caring labor and the economic stimulus

As president-elect Barak Obama puts together his economic stimulus plan, a number of feminist economists have proposed that it ought to include investments not just in infrastructure—things like roads and bridges—but also in "human infrastructure," or the care economy. Women have been among those hardest hit by the economic crisis, because women are among the most vulnerable economically. Of the 37 million Americans living in poverty even before the crisis, 27 million are women and children. By making his economic plan friendly not just to the natural environment but also to the human needs so often met by the work of women, feminist economists suggest, Obama can increase both the efficacy and the equity of his economic plan.

Economic historian Julie Matthaei is the author, with Teresa Amott, of Race, Gender, and Work, a Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Matthaei observes that

"Many are looking to the Great Depression as the model for what needs to be done with this economic crisis, and it is full of lessons of what to do, and what not to do. On the other hand, it is crucial to note. . . the very different situation our economy was in then vis a vis women's employment, especially the employment of married women. In 1933, women, especially married women, were a much smaller part of the labor force (12% of married women were in the paid labor force in 1930; 16% in 1940). Indeed, married women's employment wasn’t well-accepted and there were attempts to pass laws excluding them from paid employment, and some actual "marriage bars." So employment programs didn't have women workers -- and their dependents -- in mind. In contrast, today, 60% of married women are in the labor force, providing vital financial support to themselves and their families, and their right to employment is not questioned. Now women constitute 46% of the total labor force, and their employment needs should not be ignored in any effort to stimulate the economy in an efficient and equitable way."

"[Further,] because the vast majority of married women with children were not in the paid labor force, the "care deficit" which Nancy Folbre has written about … in her book, The Invisible Heart, was not the issue it is today. Unpaid caring labor was abundant; most families had full-time homemakers, and hence were not facing the work/family crisis and time bind, and having difficulty caring for children and elders. In contrast, today, caring work -- both unpaid and paid -- is being underprovided, and thus our economy could greatly benefit from investment in this 'human infrastructure.'"

Nancy Folbre herself has commented that "many of [Obama's] economic policies seem … gender biased. [His] biggest fiscal stimulus plans call for investments in green energy and infrastructure that will create new jobs as well as long run benefits to sustainable growth. [But ] most of these jobs will go to men who predominate in the construction and related trades. Women who try to enter such traditionally male occupations face problems of discrimination and sexual harassment, not to mention work schedules that are anything but family-friendly. "

Folbre asks Obama to " commit to explicit federal efforts to improve women’s access to such jobs." Noting that "in [his] last debate with Sen. John McCain, [Obama] supported the Lily Ledbetter Act, which would overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling that an employee only has 180 days to file a lawsuit alleging discrimination, whether or not they have access to the necessary information, " Folbre calls for Obama to get "this legislation moving right away. And [also to ] do something to remedy the deplorable pay and working conditions of home care workers like Evelyn Coke, who was recently denied coverage under the Fair Labor Standards Act to overtime pay on the grounds that what she provides is really just 'domestic service.'" "Better yet," continues Folbre, "why not direct part of [the] fiscal stimulus plan to improve the care sector of our economy? Economist James Heckman, among others, shows that investments in early childhood education deliver an extraordinarily high social rate of return—yet many states lack the funding they need to move forward in this area. Countless studies reveal painful shortfalls in long term care, shortfalls that could be met by expansion of public support for paid home care workers and tax credits for family members providing for their own disabled, elderly, and infirm. Like “green” investment, such “pink” investment would [yield] increased employment opportunities as well as long-term benefits—in this case, improvements in human capabilities and quality of life."

"Everyone in America wants to be middle-class, except of course, the super-rich who have enough money to ride out the recession in high style." Folbre asks Obama not to "postpone the small tax increases for families with income over $250,000 that [he] proposed during [his] campaign. We need that money to mend a tattered safety net that fails low-income mothers and their children. Our major anti-poverty program for these families—the Earned Income Tax Credit—provides no benefits for the unemployed. Women workers—disproportionately concentrated in low-paying and part-time jobs—have less access to unemployment insurance than men do. Our child poverty rates are already among the highest in the world. [We need ] a plan to provide income supports for families in dire need, including the bankrupt, the homeless, and the hungry."

"[President Obama ] could make many family-friendly improvements to our tax system that would provide … benefits to women. " An economic policy that supports caring labor will benefit not just women, of course, but caregivers of any gender, and the children, elderly, ill, or disabled people they care for.

"Adults who take time out of paid employment to care for family members should not see their Social Security benefits reduced as a result. A big increase in the Child Credit—and making it fully refundable—would provide tax relief to those who need it most. Parents devote enormous time, energy, and money to raising the next generation of taxpayers—the ones who we expect to pay off our debts. We owe them more support."

The economic crisis provides an opportunity to press for a more just and caring society, one that recognizes the inevitability of interdependence and the centrality of human needs.

crisis

Crisis of Capitalism and the Left
by Emir Sader

A new crisis of capitalism, in the style of 1929. The theories of casino capitalism are confirmed. The US government contradicts itself again and heavily intervenes, demonstrating that its confidence in the market isn't as great as its propaganda displayed. Neoliberal capitalism spills its guts, and the theories of the Left -- Keynesian or anti-capitalist -- critical of neoliberalism are corroborated.

