an individual’s maximum donation of $115,500 direct to candidates or parties can accomplish. More importantly, corporations have the legal means to hide that spending.

But, supporters of the Court’s decision argue, individuals can spend on broadcast political ads without limit, too. They are only constrained on direct donations to candidates or parties.

Yes, if you, as an individual, are sufficiently wealthy, you may spend unlimited money on “electioneering communications” just as corporations now can. But can you, the wealthy individual, match the political ad spending of the wealthy corporation? Or corporations, plural?

This means sorting through aggregations of FEC data on individual campaign contributions has lost interest for me.

Now I need ideas, new techniques, to track all this corporate money that will be spent on “electioneering communications.” Suggestions, dear readers?

He could not have imagined that the exorbitant and still-rising cost of electing the members of Congress would argue that not “all men are created equal.” Rather, men, and mostly men, of considerable financial substance worth in sum about $650 million would sit on Capitol Hill. Nor would he have imagined that the most powerful interests in this nation “conceived in Liberty” would be about to spend $3.7 billion to position those (mostly) men in November to immediately forget, polls might suggest, “the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

President Lincoln could not have imagined, at least on a 21st Century scale, how the enterprise of government would become precisely that – a business enterprise riddled with corruption brought on by the enticements of money primarily intended to lubricate the interests of the powerful who wish to remain that way.

President Lincoln could not have foreseen that a former member of Congress, already convicted and imprisoned for seven years for bribery and racketeering, would threaten to run for Congress again as an Independent, saying, “I have been a Democrat all my life, and quite frankly I am disgusted with both parties. I hate to say this. My father is rolling over in his grave, a truck driver.”

President Lincoln, a lawyer by trade, probably would suggest that it takes a crook to root out a drift of swine-minded crooks.

Polls of popularity generally assign Lincoln at or near the top of lists of “greatest presidents.” Despite whatever historical flaws he may have as a politician, military tactician or executive branch leader, his reputation for honesty and truth prevail scores of years later. His vision for the Republic was clear. But time and the misuse of money have eroded that vision, rendering it unrecognizable.

In his address of only 265 words, he directed a divided nation to heal the deep wounds brought on by such a divisive war. He said, “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion …” He sought freedom — and all the obligations and responsibilities that entails — as a defining characteristic of the Republic.

What would he think of a Congress so divided and held in such low regard by the voters who elected its members? How would he regard an industry surrounding Congress whose sole purpose is to prey on political and philosophical schisms on behalf of powerful clients who seek primarily to retain and expand their means of holding power? Would he be saddened by the decision of the Republic’s highest court to allow corporations the same rights as individuals?

As he sits in effigy, fatigued in appearance by artist’s intent, looking east toward the Reflecting Pool, he may be considering revising his remarks offered at Gettysburg:

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain— that this nation, under the god of Maximize Shareholder Income, shall have an enduring vision of Corporate leadership—and that government of the Dollar, by the Dollar, and for the Dollar, shall not perish from the Corporate Boardrooms.

Overturning key provisions of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and flouting a century of precedent, the decision opens the floodgates to a torrent of spending by banks, insurance companies, energy companies, automakers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical producers, agribusiness giants and media oligopolies — both domestic and foreign – to sway races by buying candidates. And to trash American democracy in the process.

“Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy — it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people — political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. The irony in Kennedy’s logic is profound, as the Court has in essence granted the status of personhood — of individual citizenship — to corporations, who are the least likely entities on earth to hold officials accountable to anyone but their own interests.

When Goldman Sachs, for instance, finds itself with a $16 billion (that’s with a “b”) bonus pool for top executives, what is the likelihood they are going to make campaign contributions to any political candidate who supports a tax on such bonuses, despite the government’s bailout for Wall Street?

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), who was in the room for the Court’s announcement, condemned it as “the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case. It leads us all down the road to serfdom.”

Yet it may be that prospect that offers the only remaining hope to unite a nation so fractured by partisanship and anger. In the face of this ruling, average Americans will become disenfranchised laborers, with no access to any ability to affect the political system in their favor. The grassroots donations of $10 here and $25 there that Barack Obama credited with momentum for his victory will be so much chump change in the face of these new playing rules. While labor unions and other groups will also be exempt from previous spending limits, it is the staggering power of corporations to shout down ordinary citizens through an exponential ability to outspend them that poses the gravest threat to our common welfare.

The real divide in this country is not so much left vs. right as haves vs. have-nots. Most Americans want health care reform. We just disagree on the best route to get it. Most Americans are disgusted at Wall Street’s escape from the economic hardship average people face every day, losing their jobs and homes and worrying about feeding their kids. Some think Democrats should be punished for the banks’ bailout; others insist it’s a Republican legacy for which the right must bear blame. Today’s decision, however, cements the already-entrenched power of the ‘haves’ to control public discourse and thereby the political agenda toward their own ends.  But if anything can galvanize the populist base of this country – and that is our true, uniting base – it must be today’s catastrophic court decision, which threatens to undermine our jobs, our health, our safety, our environment, the air we breathe and the water we drink, our access to information, virtually every element of the quality of life and freedoms we jointly value as Americans.

In the wake of this decision, progressives have more in common with teabaggers than either of us ever dreamed possible. We’ll need a lot more strange bedfellows to come together to save our democracy, fractious and scarred as it is. Congressman Grayson has introduced a set of bills to bite back – learn more here.

They recognized long ago that those who control the definitions of words rule the conversation. They know that rigorous repetition of their memes is akin to selling any product — advertise, advertise, advertise. That meme machine, usually cranked up biennually, now operates full time. In 30-second, televised chunks, the memes spew forth in every market. The messages are paid for by political organizations and single-minded groups quietly but heavily underwritten by those who wield wealth and power as a blacksmith’s hammer, bending comprehension by the electorate over an anvil. In hour-long, prime-time, broadcast soliloquies, their public voices ritualistically denigrate that which does not serve The Meme.

They are not The Right. They are not The Left. But they perpetrate the meme that the struggle for political power and control is between Left and Right. That’s the remarkable cunning of their strategy: Take two entities that are essentially identical and paint them as vastly different, and one as preferred. Misdirection masquerades as clarity.

They have remarkable resources. They own media organizations that control television, radio, Web entities, and newspapers. They have highly paid minions whose divisive, hateful, meme-managing messages they control. They have massive databases that allow parsing of their memes for different audiences.

They have money. Lots of it. They spend it without reservation in the pursuit of winning. They know that well less than 1 percent of American adults contribute to political candidates. They can outspend those who oppose the meme — and did so, spending $23 billion on campaign contributions in the past decade.

Where will you find them? The paper trails of their political largesse lead to the finance, insurance and real-estate industries; lawyers and lobbyists; ideological and single-issue donors; the health-care, health products and pharmaceutical industries; communications and electronics firms; labor unions; agribusiness interests; energy and natural-resource extraction corporations; transportation; and the defense industry.

They have eroded efforts to reform campaign-finance laws and to curtail and control campaign spending. Now the Supreme Court of All The Land appears poised to remove the last shackles limiting their political spending in service of The Meme. They will be able to spend more money to achieve more power and control over … winning? (What is it, exactly, that they think they’re winning?)

They cannot control what people think. Free will has not yet been fully suppressed. But they can limit what people think about by dunning them with focus-grouped, direct-mailed, oped-paged, demographically diced, Facebooked, tweeted, news-storylined memes. In their world of continuous, mediated shouting, it is difficult to hear an opposing whisper.

They’re winning because they have bought representation — legislators and lobbyists galore. They’re winning because they do not face the electorate — their well-disguised, glad-handing, baby-kissing, well-coiffed, properly memed candidates face the voters.

They’re winning because so many watchdogs are no longer watching. Their natural adversaries are experienced journalists bred in vats of skepticism. But the ranks of professional reporters and editors, never high to begin with, have been thinned to the point of virtual ineffectiveness. They are winning because they can continue to hide in so many dark places.

