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	Taking Our Values Public by Bernie Horn Center for Policy Alternatives USA   July 13, 2005   Why do we progressives wince at the word “values?” Because it has become a club, fashioned by the right wing to bludgeon our candidates.  It has become a code word to attack our morality. In this war of words, how can progressives fight back?  How do we reframe the values debate?    First, we have to understand how the conservatives have hijacked the word.   Thanks to the right-wing messaging machine, many Americans think the term “values” is synonymous with “moral values,” defined by a specific religious code of personal conduct.  It’s an attempt to convince the public that conservatives have values and progressives do not. But that’s just spin.   Everybody makes value judgments constantly, and most values have nothing to do with morality.  They simply measure “good” and “bad.”  Values judge how fabrics feel, how flowers smell, how foods taste, how music sounds.   In the realm of public policy, we certainly want government officials to uphold the values of honesty and integrity, but that would be true whether they administered conservative or progressive public policies.   So how do conservatives equate moral values with opposing public health coverage, favoring lower taxes or blocking the exercise of free speech?  And how do they get away with ignoring the most basic Judeo-Christian value—love thy neighbor—as they advocate for discriminatory policies?   Conservative Value Confusion   This is the message framing trick: The right wing’s “moral values” refer to private, not public, policy values.    “Private values” signify commonly accepted measurements of a good person.  They include loyalty, piety, generosity, courtesy, bravery, respectfulness and patriotism.   The term “public values” means commonly accepted measurements of good public policy. Substantive public values include fairness, justice, equality, freedom, opportunity and security. There are also procedural public values, like efficiency and transparency, which measure the administration of government, whether the substantive policy is progressive or conservative.   Significantly, the private value most commonly misused by conservatives is “personal responsibility.”  Unemployment, hunger, discrimination are all the individual’s problem, they say. They’re not a societal problem. Conservatives twist the language of responsibility to shirk responsibility.  It’s downright Orwellian.   But conservatives don’t even have to say the words “personal responsibility.” They just use the framework of personal responsibility to present their messages.  Studies consistently show that when news stories involving social issues are framed to focus on individuals’ misfortunes, the public tends to place responsibility on the individual.  When similar stories are framed to focus on the conditions and policies that cause individuals’ misfortunes, the public tends to hold government policies responsible.  (See Bales and Gilliam, “Communications for Social Good,” 2004.)  For the same reason, trumpeting private values suggests individual responsibility, the conservative position.  Using public values suggests societal responsibility, the progressive argument.   So how do we construct a language of progressive public values?  It’s easy, because progressive values reflect historic American values.   Historic American Values   “We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”  These famous lines from the Declaration of Independence are the greatest values statement in U.S. political history.  It proclaims public values—measurements of the quality of governments, not individuals.   Here is where we begin to formulate progressive values, by translating the three tenets “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” into contemporary language.   By “Life,” Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration did not mean simply the right to survival. They meant a right to personal security.   By “Liberty,” Jefferson was referring to the kinds of freedoms that were ultimately written into all federal and state Bills of Rights, blocking the government from infringing upon speech, religion, the press and trial by jury, as well as protecting individuals from wrongful criminal prosecutions.   But how do we translate Jefferson’s “pursuit of Happiness?”  It cannot mean that everyone has the God-given right to do anything that makes them happy. To understand “pursuit of happiness,” we must consider an earlier part of the same sentence:  “all men are created equal.”  Jefferson is not saying we have an unlimited right to pursue happiness; he is saying that all of us have an equal right to pursue happiness.  In today’s language, we’d call it the right to equal opportunity.   Contemporary Progressive Values   Now let us rearrange and restate America’s historic values as a Progressive Declaration:   First, progressives are resolved to safeguard our individual freedoms.  We must fiercely guard our constitutional and human rights, and keep government out of our private lives.   Second, progressives strive to guarantee equal opportunity for all.  We must vigorously oppose all forms of discrimination, create a society where hard work is rewarded, and ensure that all Americans have equal access to the American Dream.   Third, progressives are determined to protect our security.  While forcefully protecting lives and property, we must ensure the sick and vulnerable, safeguard the food we eat and products we use, and preserve our environment.   Our progressive values differ fundamentally from those of conservatives.  While conservatives work to protect freedom, opportunity and security only for a select few, progressives work to extend these rights to all Americans. Now, that’s morality.   When presented with this structure, some progressives note that the words freedom, equal opportunity and security sound awfully moderate to them.  Exactly! These are values that resonate with the vast majority of Americans.  The concept of framing is to build a bridge connecting progressives with undecided voters.  When we use familiar public values to describe and defend progressive policies, average Americans understand that we’re on their side.   It’s not that progressives should never use private values. The personal attributes of individual candidates for office are properly measured by such values. But the point is that progressives gain the upper hand when we move the policy debate from private to public values, because we’re the only ones who favor freedom, equal opportunity and security for all.   This is a battle we can win. We can assail the right wing’s perversion of the language of values.  We can declare our own values through a progressive linguistic framework.  We can sway Americans to our side by showing that progressive—not conservative—policies are grounded in “values.”   (Bernie Horn is senior director of policy and communications at the Center for Policy Alternatives).