Our theories about the anti-social and perhaps terminal character of capitalism borne out, we leftists smile, rubbing our hands, eager for social and political consequences of crises.

Should we? Or perhaps should we ask ourselves how prepared we are to confront this new crisis with left-wing alternatives? Not just with theories, but with the social, political, and ideological force to contest hegemony in crisis. Are we ready to ask ourselves if the measures taken by governments wouldn't mean more suffering for the poor, more desperation, abandonment, unemployment, and precarious labor, without people being able to see alternatives? . . . .

For the time being -- as Marx said of the petit bourgeoisie -- it seems that the people are not yet mature enough to understand the theory of a Left that is satisfied with itself, with our marvelous theory that tells us that, whether in the long, medium, or short term, inevitably history will reveal that it's advancing toward socialism.

The turns -- both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary -- of the 20th century have taught us nothing if we are still waiting for the corpse of our enemy to turn up, rather than meticulously preparing to make our dreams and utopias a reality, as recommended by Lenin's revolutionary realism.

lipstick is a petroleum product

For the Old Mole

I’m here to confess that I have been as mesmerized as anyone by the Republican nominee for vice president.

In the words of Fafblog,

there's a brand new political superstar on the scene and she's tough as nails and the media won't leave her alone and she's a rough-and-tumble Alaskan hockey mom and why are they asking all these questions and she is the pure reincarnation of the invincible Anglo-Saxon frontier earth mother and stop picking on her!

Stop picking on her lipstick, for instance. It’s true that the title of a book by McCain’s former press secretary is Lipstick on a Pig, and it’s true that McCain himself described Hillary Clinton’s health plan as “lipstick on a pig” and it’s clear that when Obama used the phrase he was referring to the McCain campaign, so that if any person is anything in that analogy, then Palin is the lipstick, and McCain is the pig, So while it’s true that Palin herself has said the only difference between herself and a dog is lipstick, this can only help to account for her interest in big oil and drilling in Alaska, even though that drilling won’t solve either our immediate or our long-term energy and climate change problems. Even the Department of Energy believes that offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.” … Opening the Arctic Refuge would cut gasoline prices by two cents in 17 years, [at the cost of destroying the] home of America’s native polar bears. So why is she so dedicated to petroleum that she has taken donations form an indicted oil executive? Because lipstick is a petroleum product.

So maybe Sarah Palin doesn't have all that much "experience." Maybe she doesn't pay much attention to your fancy-pants "foreign policy" or "domestic policy" or "policy." Maybe she's "crazy" and "corrupt" …. But maybe that's just because Sarah Palin's just too busy being a real American to hang around with your namby-pamby liberal candidates with their arugula lattes and their east coast Ivy League universities and their "qualifications" while they tax the Jesus Fetus to pay for gay Muslim healthcare! Well Sarah Palin understands that being vice-president takes more than just book-smarts or regular-smarts or knowing what a vice president does! It takes gumption and spunk and other made-up words that hearken back to another time - a realer time - a whiter time - back when men were men and great big hairy-chested frontiersmen of the plains wrestled oxen and caribou and the savage Injun Man in their mighty conquest of the West before succumbing to explosive amoebic dysentery!

And with the help of God and millions of dollars in energy industry donations, Sarah Palin will give us that dysentery again! As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five, Sarah Palin understands real American values, because she is a real American just like you, only with much more money and power and a tiny invisible fairy that lives in her brain and tells her to ban books and blow up Muslims. Sarah Palin understands that the key to America's success is personal responsibility, and the key to personal responsibility is getting lots of money from oil companies and the federal government while you enforce other people's personal responsibility! Oh, you wanted state funding to help with your out-of-wedlock Sin Child? Shoulda thoughta that before you decided to not be born to Sarah Palin!

Sarah Palin will also ban abortion, 'cause in the hardscrabble up-by-the-bootstraps wilderness of the Alaskan suburbs, they don't have abortion.

They also do not have adequate access to health care, birth control, or equal pay for equal work, as it turns out.

That’s right, Sarah Palin is mother. And what do mothers want? According to the Motherhood Manifesto from the organization Moms Rising, Moms want fair wages and paid sick days. Moms want paid family leave, like the hundred-sixty-some countries in the Harvard study, in which only four nations had no paid leave for new parents—the US, Liberia, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea.

Moms want quality healthcare for all children, though McCain campaign advisor John Goodman has suggested the 47 million uninsured Americans should be redefined as covered because anyone can get care at an emergency room.

Moms want quality, affordable childcare available to all parents who need it. But although the 2008 Republican Party platform advocates more part-time and flexible jobs for working parents, [it] contains not a single mention of affordable child care or equal pay. As governor Palin line-item vetoed the funding for a vocational residential facility that included a child care center for students, as well as the funds for breast-feeding pumps, among other supplies, for a Women, Infants, and Children program for poor women.

But Sarah Palin is not only a mother of five but a mother of a child with Down Syndrome, so she says she’s a friend to parents of special needs children. Apparently this doesn’t include being a friend to those kids after they grow up, since she had nothing to say about, or to, adults with disabilities, and her running mate McCain has opposed the Community Choice Act, which would end the institutional bias in America's healthcare financing system and allow people with disabilities to live in their own homes and communities rather than isolated nursing homes and other institutions. He has supported judicial nominees to the Supreme Court and lower-level courts who have disregarded the intent of Congress and dramatically rolled back the civil rights protections of the Americans with Disabilities Act, leaving millions of Americans with epilepsy, diabetes, mental illness, HIV-AIDS, and other disabilities unprotected.

