When we first published that series of historians' critiques of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism at HNN last week, the official word was that Goldberg had declined to respond, though we had notified him ahead of time that the essays were coming.

Well, it seems he changed his mind.

Sort of.

Actually, as you can see, Goldberg really only deigns to respond in any depth to one of his critics -- Robert Paxton, whose essay on Goldberg's scholarly flaws is damning indeed. I'll mostly let Dr. Paxton speak for himself in his own response, except that, as I'll explain, Goldberg's evasive reply is largely in line with the kind of exchange I've previously had with Goldberg.

The rest of us he airily dismisses. Indeed, according to Goldberg, the entire enterprise was tainted by the fact of my participation:

Let me say up front that selecting David Neiwert to "introduce" the discussion - without telling me in advance - is pretty strong evidence that this symposium was intended a priori to discredit the book rather than honestly discuss it (usually, introducers at least pretend to be evenhanded). The slanderous and absurd bile in some of these initial responses - comparing my book to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and me to a Nazi propagandist - runs completely counter to the spirit of open debate. I would like to think that HNN didn't know what it was getting into when it started this project.

So forgive me if I take all of this gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth over the polemical - as opposed to scholarly - nature of Liberal Fascism with a grain of salt. Neiwert and Bertlet are deeply invested in their cottage industry of spotting fascism and Nazism in the Republican Party, talk radio and elsewhere. In nearly every respect they are both caricature and embodiment of precisely the mindset I attack in my book (a mindset Professor Paxton claims doesn't exist). Heaven forbid I adopt a Marxist mode of analysis, but it's fair to say that for them to treat Liberal Fascism respectfully would be like a Luddite welcoming the cotton mill. I've dealt with Neiwert's arguments before, so I won't waste more time on him here.

Well, it's true that I previously had a brief running exchange with Goldberg, largely in response to my review for The American Prospect. What you might miss from Jonah's link, though, is the the way Goldberg abruptly ended the discussion by dismissing me as no longer worth his time:

Here's my grand theory about this guy. He's made his career hyping the terrible threat from the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations and American Nazi Party and so like the bureaucrats in Office Space who think TPS reports are the most important thing in the world, he can't seem to grasp that they're pretty trivial.

In other words, he came to his understanding of fascism by following bands of racist white losers in the Idaho woods while using some Marxist tract or other as a field guide to identify the various species he encountered. In other words, he's internalized every cliché and propagandandistic talking point I set out to demolish in my book. Moreover, his career depends on maintaining his version of the fascist peril. So, he's banging his spoon on his highchair a lot because my book undercuts his whole reason for being.

... So, you want my short answer to why I don't discuss, say, the Posse Comitatus? Okay here it is: Who gives a rat's ass about the Posse Comitatus?

I'm sure Neirwert's gorillas-in-the-mist reportage on these guys is top notch, and I'll take his word for it their bad guys. But being bad guys alone doesn't in and of itself make them fascists. Indeed, from my limited understanding of what these guys believe, they are radical localists , who don't believe any government above the county level is legitimate. Do I really have to spell out why that's not exactly in keeping with hyper-statist ideology of Nazis and Italian Fascists? "Everything in Hazard County, nothing outside Hazard County," has a nice ring to it, but the Hegelian God-State it is not.

Ah, yes. The My Superior Mind Is Grappling With Great Metaphysical Questions While You Are Merely Wallowing In Insignificant Details dismissal.

Of course, I shortly responded in some detail. Judge for yourselves, but I believe I pretty thoroughly demolished Goldberg's "Grand Theory" about me (he had nearly every detail wrong).

All for naught, of course; I had already been summarily dismissed by his Superior Mind:

After today, I doubt I will deal with Neiwert again -- at least not at any length -- for one simple reason. Virtually every rebuttal to what he's said about my book can be found in my book. He simply doesn't care what I say, he only cares about discrediting me at all costs. There's no percentage in debating such people.

Besides leaving unanswered the specific responses to his counterclaims, Goldberg most of all refused to confront one of my ongoing and major points:

[L]et me first point out the fundamental dishonesty of this kind of argumentation: I in fact provided a long list of clearly fascist American organizations -- only one of which was the Posse Comitatus -- who represent a very real manifestation of actual fascism, not simply because they're racist (as I said, that's not necessarily any kind of definitive trait of fascism anyway), but because they fully fit the description, both academic and real-life.

So yes, one might easily dismiss the Posse Comitatus, by any accounts a relatively small organization with a relatively limited immediate reach. But one cannot so easily dispense with the entire American far right -- the bulk of which in fact is identifiably fascist or proto-fascist -- quite so readily. The Posse Comitatus is just a small, though important, part of this continuum -- it was founded by one of Gerald L.K. Smith's disciples, William Potter Gale; and it in turn became a significant cornerstone of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s, perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing; who in turn gave birth to the Minutemen so fondly back-slapped by right-wing pundits like Jonah Goldberg.

I'm not complaining that Jonah missed discussing the Posse Comitatus per se; I'm complaining that he completely elides any kind of serious or thoughtful discussion of American fascists as we've known them historically. Of course, any such discussion would probably have to include the Posse, but that's beside the point.

Tracking the activities of these groups has consumed a sizable chunk of my journalistic career, but Goldberg, rather than respecting that on-the-ground experience, dismisses it in a cloud of amusing innuendo ...

No, Jonah, being bad guys alone doesn't make them fascists. But holding swastika and Dixie banners aloft, shouting "Sieg Heil," and ranting ad nauseam about how bestial colored people and queers and the Jewish media are destroying the country, and demanding that we start shooting Mexican border crossers -- well, that pretty clearly marks them as fascist, dontcha think?

Of course, all this was before two Posse-style "sovereign citizens" -- Scott Roeder of Kansas and James Von Brunn of Washington, D.C., made national headlines by committing violent acts of domestic terrorism -- walking into a church and shooting a prominent abortion provider in the head, and walking into the Holocaust Museum and gunning down a security guard, respectively.

Of course, when that happened, Goldberg not only declined to discuss the Posse connection, but actually argued, alongside Glenn Beck, that these men were not right-wing extremists at all, but merely lone nutcases.

All this inspired Charles Pierce to observe at Altercation:

Pretty trivial, indeed.

I swear, if he were more of a tool, you could use him to spread mulch.

Since then, Goldberg has continued to pretend that he fully responded to my arguments, when in fact he only indulged in selective attacks on a handful of dubious points (note especially his continuing insistence that the Klan was nothing more than out-of-hand film cult) and completely ignored the central arguments, particularly the overwhelming historical evidence that contradicts his central thesis, to wit, that "properly understood," fascism is "a phenomenon of the left" and not the right.

