Arianna Huffington

The Tea Party 600: Canaries in the Political Coal Mine?

2010-02-08T18:34:17-05:00

There was much to mock about this past weekend's Tea Party convention: the low turnout, Tom Tancredo's repulsive immigrant bashing, a conspiracy-drenched documentary claiming the financial crisis was deliberately engineered by radical 1960s ideologues bent on bringing down capitalism, and, of course, Sarah Palin's keynote lite.

But it would be a huge mistake to dismiss the movement that led to the event.

Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is ugly. Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is race-based. Yes, some of the Tea Party movement is being bankrolled by conservative political groups -- and all of it promoted by Fox News. But focusing only on those elements obscures the fact that some of what's fueling the movement is based on a completely legitimate anger directed at Washington and the political establishment of both parties.

Think of the Tea Party movement as a boil alerting us to the infection lurking under the skin of the body politic.

In his recent piece about the Tea Parties, The New Yorker's Ben McGrath wrote:

If there was a central theme to the proceedings, it was probably best expressed in the refrain 'Can you hear us now?', conveying a long-standing grievance that the political class in Washington is unresponsive to the needs and worries of ordinary Americans. Republicans and Democrats alike were targets of derision.

Though this weekend's event had a decidedly conservative bent, it was interesting to watch how during the Q&A session after her speech, both Palin and Judson Phillips, the chief organizer of the convention, proudly informed the crowd that neither of their spouses vote Republican.

And thanks to the botched bank bailout, anti-government rhetoric -- a conservative hallmark since Ronald Reagan branded government the problem, not the solution -- has moved beyond the ideological right.

Indeed, at times in her speech, Palin sounded like the second coming of Huey Long. "While people on Main Street look for jobs, people on Wall Street -- they're collecting billions and billions in your bailout bonuses," she said. "And everyday Americans are wondering: Where are the consequences? They helped to get us into this worst economic situation since the Great Depression. Where are the consequences?"

I was within an inch of singing along: "Yeah, where are the consequences!? You tell 'em, Sarah!"

I've written about how the middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse. And the bleak indicators just keep piling up: a new study found that one in eight Americans received emergency food aid last year -- up almost 50 percent from 2005. The numbers are even worse for kids: one in five. That's 14 million children facing hunger. In America.

Can you hear them now?

Tim Geithner doesn't seem to. There he was again this weekend, on ABC's This Week, assuring us that "the economy is now growing again," and "we're seeing some encouraging signs of healing."

At the same time, on NBC's Meet the Press, his predecessor Hank Paulson was equally upbeat: "I have great confidence that we have touched a dynamic private sector in this country that they're eventually going to begin creating jobs." And a little later, he let us know that the deficit is "by far the most serious long-term challenge we, as a nation, face. All these other issues... are minor compared to that."

These other issues he was referring to were jobs and the epidemic of foreclosures. Minor, eh?

Can you hear them now?

Is there anything worse, when you're struggling and mad as hell, than being told to chill out? Geithner's latest tone-deaf pep talk, and Paulson's faith that "ultimately" there will be jobs, certainly aren't going to assuage the anxiety and anger middle-class Americans are feeling.

"Discontent with the present and apprehension about the future have become the background noise of our politics," writes Tim Rutten in the LA Times, "yet both sides of the congressional aisle seem deaf to the din."

He then goes on to quote historian Ian Kershaw: "There are times -- they mark the danger point for a political system -- when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing."

Maybe that explains the lackadaisical, going-through-the-motions response of the White House to the rising chorus of middle-class anger, and the prediction among many economists that, in the end, there will be no substantial financial reform.

Calling the administration's latest proposals "superficial," Simon Johnson laments: "There will be no serious attempt to cut financial institutions down to a size at which they could be allowed to fail. With their incentive structure intact -- they get the upside and regular folk get the downside -- Big Finance is ready to roll into the next great global boom-bust cycle."

In fact, for Wall Street, the next boom appears to have already started. Our "recovery" might be "jobless," but it's certainly not bonusless. And, no, poor Lloyd Blankfein getting a bonus of "only" $9 million this year won't diffuse the populist outrage. And comments like this from compensation consultant Mark Borges don't help: "It's almost as if he's taking a bullet for everyone else."

How brave of him. I'm sure we'd have no trouble finding someone among the 16.5 million unemployed and underemployed willing to take that gold-plated bullet.

It's ironic: Democrats have been waiting 30 years for a populist movement to counter the Reagan Revolution. And now that it has, Democrats find themselves the targets of that movement, caught in flagrante delicto with the big banks -- and more in thrall to the deficit hysteria sweeping Washington instead of fighting for an aggressive, comprehensive plan to rescue the middle class.

"Washington now has its priorities all wrong," writes Paul Krugman, "all the talk is about how to shave a few billion dollars off government spending, while there's hardly any willingness to tackle mass unemployment. Policy is headed in the wrong direction -- and millions of Americans will pay the price."

And more and more of them, frustrated and convinced that their leaders don't have any empathy for their situation, will increasingly turn to movements like the Tea Parties.

Will our leaders -- finally -- hear them now?

Sunday Roundup

2010-02-06T23:34:35-05:00

The difference between Sarah Palin's reaction to Rahm Emanuel's ill-advised use of the word "retarded" (directed at liberals), and Rush Limbaugh's use of the word (directed at advocates for the mentally handicapped) speaks volumes. When it was reported that Emanuel used the word in a private meeting -- one time -- Palin quickly took to Facebook and, mentioning Emanuel by name, called on President Obama to fire him. When Limbaugh repeatedly used the term on his radio show, Palin did nothing. Then, after being goaded by commentators, she had her spokesperson offer a generic criticism of "demeaning name calling," never mentioning Limbaugh by name -- and even had her spokesperson phone Rush to assure him she hadn't used his name. Then, in an interview with Fox that aired this morning, Palin defended Limbaugh's use of "retards" as "satire." Which it wasn't -- unless I'm missing the humor in calling a meeting of advocates for the mentally handicapped "a retard summit."

