Un-Flash: California company trades in fake spontaneity

Published in the Portland Phoenix

We know: Flash mobs are so ten years ago. But it turns out the craze whose entire point is an underground do-it-yourself surprise has gone corporate. And rather than celebrating creativity, community, and spontaneity, it’s now a business model profiting in part off the energy of unpaid performers.

Yes, there’s a company called Flash Mob America. It’s based in Los Angeles, and has produced what it calls “flash mobs” for major TV shows, including Today, Modern Family, and The Bachelorette.

FMA’s “sole purpose,” according to its marketing materials, is “creating joy through surprise.” Oh, and making money by getting hired to put on staged events largely carried out by volunteers.

That’s what’s happening here. See, FMA employs a public-relations firm, Hollywood fave MWPR, which has worked with Oprah, Martha Stewart, People, Us Weekly, and more. Some poor intern from MWPR called the Phoenix (and, apparently, other Maine media outlets) on July 18 to announce that a “flash mob” will happen at 5 pm on August 5, somewhere in Portland. Surprise!

After cutting through some promo-talk the announcement boiled down to this: Would we at the Phoenix be interested in running a story, to tell people they could volunteer to perform? The company needed these unpaid workers, or it wouldn’t be able to actually provide the service for which it had been hired by an as-yet unidentified Portland client.

Now that’s a surprise.

The original flash-mob ethos was pretty different — fully DIY and organic, often created by groups of artists. One of the earliest academic studies of flash mobs, published inFibreculture Journal in December 2005 by Judith Nicholson, then a graduate researcher at Concordia University in Montreal, found that flash mobs specifically avoided traditional media, in favor of mobile communication among participants directly.

The movement’s credo, she wrote, was “the power of many, in the pursuit of nothing.” And it was deliberately created and intended as a criticism of capitalist society, designed to empower citizens over governments and corporations. In fact, she wrote, “While flash mobbing was being popularized, a fear that someone would appoint himself leader of the mob or that the trend would be appropriated for specific political or commercial purposes was expressed frequently” by those involved. (With a leaderless reclaiming of public space for use by the people, it might be seen as a celebratory precursor to the Occupy movement.)

Of course, something can hardly be called “flash” if it’s being planned from across the country several weeks in advance. And with “more than 50 professional performers” in the mix, along with somewhere between 100 and 200 unpaid workers, it’s not quite sounding like a spontaneous fun thing. “It’s a really detailed full-scale live production,” FMA co-founder Staci Lawrence told me.

Though the event will be “in a really public place,” the audience is preselected — by the paying client. There’s “a specific group of people that we are surprising,” Lawrence says, hoping that anyone who figures out the details wouldn’t share them, for fear of ruining the closely guarded, highly manufactured spontaneity.

FMA gets permission from relevant authorities — a far cry from an upstart art form that used to call for outright cancellation of the event if property owners or police got wind of it beforehand.

But then, what should we expect from a company “founded . . . in tribute to Michael Jackson” anyway? Yes indeed, in the promo materials’ “About Flash Mob America” section is a heartwarming little gem: “In July 2009, Staci and Conroe [Brooks] — moved by Michael Jackson’s emotional memorial — produced the first American tribute to the late King of Pop by recreating Sweden’s ‘Beat It’ flash mob.”

You read that right: this is a company whose founders got their start by reenacting an actual flash mob, put on by a group of Swedish street dancers just two weeks after Jackson’s death.

And then, FMA did it again. And again. Back to the press release: “The following month they again honored Jackson with a flash mob on what would have been his 51st birthday. And then the unexpected: Universal Music Group hired the team to produce a flash mob to surprise the late pop icon’s sister, Janet Jackson.”

That led to bigger gigs, including somehow working with Oscar Mayer and Charmin, and leading to their self-description as “the industry’s flash-mob experts.” Lawrence says on big corporate jobs, she does try to make sure the non-professional mobbers get paid; for the upcoming Portland show and most others, though, “there’s not that kind of budget.”

That’s no surprise.

Extended Openings: Fundraising push on for prep space at BayOne

Published in the Portland Phoenix

After a winter and spring of increasing activity at BayOne, the Anderson Street home to the expanded Bomb Diggity Bakery and some small-scale food-production businesses, it's time for another growth phase. (See "Building a Hub for Food," by Jeff Inglis, January 11.)

