The Angel of History

universities under attack (in britain as elsewhere)

2011-12-01T21:04:00.000-08:00

Advanced study and research are essential attributes of a university and some of that research will have vital social and industrial applications. But that is not its primary purpose, which is to enhance our knowledge and understanding, whether of the physical world or of human nature and all forms of human activity in the present and the past. For centuries, universities have existed to transmit and reinterpret the cultural and intellectual inheritance, and to provide a space where speculative thought can be freely pursued without regard to its financial value. In a free and democratic society it is essential that that space is preserved.

Yes, the model of the university has been a residuum of the middle ages, a feudal formation changed by its recontextualization in later capitalism. But now it is even later for capitalism. While I share the intent to resist the commodification of the university, I suspect we have to develop something new, rather than simply try to preserve the old frame for cultural transmission, transformation, and creation.

Then there's Brian Holmes on the financialization of the university, arguing that "most of US universities have become systemically corrupt --that is, captured by interest groups - in the course of the neoliberal period, essentially since the passage of the Bayh-Dohl act in 1980 which reengineered the conditions under which knowledge is patented and sold by the intellectual property departments"; and raising "questions about the "public" nature of education where undergraduate tuition pays for the administrative execs, real-estate deals, six-figure professors and corporate labs." Although

"in an era where the critique of public institutions is carried on by the corporate class, the point is not to destroy those institutions .... However, what has actually happened in the UC system and in many other cases . . . is not so much the destruction as the appropriation and remodeling of those formerly public institutions. The ground has already changed beneath our feet. So to worry about whether we are losing the Enlightenment, at this point when the universities massively manufacture, not only neoliberal subjectivities but also neoliberal policy and technology, is . . . to be exactly the kind of humanist that the Frankfurt School thinkers would have excoriated for being unable to see that - how did Adorno put it? - "the whole is the untrue." "To defend the university as it is, means defending a highly advanced state of corruption."

no government better than any government

2011-10-30T22:04:00.000-07:00

Or, the value of continuing to spend, from John Lanchester in LRB:

Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.

marx's recent popularity

2011-09-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

Facts for Working People, "Capitalist Class Worried about Marx's Popularity" (via Links):

Coy attacks Marx through his followers, who were some of the 20th century’s worst “mass murderers”. He starts with Lenin, who was a Marxist but Coy gives no examples of mass murder on Lenin’s part. He cites Mao who was not a Marxist, certainly not in practice. The next Marx follower is Pol Pot and what he has to do with Marxism heavens knows; and lastly Stalin, who may have had Lenin poisoned, murdered all the Marxists in the leadership of the Russian revolution and sent hundreds of thousands more to the gulag and had already abandoned any pretense to Marxist ideas or way of looking at the world except in name only. Coy's point here is to scare us, not educate us which shows how weak his position is. He wants us to associate Marx with dictatorship and the denial of basic democratic rights that Marx, and those who agree with him have fought for throughout recent history against fierce resistance from people like the economic editor of Business Week and the magazine's billionaire owner.

It's like saying that christianity is obviously bogus becauselook at the Inquisition.

It's an ad hominem argument, or something, not about Marx (or Xst) but about his followers.

But Louis Proyect on Bourgeois Pundits not getting Marx right anyway, either (via pink scare).

That is something that bourgeois economists can’t seem to get their head around. It is not just that the masses lack consumption power; it is that the “revolutionization” of the means of production continues to replace living labor with dead labor to the point that more and more workers either become unemployed or underemployed. That is a dilemma that no amount of “helicopter drops of money” can solve.

state murder

2011-09-21T23:48:00.001-07:00

"What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared. For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him, and who from that moment onward had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life." - Albert Camus "Reflections on the Guillotine" 1957.

The Waste Land

2011-09-11T20:20:00.000-07:00

You can find America’s future in blueprints minted in business-funded think tanks 30 to 40 years ago at the dawn of the neo-liberal age: destruction of organized labor; attrition of the social safety net; attrition of government regulation; a war on the poor, fought without mercy at every level. Last year the New York police stopped and questioned 601,055 people, predominantly blacks and Hispanics, and the numbers were up 13 per cent for the first six months of this year.

(Alexander Cockburn in the current counterpunch)

art, life, imitation

2011-08-22T15:47:00.000-07:00

In Steig Larsson's Millennium novels (The Girl Who... series), the Swedish government gives a bunch of crazy violent misogynists a free pass to abuse women and girls, because the misogynists provide useful information to the so-called "intelligence" services. I thought this was a bit over the top, as a plot point. But maybe not. Turns out, some of the informants and provocateurs the FBI has been using to entrap supposed terrorists have been in return getting away with domestic violence. E.g.,

The charges had come about because of a 23-year-old Yemeni clerk named Abbas al-Saidi, who'd been a police informant since he was 16. The fbi helped bail him out when he was in jail facing charges of assaulting his girlfriend.

education in capitalist societies

2011-05-30T16:03:00.000-07:00

From pink scare:

"We have needs beyond the needs to consume and these aren't recognized by capitalism. We have a need, for example, to develop and exercise our talents. When our capacities lie unused, they don't enjoy the zest for life that comes from having one's capacities flourish. People are able to develop themselves only when they get good education. But in a capitalist society, the education of children is threatened by those who would contort education to fit the narrow demands of the labor market.

The ruling class wants education to be geared toward restoring profitability to the system. It's dangerous to educate the young too much, because they will become cultivated people who are likely to be less satisfied with the low-paying jobs the market offers them. This might create aspirations that capitalism can't match. This, for obvious reasons, is dangerous for the ruling class. People must be "educated to know their place".

The state is trying to fashion individuals who will be willing sellers of low-grade labor power. It is deliberately underdeveloping large sectors of the population. The elites think that it's dangerous to give the masses too much education. It's hard to imagine a more undemocratic approach to education. There's a lot of talent in almost every human being. But in a lot of cases that talent goes undeveloped, because people lack the time, energy, resources and facilities to develop it. Throughout history, only a leisured minority has enjoyed this fully on the backs of the toiling majority. This should no longer continue to be the case. We have superb technology to restrict toil. Capitalism doesn't use that technology in a liberating way; it uses it to confine people to largely unfulfilling work and it shrinks from providing the enriching education that the technology makes possible."

-G.A. Cohen, "Against Capitalism"

no, no, go back!

2010-12-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

For more go HERE .

The Cocktail Party!

2010-09-16T17:28:00.000-07:00

Are you nauseated and frightened by the growth of Tea Party organizing, and the zany old white people in funny hats at the center of the current media blitz? It’s time to fight back! Join The Cocktail Party, a barstool-roots movement for left wing urban homosexuals and the people who love us. The major planks of this new movement’s platform include:

*Nationalize the banks
*Soak the rich with high taxes
*Abolish the Senate
*Abolish the Electoral College
*Free public education through college for all
*Free day care for elders and children
*National health care
*Universal accessibility
*Abolish all student loan, credit card and mortgage debt
*Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, shift resources to the Arts, and to an independent Haiti
*Forgiveness of all debt of developing countries
*Outlaw invidious discrimination
*Abolish prisons for all non violent crime, prioritize community rehabilitation for all crime
*Decriminalize sex work and drugs
*Open borders
*Abolish marriage

This platform is a work in progress. We seek additional ideas from all leftist urban homosexuals and their comrades. We acknowledge that this platform will take some time to implement. We crafted this list of policy goals with the intention, minimally, of driving the Tea Partiers crazy with rage. Because we are exactly who they think we are–a motley crew of miscegenated sex crazed lushes who read Marx and Fanon, seeking to support our lifestyles by taking resources from the rich and powerful and redistributing them with abandon.

what I like about True Blood

2010-08-18T22:18:00.000-07:00

Sita Sings the Blues

2010-07-28T02:24:00.001-07:00

disaster meter

2010-05-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

rose on writing

2010-01-29T15:38:00.000-08:00

"[T]o satisfy the demand that one might write without ignorance would not only make writing impossible; it would also deny that encounter with the unknown that carries with it the possibility, however slim, of contributing to a difference" (Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, 14).

Meditations in an Emergency

2009-11-29T23:25:00.000-08:00

by Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

. . . .

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

. . . .

Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

. . . . I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

. . . .

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=15741

mad men

2009-11-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

Pro and Con

belated subjectivity

2009-10-23T13:58:00.000-07:00

"[I]t does seem rather hard to have to give up on subjectivity when you've only recently got free of objectification" (Zadie Smith).

devil girl from mars

2009-08-16T18:02:00.000-07:00

Octavia Butler was right that devil girl from mars is a bad, bad movie. Mostly not so bad that it's funny.

socialisme

2009-08-11T22:39:00.001-07:00

brilliant

2009-07-21T00:58:00.000-07:00

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. I hadn't seen it since it came out in 1987. Watch it right now.

Also excellent: Dottie Gets Spanked.

men soon to become obsolete

2009-07-07T23:28:00.000-07:00

From the BBC: Scientists in Newcastle claim to have created human sperm in the laboratory in what they say is a world first.

but do bats eat cats?

2009-06-29T23:17:00.000-07:00

The other half of Alice's question now answered.

zero patience

2009-06-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

Fabulous movie, though as a sample I prefer the water ballet.

racism and the economic crisis

2009-03-14T15:46:00.000-07:00

racism and the economic crisis
For The Old Mole February 9, 2009
from blog1001

Racism is arguably both a cause and a consequence of the current economic crisis.

Joe Sims, writing in the Black Commentator, notes that there are many explanations for the present disaster, including “'financialization' or the capitalism-on-crack of the bond markets and banks, a crisis of overproduction (too many goods chasing too few dollars), and a weak “real” economy due to insufficient allocation of surplus capital to productive investment. Some point to objective processes, others stress mistaken policy decisions. Clearly all were, to one degree or another, at play." But, he continues, "Also at work was institutionalized racism in the form of unfair lending policies that systematically targeted Black and Latino homeowners." As a result, of course, people of color are among the first to be hit by the collapse and to see their homes foreclosed and their jobs eliminated.

Nonetheless, people of color and especially immigrants have faced attempts to blame them for the economic crisis and to shift even more of the suffering onto their backs. For instance, some commentators blamed the Community Reinvestment Act for lending to minorities, though the subprime loans were not subject to CRA regulations. Others blamed mortgages given to undocumented immigrants, though the Department of Housing and Urban Development has dismissed these allegations as baseless. When Congress was discussing the stimulus plan, the Associated Press reported –and later retracted—a false claim that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would allow undocumented immigrants to claim tax credits. Although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader John Boehner issued a joint statement stressing that the House bill "would not allow any taxpayer funds to be distributed to" undocumented immigrants (not even the ones who pay taxes), Fox Network sources continued to repeat the false claims.

In Columbia County, voters this past November passed Measure 5-190, which would impose fines of up to $10,000 and threaten the loss of business licenses for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Opponents of the measure and their representatives, including the Northwest Workers’ Justice Project and the ACLU of Oregon, successfully sought an injunction that has prevented the measure from going into effect The very fact that the measure passed by 57 percent of the vote, however, suggests the hostility to immigrants that can sometimes take more violent forms.