Sleep Challenge 2010: Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough Keep Me Up All Night... Lessons (Yawn) Learned

2010-02-04T17:21:53-05:00

Today is the last official day of the HuffPost/Glamour Sleep Challenge 2010... and I ended things by not getting a wink of sleep last night.

No, this was not an act of defiance or the sleep equivalent of a last day of school blowout. It was a twist of fate -- and scheduling.

Last night, HuffPost LA hosted a party in honor of Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough -- and Mika's wonderful new book, All Things At Once, which will resonate with every woman trying to pull off the high wire act of balancing work and family.

Sleep-wise, the trouble was not the party but the fact that Mika and Joe had asked me to co-host the show with them this morning which, since Morning Joe goes live at 6 a.m. Eastern time, meant I had to be at NBC's Burbank studio before 2:30 a.m. for hair and makeup (and had to leave my house around 1:30).

So, in between the last guest leaving the party and my heading to the studio, I did an hour of meditation but didn't actually go to sleep. Talk about missing my 8-hour goal!

Instead of sleeping, I talked about sleep, our Sleep Challenge, and the benefits of changing our sleep-deprived culture. Mika and Joe ended the show as they always do, by asking, "What have we learned today?" I said I'd learned that if you have sleep credit in the bank, you can occasionally get away with missing your goal -- especially if you're having fun.

But here's the thing: because of all the lessons I've learned during the Sleep Challenge, and the newfound importance I've given to getting enough sleep (and the amazing results I've seen from it), I'm not worried that one aberrant night is going to throw me off my new sleep routine.

When it comes to sleep, I'm not going to let the perfect become the enemy of the good. As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to do another hour of meditation... and then, tonight, I am going to get right back to my new sleep schedule -- without guilt.

That's been one of the best things about taking part in our Sleep Challenge: it's given me so much more awareness of the importance of getting enough sleep, and shown me how essential it is to make sleep a priority. Making a sleep appointment -- and treating it as seriously as I would a business appointment or a doctor's appointment -- has really worked for me, and given me a sleep structure and routine I can count on.

I also learned how valuable it is to talk to people about sleep. It's as though you are enlisting the world around you in helping you meet your goal. Not only did people share with me their sleep tips, but having people constantly ask me if I was getting enough sleep or making sure I wasn't drinking coffee after noon or staying up past my scheduled bed time were a wonderful safeguard against falling into old, bad habits.

You don't have to write about your sleep experiences twice a week and publish them on HuffPost and Glamour to get the same benefits. Tell your friends and family about your sleep goals -- put it out there -- and watch how many "sleep angels" start looking out for you and holding you to your sleep commitment. It's like a Field of Sweet Dreams: build it, and they will come (to tuck you in).

Our Sleep Challenge has also helped focus media attention on the seriousness of the issue. I am now regularly asked about sleep and our sleep-deprived culture, and read or watch stories about sleep and sleep deprivation much more often than before. Hopefully we are nearing a tipping point, and more and more people will make getting enough sleep an essential part of their daily -- and nightly -- lives.

And while the official HuffPost/Glamour sleep challenge is coming to an end, our commitment to covering the issue and bringing you the latest sleep-related information will continue.

I'm sticking with it, and I hope you will too.

Thanks to everyone who took part in Sleep Challenge 2010, especially my sleep buddy, Cindi Leive, and her great team at Glamour -- and our HuffPost sleep team, led by Living section editor Alana Elias Kornfeld, who has helped put together quite an encyclopedic collection of information on the subject.

Sweet dreams, everyone...

Only Empathy Can Save Us: Why Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization Is This Month's HuffPost Book Club Pick

2010-02-03T12:30:30-05:00

For this month's HuffPost Book Club, I have chosen a big book -- both figuratively and literally. Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization clocks in at close to 700 pages and sets out to present nothing less than -- as Rifkin puts it -- "a new rendering of human history and the meaning of human existence."

This alternative history focuses not on the conflicts, antagonisms, and power struggles that have marked human progress, but on "the empathic evolution of the human race and the profound ways it has shaped our development and will likely decide our fate as a species."

Empathy, Rifkin tells us -- and backs up with new scientific data -- is not a quaint behavior trotted out during intermittent visits to a food bank or during the Haiti telethon. Instead, it lies at the very core of human existence.

This is something I've long believed. Indeed, I dedicated a whole book to exploring what I called The Fourth Instinct -- that part of the human character that compels us to go beyond our impulses for survival, sex, and power, and drives us to expand the boundaries of our caring to include our communities and the world around us.

And, in the 15 years since then -- and especially since the economic meltdown -- the role empathy plays in our lives has only grown more important. In fact, in this time of economic hardship, political instability, and rapid technological change, empathy is the one quality we most need if we're going to survive and flourish in the 21st century.

It's important to keep in mind what empathy is -- and what it's not. It's different than sympathy, which is passive. "Empathy," explains Rifkin, "conjures up active engagement -- the willingness of an observer to become part of another's experience, to share the feeling of that experience."

But empathy is not just about feeling for another's suffering. As Rifkin points out: "One can also empathize with another's joy." Indeed, according to Rifkin, "empathic moments are the most intensely alive experiences we ever have. We empathize with each other's struggles against death and for life. One acknowledges the whiff of death in another's frailties and vulnerabilities. No one ever empathizes with a perfect being."

As he does in all of his work, Rifkin really swings for the fences in The Empathic Civilization, challenging us all to rise above the clutter of our daily lives, and explore life's larger questions. He is that rare breed, one whose disappearance is often and rightly bemoaned: a public intellectual. Or, as the New York Times once called him: "a social and ethical prophet." Aside from authoring 17 bestselling books, he's the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, an advisor to the European Union, and a senior lecturer at Wharton's Executive Education Program.

I chose The Empathic Civilization as this month's selection because, besides being a brilliant read and offering a vitally important perspective, it is the perfect companion piece to last month's selection, Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. While Shadow Elite lays out precisely who and what currently have a stranglehold on our political system, The Empathic Civilization shows us the way to decisively break that hold.