They are winning. But have they won?

In the past year, had I sought a professorship to teach print news reporting, writing, and editing, I’d be hard-pressed to find a job despite my two decades of experience and a really expensive piece of PhD parchment. A reason: Several thousand highly experienced, talented print journalists have been shitcanned by their newspapers in the past two years. But print professorships are few, making it a buyer’s market, writes Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher.

But there’s another reason: Journalism schools, at least in terms of their job postings, may be shifting identities.

In its January 2010 edition of AEJMC News, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (colloquially known as AEJ) lists few jobs in which experience in print journalism is a must, or teaching print journalism is required.

Aside from traditional broadcast, advertising and public relations professorships, here are some jobs and or job descriptions listed:

• “new media including but not limited to Internet Technology, E-commerce, and Webpage Design”
• “Digital TV/Advertising/New Media”
• “Corporate Communications”
• “integrated marketing communications” (Disclosure: My school offers this as a graduate degree.)
• “digital communication” … “web design, social networks, search engines, new media theory, media law, media ethics, gaming, blogs, virtual worlds, databases, digital literacy, new media, online communities”
• “expertise in the use of digital media applications in the advertising and/or public relations professions (e.g., social media, Web 3.0, blogging”
• “Economic Literacy and Entrepreneurship”
• “the business of the news media, including entrepreneurship and/or management”
• “communications/ media economics/ regulation and/or innovation. Knowledge of entrepreneurship as it relates to telecommunications, information technology, digital media, and/or web-based enterprises”

It’s the same with many of AEJ’s online ads. Florida wants “two new visionary faculty members with expertise in the rapidly emerging fields of Interactive Media / Digital Arts & Science.” Boston University wants “[s]cholars utilizing diverse modes of inquiry and methodologies with an interest in any aspect of new media, including but not limited to online communication, media effects, media policy, social networking, media economics, media history, and computer-mediated communication.”

J-schools are changing. In some respects, have they become commercially oriented entities that focus on designing, formatting, presenting and selling content instead of the journalistic production of that content? Are journalism schools thinking more like schools of business about their missions and pools of potential students?

Difficult questions reside here for the press, the public, deans of journalism schools and faculty.

When (not if) media corporations find a successful business model and realize credible journalism can be a profit center, whom will they hire to produce it?

Will they hire journalism school graduates whose coursework and internship experiences left them adequately trained to use various media to present content but who were not necessarily encouraged or sufficiently trained to do the hard work of reporting to produce it? Or, more simply, will they hire iPhone journalists or future Jimmy Breslins? (Breslin on media economics: “Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me.”)

In the coming decade, who will provide information — the product of rigorous reporting — in the public interest?

Readers and viewers should expect a lost decade in which they are told much more about that of little import and much less about that of great import.

Name the journalistic illness, and the decade will provide it: more one-source stories; fewer competent analyses of political, economic, and social issues; and more focus on the mundane and meaningless (i.e., celebs and pseudo-celebs) than on the meaningful (such as the true human cost on readers of the performance failures of the nation’s political and corporate elite).

Why? Simple: The newspaper business, which once had about 56,000 journalists and was understaffed at that level, lost nearly 16,000 jobs (not all newsroom) in 2008 and almost 15,000 in 2009.

Any manager faced with the need to cut people begins with the most expensive ones first — in the newspaper business, they are often the most experienced, those with decades of experience in finding out stuff others tried to hide and telling us what they learned. But newspaper executives have been lying: With each round of staff cuts, they’ve continued to say: “We’ll be a leaner, more efficient newspaper, better able to serve our readers. Our award-winning journalism will be the same as ever. And everyone can find us online.” Do they think readers really believe that?

As the new decade unfolds, who will tell the stories 315 million Americans need to hear as citizens and consumers facing overwhelming taxes, higher health-care costs, unemployment over 10 percent, and two wars (about to become three, perhaps)? They won’t be told by the experienced former journalists who lost their jobs and who are now working in public relations but not necessarily richer or happier.

In 2005 I wrote in a commentary for E&P:

Without journalists, others without a sense of the journalistic mission — such as unscrupulous advertisers and political charlatans — will be telling the stories.

Duh. Expect more stories from more sources who hide their motivations and intent. Fewer journalists are on the job. Journalism schools are training, it appears, fewer journalists. Strupp notes that newspaper majors at the University of Missouri have declined. Lee Becker’s 2008 survey of J-school enrollment notes an increase overall but a slight decline in any form of journalism as a major. Thus fewer journalists-to-be may be in the pipeline. Meanwhile, those remaining in newsrooms, if they survived because they’re inexpensive, are likely to be less experienced and will need this decade to mature.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So, predicts Rachel Sklar at The Daily Beast, bylines as brands, niches, “undernews” and Web TV will fill it. But how credible will be the content produced by the 200 million Twitterers and the 350 million Facebook users?

Do those hundreds of million of Americans trying to live out their lives with some vestige of happiness and faith that the American Dream still exists even give a damn about the economic, social, cultural, and political consequences of the media turmoil that surrounds them?

A traditional task of journalism is education. That’s why, when the Republic was founded, newspapers were given special mailing rates. School systems had not taken firm root. Teaching the public (not brainwashing or misleading it) ought to still be a part of the public-service mission of journalism.

Perhaps that’s why there’s room in journalism schools for ossified, old newsroom hacks like me. We need to teach that mission. We need to teach these iPhone-honed students that there is still a need to observe well, record faithfully, analyze intelligently, organize thoughtfully, and present compellingly. That’s the nature of communication, be it print journalism or “entrepreneurship as it relates to telecommunications, information technology, digital media, and/or web-based enterprises.”

And Sklar, who is as “new media” as you can get, walks the fine line between the old and the emerging:

Grownups, you’ve been in this business for decades, but the ground is shifting under your feet and if you don’t grab on to some smart 22-year-old, you’re screwed. Why? Because that 22-year-old grew up on the Internet while you were spending all your time working in some other quaint old-timey medium. So stop pulling rank and just say, “help me.” They will. And to you young punks who think you run this world—there actually are rules in this Wild West. Quaint old-fashioned conventions like transparency, attribution, confirmation, and accountability will matter just as much in 2010, maybe more now that the Internet is multiplying around us like Mickey’s broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And if you don’t get that reference, ask a grownup. There’s much we can teach you.

Thank you, Rachel. Well said. You’d make a terrific colleague.

But, no. After a tradition of reporting on the reporters dating back to 1884, E&P is done. And that’s sad, because the careful inspection of the media industries by a longtime, experienced staff led by editor Greg Mitchell has ended. Mitchell, who took over as editor in 2002, had revived a publication that had become moribund and almost irrelevant. To much criticism, he killed E&P as a print weekly and reintroduced it as a monthly. But his master stroke was diving headlong onto the Web, where E&P has prospered, at least in terms of timely analytical coverage of the industry.

I don’t have readership or page views, but given that newspaper staffs nationwide have been cut so drastically during the years of Mitchell’s editorship, I wouldn’t be surprised if circulation of the monthly had fallen.

The impending end of E&P was, as they say, all over the ‘nets today, rising to No. 4 as Twitter topic. For the time being, it seems, the good work of longtime E&P hands like Joe Strupp, Mark Fitzgerald and Jennifer Saba is at an end. I will particularly miss the pairing of Fitz and Jen, whose stories and podcasts on the economics of the media business have been prescient and accurate.

I have been reading E&P since 1970. If you’re in the news biz, it’s been a trusted companion and professor. If it has died solely because of financial considerations, we should be saddened. Even the industry watchdog, it seems, must make budget — or was E&P just not sufficiently profitable? In days and weeks to come, perhaps we’ll learn more details.

But the loss of E&P is just another bullet to the heart of journalism as a public service. Those who love, need, or appreciate good journalism will mourn its passing.