Scapegoating and hostility to immigrants has been on the rise for some time. According to FBI statistics, from 2003 to 2007, anti-Latino hate crimes increased by 40 percent. In the New York area, the Justice Department is investigating the beating deaths of two Ecuadorian men in separate incidents, as well as other cases that may have been improperly handled by local police.

At Portland's recent Town Hall on the economic crisis, presenters at the workshop on Uniting Across Racial and Ethnic Divides noted that such responses are likely to increase as the economy continues to decline. Organizers with cross-border group enlace international noted parallels with Mexico's 1995 financial meltdown and bailout, which led to further corporate profits and immiseration of workers. As an alternative, they suggest taxing the bailout, 2.3 billion dollars of which has gone to eighty-seven Oregon corporations. Pointing out that state government has to pay half the cost of emergency room care for the uninsured—a group that increases every day as workers are laid off and lose health insurance—enlace suggests that a fifteen percent tax on that 2.3 billion payout would finance emergency room services for the uninsured in Oregon for the next two years, even taking into account the likely increase in the number of uninsured Oregonians.

Organizers with other local groups—including VOZ workers rights education project, the Center for Intercultural Organizing, and the Office of Neighborhood Involvement--similarly stressed the importance of working together across racial and ethnic barriers in order to work effectively for economic justice. We need to remember not to buy into a model of scarcity that keeps us pitted againt each other for scraps, while the wealthy elite continue to profit from our suffering.

Raymond Lawrence in Counterpunch writes, "There is plenty of money in this country. Most of it just happens to be held by a very few people. . . . There are more than 400 billionaires [in the US] and a great many more fabulously rich persons whose wealth amounts to something less than a billion. . . . It is not easy to wrap one's mind around a billion dollars. A billion is a thousand million. To grasp the difference between a million and a billion dollars, consider the following: If a millionaire spent or gave away a dollar a second, or sixty dollars a minute, continually around the clock, the million dollars would be exhausted in 13 days. On the other hand, if a billionaire were to do the same, the money would last for 32 years. . . ." Lawrence proposes that "we levy a . . . national 'property tax' on all financial wealth above, say, three million dollars, and call it an 'infrastructure fee' based on financial wealth. . . . " Lawrence takes as one example the State of Virginia, currently facing a $2.9 billion shortfall over the next two years. In response, the Governor proposes to cut Medicaid funding, which provides health care for almost a million Virginians, reduce public school funding by 15%, cut school construction, release some number of prisoners early, cut 1500 state jobs, and borrow against the future. "If the state of Virginia imposed a 15% infrastructure fee on its own Virginia billionaires, the state deficit would be entirely erased for the next two years, with money left over. The billionaires would hardly feel the pinch. And this does not include a possible similar levy on all those who are simply multi-millionaires."

Of course, in order to get the billionaires to pay up on their taxes, we might have to offer them all cabinet posts.

But there's another way to get things done. Joshua Holland in Alternet notes that with the exception of the United states, "the whole world is rioting as the economic crisis worsens." Naomi Klein, writing in the Nation, points out that taking to the streets has gotten positive results from Iceland to Canada. "The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale."

caring labor and the economic stimulus

2008-11-30T13:19:00.000-08:00

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

2008-09-23T03:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-01T19:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-31T00:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-01T00:58:00.000-07:00

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

"utopia"

2008-07-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

via

wall-e

2008-07-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-09T19:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T23:04:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-04T20:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T00:46:00.001-07:00

(from icanhascheezeburger)

obamarama

2008-03-23T18:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-11T23:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-23T22:20:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-20T22:32:00.000-08:00

historical allusions

2007-10-27T23:17:00.000-07:00

"This extension is four bare rooms of shelf beds intended to house thirty people each. Each wall is covered with three layers of shelves plus an access ladder or two. Each shelf is to be a long, narrow bed intended to sleep two people, usually either feet to feet or head to head." (225)

"There was at least one major escape attempt. The people of Acorn took no part in it, but of course they suffered for it later along with the rest of Camp Christian. Its leader was the same David Turner that my mother had met and liked in 2033. . . . 'Day Turner's people were convinced that they could overwhelm the guards by piling onto them three or more to one.'" (238)

(all from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents)

po lice

2007-10-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Prologue to Dario Fo’s 1970 play Accidental Death of an Anarchist explains that in late 1969 there were a number of bomb incidents in Italian cities.

Milan police arrested an anarchist and accused him of the crime. At a certain point in his interrogation, the anarchist flew out the window of the police station. Something similar occurred in New York in 1921, when the anarchist Salsedo flew out the window of a police station, around the same time that Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for a crime never proven against them. From these stories we can conclude that many anarchists are obsessed by the urge to jump out of the window, because they believe they are able to fly.

It is an illusion of theirs that when they're two or three yards from the ground, they merely have to open their arms and move their feet to fly up again. Some observers have suspected that anarchists are able to fly, but they are also so underhanded that they smash themselves to the ground, just to incriminate the police and other state institutions by dying.

The case of the kamikaze anarchists helps explain similar events, such as the asymmetrical warfare of prisoners at Guantanamo, and the recent propensity of American college students to throw themselves repeatedly in front of TASERS. Only time will tell if we are at the beginning of a similar wave of middle-aged women strangling themselves with their handcuffs.

Kristian Williams has argued that the modern

police system was not created in response to spiraling crime rates, but developed as a means of social control by which an emerging dominant class could impose their values on the larger population.

Organized police forces arose specifically when traditional, informal, or community-maintained means of social control broke down. This breakdown was always prompted by a larger social change, often by a change which some part of the community resisted with violence, such as the creation of a state, colonization, or the enslavement of a subject people. In other words, it was at the point where authority was met with resistance that the organized application of force became necessary.

As Naomi Klein has pointed out, the dominance of neoliberalism is not the result of a lack of alternatives but of the violent suppression of alternatives.

But if the recent increased visibility of police brutality is a consequence of expanding corporate power, dismantling or privatizing social and government services, giving away the commons, deregulating and polluting food air water and land, spiraling inequality of income, and all of the other things which may be making previously docile segments of the population more restive--it’s still the case that police violence most particularly targets the racial and economic groups traditionally most subject to it.

Consider, for instance, Susie Day's report in Counterpunch about an incident in which Cops shot yet another Rich White Man

Hours before he was to be married, a wealthy Caucasian man leaving his bachelor party at a country club in East Hampton was shot and killed in a hail of police bullets. Two of his friends were wounded, one critically. Witnesses at the scene expressed shock and outrage, one of the club's patrons voicing the pervasive sentiment: "Why, oh why is it always rich white people who suffer at the hands of bigoted, trigger-happy cops?"

With emotions swirling around this case, and a long history of no criminal indictments for police who kill rich white people, legal experts say it will be difficult to determine if the shootings were justified. "Let's be honest," said district attorney Roger Gray, "As an affluent white male, Mr. Bellwether was part of a minority community. Those people don't trust us. They don't understand that cops confront danger every day and have to react in seconds. And if cops happen to shoot the same minority people from the same minority community again and again, that's a simple mistake--not a systemic pattern of brutality and injustice." Mr. Gray went on to say that reporters and investigators would be barred from questioning the officers, "to give them time to get their story straight."

The investigation into this case will likely prove controversial. At a time of growing social division, any appearance of police carelessness or bias could set off civic unrest. "And when white people get mad, it's really scary," said police commissioner Patrick O'Reyes. "That's why the department has maximized equal-opportunity. With our new, fully-armed multi-ethnic teams, we've got it fixed so nobody can say we're racist--even if we only shoot white people." The commissioner then ordered his multi-ethnic officers to roughly interrogate witnesses and family members of the victims, and ransack their homes for anything incriminating. "It's routine," he added.

Although civil rights leaders concede that social awareness has improved in recent years, some say more progress is needed. "The negative stereotype of the 'well-healed honky' is rampant in this case," proclaimed activist Martha Stewart at a press conference today. "But I think we can get it out with a touch of white vinegar."

On-the-street interviews, however, indicate that this prejudice might be harder to eradicate.

"Face it, prosperous white people own the corporations; they break unions; they're behind environmental degradation; they got us into Iraq--they're nothing but little Eichmanns," declared a professor of Equality and Justice Studies at Red Hook Community College. Victim advocates say this mentality has wormed its way into the police force.

One of the plainclothes officers who had been working undercover at the country club on the night of the shooting spoke on condition of anonymity. He said he thought there might be trouble when he saw several of the revelers wearing their black, navy blue, and beige "gang colors." Noticing hushed voices and some numbers being scratched onto cocktail napkins, the officer suspected that another hostile corporate takeover was being planned. "I couldn't stand to see more people suffer because of lost jobs, lowered salaries, the privatization of our infrastructure," the officer stated. "That's why I joined the police force--I wanted to help."

For more information on the problem and how you can help—and defend yourself and your community against police violence, check the links here:

National Day of Action to Stop Police Brutality, repression and the criminalization of a generation: The October 22nd Coalition ;The IWW. See also Portland Copwatch on Portland Police shootings and deaths in custody through August 2007. See also Prison Planet. The ACLU website offers A Community Action Manual on Fighting Police Abuse.

hard day's night of the living dead

2007-10-05T18:29:00.000-07:00

the iron heel

2007-09-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

Last year, Penguin Books issued a new edition of Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel.

Probably London’s fullest fictional presentation of his socialist views, it’s a book that Leon Trotsky, some thirty years later, called a “prophetic vision” of “fascism, of its economy, of its governmental technique, its political psychology. . . . Jack London foresaw and described the fascist regime as the inevitable result of the defeat of the proletarian revolution.” The book has its flaws, as Trotsky acknowledged, though I would include that sense of inevitability as one of them. Still, it’s a compelling depiction of the workings of capitalism.

The middle-class female narrator speaks in the sentimental rhetoric of melodrama, a kind of appeal that has historically proved effective in moving Americans on political issues, most famously in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Avis Everhard focuses her narrative on a working-class hero devoted to the rational appeal to material fact.

When Avis Cunningham meets Ernest Everhard, he tells her that her dress is stained with blood, and then goes on to introduce her to the bleeding workers whose unrecompensed injuries, as well as their more figurative lifeblood, has gone to swell the stock dividends that have paid for Avis’s dress. The injuries are unrecompensed because although workers can sue for damages, the other workers won’t risk their own jobs by honest testimony, reporters know editors won’t publish stories unfriendly to their advertisers and investors, and the judge and the corporate lawyer belong to the same club. The need to feed their children keeps workers bound to the industrial machine by their heart strings, but some are bound so that they are on top of the machine, and the aristocratic class believes that they are in the right.

They believe this despite having no good explanation for the miseries of capitalism. When Ernest challenges a group of oligarchs to defend capitalism’s bad management of a world with both massive productive forces and massive poverty, he gets no satisfactory answer other than the response that will ultimately come in the form of a bullet.