Rifkin divides the book into three parts. The first takes a look at the new scientific discoveries that lead to the conclusion that rather than being naturally aggressive, acquisitive, and self-involved, humans are "a fundamentally empathic species" -- what Rifkin calls Homo empathicus. The second part charts the development of human empathy, "from the rise of the great theological civilizations to the ideological age that dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the psychological era that characterized much of the twentieth century," and the emerging trends of the 21st century.

In the third part of the book, Rifkin focuses on the nascent Third Industrial Revolution and the rise of The Age of Empathy. According to Rifkin, the progress of civilization has been a constant struggle between empathy -- increased human connection -- and entropy, the deterioration of the health of the planet. It is, quite literally, a race against time. "We are on the cusp of an epic shift," he writes. "The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy."

Rifkin believes this age will be defined by how well we navigate the massive changes in both information and energy technologies. He explains that every great leap forward in civilization has involved a combination of a communications revolution along with an energy revolution. For instance, the advent of the printing press provided the "means to organize and manage the technologies, organizations, and infrastructure of the coal, steam, and rail revolution." And each one of these leaps expands the circle of empathy -- from tribes, to nation-states, to continents and, if we're lucky, to the entire world.

We are currently going through a communications revolution like no other in human history. But, Rifkin warns, we must guard against universal connectivity becoming an end unto itself. "We talk breathlessly," he writes, "about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What's sorely missing is an overarching reason for why billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end?... Seven billion individual connections, absent any overall unifying purpose, seem a colossal waste of human energy."

The Emphatic Civilization is a fascinating book that boldly challenges the conventional view of human nature embedded in our educational systems, business practices, and political culture -- a view that sees human nature as detached, rational, and objective, and sees individuals as autonomous agents in pursuit primarily of material self-interest. And it seeks to replace that view with a counter-narrative that allows humanity to see itself as an extended family living in a shared and interconnected world.

Please read The Empathic Civilization and join in our month-long discussion about it. Not only will Jeremy Rifkin be regularly blogging about the issues his book raises, we will also be featuring posts from over 30 of the world's leading scientists, scholars, and public policy intellectuals in a many fields, which will allow us to have a robust and informed discussion on what it will take to create and nurture a truly empathic civilization.

Glenn Beck Update: The Backpedaling Begins

2010-02-02T14:24:07-05:00

Click here to read my previous post: "Glenn Beck Goes After Me, But Forgets His Show Is on Video and Lies About Things He 'Never, Never' Said"

So the Glenn Beck backpedal begins. Slowly. But surely.

After initially insisting that he'd never used the word "slaughtered" on the air -- or, if he had, only in reference to Mao, Stalin, or Hitler -- Beck, having been presented with the video evidence, admitted today on his radio show that he'd said it... but insisted he wasn't talking about the Obama administration. And that, even if he was, he wasn't being "literal."

He started his second day on the subject by insisting once again, "I'm pretty sure I'd remember it if I'd said the administration was slaughtering people or was going to slaughter people." But he quickly pivoted to the assertion that when he said "They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered!" he was talking not about the Obama administration, but about SEIU president Andy Stern. He then said that if I wanted to "make the case that Andy Stern is part of this administration...bring it on, girlfriend!" Listen below:

Two things: first of all, it's just as paranoid to say that Andy Stern is taking people to be slaughtered as it is to say it of Obama. Second, it is Beck, not I, who treated Stern as if he was part of the administration. Indeed, for a full ten minutes before making the "slaughtered" comment, in a conspiracy-laced rant, Beck tries to make that exact case, saying Andy Stern "practically lives at the White House." He repeatedly makes fevered connections between Obama, various members of his administration, Stern, George Soros, "anyone around this White House," and "progressives"... all of whom want to turn America into a "Marxist" state.

But, after offering this first explanation (that he wasn't talking about the president), Beck abruptly shifted gears and admitted that, in fact, when he warned that "this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees," the "pilot" in his metaphor was, in fact, Barack Obama.

Then Beck insisted that when he said that the people "in control... are taking you to a place to be slaughtered," he didn't "literally" mean that Barack Obama was going to personally kill people. Listen below:

No, Beck contended again and again and again, the whole time he was just talking about "the economy." Barack Obama is going to slaughter the economy. Even though he clearly said "taking you" not "taking the economy."

So, to review the ever-changing explanations: Beck never used the word "slaughter" -- until it was proven that he did. Then he only used it in reference to Mao, Stalin, or Hitler -- until it was proven that this wasn't the case. Then, when he used it, he wasn't referring to the Obama administration, he was referring to Andy Stern. Then he was referring to Obama -- but didn't mean it literally.

Got it? You might need to use Beck's trademark chalkboard to keep track.

The crux of the matter was never whether Glenn Beck really believes Barack Obama is planning to actually slaughter Americans. It's the damage being done by the inflammatory rhetoric and imagery he constantly uses. The evoking of "slaughter" and "killing sprees" and a president who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" is meant to play into the public's legitimate anxiety over the economy -- and fan the flames of fear.

And that brings us back to the question I originally asked Roger Ailes on This Week: "Aren't you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using -- which is, after all, inciting the American people?"

It remains unanswered.

Davos Diary 2010: Snapshots from My Short But Sweet Visit

2010-02-01T22:43:19-05:00

Because of a jam-packed week, my time at this year's World Economic Forum was limited. But as is always the case with Davos, there were more than a few snapshot-worthy moments.

Things got off to an interesting start before I even arrived. I happened to be on the same flight from D.C. to Zurich as Larry Summers, who was reading Martin Jacques' weighty tome, "When China Rules the World. His review: "Interesting...and disturbing."

I arrived in Davos and went straight to the Newsweek lunch hosted by Lally Weymouth and Fareed Zakaria. Lally had Israeli president Shimon Peres seated on her right and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on her left. But the real tension at her table was between Barney Frank and Gary Cohn, the president and COO of Goldman Sachs.

After the lunch, I chatted with Harvard's Niall Ferguson about the State of the Union speech. "The president's spending freeze is a joke," he exclaimed. Finally, I told him, something you and Paul Krugman agree on!