	People power on the march in China by Howard French USA Today / New York Times China   Beijing.10 August, 2005   "Retreat in China", by David J. Lynch. (USAToday)   An intensifying crackdown on domestic dissent is dashing hopes that China's economic opening will produce greater democracy anytime soon.   Chinese authorities in recent weeks have arrested prominent intellectuals and foreign journalists. They have tightened restrictions on Web sites and praised the killing of anti-government protesters in nearby Uzbekistan, which Human Rights Watch labeled a "massacre." And they've rounded up the leaders of unapproved religious observances.   The current domestic chill is a far cry from what was expected when Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao took command in November 2002. Long groomed for leadership, Hu, 62, was seen as representing a new generation of Chinese rulers. His rise — more than a decade after the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square — revived hopes of gradual political reform.   Hu's response to a crisis over the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus in April 2003 — firing two top officials and briefly delivering greater openness — seemed to legitimize those dreams.   But hopes of broader change have evaporated. Since adding the title of Chinese president in March 2003, Hu has followed a two-track strategy. Publicly, he emphasizes policies aimed at helping those left behind by China's boom. This populist campaign stresses development of poorer regions long neglected under Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin.   At the same time, Hu pursues an unapologetic effort to rebuild centralized control, including unleashing the security services on domestic and foreign journalists.   Zhao Yan, a researcher for The New York Times, has been jailed since September on unspecified charges of leaking state secrets. Ching Cheong of The (Singapore) Straits Times, was detained April 22 while seeking an unpublished manuscript of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese leader deposed in 1989 for opposing the use of force in Tiananmen Square. Just last week, China said it had formally arrested Ching and charged him with spying for Taiwan.   China also recently required all Web sites and blogs to register with the authorities. And the party is using undercover agents to steer online conversations in chat rooms away from criticism of the authorities, according to the Nanfang Zhoumo newspaper. In one city, the newspaper reported, propaganda office officials posing as chat room participants were ordered to: "Develop actively, increase control, accentuate the good and avoid the bad, use it to our advantage."   A stubborn one-party system   After a quarter-century of economic reform, Hu's hard line is confounding the conventional wisdom that economic liberalization inevitably will unravel China's one-party system. Most analysts still expect market freedoms to someday spawn greater political openness. But that evolution appears likely to take longer than once thought.   Today's tight grip is likely to persist through the next Communist Party conference in 2007 and the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, analysts believe. "I would say there's going to be a four-year hiatus. ... Today, the words 'political reform' can barely be mentioned," says Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.   So far, the domestic repression hasn't affected Sino-U.S. relations. In internal party speeches, Hu might castigate unnamed "hostile forces" that want to westernize China. But with the United States as China's top export market, he wants to preserve the lucrative relationship with Washington.   China's economic advance — far from threatening the Communist Party's monopoly on power — is helping the authorities maintain their grip. The security services are flush with cash, equipment and personnel, and the government can afford to lavish comfortable salaries upon potentially restive intellectuals. "They have more resources to strengthen the police state," Pei says.   As its factories dominate one industry after another, China might appear to be an unstoppable economic behemoth. But the current moves to quell dissent reflect the leadership's private nervousness over Beijing's myriad problems. In recent years, there has been a notable explosion of public protests — over unpaid pensions, official corruption and land seizures — across the country.   It's a reminder that China's Communist Party is trying to accomplish something unprecedented: a permanent marriage of economic freedom with political repression. Hu and his Politburo colleagues have not forgotten the instability that attended the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where political reform was implemented before the state-run economies were dismantled. That's why Hu welcomed Uzbekistan's tough response to May's embryonic anti-government revolt. "They're terrified of this happening to them," says Edward Friedman, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.   