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See the Cast of 'They Live' Then and Now
John Carpenter's 'They Live' has become a cult classic since its initial release in 1988. The film starred professional wrestler Roddy Piper as a drifter who discovers -- with the aid of some awesome sunglasses -- that the upper class members of the population are actually aliens controlling society through a TV signal. 25 years after 'They Live' first hit theaters, we take a look back at the cast of the film and see what they're up to now.
Roddy Piper, John Nada
Then: Director John Carpenter had a limited budget of $3 million for 'They Live,' so he needed an actor that wouldn't come with a big price tag, which was fine, since he didn't want a huge star anyway. He met wrestler Roddy Piper at Wrestlemania in 1987, and cast him in the role of John Nada, the drifter who unwittingly discovers that aliens are controlling human affairs. Nada's famous line, "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum," was actually ad-libbed by Piper.
Now: Piper has retired from professional wrestling a couple of times, but can't seem to stay away. In 2013, he created Portland Wrestling Uncut, a local Oregon wrestling show. The wrestler has appeared in several B-movies, including the recent releases 'Medusa' and 'Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies.'
Keith David, Frank Armitage
Then: Carpenter was impressed by Keith David's performance in his film 'The Thing,' and knew he could kick ass and hold his own as John Nada's sidekick. The director wrote the part of Frank specifically for David.
Now: David's many film credits include 'Dead Presidents,' 'Requiem for a Dream,' and 'Crash,' and he recently starred in 'Cloud Atlas.' The actor has an incredibly notable voice, and has used it to do a ton of voice-acting work, including narration for WWE games (Piper was a member of the WWE for many years) and playing the role of Nick Fury in 'Marvel Heroes.'
Meg Foster, Holly Thompson
Then: Meg Foster, who had previously played Evil-Lyn in 'Masters of the Universe,' portrayed Holly Thompson, a local news channel assistant director. John Nada tries to convince her of the alien conspiracy and save her, but she shoves him out a window.
Now: Foster played the role of Chris Cagney in the first six episodes of 'Cagney and Lacey,' but when the show was picked up to series, she was replaced by Sharon Gless. She has guest-starred on several others shows, including 'The Cosby Show,' 'Miami Vice,' and 'ER,' and recently appeared in Rob Zombie's 'The Lords of Salem.'
Peter Jason, Gilbert
Then: Peter Jason, who had previously appeared in Carpenter's 'Prince of Darkness,' played Gilbert, a member of a group of underground activists who help John Nada and Frank.
Now: Jason has appeared in seven Carpenter films and 12 Walter Hill films, as well as over 100 commercials and dozens of TV shows, including 'Mad Men,' 'Desperate Housewives,' and 'Deadwood.' He played two recurring characters on 'Arrested Development': Storage Dave and Mr. Jackson.
Sy Richardson, Black Revolutionary
Then: Sy Richardson, who made his acting debut as the fairy godmother in the 1977 erotic musical comedy 'Cinderella,' played an unnamed black revolutionary in 'They Live.'
Now: Richardson is known best for his work with director Alex Cox, appearing in the films 'Repo Man,' 'Sid and Nancy,' and 'Straight to Hell,' among others. He had a recurring role as the coroner on the TV series 'Pushing Daisies,' and had guest-starred on 'NCIS' and 'Rizzoli and Isles.' Richardson currently teaches an acting workshop.


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Work has only just started on Kingdom Housing Association's Pitscottie Road development in Cupar – but already the neighbours are complaining.
And this week local Fife councillor Margaret Kennedy brokered a meeting between residents, the town's community council, Kingdom and its building contractors.
Afterwards Cllr Kennedy said the meeting had been positive.
Kingdom and builders Campion Homes have agreed to communicate better with local residents in Tarvit Gardens.
Those residents, immediately next door to the building site where groundworks started recently, had a list of complaints, most seriously about vibrations from the work.
One resident reported damage inside his home, while others expressed concerns about the level of vibration they were experiencing.
Residents also complained about early starts to work.
Richard Wigfield, who lives at 3 Tarvit Gardens, complained: "Houses have experienced not only noise from 7am until 5pm but a very serious amount of vibration.
"There is serious concern that damage to our homes is being caused, but nobody is taking any notice of us."
However, after Tuesday's meeting, involving Kingdom, Campion Homes, local residents, Cupar Community Council and Fife Council, Cllr Kennedy was optimistic that the locals' concerns were being dealt with.
Describing the meeting has being "a little bit heated" initially, she said: "A lot of concerns have arisen over the impact of the development.
"For me there are significant concerns in relation to the effect of vibration.
"To their credit Campion Homes have agreed to have an independent structural engineer to investigate," Cllr Kennedy commented.
Agreement has also been reached on working hours on the site and for better communication with local residents.
Scott Kirkpatrick, Kingdom's acting director of development, promised that the housing association would take forward the action points from the meeting.
"The structural engineer's report will be available and shared with residents before we meeting again in December. What he says is what we will respond to," Mr Kirkpatrick said.
Douglas Provan from Cupar Community Council, also saw the meeting as having been positive.
But he regretted: "Though they have agreed to keep in contact, I just wish that this week's meeting had happened earlier."
The £7.2million development of 49 affordable homes is due for completion in March 2018.

subset: commoncrawl


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Basil and Watermelon Cooler Cocktail
- Prep: 5 min
- Cook Time: –
- Total: 5 min
- Serving: 1 Serving
Fresh basil leaves, ginger and a slice of watermelon are first muddled together and then shaken with vodka and fresh lime juice to create this cool summer concoction.
- 2 ounces vodka
- 3 basil leaves
- 1 (1-inch) piece ginger, peeled
- 1 (2-inch) slice watermelon
- 1 barspoon simple syup
- 1 barspoon fresh lime juice
- ginger ale, chilled
- watermelon chunk and basil leaf to garnish
- Place the basil, ginger, watermelon slice and simple syrup into a cocktail shaker and muddle well.
- Add the vodka and lime juice to the shaker and then fill with ice.
- Vigorously shake the mixture for 35 seconds and then strain into a cocktail glass filled with fresh ice.
- Top the drink with the chilled ginger ale and then garnish with the watermelon chunk and basil leaf; serve immediately.
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Hayley Kiyoko Bobby Pinned Updo
Hayley Kiyoko pinned up her caramel locks into a pinned 'do at the Radio Disney Music Awards.
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A fleshy pink gave Haley just the right amount of color on the red carpet.
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Congressman Barney Frank and former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Margaret H. Marshall discussed legislative and judicial efforts to create a more equitable society with Rutgers Law Professor David Dante Troutt, editor and publisher of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and journalist Todd Purdum.
This Forum was co-sponsored by Mass Humanities.
View video from other recent Forums >>
TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of Heather Campion, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, the Boston Foundation, the Lowell Institute, Raytheon, and our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, Xfinity and WBUR.
This past year, the nation and this city marked two unique historical events: the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the 40th anniversary of the legal decision that led to attempts to integrate Boston public schools through court-ordered busing. Over the past half century, similar efforts have been made with varying degrees of success to expand civil rights for all -- at times through the streets, the ballot box, the courts and through our national and state legislatures. When President Kennedy introduced the legislation that would become the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he stated, "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated."
There are, arguably, many in our nation today who still are not afforded equal rights and opportunities, and our panel this afternoon will discuss both recent and historical attempts to create a more equitable society and share opinions on the best means in the future to achieve liberty and justice for all.
Now, in addition to being Kennedy Library director, I'm also a member of the board of the Mass Humanities, which is the co-sponsor of this special Forum. Mass Humanities is celebrating its 40th anniversary, which is part of the reason why we're having the Forum this evening in this theatre, rather than our normal venue.
It's my honor to welcome the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William "Bro" Adams, to today's event and also to recognize Senator Paul Kirk and his wife Gail, and now, to introduce to you the executive director of Mass Humanities, David Tebaldi, to share some opening words and introduce our panelists.
DAVID TEBALDI: Thank you, Tom. Good afternoon; it's great to see you all here. Many of you are longtime JFK fans and not necessarily Mass Humanities fans; some of you are Mass Humanities fans. For those of you who don't already know us, I want to take just a minute to tell you a little bit about Mass Humanities. I promise to be brief.
We are a private nonprofit organization affiliated with the National Endowment for the Humanities – and I'm pleased, as Tom pointed out, to say that our chairman is here with us this afternoon – and with the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Our mission is to use the humanities to enhance and improve civic life across the Commonwealth. And we do this primarily by conducting programs and offering grants and services in support of community-based projects that use history, literature, philosophy, and the other humanities disciplines to illuminate topics of interest and issues of concern to the people of Massachusetts.
Since our founding 40 years ago this year, Mass Humanities has awarded more than $10 million in matching grants to literally thousands of public humanities programs in virtually every city and town across the Commonwealth. To learn more about our programs and activities, I hope you'll go to MassHumanities.org, where you can learn a lot about us. It's a brand new website. I think you'll find it interesting, and you can sign up for our electronic newsletter if you'd like to know more about activities that are going on in your area.
It's now my pleasure to introduce our panel this afternoon. I'm going to start on my far right, your left -- someone who really needs no introduction in Massachusetts.