We’re losing, people. E&P’s end is just another symptom of the continued erosion of a democracy’s ability to closely inspect and monitor itself through its adversarial relationship with the press. E&P has been more than a mirror of the newspaper industry; it has been a teacher of how to press for information from governments and industries (and unions) that would rather stay uninspected.

Perhaps an institution that believes in that public service mission (Pew? Poynter?) could offer Greg, Joe, Fitz, Jen and company a new home. E&P still performs a valuable mission. Find a way to retain it.

[Disclosure: E&P has published commentaries I have written. Greg Mitchell is a graduate of the journalism program in which I teach.]

But viewed in the rarified context of the very wealthy, the amounts are petty cash.

For example, former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman has put $19 million so far into her campaign for governor of California — but that’s barely 1.5 percent of her $1.3 billion fortune.

Whitman has “publicly floated the notion of a record-shattering $150-million campaign budget” — but even if she financed $100 million of that herself, that still would only be 7.7 percent of her billion-dollar-plus wallet.

She wants to be governor of what used to be one of the 10 largest economies in the world. But she takes a back seat to newly re-elected New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in spending your own money to be somebody big. No one in American history has spent so much of his own money to win an election.

Bloomberg has now spent $261 million to become and remain the mayor of the Big Apple. That works out to $174 per vote this year, $85 in 2005, and $74 in 2001, according to New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro.

Egads — more than a quarter of a billion dollars. But even that amount of political spending represents only 1.63 percent of Bloomberg’s $16 billion fortune. But he had to overturn New York City’s term limits law to win that third term. Ironically, this year fewer people voted for him — 557,059 — than voted to approve term limits in 1996— 586,890. In an election in which he had been expected to coast easily to his third term because of his extravagant spending and the perceived weakness of his opponent, he won by only 4 percentage points.

Bloomberg had argued that New York City needed his — and only his — expertise in coping with the crisis that enveloped the global economy and hurt the city. Yes, he does have a credible reputation as mayoral manager. But to argue that a law must be changed — a law he supported — to allow him to continue in office as the only suitable mayor during an economic downturn is arrogant.

And Village Voice writer Tom Robbins reported that, based on a book by former NYTer Joyce Purnick, “many months before economic disaster struck in September 2008 — the crisis that Bloomberg said prompted his reversal on term limits — the mayor was already pondering the move.” More arrogance.

Size — as measured by wealth — matters in politics. For example, the total wealth of the 50 richest members of Congress is nearly $1.3 billion, an average of about $25 million each. Sen. John Kerry tops the list at $167 million.

But compared with the personal finances of mega-rich political and corporate elites such as Bloomberg and Whitman, Kerry’s ability to self-finance an election pales. This trend has been apparent for nearly 20 years, particularly in the land of 90210.

California, it seems, breeds really rich people who want to buy a political title. One of Whitman’s opponents — state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner — says Whitman’s trying to buy her way into Sacramento. Yet Poizner’s no piker. He “sold a high-technology company for $1 billion in 2000, and plunged $12 million of his fortune into his 2006 election as insurance commissioner.”

Internet entrepreneur, eBay founding member, and venture capitalist Steve Westly spent $35 million of his own $200-million-plus wealth before losing the gubernatorial primary election in 2006. Former Marriott and Northwest Airlines exec Al Checchi burned through $40 million of his $700 million nest egg in his 1998 race, also losing in the primary.

And who can forget Michael Huffington, who spent $28 million of his own money and $100 million overall in losing to Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1994.

Wealth, combined with time served in office, leads to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Liberals would argue he’s been one of the most effective senators in American history (although credible conservatives might disagree). Yet he spent little of his own fortune to stay in office, at least since 1998. Kennedy gave only $1.35 million of his own money to his campaigns, compared with $28 million in individual contributions and $2.6 million in PAC money, according to Federal Election Commission records aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics. But Kennedy was far from a billionaire. His last Senate disclosure estimated his net worth between $43 million and $163 million.

Money has always spoken loudly in politics. But the tens of millions available to billionaires to spend on their own campaigns is deafening.

Billionaires have always spent plenty of money on politics. Since 1978, one aggregation of data says, 82 billionaires have donated almost $62 million to Republican and Democratic candidates.

Some of these wealthy men (only seven billionaire donors were women) would argue it’s a merely a cost of doing business. Others might argue that campaign contributions to worthy candidates might foster social change (according to their definitions, of course). Still others might admit that they donate large sums simply because they can. The last is called really hefty “political throw-weight.”

But the political largesse of these 82 billionaires is miniscule compared with Bloomberg’s $261 million and Whitman’s $19 million. Her spending has been just since January — and the election is still a year away. Whitman’s spending, since she has no political profile and has rarely voted, has only one goal — name recognition. She can afford to spend $60 million, $80 million, even $100 million to have her name on the tongue of every registered California voter.

I have argued (here and here) for a radical overhaul of campaign financing. I have said that Congress should appropriate sufficient monies to adequately pay for every federal and statewide election in America. If candidates or incumbents took the public money, then they could not take a dime from any other source. (Forget the money-as-free-speech argument. The candidate makes the choice, not the donor.)

But is that argument for massive public financing feasible any more? When a billionaire 16 times over spends $261 million be merely the mayor of a city, how could Congress expect taxpayers to cover that stratospheric cost, let alone statewide and federal races?

The arrogance of Bloomberg and Whitman — I can outspend anyone, and thereby buy the political office I want — fosters another dramatic and saddening change in how America elects its leaders. As Bloomberg and Whitman have discovered, they no longer need to press the flesh and make nice to such commoners as mere multimillionaires to raise the money to run. (There are other consequences, too, as Doc Slammy will explain in his “Democracy & Elitism” series beginning today.)

America has plenty of billionaires. The Forbes 400’s collective net worth is $1.27 trillion. Many are shrewd, capable, intelligent people. Others were merely lucky, married well, or inherited wealth. And wealth by itself does not render any citizen ineligible for public office. (Or poverty, for that matter.)

But what massive wealth offers is literally the ability to avoid the voters. Yes, all candidates face the electorate at the ballot box. But wealth affords the ability to artfully mediate or remanufacture the narrative of one’s self, one’s policies or positions, one’s history and biography. Handshakes and baby-kissing at the county fair are no longer a mandatory ritual for a really rich candidate. The wealthy can manipulate elections through the legal means of self-financing a campaign. They can hire the best consultants (and Bloomberg rewards his consultants with $100,000 bonuses) and produce the most effective ads. And they can spend money on polling to parse the electorate for targeted emails and direct mail messages.

Most important, they need not depend on the Republican and Democratic national parties for financing. They need not kiss anyone’s ass.

These are the major leagues that professional egotists Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck wish to inhabit. Despite their large incomes from various media, they’re still in the minors.

But Rush Limbaugh? He’s at or near the billion-dollar mark, thanks to a first eight-year contract for $265 million and a second for $400 million (and the rumored $100 million bonus).

Limbaugh could self-finance a Senate seat from Florida — or any state he chooses to move to and establish residency.

Frankly, I’d rather have Salma Hayek move to New York state, where I live, and run for the Senate. After all, she married well. With a net worth of $7 billion, she could easily buy that seat. Even Caroline Kennedy, with a net worth estimated between $100 million and $400 million, couldn’t pony up enough.

Welcome to the well-funded New American Political Oligarchy — a Bloomberg-Whitman production.

The other day our friend MentalSwitch offered up a delightful little post entitled “Hello Nurse!” It featured a photo of an attractive model dressed as … well, hell, rather than me trying to describe the shot and failing miserably, why don’t you just click on over there and see for yourself. But before you do, please be forewarned that the photo is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!