Eli Cayer, who runs BayOne and its neighbor and relative, Urban Farm Fermentory, has launched a $16,000 Indiegogo campaign to pay for a couple of community-focused aspects of the project.

First, Cayer wants to raise $5000 to pay for sinks and stainless-steel tables for a set of three prep-kitchen booths, which will be available for people to rent as licensed food-prep spaces under city and state regulations. (For food carts and trucks, and other small-scale producers, home prep is no longer allowed, and a licensee needs to specify a location where prep will occur.)

"Portland is lacking a facility where startups and nano producers can legally make and package their artisanal products," Cayer writes in his Indiegogo project description.

The plumbing is in place; what's needed is money for the sinks and tables, as well as industrial track curtains that will separate the spaces as needed, but can also retract to make the area a larger space for community classes, film screenings, and other gatherings.

Cayer says he has several small startups interested in the space, as well as people wanting to start teaching classes once the space is finished.

The rewards for contributing to the Indiegogo campaign are focused on exactly those people: a $15 pledge gets a person an hour of prep time in the kitchen, and $20 the opportunity to sell wares at a booth at a market also to be held regularly in the space. For community members, a $25 pledge earns entry to a basic-skills class, or a $25 discount off an advanced-level class.

Indiegogo allows organizations to collect the money they raise, even if their campaign doesn't hit the target amount (unlike Kickstarter, which only dispenses money if a goal is achieved), and Cayer is hoping to get far more than $5000.

An additional $10,000 will pay for the setup of a greenhouse that will not only be home to herbs used by UFF and other BayOne tenants, but also to an aquaponics area that could grow in contained systems salad greens and fish for sale at the market sessions. It will be an additional site for classes and workshops, too.

Those classes and other happenings depend on another key aspect of the project, a zoning ordinance amendment that will come before the City Council at its July 15 meeting.

"We're not trying to change the ordinance. We're just trying to tweak it a little bit," Cayer says. The amendment would allow special events like "maker's markets," where people could sell art, crafts, and food — including prepared foods, which are frowned upon at the regular Portland farmers' markets — as well as lectures, musical performances, and the like.

Head to the council meeting — July 15 @ 7 pm in City Hall — and donate at igg.me/p/440350 until August 20.

You are being watched: Government surveillance is broad, deep, and dangerous

Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Providence Phoenix

The government is collecting every kind of digital communications information about you — not just the so-called "metadata" of the location, participating phone numbers, and duration of every single telephone call made in the United States, but also the content of those phone conversations, and of emails, online chats and instant messages, and text messages.

Thanks to brave leakers and reporters who have revealed the details of two major programs, one collecting telephone information, and the other vacuuming up terabytes of data from major Internet companies (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and more), we know all of those things are happening, with the possible — and only possible — exception of recording the phone calls. A former FBI agent told CNN back in May that phone conversations were being captured. The Associated Press was blunt in a June 15 report, paraphrasing Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and computer-security expert: "Just assume the government collects everything." (For an overview, see sidebar, "PRISM Primer," by Deirdre Fulton.)

Now that we know for sure that we live in a surveillance state, where do we go from here? Of course, some people will say they already expected as much, or believed so. These new revelations aren't for them — they're for everyone else, who didn't think the Panopticon had truly arrived. But now the United States itself has become 18th-century thinker Jeremy Bentham's architectural wonder of a prison, in which inmates can be observed at each and every moment, without being sure whether they are in fact being watched just now.

Rather than dismissing the alarms about government surveillance, the public at large can no longer ignore or wish away its presence. Those fearmongerers who were rudely dismissed should take heart from The Daily Show, which in the wake of the revelations about NSA spying has introduced a new segment: "Good News! You're Not Paranoid."

PRIVACY=TRUE SELF

First, a brief discussion about the importance of privacy. Many people dismiss it, saying things like "I have nothing to hide." Beyond the oft-cited "right to be left alone" definition offered by Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928, privacy is nothing less than the right to actually be yourself.

Surveillance — intrusion on privacy — affects human psychology and action. It is the ultimate infringement on personal freedom, because it exploits an instinctual weakness of humans. When we're in private, we do things freely, as our true selves; when we're being watched, we change our behavior.