Then it was off to CNBC's outdoor studio where I was interviewed by Becky Quick for Squawk Box. Here is the clip. Never mind what I said; just take in the gorgeous surroundings -- it's all about the Davos backdrop!

Friday night brought a wave of end-of-week parties.

At the Towers Watson/Wall Street Journal gathering, I ran into Alan Murray, executive editor of the Journal's online operations. Alan and I go way back, and found ourselves reminiscing about the days when our children were in kindergarten and elementary school together in Washington. Back then, neither one of us could ever have imagined that, 15 years later, we'd both be up to our necks in the digital world, living and breathing online news.

As usual, the Google party was packed. Maybe, for Davos, they can temporarily replace "Do No Evil" with "Get More Room." On my way out, I ran into Jacob Weisberg, who had been imbibing at the flavored oxygen bar. I asked him how it was. "Great," he told me, a smile breaking across his face. "It gave me enough energy to last for another hour." His favorite O2 flavor? Eucalyptus.

On Saturday morning I took part in a CNBC debate on gender parity with Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Orit Gadiesh, chairman of Bain and Company. (Read more about the debate here.)

One of the "challengers" at the event was Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. At the end of the discussion, which included much talk about how things would be different if women were in charge, Kristof wondered what would have happened if Lehman Brothers had, in fact, been Lehman Brothers and Sisters.

I said it might still be standing, since the highest form of leadership is the ability to look around corners and see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic. If women are better at maintaining the work-life balance, a less-frazzled, less sleep-deprived Lehman sister might have been able to spot the looming iceberg through the fog of highly leveraged profits and sound the alarm in time.

Glenn Beck Goes After Me, But Forgets His Show Is on Video and Lies About Things He "Never, Never" Said

2010-02-01T19:08:33-05:00

Following up on my back and forth with Roger Ailes yesterday on ABC's This Week, Glenn Beck went on his radio show today and attacked what I'd said about him -- and, in the process, ended up spewing a lot more misinformation.

Beck's key point of contention was over my assertion that he had warned people that they were in danger of being "slaughtered" by the Obama administration and its friends.

Ailes had insisted that Beck had been "talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people, so I think he was probably accurate." Beck and his on-air partners, executive producer and head writer "Stu" Burguiere and contributing editor Pat Gray, tried to stick with that story. Press the play button below to listen and click here for the transcript.

BECK: I don't even know if I've ever used the word "slaughtered." And if I used the word "slaughtered," if it wasn't in a context of Mao, Stalin, or Hitler, it was in the idea that the truth is being slaughtered by this administration... not saying that this administration is going to slaughter anyone.

GRAY: Never, never.

Unfortunately for Ailes, Beck, and Gray -- but fortunately for fans of facts, reality, and the truth -- we live in the era of DVRs, YouTube, and embeddable video. And what Beck actually said is recorded for posterity.

Here is a rant Beck delivered on November 3, 2009 about SEIU's Andy Stern and the Obama administration (the "slaughtered" remark is at 9:30):

And here's the transcript:

BECK: I told you yesterday, buckle up your seatbelt, America. Find the exit -- there's one here, here, and here. Find the exit closest to you and prepare for a crash landing. Because this plane is coming down, because the pilot is intentionally steering it into the trees! Most likely, it'll happen sometime after Christmas. You're gonna see this economy come up -- we're already seeing it, and now it's gonna start coming back down again. And when you see the effects of what they're doing to the economy, remember these words: We will survive. No -- we'll do better than survive, we will thrive. As long as these people are not in control. They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered!

Not Stalin. Not Hitler. Not Mao. Not "the truth" being slaughtered. YOU. "They are taking YOU to a place to be slaughtered."

Chiding me on This Week, Ailes said of Beck: "I think he speaks English. I don't know. I mean, I don't misinterpret any of his words."

Well, if Ailes didn't misinterpret what Beck was saying (and if Beck didn't misinterpret his own words), I suppose that means they either weren't paying attention -- or they are willfully walking away from the kind of paranoid statements that have become Beck's stock-in-trade.

And, perhaps, we also misunderstood or misinterpreted what was being said this morning when Beck's cohorts had so much fun mocking the suffering of millions of people all across this country.

After playing a soundbyte of me on This Week, saying: "There's a lot of suffering out there..." Pat Gray jumped in:

GRAY: What is this, Haiti?

BURGUIERE: What suffering?

I guess they missed that brief mention in the news about record unemployment, record foreclosures, record credit card failures, and the growing numbers of Americans going hungry.

That, Pat and Stu, is "suffering." Right here in America, not Haiti.

Finally, Beck asked me to explain why, in light of my criticism of him, I had invited him at last year's TIME 100 dinner to write a blog post for HuffPost.

First of all, let me re-issue my invitation. From the day we launched, HuffPost has always welcomed blog posts from people with whom we disagree, and preferred a full debate about the issues to just preaching to the converted.

At the same time, Glenn, as you would find out if you decided to take me up on my invitation and went backstage where our bloggers go to post, there are guidelines that have to be followed -- and they include a prohibition on conspiracy theories or inflammatory claims. So no post mentioning people being led to "slaughter" or being "the next victim" of an administration "killing spree." And no grand conspiracy theory in which you claim, as you did on your show back in August, to have deciphered a secret code proving that President Obama is trying to create an oligarchy -- although you spelled it "O-L-I-G-A-R-H-Y" on your chalkboard.

These are actually very good ground rules for Fox News to adopt. I'll send you a copy and cc Roger.

For context, it's good to remember that Glenn Beck didn't come out of nowhere. He's the latest example of what the great historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics," which he defined as angry minds that traffic in "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy," and that see "the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms... always manning the barricades of civilization."

Sound familiar?

Beck preys on fear, political instability, and economic suffering, which, in turn, means that Fox News profits from fear, political instability, and economic suffering. The question I didn't get the chance to ask Roger Ailes is: you put Beck on the air -- would you want to live in a world in which Beck triumphed? In which his worldview won out? Is that a world you want your children to grow up in?

