the starling can't get out

from Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1767)

In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage--'I can't get out--I can't get out,' said the starling.

I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity--'I can't get out,' said the starling--God help thee! said I- -but I'll let out, cost what it will; so I turned about the cage to get to the door; it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it to open without pulling the cage to pieces--I took both hands to it.

The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his breast against it, as if impatient--I fear, poor creature! said I, I cannot set thee at liberty--'No,' said the starling-- 'I can't get out--I can't get out,' said the starling. . . .

Disguise thyself as thou wilt, Slavery! said I--still thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.- -'Tis thou, thrice sweet and gracious goddess, addressing myself to Liberty, whom all in public or in private worship, whose taste is grateful, and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change--no tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle ao chymic power to turn thy sceptre into iron-- with thee to smile upon him as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch, from whose court thou art exiled-- Gracious heaven! cried I, kneeling down upon the last step but one in my ascent, grant me but health, thou great Bestower of it, and give me but this fair goddess as my companion--and shower down thy mitres, if it seems good unto thy divine providence, upon those heads which are aching for them.

my job is to presidate

Brilliant. Watch this movie. Now.

from The Smirking Chimp.

wrr: a little alito goes a long way too far

He has argued that the federal government has no responsibility for the "health, safety and welfare" of Americans; that "the constitution does not protect the right to an abortion"; that the executive should be immune from liability for illegal domestic wiretapping; that illegal immigrants have no "fundamental rights"; that police had a right to kill an unarmed 15-year-old accused of stealing $10; and that it should be legal to fire, and exclude from funded federal programmes, people with AIDS, because of "fear of contagion ... reasonable or not.” As a judge, he argued that federal regulation of machine guns was unconstitutional; he approved the strip search of a mother and her 10-year-old daughter although they were not named in a warrant.

Commenting on Judge Alito’s smooth persona and “dinner-table geniality,” Pierre Tristam on his website Candide’s Notebooks observes:

Not to make exaggerated claims, but it’s possible to be a crook, a hit man, a Jay Gould or [a Jack] Abramoff and still be a terrific dinner companion. . . . Alito is not a boor in person, he is a boor only in his legal philosophy. . . . It’s all there in his past decisions, his speeches, his on-the-record advocacies. . . . his infamous abortion ruling that drips of contempt for women, his imperial [view] of the presidency that drip[s] with contempt for Congress, his John Roberts-like, courtier’s draw to power, and in defense of power, at the expense of the weaker, the ordinary, the individual, for whom the Bill of Rights was written.

Alito, Tristam argues, is “just mean.”

For instance, less than three years ago Alito’s Third Circuit Appeals court heard a case about a prison inmate placed indefinitely in solitary confinement, where he was not allowed books, magazines, newspapers, or pictures from home. Only religious and legal tracts. . . . The inmate, Ronald Banks, claimed his First Amendment rights were being infringed by not having newspapers to read. The warden disagreed. The ban, he reasoned in court, was not only to punish inmates, but also to keep them from using newspapers as catapults and incendiary devices. Apparently, inmates are into flinging [fecal matter] at guards with rolled up periodicals, and sometimes burning them. But if that were so, why couldn’t they use the religious or legal magazines for the same purpose? Two judges ruled in favor of Banks, calling the rules unjustified, exaggerated, unsupported by evidence of necessity, irrational. In other words: cruel, arbitrary, unusual.

Samuel Alito dissented, noting, by way of evidence that the prison rules aren’t irrational, that they apply only to “the most disruptive and dangerous .1%” of the prison population. That should be worrisome to anyone who thinks that the law is not a matter of numbers: It doesn’t matter if one person’s First Amendment rights are being flouted, as opposed to one thousand people’s. [But] to Alito, it apparently does, especially when the .1% are not ordinary humans, but “the most disruptive and dangerous” of their kind. That alone is enough to suggest that Alito sees such things as the Bill of Rights as applying in a hierarchical, subjective sort of way: He leaves it to the warden to decide how to apply them.”