Indeed, he continues to do the same in his response to Paxton. Note especially that among all the words Goldberg expends on minor details (without a hint of irony, I might add) he utterly fails to properly confront this this passage from Paxton:

Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice. Since the Nazis recruited their first mass following among the economic and social losers of Weimar Germany, they could sound anti-capitalist at the beginning. Goldberg makes a big thing of the early programs of the Nazi and Italian Fascist Parties, and publishes the Nazi Twenty-five Points as an appendix. A closer look would show that the Nazis' anti-capitalism was a selective affair, opposed to international capital and finance capital, department stores and Jewish businesses, but nowhere opposed to private property per se or favorable to a transfer of all the means of production to public ownership.

A still closer look at how the fascist parties obtained power and then exercised power would show how little these early programs corresponded to fascist practice. Mussolini acquired powerful backing by hiring his black-shirted squadristi out to property owners for the destruction of socialist and Communist unions and parties. They destroyed the farm workers' organizations in the Po Valley in 1921-1922 by violent nightly raids that made them the de facto government of northeastern Italy. Hitler's brownshirts fought Communists for control of the streets of Berlin, and claimed to be Germany's best bulwark against the revolutionary threat that still appeared to be growing in 1932. Goldberg prefers the abstractions of rhetoric to all this history, noting only that fascism and Communism were "rivals." So his readers will not learn anything about how the Nazis and Italian Fascists got into power or exercised it.

The two fascist chiefs obtained power not by election nor by coup but by invitation from German President Hindenberg and his advisors, and Italian King Victor Emanuel III and his advisors (not a leftist among them). The two heads of state wanted to harness the fascists' numbers and energy to their own project of blocking the Marxists, if possible with broad popular support. This does not mean that fascism and conservatism are identical (they are not), but they have historically found essential interests in common.

Once in power, the two fascist chieftains worked out a fruitful if sometimes contentious relationship with business. German business had been, as Goldberg correctly notes, distrustful of the early Hitler's populist rhetoric. Hitler was certainly not their first choice as head of state, and many of them preferred a trading economy to an autarkic one. Given their real-life options in 1933, however, the Nazi regulated economy seemed a lesser evil than the economic depression and worker intransigence they had known under Weimar. They were delighted with Hitler's abolition of independent labor unions and the right to strike (unmentioned by Goldberg), and profited greatly from his rearmament drive. All of them would have found ludicrous the notion that the Nazis, once in power, were on the left. So would the socialist and communist leaders who were the first inhabitants of the Nazi concentration camps (unmentioned by Goldberg).

Paxton has in these brief paragraphs utterly demolished Goldberg's thesis (and believe me, he is only briefly summarizing the mountain of concurring evidence in this matter).

What does Goldberg have to say? Very little: He excerpts only the portion pertaining to labor unions, and then claims that he's already rebutted this:

I find this argument bizarre. First of all, how did independent labor unions do under Stalin? Under Castro? Under Mao? Are those regimes not left-wing? Hitler sent Communists and rival socialists to concentration camps. This was evil, to be sure, but how was it right-wing? Stalin liquidated the Trotskyites (and 31 other flavors of socialists) too. Why is killing rival Communists and socialists right-wing when Hitler does it and not when Stalin does it? If your answer is that Stalin was somehow "right-wing" when he did these things, then your definition of right-wing is simply "evil"--and that validates a big chunk of my book.

But in fact the matter of fascist attacks on unions extends well beyond the actions took after fascists obtained power: These attacks were a fundamental aspect of the early rise of fascism as a movement, and clearly delineated that fascism was occupying political space on the right.

Indeed, Goldberg has continued to claim that his thesis remains intact:

By any remotely similar definition, fascism belongs on the left - and to date, not a single critic of the book has even come close to rebutting this basic point.

Translation: "Lalalalalalala I can't hear you!"

I think it's safe to predict that eventually, Goldberg will haughtily dismiss even Dr. Paxton as somehow not worthy of the expenditure of effort from his Superior Mind. Already, he's dismissed not just myself, but Roger Griffin, Matthew Feldman and Chip Berlet. (Feldman has responded here.) On what basis? Apparently, we're just too nasty. Gearing up for the predictable kissoff, he says he was disappointed in Paxton's response, but adds:

Still he stands head-and-shoulders above some of the spittle-flecked ranters.

Indeed, his cohort Michael Ledeen -- who penned his own semi-admiring contribution for HNN, largely in tune with the admiring blurb he wrote for the book's cover -- similarly complained that we were nothing more than a partisan "mob" intent on destroying Goldberg:

When asked to participate, I hoped that maybe finally it was time for a serious debate on the nature of fascism, which has been impossible for more than half a century, mostly because of the Left's refusal to look reality in the face. Jonah's crime was to look at it and say, as others (myself included) had said before him, that fascism came at least in part from a leftist revolutionary tradition.

Now, there are several deep ironies in this: First, all four of the essays in fact discussed the fact that fascism came at least in part from a leftist revolutionary tradition. And all four of them explained from various perspectives why this ultimately was a nonsequitur.

The second big irony is this: In 1972, Micheal Ledeen published a book titled Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, a book built around interviews with Italian historian Renzo de Felice, whose thesis, as American Conservative magazine detailed a few years back, was that "Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary".

Indeed, as the AC piece explores in some detail, the idea of a revolutionary right embodied in a "universal fascism" was a fetish of Ledeen's for some years. And as far as I can determine, Ledeen has never disclaimed or explained this work in light of his more recent preoccupation with "Islamofascism" -- not to mention his current endorsement of Goldberg's thesis.

Goldberg and Ledeen are rather transparently hiding behind the claim that somehow his critics are a spittle-flecked mob that unfairly misunderstands his Superior Mind and Great Metapolitical Thesis, and instead is merely intent on burning him at the stake.

Nevermind that, when it comes to flecks of spittle, Goldberg was entirely unconcerned about Glenn Beck's frothing "documentary" calling the progressive movement a "cancer" and a "virus" responsible for most of the past century's great genocides. Indeed, not only was Beck's entire thesis derived from Liberal Fascism, Goldberg played a prominent role as an interview subject for the "documentary," and actively promoted it beforehand.

In contrast, Goldberg spends much of his time in his response whining that the mean historians misconstrue his intent -- really, he's not trying to argue that liberals are taking us down the road to genocide. He cites the text of the book itself:

Now, I am not saying that all liberals are fascists. Nor am I saying that to believe in socialized medicine or smoking bans is evidence that you are a crypto-Nazi. What I am mainly trying to do is to dismantle the granitelike assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot or cousin of fascism. Rather, as I will try to show, many of the ideas and impulses that inform what we call liberalism come to us through an intellectual tradition that led directly to fascism. These ideas were embraced by fascism, and remain in important respects fascistic.

Well, if this is so, why does Goldberg participate in, and avidly promote, a fake "documentary" by Glenn Beck claiming that indeed liberals -- or more properly, progressives -- are the same thing as fascists; and that believing in socialized medicine is part of path toward genocide, as he did just last week? (See the video above.)

Terry Welch raised this issue in the comments to Goldberg's reply:

Goldberg seems to be saying that all those darn liberals are simply getting him wrong: He never intended to suggest that American liberals are the equivalent of Nazis and to say he did is just being stupid.