MARGARET MARSHALL: Then move right along. [laughter]
DAVID TEBALDI: Moving right along, next to her is someone else who needs no introduction [laughter] in Massachusetts.
The man in the middle is Todd Purdham; he's our moderator tonight. [laughter] And he's really in the middle.
Next to Todd is Katrina vanden Heuvel. Katrina is the publisher and editor of The Nation magazine. I'm sure you're familiar with the magazine. She's also a commentator on ABC, MSNBC, CNN and PBS and is also the author of a book called, The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in the Age of Obama.
And closest to me here is David Dante Troutt. He is professor of law at Rutgers University – where I got my PhD actually – and also serves as the founding director of the Rutgers Center of Law in Metropolitan Equity. I think we'll learn a little bit more about what metropolitan equity is in the course of today's conversation. He is also a columnist, novelist and author of several works of nonfiction, including The Price of Paradise: The Cost of Inequality and a Vision for a More Equitable America.
Books by all of our panelists are on sale. You can buy one after the conclusion of this Forum and I think most of them will be hanging around a bit so you can get them to sign the book, if you'd like to do that. So with that, I'll hand it off to Todd. [applause]
TODD PURDHAM: Thank you very much, David. It's certainly a pleasure to be here on such a beautiful New England autumn afternoon. I apologize if any of us are squinting. You might not be able to tell that we're having sort of interrogation lights so that you can see us. But if we're squinting, it's not because we're in a bad moon.
It's a special privilege to be here today to talk about the topic of struggling toward equality, because that is in some essential sense the American story of all stories. And it seems fitting to be here today in the Library that honors the president of the United States who played such a signal role in the modern era in attempting, in a long delayed attempt, to grapple with moving us into true equality in the 20th century.
I think it's easy for people of my generation, and certainly my children who are 11 and 14, to forget that American apartheid is not an artifact of the distant past, it's not an artifact of the antebellum era of the Civil War, but it's something that existed in a very real and visceral way in the lifetime of most everybody in this room. It was brought home to me, actually, in doing my research for the book I wrote last year about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, about just what an immediate and transformative effect the law had when it took effect in the summer of 1964. I think nothing better illustrates that than the story of a young Army captain who had returned from his first tour in Vietnam in the winter of 1964 and was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia. He was exhausted after fixing up a small rented house for his wife and baby son, who were still living with her parents in Birmingham, Alabama. And he drove to the local drive-in at the end of the day, parked in the lot and no one came out for many minutes. Finally a waitress came out and said, "Are you Puerto Rican?" He said, "No." She said, "Are you a foreign student?" "No, I'm an American. I'm an Army officer." And she said, "Well, I'm from New Jersey and this doesn't make any sense to me, but I can't serve you. If you want to come around to the back, I can pass you a hamburger in a sack out the window." He said, "I'm not that hungry," and stormed off in his car.
A few months later on the Fourth of July weekend, just after President Johnson had signed the bill on July 2nd, he returned to the same drive-in and was served, without the slightest incident, the hamburger that he ordered. His name was Colin Powell.
So I think it's well to remember that each generation has to work on this issue in its own way. We certainly see challenges across the board for civil rights in America today. And I'd like to start by asking Justice Marshall, who has such a singular perspective on this, as a person who grew up half a world away in a country which had actually taken its system of apartheid in some very real ways from the American system, to talk just a little bit about justice, about where we stand today in this long journey, where we've come, where we have to go, what the challenges of civil rights and equality are for our era.
MARGARET MARSHALL: Gosh, what a wonderful question. I arrived in the United States in 1968, so I date my sort of permanent arrival. But I came to the United States in 1962/'63 as a high school exchange student. And at that time, '62/'63 was one of the very, very worst times in South Africa. I didn't come from a political family. My experience with black South Africans, who of course were the majority of people in South Africa, was only in a servitude relationship, a relationship of servitude.
I feel very connected to President Kennedy because he was the president, and the civil rights movement really was a very powerful part of my experience here. I returned in 1968 and sort of watched that movement. And that, by the way, changed my view. When I went back to South Africa, my life was very different. Then I came back in 1968, and the women's movement was where the … Each time I say the movement, I want to make clear the modern piece of the movement. Of course, the movement goes back in each instance hundreds of years. There was the women's movement and then more recently, in the beginning of the 1990s, I began to see the disabilities movement, and then into the beginning of the 21st century the movement for gay rights.
So in a way, I feel enormously privileged because I've watched and participated in each of these movements going forward, and then I've watched and participated as they moved back, and then they moved forward again. So the first thing that I would say is it's not a one-way direction.
I think one reason why I keep at it and just don't give up, ever – and I have grandchildren here, and I've got the daughter of one of my panelists who's 12; you just never give up – is because I had the experience of growing up in South Africa, and especially when I was political in South Africa. In the 1960s, the fact that Nelson Mandela had gone to prison was a victory, but we never expected to see him alive. We never expected that system to fail, because it was just a juggernaut at the time, and it did.
So you just do it step by step. I think to the extent that Americans keep doing this, keep doing this, never give up the promise of what this country is all about, we will keep moving forward. We are not there. We are not there on race relations. We are not there on gender relations. We're not there on the disabilities movement. We're not there on the gay rights movement. But we have certainly made progress.
TODD PURDHAM: Would you highlight two or three areas in which you think there's a particular urgent need for progress now, where we need to get over the next hump?
MARGARET MARSHALL: Race, for me. It's the most intransigent, it's the one piece of our history -- United States history -- that we haven't dealt with. We've never dealt with slavery. We've never dealt with what that terrible, terrible era meant to our society. South Africa was both racist and totalitarian, and awful. I mean, awful in terrible, terrible ways. But I always felt that with my black friends in South Africa, there was never any question about which way the direction would go. And there are lots of difficulties. We've had the Truth and Reconciliation process. We've never had that with respect to slavery.
I think what I find most challenging now is there's an assumption that we have dealt with that question, and I find that very troubling. We haven't dealt with that question at all. I'm a judge, I'm a lawyer; I believe in the rule of law. The law was fantastic to me in this country. Yet, when I have a Chief Justice of the United States making a statement as obscene as the way to deal with racial discrimination is to end racial discrimination, I consider that so lacking in understanding of what slavery meant in this country.
So that's my biggest, which is my most personal, of course. I'm a white, female, heterosexual. So I like to see women's rights advance, too. But I'll go along with Barney and with David.
TODD PURDHAM: Congressman, there have always been so many paths to progress on this question – action in the streets, action in the courts, action in the legislature. And the action in the legislature in 1963 and '64 was the result of some remarkable series of compromises, bipartisan cooperation, extraordinary sort of mutual respect even among people who disagreed bitterly over what they should do, a certain number of grubby compromises here and there. What are the prospects in this country today -- in your former trade -- for those kinds of things, which have seemed throughout our history so essential to making progress on these particularly knotty questions?
BARNEY FRANK: Bad in general. But good in a surprising, I think, area that I will get to. First of all, Margie's absolutely right. Race is our besetting sin in America, and it's very frustrating for those of us who have hated racism, frankly, to see that other movements have started later and come close to finishing earlier. I remember being very grateful that I didn't have a power of ultimate decision in the week in which the US Supreme Court threw out the Defense of Marriage Act, but also threw out the Voting Rights Act. You talk about mixed emotions. I said to friends, "I'm glad that I wasn't asked, that I didn't have the power to say which one should have been reversed, because I would have lived with DOMA and keep the Voting Rights Act."
We've made progress in race, and we've got some legal equality. But to answer your question, the problem is that – I'm being straightforward about this – the Republican Party has put race back into the political mix. So there is no bipartisanship.
I was in Congress in '82 when we renewed the Voting Rights Act. I'd been to Mississippi in the summer of '64 and second to Jim Eastland, who was a vile bigot, we had Jamie Whitten, who people were very upset about, who was in charge of the agriculture area. I was standing 18 years later next to Jamie Whitten on the floor of the US House when he voted for the Voting Rights Act. And to have that now become controversial again, have the voter suppression that you see is very discouraging. And anybody who doubts that racism is still a factor in America, I have a column in Sunday's Portland Telegram, the daily paper, this is the Sunday edition, in which I said that I have to conclude reluctantly that if Ebola had broken out in Ireland, Israel, Greece, Italy or Poland, you would not have the resistance to a full American participation in combating that you have today. People would not be saying, "Don't let anybody from Italy or Israel land in America. Don't let our troops go to Ireland and Greece and help out."
So we've made great legal progress, but there's a stubbornness there. And I am afraid that the problem has been that it got politicized. You mentioned Colin Powell; he was very helpful as District Attorney in 1997. When the Republicans took over in '95, one of their goals was to amend the Civil Rights Act to strike out any possibility of affirmative action. And interestingly, I was the senior Democrat on the subcommittee of jurisdiction. Colin Powell gave us a letter in which he said that if it had not been for the affirmative action that they had in the military – not quotas, but affirmative action – he never would have been a general. That frankly was one of our rare victories that year, because the Republicans were embarrassed into stopping it. So that is the troublesome area. Yeah, we're going backwards with the Voting Rights Act.