The socialists do first win at the ballot—in the days before widespread purging of voter rolls and electronic voting machines—but they’re framed for a bombing, and the whole socialist congressional delegation arrested. So the revolutionists move underground, spying on the oligarchs as they are spied upon.

The second half of the novel—once Avis Everhard’s political education is complete, her marriage consummated figuratively as well as literally—consists in the story of a failed revolt against the machine, the blood of the workers become literal blood in the streets.

But the fascist dystopia of The Iron Heel is wrapped inside a socialist utopia—the manuscript Avis writes has been published some 700 years after her death, and features a foreword and footnotes written in year 419 of the Brotherhood of Man.

It’s not surprising that it’s called the Brotherhood of Man, since despite the presence of Avis and other women in the ranks of the revolutionaries, the book doesn’t register the possibility of women’s emancipation, nor the possibility that there might be anything other than the class system from which to be liberated.

And as some readers have noted, it’s probably just as well, given London’s record on questions of race, that there’s little about that in the book, though it is strange to think of a socialist revolution in the US that doesn’t have something to do with race.

Those aren’t the only omissions in The Iron Heel. It’s not clear how, in the three hundred years between the events of the novel and overthrow of the oligarchy, the revolutionaries have escaped from the trap of coming to mirror their oppressors. But the long view does provide a kind of hope in the face of defeat.

Moreover, for readers today, the book offers a salutary reminder of the struggles of the past and of how close the possibility of socialist change has sometimes seemed in the US.

As Naomi Klein has recently reminded us, we haven’t lacked for ideas— “universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren’t new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN Charter.”

Nor have we lacked resources. Last year, “ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, a world record. . . . We can tax the polluters and the casino capitalists to pay for alternative energy development and a global social safety net.”

Nor is the problem political will or coordination among political leaders.

In The Iron Heel, the character who most believes that the problem is simple ignorance is a clergyman who is shocked to learn, under Ernest’s tutelage, the extent of the suffering of the poor. But his wealthy congregation is shocked at the turn his sermons have taken, and he ultimately loses his job, his home, and his freedom, when he’s declared insane and committed.

As Klein says, “elites don’t make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse. And that is what happened all those years ago when the income gap began to close. That was the motivation behind the New Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism . . . needed to soften its edges.”

Klein notes of these alternatives to the so-called free market, “They were chosen, and then they were stolen. They were stolen by military coups. They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror. . . . These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They’re popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly.”

As Frederick Douglass knew, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

On beliefs about Iraqi WMDs

2007-09-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

Last week in class someone referred to the US administration’s belief, before the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It may well be true that the administration believed that Iraq posed a threat to the US at that time. However, there were reasons for skepticism about the danger of the Iraqi weapons program even then. Hans Blix, the executive director of the UN inspection commission (UNMOVIC), reported that Iraq was increasingly complying with inspectors, who would need some months further to complete their work. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter also argued that Iraq’s weapons were unlikely to pose a threat.

In addition, the administration would have had more reasons that did the public at large for skepticism about Iraq’s possession of WMDs. Joseph C. Wilson reported, before the war to the administration, as well as after the war to the public, that it was “highly doubtful” that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq. The subsequently leaked Downing Street memo has suggested to some that the US administration was not interested in exploring counter-evidence; the statement that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” has been read as indicating that intelligence and facts were being read selectively to achive the desired conclusions.

Anyway, as with the varieties of socialism, things may be more complex than they might seem.

Orwell & socialism

2007-09-02T00:59:00.000-07:00

Someone suggested in class that Orwell was strongly opposed to socialism. But it’s worth noting that not everyone reads him that way--including, for at least much of his adult life, Orwell himself.

He fought against the Facists in Spain, and after seeing the Stalinist tactics of the Soviet-supported Republican army against groups like the anarchist & syndicalist militia of the POUM, with which Orwell fought (on the same side, that is, against the Fascist National Front, which had narrowly lost the 1936 election), he became strongly anti-Stalinist and anti-totalitarian. But he continued to identify as a socialist. (Brief bio here )

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), in which he reports on the lives of miners in Lancashire and Yorkshire, he argues that

Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.

And as late as 1946 in “Why I Write” he wrote that

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it

(also w/o italics here. I don't have a print text handy, so I don't know which is more reliable).

That was still before writing 1984, so one might argue that his views changed. But many read it as consistent with his earlier positons. So, for instance, Robert Resch in Boundary 2 reads 1984 as both socialist and anti-Stalinist:

Because Orwell’s democratic socialism is explicitly and militantly anti-capitalist, his concept of totalitarianism must be distinguished clearly from that of his cold war appropriators.

According to Paul Foot in Socialist Review

George Orwell was the earliest and most eloquent British writer to call himself a revolutionary socialist and yet denounce the influence and propaganda of the most powerful force to describe itself as socialist - Stalinism.

More Orwell, of course, at the library.

easy in a police state

2007-08-09T01:59:00.000-07:00

In Touch of Evil, Mike Vargas explains that "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." Some would say we're on our way.
Some would say we should go farther--like this guy, who thinks Bush should emulate Julius Caesar, nuke Iran, & declare himself president for life. No, really.

Update: The site's been scrubbed, but here's the cache.

on zombies

2007-07-27T14:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about zombie movies, of which the twenty-first century has seen a resurgence. The zombie movie database lists nearly 1600 films since the year 2000, though that includes shorts, tv shows, and direct to video releases. Still, many of those have been quite successful theatrical features. In 2002, we got 28 Days Later, and this year its sequel, 28 Weeks Later. In 2004, we saw a remake of George Romero’s 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead, as well as the British horror comedy Shaun of the Dead. The next year, 2005, Romero himself directed the fourth in his series, Land of the Dead. What’s more, there are games like Resident Evil (which itself spawned a series of films), and books like Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. Zombies, it seems, are everywhere.

So, when I recently saw on the website commondreams.org an article by Olga Bonfiglio titled “Dead Nation Walking,” I naturally thought it must be about zombie movies. But of course the article was instead about capital punishment in the US, and the title a reference to the anti-death penalty work of sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking.

Still, in the midst of life we are in death. Surely the violence of our world has some bearing on the popularity of a genre about the walking, biting dead.

As one can confirm in Bonfiglio’s article and through her sources, most nations have recognized that capital punishment does not act as a deterrent to crime. The US is the only NATO nation that retains the death penalty, and we rank fourth in the world for the number of executions, behind only China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Not only are there significant racial disparities in sentencing, so that people of color are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death, but also many innocent people have been falsely convicted and sentenced to death. Since 1973 over 120 people have been released from death row because of evidence of their innocence.

But the 431 people who have been executed in the US since 2000 don’t necessarily account for the recent interest in the walking dead, since the yearly figures have actually been declining since they peaked in 1999, in part because of the work of activists like Prejean and Bonfiglio.
But we might consider the casualties in Iraq—including the over 600,000 “excess deaths” reported by the Lancet, or perhaps the deaths resulting here from the lack of access to health care. Or those who have died in US custody, or for that matter in the US in police custody

In the midst of life we are in death, indeed, and maybe death is also in us, as well. George Romero’s work, in particular, has tended to stress the blurring of boundaries between zombies and humans, the idea that zombies are us. In Land of the Dead, a human character observes of the zombies, “They’re pretending to be alive,” and another responds, “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Pretending to be alive?” Similarly, in Shaun of the Dead, some of the initial humor comes from Shaun’s failure to notice that the people around him are zombies, since they don’t seem to be acting all that differently than usual (though, as one character later notes, “they are a little bitey”).

This blurring of boundaries means that zombies figure differently in different films, or sometimes even within a single film. They may be emblems of frustration with routine, as when a character in Shaun of the Dead comments, before the zombie outbreak, “I want to live a little.” They may embody a rebellious underclass, as when they overrun the gated community of wealthy humans in Land of the Dead. They may provide opportunities for human characters to act out unacceptable and unconscious aggressive wishes, as when people are obliged to kill zombified family members. But the deadening effect of life under capitalism has long been a staple of the zombie tradition.

Writing in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, a psychoanalyst with the science-fictional name of Mark Borg suggests that the palliative care culture –which dovetails so nicely with the commodification of treatment, with selling drugs to cure sleeplessness, inattention, depression, anxiety, shyness, and all the ills the human mind is heir to—invites us to become emotional zombies, armored against social connection and empathy. He writes,

Human—that is, emotional—responses to everyday stimuli are increasingly pathologized, and we are increasingly promised the obliteration of all human suffering. Yet at the core of all these human responses to suffering that need remedy is a deep sense of empathy with the struggles associated with simply existing at this time in this society, in a state of perpetual dread over the immense social problems that infect those around us, and that seem (and often are) insurmountable.

The list of potential remedies for our discomfort is long enough to [ . . . remove] us from the emotional experience of painful and anxiety-provoking stimuli. In this state of amputated emotions and self-experience we can become zombie-like, unable to impact or be impacted by our world or by each other. (2)

One recurrent motif in zombie movies is the coming together of human survivor groups, often an affirmation of the human sympathy to which life under capitalism is so antagonistic. In Shaun of the Dead the title character quotes Bertrand Russell’s statement that “The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.” That film ultimately betrays the words of the pacifist Russell, when the characters are saved by military intervention, but most zombie films are quite critical of militarism and of war.

Heather Hendershot, writing in Flow, notes that there is a long history of non-vampiric walking corpses being used as anti-war symbols, going back to Abel Gance's J'accuse in 1919: “The film ends with the dead of the Great War returning to ask why they have been sacrificed.” More recently, Joe Dante’s 2004 “Homecoming,” part of the television series Masters of Horror, featured dead soldiers from the current conflict returning to vote against the politicians who falsely led them into war.

Meghan Sutherland, writing in Framework, argues that zombie movies offer a “scenario . . . familiar to us in the time of the Patriot Act, it is precisely the bleed or collapse of structural boundaries—between murder and law, power and the body, life and death—that constitutes the survival of sovereign power on the unpredictable terrain of modern politics.”

This certainly sounds like a description of the death penalty, as well as, often enough, the actions of US forces in Iraq, and the actions of US police and prison guards in the US.

Despite the recurrent appearance of zombies, however, there has been a twist in the recent films, in many of which the zombies are not slow and shuffling, but fast and surprisingly agile, as in the remade Dawn of the Dead. Indeed, in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, the source of the problem is described as the “rage virus.” The deadened affect, the lack of emotion registered in earlier zombie films seems now to have given way to return of repressed fury.

And why shouldn’t we be furious? We have been paying attention, and we are outraged.

resident evil

2007-07-27T02:06:00.000-07:00

Why is Milla Jovovich in lingerie? I really want to cgi onto her a decent set of clothes. Something with sleeves, and legs. I do like the knee-high black boots, though. Something I know I always think of wearing when I’m lounging around in a strange house after waking up in the shower, bruised and amnesiac.

All those shots of elevators plunging through shafts and trains through tunnels.