Ahem. Well, actually, its worksafeness (or unworksafeness thereof) became the topic of some discussion here. Initially the pic was posted without a cut, meaning that the image itself would appear on the front page of S&R. Later, after some complaint and brief deliberations, we moved it behind a cut with the dreaded “NSFW” tag, indicating that the content would most certainly get you fired if it were accidentally viewed by any decent, God-Fearing American^® co-worker. And since way too many of our readers work in places where others might be looking over their shoulders, this was a practical concern. As one colleague put it – and we’ll let that colleague name himself if he wants to – “if the wrong person had walked behind me with that image up on my screen, I could have been walked out the door that day, no appeal.”

Such is the reality for millions and millions and millions of people living here in the Land of the Free^®, the Home of the Brave^® and the Birthplace of the Religious Freedom^®.

As badly as it griped me to see such a fine, artistic photo hidden behind a cut like some tawdry porno you’d pay a Times Square carney a dollar to see (price adjusted for inflation), I also had no interest in seeing any of our intelligent, hard-working readers escorted out of their places of employment at gunpoint.

However, my colleague Dr. Slammy suggested that the all-too-standard NSFW tag – the Modern American Internet’s version of the Scarlet Letter – was a lingering stain on the credibility of the artist, and in due course I (apparently being ill of will and sharp of tongue) was enlisted to pen what you may take as an official Scholars & Rogues policy position.

Briefly stated, when you put an artist behind the Scarlet NSFW, you convey a general social verdict that shame should be attached to the work. It is not fit for general viewing; it is likely to be deemed offensive to some people; and those who choose to click the link, well, that’s between them and Jesus.

It does not matter whether such a judgment is reasonable. For instance, in the case of “Hello Nurse,” what really is there to be scadalized by? Let’s take a close look:

What is the supposed objection? The subject is of consenting age. No aberrant sexual acts are depicted. Hell, she’s not even partially naked. No vajayjay showing. No boobies. She’s not fondling herself (at the moment, anyway). There is an aspect of the erotic in her pose, of course, but let’s be clear here: whatever obscenity might arise from the communication of this image lies entirely within the mind of the viewer.

Goddammit, people, you can see more NSFWing imagery any goddamned night of the week on any goddamned channel on television during goddamned prime time. If this is NSFW, then the publishers of every fashion magazine available in America need to be hung in the public square right fucking now!!!

Oh, I’m sorry – is my invective NSFW?

It is true, as another of my unnamed colleagues pointed out, that good art seeks to provoke. MentalSwitch isn’t an especially in-your-face artist, but it is also true that his work routinely challenges convention in ways that are guaranteed to provoke, and it’s not hard to conclude who the targets of his critiques are. As he explains in the notes accompanying a portrait of “Lizzy”:

If all Christians were like this guy then the world would be a better place. On the other hand, if all Christians were like this guy we wouldn’t even recognize Christianity anymore….

Well played, that.

Welcome to 17th Century Salem, folks. Welcome to neo-Puritan America, a land where dismemberments and flying body parts and mushroom clouds and elected officials intentionally and strategically lying to their constituents are cool but a woman wearing four times more clothing than every teenaged girl around every swimming pool in the United States is NSFW. Because she looks suspiciously like she might enjoy sex in a non-missionary position. And sex is not to be imagined. Pictures that might make us think of sex are not to be condoned.

In neo-Puritan America, millions of people wake up every morning praying that the Lord will afford them an opportunity during the day to be offended. Hypocritical offense is next to godliness and the Constitution apparently has a clause about the right not to be exposed to anything you don’t like. Lawyers will be summoned. Human Resources policies will be invoked. Sinners will be terminated. And Hester Prynne will have a red NSFW branded on her twitchy, hellbound little ass, BY GOD!

In case the theme of my rant hasn’t yet made itself apparent, the Scarlet NSFW brands the wrong person. Those whose visions challenge are to be positioned behind the screen of shame, while those who are afraid of ideas have their narrow prejudices reinforced by official policies and unspoken self-righteous bullying.

We will know America has finally attained a measure of enlightenment when the reverse of those statements is true.

In the meantime, I mentioned something about a policy, so here it is. Since, as I noted above, we have no interest in damaging the careers of our readers, and since we’re smart enough to know the reality of many workplaces, we’ll be placing things that we believe might offend the average granny-panty neo-Puritan behind a cut. But when we do, understand that it is not the artist whom we are indicting. It’s the Scarlet Letter crowd.

In addition, don’t be surprised to see NSFW replaced by NSFP – Not Safe For Puritans. (My original idea, Not Safe For Repressive Puritan Asshat Jesus Nazis, was deemed a bit unwieldy.)

At Scholars & Rogues, we don’t shrink from challenges. We’re not kept up at night by the unconventional. And we are absolutely, positively not afraid of ideas.

And we will not quietly pander to those who are.

Still, this whole “marketplace of ideas” is a marvelous concept. Perhaps the most marvelous concept in history. Drawing on the Miltonian belief that if people are allowed to enter the agora and freely state their cases, then “the truth will out” (that is, an educated and informed citizenry will unerringly perceive the truth and that weaker ideas will be disregarded in favor of stronger ones), our nation’s founders crafted a Constitution that assured people the right to voice their opinions, free from government intrusion. Yes, the formula has its problem spots – Americans have religiously rejected the “educated and informed” part, for instance, and there have been embarrassing questions reagrding who, precisely, got to be a “citizen.” Also, the framers seemed not to foresee that we’d get to a point where governmental threats to the exercise of speech paled next to those posed by private institutions. Still, all that said, it’s hard to argue that Americans have made a lot of hay with our 1st Amendment guarantees since they were enacted, and even an imperfect marketplace of ideas beats none at all.

This week presented us with a sparkling case study of the marketplace of ideas at its best. A few days back it was announced that conservative pundit and noiser-without-peer Rush Limbaugh was part of a group seeking to buy the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. The agora fairly exploded in conversation. A number of players and the head of the NFL Players Association wanted no part of a man who’s established a reputation for … racial insensitivity? The owner of the Indianapolis Colts (a Bush/Cheney spporter, as it turns out) promised to block any bid involving Limbaugh. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell finally got around to offering that “Limbaugh’s divisiveness is not what the league needs.” Columnists, pundits and bloggers (including S&R’s own uber-cynic, Dr. Sid Bonesparkle) weighed in with a broad range of takes (mostly anti-Rush, it seems). Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton had things to say, and we’d have felt cheated if they hadn’t.

Many of these voices were informed and credible. Others were driven by prefabricated ideologies instead of facts and reason. And a boisterous debate was had by all. In the end, the brazillionaire heading the investment group, St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts, put two and two together. Realizing that Limbaugh was an 800-lb albatross hanging around the neck of his NFL aspirations, Checketts unceremoniously kicked him to the curb.

The wonderful thing about the whole episode? This is precisely how our nation’s founders envisioned our democracy working. An idea was presented. Interested parties, informed or otherwise, had their say. (Remember, the framers knew there would be irresponsible voices in the public debate – that was part of the equation.) Marvelously, it was all enabled immeasurably by the Internet, which Al Gore, love him or hate him, saw as the ultimate tool of Jeffersonian democracy. From a 1994 address:

“And the distributed intelligence of the [Global Information Infrastructure] will spread participatory democracy… I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create.

The entire public debate was conducted free of coercion from the government. And in the end, the marketplace decided, governed by its collective conscience, that Limbaugh’s participation was not in the best interest of the league, the ownership group or the free market. An idea was tested and found wanting. Dave Checketts made an informed decision.

In theory, we should now be able to tune in and listen as Rush, disappointed though he may be, extols the virtues of the marketplace. After all, that is his core ideological concern – that free enterprise and the marketplace of ideas be allowed to determine the value of products and propositions, right?

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world.

And yet the Supreme Court took the unusual step of ordering a hearing during the court’s recess in order to hear legal arguments over whether corporate money could be spent to influence elections and whether the current bans on most such money in politics were constitutional. And indications are that the conservative majority will likely rule to overturn nearly 20 years of precedent and rule that it is constitutional for corporate money to be spent directly to influence local, state, and federal elections.