So why is it that he ONLY argues this when liberals read his argument this way? Many right wing nutjobs believe that his books thesis is "liberals=Nazis" (just look at the many, many signs to that effect at the tea parties or the Glenn Beck "documentary" in which Goldberg himself took part) and yet Goldberg seems content with their use of his oh-so-scholarly work.

If Goldberg only answers one more question -- and that's doubtful, considering that we have already cost him more effort from his Superior Mind than he would like -- I would like to see him answer that one.

This Friday marks the 99th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. You're going to be hearing a lot about the Gipper this week, and you're going to be hearing a lot about him for the next 12 months. Already, a Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission -- signed into law by President Obama last June, at a ceremony attended by Nancy Reagan -- is busy planning a slew of Feb. 6, 2011, events that may take the nation one step closer toward Reagan's political canonization. Meanwhile, day in and day out, the legacy of the 40th president still looms large over the national conversation, some 21 years after he left the Oval Office and nearly six years after his death -- thanks in part to a deliberate campaign of distortion by modern conservatives, a Reagan myth has been used to justify disastrous spending policies at home and disastrous militarism abroad .

This week also marks the new paperback release of my book, now slightly retitled: "Tear Down This Myth: The Right Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy." When I was working on the book in 2008 in preparation for the original hardcover version, I did worry somewhat whether the likely election of a center-left Democratic president would render as moot the power of the Reagan myth. As it turned out, the inauguration of Barack Obama and the arrival of a large Democratic majority in Congress instead showed the limits of government in the face of this powerful philosophy that is loosely based on Reagan's 1980s presidency but distorts or exaggerates the reality of much of what happened in those years.

The Reagan banner as carried by today's conservatives involves deep and unrelenting mistrust of the government to solve any problems, even as crises from joblessness and unsound fiscal policies and a lack of a serious approach to energy and global warming fester from a lack of... problem solving. Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, captured the White House in the election after Watergate by promising "a government as good as the people," but when Carter stumbled for a host of reasons, Reagan was elected with a much different message. In his 1981 inauguration, he said: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems -- government is the problem."

Little remembered is that in the same speech, Reagan also said: "Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back." But is the first message -- that there is no government solution to any problem, no matter how complex -- that has been hammered home by the powerful right-wing infrastructure, most notably talk radio and now the highly rated Fox News Channel on TV, that has endured and grown since Reagan's tenure in office.

In this present crisis -- the one with deep roots in the catastrophic eight-year reign of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- the Obama administration has been unable to do what Reagan ultimately suggested in 1981: Make government work better. Obama mistakenly believed that his election had at least dented the Reagan myth; in a December 2008 interview with political journalists Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz, the incoming president acknowledged the Gipper-powered skepticism toward government but also predicted America was witnessing "an end to the knee-jerk reaction toward the New Deal and big government."

No one ever said Barack Obama was good at predictions. Although he did win passage of an economic stimulus package -- the time-tested solution for digging a national economy out of a near-depression -- he bowed to Reagan-myth-inspired GOP opposition to make the roughly $800 billion package still too small to stop rising unemployment, still weighted too heavily to tax cuts less likely to create jobs. A health-care package that -- while certainly imperfect -- would have been the first steps toward curbing medical costs, reducing the federal deficit and eliminating bankruptcies and even unnecessary deaths -- is foundering in the face of an opposition whipped into a frenzy by the radio and TV hosts who also ask nightly, "What would Reagan do."

This Reagan legacy that continues to prevent action on jobs, on health care, and on alternative energy (it was Reagan, after all, who tore down the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House roof) is no accident. As laid out in "Tear Down This Myth," it is the result of a deliberate campaign -- led by Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project -- to name roads and schools and erect bronze statues of the 40th president. The result is that a president who was divisive and had average approval numbers during his actual presidency is now widely admired by a churning population that increasingly remembers the myth better than the man. Even though there's a lot about the real Reagan record to knock (the creation of a debt-powered consumer economy, heartless responses to AIDS, homelessness and urban decay, trading arms for hostages in the Middle East), progressives can't win their case in 2010 with a direct assault on Reagan.

But they don't have to. Here are three ways that progressives can take back the political debate by turning the Reagan legacy on its head:

1) Reagan had a big-spending economic stimulus plan. It's true. As noted in the book, the economic turnaround of the 1980s had little or nothing to do with Reagan's income tax cut that was heavily weighted to the rich but was instead the result of other factors, including the tight money policies of then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker (now an Obama adviser) and a global collapse of oil prices. But there was something else: Reagan also created thousands upon thousands of new jobs across America with a spending program that caused the federal deficit to skyrocket. It was called the Reagan defense buildup.

In the part of America where I lived in the 1980s, Long Island, N.Y., the economy was booming, in part because of the government dollars thrown at the then-Grumman Corp. to build new jet fighters. Now, government has a chance to do the same thing that Reagan achieved -- but not by building machines of death but creating jobs for things that will improve life, like solar power and high-speed rail.

2) Reagan would not have allowed many of the terror tactics started by Bush and Cheney and continued in the face of pressure by the Obama administration. Don't believe it? -- let me count the ways:

A) Reagan was a staunch opponent of torture by Americans, signing in 1988 the International Convention Against Torture, which said "[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

B) The official policy of the Reagan administration was civilian trials for terrorists, as elaborated in a speech by the official overseeing the policy, Paul Bremer (yes, THAT Paul Bremer) who said in 1987 "a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law against them."

C) Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan said "retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed is 'itself a terrorist act.'"

3) Obama can best honor Ronald Reagan in this centennial year not by another statue, but by continuing to work toward the grand goal that the 40th president and the 44th president both share: Ridding the world of nuclear weapons. As I note in a new introduction to "Tear Down This Myth":

It was in 1983 that President Ronald Reagan privately screened the anti-nuclear movie "The Day After" in Camp David and wrote in his diary of his resolve "to see there is never a nuclear war" - the ambition that fueled his remarkable series of summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That very same year Barack Obama was just an undergraduate in his senior year at New York's Columbia University, still very uncertain of his place in the world, when he publicly voiced the idea that Reagan shared but kept secret, an ambition of eliminating all nuclear warheads. As reported by the New York Times, the young Obama wrote an article for a campus magazine that was entitled "Breaking the War Mentality." In it, he railed against "billion-dollar erector sets" and what he called "the twisted logic" of a winnable nuclear war. Little did the then-22-year-old Obama imagine that it would be Reagan who would start the job of reducing the world's nuclear stockpiles or that he himself would be the president in a position to carry that mission forward in the 21st Century.

Although it's rarely portrayed this way, nuclear-arms reduction was the great progressive cause and the great progressive achievement of Ronald Reagan, and it can be so for Barack Obama as well. We've just seen in 2009 that it is impossible to fight an entrenched myth on its own terms. Let's hope that Obama and all of us who believe in more just and a more progressive society can instead harness the Reagan myth in 2010 and beyond, and steer America in the right direction again.