The principle Bentham articulated in 1787 is simple: "Observation and fear of detection ensures compliance," as author Charlie Canning summarized it. Think about it yourself (privately): Is there absolutely nothing you would do differently in your entire life if your partner, parent, child, boss, and best friend were watching at all times? Now expand that audience to include the only power that can by the force of arms deprive you of your freedom — the government. (There are several other important related problems; see sidebar "Debunking 'Nothing to Hide.'")

Of course, there are plenty of regular, law-abiding people who will respond, "I don't do anything wrong, so they won't watch me, and there's nothing to catch me doing." But in his 2011 book Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, civil-liberties lawyer (and occasional Phoenix contributor) Harvey Silverglate details exactly how misguided that sense of security can be. Making the argument that federal laws are overbroad, loosely interpreted, and aggressively prosecuted, Silverglate describes case after case in which innocent citizens doing their very best to behave within the law accidentally came to the attention of federal authorities — largely through personal misfortune, such as running out of gas when riding a snowmobile on US Forest Service land — and were charged with, and convicted of, felonies.

Let's just say it straight: If a federal prosecutor wants to find something you've done wrong, there's probably something that could qualify. Your main hopes to avoid prosecution are: 1) avoiding coming to authorities' attention, and 2) depriving the authorities of information that could be used against you. Since the first is mainly a matter of chance, it's best to focus on the second — which is, plainly put, privacy. How, exactly, should we do that? In her sidebar ("Counterveillance 101"), Deirdre Fulton outlines some strategies.

DOING THE NSA'S BIDDING

As best we can tell, the government is not doing direct collection of the information it's using. Rather, the NSA and the FBI are demanding — at times with the help of judges in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — that private companies disclose data those firms have already collected from us. We have offered up that information willingly in almost every case, often in exchange for services we like, such as connections with distant friends, or directions to the nearest gas station.

There are two key differences between this and what the government is doing. First is transparency: do we know the information is being collected, and by whom? And second, what could the people who have the data do with it? The specter of being tracked just by our cellphones is very real — and requires no snooping on conversations. (See sidebar, "Metadata matters.")

That said, corporate data-mining is pretty open. Most of those companies tell us — even if it's buried pages into a software license agreement — they're collecting data, and most of them make it fairly obvious they do so. For example, when we connect to Facebook, it's right in front of us that the site knows our own information and that of our friends. And we know, when we sign up for customer-loyalty programs, that we're being tracked in exchange for discounts or special deals.

And what companies can do with the data is pretty limited (or so we think). Of course, they could publish it — but apart from the fact that Facebook in particular offers publication as a benefit of its service, it's worth noting the effectiveness of public backlashes against Facebook's periodic attempts to relax privacy controls. That outcry is a limit on intentional corporate misuse of the data — and if the data is stolen or otherwise gets out unintentionally, federal and state laws offer recourse to those whose private data is compromised.

Which is not to say that corporations' use of our personal information is not invasive. But it is less of an affront because we know it's happening, assist in the data-collection process, have some recourse if policies change, and are limited in our vulnerability — at least companies can't lock us up!

Government data-mining, by contrast, is secret — until it's revealed by leakers who face prosecution for telling the truth. And the government's power is sweeping, including literal deprivation of freedom, or even life itself, through prosecution and punishment. Public outcry can only change things when we know what's happening — but too often officials hide behind the concept of classified information, even when they're involving corporations in the info-vacuum. And the so-called "public servants" are bought and paid for by special interests that conflict with our own.

Beyond being deprived of the information we need to make good decisions about our government's actions, we can't even fight back against telecom firms, which are forced to comply and protected from repercussions. A June 11 Huffington Post report details the millions of dollars spent by AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint from 2002 to 2012, including a combined $55 million on lobbying relating to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And sure enough, the companies have gotten federal legislation enacted that gives them total retroactive legal immunity from civil lawsuits related to their participation in government surveillance programs. The immunity has been attacked, but repeal efforts have failed.