But I guess she’d protect the rest of us from foreign threats through her support for war with Russia and her endorsement for invading Pakistan and her condoning an Israeli strike on Iran, and her belief in the idea that the US has a right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us.

As a hockey-playing moose-hunting Jesus-fearing hockey-mom mother of five who plays hockey, Sarah Palin lives in Alaska, which is just a couple thousand miles away from Russia and the Red Chinese, giving her valuable insight into their inscrutable foreign ways. Every day for forty-four years Sarah Palin has gotten up and thought to herself, "Hmmm, the weather is cold today - and I bet the weather is similarly cold in Russia at this latitude." Isn't it about time we had a vice-president who understands the climatological grievances of our most deadliest frenemies? Think about it! But not for very long!

Alaska is also close to the International Date Line, giving Sarah Palin the power to traverse the distance between Today and Yesterday at will and making her the Wizard of Speed and Time. She's sassy and white and ready to lead, people! And to ban abortion. Again. Just in case it got away the first time.

labor day

for the Old Mole

Today is Labor Day. Most nations celebrate Labor day on May first, to commemorate the eight hour work day and the Haymarket riot, while we in the US celebrate instead the less radical date associated with outdoor barbecue and the end of white shoe season.

But this Labor Day, I’m thinking about Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a future American theocracy in which declining fertility has led to assigning still-fertile women the role of designated breeders, or handmaids. Along with dystopian controls on women’s roles and bodies, the novel’s regime features the rewriting of history. “Yesterday was July the Fourth,” the narrator recalls at one point, “which used to be Independence day, before they abolished it. September the first will be Labor Day, they still have that. Though it didn’t used to have anything to do with mothers.”

Of course it’s true that mothering is work even if it isn’t waged, and parenting is labor even if one doesn’t give birth.

But still. It is, after all, only one of the many forms of human labor.

I’m thinking about The Handmaid’s Tale in part because on August 22, the department of Health and Human Services proposed a regulation that would allow health care providers not only to refuse to provide abortion – as they are already permitted to do under existing federal employment law—but would further allow those health care providers not to refer a patient to another provider but simply to withhold information about available options. Moreover, because the regulation leaves the definition of “abortion” to providers, it is vulnerable to the mislabelling that has allowed some anti-choice activists to describe IUDs, Plan B Emergency contraception, and even birth control pills as forms of “abortion.”

HHS is accepting public comment on the regulation through September 25, and the Planned Parenthood website has a link that makes it easy to submit your responses.

Two years ago in Salon dot com, Priya Jain reported on the growing anti-contraception movement. She quotes Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood, who notes, "When you peel back the layers of the anti-choice motivation, it always comes back to two things: What is the nature and purpose of human sexuality? And second, what is the role of women in the world?" Sex and the role of women are inextricably linked, because "if you can separate sex from procreation, you have given women the ability to participate in society on an equal basis with men."

Cristina Page, vice president of the Institute for Reproductive Health Access at NARAL Pro-Choice New York, notes that the anti-choice movement has succeeded in pushing legislation that, though seemingly unrelated to contraception, helps support its cause. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures , at least 19 states have fetal homicide laws that apply to "'any state of gestation,' 'conception,' 'fertilization' or post-fertilization" -- meaning that one can be convicted of manslaughter or murder for destroying a fertilized egg, even if it hasn't implanted itself in a woman's uterus.

Page says she has noticed, too, that some anti-choice groups tend not only to oppose birth control, they also oppose child care. In her book, "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex," she points to some troubling statistics and anecdotes: “Ninety percent of senators who opposed the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act are anti-choice; in the 2004 Children's Defense Fund ranking of the legislators best and worst for children, the 113 worst senators and Congress members are all anti-choice; Web sites like Lifesite and that of theIllinois Right to Life Committee post reports linking child care and aggression; Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America stress the damage that day care can have on a child. (Most of their information comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Early Child Care Report, which has been debunked again and again and again.) "The trifecta is ban contraception, ban abortion, make child care impossible," says Page.”

Frances Kissling, of Catholics for Free Choice, agrees that the ultimate message is that "mommy should stay home and take care of the kiddies. This is bound up in this notion of men at the head of a family, of women's identity as linked to their biological capacity, that men and women are complementary and different, that a woman's primary function is motherhood."

Keeping women at home as caretakers fits with the neoliberal elimination of public sector social supports for families, as the authors of the Beyond Marriage statement have observed: “the Right has mounted a long-term strategic battle to dismantle all public service and benefit programs and civic values that were established beginning in the 1930s, initially as a response to widening poverty and the Great Depression. The push to privatize Social Security and many other human needs benefits, programs, and resources that serve as lifelines for many . . . is at the center of this attack. In fact, all but the most privileged households and families are in jeopardy as a result of a wholesale right-wing assault on funding for human needs, including Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, HIV-AIDS research and treatment, public education, affordable housing, and more.”