Evil corporations, man; they creep me out.

watch out

2007-06-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

So, the last time I flew, I couldn't check in through the computer kiosk because, the person behind the counter told me, my name matched that of someone on the watch list. But if my name matched, then how did they decide so easily it wasn't me? (And I had no trouble on the return trip.) And if it was the same name, did the other user of it steal it from me? Because it's not a name you'd think was common. Or was it really my name on the list for some reason (my visiting of leftist websites, perhaps)? None of it makes me feel any safer.

spectacle

2007-06-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

"To the degree that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary."

(1968: seems to include a lot of nekkid young women)

knocked up

2007-06-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

Knocked Up was written and directed by Judd Apatow, best known for The 40 Year Old Virgin, and the director of photography was Portland native Eric Edwards. It’s a beautifully shot film, and it’s been getting enthusiastically positive reviews (especially at sites like Reviews for Guys and Movie for Guys).

All that press may have made the storyline familiar, but here it is in brief. Alison (played by Katherine Heigl), has just been promoted from behind the scenes to doing on-air interviews with celebrities. Out dancing with her sister to celebrate, she meets Ben (played by Seth Rogen), who’s out with his stoner slacker roommates. They spend the night together and she’s clearly alarmed in the morning (he asks, did we have sex?). But, as it turns out, she’s pregnant, and with little discussion of her options, she decides to continue the pregnancy and try to develop a real relationship with Ben.

A number of critics have suggested that the emotional center of the film lies with Alison’s sister Debbie and her husband Pete, played by Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd. The film is more interesting if we understand the Alison and Ben pairing as a kind of projection of the feelings of someone in Paul’s position (or Apatow’s).

At least one critic has suggested that the obvious thing for pretty, successful, upwardly-mobile Alison to do is the terminate the pregnancy and move on.

The problem is not that Knocked Up is “liberal” because it’s about casual sex and having a baby out of wedlock. The problem is that it is horribly conservative about embracing and enjoying an adult version of sexuality that has moved beyond dorm-room-esque groping. One night with some guy you don’t even know does not mean you must tie yourself to him for the rest of your life... unless you think that women must be punished for sex. Oh, but it’s not punishment: you get an adorable baby out of the deal! And you get to “train” a man!

Another observes that

It's just not believable that, in Alison and Ben's upper-middle-class, secular L.A. milieu, abortion would not be matter-of-factly discussed as a possibility in the case of a pregnancy this accidental. If she doesn't want one, great—obviously, there'd be no movie if she did—but let's hear about why not. Otherwise, her character becomes a cipher, a foil for Ben's epiphanies about growing up, without being allowed any epiphanies of her own.

The pro-natalist position is implicit; we never hear anything about Alison’s possible religious or moral scruples. But we know little about her character. Aside from her job and family, she seems to have no life, no friends, no interests, no psychology.

Clearly the movie is a Guy Fantasy that the gorgeous successful blonde will fall for the crass loser; that's pretty much the central joke. Comments on some blogs have been far more scathing:

first of all, the woman gives up her hope of love and compatibility. face it, it's a trade up for him, a trade down for her. second of all, when the woman's mother suggests she get an abortion, the woman digs her heels in for daughter rebellion. the guy writer obviously can't have a powerful older woman giving the gal advice. third, the woman has no women friends except bitches. Another guy fantasy. And the woman rejects her friends in favor of the guy. Another guy fantasy. Lastly, the guy gets to command the woman's sister to leave the birthing room because she doesn't belong there. Another guy fantasy - telling off the sister. . . . The message is - abandon all your friends and sisters and your mother for the chubby guy. Of course, he gets to keep his friends. Does anyone see how hateful that is?

The World Socialist Web Site notes that the film is very narrowly focused, entirely concerned with individual choices and relationships, and that despite the superficial lewdness, its values are conservative, signs of an "inward turning and lack of interest in broader currents of American life":

At a juncture when it’s difficult in everyday life to avoid complaints about (or curses aimed at) the Iraq war, George Bush, gas prices, multimillion-dollar salaries for corporate executives, falling house prices or other sources of public anger or anxiety; conspiracy theories, plausible or otherwise; rage of an increasingly social or anti-social character; and varying, often infuriating, manifestations of the generally dysfunctional character of American society, none of this appears or is hinted at in Apatow’s work. It is consciously oriented in another direction, a kind of comic, chaotic self-help book....

Apatow stacks the deck, in any event. He creates a situation in which there are only two possibilities for Ben—carrying on with his vaguely bohemian, hedonistic, idle lifestyle or “growing up” and becoming a respectable, money-making petty bourgeois. The possibility of maturing and accepting certain personal responsibilities as well as doing something substantial and challenging, not necessarily financially well-rewarded, with one’s life is excluded.

It’s perhaps worth acknowledging that the hedonistic idle life of Ben’s friends and roommates could be understood as a resistance to capitalism and the protestant work ethic, and that may be part of the appeal of those sections of the film, but surely there are better means of resistance.

kitteh sez

2007-06-08T14:19:00.000-07:00

from I can has cheezburger

the pain of our inner troops

2007-06-03T20:54:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, the mainstream press discovered that there are problems with veteran’s health care. The scandal of dilapidated buildings and untreated soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center led to a series of firings and resignations. But, as even the commercial press is aware, being a veteran is still no guarantee of access to health care.

Stories reflecting on this fact imply that veterans have an extra claim to medical attention. Perhaps they do, but we should be wary of suggesting that there is anyone who doesn’t have a right to health care.

Let’s review. According to Cesar Chelala, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, “The most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that 46.6 million Americans (about 15.9 percent of the population) had no health insurance coverage during 2005, an increase of 1.3 million over the previous year. It is no wonder, then, that medical bills are overwhelmingly the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States. According to the Children’s Health Fund, 9 million children are completely uninsured in the United States, while another 23.7 million - nearly 30 percent of the nation’s children — lack regular access to health care.”

Last month the Commonwealth Fund released an update of their report comparing the health care systems of the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. They found that “the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage.”

Susie Day, who writes for Monthly Review zine, is one of the lucky ones. Last week, she reported on a recent call to her Doctor in a piece titled "U.S. Troops Out of . . . ME":

Hello, Doctor? Thanks for taking my call -- it's an emergency. I've been infected. Well, medically speaking, I guess you'd say I'm not so much infected as occupied. My symptoms? They're hard to describe. A cough, maybe.

Like today, I'm walking down the street. Big, shady trees, leaves bright green . . . twittering birds, everything oxygenated and sparkling. And I see an old gentleman in a baseball cap and suspenders, struggling to heave his grocery-filled shopping cart up the stoop to his apartment. My first thought is to go over and help him lift the cart. Simple enough.

Then I get a scratching in my throat and this weird, fearful sensation. "WHOA," I say to myself. "Instead of being grateful, this guy could take out a .357 Magnum and blow my head off." I notice a blockage; I cough. I think, "[Forget] you, old man, you ingrate, I was only trying to help." I'm now shaking and feverish. I think, "To make sure you don't kill me, you bum, I'm going to run a steak knife into your guts and drive a tank over your pitiful geezer body."

By now, I'm coughing hard. The birds continue to twitter and the leaves are shimmering in the breeze -- while I am picturing myself annihilating this old guy. But that's the price you pay, right -- kill them before they kill you? Just then, I retch; I double over and cough up . . . a tiny American soldier.

I'd call that a symptom, wouldn't you, Doctor? Anyhow, it lands in my hand, all tricked out in little fatigues and a bayonet. I can tell right away it's dead. So I panic . . . and run home and phone you.

I think it's obvious, Doctor: I've become contaminated by U.S. foreign policy. I calculate, according to the last Democratic sellout vote, that I have at least 147,000 U.S. troops stationed in my Persian Gulf, er, body. Plus all their equipment.

How was I infected, you ask? This is embarrassing, Doctor -- I, uh, didn't take precautions. I must have exchanged bodily fluids with a peace activist or something. Some commie pervert who believed that all humans are "created equal." I admit I've jumped to this conclusion once or twice, watching the news -- that the beings who have died by the hundreds of thousands in Iraq are, in fact, human -- that their lives matter as much as yours or mine. Naturally, in America, I couldn't live, knowing this. So in came the troops. That's right, Doctor: the government sent them. To protect me.

Even now, I can feel my inner troops. Drilling, playing cards, writing letters home, making sure I am terrorist-free. They won't tell me if they had anything to do with the siege on Fallujah, or if they hooded detainees for interrogation. They say a lot happens that doesn't make the news. They say they're just doing their job.

Kids, mostly. Came to see the world, feed their families, get a college degree, defend democracy. But they're stuck now and scared. They hate it and, knowing they are hated, they kill. They belong to me. . . .

But here's the thing, Doctor. With all due respect to my troops, I don't want them. Although they do allow me to cope with post-9/11 reality, they won't let me dream of happiness. For example, I'll be thinking of a quiet, sun-filled room, tulips in a vase on the piano, a puppy playing with a fallen petal and -- blam!, a combat boot kicks in the door and stomps everything to death. This is unacceptable, Doctor: I cannot live on a planet where innocence is a constant deterrent to survival.

So I need fast relief. What would you prescribe -- a stomach pump, chemotherapy, exorcism? This isn't some little ailment where you say, "Click on two MoveOn.org petitions and call me in the morning," this is serious. In fact, I suggest a radical troop-ectomy to actually remove our military from Iraq.

Lots of people could assist you in this operation, Doctor; me included. Then, of course, we'd have to get the troops out of the troops. They're occupied, too, you know.

restoring the constitution?

2007-05-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

Someone in Washington must have finally taken to heart the bumper sticker that says, “Ok, joke’s over. Bring back the constitution” because there’s now a bill in both houses called the “Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007.”

Its provisions are less ambitious than its title, but it would repeal many parts of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 by, among other things, banning the use of coerced testimony, and restoring the right of detainees to seek a writ of habeas corpus.

The phrase habeas corpus is Latin for “thou (shalt) have the body” –in court, that is. Also called the Great Writ of Liberty, and other things in Latin, a writ of habeas corpus was originally used to require the custodian of a person detained without charges to bring the body of that person before a judge for a determination of whether the person is being held for legal reason, or else should be released from custody.

The Military Commissions Act was passed in response to the Supreme Court decision in Hamden v. Rumsfeld, which last year determined that the Guantanamo military commissions provided for in the PATRIOT ACT are illegal under U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions.

So, in a twist on checks and balances, when the Supreme Court asserted that the executive administration's initial plans to try detainees using military tribunals were illegal, the legislative branch passed a law declaring it legal: Military Commissions Act of 2006. “In doing so,” as the ACLU puts it, “they cast aside the Constitution and the principle of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. They also gave the president absolute power to designate enemy combatants, and to set his own definitions for torture.” There was no mention in the Commissions Act of the Geneva conventions it undermined.

In February of this year, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited provisions of the Military Commissions Act in ruling that Guantanamo Bay detainees may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

But the Hamden decision followed an earlier ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. In the Hamdi case, the government contended that it could hold Hamdi, an American citizen, indefinitely without charges, and without the right to stand trial. In 2004 the Supreme Court ruled that Hamdi had been denied due process and should receive a meaningful opportunity to contest the facts allegedly underlying his designation as an “enemy combatant.” Faced with the obligation to defend its detention before an objective decisionmaker, the government agreed to release Hamdi.