HAVING A PUBLIC CONVERSATION

It's easy to laugh about how ineffective this surveillance system might be, especially in certain cases: How did they miss the Boston-bombing Tsarnaev brothers? Why can't the feds locate NSA leaker Edward Snowden in a worldwide manhunt? "Agency Busy Spying on Three Hundred Million People Failed to Notice One Dude Working For It," wrote the New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz. But to point out flaws, even arrogance, in the concept that data can tell us everything is to miss the point that our leaders apparently think data is all-seeing, and have taken it upon themselves to gather it without real oversight.

The biggest problem with this whole surveillance mess is that it was secret. We simply have not, as a democratic society, had the conversation about what kinds of freedoms and privacies we are willing to give up in exchange for what kinds of safety and security. As President Barack Obama put it in his false dichotomy June 7, "you can't have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy."

Nobody's asking for such a thing (nevermind that both concepts are unquantifiable) — we're asking for a clear and transparent balance between security and privacy, a balance arrived at through a public debate, both in Americans' own lives and in Congress. (Also useful would be a conversation through the courts; at present, only government attorneys are permitted to appear at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's secret hearings, removing any possibility that government claims could be challenged or questioned.)

But it's hard to talk about the details of these programs without security clearances; whether it should be or not, most of this work is classified. That's where a post-9/11 recommendation that has finally borne fruit comes in.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was suggested in the list of recommendations from the 9/11 Commission report, back in 2004, and was created by Congress later that year. It was never truly funded or staffed, but after a 2008 change in its authorizing law, and after years of Congressional and delays from the Bush and Obama administrations, its chairman was finally confirmed by the Senate on May 7 of this year.

That man, David Medine, has said his board will investigate the NSA program — after a classified briefing on June 11, he told the Associated Press "further questions are warranted." In addition to meeting with Obama and officials in the intelligence community, the board will also hold a public meeting slated for July 9, "that would bring together academics, experts and advocates to explore issues raised by the national surveillance programs," the Washington Post wrote on June 21.

But then again, perhaps these surveillance programs do keep us safer. As Stephen Colbert said of our enemies: "They hate us for our freedoms. The less freedom we have, the less likely they are to attack us."

There's a comforting thought.



Debunking 'nothing to hide'

'NO SECRETS' DOESN'T MEAN 'NO PROBLEM'

• Apart from the fact that you do have things to hide — or wasn't it you who posted nudie pics of yourself and your beloved online? (and was it really for the sake of living a transparent life?) — the claim that people have "nothing to hide" and that, therefore, government surveillance must be okay, is torn to pieces by George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove's 2011 book Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security (Yale University Press).

Solove argues that the problems of government surveillance go well beyond the watching and collecting. While most debate about privacy centers on themes along the lines of the all-seeing telescreens in George Orwell's 1984, Solove says a better example is Franz Kafka's The Trial, a chillingly prescient early 19th-century novel about a man arrested but not told why, and whose attempts to find explanation only result in vague information that he is being investigated by some authority for some unknown transgression.

"Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered," Solove writes. "In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system's use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones — indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability."

Beyond that, claiming "nothing to hide," Solove points out, suggests that what's hidden is bad, wrong, or illegal. But "Surveillance . . . can inhibit such lawful activities as free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy," he writes.

There is also the key question of whether people own their own data. "Many government national-security measures involve maintaining a huge database of information that individuals cannot access," Solove writes. "Indeed, because they involve national security, the very existence of these programs is often kept secret." Calling this collection a "due-process problem," in which citizens are denied power over themselves and their information, Solove says this creates "a power imbalance between people and the government. . . . This issue isn't about what information people want to hide but about the power and the structure of government."

Solove also notes a key vulnerability that even law-abiding citizens have to government misinterpretation. "For example, suppose government officials learn that a person has bought a number of books on how to manufacture methamphetamine. That information makes them suspect that he's building a meth lab. What is missing from the records is the full story: The person is writing a novel about a character who makes meth. . . . Should he have to worry about government scrutiny of all his purchases and actions? He might not want to have to worry about how everything he does will be perceived by officials nervously monitoring for criminal activity. He might not want to have a computer flag him as suspicious because he has an unusual pattern of behavior."

So it's not that you have nothing to hide. It's that revealing all would leave you naked and powerless before the fearsome strength of the government — which is the very opposite of freedom.