In fairness, not all anti-choice groups seem to oppose child care. Feminists for Life, a group that has gotten some public attention since one of its members became the Republican nominee for Vice President, claims that young women should have the right to bear a child and have access to high-quality, affordable child care. While no feminist would be likely to disagree with that point, Ruth Rosen reports that Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life, is “vague and evasive” about what excatly the group does to promote access to child care. Rosen notes that Foster speaks “as though she had invented the idea of child care and describes pioneer feminists of the 1960s and 1970s as selfish, diabolical creatures who never wanted women to have the choice to bear a child.” But—Rosen points out-- she's wrong. “The three demands made at the first national march in New York City in 1970 included child care, equal pay for equal work and the legal right to have an abortion. Many feminists, moreover, spent years trying to persuade the institutions where they worked that real equality for women required family-friendly policies, including child care.”

Rather than follow the path of Serrin Foster or The Handmaid’s Tale, we should remember our history. Making contraception and abortion illegal will not mean the end of abortion, any more than abstinence education actually results in abstinence.

Earlier this summer, a retired ob-gyn wrote in the New York Times about his experience, in the days before Roe versus Wade, of treating women who had had illegal abortions or tried to self abort. He concludes, “it is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days. What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such."

naming rights

Doesn't it give anyone the creeps that the DNC was at Pepsi Center and INVESCO Field ?

I hate that the civic stadium is PGE Park .

Get Your War On: The Watch List

http://www.236.com/video/2008/get_your_war_on_the_watch_list_1_8056.php

"utopia"

via

wall-e

For The Old Mole, we review WALL-E, the latest Pixar animation, also brought to us by Disney.
The title character is a lonely trash compactor, a Waste Allocation Load Lifter—Earth-class—the last operating robot on a desolate planet Earth, with mountains of garbage to compact—and to collect. In the 700 years since humans left, our solar-powered hero has developed a personality and a fondness for human detritus, including an old tape of the musical Hello, Dolly!, which he watches over & over. His isolation ends when another robot shows up—EVE is an Earth Vegetation Evaluator, sleek and powerful. Her directive is to seek plant life, and when she finds some, she goes into hibernation until she’s picked up by her space shuttle. WALL-E protects her from the weather while she’s in stasis and follows her back to the enormous cruise liner the Axiom, where humans have been getting fatter and lazier for the last 700 years. The plant life is supposed to be a signal that it’s now safe to return to earth, but this plan is temporarily interrupted by the ship’s autopilot. Everything is still owned and run by the Buy-N-Large Corporation, whose last president on Earth had despaired of ever rehabilitating the planet, and so had secretly ordered ships not to come back. But WALL-E, EVE, the captain, a group of malfunctioning robots, and a couple of humans -knocked out of their floating deck chairs and away from their personal video screens - all work together through a slapstick chase to save the plant and return to the planet.

The film has gotten almost uniformly positive reviews—8.9 out of 10 at the internet movie database, 94 from metacritic, 97% positive at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s also been criticized from the right for its purported environmentalism, and from further left for its hypocrisy; it's also been criticized for vilifying fat people and blaming them for the global overconsumption of planetary resources.

We look at it in relation to commodity fetishism.

on the relation between queer and immigrant movements

Certainly both groups have faced legislative attacks. Richard Fricker on Consortium News is only one of several recent writers to note what he calls a “surge of theocracy tinged with white racialism,” which he sees in a series of recent measures in Oklahoma.

But of course it’s not just Oklahoma.

In the last ten years, twenty seven states have held popular votes putting in place bans on same sex marriage, domestic partnership, or both. One of those in 2004 was Oregon’s Measure 36, recently upheld by the Marion County Court of Appeals. This year, Measures 144 and 145 would, if qualified and passed, repeal Oregon’s domestic partnership legislation and remove sexual orientation from the list of grounds on which it is illegal to discriminate.

Oregon is also participating in the wave of anti-immigrant legislation. Ballot Measure 112, if qualified and approved, tighten immigration enforcement and entail tighter cooperation between local law enforcement and the federal bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, I-C-E, or ICE. Abid Aslam reports for InterPress Service that more than 1,400 initiatives targeting immigrants have been introduced at state and local levels in the last year, compared to 1,300 in the past 10 years, and Hate crimes against Latin Americans have risen by 35 percent over the past four years.

We’ve also recently seen a surge of ICE raids targeting workers, including the one in Iowa last month that netted nearly 400 people—but has not resulted in any charges for their employers Immigration proceedings are up nearly 150 percent in the last 5 years, and in 2007 alone, more than 276,912 US residents were deported. Community groups have noted that raids appear speculative and that many of those arrested have turned out to be victims of mistaken identity or have been released for various reasons—although not before being photographed, fingerprinted, interviewed, and generally harassed. A recent edition of KBOO’s Friday radiozine featured an interview with Eric Ward of the Center for New Community , who noted that the groups targeting immigrants now have a larger anti-progressive agenda. In particular, debates on immigration are coded debates about race.