According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the four liberal justices were the ones quoting from the U.S. Constitution to support their questions and arguments:

Justice Ginsburg reminded Olson that it is living persons, not corporations, who are “endowed by [their] Creator with unalienable rights.” Justice Sotomayor, too, picked up on this theme, emphasizing how the Supreme Court had rewritten the Constitution to create the fiction that corporations are persons entitled to the same basic rights as human beings. If we are looking to constitutional first principles to topple precedents, she asked, why shouldn’t we also look at the cases that invented corporate constitutional personhood and “imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics”?

Several of the court’s conservatives are supposed to be Originalists, judges who believe that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at it’s writing (except for amendments, of course) and has not changed since then. Granting state creations the rights guaranteed to flesh and blood people when the Constitution doesn’t mention state creations is hypocrisy of the first order. It’s also an example of the very judicial activism than the Senate Republicans who voted against confirming Justice Sotomayor feared she would bring to the court. Perhaps the most activist judge on the Supreme Court today, defined by being the most willing to overrule Congress, is Antonin Scalia.

At present, corporate profits may not be spent to directly influence elections. This has historically been the case because corporations can live effectively forever and amass financial resources that no individual person could equal, and because legislators and courts have been concerned about corporate influence corrupting the political process. In essence, these are many of the same arguments that federal law uses to ban foreign nationals and governments from donating money to political campaigns. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, there are no foreign governments suing for free speech rights to influence elections.

The problem twofold – corporations are presently considered people, and money is considered speech. Corporations were defined legally as people for the purposes of limiting personal liability in the event of a business failure. But one of the results is that corporations have claimed the rights guaranteed to real people in the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment right to free speech. And because the Supreme Court declared, in Buckley v. Valeo, that spending money equals exercising the right to free speech, corporations are now claiming that their money should be given identical rights to the money of individual citizens.

There are at least two direct solutions to this problem. The first would be to overturn Buckley v. Valeo. This would make money no longer equal to speech and could be an even more significant change in legal precedent than overturning 100 years of campaign limits on corporate donations to candidates. It would also require the conservatives on the court to go against their known personal ideologies.

The second is to redefine corporations so that they are not considered individual people for all situations. This would certainly require federal legislation and would probably require state legislation as well. It would also require that the economic and political powers at the state and federal levels voluntarily relinquish the power that corporate money (via PACs today, possibly via direct contributions in a few months) brings them.

Neither is particularly likely given the composition of the Supreme Court and the major influence of money in politics today.

Eventually, though, if the laws are overturned, enough companies will corrupt enough politicians with direct donations that they’ll overreach, and the public reaction will be swift and unstoppable. And when that happens, Exxon Mobil’s money and Wal-Mart’s money and Chevron’s money will be as untouchable as money from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Both of which have smaller economies than either Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart.

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

His adventures through idiocy take him, for instance, to a Creationism museum where dinosaurs have saddles. He visits a talk radio convention to listen to right-wing hosts pat each other on the back in the name of freedom. He looks at legal battles over textbook adoptions. He delves into conspiracy theories, Masons, and Templars. In an especially excellent chapter, Pierce explores behind the scenes of the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case from 2005, where emotional sensationalism and political grandstanding obscured the medical facts of Schiavo’s case.

“If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress,” Pierce says, “we have done so by moving empirical debate into the realms of political, cultural, and religious argument, where we all feel more comfortable, because there the Gut truly holds sway.”

The problem with trusting the Gut is that the Gut can’t always be trusted. “Good ol’ common sense is almost never common and it often fails to make sense,” Pierce says.

Pierce readily acknowledges the proud tradition America has for crack-pot ideas and cranks. In fact, such eccentricies are vital to the proper functioning of the Marketplace of Ideas. “Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece” Pierce says. “This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it’s the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents.”

As one of the organizing conceits of his book, Pierce traces the career of great American crank Ignatius Donnelly—land settler, sometimes-politician, and believer of Atlantis and Ragnorak. Contrasted against that is the career of Founding Father James Madison, a disciple of the enlightenment who believed passionately in the protection of free speech. Both men thrived in America at opposite ends of the American spectrum; America had room for both.

But in Idiot America, Pierce says, the idiots have no patience for—and want to leave no room for—anyone with enlightened, educated minds. Nonsense rules, and Pierce says that’s a serious problem because it comes with “a dangerous denial of the consequences of believing nonsense.”

Whereas cranks like Donnelly peddled their ideas because they believed in those ideas, modern American Idiots peddle their ideas because those ideas move units or forward a political agenda. The ideas themselves don’t mean much so long as someone can make a buck or gain political leverage.

Pierce places the blame squarely on American conservatives. “If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right,” he says, “that’s because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and it succeeded very well.” Pierce does little to hide his left-leaning biases, which sometimes get to be a little much and too holier-than-thou. Perhaps it’s understandable, though, considering how palpable his frustration and anger are.

“It is, of course, television that has enabled Idiot America to run riot with modern politics and all forms of public discourse,” Pierce says, although he points a damning finger at talk radio as “the driving force in changing American debate into American argument.”

Pierce lambasts Idiot America for making a devil’s bargain, “exchanging (rather than mistaking) fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and believing itself shrewd to have made a good bargain with itself.”

Pierce doesn’t seem too hopeful that the problem will go away any time soon, but despite his obvious cynicism, the text carries an undercurrent of faith in the American system to eventually right itself. The alternative, he implies, would be an intellectual Armageddon that would cripple democracy itself.

Idiot America provides sympathetic audiences with the chance to vent alongside Pierce. Other readers will find well-researched investigation laced with snarkiness.

As for the idiots who won the culture wars—they will probably pick up Pierce’s book, look at the cover and get a Gut feeling that they wouldn’t like it. The people most in need of Pierce’s wake-up call will be the ones least likely to get it.

I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.

I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that.

In this young century, however, Americans have suffered increased assaults on their rights — especially privacy — by their own government, all in the name of the proclaimed need for “national security.” Because of fear, government continues to attempt to foreclose on constitutional protections.

Government may erode constitutional guarantees in the absence of the watchful eye of the governed. Rights not exercised may become rights lost. It is an obligation of citizenship for Americans that they continually critique and comment on the actions of their government. That is how we shape our government. Failure to do so allows government to shape us and our rights instead.

At the moment, America has a slew of problems confronting it — record unemployment, a shrinking economy, two foreign wars, a two-party system run amok, and an enormous fiscal deficit, just to name a few.

As we toss the steak on the barbecue and watch the fireworks today, let’s keep in mind the rights and riches we do have, the historical cost of attaining them, and the future risk of losing them if we fail to speak up when government displeases us.

“Tiananmen” means “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Ironic, then, that most Americans know it, if at all, as a scene of violence and bloodshed.

photo by Jeff Widener, A.P.

June 4 marks the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on protestors who’d gathered in Tiananmen Square. The incident made headlines across the world, and the image of a lone protestor blocking a line of tanks proved especially powerful.

The protesters had camped out in the square since the April death of a pro-reform Communist Party official, Hu Yaobang. By June 4, after a great deal of international attention that embarrassed the Chinese government, tanks and troops rolled in and started cracking skulls.

Western news outlets reported yesterday and today (June 3 and 4) that no media would be allowed near Tiananmen Square on June 4th. Soldiers and uniformed and plainclothes police stood at attention everywhere in the square this morning, and visitors were being searched.

But visitors to Tiananmen Square are always searched. I was searched when my group first visited the square on Tuesday, May 26. I was searched again when I went there on my own last Sunday. The searches were similar to the same thing I went through at the airport: carry-on bags and metal items got sent through an X-ray machine, and I had to pass through a metal detector. We were allowed to keep our cameras with us.