The decision that Tristam discusses resembles Alito’s dissent in Planned Parenthood v Casey, which is discussed (among other places) on the blog “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” In his dissent, Alito argued to uphold a law that required women to sign a statement notifying their husbands unless they met a fairly narrow set of exceptions. The Supreme Court subsequently voted to nullify the notification requirement.

The core of Alito's argument that the provision does not constitute an "undue burden" is his acceptance of the state's argument that the spousal notification provision would only affect a small percentage of women seeking abortions. This argument is not only illogical, it’s also wrong as a matter of law. As the plurality opinion (O’Connor et al.) noted in Casey:

The analysis does not end with the one percent of women upon whom the statute operates; it begins there. Legislation is measured for consistency with the Constitution by its impact on those whose conduct it affects. . . . The proper focus of constitutional inquiry is the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant.

In both of these cases, Alito seems to suggest that it is fine to violate people’s constitutional rights, as long as it’s only a few people, and perhaps especially if they are members of disfavored groups.

On the other hand, there is one person to whom Alito would like to give more power: the president.

In 2000, Alito declared his belief in the “gospel” of the “unitary executive”—the theory that “the president, as commander-in-chief, is sole judge of the law, unbound by hindrances such as the Geneva conventions, and has inherent authority to subordinate independent government agencies to his fiat.”

Sidney Blumenthal, writing in the Guardian UK, suggests that Alito's belief in the “unitary executive” was perhaps the paramount credential for his nomination by Bush to the supreme court.

During the Reagan Administration, Alito promoted the use of “signing statements,” which have been adopted with the greatest gusto by George W Bush. For instance, when signing the Defense appropriation bill containing the McCain Anti-Torture Amendment, Bush issued a signing statement reserving the authority to ignore the very law to which he had just put his name—in the interests, of course, of “protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”

Last month, John Yoo, the former justice department official who wrote the crucial memos justifying Bush's policies on torture, detainees, and domestic surveillance without warrants, debated Notre Dame law profesor Douglass Cassel on the subject of the “unitary executive.”
Cassel asked, "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"
"No treaty," Yoo replied.
Cassel prompted, "Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo."
Yoo said, "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”

I think it’s safe to assume Bush would again cite his need to “protect the American people.”

John Nichols, on commondreams.org, quotes James Madison, who drafted the Constitution and later became the fourth president, and who said,

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. . . In war . . . the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. . . .War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement . . . .The same malignant aspect . . .may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war. . . .No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

emergency

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."

wrr: old mole underground

What is this “old mole,” and how can a mole root down a mountain? We can trace the figure of the “old mole” back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the first act, the ghost of Hamlet’s father speaks from beneath the ground (or beneath the stage), following and echoing Hamlet’s demand that his comrades keep secret what they’ve seen. In reaction to the ghost’s pursuit and speech, Hamlet says, Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast? / A worthy pioneer!”

The phrase was taken up by Hegel, in his lectures on the history of philosophy, where he substitutes the spirit of the times –or Spirit, with a capital S—for the spirit of the ghost. He says Spirit is “inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! canst work i' the ground so fast?”) until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away.”

Karl Marx, of course, cared more for the earth than for its crumbling, and famously inverts Hegel’s idealism. In an afterword to the first volume of Capital, discussing “the mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands,” Marx observes that “With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” So Marx’s old mole is not the Spirit that speaks, but the Revolution that grubs, that burrows, digs, undermines, or agitates.

In an 1856 speech in honor of the anniversary of the Chartist People’s Paper, Marx said, “In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy, and the poor prophets of regression, we do recognize our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer — the Revolution.”

But what has a mole in common with a pioneer? Both, as it turns out, are terms drawn from mining. A mole is a person who works underground or a machine used for tunneling, and a pioneer is an old word for a miner.

Miners have been in the news recently, among the latest victims of the transfer of resources from workers to capital.