The current issue of Monthly Review includes more about that point in an essay from César Hernández titled “No Human Being Is Illegal: Moving Beyond Deportation Law.” As he puts it,

The border and the Border Patrol are children of the same xenophobia, justified by the pseudoscience of eugenics. In 1882 Congress responded to widespread hostility to Chinese immigrants by enacting the first law that effectively excluded all members of a particular nationality from the United States. By 1911 eugenics had gained so much support within policy-making circles that the Senate’s Dillingham Commission concluded that the country would be debased unless migration from southern and eastern Europe—mainly Italians, Jews, and Poles—was substantially curtailed. … In 1924, the federal government created the Border Patrol—the predecessor of today’s ICE and its cousin along the border, the Customs and Border Protection Agency…. Historically, immigration law has been used as a mechanism of social control…. According to what’s known as the plenary powers doctrine, immigration law and deportation procedures are quasi-judicial. Immigration courts and judges are part of the Executive Office of Immigration Review; they are not part of the federal court system. More fundamentally, immigration law lacks basic procedures commonly associated with judicial proceedings. Most notable among these are a lack of due process protections, a lack of protection against dispensation of disproportionate punishments for an illegal act, and a lack of legal representation in immigration proceedings…..The bifurcated regime that identifies some immigrants as “legal” necessarily designates others as “illegal.” These “illegal” residents become the perfect scapegoats for xenophobes who have converted them into criminals in the popular consciousness.

Moreover, just as the legal/illegal distinction is invidious, so too the citizen/noncitizen distinction breaks down when it comes to ICE raids. Jacqueline Stevens in latest issue of the Nation Magazine estimates that since 2004 ICE has held between 3,500 and 10,000 US citizens in detention facilities and deported about half of those. She writes, “US citizens are a small percentage of ICE detentions for this period, which totaled around 1 million, but in absolute terms the figure is staggering.” Indeed. Some 5,000 US citizens deported, some of them native-born, some of them mentally ill, none of them accorded due process.

And probably, some of them queer.

Kerry Eleveld noted a couple of years ago in the New York Blade that LGBT rights and immigrant rights have several practical points of convergence beyond disenfranchisement. For instance, U.S. immigration policy essentially bars HIV-positive individuals from getting a green card or even a temporary visa unless they meet very strict criteria for a waiver. And Detention is particularly harsh for LGBTQ and HIV positive detainees. Rape, harassment, abuse, and denial of HIV treatment/hormone therapy are some of the routine forms of hardship that LGBTQ people face in detention.

Also, since LGBT immigrants cannot legally marry their partners, they do not have a path to legalization afforded to straight couples. One proposed remedy for that disparity would be the Uniting American Families Act. But as Yasmin Nair has noted, “if we queers are really concerned about immigration, we need to stand with Immigration Rights activists and consider reform for the long term and for all. This means being critical of the rhetoric of “family reunification,” which privileges family and erases issues of labor. Consider the story about workers who're denied legally mandated medical coverage by bosses who exploit their fears of deportation. Consider asking your favorite gay advocacy group: How will you advocate for change even if and after the Uniting American Families Act gets passed? We need to work on reform that matters to all of us, not just because it validates gay bodies and relationships.”

Two years ago, the group Queers for Economic Justice, issued a Vision Statement on Queers and Immigration, noting that

Two of the most divisive issues in the United States today are those concerning Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer rights and immigration. There is little discussion of how immigration is also an issue for queer people, and even less analysis of the structural similarities between queer and immigrant struggles. Queer immigrants are marginalized or invisible at the intersection of two identities. As a whole, more complex family structures—such as those of binational same-sex couples and extended families—are completely absent from the larger struggle for immigration reform. The immigrant advocacy movement places undue emphasis on heteronormative relationships and conceptions of normality in an effort to gain basic citizenship rights. The mainstream LGBTQ rights movement tends to focus on those immigrants who are partners of US citizens. This leaves out the predicament of, for instance, single people and/or those who do not define themselves within conventional relationships like marriage or conjugality. Both movements are depriving themselves of the power and strategic insights that LGBTQ immigrants can provide. We call for an end to the stigmatization of queer individuals, the recognition of our varied, unique, and flexible kinship networks, the end of the restrictive and dangerous criminalization of migrant and queer communities, and an immigration reform package that puts progressive labor reforms into practice.

As César Hernández puts it, the left’s ultimate goal should be to replace the current model of immigration control with a radically different model premised on the inherent right to travel and thrive, even across borders. This June, as we celebrate Pride month, and the resilience, resistance, and persisting presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other generally queer folks, we can remember Yasmin Nair’s point that our interest lies in dismantling the status quo, changing the paradigms, and asking for a more complex but more just world.

for The Old Mole

mother's day for peace

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and by some counts it was the one-hundredth anniversary of Mother’s Day in the US . In 1870, social activist Julia Ward Howe wrote her Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament, a call to unite women to organize against war.

One of Howe’s inspriations was Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors. When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in 1908. From there, the custom caught on, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.

Ironically, then, a holiday first intended to promote peace and reconciliation was turned instead to support nationalism and militarism.

But activists with Code Pink have revived Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation , and call for a reclaiming of Mother’s Day.

Maybe the Congress heard about this move, since last week a majority of House Republicans voted against a resolution in support of Mother’s Day, leading the Washington Post to run a headline reading "Republicans vote against moms; no word yet on puppies, kittens."

Anyway, Code Pink Portland held a rally yesterday, and the Code Pink website has a petition you can sign, asking Nancy Pelosi and the rest of Congress to put our money where their mouths aren’t, and to fund refugee support instead of the continuing Iraq war, which has created so many refugees, most of whom are women. More than 70 percent of the four million people forced out of their homes in the past five years in Iraq have been women and children.