Standing in Tiananmen Square for the first time really drove home how significant the crackdown was which the Chinese government refers to as “The June Fourth Incident”).

First of all, it’s impossible to appreciate how wide and vast Tiananmen Square is. It’s the largest public square in the world, even beating out the public courtyard at the Vatican. It can hold a million people—just as it was doing by June 3, 1989.

China’s Great Hall of the People, opposite Tiananmen Square

The square sits opposite the Great Hall of the People, roughly China’s equivalent of our Capitol Building. In essence, that made the protests a direct slap in the face of the Communist Party and central Chinese government even though the demonstrations were peaceful.

In the resulting military action, thousands were injured. The number of killed various from 241 (the Chinese government’s official number) and 2,600 (an unofficial number once given by the Red Cross).

While I certainly don’t condone the government’s decision to clear the square, I can understand it a little better than I once did. China is not, nor has it ever really been, ruled on principles anywhere close to ours. Authoritarian rule has always been the way there—for five thousand years. We forget how old and ingrained that is.

On Sunday, as I strolled the square, I saw a few extra plainclothes police near Mao’s Tomb. Nearby and just out of direct sight, soldiers were drilling in a closed-off portion of the square. I have no idea if that’s normal or not; it’s just what I saw and heard on Sunday.

I’ve also heard that the government was blocking internet access and it was blacking out CNN. It was trying very hard to be sure that no one remembered the events of June 4, 1989.

I didn’t register as a journalist before I went to China, so my dispatches have been under the radar screen I suppose. But from my own perspective, I’ve not had any trouble blogging since I got to Beijing (although I think some of my e-mail was reviewed or filtered or something). I couldn’t access YouTube, which I only tried to access because I’d heard from my students that it was off-limits. They were right. On Tuesday, students suddenly couldn’t access hotmail, either.

I actually had more trouble in Shanghai than in Beijing. In Shanghai, I couldn’t log on to LiveJournal, although I never had a problem logging into or posting at Scholars & Rogues (I suppose we at S&R need to start being even more subversive!).

In Tiananmen Square, looking south toward Mao’s Tomb

But I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel comfortable talking about Tiananmen Square in my dispatches other than to provide a description. In my post about Mao’s Tomb, I didn’t feel I could talk about just how oppressive Mao’s regime was. Maybe it was just my good manners because I didn’t want to run the risk of causing headaches for my host from the Beijing Institute of Technology—which is, of course, a government-run school.

Tiananmen is one of the “Three T’s and an F”: Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Falon Gong (a cult-like religious group that stirs up a great deal of political controversy). Those are the taboo subjects. The government actively discourages and represses coverage of those topics, although I was able to discuss the “Three T’s and the F” openly with tour guides and people I met.

The same day we visited Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall, for instance, the president of Taiwan was in town for talks on more open relations. The few Chinese citizens I spoke to about Taiwan expressed delight that relations between the mainland and the island had thawed considerably over the past year or so.

My students, colleagues, and I had a chance
encounter with a Tibetan monk (pictured center).

That same day, our group also had a chance encounter with a Tibetan monk near the gates of the Forbidden City, just a stone’s throw away from Tiananmen. The students thought he looked cool and all wanted their photo taken with him, but I’m not sure if they realized what a rare encounter or a big deal it was. “Imagine what he must feel like,” one colleague said. “People around here must be looking at him like he’s some kind of trouble-maker.”

It’s too bad the government frowns on discussion of those controversial topics because the rest of the world doesn’t get the full story. Any P.R. person knows it to be true: Tell as much of the truth as you can because otherwise people will think you have something to hide, and their assumptions will usually be far worse than the actual situation.

I’m no expert on Tibet, for instance, but talking to ordinary Chinese folks—who are, far and away, an apolitical bunch—they see the Tibet issue much differently than Westerners do. A Chinese princess married the Tibetan emperor in 640 A.D. to unite the kingdoms, and in Chinese minds, they’ve been one kingdom since and that’s that. Their sense of history comes not from the Communist Party but from a long oral tradition, so they aren’t just spouting party propaganda.

The Chinese people aren’t exposed to the Dali Lama’s P.R. efforts—and we are. I emphasize that because we forget, in the end, that the Dali Lama is conducting a P.R. campaign. (I don’t mean to oversimplify, although I am, because I know there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than I’ve even broached here—but that’s part of my point: there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than we even realize.)

The silver lining is that the Chinese people find ways to talk about these things anyway. As CNN correspondent Jaime FlorCruz told us, technology provides ways around the government controls. As restrictive as the Chinese government can be with its censorship, it can only just keep up with the internet—it can’t control it. FlorCruz’s kids, for instance, can bring up YouTube on a whim by easily circumventing government blocks.

That trend will only continue as the number of online users grows (the online population in China already exceeds the entire population of the U.S.). The Chinese themselves call for more information.

“The internet is one of the most revolutionizing phenomena in China,” FlorCruz said. “The Chinese government can join it, ride it, sort of control it, but they cannot stop it or shut it down.”

These are skilled people with diverse interests and even more diverse points of view. Three are college professors. Also writing for S&R have been or are an Hispanic activist from Texas; a foreign affairs writer who specializes in nuclear deproliferation issues and civilian casualties resulting from armed conflict; a gay staff cartoonist; a management consultant specializing in organizational behavior whose clients include 20 percent of the Fortune 500; an ex-pat South African economist; three experts in popular culture; a former director of the Berkeley Stage Company and statistical demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau; a professional stage actor; two stay-at-moms; a photographer; and occasional guest columnists.

However, we all share one trait: We are volunteers. We don’t get paid. We have other lives, other responsibilities, other people dependent on us to make a living. As business models go, ours sucks. Modest ad income and passing the hat means S&R remains a labor of love. But can love be a sustaining force for the online medium in the absence of profit?

In the Beginning of Blogging, it was all so exciting. Thrilling, even. Putting up a post, watching the stats, seeing who read your work, where they were — and how many read your stuff. Generate those hits. Yeah. That was heady stuff.

Is it still?

Most individual and group blogs are dependent on volunteers. It’s rare that a Huffington Post can raise $37 million to sustain the enterprise. (Of course, HuffPo has “volunteers” too, doesn’t it?)

The print newspaper industry continues to collapse in terms of revenue, profitability, and numbers of paid, professional journalists. So the dominant use of volunteers to inaugurate and maintain sites featuring commentary and/or advocacy journalism becomes an increasingly important public-interest issue.

Most S&R writers are ideologically progressive but rarely hew to party lines. As the S&R mission statement says:

Scholars & Rogues is a diverse band of thinkers, social analysts, activists, grousers, jesters, and troublemakers. We’re different in many ways, but we share a general belief in progress, a conviction that smarter is better, and a passionate distaste for convention.

That statement mirrors the intent of many capable bloggers. Many (but perhaps not most) bloggers seek to simply make things better. We have particular issues or problems that occupy our blogging attention. We are exceedingly dependent, though, on the research of others (those paid professional journalists whose stories we link to) to support points made in our posts.

But those posts, which leaven “objective” journalism with (usually lucid) commentary, add substance to debates of public interest. Yet the majority of bloggers are not paid for their work. What will become of community blogs such as S&R as the corps of volunteers 1) lose interest, 2) lose access to reliable, verifiable information produced by journalists, 3) lose equal access to the Web as politicians favor corporate control of the Internet or 4) just need to spend more time at the day job in a bad economy to make ends meet?

Note that newspapers, in the early days of online news Web sites, had links where volunteers could post community news. Now, that didn’t work out so well, did it? Let’s hope community blogs fare better.

Volunteerism is the principle means of support for community blogs such as S&R. Many such blogs, blogs populated by smart, capable people (see our blogroll), no doubt face the same pressure the volunteers at S&R do: Keep pumpin’ out the posts. Keep the conversation going. Keep the debate fresh and focused. But it’s difficult, as a volunteer, to pump out as many posts as I’d like. (I do like to get eight hours’ sleep each night.)