I talked Sunday about Move Your Money with Guy Raz of NPR's Weekend All Things Considered (summary; audio from about 3:45). We covered a lot of ground, from what's in it for individuals to shift towards community banks and credit unions (better service and lower costs, in many cases) to how this could begin to reign in Too Big To Fail financial institutions (slowly, but surely).

Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to discuss what comes next -- i.e., what happens when the location of political candidates' own money starts to matter. As early as this fall's primaries, expect to hear people ask politicians in debates and through various kinds of interactions: (1) where do you, personally, keep and borrow money, and (2), in all relevant cases, where did you put public money when it was up to you?

These questions strike to the heart of democratic responses against overly concentrated financial power throughout US history -- a topic we take up in Chapter 1 of 13 Bankers.

In the 1830s showdown between elected officials and big banks, President Andrew Jackson went toe-to-toe with Nicolas Biddle of the Second Bank of the United States. Both sides won several rounds and finally it came down to this -- could Jackson really move the money of the US government away from the Second Bank? He could and did. And despite being threatened -- by bankers, naturally -- with dire consequences, the US had a very good 19th century.

The essence of the second confrontation was neatly captured by the title of Louis Brandeis's 1914 book, Other People's Money - and How the Bankers Use It. Brandeis, a future Supreme Court Justice, saw clearly through the nature of the "Money Trust" -- recognizing that its power was based, essentially, on its access to and control over funds deposited by regular people.

In effect, the industrial revolution had spread wealth and disposable income, but -- through the rise of powerful investment banks -- actually concentrated economic and political power.

Reformers struggled for several decades with how to constrain the biggest banks, without choking economic growth and while protecting individual depositors, in this new economy. The solution, reached after much difficulty and finally in response to popular demand, was the regulations of the 1930s.

From that time, until the early 1980s, financial empires based on retail deposits were greatly constrained in terms of the risks they could take -- and without retail deposits, it was hard to become big enough to do serious damage to the economy.

After 30 years of deregulation and financial "innovation," our problem today is rather different. The idea of banks being so big they can extract enormous resources from the state would have been incomprehensible to Jackson and ludicrous even to FDR -- in their day, the federal government did not have anywhere near enough resources to "save" massive failing banks as we have done in the past few years.

The essence of our current difficulties is that so many people -- both in power and from all walks of life -- still actually think our biggest banks are good for their customers and for society as a whole, so we must hold our noses and live with them. This view must be challenged, directly and repeatedly.

In this context, moving your own money is more than an important gesture, and if enough people get on board, it will make a difference. More likely, thinking hard -- and talking with others -- about your various monetary transactions also begins to change the rules of the political game. How can politicians claim to be against Too Big To Fail banks when they actually have an account or a credit card or a mortgage at one such offender? Shouldn't state officials be held accountable for where they park the taxpayers' funds? Which governor wants to risk reelection while heavily dependent on big banks? Who got what kind of commission last time a government body issued bonds?

This set of litmus tests can be seized on by left or right -- both, in fact, can reasonably claim some inheritance from Jackson and Brandeis. Expect competition from all sides to prove their candidates are less beholden to the dangerous and debunked ideology of Reckless Finance.

Move your politicians.

Cross-posted with the Baseline Scenario.

This is the second of a six-part weekly series excerpted from chapter 11 of my book Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World. This series is an attempt to build new momentum for a climate change movement that has lost some of its mojo because of the failure of Copenhagen and the forces lined up against bold and timely national legislation in the U.S. While government has a very important role to play in setting the rules, the transformative and rapid change needed to address this issue is a lot to ask of a legislative system purposefully designed for incremental and slow-moving change. Or what I call social change 1.0. But we are justified in placing our hope in bottom-up change--social change 2.0--as this is how all major change in history has occurred.

In case you missed Part One of this series here's the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-gershon/empowering-a-climate-chan_b_434874.html

Along with the immense gratitude so many people felt toward Al Gore for raising our collective consciousness about the threat of global warming through his movie An Inconvenient Truth, came some criticism that he did not spend enough time helping people understand their unique contribution as individuals and what they could do to mitigate it; the problem came across as out of our control. While this may be fair criticism, it was not his primary aim to tell us precisely how to solve this problem. That is a tall order. His job was to tell us, the blissfully unaware passengers on the Titanic, that we are about to hit an iceberg and sink unless we dramatically change course.

Many have taken heed of his warning and are developing ways to help humanity make the necessary course correction as rapidly as possible. Al Gore is among the most prominent of these, advising the Obama administration on how America can take a leadership role on global warming and advocating for a shift to a 100 percent renewal energy system. But one of his less visible roles is as a thought leader shaping a strategic way of thinking about the process of change around this issue. It is in this role that he provides an answer to the question posed to him about what we can do as individuals, and as Americans. He offers a strategy that both empowers and holds us accountable as individuals.

"When people take personal action on global warming," Gore explains, "it leads inevitably to their desire to have changes in policies. They begin communicating with their representatives at the local, state, and national level. They say 'Look, I've made these changes in my life and I want you to work for changes in policy.' They are linked together. And when enough American citizens become part of this new critical mass and the U.S. changes policy, then it becomes much more likely that China will make the changes it has to make. We're all in this together." What I like about his thinking from a social change point of view is that it is a whole-system approach and therefore capable of generating the synergy we need to accelerate transformative change within the limited time available to us.

What I find unusual and noteworthy coming from a person who has spent his career as a policymaker is his understanding of personal action as a strategic lever that can work both the demand and the supply side of the equation. Many people who spend their time formulating public policy tend to undervalue the importance of personal action--the demand side of the equation. This is mostly because they are not familiar with how to build demand for change of this nature and scale up personal action; and so, rather than trying to crack that nut, which is a hard nut to crack indeed, they stick with what they know. In this context, that would be passing climate change legislation that provides subsidies and tax incentives to homeowners for taking actions like putting solar panels on their roofs, insulating their homes better, or buying new energy-efficient automobiles. But people need to be motivated to want to make these purchases and to adopt low carbon lifestyle practices. As the old maxim goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. A supply of policy solutions without demand for them will not get us across the finish line.

But Gore goes further than just encouraging personal action; he recognizes that people who are invested in this issue as individuals, when mobilized, can be remarkably effective advocates for supply side solutions. They know exactly what policies will help them lead a low carbon lifestyle. Carbon-literate and committed citizens become a true force for policy change when they can say to a political leader, "I am doing my part, but need your help to go further. These are the specific things that will help me. And by the way, most of the people in my neighborhood have made similar behavior changes and are also very eager to see these policies adopted." What political leader would not be motivated to vote for a more aggressive climate change policy knowing that they will be rewarded by their constituents?

The wider and deeper the constituencies of people who have taken personal action, the stronger the impetus available for policy change. As Gore noted, "They are linked together." When EcoTeam members from our sustainable lifestyle campaign advocated for environmental policy change in conservative Kansas City, Missouri, after having taken personal action, and made it clear that there were many more people like them, they encouraged conservative city council members to vote for policies they might not have otherwise.