Many observers, including  Nadje Al-Ali, have noted that, as she puts it, Iraq's women have become the biggest losers in the post-invasion disaster. Women in Iraq have been particularly hard-hit by poverty, malnutrition, lack of health services and a crumbling infrastructure. The lack of clean water, electricity, and vaccination services has led to a marked increase in the mortality of children under 5 in Iraq.  As in the humanitarian crisis during the sanctions period, women suffer particularly as they are often the last ones to eat after feeding their children and husbands. They often watch powerlessly as their sick and malnourished children do not obtain adequate health care.

But women in Iraq have also been working together to respond to the disaster. There has been a flourishing of locally based women’s initiatives and groups, mainly revolving around practical needs related to widespread poverty, lack of adequate health care, lack of housing, and lack of proper social services provided by the state. Women have also pooled their resources to help address the need for education and training, as well as income generating projects The organization MADRE recently released a tribute to some of the activists they’ve been working with around the world, including Yanar Mohammad, founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). Yanar has dedicated herself to meeting the needs of Iraqi women and families suffering as a result of the US invasion and the rising religious extremism it has unleashed. Together with MADRE, OWFI has founded a network of women’s shelters in Iraq. In addition, OWFI’s Freedom Space project brings together young poets and artists of varying religious and ethnic backgrounds to create art and express their hopes for a peaceful Iraq where human rights are cherished.

But today, of course, women are not just the casualties of war, and not just the mothers and wives and daughters of soldiers, they are also soldiers themselves, comprising 15% of US military enlisted personnel. As Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib revelations, in light of what we know today, no one can think that the mere presence of women in the military will make it more humane; "a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience; menstrual periods are not the foundation of morality."

But some of the women who have been in the military have, like some of the men who have been soldiers, have also begun working for peace. Women like Eli PaintedCrow, a founder of the Service Women’s Action Network, a group of women veterans who have gathered to heal from the trauma of military service and war, to document their stories and to support their transformation from soldiers to peacemakers. They also work with the Women of Color Resource Center, which has a curriculum of peacegames for community education--some of which is available free on their website, including information on military recruiting and its targeting of women and of men of color.

Bad as things are for the women under occupation and who have lost loved ones in the current wars, things aren’t so great for the women in the US military, either. Representative Jane Harman of California, citing a recent Department of Defense report, has noted that women in the military in Iraq are “more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire,” though some of those who are raped are apparently also murdered by fellow soldiers . Moreover, if any of those rapes lead to pregnancy, the women have limited recourse, since military hospitals will not perform abortions. A recent federal court ruling allows women employed by defense contractor Halliburton/KBR to bring charages for sexual assaults by their coworkers, despite having signed a contract that Halliburton/KBR argued would have submitted such claims to binding arbitration rather than criminal trial.

But we cannot rely only on the legal system to make the world safe for mothers or people who have mothers. Let us, as Julia Ward Howe declared,

take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace...

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.

 

torture as biopower

Neal Andrew on Foucault in Guantanamo:

Foucaultian methods can be used to analyse power in exactly the sites and practices that Schmitt clearly depends on, but only alludes to. In «Society Must Be Defended»Foucault gives an account of his methodology that reads like a step-by-step refutation of the Schmittian approach. First, not to look at power as if it has a single centre, but at its extremities, at its material means of intervention and actual apparatuses of violence. Second, not to analyse power at the level of intentions or decisions; not the ‘internal face’ of power, but the external points of exercise and application. Third, not to regard power as a homogenous mass of domination divided between the haves and have-nots. Power circulates in networks and is never terminal; individuals both submit to and exercise power. Fourth, not to begin analysis at the centre of power circulation downwards but from its infinitesimal mechanisms upwards. How are these micro-mechanisms colonized and annexed by more global mechanisms of domination? Fifth and finally, not to analyse mechanisms as mere appendages of ideology, but rather to explore how mechanisms get formed into ideologies and knowledges. Foucault summarises his general intention as to analyse not the juridical edifice of sovereignty, but its material operations, local systems and apparatuses of knowledge. [7]

of the communist hypothesis

Alain Badiou in New Left Review

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away. . . .

The virtue of courage constructs itself through endurance within the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes courage is to operate in terms of a different durée to that imposed by the law of the world. The point we are seeking must be one that can connect to another order of time. . . .

In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.

zulie says

(from icanhascheezeburger)

obamarama

Many progressive commentators have observed that Barak Obama’s rhetoric and supporters seem quite progressive, but his policies and record are much less so.

Responding to Obama’s speech last week on race in America, Steven Pitts in The Black Commentator observes that

the power of a speech lies not its words nor its deliverer. The power of a speech lies in the strength of the movement that inspires the speech and is inspired by the speech. Without such a movement, the spoken words are like the sound of a tree falling in a forest when no one is around. The challenge for Black progressives (and all progressives) [is] to use this moment and the incredible energy unleashed by the Obama candidacy to build a movement for social change that will make a lasting mark on U.S. society.

Similarly, addressing Obama’s record on the war, Joshua Frank in Dissident Voice notes that the Republican establishment deems Obama a serious threat because of his grassroots support, not his [purported] “antiwar views.” "Simply put: Obama is not antiwar but his following seems to be."

The World Socialist Web Site notes that Obama has vowed not to reduce the US military budget but rather to increase it; he has called for recruiting more soldiers for the Army as well as more Marines; and he has pledged to keep American forces in Iraq to defend ‘US interests’ and conduct ‘counterterrorism operations,’ a formula that would see tens of thousands of US soldiers and Marines continuing to occupy Iraq and repress its population for many years to come.”

