Memorial Day (2009)

Memorial Day is popularly recognized as our national holiday for remembering those who were killed in wars. 

As Barack Obama said the other day, it's a time to "pay tribute to our fallen heroes; and to remember the servicemen and women who cannot be with us this year because they are standing post far from home." He acknowledged that we have often "failed to give them the support they need" and promised that we are now "building a 21st century Department of Veterans Affairs with the largest single-year funding increase in three decades." Certainly veterans need better services and better access to them.

Some right-wing bloggers have been complaining about the President's confusion of Memorial day and Veterans day, but it seems reasonable to consider the larger context of what is being honored. We would not be remembering dead soldiers if they hadn't once been live soldiers.

We would also not be remembering so many dead soldiers if more of them had followed the model of Ehren Watada, the first commisioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. Last week he won a legal victory when the Justice Department dropped efforts to retry him after his court martial ended in a mistrial. But the Army still wants to punish him for declaring the Iraq war illegal and immoral, and for having the courage to call out "the deception . . . used to initiate and process this war."

But President Obama did not mention Ehren Watada nor any of the other troops who have refused to serve. He also did not mention the plight of women soldiers, about whom Helen Benedict has written in the current issue of the Nation magazine, noting that

 More women have fought and died in Iraq than in all the wars since World War II put together. Over 206,000 have served in the Middle East since March 2003, most of them in Iraq; and over 600 have been wounded and 104 have died in Iraq alone, according to the Department of Defense. In Iraq, one in ten troops is a woman.

In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed.

More female troops have died in Iraq of [what are called] non-hostile causes than have been killed in battle, and several of those deaths have either been labeled suicides or been left unexplained by the military. Four of those women had earlier been raped, and at least sixteen others died in such suspicious circumstances that retired Army Colonel Ann Wright and Congressman Ike Skelton have called for Congress to compel the military to reopen the cases and investigate, so far to no avail.

The collapsing economy is driving numerous new recruits to the military, 16 to 29 percent of whom are women, depending on the branch of service. It remains to be seen whether these female troops will be as isolated, harassed or abused as their predecessors.

Those who do enlist and survive their service can turn to The Service Women's Action Network, or SWAN, established in 2006 primarily as a support network by and for women of color and LGBT women veterans who returned home from military service without the resources to heal their wounds. SWAN now works to improve the welfare of current U.S. Servicewomen and to assist all women veterans.

But President Obama did not mention the Service Women's Action Network, nor did he mention the "don’t ask, don't tell" policy that requires gay and lesbian military personnel to remain in the closet. He did mention 1776, 1861, and 1944, reminding us of the wars that are remembered for throwing off colonial rule, ending chattel slavery, and defeating Hitler and ending the Holocaust.

He did not remind us of any of the other 230 times the US has used its armed forces abroad, nor any of the over 60 military efforts outside the U.S. since World War II. Those efforts include actions in Greece, Turkey, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Haiti, Cuba, Panama, the Dominincan Republic, Cambodia, Laos, Iran, Libya, Grenada, El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, the Philippines, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Macedonia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Seychelles, Tajikistan, Colombia, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
He did not mention the military or civilians of other countries who have died in the same actions that killed American soldiers.

As Noam Chomsky recently noted, "Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon, not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity, but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead."

I'd like to close with a poem by Adrienne Rich, that appears in the current issue of the Nation. It's called "Quarto":

 Quarto

By Adrienne Rich

May 20, 2009 

1.
Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over
The map of my battlefields. Marathon.
Wounded Knee. Vicksburg. Jericho.
Battle of the Overpass.
Victories turned inside out
But no surrender
Cemeteries of remorse
The beaten champion sobbing
Ghosts move in to shield his tears
2.
No one writes lyric on a battlefield
On a map stuck with arrows
But I think I can do it if I just lurk
In my tent pretending to
Refeather my arrows
I’ll be right there! I yell
When they come with their crossbows and white phosphorus
To recruit me
Crouching over my drafts
lest they find me out
and shoot me
3.
Press your cheek against my medals, listen through them to my heart
Doctor, can you see me if I’m naked?
Spent longer in this place than in the war
No one comes but rarely and I don’t know what for
Went to that desert as many did before
Farewell and believing and hope not to die
Hope not to die and what was the life
Did we think was awaiting after
Lay down your stethoscope back off on your skills
Doctor can you see me when I’m naked?
4.
I’ll tell you about the mermaid
Sheds swimmable tail Gets legs for dancing
Sings like the sea with a choked throat
Knives straight up her spine
Lancing every step
There is a price
There is a price
For every gift
And all advice

For the Old Mole Variety Hour May 25, 2009

mole in the ground music

About the song and its performance in various styles.

Old Mole Underground

The show's name explained, January, 2006

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, 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. . . . 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, 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 tax cuts. 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 argues for the importance of critical education in responding to the authoritarian challenges to bourgeois democracy: “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.

a difficult genre

Read books.

Read books on paper, at least some of the time.

Watch movies on big screens, at least some of the time.