The area where I think has a possibility of some cooperation, de facto, it seems to me today – interesting in terms of the Boston history of segregation – the most unfair treatment of African Americans comes in the administration of the drug laws. The discrimination there is the worst. People in prison, then people who can't vote and they can't do things economically …
MARGARET MARSHALL: They can't vote for life.
BARNEY FRANK: Yeah. In fact, the mayor of a city in North Carolina, Charlotte, just went back to jail because he voted, having been convicted. [laughter]
TODD PURDHAM: There are some states where you can. I think Florida you can …
BARNEY FRANK: Yeah, it varies place to place.
MARGARET MARSHALL: It varies.
BARNEY FRANK: And in Louisiana, you can theoretically vote. Well, in Rhode Island, you can theoretically be the mayor. [laughter] But the point is that nobody that I know of thinks that African Americans use either marijuana or cocaine so disproportionately as you would think if you looked at who's in prison for it.
My own view is that one of the most important things we can do to end that racism in practice, with its terribly debilitating effects, is to stop criminally prosecuting people because we don't like what they take. I think there are other ways to deal with drugs. And by the way, there was an interesting possibility of some cooperation, because you have that libertarian urge on that side. But, in general, in terms of hitting racism, I'm discouraged because the Republicans have put it back into play as a political issue, but I do think there is a chance that we can improve the worst factual situation that so affects young black men in particular, but then the whole community, by rationalizing our drug laws. I think it's inherent that they're going to be badly administered racially.
TODD PURDHAM: Professor, you've written about that problem, but you've also written a lot about the question – I'd like to stick with the Voting Rights Act for a minute and picking up on what Justice Marshall said about the decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The Court did seem to be saying that racial discrimination was not a real issue anymore in elections and that these remedies were no longer needed, and there was not the need for special treatment in certain jurisdictions.
Could you just talk a little bit about the facts on the ground versus that sort of assertion and how we came to this pass? Including, it must be said, Congress's failure and inability to act to change the formula, if appropriate, but simply all Congress was ever able to do is renew the Act year after year by overwhelming margins, because it didn't want to tinker with the details of the Act because they knew it would become a propper[?].
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: Well, this is global question. In the first instance, just focusing on the Voting Rights Act and the Shelby case in particular, it seems fairly clear to me that the Supreme Court, that the majority, ignored a tremendous amount of empirical information on the ground. They just had to do that and they had to do that not only to reach the particular result that they reached, but to advance the rationale behind that. And that is that we as a nation have moved somehow, magically and miraculously, to the sort of colorblind euphoria where we very rarely see racism in almost any aspect of life, significantly limit minority chances, whether it's politically, whether it's in the labor market, whether it's educationally, what have you.
So the first problem with that was the willingness to ignore facts on the ground. And if we needed any evidence for how sort of naked that disregard was, we saw what Texas did immediately after the case. So the prediction was in the Shelby case that preclearance was no longer necessary because the states subject to preclearance were no longer running afoul of the law. But the moment the preclearance requirement is lifted in the decision, those very same states enact laws that had been sitting abeyance, enact laws to go ahead and discriminate against the likelihood of minority voting, or at least to severely crimp minority voting. And then we see, in fact, in this latest round of voting that suppression come to pass.
But more problematic than the particular voting rights instance is what we're hearing from the court consistently, which is the tendency to advance this almost willfully colorblind perspective on life in America that doesn't jibe with the experience of most Americans. It just doesn't meet the opportunities that most of us see in our daily lives.
So the Justice Roberts quote about the way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of race as though you could have it by saying it just isn't real. We see another example of that in the Michigan affirmative action decision, where the same majority of justices denies really the most stringent affirmative action set of rules in the country, a set of rules that this very same Court had sanctioned just a couple of years before. And instead, when that set of rules goes before a popular vote and a majority of white voters in Michigan says no, we don't believe that any decisions about the expenditure or the allocation of government goods should be made on the basis of race, the Supreme Court blesses the political process, says -- not withstanding the fact that a clear minority interest is being frustrated and overwhelmed by a majority interest in higher education -- "Well, this is more evidence that we just don't have discrimination, and the public would know."
But, of course, if you're sitting in a classroom in Michigan, if you're sitting at the University of Michigan, either in the undergrad or the law school, or any of the graduate programs, you see the stark segregation that still exists in this country.
And I just want to throw in one other thing about this. So we're not only combating kind of an aggressive colorblindness that demands a level of proof that can never be satisfied, in part because the level of disbelief with which it's attacked is so overwhelming that it cannot actually hear the proof that's proffered, but there's also a tendency, at least in that particular opinion, to promote a kind of white innocence on questions of race – the Michigan decision, for me, reflected a need that you see most acutely on the issue of affirmative action, but you see it in other racial contexts, too – that what colorblindness does is it essentially exonerates whites for any implications, for any responsibility for the empirical disadvantages experienced by so many blacks and Latinos in their own communities. We see this. These are our lives, right? We wish it weren't so, most of us, and we can come up with a number of different explanations for why it is. But we know that we lead segregated lives. We know that our labor markets are segregated. We know when we walk into a professional setting that we have very little likelihood of having a black boss, of having a Latina coworker who is truly our equal, who is a decision maker at our level. We don't expect authority to come in the person of those people. And we don't expect our children to go to school with them either. And we don't expect them to enjoy the same sorts of benefits that so many middle class people are desperately trying to get. So there is this real tension. And colorblindness helps, I think, to some extent, to work as a bomb in defusing some of that tension. So we see it as a jurisprudential matter and we see it in our conversations even with dearest friends.
TODD PURDHAM: Katrina, I'd like to ask you to follow up on that a little bit, because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed in part because it was self-consciously, and even ostentatiously, colorblind. President Kennedy said in proposing the bill that the Constitution should be colorblind, as the first Justice, Harland, said at the turn of the 20th century. And the Title XII on the employment discrimination explicitly says "nothing in this act can be construed to require quotas or racial balancing," so forth and so on. The Civil Rights Coalition began to break apart in the '60s, of course, as we moved toward more necessary, but race-conscious remedies that continued in the '70s in Boston and busing.
How do we grapple with that? How do we get at the problem Professor Troutt's talking about without splintering what had been this momentary but magnificent consensus that something needed to be done? How do you get people to see that, no, no, you have to …
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: If I could step back just a moment. The Nation was founded in 1865 by abolitionists. And The Nation was there for the first reconstruction. There is a thinking today that we are in the third reconstruction. I speak to that because you speak of the splintering apart in the '70s around a grievance politics. But that first reconstruction was broken apart for many reasons – Plessy v. Ferguson part of that in the legal function. You move then into the next reconstruction really around Brown v. Board of Ed, moving into that civil rights movement, which was so powerful. I would argue, though I sit here with an important Justice, that legal decisions have always needed the movements, it seems to me, to make them real. But that broke up partly for the reasons you're describing.
There was a resentment politics, a grievance politics that primarily, but not only, Southern Republican white politicians played on, which we see very vividly today in this grim midterm we've just come out of. When you hear about redistribution, that we're going to take to give to them, you don't need too much decoding or a Dick Tracy ring to understand what they're talking about.
But we enter now, it seems to me, a third reconstruction. I so respect what the Justice said -- never give up -- because the history of America, it seems to me, is in zigs and zags. There's a backlash to progress. And we're in a moment, it seems to me, where you are seeing, because of the ugliness of what I consider and Professor Troutt has written about, one of the civil rights issues of our time, mass incarceration, police brutality. You're seeing a younger generation rise up. There is new organizing. There's new thinking. There is an awareness that that has to be tackled.
I agree with Representative Frank that this is what I call a transpartisan issue. I think there's real possibility of bringing together a coalition to begin to dismantle the wasteful, ineffective drug war.
But the third reconstruction, I direct people's attention to this multiracial, pro-labor, pro-LGBT community, pro-voting rights movement in North Carolina, the Moral Mondays, led by Reverend William Barber II. I think it has drawn people because it is very deeply principled. It's not really about the Democratic or Republican Party, but it is certainly squaring off with the worst voter suppression we've seen, Jim Crow voter suppression. It has touched people and moved people. This idea of a third reconstruction is something to hold on to, because it's an anchor for many who are buffeted by the day-to-day politics.
I would just come back to that new generation. It seems to me that they took an anniversary this summer, Freedom Summer, and found their own way to honor it. There was Freedom Side, there were Freedom schools. They were working with the immigrant community. So there was a multiracial coalition, a broadening. But a respect for history, which I think is at the root of progress in this country as well, a retrieval of what is great in our history, an understanding of what is racist and what has been so intertwined with the building of this country. In the latest Nation, we have a review of … There are new schools at universities studying how the economy of this country was so intertwined with slavery. So it moves it into, I think, an important area of thinking for Americans, for all of us to look at.
BARNEY FRANK: Could I ask … You encouraged us to talk.
TODD PURDHAM: Please do.
BARNEY FRANK: A question, just one point I want to make … The jurisprudence of this Supreme Court majority, this right wing Supreme Court majority with regard to voting, they have made one major decision, which is based on denying the discrimination that exists. Then they have made a series of decisions that are based on affirming voter fraud, which is imaginary. [laughter] So imaginary voter fraud gets much more respect from these guys than real discrimination.