To help further this personal action and policy advocacy strategy Al Gore created The Climate Project and personally trained 1,000 community leaders from all across America to present his slide show. In return for the training, each agreed to make at least ten community presentations. This is where Low Carbon Diet came in. He gave the book to his trainees so that they would have a resource for the personal action part of his strategy, and invited me to offer a webinar for those who wished to apply it in their communities.

To take full advantage of this webinar I realized that participants would need more than the book and some tips on how to organize their communities; they would also need the community-organizing tools we had developed over the past two decades. This was clearly a teachable moment in America for these empowerment tools, so we posted them on our web site as an open source social technology and encouraged people to use and modify them as they wished.

This webinar attracted the early-adopter grassroots organizers within his cadre of trainees and they spread the Low Carbon Diet and these community empowerment tools far and wide. When the full story of Al Gore's many contributions to helping get America on a low carbon path is told, one of the important credits he deserves is helping spawn this community empowerment movement committed to furthering personal action. I am very grateful for his leadership and the opportunity he provided me to share our work with his community.

Empowering a Movement

I posted the times I would be leading this free webinar on our web site and requested that Al Gore's trainees register so we knew how many to expect and who was on the call. Because we were posting this in a public space, it would be awkward to say this was only for The Climate Project trainees, so we allowed anyone who might come across this posting to attend. Since the only advertising was by The Climate Project to their trainees, we didn't really expect anyone else. That proved to be an erroneous assumption. News of this free training for community organizers and other individuals wishing to address climate change spread rapidly among the many grassroots networks around the country. There was such a paucity of resources other than carbon calculators and checklists on web sites, and such a pent-up demand for taking action stimulated by An Inconvenient Truth, that when a proven approach to household behavior change and community organizing became available, we found ourselves inundated with interest.

As of this writing I have given this webinar twenty-two times and trained more than 600 individuals from environmental, faith-based and community groups, local governments, and large and small businesses; university and high school student environmental leaders and unaffiliated citizen activists have participated as well. People have come from thirty-six states and over three hundred cities and towns across America. The largest interest has come from California with forty-eight cities participating, followed by New York with forty-two, Massachusetts with thirty-nine, Washington with thirteen and Oregon with ten. There have also been participants from Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan.

The webinar format consists of people introducing themselves and their community and briefly describing how they wish to apply the program. This introduction process allows these change agents, who are often working in isolation, to experience the wide diversity of committed people like themselves who are part of this climate change movement. To further enhance this connection, we send everyone a list of all the attendees on the call, their community-organizing background (which they send us when they register) and e-mail addresses. This allows them to get a better sense of one another and follow up to exchange ideas with those applying the program in similar venues.

After this introduction I present what I call the Cool Community slide show. This is posted on our web site and participants view it as I go through each of the slides. It begins by making the case for the need to achieve rapid carbon reduction based on the urgency communicated by climate scientists. I then explain how conservation at the household level is the low hanging fruit, makes up half of America's footprint, and buys us time for the longer-term solutions to kick in. I briefly talk about the five Social Change 2.0 design principles so that they have an understanding of the operating system embedded in the tools and can make future adaptations in their organizing strategy based on them. I then describe our behavior-change and community-organizing research with the sustainable lifestyle campaigns to build their knowledge of and confidence in the model they are about to use. Finally, I explain the design of the Low Carbon Diet, and the tools and strategy for taking it to scale.

I tell participants that this slide presentation is itself one of the community-organizing tools in that it allows them to make the case for an effective residential carbon reduction program to key community stakeholders, and they should feel free to customize it as they see fit for such presentations. I then take questions, which vary from requesting more technical knowledge on how to implement one or more of the tools, to asking for additional strategies for getting started.

I conclude with an exercise, in which I offer consultation on the community-organizing plans of three represented cities based on a template we provide in advance of the call and which they subsequently submit to us. The template asks participants to answer seven questions:

1. Who is your target population?
2. How will you engage them in the program?
3. What is your carbon reduction goal through engaging this population?
4. By when do you wish to achieve this carbon reduction goal?
5. What do you see as your greatest challenges in implementing this program and how are you addressing them?
6. What questions would you like to have answered to help you implement your strategy?
7. What is your next step in implementing your strategy?

This is when the webinar comes alive for people because we have real people with real strategies in real communities with real problems to solve. Based on the slide presentation, we also have a community-organizing framework on which to build. These interactions provide me an opportunity to share some of the experience we have acquired over these many years and help both the person I am speaking to and the others on the call to see how all this works on the ground. Based on the feedback we get from people, they leave this training inspired by one another, hopeful that there is a practical and immediate way to begin addressing global warming, and empowered with concrete tools and a strategy for taking action in their communities.

On a personal level it is very gratifying to share the fruits of all these years of trial and error with such receptive people from all over the country and world. What a difference it makes when an idea's time has come. Although pushing a boulder up a mountain is a good upper-body workout, it certainly is more fun when it is poised to go down the other side on its own momentum. While we are not at that point yet, it seems to me, based on the large number of competent and committed people attending these webinars, that we are edging ever so close.

To be continued... Part Three of this six-part weekly series, "Instead of Cursing the Dark, Light a Candle - One Person Making a Difference" will appear in the Huffington Post Green Section on Monday, February 8.

David Gershon, founder and CEO of Empowerment Institute, is a leading authority on behavior-change and large-system transformation. He applies his expertise to issues requiring community, organizational, and societal change, from low carbon lifestyles, livable neighborhoods, and sustainable communities to organizational talent development, corporate social engagement, and cultural transformation. Gershon is the author of eleven books, including his recently published Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World, winner of the 2009 National Best Book Award and Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds. He co-directs Empowerment Institute's School for Transformative Social Change and consults with communities wishing to develop Cool Community initiatives. To learn more about Cool Communities or register for the next free webinar, March 11, on how to implement one in your city or town visit www.empowermentinstitute.net/lcd.

Previous posts by David Gershon on this topic:

"Empowering a Climate Change Movement -- Part One: Low Carbon Diet and the Cool Community" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-gershon/empowering-a-climate-chan_b_434874.html

"Hope for a Climate Change Solution in the Wake of Copenhagen: If Governments Can't People Can" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-gershon/hope-for-a-climate-change_b_401298.html

"Stepping Up to Save the Planet: From Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Social Engagement" Stepping http://csrwiretalkback.tumblr.com/post/341862628/stepping-up-to-save-the-planet-beyond-corporate-social

NEW YORK — New copies of Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall," Andrew Young's "The Politician" and other books published by Macmillan were unavailable Saturday on Amazon.com, a drastic step in the ongoing dispute over e-book prices.

Macmillan CEO John Sargent said he was told Friday that its books would be removed from Amazon.com, as would e-books for Amazon's Kindle e-reader. Books will be available on Amazon.com through private sellers and other third parties, Sargent said.

Sargent met with Amazon officials Thursday to discuss the publisher's new pricing model for e-books. He wrote in a letter to Macmillan authors and literary agents Saturday that the plan would allow Amazon to make more money selling Macmillan books and that Macmillan would make less. He characterized the dispute as a disagreement over "the long-term viability and stability of the digital book market."