But as Jennifer Van Bergen puts it in a 2004 article on Counterpunch dot org.

While saying Hamdi had the [habeas corpus] right to challenge his detention, the Court eviscerated that right by the applying a "balancing test" used in civil cases--a test that in fact originated in the context of the deprivation of welfare benefits. Rather than requiring the Government to supply probable cause of criminal activity in order to detain Hamdi, Hamdi has to somehow prove that he isn't what the Government says he is. The Court pointed out that the lower court "apparently believed that the appropriate process would approach the process that accompanies a criminal trial."
Well, yes, a person being held in custody has the right to be charged with a crime or released. But the Court rejected this approach, [though] it is hard to see why the Court would refuse to apply criminal procedural protections to challenges to the detention of persons who have claimed innocence. Innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be our standard.

In an essay titled “Guantanamo and the New Legal Order,” in the May 2005 Monthly Review, Jean-Claude Paye writes,

The “war against terrorism” has provided all executive branches of the leading Western governments with a perfect opportunity to make some deep adjustments to society. These changes are so far-reaching that they approach a shedding of the old political regime. We in the West are witnessing a reversal of the role of criminal procedure right across the board. Its usual function—to guarantee fundamental freedoms and cap the powers of police and government—is morphing into the opposite, a suspension of constitutional order. By extending exceptional proceedings to all stages of the criminal process—from inquiry to trial—private life is being invaded and the expression of public freedoms chilled. . . .
These measures are common to all nations, but the United States goes one step further. It has set about reorganizing its penal system by making outright violence an integral part of the legal system. Such action affects foreign nationals accused of terrorism or U.S. citizens labeled as “enemy combatants” by the Pentagon, and whose constitutional guarantee that they would not be deprived of liberty without due process of law has been suspended ….
In the state of emergency the extent of the powers magistrates have at their disposal is a direct result of the suspension of laws limiting their privileges. The extraordinary powers of both the executive and police stem from diminishing the mechanisms that protect fundamental freedoms. The state of emergency is a state without law.

As Paye notes, the move toward centralized rule by executive decree is part of a large-scale political shift. But we can also see an attempted small-scale version of this move in the city of Portland, Oregon. Ballot Measure 26-91 would transform Portland’s committee-style government, giving greater power to the mayor, currently former police chief Tom Potter. And as Dave Mazza reports in the May 2007 Portland Alliance, the charter revision campaign has been financed chiefly by big business.

Ballots have gone out to voters in Portland. The Center for Constitutional Rights has an online resource and action page for restoring habeas corpus, and the ACLU has an online petition that will be delivered to legislators on June 26th, the one year anniversary of the ratification of the Military Commissions Act.

Finally, though, it’s worth remembering that, as historian Howard Zinn reminds us in a 2005 essay in The Progressive,

Knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. …
[T]he most important job citizens have […] is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system.

kiss me deadly

2007-04-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

Kiss Me Deadly will be playing this coming weekend (April 28th & 29th) as part of the Northwest Film Center’s Film Noir series, “Killer Ladies.” In the 1940s and 50s, Film Noir combined the grim vision of the American hard-boiled detective novel with the dramatic camera angles and lighting of German expressionist cinema, and Kiss Me Deadly is considered a late masterpiece of the genre. Directed in 1955 by Robert Aldrich, the film draws its title, though little else, from a Mickey Spillane book. It opens with a barefoot woman in a trenchcoat stopping a car on a dark road. The hitchhiker, Christina Bailey, played by Cloris Leachman, and the driver, private detective Mike Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, are themselves stopped by mysterious thugs who torture them and leave them for dead. Mike survives, and his subsequent interrogation by interstate police convinces him that he’s on to something big, and potentially profitable. With the help of his secretary Velda, played by Maxine Cooper, he pursues the secret that Christina was hiding, and along the way encounters her supposed former roommate, Lily Carver, played by Gaby Rogers, as well as an opera singer, an art dealer, a number of boxers, and assorted cops, thugs, and other sadists wielding knives, guns, and hypodermic needles.
For more on femmes fatales and film noir, listen to the Old Mole Variety Hour tomorrow (April 23), or check out these links.

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0600/rc1fr10m.htm
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/rr0600/cfrr10b.htm

queer morality

2007-04-07T15:56:00.000-07:00

Last month, General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay service members by saying that "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” He apparently did not comment on the morality of, say, invading a country and directly or indirectly causing the deaths of approximately 655,000 individuals.

That evident contradiction, according to which gay love is bad, but killing is good, is addressed by Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America in a recent column in Truthdig:

"The radical Christian right . . . has built a binary worldview of command and submission wherein male leaders, who cannot be questioned and claim to speak for God, are in control and all others must follow. Any lifestyle outside the traditional model of male and female is a threat to this hierarchical male power structure. Women who do not depend on men for their identity and their sexuality, who live outside a male power relationship, challenge this pervasive cult of masculinity, as do men who find tenderness and love with other men as equals. The lifestyle of gays and lesbians is intolerable to the Christian right because its existence is a threat to the movement’s chain of command. . . .

This hypermasculinity, which crushes the independence and self-expression of women, is a way for men in the movement to compensate for the curtailing of their own independence, their blind obedience to church authorities and the calls for sexual restraint. The images of Jesus often show him with thick muscles, clutching a sword. Christian men are portrayed as powerful warriors. Jesus’ stoic endurance of the brutal whippings in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ presages the brutal, masculine world of this ideology. . . . Jerry Falwell, in a New Yorker interview, said Christ was not a gentle-looking, willowy man: “Christ was a man with muscles,” he insisted. Falwell and Gibson see real men, godly men, as powerful, able to endure physical pain and suffering without complaint. Jesus, like God, has to be a real man, a man who dominates through force. The language of the movement is filled with metaphors about the use of excessive force and violence against God’s enemies.

The unspoken truth is that Christian men are required to have a personal, loving relationship with a male deity and surrender their will to a male-dominated authoritarian church. . . . Glorified acts of force and violence against outsiders, against nonbelievers, compensate for this unquestioning submission. The domination that men are encouraged to practice in the home over women and children becomes a reflection of the domination they are taught to endure outside the home.

This cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check. It fosters this world of binary opposites: God and man, the saved and the unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, and male and female. There runs through this radical belief system a dread of disorder and chaos. The belief in a binary universe helps believers avoid confronting the confusion of human existence. Reality, when it is defined in these absolutes, is made predictable and understandable. All configurations of human life that do not conform to [this] rigid [. . .] model, such as homosexuality, are forms of disorder and tools of Satan and must be abolished. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear markers, can be managed and controlled."

Successful challenges to this movement are unlikely to come through legislative reform alone, any more than an end to racism came though the 1964 civil rights act outlawing racial segregation and discrimination. But legal recognition and rights would certainly be a step in the right direction.

You have a chance to participate in such steps this very evening, Monday April 9, 2007, when the Oregon House Elections, Ethics and Rules Committee holds a public hearing on two gay rights acts: the Oregon Equality Act (SB 2) and the Oregon Family Fairness Act (HB 2007). Hearings will be held at 5:30 PM today in Hearing Room E at the Capitol in Salem.

The House Family Fairness Act would provide for civil unions between same-sex partners. The Senate Equality Act would provide gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people with protection from discrimination in employment, housing, access to public places and other areas.

While antidiscrimination law seems a no brainer (though the exemptions for religious groups raise thorny questions, and have been the subject of much negotiation), civil unions are more complicated.

Bonnie Tinker, writing in this month’s Portland Alliance, asks,

“How can I support a bill that treats same-sex partners as a separate class and asks us to wear the pink triangle of civil unions? On the other hand, how can I oppose a bill that intends to make things better for lesbian and gay families?”

She suggests,

“Go to the hearings on HB 2007 and demonstrate outside, or testify inside from a neutral position that they have given us the wrong choices. We need a choice that offers equality.” And Tinker propses several further actions: those in other sex relationships can refuse special rights and wear “the pink triangle of civil unions” along with queer couples; those in legal marriages can testify to the privileges they receive; on forms that ask for marital status, queers in couples might check the box that says “married”; those in legal marriages might check “single” in order to reject special rights.

Tinker concludes, “Our acceptance of the caste system of legal marriage rights is a reflection of the depth of heterosexist conditioning in society. It is no longer acceptable. As with any oppression, the first step toward changeis to pay attention ot unconscious and unstated privilege. The next step is to negotiate for change. We are now ready for the next step: non-violent direct action to resist the inequality of legal marriage.”

passive voice and other crimes

2007-03-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

From today's NYTimes:

Quotation of the Day

"I acknowledge that mistakes were made here."

-ALBERTO R. GONZALES, the attorney general, on the dismissals of federal prosecutors.

manifestoon

2006-12-24T00:13:00.000-08:00

wrr: women's reproductive freedom

2006-11-24T13:57:00.000-08:00

The defeat in Oregon of Measure 43, which would have required parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion, and the repeal in South Dakota of the law allowing for abortion only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, both mark modest defeats for those opposed to women’s reproductive freedom. But in the campaigns around these measures, the rhetoric of anti-choice advocates has increasingly adopted the argument that abortion should be banned because it harms women.

Like the groups trying to suppress multicultural education in the name of academic freedom, or to disrupt the teaching of evolution in the name of scientific debate, many anti-choice advocates have been appropriating the language of their more progressive opponents.

We can see some of this in the career of Eric Keroack, recently appointed by George W. Bush to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs, a position that oversees a number of Health and Human Services programs, including the Office of Family Planning.

Until recently, Keroack was medical director for a chain of “crisis pregnancy centers” called A Woman’s Concern, which use a variety of techniques, including deception, to pressure pregnant women to continue their pregnancies, avoid contraception, and remain abstinent until marriage. His career has been dissected and his arguments refuted on the website talk2action.org, as well as a number of other venues.

For instance, the idea that it’s concern for women that’s expresessed by A Woman’s Concern when they try to encourage women to continue unwanted pregnancies is refuted by the American Psychological Association’s statement that

research shows that the ability of women to make decisions about their own childbearing (including timing) is a necessary condition for their health and mental health, as well as for their families. Abortion is a safe medical procedure that carries relatively few physical or psychological risks and that yields positive outcomes when the alternative is unwanted pregnancy.

In an article in the American Prospect, reposted on AlterNet, Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain have noted that all of that evidence and argument was rejected by the South Dakota legislature and the document on which they based their decision,

a 70-page set of findings contained in the “Report of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion” -- by far the most comprehensive government account of the arguments and evidence for protecting women from abortion.

South Dakota’s official endorsement of these arguments gives them more validity than ever and virtually assures that they will be employed to justify abortion restrictions across the nation.