But the point I want to raise is I mentioned Republicans -- I've told people I consider myself a member of a minority that's often unfairly ridiculed. I'm a partisan Democrat. [laughter] And I am because in today's world that's where my values get best defended. And Katrina, I agree with what you said, except you said, "Well, it's not Democratic versus Republican." I wish it wasn't, but it is. The fact is that it is the Republicans that are doing the voter suppression. They're the ones going after affirmative action. That doesn't mean that Democrats are always there. But the problem is they have now made this a party cause.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I agree. But I would just come back and say I don't believe that women's rights are a left/right issue.
BARNEY FRANK: I didn't say it was.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I don't believe labor rights or giving unemployed people a job left/right. But I totally agree with you. I think, by the way, I'll one up you if I could, Representative Frank, because I think partisan has gotten a bad name. Partisan has become like what the food fights are on talk shows, when in fact partisan is standing up for one's principles. And I agree with you. On the other hand, there are Democrats, and certainly in the history of this nation there are Southern Democrats, but right now the Republicans are -- some of them -- are like a party of the neo-Confederacy. Some of them are trying to figure out how to do nothing.
BARNEY FRANK: Unfortunately, the bad ones are in power. You say women's rights aren't a left/right issue. I think you mean that they shouldn't be. But, de facto, they are. I wish it wasn't the case. And you mentioned the key, the biggest economic problem we have today is the successful drive that Ronald Reagan began to decapitate unions. That is the greatest institutional weakness in America today, and a major reason why inequality has progressed.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The only thing I'd say though about the power of the civil rights movement was that it was a deeply moral movement. And I'm not speaking for the Reverend, but the Reverend in North Carolina is trying to retrieve those values.
BARNEY FRANK: That's the goal. But you don't get there by ignoring the current reality. MARGARET MARSHALL: So let me just throw another little thing in here. You asked is it executive, legislative, judicial public support.
TODD PURDHAM: That's what I was just going to ask you.
MARGARET MARSHALL: You don't get judicial opinions without movements. So this is going to be a very challenging one for partisan Democrats, for The Nation and for professors. One of the things that concerns me the most – we've talked about race being my most important thing – is hate speech. You mention hate speech to an American audience: "We have a First Amendment. You have a right to say whatever you want." Give me a break. [laughter] Right? Everybody gets nervous. They don't look at the hate, they don't look at what hate does. They forget what happened with lynchings. They just don't. We've always assumed that we're a peace-loving people. We say only nice things about each other. [laughter]
The First Amendment has played an incredibly important role, but there is so much hate, just hate. Forget about trying to get together to get legislation through. Look at the language. Look at what the language says. Look at what the actual speech says. You talked about it doesn't take much to decode. Most of the time you don't have to worry.
Now, am I suggesting the government has to regulate that? Not particularly. But could we please hear a huge standing up of people saying, "We won't tolerate this"?
TODD PURDHAM: I think one thing that was shocking to me in my research was to find people writing postcards to the president or to their legislators, in their perfect Palmer penmanship. And no Internet flame war, no email, hate mail could have anything on the letters that John Kennedy got. He got a letter after the March on Washington, that very night, in West Virginia, somebody postmarked a letter addressed: "John F. Kennedy, The White House, question mark, care of Martin Luther King." And it was a one-line letter and it said inside in its entirety: "Grab the nigger votes, you just lost mine."
So hate speech in that sense is nothing new. But I wanted to ask you about another aspect of this, the sort of multiple strands – movement, judicial, legislative. There was disagreement in the civil rights movement in the '60s about what the best course was. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP once famously challenged Martin Luther King, "Martin, I'd like to know just what you've desegregated by your action." And he said, "I guess maybe just a few human hearts." And in fact, John Kennedy's was apparently one of those hearts that had been moved by Dr. King.
So it took ten years from Brown to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In your mind, do you think legislative decisions – and this would be a good question for you, too, Congressman – do legislative decisions on a question like gay rights or civil rights or women's rights have more impact and effect and legitimacy? And are they accepted more readily than judicial acts?
MARGARET MARSHALL: Are they accepted more readily? The nice thing about being a judge is somebody comes to you and says, "I want to get married." If you're a legislator, you can say, "Send it to the committee." [laughter] Right? I mean, Chief Justice Amestoy, who's a very good friend who is the Chief Justice of Vermont, said "Send it to the legislature." And the legislature came up with something that nobody had ever heard of before called civil unions.
Now, civil unions gave plenty of rights and they gave lots of protections, but they weren't the same as marriage. By the time people came to my court -- wonderful, brilliant strategists -- they decided to come to the Supreme Judicial Court– and I can give a plug for that court as well: It was the first court in the world to know that slavery was inconsistent with the Massachusetts Constitution, 1783. 1783. It took the rest of the country how many years to catch up with us?
BARNEY FRANK: To 1971.
MARGARET MARSHALL: But legislators are incredibly important. But I want to say something about the gay marriage decision in Massachusetts. It was a judicial decision. It was the result of a political strategy by a movement, carefully considered. And there was a backlash, a very big backlash. And there was an attempt to change our Constitution. Our governor, Deval Patrick, and our speaker of the house, Sal DiMasi, led that legislative movement, and it was not a foregone conclusion.
DAVID TEBALDI: That they would succeed.
MARGARET MARSHALL: That they would succeed. And but for that, who knows what would have happened?
So I give full credit, first and foremost, to the movement, to the framing of the questions. They have to come to us, whatever it is. And then you have this back-and-forth.
BARNEY FRANK: I just want to follow up. First of all, I was just reading yesterday a wonderful book by a man named Marc Solomon, who is in the midst of that fight, documenting in some detail what the Chief Justice has just said and it is a wonderful example of this. Margie said well, the court, someone comes and says "I want to get married," and they have to deal with it. What she didn't tell you was that a year, well, two-and-a-half years ago, I called her up and left a voicemail that said, "Margie, will you marry me?" [laughter] And she called back and said that she would, but unfortunately we had a schedule thing." So my husband and I had to get married …
MARGARET MARSHALL: So he went off and married somebody else. [laughter]
BARNEY FRANK: First of all, let me say, in terms of accepting, that's a very important point about democracy. I obviously have studied this a great deal and have been through this, from the fight on the Defense of Marriage Act. Here's a story with regard to same-sex marriage, but it's true of other civil rights things as well.
A judicial decision on that sort – say on same-sex marriage – that can immediately be overturned more often than not was overturned. But a judicial decision that established the right and then a period of time had to intervene before it could be overturned was sustained because the reality beat the prejudice. California had the decision in favor of same-sex marriage and shortly thereafter they were able to repeal it, because they had no experience with it.
What happened in Massachusetts, as Margie said, they made the decision in 2003. It went in effect in 2004. It takes two successive legislatures in Massachusetts with an intervening election to put this on the ballot. So we had time. It is true, Governor Patrick saved us. But I want to go back to my theme. The Governor at the time of this decision was Mitt Romney. And Mitt Romney clearly decided that he could win the presidential nomination the next time he ran for it as the man who ended same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. He began an enormous crusade in the 2004 legislative elections to defeat people unless they would vote for this, and there was a very good countereffort. As I said, Marc Solomon's book shows this. But the key point is this: In terms of the acceptability of judicial decisions, if there is time for the decision to take effect, then it will survive. Obviously, some justices are aware of this and that explains, I guess, the notion "the need to give it time," I assume is the reason why the key justices who were probably for same-sex marriage in principle, but weren't ready to do it right away, made the decision they made earlier, this decision that, "We'll let these good decisions stand. We'll move forward in that way. But we won't go for the whole thing." I characterize that as the judicial decision, the judicial equivalent of an intentional walk. [laughter] They walked same-sex marriage; they let it take one base.
But that's a very important question. And it's also, by the way, what Felix Frankfurter talked about, the sober second thought. No court decision that I've ever seen, if it remains unpopular, will be sustained because there are ways to replace the justices, undo it in some states. What happens is that when the court makes a decision generally in favor of somebody's rights and it's initially unpopular, give it some time and it becomes accepted. If they could have repealed Brown v Board of Education by some political mechanism, it would have been repealed.
TODD PURDHAM: It's hard to remember that in '64 the Civil Rights Act passed 73 to 27, with 27 out of 33 Republican votes in the Senate. And the Senate couldn't pass an agreement to decide the shape of a table by that margin today. [laughter]
BARNEY FRANK: Because the Republican, again, the Republican Party …[laughter] These are stats. The Republican Party has simply moved en bloc into the opposition.
TODD PURDHAM: I wanted to ask you about a theme of that that Congressman's actually saying, Professor. You wrote in Price of Paradise, "Only racism could explain the ideological union of the Republican rich with the working man and woman. Nothing else could fuse their naturally opposed interests." Could you expatiate on that a little bit and explain why you believe that's so?
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: I wrote that? [laughter]
TODD PURDHAM: You did.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: Well, I think that this is sort of old-time American history, to some extent. This goes back to all sorts of political compromises that were made in the antebellum South. But you keep ringing that race bell, or as people refer to it now, you keep engaging in dog-whistle politics. There are folks sort of wired to hear that.