Macmillan and other publishers have criticized Amazon for charging just $9.99 for best-selling e-books on its Kindle e-reader, a price publishers say is too low and could hurt hardcover sales, which generally carry a list price of more than $24.

Macmillan is one of the world's largest English-language publishers. Its divisions include St. Martin's Press, itself one of the largest publishers in the U.S.; Henry Holt & Co., one of the oldest publishers in America; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and Tor, the leading science-fiction publisher.

Sargent credited Amazon in his letter, calling the company a "valuable customer" and a "great innovator in our industry."

But, he wrote, the digital book industry needs to create a business model that provides equal opportunities for retailers. Under Macmillan's model, to be put in place in March, e-books will be priced from $12.99 to $14.99 when first released and prices will change over time.

For its part, Amazon wants to keep a lid on prices as competitors line up to challenge its dominant position in a rapidly expanding market. The company did not immediately return messages seeking comment Saturday.

Barnes & Noble's Nook and Sony Corp.'s e-book readers are already on sale. But the latest and most talked about challenger is Apple Inc., which just introduced the long-awaited iPad tablet computer and a new online book store modeled on iTunes. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, suggested publishers may offer some e-titles to Apple before they are allowed to go on sale at Amazon.com

The e-book market is an increasingly important one for Amazon. The company hasn't given specific sales figures on the Kindle, but CEO Jeff Bezos said Thursday that "millions" own the device. The company now sells six digital copies to every 10 physical ones of books available in either format.

To preserve the more lucrative hardcover business, publishers including Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins Hachette Book Group USA have said they will impose delays on the release of digital copies.

It's not the first time that books have disappeared from Amazon's virtual shelves. Last summer, Kindle users were surprised and unsettled to receive notice that George Orwell works they had purchased, including "1984" and "Animal Farm," had been removed and their money refunded. It was a deletion of pirated copies that had been posted to the Kindle store, but the ordeal highlighted a concern – that a book already paid for and acquired can be revoked by an e-tailer. The Kindle operates on a wireless connection that Amazon ultimately controls.

Bezos later apologized, and Amazon offered affected customers free books or $30.

Late Friday, author Cory Doctorow, who is published by Tor, the Macmillan division, called readers and writers "the civilian casualties" of the dispute in a post on his popular Web site, boingboing.net. It's a "case of two corporate giants illustrating neatly exactly why market concentration is bad for the arts," he wrote.

Another Tor writer, John Scalzi, speculated that Amazon's move would have "a long-term effect on Amazon's relationship with publishers, and not the one Amazon is likely to want," he wrote on his Web site.

___

AP Business Writer Andrew Vanacore in New York contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — Tishman Speyer Properties walks away from 11,232 Manhattan apartments because it can't pay its mortgage. That's good business.

Rick Gilson, a college custodial supervisor in South Dakota, wants to walk away from the mortgage on his mobile home. If he does, he'll be a deadbeat.

Those two borrowers face the same financial dilemma: Their mortgages far exceed the values of their properties. Yet one gets to walk away without guilt, while the other can't.

Gilson is too scared to dump the mortgage on his mobile home. He owes $31,973, but the home is only worth about $14,000.

"I have 12 years of money put into this property that I will never get out," said the 50-year-old Gilson, from Rapid City, S.D. "But I am still paying because this is what I have been told to do. That's what I think is right."

Until now, the focus of the real estate crisis has been on individuals. One in four U.S. homeowners, or nearly 11 million Americans, are underwater on their mortgages. In some parts of the country – Florida, Nevada, Michigan, California and Arizona – the share tops 40 percent.

Some experts say it makes sense for some people to walk away if they're deeply underwater, even if doing so could wreck their credit score for seven years. It may not be worth it to keep paying a mortgage when they can find comparable rental housing for considerably less money.

The argument against walkaways is that they will wreak economic havoc if a lot of people do it. Banks will have more bad loans on their books. They'll make fewer loans. Home prices will plunge more.

The rules are different, though, for the walkaway of all walkaways.

That title is reserved for what happened to one of New York's trophy properties, the 56-building Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex. Spanning 80 acres on Manhattan's east side, it's the largest single-owned residential area in the city. Its red brick buildings, built by Metropolitan Life in the 1940s for World War II veterans, are still a haven for the city's middle class.

Commercial real-estate firm Tishman and its partner, investment firm BlackRock, paid $5.4 billion to buy the property from MetLife in late 2006 – right at the market's peak. They hoped to make money by converting rent-regulated apartments into luxury condos and raising rents.

Then the housing crash hit. The value now: $1.8 billion.

And you thought you overpaid for your house.

"They made assumptions that things would grow to the moon, and things certainly did not," said Len Blum, a managing partner at investment bank Westwood Capital.

Tishman said last week that it was turning the property back over to creditors to avoid filing for bankruptcy protection. In recent weeks, Tishman failed to restructure $4.4 billion in debt, and couldn't find another buyer, according to a statement from the company.

Tishman exits the deal with a ding to its reputation, but it will be fine. It still has Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Center in New York, and dozens of properties in cities worldwide. The company has about $33 billion in assets.

Residential homeowners wouldn't get off so easy.

For most underwater homeowners, the thought of walking away from their commitment is impossible to fathom. After all, it's part of the culture. Pay your bills. Uphold contracts.

University of Arizona law professor Brent White, who has written about mortgage walkaways, says societal pressures often trump what's actually legal. He thinks individual borrowers believe they are obliged to repay their loans even when it isn't in their financial interest.

"The problem is that we have a structure whereby corporations can walk away with impunity but individuals can't," White said.

Gilson reads what's happening 1,700 miles away in Manhattan and gets angry.

His mobile home started depreciating the minute he moved in 12 years ago, much as a car loses value as soon as you drive it out of the dealer's lot.

Three years ago, he bought a new home that he lives in with his wife. Since he can't sell the mobile home for anything near what he paid for it, he rents it out in order to make the $300.36 mortgage payment every month.

"I get so stressed over this," Gilson said. "It's like the elephant in the room and there is nothing you can do about it."

Gilson is frustrated that real-estate tycoons can default on a $4.4 billion mortgage, but he's not supposed to do the same on his $31,000 loan.

How can you blame him?

___

Rachel Beck is the national business columnist for The Associated Press. Write to her at rbeck(at)ap.org

DAVOS, Switzerland — The world's foremost gathering of business and government leaders wrapped up a five-day meeting Sunday with widespread agreement that a fragile recovery is under way but no consensus on what's going to spur job growth and prevent another global economic meltdown.

In a group of big egos and many power players attending the annual World Economic Forum, there was even some humility and a realization that overcoming the first global financial crisis is uncharted territory.

The gathering of some 2,500 VIPs in this Swiss alpine resort saw much spirited debate on whether more regulation is needed for the financial industry, how to boost sagging global unemployment, and finding ways to ensure the nascent recovery is kept on course through 2010.