On other economic issues, Ethel Long-Scott observes that although Obama’s March 18th speech was moving,

it did nothing to unravel the central contradiction of Mr. Obama’s candidacy. That contradiction is rooted in the fact that America has always needed a class of workers who are kept downtrodden and in poverty to make its economy work. That is a fact that has not changed, and none of the remaining presidential candidates are dealing with it.

Dan LaBotz in Monthly Review similarly notes that Senator Obama’s position is not unique to him, and the current economic crises are not the result simply of the current administration.

President John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society with its War on Poverty, both failed to fundamentally change the situation of blacks and did not end poverty among whites, largely because they did not end corporate domination of American society. Under President Bill Clinton, the Democrats turned away from even those liberal programs and adopted the conservative (or neoliberal) policies long identified with the Republicans. Democrats have not proposed [. . . ] any fundamental changes in the social programs of the country. Today, there is a real question of whether or not the American capitalist system -- faced with problems of competitiveness, productivity, and profitability -- has the capacity to construct a liberal or social democratic system which would ameliorate [. . . ] the race and class systems of the country.

Certainly nothing in Senator Obama’s voting record suggests he will be a source of major economic improvement for most people. Matt Gonzalez in Counterpunch online and Pam Martens in the print edition have examined his record and his funding base—which, despite his campaign claims that he doesn’t take lobbying money nonetheless includes registered lobbyists as well as Wall Street financial firms, midwest mining companies, and other corporate donors.
Barak Obama has voted for legislation that will make it harder to bring class action suits against corporate abusers; voted against legislation to create the first federal cap on predatory credit card interest rates; voted to limit the recovery that victims of medical malpractice could obtain through the courts; and voted against collecting royalties from corporations that mine hard rock minerals on public lands, royalties that would have provided funding for the cleanup of these areas currently paid for by taxpayers rather than the mining corporations

As Ethel Long-Scott argues,

while major party politicians can talk about change, they are not likely to fight for the kinds of changes that would really end poverty. To do that, we the people must organize with new ideas and a new vision of justice. In the face of the growing encroachment on rights and democracy we, the people must gain the political power to direct society's resources so we can end the problems of poverty, national & women’s oppression, and this outrageous war. A new society is not only possible, but necessary.

old mole v snake

Hardt and Negri, from "Marx's Mole is Dead":

Marx tried to understand the continuity of the cycle of proletarian struggles that were emerging in nineteenth-century Europe in terms of a mole and its subterranean tunnels. Marx's mole would surface in times of open class conflict and then retreat underground again - not to hibernate passively, but to burrow its tunnels, moving along with the times, pushing forward with history so that when the time was right (1830, 1848, 1870) it would spring to the surface again. "Well grubbed old mole!"^[2] Well, we suspect that Marx's old mole has finally died. It seems to us, in fact, that in the contemporary passage to Empire the structured tunnels of the mole have been replaced by the infinite undulations of the snake. This is the image that Deleuze gives in his analysis of the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of control. (Deleuze claims that contemporary society had gone beyond the disciplinary forms that Foucault analysed. Today the disciplinary institutions, the school the family, the prison, the factory, are all in crisis. This doesn't mean that disciplinary logics are breaking down; what is breaking down rather are the institutional boundaries that once defined and limited their application to one social space. The disciplinary logics spread out across society, they are generalised and in some respects intensified. The generalised disciplinarity is what defines the society of control.) "The old mole", Deleuze writes, "is the animal of closed environments, but the snake is the animal of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to another, from the mole to the snake, in the regime we live under, but also in our way of living and our relations with others." The depths of the modern world and its subterranean passageways have in postmodernity all become superficial. Today's struggles slither silently across the superficial, imperial landscapes. Perhaps the incommunicability of struggles, the lack of well-structured, communicating tunnels, is in fact a strength rather than a weakness - a strength because all of the movements are immediately subversive in themselves and do not wait on any sort of external aid or extension to guarantee their effectiveness. Perhaps the more capital extends its global network of production and control, the more powerful any singular point of revolt can be simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles striking directly at the highest articulations of imperial order. Empire presents a superficial world, the virtual centre of which can be accessed immediately from any point across the surface. If these points were to constitute something like a new cycle of struggles it would be a cycle defined not by the communicative extension of the struggles but rather by their singular emergence, by the intensity that characterises them one by one. In short, this new phase is defined by the fact that these struggles do not link horizontally but each leap vertically, directly to the virtual centre of Empire.^[3] From the point of view of the revolutionary tradition, one might object that the tactical successes of revolutionary actions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were all characterised precisely by the capacity to blast open the weakest link of the imperialist chain, that this is the ABC of revolutionary dialectics, and thus it would seem today that the situation is not very promising. It is certainly true that the serpentine struggles we are witnessing today do not provide any clear revolutionary tactics, or maybe they are completely incomprehensible from the point of view of tactics. Faced as we are with a series of intense subversive social movements that attack the highest levels of imperial organisation, however, it may be no longer useful to insist on the old distinction between strategy and tactics. In the constitution of Empire there is no longer an "outside" to power and thus no longer weak links - if by weak link we mean an external point where the articulations of global power are vulnerable. To achieve significance, every struggle must attack at the heart of the Empire, at its strength. That fact, however, does not give priority to any geographical regions, as if only social movements in Washington, Geneva or Tokyo could attack the heart of Empire. On the contrary, the construction of Empire and the globalisation of economic and cultural relationships means that the critical centre of Empire can be attacked from any angle. The tactical preoccupations of the old revolutionary school are thus completely irretrievable; the only strategy available to the struggles is that of a constituent counter-power that emerges from within Empire.

clr james

Born in Trinidad in 1901, CLR James was a leftist writer and social theorist until his death in 1989.