The task force’s report … argued that the state needed a ban because of the epidemic overriding pressures on women to abort -- from a family member, a husband or boyfriend, or an abortion clinic -- that make extra protection from abortion necessary. Finally, to make credible its claims about women’s health and women’s choices, the task force made repeated claims about women’s nature. It asserted that women would never freely choose an abortion -- even absent outside pressures -- because doing so would violate “the mother’s fundamental natural intrinsic right to a relationship with her child.” The task force took as a statement of biological and psychological fact that a mother’s connection to her unborn baby was more authentic than her own statement of desire not to be pregnant. These gender-role convictions are at the heart of the movement’s claim that the nation must now combat an epidemic of dangerous and coerced abortions.

The legislature also heard testimony from women who said that their experiences of legal abortion had caused them psychological trauma.

The task force argues that abortion causes symptoms of what it calls Post-Abortion Syndrome (or PAS) because abortion violates women’s nature: “It is simply unrealistic to expect that a pregnant mother is capable of being involved in the termination of the life of her own child without risk of suffering significant psychological trauma and distress. To do so is beyond the normal, natural, and healthy capability of a woman whose natural instincts are to protect and nurture her child.”

In July, Democratic Congressman Henry A. Waxman released a report on the “False and Misleading Health Information provided by Federally Funded Pregnancy Resource Centers.” These anti-abortion and “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), according to a March report in The Washington Post based on a review of federal records, received more than $60 million in federal funds between 2001 and 2005 and represent a small fraction of the more than 3,000 centers in North America. According to Waxman’s report, the centers provided “false and misleading” information about a link between abortion and breast cancer, the effect of abortion on future fertility, and the mental-health effects of abortion. Indeed, Waxman’s report details the major government and professional studies that discredit PAS.

Which is why the stories of women are so important. What the PAS movement lacks in scientific credibility, it makes up for with dramatic and often touching stories of individual women who feel it is legal abortion that allowed them to be coerced into giving up pregnancies they wanted to continue. Crisis Pregnancy Centers (or CPCs) help women understand that feelings of loss and self-destructive conduct can be traced to unacknowledged guilt over past abortions. In offering suffering women this relief, the CPCs produce meaning. In the process, abortion comes to symbolize women’s disempowerment -- and its prohibition promises women healing, protection, maternal recognition, and freedom.

The predicament of women who grieve their abortions raises questions about the counseling and social supports available to women facing unintended pregnancies.

But criminalizing abortion is not a response. It would not only force motherhood on women who would choose to terminate their pregnancy under any conditions, but it would do nothing to

address the needs of women who seek an abortion because they lacked contraception or were raped or are living in an abusive relationship, or will have to drop out of work or school to raise a child alone, or are stretched so thin that they cannot emotionally or financially provide for their other children.

There is a cautionary message in all this, as well, to supporters of choice … who in recent years have embraced a vocabulary of grief around abortion. There is an ocean of difference between “safe, legal, and rare,” as Bill Clinton put it, and criminal, as in South Dakota. But it is plain that the [liberal] emphasis on abortion-as-tragedy will feed right into the woman-protective frame unless the pro-choice camp anticipates its opponents’ arguments and grounds the case for abortion rights in ... a broader agenda of progressive family values.

But beyond the claims of Siegel and Blustain, progressives might also want to clarify the real causes of women’s disempowerment, and call again for the real conditions of our freedom.

chicken

2006-10-25T21:06:00.000-07:00

Robert Jensen on Academic Freedom in Counterpunch:

All teaching -- especially in the humanities and the social sciences -- has a political dimension, and we shouldn't fear that. The question isn't whether professors should leave their politics at the door (they can't) but whether professors are responsible in the way they present their politics and can defend their pedagogical decisions. It's clear that every decision a professor makes -- choice of topics, textbook selection, how material is presented -- has an underlying politics. If the professor's views are safely within the conventional wisdom of the dominant sectors of society, it might appear the class is apolitical. Only when professors challenge that conventional wisdom do we hear talk about "politicized" classrooms.

But just because the classroom always is politicized in courses that deal with how we organize ourselves politically, economically, and socially, we should not suggest that it's all politics. Because there's a politics to teaching doesn't mean teaching is nothing but politics; indeed, professors shouldn't proselytize for their positions in the classroom. Instead, when it's appropriate -- and in the courses I teach, it often is -- professors should highlight the inevitable political judgments that underlie teaching. Students -- especially those who disagree with a professor's views -- will come to see that the professor has opinions, which is a good thing. Professors should be modeling how to present and defend an argument with evidence and logic.

opium

2006-10-16T22:24:00.000-07:00

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

tag, you're it

2006-10-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

"The basic idea is that airports could be fitted with a network of combined panoramic cameras and RFID (radio frequency ID) tag readers, which would monitor the movements of people around the various terminal buildings."

The plan, he said, would be for each passenger to be issued with a tag at check-in.

He said: "In our system, the location can be detected to an accuracy of 1m, and video and tag data could be merged to give a powerful surveillance capability."

wake up

2006-10-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

habeas who?

2006-09-29T07:11:00.000-07:00

Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006). It was so pre-9/11 anyway. Instead we may get "our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts." What could go wrong?
(via mefi)

no turning back

2006-09-16T19:57:00.000-07:00

Estelle Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women

The NTB website has links to both primary source documents and contemporary oprganizations and resources for Chapter 4: "Race and the Politics of Identity in US Feminism."

Some documents mentioned in Chapter 4:
The Hayden-King memo

The Woman-Identified Woman

Also possibly of interest
Linda Martín Alcoff
What Should White People Do?

the abolition of work

2006-09-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. . . . Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. . . . Some [conservative old ideologies], like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

But is that really what Marxism believes in? For one thing, Marx doesn’t binarize work and play so absolutely—a rhetorically effective but conceptually simplistic move. And Marx wants to get rid of alienated labor, since it’s the effect of exploitation, but then sensuous human activity includes what Black means by play, I think. Also, I’ve found laziness an effective tactic.

bad housekeeping not fatal after all

2006-08-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

STAMFORD, Conn, Aug. 28 — The Connecticut Supreme Court on Monday overturned the conviction of a woman who prosecutors said had kept such a messy home that it endangered the safety and mental health of her 12-year-old son, who killed himself in 2002. . . .

pluto demoted

2006-08-25T22:44:00.000-07:00

The planet named for the god of the underworld has been exiled, demoted to a dwarf planet.

We’d love to exile mortality, banish death.

Certainly we don’t want to be seeing those mutilated bodies or those flag-draped coffins.

Plus, he’s faithful.

unbelievers, unite!

2006-08-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Miller's Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief is muchly on the persecution of English atheists.

Plenty of class bias here. And where are the women?

But I like that when he talks about the wtc twin towers he doesn’t show the usual clip—nothing of the towers coming down: we see the cleanup, W’s posturing.

And I appreciate the point that one wouldn’t think about one's disbelief if it weren’t being raised so much of late in culture.

Ends by excoriating the Christian fundamentalist cabal in the White House.

b&w is more realistic

2006-08-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

Which director will commit to celluloid the story of your life?

Ingmar Bergman
Your film will be 66% romantic, 31% comedy, 53% complex plot, and a $ 40 million budget.
Your life will be portrayed on film as an intense psychological drama, likely with some actresses screaming at the camera (Pers ona), or maybe a pleasant chess game between the Grim Reaper and a Crusader (The Seventh Seal). This Swedish director's films are intensely scrutinized and studied in colleges all over the world to this day. This means that most Americans still don't understand his films!

maya deren

2006-07-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned how much I love the work of Maya Deren (1917-1961), avant-garde film maker, a major, radical figure?
My favorite of her works is the early Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a surreal noir melodrama that I like best silent, without the later-added music. It tops Senses of Cinema's list of best films by women directors. I also like At Land (1944). I'm less fond of later works like Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) or her film about voudoun, Divine Horsemen. I guess I like best the films on which she collaborated with Alexander Hammid, who also made The Private Life of a Cat. Her statements on her work tend to be a bit too arty and mystical for my taste, though the films make brilliant use of the medium. Most of her films can be seen on DVD, and there's a very good documentary about her life & work, In the Mirror of Maya Deren.

if you can't stand the heat. . .

2006-07-24T23:19:00.001-07:00

. . . get off of the planet.

Around 55 record highs were shattered on Friday. Phoenix, Ariz. had its hottest day in almost 11 years (118). Hillsboro, Ore. set an all-time record high of 108. San Jose, Calif. may have recorded its hottest morning low on record (74). Even more amazing is that Needles, Calif. had a morning low of 100 degrees, which was an all-time hot low temperature.
Records were set or tied Saturday at all five of the National Weather Service's recording locations in California Central Valley: 109 degrees in Sacramento, 111 in Redding, and 112 in Red Bluff, Stockton and Modesto.
Emergency workers scrambled to help heat exposure victims in downtown Los Angeles, where 99-degree temperatures broke the 96-degree record set in 1960. Temperatures in the city's Woodland Hills section hit a record 119 degrees, topping the 116-degree high set in 1985.
Records were also set throughout the San Francisco Bay area, including Livermore at 115 degrees, San Rafael at 108 degrees and San Jose at 102 degrees, according to the weather service. San Francisco's 87 degrees topped an 81-degree record set in 1917. (Note: San Francisco is suppoed to be FOGGY alla time.)

equality of suffering

2006-07-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

Last week in TomDispatch, Ruth Rosen discussed “The Hidden War on Iraqi Women” To the roster of American shame that includes Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Guantanamo, Rosen notes, we can now add “Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of Baghdad. There, this March, a group of five American soldiers allegedly were involved in the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza, a [fourteen year old] Iraqi girl. Her body was then set on fire to cover up [the] crimes, [and] her father, mother, and sister [were] murdered.”

Rosen discusses in detail the ways that “the invasion and occupation of Iraq has had the effect of humiliating, endangering, and repressing Iraqi women in ways that have not been widely publicized in the mainstream media: As detainees in prisons run by Americans, they have been sexually abused and raped; as civilians, they have been kidnapped, raped, and then sometimes sold for prostitution; and as women -- and, in particular, as among the more liberated women in the Arab world -- they have increasingly disappeared from public life, many becoming shut-ins in their own homes.”

Tom Engelhardt, in his preface to Rosen’s essay, quotes Riverbend, who writes the “girlblog” Baghdad Burning from Iraq:
"Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest -- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"

Engelhardt suggests that the secrecy around rape as a taboo subject marks an area where the US is more enlightened than Iraq.
“In the United States,” he says, “rape is now a public crime. Cases are regularly discussed and followed in the media; victims are far less often blamed; if you turn on a TV program like Law & Order: SVU, rape cases are national drama and even entertainment.”

The idea of rape cases as entertainment seems not to strike Engelhardt as troubling.

Lucinda Marshall in Counterpunch sees coverage of the Mahmudiya story some what differently:
“despite the enormous press coverage and airplay that this story is getting, the context in which the atrocity took place will only nominally be examined, if at all. That aspect of the story is not what is newsworthy. Or to be a tad more crass and honest, it is not what sells. And the dissemination of news is most definitely a business, one that is now owned and controlled primarily by large corporations who are far more concerned with the bottom line than with truth and integrity.

“. . . . it should not be at all surprising that when a news story that contains the same elements as a . . . porn plot occurs, the media doesn't hesitate to frame the story from that angle. Sex sells. . . .