UPDATE, 2/2/10: "Glenn Beck Update: The Backpedaling Begins"

***

BONUS: Here's a montage Brave New Films put together showing, side-by-side how wrong Ailes and Beck were.

Sleep Challenge 2010: Getting Horizontal on the Way to Gender Parity

2010-02-01T14:48:11-05:00

So I made it through my Travel Week from Hell not too much worse for wear. I wasn't able to meet my 8-hour sleep goal most nights but by sleeping on planes and grabbing power naps here and there, I didn't miss by much. And by sticking to the anti-jet lag rules I laid out in my last post, I was able to avoid the nastiest consequences of a globe-hopping schedule.

The other thing that helped was never shutting up about the importance of getting enough sleep. Wherever I went, from Toronto to Chicago to Washington to Davos, I kept talking about the sleep challenge and why we're doing it. I did this partly to spread the word, but also to keep reinforcing for myself the lessons I've learned over the past four weeks. It was as if I was acting as my own Sleep-Skippers Anonymous sponsor. "My name is Arianna, and I used to be sleep-deprived..."

Another reminder of the downside of not getting enough shut-eye came from Harry Reid, who was caught yawning during the State of the Union speech on Wednesday and got major flack for it. C'mon, Senator, it's not too late to join Sleep Challenge 2010. It may not keep Frank Rich from describing you as "the face of Democratic fecklessness in the Senate," but I promise you'll feel more up to the task of trying to prove him wrong.

The exaltation of exhaustion, particularly the effect it has on women in the workforce, was one of the things discussed during a panel on gender parity I took part in on Saturday in Davos.

Scheduled to be broadcast on CNBC on Thursday, "The Gender Agenda" focused on how we can get more women in charge -- and how that would affect businesses and the world. At the moment, only 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a woman in charge.

My fellow panelists, including Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Orit Gadiesh, chairman of Bain and Company, all agreed on the value of achieving gender parity in the workplace but not on how to make it happen.

I stressed the need to change a corporate culture that continues to equate workaholism with success -- and often leads to talented women jettisoning their careers in order to have a healthier, more well-rounded life.

My friend Pattie Sellers of Fortune, who has interviewed many of the world's female business leaders, says one of the main issues that arises is the fact that women tend to think about power very differently than men do. "Women think about power horizontally," she told me. "Women have a broader view of life and what fulfills them."

This horizontal view leaves many high-achieving women less obsessed with moving up the corporate ladder -- always in search of a higher rank, better position, bigger job -- and more focused on family concerns and the idea of doing something better for the world. For them, "advancing" means getting the chance to broaden their influence and reach -- and to use this influence in socially responsible ways.

When confronted with the prevailing "success = driving yourself into the ground" corporate mindset, many women either drop out or, thinking it's the only way to get ahead, embrace the destructive ethos.

As I told the audience in Davos, if we had a corporate culture where people were less stressed and had more sleep and more balance between their work and their lives, we might not have found ourselves on the verge of a complete financial meltdown (recall Matt Taibbi's observation that Wall Streeters often "talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.")

Given their "horizontal" view of success (and that includes getting horizontal for more hours each night!), I believe that women can lead the way to creating a culture -- not just in the business world, but in all aspects of our lives -- that is less toxic, less sleep-deprived, less addicted to sleeping pills that help us wind down and energy drinks that wind us back up, and less likely to burn out the best and the brightest among us.

This would not only lead to more women rising to the top, but happier lives for our male leaders as well -- and better results both for companies and for society.

Now that's gender parity we can believe in.

Sunday Roundup

2010-01-30T23:45:52-05:00

This week, Justice Alito offered up the refined, Supreme Court version of Joe Wilson's "You Lie!"; James O'Keefe went from ACORN-busting "pimp" to FBI-busted perp; and Kirstie Alley, under the influence of her made-for-TV diet, Tweeted her desire to "bash" Joy Behar "in the vagina with her microphone." President Obama, meanwhile, was so effective during his masterful 82 minute Q&A session at the House Republican retreat on Friday that Fox News cut away from the riveting broadcast 20 minutes before it ended -- turning the airtime over to his critics. The president being smart, forceful, and offering well reasoned, fact-based arguments didn't jibe with the relentless Fox framing of him as a radical, Kenya-born Muslim socialist.

Sleep Challenge 2010: Trying to Get Enough Sleep While Logging More Air Miles Than Clooney in Up in the Air

2010-01-28T10:48:04-05:00

Over the three-and-a-half weeks of Sleep Challenge 2010, I've faced numerous challenges in meeting my sleep goal. But this week has presented me with perhaps the toughest obstacle of all: the travel week from hell.

Starting this past Monday and continuing until late Sunday, I'm spending more time in planes and airports than George Clooney in Up in the Air. And in the process, I'm wreaking havoc on my newly improved sleep regimen.

A quick check online lays out the consequences of messing with the primal forces of one's Circadian rhythm. According to Medicinenet, a case of jet lag can lead to "anxiety, constipation, diarrhea, confusion, dehydration, headache, irritability, nausea, sweating, coordination problems, and even memory loss. Some individuals report additional symptoms, such as heartbeat irregularities and increased susceptibility to illness." Other than that, Ms. Huffington, how are you enjoying your week? It's enough to make you swear off flying across multiple time zones.

Unfortunately, teleportation is still reserved for Kirk, Spock, and the other members of Starfleet Command. So, on Monday, I caught a midday flight from Los Angeles to Toronto, three time zones away. I landed around 5pm body clock time -- but it was suddenly 8pm for everyone around me. When everyone else was ready for bed, I was still wide awake. But I knew I needed to try to get to sleep, since I had to be up bright and early the next day.

I was only mildly successful, and ended up getting less than my optimal 8 hours. My wake-up call came before my body was ready, and I got out of bed feeling much less refreshed than I'd gotten used to feeling over the last few weeks.

I hoped to make up for the missed sleep by fitting in an hour of meditation or a quick power nap on Tuesday, but between a full schedule of appearances, TV interviews, and business meetings (where the possibility of a Canada section on HuffPost was discussed), the downtime never materialized. Plus, I was staying with friends and wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. Another night of less-than-hoped-for sleep followed.