Be as aware as you can of as much of the world around
      you as you can.

Listen.

Pay focused attention to a few things. 

Ask questions.

Question authority.

Follow the money.

Find like-minded people and spend time with them.

Organize, agitate, educate.

Mourn, then organize.

Know your rights.

Film the police.

Ask who benefits, who bleeds.

Drink before you're thirsty.

Remember you are not a loan.

Remember graduate school is free in Germany and
        other places in the world, and not worth going
        into debt over anywhere.

Try to exercise skepticism.

Try to exercise compassion.

Try again.

Only connect.

Look up the words you don't know, at least some of the time.

Give prudent consideration to the size of this advice before
       swallowing.

Skip the sunscreen.  Wear a hat.

no confidence

Just as workers have risen up to demand fifteen dollars an hour and a union, just as residents of many areas have risen up to demand an end to dangerous and polluting practices like fracking and the transmission of oil and coal trains and pipelines,  just as renters have risen up to demand rent freezes and an end to no cause evictions, so too have students, teachers, and faculty members risen up to demand control over the conditions of their learning and working lives.

One of the tools faculty members  at colleges and universities have used is the vote of no confidence.  In 2015, presidents and other administrators were the object of faculty votes of no confidence at  Cal State University Chico, Ithaka College, University of Alabama Birmingham, Phoenix College, Bermuda College, San Bernadino Community College, Connecticut State Colleges and University, Northwest Nazarene University, University of Missouri, Yeshiva University, University of South Carolina Upstate, Sweet Briar College, Green River College, West Liberty University, and  Broward College.  And faculty of the University of Iowa voted no confidence in their Board of Regents.

The vote of no confidence is typically a statement to a university's Board of Regents, Governors, or Trustees, calling for a change in the administration, usually the firing of the president.
As law professor Mae Kuykendall of Michigan State University has described it,

The phrase arose in the British Parliament [in 1782, in response to the British surrender to the Americans at Yorktown]. The vote has come to express the loss of support by a group whose cooperation is necessary for a leader's exercise of her duties. Libraries, police departments, public schools, fire departments, universities and their subunits, and various nonprofit groups use the vote of no confidence.
A vote of no confidence undermines a leader's claim to legitimacy....
In authoritarian groups, regular members cannot demand a change. At the other end of the spectrum, democratic structures have clear, weighty procedures–impeachment and recall–for ousting their leaders. Universities and other nonprofit institutions sit in the middle of this spectrum. There is consultation to select leaders and to make decisions.

This year, in January, faculty at Loyola University and at University Hawaii Manoa voted no confidence in, respectively, their President and in their Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.
In February,  it was faculty at Grambling State University, the College of Saint Rose, the University of Akron, and the City Colleges of Chicago.

Last month, faculty at Hartwick College  voted no confidence in their president, and this month, faculty at campuses across the University of Wisconsin system have been voting no confidence in their President and Board of Regents.

Although each of these cases differs from the others, some patterns emerge.  In some cases the votes are precipitated at least in part by administrative mishandling of incidents of racism, as at University of Missouri and Ithaca College, where the faculty vote of no confidence was actually preceded by one held by the students. Often, the votes come in response to administrative cuts to programs or firing of tenured faculty, as at the College of Saint Rose or Northwest Nazarene University. Occasionally the complaints involve financial irregularities, or worse.  At the University of Louisville, where some of the senior administrators have been convicted of financial crimes, the trustees themselves contemplated voting no confidence in the scandal-plagued president.  But often there there are multiple grievances, and frequently they reflect a sense that the institution has moved further from the democratic end of Kuykendall's spectrum and closer to the authoritarian end. 

As the American Association of University Professors puts it, this is a time when "governing board members are increasingly drawn from the business community," and  "some critics of the tradition of shared governance have encouraged boards to adopt top-down decision-making strategies and to intrude into decision-making areas in which the faculty traditionally has exercised primary responsibility."  Most of the recent entries in Sean McKinniss's No-Confidence Vote Database cite violations of "shared governance."

My guess is that in many cases, at public as well as private universities, the underlying problems relate to the wider crisis of capitalism and some typical neoliberal responses to these crises.   As the rate of profit has tended to decline, capital has turned toward wage repression, cutting of social services, and financialization of the economy.  And since 2008 we've seen even more upward redistribution of resources, offshoring or no-shoring of jobs, military and carceral controls. Pending international trade deals are likely to make all this worse.  College education costs more, and the financial advantage it once seemed to offer diminishes.  Funding for public education is cut, and teachers are blamed for the failure of every child to be above average, beating the odds in a world of diminishing returns. As Diane Ravitch was quoted recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "We’re projecting economic insufficiencies onto the education system" and "The college-for-all talk is like fairy dust sprinkled over the conversation."

In Wisconsin, under an overhaul signed by Gov. Scott Walker last summer, the Wisconsin Legislature stripped tenure and shared-governance protections from state law, leaving it to the regents to set new policies for the system on both fronts. The board enacted those policies in March over the objection of faculty leaders, who argued that the new protections would leave professors vulnerable to arbitrary dismissal and would hamstring the system’s faculty-recruitment efforts.