_JI



'Metadata' matters

FOUR CALLS OR TEXTS CAN ID YOU

• If your concern is focused on whether the government is listening to your phone conversations, you're worrying about the wrong thing. Cellphone "metadata" — whom you call, when, from where, and how often — is much more interesting, and much more invasive than whether someone hears you say, "Hi. It's me. Can you please get milk?"

A study published in the online academic journal Scientific Reports in March details exactly how just four pieces of "spatio-temporal" data can "uniquely identify 95 percent of . . . individuals" without hearing any phone conversations or reading any text messages.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Catholic University in Belgium, and the Complex Systems Institute in Chile studied cellphone company data covering 1.5 million people's calls over 15 months. The data provided did not contain callers' names or addresses; it included only the time and location of the connecting cellular antenna each time a phone received or sent a call or text message.

By charting the series of antenna connections over time, the researchers were able to construct a map of each phone's movement, which they called a "mobility trace." In 95 percent of the traces, just four points of time-location data were needed to tell that trace uniquely apart from the others in the large dataset. (The most difficult traces to focus in on needed only 11 locations before becoming unique.)

While the study does admit that additional, outside, data would be needed to connect a mobility trace to a person's name, the researchers observe that many pieces of location information are a matter of public record (such as property ownership files), are disclosed voluntarily through online check-ins (Facebook, Foursquare), or are easily searchable (business addresses).

In an example offered on Democracy Now on June 12, cybersecurity expert Susan Landau said this: "When Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, there were a number of calls that weekend before. One can imagine just the trail of calls. First the CEO of Sun and the CEO of Oracle talk to each other. Then probably they both talk to their chief counsels. Then maybe they talk to each other again, then to other people in charge. And the calls go back and forth very quickly, very tightly. You know what's going to happen. You know what the announcement is going to be on Monday morning, even though you haven't heard the content of the calls."

And even without a name attached, drawing a picture of events is simple, Landau said: "The metadata of a phone call tells what you do as opposed to what you say. If you call from the hospital . . . and then later in the day the doctor calls you, and then you call the surgeon, and then when you're at the surgeon's office you call your family, it's pretty clear, just looking at that pattern of calls, that there's been some bad news."

Bad news is right.

_JI

Best advice series

Published in Money magazine; these are my contributions to a larger group project

Shed financial stress
Money worries often trigger an obsessive-thought loop, sending your brain and body into fight-or-flight mode. In this state you can't make good decisions.

So first break the physical response: Close your eyes and take a couple of slow, deep breaths. Next, break the mental response: Focus your attention on the sensations of breathing.

This process opens up the medial prefrontal cortex, the reflective, creative part of your brain that develops strategies to solve complex problems in a way that's simply not possible if your body and brain are still trying to fight or flee. When the worry loop restarts -- and it will -- you can always come back to your breathing. 
-- Stephen Cope, director of the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living

Be healthier for free 
Take the closest thing we have to a wonder drug: a walk. It reduces the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, depression, and many other ailments. Even if you never lose an ounce of weight, increasing activity is crucial to protecting your health. 
-- Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Win a bidding war
Go as high as the maximum price you'd ever be willing to pay -- if someone outbids you, you'll feel confident you gave it your best shot.

Sometimes it's not just about the money. Give the seller some breathing room too. Buyers often signal their interest by offering to close quickly, but that move might backfire in this market: If the sellers haven't found a new place yet, they may be unable to accept your offer.

Instead, propose a seller's residential lease. You close on the house quickly, then rent it back for 60 or 90 days. That gives the sellers a chance to look for a home in a nonpanicked way -- and gets you the house you want. 
-- Mary Beth Harrison, founder and realtor, Keller Williams Elite, Dallas

Prosper as a landlord
Think like your worst-case tenant -- the one who'll never pay you a dime and never leave. These folks will take advantage of strict laws on when and why a tenant can be evicted. You need to know those laws just as well as they do.

Write your tenant lease to safeguard your rights, like setting community standards for noise, trash and other areas of possible neighborly nuisance. To protect yourself financially, put away a little money from the rent to cover potential legal costs. 
-- Casey Edwards, long-time landlord and co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Being a Smart Landlord

Take the drama out of a renovation 
Don't walk blindly into a major renovation project. Know why you are remodeling, and define what you really need so you don't just pretty up a space that doesn't work for you.