“Like Abu Ghraib, the brutal rape and murder of . . . Abeer Qasim Hamza was just such a story. Young soldiers, the supposed . . . defenders of our rights and values, in a premeditated act of sex and violence against a . . . girl who had earlier refused their taunts and advances at a checkpoint. . . . In [a] sense, this story bears a resemblance to the coverage of cases such as the . . . the Duke University rape allegations. Virile young men [behaving] . . . in sufficiently obscene ways to be titillating and very marketable stories.

“None of this is lost on news producers. . . . [and it] impacts how the media frames the story, even to the extent of editing the facts to fit the story. In an Op Ed piece about the Duke rape allegations, David Brooks waxed poetic about the reputation of the Duke Lacrosse team--their good grades and community service; That the alleged victim was an honor student and a military veteran was conveniently omitted from his piece. To have included that information would have damaged the media portrayal of the alleged victim as being deserving of whatever may have happened that night by virtue of her 'behavior'.”

The hidden war on women, or its repackaging as entertainment, brings to mind the question that forms the title of Catherine MacKinnon’s latest book, Are Women Human? According to reviewer Martha Nussbaum, writing in the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the book argues that “women suffer aggression and exploitation, "because we are women, systemically and systematically,"” and considers the “hypocrisy of the international system when it faces up to some crimes against humanity but fails to confront similar harms when they happen to women, often on a daily basis.”

“Similarity of treatment, [MacKinnon] has argued throughout her work, is not sufficient for the true "equal protection" of the laws. Mere formal equality often masks, or even reinforces, underlying inequalities. We need to think, instead, of the idea of freedom from hierarchy, from domination and subordination. . . . To deny women benefits that they need in order to function as equals (medical pregnancy benefits, for example) is to violate equal protection, even when the treatment of men and women is similar (no men get pregnancy benefits, and no women get them either).”

Another example would be abortion rights. In an essay on Alternet.org, Carmen Valenzuela argues that a woman's right to end her pregnancy must be considered an international human right. As 70,000 women die each year around the world as a direct result of unsafe abortion, and 600,000 more are seriously injured, Amnesty International is currently considering adding a woman’s right to safely terminate a pregnancy to the rights that they support. Denying men the right to abortion would not make its denial to women equal.

Conversely, that suffering is shared by men does not make it of less concern to women. Judy Martin, writing for Women’s eNews, reports on a conference of Iraqi women sponsored by the NY-based group Global Peace Initiative of Women, at which women from Iraq cited as their chief problems violence against civilians, widespread infrastructure damage, and the consequent instability of daily life. They noted the need for potable water and for health care, the shortages of electricity, and the lack of social services.

Reporter Nir Rosen on Truthdig suggests that "Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the [US] occupation [of Iraq]. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."

photo op

2006-07-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

daily mail via commondreams

have his carcase

2006-07-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

In 1866, the Supreme Court overturned Lincoln’s wartime suspension of habeas corpus. In that ruling, Justice David Davis wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false, for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence, as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority. (Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866))

Dave Lindorff in Counterpunch comments, Those stirring words should be mailed to every member of Congress as they now consider the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling, with many Republicans clamoring to pass a law exempting the Guantanamo detainees from the Geneva Convention's jurisdiction.

hindsight

2006-07-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Virginia Governor Timoth M. Kaine has pardoned Grace Sherwood, who was convicted of witchcraft in 1706. "With 300 years of hindsight, we all certainly can agree that trial by water is an injustice," Kaine wrote.

On the other hand, without the retrospective view it's not so certain we can all agree that it is torture:

CIA DIRECTOR Porter J. Goss insists that his agency is innocent of torturing the prisoners it is holding in secret detention centers around the world. "This agency does not torture," he said in an interview. "We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information, and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture." One of these techniques is "waterboarding," in which a victim is strapped to a board and lowered into a vat of water until he or she believes that drowning is imminent. The subject is then removed from the water and revived. If necessary the process is repeated. The torture is designed to be psychological more than physical, as the victim is led to believe that he or she is being executed. This reinforces the torturer's control and makes the victim experience mortal fear. Here's What's Left also noted the connection.

lightbulbs, no joke

2006-07-05T18:46:00.000-07:00

Amy Belanger complains helpfully about the limits of Gore’s film and its overemphasis on turning off the lights instead of taking political action. She also points to this site touted by Oprah and which does advocate lobbying your mayor to sign the Climate Protection Agreement, which ours has. But there, too, with the lightbulbs. And apparently Leonardo diCaprio also has a little global warming movie, which has some suggestions other than changing bulbs. But commondreams also reprints the lightbulb idea. So, ok, ok, I'll change the lightbulbs. But where to get them made by someone other than the evil GE? More bright ideas to come. . . . (photo by Will Pate.)

update on the bare bear

2006-07-04T12:37:00.000-07:00

Talking with A. about the poor drowning polar bears, he pointed out that what's so distressing about that image in the movie is its suggestion of homelessness and abandonment. Which is of course what the sentimentality of the image taps into: one can project one's own feelings about that onto the cute cuddly animated bear. Poor bears. Poor us.

just unjust powers

2006-07-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

Oh, for the days when government derived their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Chris Floyd in the Moscow Times points out

That the United States, once touted as the "world's greatest democracy," is now ruled by a presidential dictatorship is a fact beyond any serious dispute. . . . The Bush Administration no longer bothers to hide the novel theory of government upon which its rule is based, but declares it openly, in court, in Congress, everywhere.

The theory holds that the president has the arbitrary right to ignore any law that he feels is an unconstitutional infringement of his power -- and a law is automatically unconstitutional if the president feels it infringes on his power. This neatly squared circle makes Congress irrelevant and removes the judiciary from the loop altogether. Thus, the only effective instrument of power left in the land is the "unitary executive": the fancy modern name that the legal minions of President George W. Bush have given to the ancient concept of "tyranny."

Which pretty much sums it up. Except of course that dictators tend to rule indefinitely.

Bob Cesca in HuffPost suggests the inscription on this bust of Bush is evidence of plans to cancel the next presidential election. But Raw Story cites a source saying it’s just because it was completed during Bush’s first term. We shall see. Though it's not as though they can't rig the election to replace him with some other, equivalent, figure. The problem of course is systemic (especially now that the machinery is in place with the supremes), not individual. And anyway Cheney could stay on as Dicktator.

drowning polar bears

2006-06-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

So I went to see An Inconvenient Truth and frankly the most distressing part was about how polar bears have started drowning because there's not enough ice anymore. It wasn't the scariest part, or the most important part. But the most distressing. They had a cartoon polar bear swimming in an endless sea. Poor bear. Why is the suffering of animals so particularly distressing? Like the pets left behind in Katrina. Is it just sentimentalism? I'm sure the cartoon quality makes it cuter than an actual bear and therefore more available for sentimental response. But still. Poor bears. They really are endangered.

But of course the most irritating parts of the movie are the things it leaves out, like Gore's shabby environmental track record, or that part of the problem might actually be capitalism. The end credits encourage mostly individual actions, and the website points to "free-market" mechanisms for controlling CO2 emissions. I mean, I suppose, fine, I'll go get me some flourescent bulbs. It's a point. But it hardly seems enough to save the poor bears.

wrr: pride

2006-06-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to report that yesterday Portland did not suffer an earthquake, a tsunami, or a terrorist attack, nor did the Bonneville dam collapse. All of these events were predicted by a Salem Pastor as God’s punishment for our celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride, as reported on Alas, a blog, as well as by the Portland Mercury.

Pride celebrations usually occur in June in commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots, when police raided the Stonewall bar in New York, and the patrons, especially drag queens of color, fought back. Clashes between police and the gay and lesbian community continued for several days, and the incident is considered a turning point in the modern gay movement. Marches were held the next June in New York and San Franciso, and Pride Parades and events now occur all over the world, including Sao Paolo, Jerusalem, Taipei, and, of course, Portland.

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, gay and lesbian activists attempted to hold Russia's first gay pride march in Moscow, timed to coincide with the 13th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia. Although the march was thwarted by opposition from police and from nationalist and fundamentalist opponents, organizers considered the turnout a sign of victory, as queer Russians claimed their rights to public space.

But in the US, Pride events have other problems, too. Ryan Murphy, on his blog liberalserving,
bewails the commodification of pride, asking,

From a spontaneous riot of trans women and other sundry queers who were fed up with police harassment evolves . . . - a corporate branding opportunity?. . . .
How can they crap all over us in legal discrimination after constitutional amendment but throw products and advertising at us like we're Jane Q American?

Charlie Hinton, writing last month in dissidentvoice.org, recalls that

In 1975, [he] became a founding member of an historic organization called Bay Area Gay Liberation. This was the time of the war against Viet Nam, the civil rights movement, black power, brown power, and women’s liberation. [Queers] became the next group to challenge the traditional values of heterosexual white male ruling class dominance. . . .
The idea behind gay liberation is that no one is free until all are free. The politics of liberation advocate building a united movement to overcome all forms of discrimination and oppression, if LGBT people are someday to be truly free. . . .
In the late 1970s, a gay rights approach to gaining equality became the dominant ideology in the lesbian/gay movement, replacing the gay liberation approach. The idea behind gay rights is more limited -- build a movement that addresses strictly gay issues -- housing and job discrimination, military, marriage/partnership, etc. and unite solely on the basis that we’re gay; Gay Pride Day [being a] good example.

Hinton advocates returning to a liberation approach.

At the very least, gay men should unite with women to protect choice and reproductive rights. The same groups are trying to take away all our rights (as well as any rights for immigrants and prisoners) and it’s stupid and self-defeating not to join forces to fight them together. . . .
In the bigger global picture, it’s the same anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-democratic Right wing forces that drive the conservative agenda, which includes the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and unquestioning support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. . . .
Do we make the world safer with more war and more and bigger weapons, or with more justice and equality that all can share?

And speaking of Iraq, Gary Leupp, also on dissidentvoice, observes that even

Leaving aside the daily “collateral damage” killings of Iraqi civilians, and the occupiers’ failure to accomplish the most basic reconstruction goals, the collapse of law and order and accompanying empowerment of fanatic religious militias has made life hell for women, Christians and other religious minorities, and intellectuals, [and, of course, for queers]
Last month Ali Hili, who used to run a gay nightclub in Baghdad, told The Times of London he knows of more than 40 Iraqi gay men killed this year. “We could never envisage this happening when Saddam was overthrown,” the 33-year-old now in exile declared. “I had no love for the former president, but his regime never persecuted the gay community.” He told Democracy Now!, “It’s a very dark age for gays and lesbians and transsexuals and bisexuals in Iraq right now. And the fact that Iraq has been shifted from a secular state into a religious state was completely, completely horrific.”
In April 2005, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani declared that homosexuals should be killed in the “worst, most severe way.” [and Iraqi militia have been] tracking down and brutally murdering gay men and boys. Last month, following the murder of a 14-year-old boy by the Iraqi police, al-Sistani removed the anti-gay male fatwa from his website (retaining one against lesbians). Not that this will necessarily change the militiamen’s behavior towards gays.
Al-Sistani is of course viewed by the occupiers as an ally of sorts, since he has discouraged armed resistance and commands the respect of the . . . Shiite politicians. So while officially “troubled” by the bourgeoning misogyny, religious intolerance, anti-intellectual and homophobic plagues unleashed by the illegal overthrow of the former regime, U.S. spokespersons can’t attack too squarely the Muslim fundamentalist repression exercised by their sometimes allies.
“If someone is in danger of being slaughtered or persecuted, we do all we can to stop it,” says Army Maj. Joseph Todd Breasseale, chief of the Media Relations Division of the Multinational Corps in Iraq. In other words, the U.S. military, which officially regards bans gays who are out unsuitable for military service, does want to stop the slaughter of Iraqi gays. But he adds:
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, when we’re in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, ‘Here’s these issues that are going to repel 80 percent of the population and this is what we want to inflict on you.’ We’re trying not to get into too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing.” That’s what Breasseale told the Washington Blade, the capital’s GLBT newspaper.