One Wisconsin legislator commented that "It’s a clear example of the complete disconnect between UW Madison faculty who seem to expect their job to come with a forever guarantee and the average Wisconsin family struggling just to make ends meet.” And… “I think it shows that they’re a little out of touch with the average Wisconsin citizen who doesn’t have the job protections they have through tenure.”

Wisconsin Professor Chuck Ryback points out that the important points in those comments are not the attitude of Madison faculty but that average Wisconsin families struggle to make ends meet and don’t have job protections. "If the argument is that UW faculty should have less job protections and salary, then we’re moving the needle the wrong way," he observes. "I mean, what legislator would argue that what the state of Wisconsin needs right now is even more people with limited to no job protections? Who wants a race to the bottom?"

The protections that tenure affords for the increasingly small section of the professoriate that has access to it are not a "forever guarantee," but the right to free speech on the job and entitlement to due process before dismissal, and those should be the right of every worker.

But the business orientation of many boards may support their tendency in the aftermath of a no confidence vote to declare their support for an unpopular president. And if the goal of a no confidence vote is to change the leadership and direction of a college or university, a vote of no confidence may fail even if it succeeds in ousting a president. If it leads to withdrawal of donor funding and loss of students and the tuition that keeps some universities afloat, it may exacerbate financial problems and negatively impact some of the very issues faculty and students are often seeking to address: it may make it even more difficult to hire diverse (or any new) faculty, for instance.

In the lead up to the vote at University of Wisconsin Madison, Dave VanNess in an open letter to his colleagues, observed that

many of us are afraid that expressing ... lack of confidence could bring harm to the university. State legislators have already publicly threatened us with further cuts and reforms after simply announcing the upcoming vote. [And yet.]  If nearly all of us conclude that our leadership is failing, but we allow fear of reprisal to suppress our expression of that finding, then haven’t we already lost our academic freedom? If fear of the Board of Regents, the Legislature and the Governor stops us from exercising our responsibility in governance, then I am afraid we really have lost. What’s next? Will we allow fear to change what we teach or research or say in public? 

Continuation of a corporate style of governance, in which front-line workers are reduced and ignored while management is given princely rewards, is not a solution.  Reflecting on the situation at Ithaca College, Maura Stephens suggests reconfiguring the Board of Trustees, changing it from one in which the majority of current trustees have ties to corporate industry, and are appointed to the board by obscure methods. A board that was predominantly composed of elected figures from educational, religious, social service, and nonprofit backgrounds might have very different ideas about the direction of the university. An administrative pay scale that was linked to the pay of all employees and capped at a reasonable multiple of the lowest paid employees might encourage raising the pay of the lowest paid employees, as well as encouraging the hiring of administrators more interested in serving the public good of education.

 Those sorts of changes require a broader vision that is not yet on offer, and ultimately require changes beyond higher education alone.

In a reflection after the Wisconsin Madison vote, another faculty blogger observed

Like many of my colleagues, I have had no confidence in the current regime for over a year . . . But we are used to the slow process of shared governance. So we have been patient, assessing the situation, trying to actively participate in improving it: waiting it out. . . .
The terrible math of austerity is accompanied by a moral language that  . . .  elevates supposed fiscal values like the much-vaunted “flexibility” over non-market based, educational calculations. . . .
By voting no confidence, faculty lift up an alternative moral language to the one imposed by fiscal austerity....
Over the long course of the past year and a half, we have seen countless examples of democracy in action, in defense of the UW system and of public education in our state.
By voting no confidence, we side with the students, who know that austerity limits their futures.
A vote of no confidence is a vote for a democratic future.... It is at once a small, symbolic act and the beginning of a sea change: a hope for unity and vision against the regime of cynicism and cruelty.

for the Old Mole Variety Hour May 9, 2016

posts from kboo.fm/blog/1001 and other vanished places

Zapatista Resistance to Neoliberalism
Neoliberal Higher Ed One
Neoliberal Higher Ed Part 2
Poverty as a weapon of mass destruction

A Revolution in Happiness?
Young White Men with Guns
Mass shootings & Insanity Pleas
Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
on the relation between queer and immigrant movements
big babies

Medicare for All Oregon
Reviewing Capital 21
Pillaging Public Pensions
against work

labor day
Indigenous People's Day
Memorial Day
Happy Bastille Day
May Day 2015
Happy Labor day?

Don't Teach for America

Some movie mole reviews: links to reviews of Star Trek, Shift Change, No,  A Place at the Table, Persepolis
They Live  
The Glass Shield
Orange is the New Black
Carol
What Happened, Miss Simone?
Amy
Rosa Luxemburg (1986) 

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Dear White People
Alien 
Her
Heaven Adores You
Toy Story 3
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Orgasm Inc

audio: Well-read Red: Black Study, Black Struggle
Gentrification, Class Domination, & Racism
Migration & Climate
Democracy Rising against Capitalism in Greece
RDG Kelley on resisting war among the black underclass