And before you even contact a contractor or designer, take 25% of your renovation budget and sock it away. That way when your contractor finds water damage, you can fix the problem and move on without fighting about how much it's going to cost -- or what part of your plan you have to scrap to stay on budget. 
-- Susan Solakian, consultant and author of The Homeowner's Guide to Managing a Renovation

Equality drive continues: Workplace rights fight heats up

Published in Out In Maine

While much has — rightly — been made of progress toward marriage equality for LGBT Americans, another, possibly even bigger, hurdle remains: workplace equality.

In 29 states, people can still be fired simply for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. Fortunately, Maine isn’t one of them — it’s one of the 21 states that protect LGBT individuals from workplace discrimination; a further 16 states protect LGB people, but not workers who identify as transgender, says Tico Almeida, founder and executive director of Freedom To Work, a national organization promoting employment equality.

To provide national uniformity, and include being L, G, B, or T on a long list of federally protected elements of identity that cannot be discriminated against in employment (with race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and disability, among others) comes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, re-introduced in Congress in April. All four members of Maine’s congressional delegation are co-sponsors; Republican Susan Collins is a lead sponsor of the bill in the Senate.

Despite having 172 co-sponsors in the House and 48 in the Senate, it faces an uncertain future, though perhaps its best chance in many years.

For Maine’s delegation, it’s a pretty straightforward issue: As Independent Senator Angus King said in a statement from his office, “No one should suffer employment discrimination for any reason, including on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Simply put, it’s entirely unacceptable and shouldn’t be tolerated. When it comes to the workplace, all that should matter is a person’s skills and their ability to perform the job.”

And it’s not exactly a controversial issue outside the Capitol. In a November 2011 poll done by the Human Rights Campaign, 87 percent of Americans thought discrimination against LGBT workers was already outlawed by federal statute; 78 percent thought it was illegal in their own state, including 75 percent of people in states that actually lack anti-discrimination laws. (The survey’s margin of error is 3.46 percent.)

Further, 77 percent of Americans support protecting LGBT people from employment discrimination, including 70 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of people who identified themselves as conservative. Heck, groups usually thought to really oppose gay rights were strong backers: 69 percent of people over 65, 68 percent of people with a high school degree or less, 77 percent of observant Christians, 74 percent of born-again Christians, and 72 percent of residents of the Deep South, the poll says.

But in Congress, it’s a hot potato, 1st District Congresswoman Chellie Pingree says in an interview: “The Republican House leadership is extremely conservative. There’s just no way they would bring it up.” As a strong supporter, she’s trying to be optimistic: “I’m hoping Congress will catch up” with the wider public, she says.

With some major donors starting to withhold money from the Democratic Party because of their failure to act to protect LGBT individuals, whether through the executive order or through the killing of sponsorship for non-citizen same-sex spouses in the immigration reform package, the pressure is on President Barack Obama and the Democrats to force something to happen.

Senate action

Congressional progress has been long delayed — ENDA and other bills with similar protections have been introduced repeatedly since 1974. Supporters had hoped for a Senate committee hearing in June, but may yet get one sometime in mid-July, if Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who co-sponsored the bill in the Senate, keeps his promise to discuss the bill after the July 4 holiday break. (With the Supreme Court expected to rule on the Defense of Marriage Act by the end of June, the July timing also provides an opportunity to revise the ENDA bill’s language to preserve protections in response to whatever is contained in that ruling.)

Harkin’s announcement of committee hearings gives supporters heart; so does the recent announcement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, that he has a lesbian niece, and that he does not think she should lose her job because of her sexual identity. He has floated the possbility that the bill might come up for a full Senate vote this year, perhaps in September or October.

If that happens, and if it succeeds, as Almeida expects, it will likely be due to Collins’s hard work behind the scenes, convincing her colleagues, both Democrat and Republican, to support fairness and equality in employment.

“I think Democrats have been going too slowly on ENDA,” Almeida says, adding that Collins appears to agree, because she is pushing Dems in the Senate to keep their promises of support for gay rights. And she is convincing her Republican colleagues that ENDA is a safe, bipartisan bill that deserves their support too.