Wednesday started with a very early flight to Chicago, one time zone behind Toronto. It too was followed with a full day of speeches, HuffPost meetings, and post-State of the Union TV interviews.

But my hellish travel week is just kicking into high gear. Thursday morning I begin the 15-hour journey taking me from Chicago to Washington to Zurich to Davos, to take part in this year's World Economic Forum. Davos is 9 hours ahead of Los Angeles, but who knows what time my internal body clock will think it is by then.

After a very full Friday in Davos, and a Saturday morning panel discussion for CNBC, I'm set to drive from Davos to Zurich to catch a flight back to D.C. -- praying for my 8 hours before Sunday morning's roundtable taping on ABC's This Week. Barbara Walters is guest hosting, Scott Brown is her main interview, and I'm taking part in a discussion with George Will, Paul Krugman, and Roger Ailes. Straight from the studio, I go to the airport to fly to L.A. in time to have dinner with my daughter. Phew. I'm feeling exhausted just typing that up!

So what am I going to do to avoid the above list of symptoms?

For starters, I'm going to follow all the anti-jet lag rules I can, including drinking as much water as possible, avoiding sugar and caffeine (not sure how well I'll do with that last one... do they have Starbucks in Switzerland?), moving around the plane as much as space and security restrictions will allow, stretching when I can, and, above all, sleeping on the plane for as long as I can with the help of my meditation music and tapes.

So, what else do you think we should do to minimize jet lag and the upsetting of our sleep patterns? I'm open to any and all tips and helpful hints.

Time for me to board!

Obama's State of the Focus Group Speech

2010-01-28T00:22:53-05:00

The president, we were told, spent a good deal of time in the days leading up to his State of the Union address, going over it with a fine-toothed comb, making changes and additions in longhand.

But judging from the speech, he also spent a lot of time going over the results of focus groups and polls. Indeed, the speech, despite its charm, humor, and occasionally impassioned rhetoric, had the feel of being focus-grouped within an inch of its life. There was a decidedly paint-by-poll-numbers air about it.

Focus group participants say they are concerned about the deficit? Then let's throw in a 3-year spending freeze, delivered with a populist spin. "Like any cash-strapped family," the president said, "we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don't. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will."

Sure, the freeze will actually have little impact on the multi-trillion dollar deficit, exempts budget-bloating defense spending, and, as Steve Clemons puts it, "will essentially forfeit America's growth future to China." But "spending freeze" moved the test dials -- so spending freeze it is!

Remember when serious health care reform was going to be the main path to reducing long-term budget deficits? Not anymore. Now we're going to freeze spending -- except, of course, on the wars of choice we are fighting, at a cost of $250 billion a year, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The president and his team know that the spending freeze is little more than what The Economist's Ryan Avent calls "a bright shining gimmick." And no one in the administration could really have believed that conservatives would suddenly swoon and fall into line at the mere mention of "freezing discretionary spending."

Indeed, the reaction of Republicans to his announcement that the freeze won't take effect until 2011 was so derisive that Obama fired back with a caustic ad lib: "That's how budgets are done."

The truth is, the American people are not angry because of all the money the government has spent this year -- except, of course, the people who believe Obama was born in Kenya, is a Muslim, and a Socialist. The rest of the people, the ones Obama has a chance of reaching, are angry because the vast majority of that money went to -- and continues to go to -- rescuing Wall Street, which has thanked taxpayers by reducing lending, recording record profits, paying out massive bonuses, and using our money to pay lobbyists to scuttle financial reform. That is what is putting voters on the electoral warpath.

The president's Pander-palooza continued with the middle class-friendly initiatives he announced on Monday and touched on again during the SOTFG (State of the Focus Group). As I wrote earlier this week, these modest tax credits and subsidies "are all very good ideas, but hardly commensurate with the deep crisis America's middle class is in." The New York Times labeled them the "opposite of bold."

They are also incredibly similar to the "middle class bill of rights" Bill Clinton rolled out in the wake of the mid-term shellacking Democrats took in 1994. Obama has apparently decided that he'll cut to the chase and preemptively follow Clinton's third-way strategies. So get ready to wave goodbye to the Big Bang agenda, and say hello to bite-sized programs -- Obama equivalents of school uniforms, extended hospital stays for new moms, and midnight basketball leagues. But when Wall Street was in trouble it didn't get a bunch of micro ideas, it got a huge bailout.

But 2010 isn't 1994. Robert Reich, who, as Clinton's Secretary of Labor had a front-row seat to that time, lays out the vast gulf between then and now, writing on HuffPost that in 1994 "the U.S. economy was coming out of a recession. It was of no consequence that Clinton's jobs proposals were small or that he moved to the right and whacked the budget, because within a year the great American jobs machine was blasting away and the middle class felt a lot better... Today, though, there's no sign on the horizon of a vigorous recovery."

President Obama is not going to be able to micro-trend his way into this recovery. And he's not going to be able to win back the confidence of the American people with worthwhile but small bore initiatives like child care tax credits. And he's got to make sure his team doesn't go around making claims like the one Austan Goolsbee made on MSNBC the other morning, when he told Chuck Todd that child care is "highly tied to the job market" and that many people are out of work because they can't afford to get someone to take care of their children. But people aren't out of work because they can't afford a baby sitter; they're out of work because there are six applicants for every job opening.

And while most State of the Union speeches have a bit of a kitchen-sink feel to them, this one seemed particularly so with its blink-and-you-missed-it mentions of "earmark reform" and cracking "down on violations of equal pay laws -- so that women get equal pay for an equal day's work." It felt less like an overriding vision for the country, and more like an attempt to deliver at least one applause line for every constituency in the country.

That's not political leadership. Obama clearly understands this. It's why he ended his speech by mocking politicians who "do what's necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what's best for the next generation." And he just as clearly has the ability to articulate a bold vision for the nation and lead it where it desperately needs to go.

But he didn't do it tonight.

P.S.: It was great to hear the president embrace the Move Your Money concept, "proposing that we take $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid and use it to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat."