The atmosphere of doom and gloom that pervaded last year's forum, which took place at the height of the economic crisis, was replaced this year by a feeling of some satisfaction that a modest recovery is under way but uncertainty about the way forward and how banks should respond.

Deutsche Bank chief Executive Josef Ackermann told an AP-sponsored closing panel that the worst of the financial and economic crisis had been managed "quite successfully" but decision-makers now had a tough choice: "Should we take more risk, be a creative force for growth, or should we focus on security?"

Peter Sands, the CEO of Britain's Standard Chartered Bank, said at the panel that the right balance must be struck "between making a safer banking system and a financial system that can support the sort of dynamism and growth in job creation."

"Get it wrong one way and we risk a new crisis; get it wrong the other way and we'll take the steam out of the recovery and reduce the chances of creating new jobs," he said.

At the same time, Sands said, everyone must have "a degree of humility about what we actually know, and how confident we can be, that the ideas we're going to put in place are going to have the consequences that we thought they were going to have."

At Davos, the pendulum swings between a focus on the economy and other global issues.

The spotlight at past forums has been on celebrity guests like Angelina Jolie and Bono, but this year it fell on the big bankers and government financial regulators. Many participants remarked upon the absence of high-profile figures from the Obama administration. The highest-ranking was Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council.

In the keynote speech, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for a return to ethics and morality in business and gave a broad riposte to free-market capitalism.

Klaus Schwab, the forum's founder, ended the meeting with a call to the business and government leaders to reflect "on values" and social responsibility.

Sarkozy told international bankers and CEOs just what they didn't want to hear: Brace for bonus curbs, tighter banking regulations and new bookkeeping rules. He echoed rallying cries of workers from the United States to Europe and Asia, and hours later, President Barack Obama also called for reforms to Wall Street.

Perhaps the most important meeting was unscheduled. It came Saturday on the sidelines of the forum when government regulators, finance ministers and central bankers from the U.S. and Europe laid out their financial reform plans during a two-hour meeting with bank executives.

Sands called the discussions at this and other meetings "very constructive" but said: "They haven't in a sense solved the issues, but they certainly, I think, pushed them forward."

Ackerman praised the major economic players for expanding their Group of Eight to the Group of 20. He said there should be a Business group of 20 to work alongside them and focus on business issues.

With China and India spurring the global economy, Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Limited, India, a global communications company, predicted that the difference between growth rates between the developing and developed worlds "are increasingly going to become larger."

The result, he told the AP-sponsored panel, is that richer countries will "more aggressively" invest in emerging markets in order to maintain their own growth, which will be "good for the emerging world."

Muhammad Yunus, managing director of the Grameen Bank, which pioneered microcredit, said in an AP interview that "this is a good time to redesign the entire financial system."

"Big guys are not the big sufferers," he said. "Big sufferers are the small guys who lost their jobs, who lost their food, who lost their livelihood."

PRESIDENT OBAMA 10 days ago set out one important element in the needed structural reform of the financial system. No one can reasonably contest the need for such reform, in the United States and in other countries as well. We have after all a system that broke down in the most serious crisis in 75 years. The cost has been enormous in terms of unemployment and lost production. The repercussions have been international.

by Kristin McCracken

In the latest addition to the adventure genre, North Face (Nordwand), director Philipp Stölzl tells the story of Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas (Andi) Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas), two Nazi climbers who in 1936 made a daring attempt to ascend the north face of the Eiger. Known as “the last problem of the Western Alps,” this treacherous route seemed to defiantly challenge climbers near and far. Was it insurmountable? Who was brave enough even to try? Kurz & Hinterstoisser’s story is very well known in Alpine regions of Europe and in certain mountaineering circles, but the film is gripping—perhaps even more so— to those of us unfamiliar with their fate.



To a certain point, the Eiger was mastered earlier—and more visibly— than its Alpine peers: a train route was blasted through the mountain as early as 1912, allowing thrill seekers without any athletic ability the chance for breathtaking views from stomach-dropping heights. The film makes great use of these (and higher) vantage points, and depicts life both on the mountain and in the hotel nestled above the treeline just below the north face. In the summer of 1936, tourists at the hotel were afforded a front-row seat to the drama of the climb, attempted by both the German duo and their two Austrian challengers. In the film, one of these spectators is Kurz’s childhood sweetheart, and as we watch the events unfold through her eyes, we are kept in nail-biting suspense, rooting for these (Nazi, and thus unlikely) heroes. The film evokes such notable depictions as Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void (based on Joe Simpson's marvelous book) and Jon Krakauer's Everest epic Into Thin Air.
 
Tribeca Film talked with Stölzl (also credited as one of the film’s writers) about the German mountain films that inspired him and the many challenges in bringing this story to the screen: developing the backstory, hunting for financing in the European market, making his Nazi characters endearing, and conquering the Eiger in his own unique way.
 
Note: It’s kind of tough to do an interview about the film without giving away the ending; to that end, what's posted here is spoiler-free. More of the story (with spoilers noted) is posted with the full article on TribecaFilm.com.


Philipp Stölzl

Tribeca Film: Please tell us a little about the old German climbing films that were your inspiration.
 
Philipp Stölzl: The climbing films were thought of as sort of a blockbuster genre in the 1920s and 30s. In Germany, people didn’t really travel far—the mountains were the main place for people to go, so they walked and they climbed. Because the more famous climbers were stock heroes, the admiration for climbing was reflected in the movie theaters; thus there were a lot of mountain movies in these years, starting in the 20s and ending during WWII.
 
TF: How did the Nazis get involved with these films, and with climbing?
 
PS: The Nazis loved mountain climbing. The whole idea of climbing fits into the way the Nazis saw death—dying for an ideal was a metaphor, that you could become a willing hero in the war against the rock. When you look at the early mountain movies, they are very symbolistic, with a visual type of language. They were connected to a German Romantic vision of nature, with the mountain as a character. The Nazis really, when you look at the Leni Riefenstahl’s [the Nazi propagandist] documentaries, clearly liked the powerful, visual language. After the war, people had to look for new images, since the mountains were loaded with the whole terror of the Nazis.


Spectators' view from the chalet/hotel at the foot of the Eiger

TF: Is the chalet at the foot of the mountain as it was in the 1930s, or has it been more built up? How realistic was its portrayal in the film?
 
PS: [The hotel] is still [virtually] the same [today], and would have been a prime location to shoot, but we couldn’t afford it. The historic part of what happened at the hotel is pretty realistic. The hotel itself has 60-70 beds, and given the timing [summer], it was sort of a tourist hotspot. The special thing about the Eiger is that there is a public arena—the hotel is at about 2300 meters [up the mountain, above the treeline], which is a very, very high spot for a tourist hotel. The train [through the mountain] was finished in 1912, very early—people were starting to make money off of nature; it’s sort of an early mass tourism place.
 
TF: The cinematography was breathtaking. How did you technically pull off the climbing scenes in blizzard conditions? Were they a combination of actual locations and sets? How grueling was the shoot on the mountain?
 