It's sort of a long sociological conversation, the likes of which got candidate Barack Obama in a whole lot of trouble when he -- I guess in a back room -- was overhead saying, "Give them guns"… What was the …
TODD PURDHAM: Cling to guns and God.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: They cling to guns and God. But I think to some extent there has always been a willingness by the Republican Party – I don't want to say has always been because obviously there were changes historically in really who was a Republican – but there has always been a successful appeal to working class whites through the message of race to unite them with the interests of wealthy whites over their own best interests because of the importance of maintaining a sense of distance. I think that, frankly, this has been one of the pillars of white supremacy and one of the great "okey dokes" of all time in terms of affecting the interests of working class whites.
I want to actually go back to this question of hate speech for a moment, because I think it's relevant here. What people who defend colorblindness – in the Chief Justice Roberts sense of colorblindness – they tend to say it's not about race now; it's about class. Why don't we focus much more on class? Look, there are certainly very good reasons to focus on class and one of them goes to the question that you just asked, that if people really voted their economic interests, we would see much great mutuality, we'd see a realignment of what partisanship means …
TODD PURDHAM: Tom Frank has written about questions like that in What's the Matter with Kansas?"
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: Right. We might get a very different notion of a social compact in this country when we so desperately need one because of what a transformative time this is.
But let's say we did it for a moment; let's just stop for a moment and assume: Okay, let's not focus so much on race. Let's even ignore the tremendous overlap that allows us to speak almost interchangeably about race and about class and let's just talk about class for a moment. When we talk about class, that's when you hear the most vituperative hate speech imaginable. We have a no-holds-barred culture when it comes to class hostility. In almost any community anyone in this room comes from, the mere mention of an affordable housing project in your local paper will – fill in the blank -- will create an avalanche of reader anonymous commentary that is so vitriolic. I mean, it would put some KKK literature to shame.
And we see this constitutionally as well, too. We've tried on a couple of occasions – Valtierra, Rodriguez, those cases – where the Supreme Court heard the question of whether or not there would be a protected interest in socioeconomic status, and each time it was always rejected. So socioeconomic class is not a protected group in this country. It's not protected constitutionally, which means that in many respects you are free to discriminate against people on the basis of class. But culturally, it's sort of the same thing.
So whenever you can transfer your antagonism from race to class, you're on much safer grounds. I'm not sure that we would actually benefit that much as a nation, if we're interested in moving forward in our social compact, to take the conversation out of race and into class. But we desperately need to be able to do both.
And in case I don't get a chance to say this – because some of the speakers so far have sort of declared what they consider to be the singlemost important issue – I want to just throw out one other singlemost important issue. I think that the failure to do what we might have done with fair housing -- the most difficult of the Civil Rights Act to pass, the one that didn't pass until 1968 and the one that was watered down the most -- has so much to do with the problems at this intersection of race and class today.
BARNEY FRANK: I understand the argument you don't get that much politically from race to class, but if you can do the right kind of class-based one, recognizing, incorporating the racial … it would make it harder for the right wing to throw it out judicially. In other words, the fact that there's not a constitutional issue there could play both ways, if that was phrased right.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: In New York City, it's been a very interesting year because the new mayor, de Blasio, ran on a platform of A Tale of Two Cities on inequality. And there's been a real, I think, class focus in a city which has Wall Street, which has some of the highest levels of poverty and inequality and stratification by race. I do think there's the possibility of a social compact built around economic justice and in there, a multiracial coalition.
I think of the $15 minimum wage movement going on around this country. This election was so strange because you had all these Republicans– and Representative Frank has me at this stage; I've given up on being the nonpartisan [laughter] -- but you had Democratic issues – I've given up on not right or left – Democratic issues winning: minimum wage, right, in four rock-ribbed red states. You have movements around this country, multiracial movements fighting, fast-food workers fighting for increases in minimum wage. I think part of this election– there were many factors -- but part of it was that millions of Americans didn't feel they had participated in this so-called recovery that we keep hearing about.
Again, I think this is is a class/race issue. How do we work with low income, middle class communities, which are deunionized in a globalized economy, in a far-from-full employment economy? I think there's a social justice/economic justice agenda that could begin to address what you spoke of which is how the Republican Party has so played and preyed on working Americans so that they vote against their self-interest. But what has been on offer from the Democratic Party over these last 40 years? Not enough, right? Not enough. I mean, stagnant wages for most working Americans, low income, more poverty. There needs to be an alternative if people are going to reach for something that …
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: But do you think it will happen at the federal level?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I think it will happen at city and state levels. I think there's a lot of motion – people in motion, policies in motion – at the city and state level. The federal level right now is [laughter] is consigned to the gates of …
TODD PURDHAM: Could I ask you, at the risk of trying to shoehorn you into being the resident historian, but I think it's an appropriate attempt since you are in fact very learned, there's this essential tension in American life between the self-sufficient yeoman farmer and the barn raising and the quilting bee, and we see that all the time. You see that played out in the Mitt Romney kind of … How do we get at that question in the modern era?
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I think at the root of it – and again, Representative Frank has talked about this – the denigration of government, the denigration of government is deep rooted, has been worked on and cultivated for more than 40 years. Great Senator from your state, I think Senator Elizabeth Warren does it better than anyone when she talks about the role government has played in people's lives. You're driving down the interstate. You may be an entrepreneur, but who's actually pulled together the infrastructure that allows you to do what you do?
I think we need to work hard, not a big government/small government, but a government that will give people a fair shake and to go beyond kind of the minimum wage and say, "At the moment, government is rigged against a lot of people in this country. And we can't give up on government, but we need to take it back, clean it up, and get it back in a space it can work again."
BARNEY FRANK: Absolutely. I'll make one reciprocal concession to Katrina. [laughter] Historically, when the question is who gave us the infrastructure, the single first answer was Dwight Eisenhower, who as a Republican president did the interstate highway thing. But the other point I'd make is, I completely agree …
TODD PURDHAM: In the face of a global external threat.
BARNEY FRANK: Right. But that's very relevant, because now in the face of a non-global threat – terrorists are bad people but they do not threaten the existence of the United States the way Hitler did, the way Stalin at his worst did. And I very much agree. Read my book, you'll hear! [laughter] But here's the point: I believe that many of the people who are alienated are not philosophically opposed to government. In fact, they believe in government strongly and are disappointed that so little has been done to alleviate their economic distress. It's very straightforward what we need to do:
Substantially reduce this worldwide military establishment that is being told to do things that can't be done. You can free up well over $100 billion a year. You could use some of that to provide fairness in the financing of higher education, to reduce medical costs, to do other things. That's the way you get beyond the minimum wage to do that. But the prerequisite for that is a substantial reduction in American military expenditures, which would be in our interest anyway.
MARGARET MARSHALL: But you have to start with people voting.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: You have to give them some …
TODD PURDHAM: Well, Ferguson is proof positive of that.
MARGARET MARSHALL: We take away a lot of votes. We deliberately take away a lot of votes.
And I just wanted a little plug for Mass Humanities. Mass Humanities has a little thing that comes out every morning called "Massachusetts Moments." And if you don't have it, you should get it. Every morning, it pops up.
Right before the election, I looked to a whole bunch of women because they had a little Mass Moment, November 1915, and the good voters of Massachusetts, who I hate to tell you were all white males, voted overwhelmingly that they didn't think women should have the right to vote.
BARNEY FRANK: When was this?
MARGARET MARSHALL: November of 1915. So I sent it around to every woman that I knew and I said, "I don't care for whom you vote, that's your choice. But vote."
BARNEY FRANK: Were you under oath? [laughter]
MARGARET MARSHALL: "But vote." And that's really my South African thing. Of course, we like to make big changes. I mean, we're a big country with big people. But you have to just do the day-to-day slogging. There's an incredible lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, who works on the death penalty. I mean, talk about the worst role for a lawyer to have.
Look, I know about drugs, Barney, but we are executing people as well in circumstances that would make you cringe. And there's Bryan Stevenson going on, taking case after case after case after case, with judges who closed. I mean, you just have to keep doing it. And you have to vote. And you have to get involved.
I like to think that things are happening on the ground in states. But if you want to be partisan, the Republicans picked up many, many, many, many more seats than …
TODD PURDHAM: That brings me to the point I've wanted to make. I don't think it's any criticism of the organizers to say that Republican voices are conspicuous by their absence here today, except in Congressman Frank's invocation of them. [laughter]
I'll just throw this open to all of you: Are there any voices in the Republican Party today who could be forces for the good on these questions? I think of Rand Paul in the wake of Ferguson. Maybe that's too easy.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I have this obsession with what I call transpartisanship, which means not giving up your values. A friend of mine, the Texas populist Jim Hightower, once said something: "The only thing in the center of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos." [laughter] But bringing your values. So Rand Paul, and John Conyers on reducing this wasteful drug war, Sherrod Brown, someone I admire, a Democrat from Ohio, worked with David Vitter on the banks front. Senator Warren worked with John McCain to reintroduce Glass-Steagall. I mean, these are all issues. And Rand Paul, as I recall, worked with you, Representative Frank, on reducing the defense budget by a smart 50%.