Sleep Challenge 2010: Sleep As the Key to Happiness and Peak Performance

2010-01-26T08:00:00-05:00

One of the great side benefits of writing regularly about a subject is that you suddenly become a magnet for other people interested in that topic. I've found that to be especially true when it comes to writing about sleep. I suppose that's because it's one of the rare things all people have in common: there is no one on the planet who doesn't sleep.

Over the first three weeks of our sleep challenge, I've heard from literally hundreds of people, writing (or stopping me on the street) to tell me about their experiences with sleep -- or the lack thereof.

I heard, for example, from an old and dear friend, Tony Schwartz, President and CEO of The Energy Project, whose new book, The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance (coming out in May), has a whole chapter on the importance of sleep.

Tony, a business performance guru who has been described as "a National Treasure," and "the champion of a new source of renewable energy -- ourselves!", sent me a preview copy of his book. I haven't had time to read it all, but I read the Introduction and the sleep chapter and loved them. They convincingly make the case that, as Schwartz puts it, "the way we are working (and the way the world works) isn't working, for most people or most organizations." And he singles out the role sleep plays in making people happier, healthier, and more productive.

"No single behavior," writes Schwartz, "more fundamentally influences our effectiveness in waking life than sleep... sleep may well be more critical to our well being than diet, exercise and even heredity."

Sleep is so vital to success in everything we do, Schwartz titles his chapter about it "Sleep or Die." In it, he cites the role lack of sleep played in numerous high-profile disasters -- including the Three Mile Island meltdown, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle -- and points out that "Amnesty International lists prolonged sleep deprivation as a form of torture, and it has widely been used as an interrogation tactic."

He also highlights the fact that sleep isn't just a time for our bodies to rest -- it's also a time for learning. "Sleep is not simply cognitively restorative," he writes, "but also a time during which considerable learning occurs. Although the acquisition of knowledge occurs only during waking life, there is evidence that we process, consolidate and stabilize memory during sleep." So, if you still look at sleep only as "down time," you need to think again. Sleep is also practice time for a wide variety of mental skills -- and the full 90-minute sleep cycle allows for different kinds of learning. In our deepest sleep, according to Schwartz, "we appear to process and consolidate fact-based information, such as a new language or the capital of a state." REM sleep, meanwhile, "appears to play a key role in remembering how to do an activity, such as typing or driving a car." And visual learning is processed both in deep (slow-wave) and REM sleep.

Schwartz, whose clients include Google, Ford, Sony, and Gillette, as well as organizations such as the Los Angeles Police Department and the Cleveland Clinic, has spent his life coaching people how to perform at their best. And he puts getting enough sleep at the apex of the things we can do to achieve peak performance.

And he's written a terrific book that sums up why.

I've also heard from a number of sleep experts, including Dr. Richard Shane, a former-insomniac-turned-sleep-specialist based in Colorado, who has developed what he calls the Sleep Easilyâ¢ Method of getting a good night's sleep. Dr. Shane emailed to direct me to a pair of studies on the benefits of sleep he thought might be of interest to our Sleep Challenge audience.

The first was done at the University of Michigan. It found that getting just a little more sleep had a greater effect on a person's state of mind than a large increase in income. According to psychology professor Norbert Schwarz, one of the authors of the study, "Making $60,000 more in annual income has less of an effect on your daily happiness than getting one extra hour of sleep a night." So instead of putting in extra hours of overtime in the hope of impressing your boss and getting that raise you're sure will make you happier (different, of course, from the raise you need to make ends meet), save yourself the trouble, get to bed a little earlier instead, and reap the psychological rewards of a happier you. Odds are, a happier you will also mean a more creative and productive you -- so you'll probably end up getting that raise as well.

Dr. Shane also directed me to a study published in the professional journal Science that reaches many of the same conclusions about the connection between sleep and happiness -- and the lack of connection between extra money and happiness -- as the Michigan study. "Large increases of real income in the developed world over the past 50 years have yielded no change in reported life satisfaction," write the Science study's authors. On the other hand, "differences in reported sleep quality are associated with a very large difference in reported enjoyment during episodes at home."

So please keep emailing me -- and stopping me on the street -- to pass along this kind of fascinating information. These three weeks have been an amazing learning experience for me -- both while awake and asleep!

State of the Union: Is Obama Ready to Make the Middle Class His Priority?

2010-01-25T17:18:03-05:00

By the end of the president's State of the Union speech on Wednesday, we'll know just how serious he is about his post-Massachusetts pivot to making jobs and the middle class his top priority -- or whether the last week of two-fisted rhetoric has been an escalation in tone but not action.

"The middle class has been under assault for a long time," the president said today in announcing a series of new initiatives designed to bolster what he called "the class that made the 20th century the American century." The proposals include an increase in child care tax credits, a cap on student loan payments, and an increase in aid for families caring for aging relatives.

These are all very good ideas, but hardly commensurate with the deep crisis America's middle class is in. To show that he gets the gravity of the plight of working families, Obama will have to put forth, in front of Congress and the nation, an aggressive, comprehensive plan to rescue the middle class.

How will we know he's serious? Luckily, we've seen what it looks like when the president really makes something a priority. Picture the hastily arranged meetings and feverish all-nighters to save Wall Street's banks in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the near-collapse of AIG.

When it came to that crisis, the federal government -- first under Bush, then under Obama -- didn't just up the rhetoric on the importance of saving the banks, it took decisive, overwhelming action to save them.

So what is going to be the middle class equivalent of the Lehman collapse that will provoke the same kind of urgency and action from the White House's economic team?

To justify funneling trillions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street's too-big-to-fail banks, we were told the entire financial system was on the brink -- that it wasn't just about economic stability, it was about national security.

Now Wall Street has been stabilized -- and then some. But Main Street is facing an economic apocalypse no less threatening to the long-term stability of the country.

In explaining why the White House is bringing back Obama's 2008 campaign guru David Plouffe to help engineer the mid-term elections in November, David Axelrod explained: "We are going to evaluate what we need to do to get timely intelligence and early warnings so we don't face situations like we did in Massachusetts."