Indeed, Hu's signature initiative is aimed at strengthening the party's ability to rule. A throwback to the pre-1978 Maoist era, the effort "to maintain the advanced nature of Chinese Communist Party members" requires the party's 69 million members to attend special lectures and engage in "self-criticism."   "On the ideological level, there's no question Hu's been quite tough. He is pulling things in. He's reining in the intellectual atmosphere," says Boston University's Joseph Fewsmith, an expert on the Chinese leadership.   Because of changes in society, though, Hu's crackdown is irrelevant to all but a small, politically conscious elite. It was easy for the party to exert influence when everyone received their salary, housing, medical care and education through jobs with state-owned enterprises. But now that only 27% of urban residents work for state factories, the old levers of control are no longer as effective. And that means Hu ultimately faces a decidedly uphill battle.   (Veteran foreign correspondent David J. Lynch recently returned to the USA after a three-year tour in China, where he opened USA TODAY's Beijing bureau).   Xinchang, China. July 20, 2005 (NYT)   After three nights of heavy rioting, police took no chances on Monday, deploying busloads of officers to block every road leading to a rural factory.   But the angry villagers had learned their lessons too, having studied reports of riots in towns near and far that have swept rural China in recent months.   Sneaking over mountain paths and wading through rice paddies, they avoided police as they made their way to a pharmaceuticals plant, determined for a showdown over what they see as an environmental threat to their livelihoods.   Almost 15,000 people waged a pitched battle with the authorities on Sunday, overturning police cars and throwing stones for hours, undeterred by clouds of tear gas.   Residents of this factory town in China's wealthy Zhejiang province vow they will keep demonstrating until they have forced the 10-year-old plant to move and take its pollution with it.   "This is the only way to solve problems like ours," said one protester, 22, whose house sits less than 100 metres from the smashed gates of the factory, where police were massed. "If you go to see the mayor or some city official, they just take your money and do nothing."   The riots in Xinchang are part of growing discontent in China, with the number of mass protests like these hitting 74,000 incidents last year, from about 10,000 a decade earlier.The protests share a common foundation of accumulated anger over the failure of China's political system to respond to legitimate grievances and in defiance of local authorities, who are often seen as corrupt.   A sign of the leadership's growing concern with the protests is evident in a proliferation of high-level statements about the demonstrations.   In a nationally televised news conference this month, Li Jingtian, deputy director of the Communist Party's organisation bureau, complained that "with regard to our grassroots cadres, some of them are probably less competent, and they are not able to dissipate these conflicts or problems". In another statement, Chen Xiwen, an economics vice-minister who oversees agricultural affairs, saluted the internet's role in allowing central government authorities to learn of unrest more quickly, and praised demonstrating farmers for "knowing how to protect their rights".   The people of Xinchang were reluctant to speak openly about the uprising, since they would be arrested if identified. The problems at Xinchang started with an explosion - in a vessel containing deadly chemicals - at the Jinxing Pharmaceutical Company this month. It killed one worker and contaminated the water supply.   Villagers say they appointed representatives to press for compensation but when they sent a group on July 4 to demand an audience with factory officials, security guards beat the representatives. The next day, the villagers returned in larger numbers and managed to grab a security officer, whom they acknowledge beating. As word spread of the beating of the village representatives and of the worker's death in the explosion, villagers demanded that the factory close.   The protesters are sustained by the example of the city of Dongyang, 80 kilometres away, which was the scene this year of one of China's biggest riots, in which more than 10,000 residents routed police in a protest over pollution from a pesticide factory. Despite tight controls on news coverage of the incident, the riot in Dongyang, where the chemical factory remains closed, has been seen as proof that determined citizens can force authorities to deal with their concerns.   "As for the Dongyang riot, everyone knows about it," a man in his 20s said. "Six policemen were killed, and the chief had the tendons in his arms and legs severed. Perhaps they went too far, but we must be treated as human beings."
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