Christian Berle, FTW’s new legislative director, who was born on Cliff Island and grew up in Portland and Cumberland, calls Collins’s support for gay rights “a matter of compassion and support for common human decency.” He should know: not only a former deputy director of the Log Cabin Republicans, he has known Collins for 17 years, including interning on her 1996 campaign and twice in her DC office.

Almeida projects the bill will pass out of the Harkin-led Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee with every Democrat in support and “one to three Republicans” in favor as well, which should set it up for a good vote in the full Senate, if Reid keeps his word. “I think we can get go 60 votes and even a little bit more,” Almeida says.

House inaction

Speaker of the House “John Boehner is a roadblock to ENDA — and many other things that would benefit the American people,” Almeida says. And John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who chairs the House Education and the Workforce Committee, is also “ultra-conservative, anti-gay,” Almeida says. “His intention is to bottle up ENDA in committee and never have it see the light of day.”

So the normal legislative process in the House may need a kick in the pants.

Happily, there is a method for doing that. It’s called a “discharge petition,” through which, with the support of at least half the House, a bill can be pulled out of committee and directly to a vote on the House floor. With more than 170 House members already signed on as co-sponsors, that leaves between 40 and 50 more members needed to support bringing it to a vote.

Almeida says the full number may not be needed; the last time this method was used successfully was with the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill, in 2002 — when the number of House members supporting the discharge petition got close to the 218 target, the House leadership reluctantly started working the bill through the committee process. Almeida projects a similar situation may happen with ENDA, so Boehner can avoid looking like he is losing control of the flow of legislation.

Pingree says such a petition would likely be more strategic and symbolic than directly effective, but she supports any effort to bring ENDA up for a vote, even in a House led by hostile opponents.

Executive action

Even before Congressional movement, there is more that can be done: President Barack Obama could issue an executive order offering similar protection to more American workers.

Employees of the federal government are already protected by ENDA-like rules, created initially by an executive order from President Bill Clinton for LGB people, and expanded by Obama to include transgender people.

The next target for an executive order is federal contractors — private companies that get government contracts and are paid in taxpayer dollars. While campaigning in 2008, Obama said he supported such a move; five years later he has yet to act on it.

It is true that most major federal contractors have protections for sexual orientation and gender identity, and that more such companies are adopting such policies all the time. But discrimination remains widespread: Williams Institute studies show that between 15 and 43 percent of GLB people have been subjected to sexual-orientation-related discrimination or harassment in the workplace, and 90 percent of transgender people report “some form of harassment or mistreatment on the job or report having taken some action such as hiding who they are to avoid it.”

It is indeed is worth celebrating the fact that at least 61 percent of federal-contractor employees “are already covered by laws or private policies protecting against sexual orientation discrimination,” and “at least 41 percent . . . are already covered . . . against gender-identity discrimination.”

But that means a stunning 11 million people — 39 percent of people working for companies that receive taxpayer dollars — are vulnerable to being fired (or passed over for promotions, or otherwise discriminated against) simply for being gay, lesbian, or bisexual — and 16.5 million — 59 percent of those workers — if they are transgender, face similar perils.

Williams Institute research says 91 percent of Americans, including 86 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of Independents, and 61 percent of Republicans support Obama issuing the executive order. With all this momentum, ENDA has its best chance in years. 

A possible pitfall

A common objection to gay-rights legislation — and an excuse for stalling, revising, or outright gutting protections — is that it somehow interferes with people’s religious freedom.

But this draft of ENDA goes so far toward protecting religious liberties that even the ACLU — which is primarily concerned about constitutional rights — says it is too broad. While the ACLU does support the overall bill, and its underlying principles, “we do have really serious concerns with the religious exemptions,” says Rachel Healy, communications and education director of the ACLU of Maine. Counterintuitively, the rules could “provide . . . cover to discriminate against LGBT employees,” by exempting a very broad range of religious-affiliated organizations from the law.

Churches and other houses of worship would be exempt, as expected (the law couldn’t tell the Catholic Church it had to hire, or could not fire, a priest who did not conform to the Pope’s rules). But so would hospitals and universities affiliated with religious groups. And they would be allowed to discriminate in employment positions that are not at all related to religious doctrine or practice — such as cleaning staff and office workers. That level of discrimination is “a sweeping exemption that is broader than anything that’s ever been okayed before,” including for exemptions about discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or disability, Healy says.