At some point, as B.B. King would sing, “The thrill is gone.” I hope most of us aren’t there yet, but it’s increasingly a problem faced by those bloggers who believe in candid, civil, and common-sense conversations in the public sphere — yet have family and job responsibilities elsewhere.

But readers in those cities still have print options for newspapers providing some local news.

Not so in the mountain town of Carbondale, Colo., whose population about equals its elevation. The Valley Journal, founded in 1975, had its plug pulled in March, reports DeeDee Correll of the Center for Rural Affairs. The 6,000 residents had no other sources of local news.

Their solution: Publish a newspaper themselves.

A core of volunteers started the Sopris Sun, running it as non-profit free weekly with a press run of 3,000 copies. Why’d they do it? Says the Journal’s original founder, Rebecca Young: “It just beat the dickens out of sitting around whining that our paper was dead.”

Carbondale’s solution was civic-minded. It taps every possible source of revenue, including grants. Says Carbondale Mayor Michael Hassig:

I don’t know if they have a business model that will work. It wouldn’t surprise me if [the newspaper] was sustainable because there are an awful lot of people who do labors of love here. There was a void. Every town should have a park, a library and a newspaper.” [emphasis added]

The Sun, of course, has days of reckoning ahead. Commitment and pride may drive volunteerism, but is free labor a sustainable business model? Will printing 3,000 copies a week be a cost that eventually cannot be borne? Will volunteers shy away from penetrating coverage of their neighbors and friends who may be public officials or business owners? Will the Sun succumb to soft-feature-itis by being unable or unwilling to produce eat-your-veggies journalism?

American has thousands of small daily and weekly newspapers. The mean circulation of the American daily newspaper is about 38,000 — but I’ll bet the median circulation is a third of that.

Small papers’ chances of economic survival are much higher than the metro newspapers of large cities. Small papers offer unique goods – local news and a local audience for local advertisers. Big newspapers are targets of aggregators galore. Their goods are not always unique.

Carbondale could react quickly to fulfill the communal void left by the demise of its newspaper. Could Cleveland? Portland (either one)? Tampa Bay? Dallas? Boise? Toledo? Burlington? San Diego? St. Louis? Spokane? Buffalo?

America’s cities are largely served by only one daily newspaper of substance. (Yes, that substance has been diluted by foolish cost-saving measures such as firing or buying out the professionals who report and write the product the papers are trying to sell.) We’ve seen the first metro dailies fail. What happens when the lone metro of a large city ceases print publication?

Perhaps opportunity happens. Dan Conover, says his bio, edited a big metro-daily and took a buyout in 2008 after 18 years in the news business. He makes this observation:

A client looking to invest in media asked me earlier this month for advice on what might replace failing newspapers. My response? There are plenty of interesting ideas in play, but the first meaningful test won’t come until a major American city loses its only metro daily. So wait.

That’s because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he’s looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants. [emphasis added]

That’s an interesting perspective. So pundits like me will be watching what’s lining up to contest for that “market space” about to be relinquished, developments in Seattle, Denver, and Tucson suggest, by large metro dailies.

[Thx to my colleague Carole McNall.]

But this week, it gave its product to me for free. I would have gladly paid up to 5 cents to read just one of its stories. But the JS didn’t charge me. What kind of business model allows me to consume a product for free?

I learned of the story through an e-mailed version of Romenesko, the legendary (or infamous, depending on your POV), media news page at Poynter. org, the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

The Poynter e-mail contained this tease: “Wisconsin university football coach bans student reporters (http://www.jsonline.com/business/43539347.html).” I clicked on the link and —ta da — there it was, a story written by JS reporter Don Walker. Free. Didn’t have to pay a penny. And I would have. Gladly.

I know this isn’t a rare phenomenon. I suspect you’ve read news for free online, too. Bet you kinda expect it to be free, even demand that it be free. Perhaps you think it’s some kind of birthright. But in the long run, if you do not pay for the product of professional journalists, you will lose one of your best defenses against secrecy, corruption, and tyranny.

Those who wish to keep information from you, those who demand or offer kickbacks and bribes to get what they want, those who wish to secretly manipulate the levers of power unfairly for selfish financial advantage, those who wish to attain and maintain power over you … they’re winning. They’re winning because fewer and fewer journalists are keeping an eye on them, holding them accountable for their words and actions. Remember, that’s the deal the Founders gave the press: Hold government accountable, and we’ll protect you from government intervention.

If you don’t pay for the product produced by professional journalists who cover the “eat-your-spinach” stories bloggers don’t, won’t, or can’t, then don’t complain if the powerful and influential take advantage of the lack of scrutiny formerly provided by the 5,900 journalists who lost their jobs last year.

In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers, very close to the historical high, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Newspapers were cash cows for investors, with profits north of 20 percent. In 2000, the population of journalists at dailies was still high — 56,400. Then the Internet came, folks say, and stole all the advertising revenue. Profit margins have been halved — as revenue has dropped precipitously. (Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Apparently, bad management and arrogance had much to do with the decline of circulation, and hence the declining advertising revenue, of daily newspapers. In effect, corporate newspaper management shot itself in the foot as it bad-mouthed the Internet as an irrelevant upstart.)

To attempt to maintain the profitability of that now-highly suspect business model, newspaper managements whacked jobs — the very jobs that produce the product those executives presumably want to sell. This has to be among the dumbest responses to economic stress in corporate history.

At the end of 2008, only 46,700 journalists were left at the America’s daily newspapers. 2009 is off to a rough beginning: The Web site Paper Cuts reports that about 8,500 newspaper staffers (including journalists) have been laid off or bought out as of mid-April. (Paper Cuts is a Web site by Erica Smith, who has been tracking newspaper layoffs since 2007.) It is possible that by 2010, the number of daily print journalists will have been halved in only a decade.

Surely that’s not a positive development for the democratic health of the Republic.

Interestingly, the nation’s premier journalism graduate programs are seeing marked increases in applications: Columbia, up 38 percent; Stanford, 20 percent; and NYU, 6 percent. But these new students are not necessarily seeking to become journalists. Says Jim O’Brien, director of Northwestern University’s Medill Career Services office:

Corporate communications is a growth area in terms of opportunities for jobs for our MSJ grads. Both corporations and nonprofits who are interested in communications, where they had typically looked at an English major before, are now thinking that a journalism grad might have leg up on those candidates because of their training.

This is a two-pronged blow to “eat-your-spinach” news. First, newspapers are shedding the very people trained —and paid — to do that. Second, former journalists and others are seeking graduate journalism degrees to become corporate communicators.

That means fewer professionally trained and experienced journalists are digging for information corporations and governments wish to hide, and more smart people are being trained — and, eventually, paid handsomely — to do the hiding.

They’re winning. Democracy is losing. Please consider that next time you read a news story online — for free. It may be, in the long run, a very costly read.

Our ears may hear bleep, but our eyes see lips moving that say shit, asshole, fuck, cocksucker, and motherfucker. Sometimes our ears will gather additional evidence. They will hear mother followed by bleep instead of fucker. Sometimes the ears will detect ass followed by bleep or bleep followed by hole but never the compete asshole. But the ears never hear cock followed by bleep or bleep followed by sucker because, it seems, Almighty Television Execs think cocksucker is so reviled a concept as to ever be partially bleeped.

I rarely view pricey premium channels such as HBO or Showtime. But my friends who can afford such luxuries assure me that there’s rarely if ever a bleep to be heard. It’s shit and fuck and motherfucker and cocksucker, etc., as far as the eye can see (or, rather, the ear can hear).

The broadcast networks, of course, don’t even offer any profanity to bleep. (Well, maybe the occasional nipple, but that’s not the issue here.) Apparently, the Federal Communications Commission fines them (in the public interest, of course) for transgressing against something called “public decency.” (We all know, of course, that offending the public with profanity isn’t the real reason — the networks just don’t want to piss off the advertisers.)