BARNEY FRANK: In 2012, I approached him to ask him to sign on with me and he said, "I can't do it. My people tell me you're killing me in Iowa." [laughter]
You're right, the problem is this: And let me link up what these two women have said. The most important thing going on in America today, I believe, is the struggle within the Republican Party for the mainstream conservatives to take back control. Unfortunately, they're not doing very well right now.
And people are getting it wrong. They talk about, "Well, McConnell flubbed in the Senate." His real problem is with the House, which has become more Neanderthal. But part of the problem is people don't vote in primaries. The Republican primary electorate is the most hard-edged, right wing mass movement in the history of this country and it becomes self-reinforcing, because the less hard-headed don't want to vote and they get driven away. So the answer is de facto right now, but in fact, there's no strength on the Republican side. I wish there would be. But the self-fulfilling primary stuff is.
The other problem, of course, is the media. You're asking about why we don't do agreements. American activists today, on both sides, left and right, live in parallel media universes in which the most energized people only hear from people with whom they agree, and consequently think that everybody in the country agrees with them. So if their side tries to compromise, it's "Oh, you're selling us out; why are you doing that?" "Well, we didn't have the votes for single payer." "What do you mean, you didn't have the votes for singer payer? Everybody I know is for it." So that's what's driving …
TODD PURDHAM: "That's not enough, I need a majority," as Adlai Stevenson said.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: I think another of the singlemost important challenges facing this country is what we do with this spatial distribution of demographic change. I think where most of these issues really meet the road is at the state and local level. I don't think that we see much at the federal level to be hopeful about. I don't think we can expect a whole lot of change. I think most of the analyses so far of the midterm elections have suggested that there will be revenge in 2016, and then there will be revenge in 2018, and we will probably go down a path of impasse.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will live our lives and we will live our lives in communities that are, by and large, changing dramatically. So if I had to point to the Republican that I'm most hopeful about, it is the local elected official who is a mayor, or a freeholder, or a state assemblyperson whose district is dramatically changing because of the influx of Latinos, of blacks in inner ring suburbs, of Asian communities that ten years ago were not there and are now 30% of the population, and whose children are half the schoolchildren in the public schools. And this particular local elected official is really not sure how best to represent this district -- that the rules have changed, that there is fiscal distress. The whole reliance upon property taxes is not working for a variety of reasons that we're well aware of over the last five to seven years. So this elected official suddenly sees a different set of interests that, because so many local elected officials really do care about the – they don't care as much about political aspirations, they don't care about what's going to work ten years down the road -- they care really about making sure that potholes get paved and the school budget is met, that we don't lose cops on the beat.
BARNEY FRANK: How many of those people do you know?
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: I know a lot of those people.
BARNEY FRANK: I'm skeptical. First, they don't care. They don't have political aspirations, probably isn't true about a lot of state legislators. Most of the members of the Congress came from there. The other problem is you said ten years ago. But four years ago a lot of those people were taken out of their districts by redistricting. That's one of the problems that we face.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: Right, and that's part of why I say the spatial distribution of demographic change. Look, it's a majority/minority country. It already is. In 2012, majority of births to people of color. The jig is up. It's about to change. In the top 100 metropolitan areas of the country, the school population is already a majority/minority. That's going to translate eventually into votes. That's in part what you saw in the voting rights, in the Shelby decision. Part of that is the concern not just about black voters, but about Latino voters in those very same states.
BARNEY FRANK: I wish I could be as confident that there will be unity there. For instance, immigration is an issue that causes some friction between the groups.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: Well, there's a lot of work to be done on the ground and it's hard to crystal ball it. But it is also clear that these are kids sitting in the same classrooms. These are kids living in close proximity to each other. These are kids experiencing the same level of public services. These are kids being pulled over by the same cops. So they have interests in common. They have not been as politically active as they will be. Ferguson is an excellent example of that. Ferguson is not merely some sort of static moment in time. Ferguson is the beginning of metropolitan St. Louis. It is an area in rapid transition. That area didn't look anything like that in 1980.
So what that means politically, how we look at our political interests – forget for a moment the national politics – how we look at our political interests in terms of the distribution of resources to the institutions that really affect opportunity in our lives, that to me is as important as any …
BARNEY FRANK: I don't understand why you say forget national politics. It's a continuum. But the other point I would make though is this – and I agree with you, and I hope we'll get more voting – I worry about voter suppression on the right through legal situations. But I worry about voter suppression on the left by telling people they don't care how you vote, they don't care what you say, they only listen to big money. If you listen to some of the rhetoric on the left, it is depressing the incentive to vote. And I think it's important to say, yeah, things are terrible, but if enough people vote, it can change. But there is too much of, "Oh, it doesn't make any difference what you do, why bother."
TODD PURDHAM: I think I'd like to just ask all of you to follow up a little bit on this point you raise about this change, incipient, or it's probably as you say already happened.
One of the fascinating realities for Barack Obama in 2008, especially to a lesser degree in 2012, he did very well in states where there was almost no black population, like Iowa in the primaries. He did very well in states where there was a large black population, like South Carolina.
He had the biggest trouble in states where there was a large black plurality that presumably made the white majority nervous. And it seems to me that part of the problem he's had in office is that very thing – trying to grapple with the notion that so many people who, on what they see as the losing end of this equation, are looking at him and seeing the living proof that it isn't their father's country anymore. Of course, President Obama supporters are seeing the exact same reality and feeling hopeful about it.
How is that going to sort itself out in the future of our politics? And one of the things that's so interesting is it's not as if there's another plausible national black candidate waiting immediately in the wings. It's a fascinating thing that we've come to this pass.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: I'll let others in on this but I'll say, briefly, we had never imagined ten years ago that there would be a black presidential candidate who would galvanize a generation of voters the way that Barack Obama did. What we're seeing, of course, is that those voters tend to come out only when he's on the ballot. So the next step, if we're to be optimistic about the social compact, where the social compact relies upon much greater participatory democracy, is that many of those newly minted voters begin to see that they have a role to play in the midterms, in the off-year elections.
BARNEY FRANK: That's why you shouldn't tell them that national politics is irrelevant.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: Well, I wouldn't tell them – I just never got a chance to tell a Congressman that national politics is irrelevant. [laughter]
BARNEY FRANK: But you just did. I mean, your message about …
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: And I've been waiting 50 years!
BARNEY FRANK: No, that's your fault. You could have called any of them up, and I swear to you, they'd …[laughter]
TODD PURDHAM: Now we're going to move. It's time for questions from the audience. But before we do that, I did want to ask Katrina -- so if you move to microphones at the side aisles there are wireless mics -- I wanted to ask you one quick question, Katrina, and that is: Our whole history is the story of agitators making change happen. The Nation has been at the forefront of that for decades. Our fellow Princetonian, Norman Thomas, never won the presidency, but so many of his ideas became accepted realities of American life. What are the hot button issues of today that seem impossible to resolve, that if we look back 50 years from now will have been seen as no-brainers and our grandchildren will say, "Why did they ever fight about that?"
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Well, Norman Thomas said there were no lost causes, in his view, only causes waiting to be won. Boy, do we have time? Medicare for all. Full employment. Truly a country that is not a white supremacist country, that is one that fulfills the promise for all. Free college education. An end to these endless wars, which are devaluing the very principles we claim to uphold as a nation. But it is the case that what starts as "just cannot be done" moves into the mainstream.
I would say one thing related to that because Barney Frank is right: the media too often in this country has been sensationalistic, has been too adversarial. I believe in skepticism. But the candidate Professor Troutt is talking about isn't going to get media air until people know there are people like this or there are possibilities happening …
TODD PURDHAM: Because the media will say he has no chance.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Well, no, it's just not interesting. That someone is working for the common good or trying to be, as Justice Marshall said, in the trenches, slogging it out, day to day, that doesn't get the air time. I think the media that is valuable is Ferguson. What happened in Ferguson to me is fascinating, not just because there's a new generation organizing in new ways for social justice but with all the problems with Twitter – and I know this city was afflicted with false Twitter, the Marathon – but you wouldn't have known – the national television, cable wasn't on Michael Brown's death – without Twitter.
I think there is a new medium that would have played a role in the civil rights movement of a different time. But we're seeing new forms of media, new forms of agitation around not-so-new issues, but issues that have not yet been fulfilled and where promise …
TODD PURDHAM: Questions from the audience.
Q: We're talking about Republicans. Recently a biography of Governor Rockefeller came out. In 1964, he made a speech where he was booed, almost booed from the stage, because of his stand on civil rights. Governor Romney, the first one, walked out of that convention because of civil rights. Now we have a governor in Massachusetts who, I think, could lead their Republican Party in a different direction. The question is do we need a new Republican Party, literally a new Republican Party, rather than just a factually Republican Party?
BARNEY FRANK: There is no difference. There is no law that says: This is the Republican Party, we get a new one. The question is the Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is essentially determined by the people who show up and vote in primaries, and I am hopeful that we'll see it.
But I will tell you, even in Massachusetts, Charlie Baker is clearly light years away from the Neanderthals that dominate the Republican Party in Congress, but even in New England, the Republicans picked up two seats in the House. They were both very right wing Tea Party guys in Maine and in New Hampshire. Again, I wish it was the case, but there's no mechanism by which you say, "This is the new party, we're the old party." People have got to get out and vote in primaries.