PS: The whole mountain stuff takes forever and forever—after a long, exhausting day, we would get one or two good shots. Then we shot a lot of documentary-style stuff: a couple of weeks in a mountain cabin, below the face. Then we shot using doubles [on the mountain], and then more main drama with the actors in a refrigerated set. We had a hall, normally meant to cool down vegetables, 15 degrees, and we just did our work inside, with rented snow machines like the ones ski resorts use.
 
TF: It still sounds brutal.

PS: It’s actually more brutal than shooting on a mountain, because at least there you are moving a lot. In the fridge set, you just stand around a wait, and you don’t need to haul everything, so you get cold.



TF: You are a mountain climber yourself. Can you identify with the need to conquer big challenges?

PS: I am familiar with it. I come from Munich, close to the Alps, and as a boy, I went climbing and walking easy routes. We went to all these locations, and I became sort of a more higher-level mountaineer. (I am far from climbing the North Face, but I spent a lot of time with professional mountain climbers.) After we finished the movie, a group of us climbed the Eiger—the actors, the producers, the cameraman, and me—but not the north face. It’s a two-day route. Because there is a train inside the mountain, you can get out on the backside. It’s one day through the glacier, and then you stay in a hut on a ridge, and then you start climbing up the ridge. It’s a beautiful route.

Continue reading on TribecaFilm.com (Warning: contains spoilers!)
More on Germany

This Week's Top Stories in Foreign Affairs:

Desperate or Deliberate Moves from North Korea?
Behind the bells and whistles of US President Barack Obama's State of the Union where the US President claimed that sanctions are working against North Korea, the international pariah state continued to make concrete belligerent moves in its foreign policy this week. The week began on Sunday with Pyongyang accusing Seoul of declaring war by announcing that it would make a preemptive attack if it suspected the South of planning a nuclear attack. Following this, the North has carried out a series of "military exercises" along a disputed naval border with the South, lobbing missiles and artillery towards the contentious line. Although Pyongyang calls these drills "routine", Seoul and its allies are watching tensely. Meanwhile, North Korea arrested another American in addition to Robert Park, a missionary who was arrested Christmas Day. This second American had allegedly trespassed into the isolated state evidently investigating human rights issues. This arrest is sure to raise tensions between Washington and the US again, just as they had been during the imprisonment of two American journalists earlier this year. Such tension was already evident as Washington rebuffed an offer from Pyongyang to reopen talks on locating American remains from the Korean War. The US responded to the proposal by saying that the North should first come clear and clean on its nuclear ambitions.

The State of the Union - What Else?
It was a given that something would be left out of US President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. Although the President focused much of his speech precisely on what it was intended to do (present the state of the union) many analysts and pundits have remarked that it was volume-low on foreign policy (only 11 out of 69 minutes). Why did he sideline foreign policy? Whether it should have included more foreign policy items is beside the point here. The items he brought up were competition in alternative energy markets, sanctions on Iran and North Korea, commitment to the Doha trade talks, and an urge to get trading partners to play by the rules for imports and exports. He also emphasized that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winnable and controllable. Remarkably missing from the speech was any mention of Israel-Palestine, or instability in Pakistan and Yemen. Both of these nations are key fronts in America's war against terrorism, and have been a focal point in foreign policy. This is telling, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton skipped out on the State of the Union address to meet in London with world leaders to discuss the deteriorating situation in Yemen and Islamist extremists' growing presence there.

War Reports:

Afghanistan/Pakistan
65 nations gathered at a Donors Conference in London to pledge support to the struggling nation and Afghan President Karzai sought to reassure international leaders that Afghanistan is on the right track. This was a tough task for Karzai, who's election was greatly contested and who has yet been able to name a complete Cabinet. During this conference, Karzai clearly stated his intention to foster reconciliation as a key component of his domestic policy, including making peace through tribal councils with Taliban leaders. This is in contrast to the American and NATO strategy to reintegrate low level factions of the Taliban. Taliban leaders have scoffed at this initiative. Meanwhile, a convoy bringing key NATO supplies to Afghanistan was attacked in the key port city of Karachi (a rare and troublesome occurrence).

Iraq
Three coordinated car bombs rocked Baghdad, and killed over 30 people on Monday. One target, the Hamra hotel, is a noted haunt for foreign journalists. Analysts believe this is an effort of insurgents seeking to undermine the upcoming Parliamentary elections on 7 March. Far more likely to disrupt the elections has been the Justice and Accountability Commission's insistence that its disqualification of hundreds of candidates, many of them Sunni, is legal and non-partisan. Some people have suggested, though officials have denied it, that Iranian influence has played a part in the Commission's decisions. Meanwhile, US and Iraqi security forces both confirmed that wanted insurgent Abu Khalaf was killed in the restive area of Mosul.

Analysis in Brief:

Palestinian reconciliation?
On Monday, analysts groaned that Hamas and Fatah were no closer to reconciling their nearly 3-year territorial split amid the expiration of the term of the Palestinian parliament. Then on Thursday, Hamas suggested it was interested in resuming talks via Egyptian moderators in Cairo. Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that it was willing to begin low-level talks with the Palestinian Authority. If this small goodwill translates into something larger then we could be in another round of Mideast negotiations.

Belarus buys in and Moscow Enhances Its Sphere of Influence
Following all the hype last week with pro-Russian v. pro-Russian runoff in Ukraine's elections, another former Soviet republic, Belarus, made news this week. Minsk and Moscow reached a deal after a month of back-and-forth proposals concerning oil deliveries. The agreement states that Belarus' tariffs for oil will only increase by 11 percent. It allows Europe to make a sigh of relief... until next year. Clearly, a solution for energy security for Europe is far off so long as nations like Belarus and Ukraine base large portions of national revenue on transit fees for natural resources.

Shaky Status-Quo in Southern Lebanon
Following a Lebanese Parliamentary resolution allowing Hezbollah to keep its arms as long as Israel poses a threat to Lebanese sovereignty and growing worry that Hezbollah is rearming, Israeli leaders have said that the entire Lebanese state, not just Hezbollah, will be the target of Israeli aggression should the border situation escalate. And more recently, Lebanese leaders have claimed to have obtained French guarantees to support Lebanese infrastructure in case of an Israeli attack. Despite this saber rattling on both sides, heads of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) remain optimistic that conflict will not break out again, though they say both sides could do more to promote peace.

First Peacetime Sri Lankan Elections
Incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa is re-elected President with 58% of the vote against 40% for opposition leader General Sarath Fonseka. Fonseka says he is contesting the results and security forces surrounded his hotel, but this drama will subside with time. Both Fonseka. as former head of the Army, and Rajapaksa are credited with ending the 26 year civil war the Tamil Tigers. The political allies then suffered a split over who should receive credit for the victory. The winner is now tasked with actually rehabilitating and maintaining a peaceful country, a harder task than merely winning the election.

This Foreign Affairs Roundup can be read on the Simple Intelligence Site or the Huffington Post World Page every Friday.