Basic cable is my only hope for a little guilty pleasure. Wouldn’t comedian and social critic Lewis Black’s unbleeped HBO “Red, White & Screwed” special be much more delicious if Comedy Central’s reprises of it didn’t bleep every instance of Mr. Black’s fuck and shit and the occasional dickhead? Comedy Central doesn’t demand that Jon Stewart clean up his language during live taping of The Daily Show — yet bleeps his utterances of asshole and fuck when the show airs.

And then there’s the lovely, demure Kathy Griffin on Bravo (winner of two Emmys, as she likes to point out). She’s a true potty mouth. We all know what she’s saying. She drops the offending profanities with aplomb. She’ll even use hand motions to emphasize the language. Yet Bravo bleeps them all.

That’s hardly brave of Bravo, the basic cable channel that says it “delivers the best in food, fashion, beauty, design and pop culture to the most engaged, upscale and educated audience in cable.” Surely such an audience can deal with the occasional shit, fuck, motherfucker, and cocksucker uttered by some of its performers. Surely such an audience does not need the “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” that bleeping represents.

Hell, even basic cable channel AMC bleeps the use of shit in “Blazing Saddles.” Why is AMC so wimpy about such a low-level profanity in that Mel Brooks classic movie ?

I like the occasional, well-timed profanity. I’ve even used it in my classroom. (Committing such rhetorical sins, however, as a professor at a Catholic university probably means I’ll be plenty warm during my afterlife.)

I should confess, though, that I prefer limits to my liking or use of profanity. Like any rhetorical device, if overused, profanity loses its capacity to convey shock, emphasis, and powerful emotion. We all know, of course, people who drop fuck, shit, asshole, and motherfucker into every possible utterance. From the lips of those people, profanity is merely noise shrouding a lack of signal. Lewis Black, Jon Stewart, Kathy Griffin, Mel Brooks and other comedic social commentators are not such people: They are desperately needed signal trying to break through overwhelming noise.

I wish basic cable would just let me hear what my eyes can see. It’s particularly egregious when Comedy Central, of all basic cable channels, bleeps profanity. After all, this is the network that put a counter on screen to record the 162 utterances of shit in a South Park episode. Comedy Central broke linguistic ground with that show — then promptly threw the dirt back into the hole it dug in social norms.

To those TV chieftains who serve as basic cable’s Highest Authorities on What May Be Heard, who deny my ears the profane audio of these social critics to accompany the video my eyes can see, I say fuck ‘em. If viewers of these comedians object to not bleeping shit, asshole, fuck, cocksucker, and motherfucker, I ask: Why the fuck are you watching those shows in the first place?

We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Frankly, I don’t know how Natalie can make it through a performance of “The Long Way Around” or “Not Ready to Make Nice” because I can barely listen to the songs without wanting to take a folding chair to every goddamned corporate radio executive and program director in America responsible for driving them from the airwaves.

No doubt that this makes me a lesser man than I should be. I can’t imagine that the Chicks would approve of my violent impulses (which, I have to admit, are a little too literal for my own comfort), given the grace with which they have navigated the turbulence surrounding their lives in recent years. In truth, they haven’t taken the long way around so much as they have taken the high road, and I regret that I’m not quite worthy of the example they have set for those of us trying to lead civilized lives in the midst of so much willful ignorance.

In recognition of their willingness to risk their careers speaking truth to power and for their courage in facing the backlash (which included death threats, let’s remember) that’s all too frequently aimed at uppity women in the less advanced corners of our nation, Scholars & Rogues is proud to honor The Dixie Chicks as our latest Scrogues and accord them a place in our masthead of fame.

And, if it isn’t obvious, then I’ll apologize in advance for not being up to the standards that Natalie, Martie and Emily have set. They’re not to blame for my tribute to them.

What Did the War on The Dixie Chicks Teach Us About Our Freedoms?

Some time back I read a story in the international press about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in one of Europe’s leading nations – I believe it was the Netherlands, but can’t recall for certain. They’re apparently facing the prospect that one day this minority could grow to the point where it could go to the polls and, using the legitimate engines of the democratic system available to it, vote to eradicate the nation’s religious freedoms. A politician was asked what should be done in this case. His answer was that nothing should be done – it must be allowed, since it would be the result of a democratic process.

Quite a conundrum, that. What to do when democracy is used to dispose of democracy? Obviously America is under no immediate threat from organized Islamist voters, but we do have our own Christian Taliban problem, don’t we? What should we, here in the Land of the Free^®, think about those who do not value actual freedom of religion? How many Americans would we send off to die to preserve the free speech rights of those who’d squelch the free speech rights of their fellow citizens? What should a true patriot do when confronted with the reality that the tools of liberty are being used against Lady Liberty herself?

My own code of ethics has always said that you cannot allow a barbarian to use your civilization as a weapon against you. A man who insists on fighting according to a set of honorable rules while his opponent is using a tire iron to liquefy his testicles deserves what happens to him. In my angrier moments I’ve said that no, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with a flamethrower.

But that’s just me, and you’ll recall from earlier that I’m perhaps not to be taken as a role model. Still, we do live in a nation with many who do not share our respect for Constitutional freedoms. Exactly how many I can’t say, but I feel comfortable with “millions and millions.” It’s certain that without such people we’d not have had to endure eight years of Bush/Cheney thuggery.

I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

This was the message – “shut up and sing.” You’re not being paid to think, you mouthy little bitches, you’re being paid to entertain us. Now dance, girlies. God Bless America.

History will validate, with a minimum of controversy, the sentiments Natalie Maines expressed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre on March 10, 2003. Hopefully the record will point to our present moment and note that already the momentum had shifted and that within a generation people would have an impossible time imagining how such an affront to freedom was ever possible. Hopefully.

For the time being, “mad as hell” doesn’t begin to describe the indignation that those of us working to move this culture forward by promoting genuinely intelligent and pro-human values ought to feel, even now. I won’t tell you how to think and act, of course – you have a conscience and a brain, and you can be trusted to take in the information and perspectives around you and form an opinion that you can live by.

But for my part, I have a message for the “shut up and sing” crowd: I’m not ready to back down and I never will be. Your values are at odds with the principles upon which this nation was founded and true liberty cannot survive if your brand of flag-waving ignorance is allowed to thrive. You will not be allowed to use the freedoms that our founders fought for as weapons to stifle freedom for others.

You have declared a culture war, so here’s where the lines are drawn: I’m on the side of enlightenment, free and informed expression and the power of pro-humanist pursuits to produce a better society where we all enjoy the fruits of our shared accomplishments.

What side are you on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But if you’re all pissed off about that, how about Olympic athletes wrapping themselves in the flag? Or flag napkins? Or a car painted as a flag? Flying a flag in the rain or leaving it up overnight unlit? Flag beach towels? Flags on campaign buttons? In every case, that’s mistreatment of the U.S. flag, according to the Flag Code.

According to the US Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8, “Respect for the flag”:

(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.

So much for those beach towels.

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery
(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform.

And so much for flag clothing.

(h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
(i) It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard.

And there goes those campaign buttons, napkins, cups, and plates.

(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.

And given how dirty cars get (pigeons, insects, road grime, slush), you’d think that a flag paint job on a car would qualify as “easily soiled.”

As for displaying the flag, let’s not forget that all-weather flags are OK in bad weather, but no flag should be displayed unlit overnight – it’s disrespectful, and against US Code Title 4 Chapter 1 Section 6.

Tell you what – you don’t question the patriotism of Obama’s supporters and I won’t question the patriotism of all the Olympic athletes who have soiled a flag with their sweat, of all the swimmers who have lain on a flag beach towel, of all the patriots who throw millions of flags away on the Fourth of July every year. Deal?

Image credit: Baltimore Sun