MARGARET MARSHALL: As an Independent – I actually am an Independent. I'm a card-carrying Independent.
TODD PURDHAM: You're the growing part of the electorate.
MARGARET MARSHALL: There's a huge problem. We have a two-party system at the moment. And third parties, generally speaking, haven't done terribly well. Although every now and then, somebody gets so exasperated they think they can start a third party. That's also part of our tradition. We have two parties, and somehow people have to figure out how to get legislation through to make things work. When you get somebody like Charlie Baker, who isn't at there screaming in, your word, a Neanderthal way, I am hopeful that with our new Senate president and with the Speaker of the House and with decent people …
BARNEY FRANK: No question it'll happen in Massachusetts. But Massachusetts is very much the exception. When you make a mistake in this state you say, "Well, why can't they get together and work it out?"
MARGARET MARSHALL: No, no, no, I understand.
BARNEY FRANK: I want to be very explicit. The Republican Party in the Congress today is dominated by people who do not believe in government and do not accept the notion that it's a good thing for it to work. To them, less is better. I think what we need to do is free up the resources so when we do get some control, we can have the government do things. It's not that people don't get along with each other …
MARGARET MARSHALL: No, no, I don't mean getting well, I mean …
BARNEY FRANK: … it's an ideological divide.
TODD PURDHAM: So we just have to hope that the spirit of Massachusetts is indeed the spirit of America. [laughter] But now there's a question on this side of the room.
Q: This is in some ways a perfect setup. First of all, I think it's not just primaries, it's midterms. Look who voted last week – white men and white women, by and large. Young people didn't vote and minorities didn't vote. Without them, you see what happens.
But the day before the election, Mayor Menino's funeral was held. For those of you who don't live here, during the days from his death the week before until his funeral, he laid in state, there was a huge, huge outpouring. People stood in the sleet and the rain, the most disgusting day we've had this year. And I'm not trying to take away from Tom Menino; he did a lot of really good things. But nobody stood up that whole weekend and maybe it wasn't appropriate. The Governor's eulogy was very tender and sweet, and Marty Walsh – but nobody stood up and said … When he filled the potholes, that's what you're thanking him for, when he went to Roxbury and he went to Dorchester and those were the people who came, nobody said, "He was a Democrat. He believed in government. That's why he delivered these services to you. Go out tomorrow and vote for the Democrats." And they didn't!
BARNEY FRANK: I said half of it. [laughter] I commented on MSNBC, CNBC, and I specifically made the point that Tom Menino was a man who believed in government, whose dedication was to delivering through government and the public response shows what can happen when government is able to do the right things. I think it wasn't appropriate to get quite so partisan there, but I did make the pro-government point.
Q: Well, I didn't see you. Because I was watching Fox. [laughter]
BARNEY FRANK: You were watching Fox News? [laughter]
Q: Anyway, I just thought that was a missed opportunity. But I'm glad to know, Congressman, that it wasn't entirely.
TODD PURDHAM: There's another question waiting, but I can't resist saying in response to you that when the special election was held to fill Paul Wellstone's seat in Minnesota, a rally in his memory turned into just such a partisan thing and it's widely considered that it contributed to the loss of Fritz Mondale.
But anyway, I'm sorry, you have a question, sir?
Q: I want to pick up on the comment that was made about the new media. Given that a lot of people do regard the government as very dysfunctional now, it is going to change, something will happen to fix this problem. When everything got started 200 years ago, we needed representatives. It was a long way to get people together, to gather, to share opinions, share ideas and work things out. So we needed representatives for people to do that.
Today, because people are linked in different ways for technology reasons and other things, you truly could have more of a referendum-based process and more direct participation. So these ideas of locality are less powerful. And that sounds very naive; that sounds like sort of one simple solution. But I'd just like you to talk a little bit about how some of these things that are happening outside of politics might cause politics and the system to change in some way.
BARNEY FRANK: I want to respond to one part of that, this notion about dysfunctional. Yes, the federal government has been dysfunctional, the president and Congress, since 2011. But that is clearly the result of a very rightwing faction in the Republican Party taking over. The reason is this. Please go back and look at 2009 and 2010. Look at 2007 and 2008. Look at the Clinton administration, the George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. You may not have liked what was happening but things were happening. This whole notion– in fact, in 2009 and 2010, when Obama was president, he had a Democratic Congress, we got healthcare. Not perfect, but an advance. We got financial reform. We repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell. We expanded the ability of women to sue when they were being mistreated. We did a couple of other things. You don't read about dysfunction in the sense of nothing happening until the Tea Party people take over. So the problem is not structural at the federal level. It is electoral.
The other thing is, in terms of referenda, I have to say, we talked about race and same-sex marriage, there are some areas where public opinion would be very helpful. But it would not have been helpful to either racial equality legally or same-sex marriage to have had referenda early on in the process.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: Or now. That's what the Michigan case was about. The Supreme Court's decision in Grutter was essentially overturned from Michigan by referenda.
Can I just say something about localities? About three years ago, my family and I moved from New York City to the United States of America. [laughter] Turns out it was 11 miles away. [laughter] And we moved to a wonderful town in New Jersey where we discovered how critically important localism is, legally and culturally, to the way we live our lives. What we discovered was that thing I had been teaching in local government and state government civil rights classes for a long time. We discovered in our own lives how critically important the police power authority within each incorporated municipality really is in terms of determining who's a member, who's not, the quality of the schools, the property tax levies, the quality of services, the things that will enhance or diminish our property values.
And these particular levers are so critically important to the sense of opportunity that everybody in a middle class municipality, generally a suburb, which is where most of us still live in this country, really is. I mean, that's how we realize a sense of democracy. That's how we realize a sense of community. And it really boils down in many respects to a matter of place, to the rules around place.
So it may be true that the new media has opened up more opportunities for us to sort of enlarge things. I'm a big fan of regionalism. I think we can overcome some of the parochialism and the exclusionary tendencies of localism by looking much more regionally and organizing much more regionally. But I'm just not so sure that whether or not we can Twitter or whether or not we have access to a more magnificent chat board is really going to make a lot of difference while the rules around our own jurisdictions remain in place.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I second that emotion. I'm a provincial. I live in the heart of the universe, New York City. Brooklyn is now the heart of that universe. But in New York City, first of all, the mayoral race, there were 50 fora around the city. Hundreds of people came out. And there's something really exciting going on in the city which, by the way, came from Porto Alegre, Brazil, but participatory budgeting going on in communities around the city. There have been sessions where you have 1500 people on a cold night coming together to talk about the local budget. I think that's very important.
I'm not a huge fan of social media. I think with Ferguson you saw the ability to break through the gatekeepers. And it has energy only if it's fused with organizing on the ground and fused with voting. I think Barney Frank is right, that there is a danger on the left, that people fall into a paralysis and say "Voting doesn't matter." But I guarantee you, the younger generation – we had a cover story about this – they came out of Ferguson, not just tweeting, but registering voters.
BARNEY FRANK: In Ferguson, but not in the rest of the country.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: No, no, but I also think – and if you can believe this, I just did a four-hour interview with Edward Snowden in Moscow. He is very critical of the Internet in the sense that people fall into tribes and only talk to each other. It's like a filter bubble. We need a broader range of views and not just talking to each other – with all respect for everyone here and everyone on the panel. [laughter]
MARGARET MARSHALL: I want to make this quick point because I want to give the questioner her time. It is representative government. And the point about representative government is if you are a Senator or a Congressman, you are supposed to represent everybody in your district. That's why I think the gerrymandering that's going on now and is being tolerated and being endorsed by the Supreme Court is so bad. Leaving aside the race issue, if you keep drawing the districts that it includes only people who think like you do, we've got a real problem. The only way you can change that, if you can get out and vote.
I also like the fact that you have to stand up and be counted. The anonymity of social media, I think, is a very dangerous thing. So you want representatives to make sure that they in fact represent everybody in their district. I would take the United States and cut it into squares.
BARNEY FRANK: We should represent their interests, not necessarily their opinions on any given topic.
MARGARET MARSHALL: No, of course not. You have to be a judge. You have to exercise your judgment.
TODD PURDHAM: Perhaps the crucial person in the House debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was William McCulloch of Ohio, a rock-ribbed conservative, whose district is now represented by John Boehner. But he'd been descended from abolitionists and he was a passionate supporter of civil rights. He had one declaration in his law office at home in Piqua, Ohio. It was an excerpt from Burke's letter to the electors in Bristol in which he said: "Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment. And he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion." I think that should be required reading.
BARNEY FRANK: You do know he got beaten the next election. [laughter]
TODD PURDHAM: He did not get beaten next election. He retired in 1972.
BARNEY FRANK: No, not McCulloch. Burke.
TODD PURDHAM: Oh, Burke, I'm sorry.
BARNEY FRANK: Burke got beat in the election.
Q: One issue that has not been mentioned today is climate change. And I'm wondering how increasing shortages of food and water and increasing relocations of populations will exacerbate the issues we're talking about today.