Pierre Tristam on Commondreams.org, notes that
“In its crudest but truest terms, the West Virginia mining tragedy . . . is an example of corporate dividends at the expense of workers’ safety. . . . the mine in Sago, W.Va., was a documented disaster zone of safety infractions. . . . But [few make that connection] between the cost of true safety in day-to-day, working America — in the workplace anywhere, in the mines, in the meat-packing plants, in the rail yards — and the cost of corporate corner-cutting in the name of shareholder demands. In all, 5,703 people were killed in job-related accidents in 2004 [the last year for which figures are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics] [and (58 of [those died] in West Virginia). It takes money to pay for government inspectors of workplaces. It takes money and commitment to make the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) be more than a wrist-slapper. But the Bush administration despises regulatory agencies like OSHA and sister agencies like the Mine Safety and Health Administration (to say nothing of the Environmental Protection Agency). It starves them of money and authority, enabling companies working under them to snub their noses at them.

In 2004 eight workers at the Sago mine in West Virginia were injured badly enough to be kept off the job for at least a year. The entire year, the company sustained $9,515 in fines. . . . They call that safety regulation. It’s as toothless as a dentured crash-test dummy. The bottom line isn’t safety. It isn’t keeping Americans secure in their job. It isn’t doing what it takes to hold employers accountable for workplace safety. The bottom line is the bottom line. . . . the West Virginia mining tragedy is a parable of Homeland Security America.”

That transfer of resources form poor to rich has been going on a long time (it’s currently known as capitalism), but it’s been accelerated in recent years.

The Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy recently found that in 2004 the ratio of C.E.O. pay to worker pay at large companies has grown to 431 to 1. If the minimum wage had advanced at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, it would be $23.03 an hour instead of $5.15.

According to Citizens for Tax Justice, of Bush's $1.7 trillion in tax cuts, $578 billion or 33% went to the top 1% of income earners, while the top 20% of income earners received 71% of all

Henry Giroux, in a recent essay on dissidentvoice.org, puts these economic developments in a broader context. He traces a series of authoritarian developments, including market fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, attacks on critical education, and rising militarism, Giroux writes,

“Recent revelations in the New York Times about the Bush administration’s decision to allow the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without first obtaining warrants, the Washington Post disclosure of the chain of secret CIA torture prisons around the world, and the ongoing stories about widespread abuse and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan are just some of the elements in the popular press that point to a growing authoritarianism in American life. The government, as many . . . critics . . . have pointed out, is now in the hands of extremists who have shredded civil liberties, lied to the American public to legitimate sending young American troops to Iraq, alienated most of the international community with a blatant exercise of arrogant power, tarnished the highest offices of government with unsavory corporate alliances, used political power to unabashedly pursue legislative polices that favor the rich and punish the poor, and disabled those public spheres not governed by the logic of the market. Closer to home, a silent war is being waged against poor young people and people of color who are either being warehoused in substandard schools or incarcerated at alarming rates. Academic freedom is increasingly under attack, homophobia has become the poster-ideology of the Republican Party, war and warriors have become the most endearing models of national greatness, and a full-fledged assault on women’s reproductive rights is being championed by Bush’s evangelical supporters -- most evident in Bush’s recent Supreme Court appointment and nominee. While people of color, the poor, youth, the middle class, the elderly, gays, and women are being attacked, the current administration is supporting a campaign to collapse the boundaries between the church and state.”

Giroux doesn’t make the point, though we might, that fascism is arguably a sign of the disintegration of the capitalist system. But he does argue for the importance of critical education in responding to the authoritarian challenges to bourgeois democracy. Giroux argues that “Education is the terrain where consciousness is shaped . . . and the capacity for self-reflection and social change is nurtured and produced. . . .” He acknowledges that “Changing consciousness is not the same as altering the institutional basis of oppression,” but stresses that “at the same time institutional reform cannot take place without a change in consciousness capable of recognizing the very need for such reform or the need to reinvent the conditions and practices that make it possible. . . . Fortunately, power is never completely on the side of domination, religious fanaticism, or political corruption.”

If the Sago miners are the latest in the flock of canaries in the coal mine of capitalism, we need to educate ourselves and each other to interpret the “the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy, and the poor prophets of regression.”

Here’s one last bit of mole trivia for the day: a group of moles is known as not a flock or a pride but a labour.

The labor of moles on the Old Mole Variety Hour is doing our part to read the bewildering signs of the day, to discover our usable history, and to root down the mountain of capitalism that threatens to bury us all.

(young mole photo by bob travis from flickr).