But we are way past the "early warnings" stage. The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was last fall -- only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hard working Americans. This country's middle class is going the way of Lehman Brothers -- disappearing in front of our eyes. A decline that began a decade ago has now become a plummeting free-fall.

Just how bad things have gotten was succinctly -- and bracingly -- summed up by Elizabeth Warren, writing on HuffPost:

One in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings.

And the housing crisis is about to undergo a second wave. As Nancy Cook laid it out in Newsweek, the first run of foreclosures was because of subprime loans -- the second run is because of jobs lost. And Obama's loan modification program won't be of any help with this round of foreclosures. "If you're unemployed," as Cook pointed out, "you don't qualify for a loan modification."

Perhaps most indicative of the crumbling of the middle class is the fact that poverty is now becoming a suburban phenomenon. According to a stunning new study by the Brookings Institution, by 2008 the largest and fastest growing poor population was in the suburbs. In the first eight years of the decade, the suburban poor increased 25 percent -- almost five times the rate of those in cities. And by 2008, over 90 million Americans were living on less than twice the poverty line -- which translates to $21,834 for a family of four.

And these figures don't include 2009, a year of massive job losses and foreclosures, so surely things have gotten even worse.

Do we really need any more "early warning signs"?

The stark reality is that America, in the not-too-distant future, could become a country without a middle class. That might seem unimaginable -- but only if you aren't paying attention to the evidence. Of course, over the last decade, we have seen example after example of things that once seemed unimaginable come to pass.

No one could imagine the world's economy being pushed to the precipice by the collapse of Lehman Brothers (although numerous experts had warned about the dangers of a wildly overleveraged financial system). No one could imagine the destruction of an American city caused by the breaching of the levees surrounding it (although there were many, many warnings that it was a very real possibility). And no one could imagine that terrorists would bring down the Twin Towers by flying planes into them (although there was intelligence that they intended to do just that).

In reality, no one taking a hard look at what's happening to America's middle class could say that its disappearance is still unimaginable.

The Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the big banks because it suddenly became imaginable that the financial system might collapse.

Has Obama come to the same realization about America's middle class? Will he throw everything he has at the crisis it's facing -- just as he did for Wall Street? Or do we need to become Brazil first, with the super-rich living behind fortified gates, with guards protecting their children from kidnapping?

Will we heed the warning signs before we see another failure of imagination -- one of epic proportions and catastrophic consequences?

Sunday Roundup

2010-01-24T12:04:46-05:00

John F. Kennedy came into office wanting to be a transformational president, but he started with three false assumptions: He was convinced that the Third World was about to go Communist, that the Soviets would soon have a nuclear advantage, and that civil rights legislation could wait. When he realized all three were wrong, he was able to course-correct. Obama also came into office wanting to be a transformational leader. He was convinced that as long as Wall Street was sound, the rest of the economy would follow; that as long as he surrounded himself with smart old pros like Larry Summers, he was in good hands; and that bipartisanship was a worthwhile goal unto itself. He was wrong about all three. His response after the Massachusetts defeat shows that he is capable of learning on the job. If he follows through, he still has time to be a transformational president and turn the country around.

Sleep Challenge 2010: I Now Have Dozens of Baby Sitters ... All Telling Me to Go to Bed

2010-01-21T16:45:40-05:00

Ever since I've started writing about the Sleep Challenge, I keep running into people who have taken a strong interest in my sleeping habits -- and seem committed to helping me stick to my sleep goal.

Sunday night, I went to the HBO Golden Globes party at the Beverly Hilton. It was a lively celebration, the spirit unhampered by the un-Los Angeles-like rainstorm that had people crowding into the covered areas of the party, which was set up around the hotel's pool area.

As the night wore on, people kept coming up to me, glancing at their watches, and wondering how much longer I planned to stay and whether I was going to be able to get my 8 hours. I felt like I was a kid on a school night -- with dozens and dozens of mothers (or at least very elegantly dressed baby sitters), all anxious about me keeping my sleep commitment.

Luckily, the Golden Globes actually start at 5 pm Pacific time, and the after-parties are in full swing by 8:30. So I was able to have interesting conversation with Marty Scorsese, George Lucas, Alfre Woodard, and almost the entire casts of Entourage and Hung -- and still make it to bed in time to get my full 8.

Along with the sleep police, I'm also regularly approached by people asking me which of the many tips provided by our sleep experts I've found the most useful.

While I've tried out most of the suggestions, here are my favorites:

I got a new pillow. And a new pillowcase.

I've tried to treat bedtime as an important appointment, instead of an afterthought.

I made my bedroom darker.

I added magnesium to my supplement routine.

I've practiced deep breathing before bed, taken a warm nighttime bath when I've had time, and tried to exercise every day.

I've also banished my Blackberries to another room at night.

And while I'm still fighting the caffeine battle, I have dramatically cut down on coffee after noon.

How about you? Which tips have you made part of your sleep ritual?

More on Dreams and Dreaming: My last post about my newly compelling dream life prompted a number of interesting reader comments.

Payam Ghassemlou Ph.D quoted Rumi, who taught: 'There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, and yet you go door to door asking for crusts. Knock on your inner door. No other.' According to Dr. Ghassemlou, "We knock on our inner door by honoring our dreams."

Kelly Bulkeley wrote, "I appreciate the reference to Egyptian practices of dream incubation. Although modern society has no comparable temples to the deities of dreaming, people today still find spiritual insight and deeper self-awareness in their dreams. Indeed, this is perhaps one of the mostly widely shared beliefs across all different religious traditions: dreaming is one of the ways humans commune with greater-than-human powers."

And one of our sleep experts, Dr. Michael Breus, commented: "You have also now reached a second benefit of sleep: dreaming. Just like with the increase in your exercise performance you are now going to see an increase in your dreaming performance. Why is this important? Because we think dreaming (most often in REM sleep) helps consolidate your memories. So what might that mean for you? You will begin to see an improvement in your overall memory and your ability to organize your thoughts, and maybe in getting things done!" And he promised, "In my next post everyone will learn more about why they dream, if they dream, and even how to influence the content of their dreams."