TODD PURDHAM: Professor, do you want to take a first crack at that, because you've written about environmental justice.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: Well, not as much. To tell you the truth, I'm like so many Americans, really trying to get smart about climate change. One thing I'll say about climate change though, that I really appreciate, beyond its details, its science and its imperatives, the specific imperatives about what we do with our lives, is that to me climate change is not only the most important issue in our lives because without a planet none of these things matter, but also because it sort of brings full circle something that I cling to in my own work, maybe somewhat naively, and I try to advance it in the book.
And it's something that Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about from Birmingham jail and in some of the sermons before he was arrested. He talked at that point about mutuality. He said that, "We live our lives in an inescapable network of mutuality bound in a single fabric of destiny." And to be saying that at that tumultuous time must have seemed poetic, moral and impossible.
I think where we live now in this country and in this world is really at the crossroads of a sense of mutuality because of the imperatives of our climate, because time has really run out, that we can't keep putting off these decisions. And we all must act with shared interests. But also, I think in our communities we're experiencing that now. If I'm hopeful about anything, it is the sense that we're running out of space to run to. In law schools, the libertarian professors often like to talk about the importance of exit. And if you go to an urban planning department, they call that sprawl. And then it becomes a question of climate change, because it's such a waste of our resources.
We cannot keep exiting. We will have to live in communities together. And those communities are becoming increasingly politically, economically and environmentally interdependent. So that's really been my starting point on climate change, the recognition that we really are all in this together.
BARNEY FRANK: I have a very important point I have to make. Climate change was a loser for the Democrats. At this point, we have got to find a better way to deal with not just the argument, but the substance. If you go to the white working class men whose votes we lost, they're first response when you talk about environmentalism is job loss. We have to be more sensitive to that issue. It doesn't mean you back away from it. But we have to do better prioritizing. I think the problem is that it has been done as if this a moral imperative and the economic impacts can be ignored. We have to factor them in.
TODD PURDHAM: I've been told we have time for one last question, and you're it.
Q: I'd like you to look at this entire presidency of Barack Obama and discuss the impact of racism on how much he has been able to get done, how much he has been obstructed, and how much is the legislative partisanship involved, how much is the media involved. And what does this bode for another president of color?
TODD PURDHAM: Well, Bill Clinton used to say when he was introduced in a very effusive way by someone, "We could stop right now and have had a very nice evening." [laughter] I think we could start right now and have a three-day conference. Does anyone want to …
MARGARET MARSHALL: I just want to say, the next job that I want is to be the person who selects the photograph that goes on the front page. I mean, this is not modern social media but if you picked up the New York Times yesterday morning, there was a picture on the front page, which I just loved, because it showed President Barack Obama engaged and talking, and there was Mitch McConnell. [laughter] Now, whether he was like that through the whole meeting, I don't know. I would charge I don't participate in politics. [laughter]
BARNEY FRANK: You have to bifurcate it. As far as the Republicans are concerned – and again, 2009 and 2010, Barack Obama has one of the best legislative records of any president in a two-year period – financial reform, healthcare, Don't Ask Don't Tell, other important issues. The Republicans who took office in 2010, their attitudes, those who were in Congress, were not motivated racially. These are people who ideologically want to tear government down and don't see any value to it. The question then is to what extent was racial resentment of Obama a motivating factor? And I think that's significant. I think the Professor was right, that when we talk about class, we try to talk about economics, but they hear "them getting my money." So as far as the Republican Congress is concerned, they were as angry at him as they could have been, no matter what. But it clearly is a factor in his electoral populace.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: You still hear birtherism, that is so racially coded. But I think the president overestimated the ability ….
BARNEY FRANK: That he wasn't born here.
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I'm sorry, this birther movement – even giving it the name movement is to denigrate movements.
BARNEY FRANK: You've got to say "birtha" here in Massachusetts. [laughter]
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The demand that he show his birth certificate. But I will say, he overestimated the ability to do post-partisan politics and he underestimated the vitriol and virulence of the hatred of people like Mitch McConnell, who, as Barney Frank said, determined not only to take down President Obama – he said it openly, that was his first mission – and also to destroy government. I don't quite understand why all these people – we haven't talked about money – spent millions and millions of dollars to go to Washington to fix the very government they claim they want to serve.
The last point: I do think President Obama, by keeping those banks alive and not asking for some payback from those banks and not handling homeowners in terrible distress, of all races and classes, I think that really put us in the place, this ugly place, not of his own fault. But those banks, you could have demanded more from those banks. Barney Frank has been at the forefront of that, and they got off pretty scot-free and homeowners are still suffering.
BARNEY FRANK: The banks did it first. They have put up an awful lot of money since then. We didn't do enough for homeowners, without question. But the other point I'll just make would be this: you're absolutely right. The president's biggest mistake was thinking he could talk some of these hyperpartisan people into a reasonable mode. When he said in 2008 that he was going to govern in a post-partisan manner, and I'll have to say I told you so, I told some of his staff that he had given me post-partisan depression. [laughter]
TODD PURDHAM: Professor, you have the last word.
DAVID DANTE TROUTT: I really don't want to kill the laugh line. This is something we could talk about at great length. But I will say this: I want to offer this up -- my 12-year-old daughter was good enough to come with me on this trip. We struggle with this at home quite a bit and I think part of what we struggle with is something that a lot of black families struggle with, frankly. There are many, many complicated ways to see the Obama presidency. We are not beyond its nuances. We are certainly not beyond criticizing certain emphases of the administration, certain policies of the administration. But we are strong supporters. I think what we have seen in the last four years, our household, and in many households – and this is something that's important for me to try to read in black communities across America – is whether or not the nuanced political arguments about the vitriolic opposition to Obama's policies really make any sense, whether they resonate. And they don't.
I don't want to pretend to be the representative of black America, but I have to say there is a profound sense that what we are witnessing is a kind of a stark racism unlike anything this generation has ever seen. [applause] They're saddened by it. They're angered by it. They're not fooled by it. They go to school and Obama among their conservative peers has become – the mere word has become an epithet. The willingness to talk about him as somebody who can and should be murdered, with frequency and glibness, is not something that they will easily forget.
So something is wrong. Something is profoundly wrong in this. I mean, we disagree, and folks had a lot of contempt for Bill Clinton. Folks had a lot of contempt for George Bush. But what we're seeing in the popular reaction to this particular president is not lost on folks of color and it suggests more than anything that the Supreme Court says, that we've got a long way to go.
TODD PURDHAM: I'm loath to say that's a good note to end on, but it's certainly a plangent note to end on. And I'd like to thank you all for coming. I'd like to thank the panel. [applause]
W.C. Fields used to say that he hated working with dogs and children. I feel a little bit that way today coming here to this panel to try to corral two of the most distinguished citizens in Massachusetts, and my fellow moderator, Congressman Frank. [laughter] And my old friend Katrina, and the Professor, who's a new acquaintance.
Anyway, it's a great occasion. And I think you see here today how the Commonwealth of Massachusetts owes a debt of gratitude to someone who spent 40 years in the House. [applause] And to Justice Marshall. [applause] I feel very honored to have been here today, even for a few hours. And thanks very much for having us all. [applause]
JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUMColumbia Point, Boston MA 02125 (617) 514-1600


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Man caught with suspected stolen goods
(CNS): Officers rounded up a suspect burglar in the early hours of Wednesday morning in West Bay as they patrolled the area where an indecent assault took place last week. Just before 3:3oam yesterday, the police spotted a man behaving suspiciously. When they spoke to him, he became uncooperative and fled along the beach but the police chased him. When he was apprehended they found property they suspected was stolen. The 36-year-old man from West Bay was arrested on suspicion of theft and possession of an offensive weapon and he is currently on police bail.


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There has been an increase in the number of abandoned children, while the number of families willing to adopt children is on the decline, a report released by the Children's Welfare League Foundation said yesterday.
"There were 509 abandoned children reported last year, which was a 40 percent increase from the 2001 figure," the foundation's executive director Alicea Wang (王育敏) told a news conference in Taipei, citing figures from the Ministry of the Interior.
The figure did not include unreported cases or abandoned children who died before being discovered, Wang said.
The statistics included children who were deserted right after being born and those whose parents had later refused to take care of them, Wang said.
Economic difficulties, such as low or unstable income, child birth out of wedlock and the incapacity of parents "were the top three reasons for children being deserted," she said.
What worried Wang more, however, was the declining number of families willing to adopt these abandoned children.
"There are fewer people willing to adopt children," she said. "Comparing last year's figure to that of 10 years ago, the number of adoptions has declined by nearly 35 percent."
Rising child care costs and advancements in ectogenesis technologies are among the causes of the decline, Wang said.
The adoption rate is especially low for certain groups of children.
"Babies born with disorders, babies of drug-addicted parents and babies with darker skin are the `deserted of the deserted,'" Wang said.
"These babies may have been taking drugs from their mothers through the umbilical cord, and therefore would have symptoms such as restlessness or dyspnea," she said.
"But the phenomena would in fact gradually disappear over time. Babies with darker skin are sometimes unwelcome because adoptive parents do not want their children to look too `foreign,'" Wang said.