In the 1930s, he worked for West Indian Independence, and moved to Britain, where he wrote a number of novels, and was the cricket reporter for the Manchester Guardian.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, he lived in the United States, and wrote about politics, film, literature, and literary criticism. Deported in 1953, he was much influenced by the 1957 revolution in which the former British colony of the Gold Coast became Ghana, and by the ensuing anticolonial and Black Power struggles of the 1950s and 60s.

Perhaps his best known work is The Black Jacobins: Touissaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Manuel Yang, writing in MR Zine, reminds us that this year is the 70th anniversary of this history of the successful slave rebellion that became the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803.

Its title refers to the Jacobins, the most radical element within the French Revolution who, like the former slaves who created Haiti, propagated. . . "extreme democracy and absolute equality."

James wrote The Black Jacobins to give inspiration to the then-struggling forces of pan-African revolt against European colonialism and racial oppression.

He said he wrote it while listening "most clearly and insistently" to "the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence."

Similarly, James’s 1936 play, also entitled The Black Jacobins, was intended to prompt the British labor movement to take a critical stance toward the Western imperialist collusion with Mussolini's fascist invasion of Ethiopia. In his essay "Abyssinia and the Imperialists," James underscored how imperialism destroyed the working class: ". . . all the money that the imperialists are making out of the country has to be paid for by labour, and the real sufferers are those millions who, unprotected by trade union organisation or any sort of organised public opinion, are driven off their lands, down into mines at a shilling a day, or working above ground for fourpence a day as in Kenya. . . ."

In order to prevent this destruction, which soon spread into the genocidal conflagration of a world war, James extracted two important insights from the Haitian Revolution.

One was the fact that the slaves recognized and organized themselves as a class of workers exploited under modern capitalist conditions: ". . . working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement."

Another was the internationalism of this class whose collective labor made the wealth of empires and nations. . . . "'Servants, peasants, workers, the labourers by the day in the fields' all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the 'aristocracy of the skin.' There were so many moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes."

Both of these revolutions however soon foundered because this solidarity was not preserved and developed further. Although "[t]here were Jacobin workmen in Paris who would have fought for the blacks against Bonaparte's troops," once in power Touissaint "ignored the black labourers" and tried to appease the white elites. . . .

The term "Jacobin" had taken on authoritarian connotations because the French Jacobin leadership stopped listening to the workers and commoners and shut down their radical organizations -- much as Toussaint in power lost touch with the Haitian workers. In short, the Haitian and French Revolutions … failed to go as far as they could because the new rulers destroyed, in the interest of capital and empire, the original conceptions of democracy that the self-activity of workers had made possible.

Today we are facing a similar destructive moment in history. The presidential election is poisoned with anti-immigrant rhetoric seeking to divide and decimate the working class. Following the Bonapartist model, the American Empire is perpetrating this class destruction in Haiti as well. According to the Haiti Information Project, "the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency… helped create the Revolutionary Front for Advancement and Progress of Haiti" (FRAPH) who are "responsible for the rape and murder of thousands of Haitians after a brutal military coup forced then president Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile in 1991." U.S. aid to Haiti's brutal police force has reached $40 million. In this dark hour of ongoing crisis, reading The Black Jacobins … could give us the necessary "clarity and influence" to sustain our struggle against this new moment of war and imperialism.

And some comments from a 1949 essay by James on “The Price of Imperialism to the People”, in which he discusses

the attack which is being carried out against the civil liberties of the American people by the American bourgeoisie.

That the cause of this is the “danger of communism” is the familiar alibi of all despots, parasites and privileged groups. This was the ideological justification for the fascist dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco-and for the police regime of Stalin, who merely substituted the word “Trotskyism” for communism. But there is one difference, a difference which speaks volumes on the subject of morality: Hitler smashed democratic rights as an open antagonist of democracy, while the American oligarchs abrogate the rights of the people in the name of the struggle against “dictatorship” and “totalitarianism.”

(or today, against terrorism)

The American bourgeoisie, first and foremost, and from first to last, is in mortal terror of the American people and, above all of the American workers. Let the stupid liberals put their fingers to their foreheads and wonder at the “hysteria” of the American government
…. Let them wonder at the constant betrayals in Congress of every promise made at the election. Let them be perpetually “astonished” at the apparently senseless persecution of … scientists. They will know only frustration and impotence until they recognize that the struggles over civil rights in the United States express the intensification of the irreconcilable class antagonisms of … capitalism. These struggles are an expression of the inevitable break-up of that society, a stage … in the transition from capitalism to a new social order.

Capitalism in its decline must destroy the democracy and civil rights which it brought into the world and nourished in its progressive days. The attack against civil rights is the defense of capitalism. The defense of civil rights … involves the attack against capitalism.

You can no more separate the crisis of civil liberties from the crisis of capitalist production and the . . . war than you can separate the arm which is administering the blows from the body [to] which it is attached.

state capitol