So let me get this straight. [Leupp continues] In this “fledgling time,” while the primordial chaos of the criminal invasion still prevails, the occupiers -- bogged down in suppressing resistance to their presence, slaughtering civilians in the process -- haven’t much wherewithal to prevent other, indigenous Iraqi slaughter. . . .The occupiers have better things to do than to “get into” the “values judgment issue” of shooting 14-year-old gay boys, especially if 80% of the population has no problem with that. That’d be “inflicting” somebody else’s values (although not, apparently, the Major’s), and that just wouldn’t make sense, would it?

So doing the “right thing” must mean doing something else: publicly acknowledging that gay people shouldn’t be murdered, probably, and it’s not the occupiers’ policy that they should be. But, hey, this is the Iraqis’ business. At least they’re free now.

racial profiling ok'd

2006-06-15T08:33:00.000-07:00

Racial profiling of immigrants, that is, because foreigners evidently don't deserve the same rights as real Amurkans.
from the NYTimes (registration required):
Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely

A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that the government has wide latitude under immigration law to detain noncitizens on the basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation. . . .
This is the first time a federal judge has addressed the issue of discrimination in the treatment of hundreds of Muslim immigrants who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks and held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported. . . .
"This decision is a green light to racial profiling and prolonged detention of noncitizens at the whim of the president," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the detainees. "The decision is profoundly disturbing because it legitimizes the fact that the Bush administration rounded up and imprisoned our clients because of their religion and race.". . .
"The executive is free to single out 'nationals of a particular country' and focus enforcement efforts on them," the judge wrote. "This is, of course, an extraordinarily rough and overbroad sort of distinction of which, if applied to citizens, our courts would be highly suspicious.". . .
"It doesn't seem to limit the motives the government has to have in being slow in removing them; it could even be just basic neglect," [a lawyer] said. . . .
But David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and a co-counsel in the lawsuit, said the ruling was the only one of its kind and made New York "an equal protection-free zone" because the government can detain immigrants wherever it chooses. . . .

wrr: iran, irant, irate

2006-06-12T11:16:00.000-07:00

The US administration’s recent reversal on the question of diplomatic negotiations with Iran may have left us breathing a bit easier, but some observers remain skeptical. The roots of that skepticism go back to a history available in any standard encyclopedia—Britannica, for instance. In 1951, Mohammad Mossaddeq was democratically elected prime minister of Iran, and immediately nationalized the country’s oil industry. In 1953 a coup funded by the CIA overthrew Mossaddeq’s government. The Shah returned to Iran, and a Western multinational consortium accelerated Iranian oil development. There was no further talk of nationalization, as the Shah repressed political dissent within Iran. Opposition to the Shah led, of course, to his ouster in 1979 by a coalition of leftist and religious dissidents, and ultimately to the current Islamic republic.

Tom O’Donnell in an article for Z magazine
draws some of the evident conclusions from this and other evidence.

Just as the true reasons for the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq were not “weapons of mass destruction” or “links to Al Qaeda,” so too, the true reason for the present U.S.-Iran crisis is not the ostensible “nuclear threat” posed by Iran. Rather, the American push against Iran’s nuclear program and for “regime change” is about maintaining American hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf Region.

As one might not learn from the mainstream media, but can learn from other sources including the United Nations website, Iran has signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, under which states have the right to pursue nuclear power. To that end, they have been trying to enrich uranium for fuel, a very different matter than building a bomb or even than enriching uranium for use in a bomb. As Juan Cole has pointed out on his blog, the Iranians have something like the ability to make those old Mickey Mouse watches that glowed in the dark because they were painted with radium.

Hans Blix, chair of the U.N.'s WMD Commission, noted on a recent Democracy Now that there are reasons why the Iranians might want nuclear weapons:

They see 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq and they see American bases in Pakistan and in Afghanistan and more American military activities to the north of them. . . .It is not inconceivable that [they] may feel that their security is being threatened.

Especially with US politicians saying all options are on the table.

But O’Donnell argues that

even if they were near to building a nuclear bomb, Iranian nukes would not, per se, be why Washington is out to remove the mullahs from power. Just this February, Bush was . . . pleased to recognize India as a nuclear power . . . . He did this after India sided with the U.S. against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency {the I.A.E.A}. So too, Bush hasn’t insisted that Pakistan, a country which admits to having proliferated nuclear weapons . . . give up its illegally developed nuclear weapons – rather, he called Pakistan a “close ally” of America.

Neither India, nor Pakistan, nor Israel has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Mina Hamilton on dissidentvoice.org points out that

Israel's nuclear facilities have never been inspected by the I.A.E.A or any other representative of the international community. The existence of the nuclear arsenal sitting deep underground in the Negev desert continues to be scrupulously ignored by . . . most . . . US establishment media. Also off the radar is the fate of UN Security Resolution 687 [which] ended the Gulf War of 1991. It was signed by the US and called for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

O’Donnell argues that

the reason for U.S. hostility to Iran can neither be explained by nukes nor by Islamic fundamentalism, nor, for that matter, by any Iranian support for terrorist organizations. Rather, the uncompromising first principle for Washington when it comes to Iran, or to any other state in the Persian Gulf Region, is that the U.S. and the U.S. alone shall remain the regional hegemon – which is … about oil.
… Whoever has predominant influence in this region has their hand on “the global oil spigot” – a prize which brings enormous power and leverage far beyond the region itself, reaching over every country and enterprise that needs the region’s oil. Washington has worked since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to keep Iran … from once again becoming the oil-producing powerhouse it was under the shah, . . .

O’Donnell points out that since 1996 the US has imposed sanctions on Iran to block development of its oil and natural gas resources, and the sanctions have been devastatingly successful . . . They have preserved U.S. hegemony in the Gulf Region from any significant threat by Iran, and, as a bonus to the U.S., have greatly weakened the Iranian economy and the mullahs’ domestic position.

They have also prompted potential concessions we hear little about. Juan Cole has noted on his blog that in 2003 Iran offered the US full cooperation with the IAEA-- and more--including Recognition of Israel within 1967 borders. In response, Bush reprimanded the Swiss embassy for daring to forward the proposal, because, Cole argues, Bush and his various constituencies (including the military-industrial complex…) do not want peaceful relations with Iran.

And they may not get what they do not want.

Frida Berrigan and William Hartung, writing on TomPaine.com last week, observe that the US proposal--that Iran will be allowed to continue its enrichment program, as long as it agrees to first suspend all activity, and “prove” that its intentions are entirely civilian—sets the bar awfully high. They note that,

One administration official has indicated that a rejection of the U.S. overture by Iran may in fact be the White House’s objective. Such a rebuff would allow the Bush administration to take forceful action without being seen as unreasonable unilateralists.

This cynical approach is similar to U.S. actions in the run-up to the Iraq war, when President Bush falsely claimed that a diplomatic solution was possible even after the decision to attack Saddam Hussein's regime had been [taken].

Berrigan and Hartung ask,

What would the United States be doing if it were truly committed to a diplomatic resolution? In addition to pursuing a more gradual approach that would give the negotiating process months or years, not weeks, to bear fruit, non-aggression pledges by the United States and Israel might get things moving.. . . . The clearest route to a nuclear-free Iran, is a nuclear-free Middle East. [and ] The clearest route to a nuclear-free Middle East is concrete steps towards nuclear disarmament by nuclear heavyweights. And that has to start with the heaviest heavy of all—the United States of America.

hell, meet handbasket

2006-06-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

people shouldn't be afraid of their governments...

2006-05-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

Governments should be afraid of their people. Count me with those who liked V for Vendetta a lot. Just what I needed. Ok so it’s a comic book. But what’s wrong with the idea that revolutions should include dancing? The only thing that worries me is that there's a positive review on The Conservative Commentator or some such site. And no, I am not linking to that.

well, shut my mouth

2006-05-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

I feel kinda bad now for having had a NYTimes letter published critiquing Souter back when he was appointed. He looks better and better all the time (well, the rest of the court looks worse & worse). This from DHS’s dissent in Ceballos:

The Court holds that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” Ante, at 9. I respectfully dissent. I agree with the majority that a government employer has substantial interests in effectuating its chosen policy and objectives, and in demanding competence, honesty, and judgment from employees who speak for it in doing their work. But I would hold that private and public interests in addressing official wrongdoing and threats to health and safety can outweigh the government’s stake in the efficient implementation of policy, and when they do public employees who speak on these matters in the course of their duties should be eligible to claim First Amendment protection.

Lawyers Guns and Money points out,

He's particularly strong on the potential implications of this new doctrinal creation; as he notes, "[t]his ostensible domain beyond the pale of the First Amendment is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today's majority does not mean to imperil First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write "pursuant to official duties."

wise freud

2006-05-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

The individual in any given nation has . . . a terrible opportunity to convince himself of what would occasionally strike him in peace-time—that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desired to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it like salt and tobacco. The warring state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual man. It practices not only the accepted stratagems, but also deliberate lying and deception against the enemy; and this, too, in a measure which appears to surpass the usage of former wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time treats them as children by maintaining an excess of secrecy, and censorship of news and expressions of opinion that renders the spirits of those thus intellectually oppressed defenceless against every unfavourable turn of events and every sinister rumour. It absolves itself from the guarantees and contracts it had formed with other states, and makes unabashed confession of its rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual is then called upon to sanction in the name of patriotism.

Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts on War and Death," trans. E. Colburn Mayne, in Collected Papers, ed. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic, 1959), 4:293-94. Written in 1915, in the midst of WWI, The Great War to end all wars.

wrr: hell, no

2006-05-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

What sort of resistance to business as usual can we find in the US Military? We know that a number of retired generals have lately spoken out against the war in Iraq, and a recent Zogby poll showed that 29 % of US troops in Iraq favor immediate withdrawal, while another survey shows 72 percent of them think the US should withdraw within the year. Soldiers like Kevin Benderman, Carl Webb, Pablo Paredes, and Kelly Dougherty have sought conscientious objector status, 400 have sought refuge in Canada, and some 9,000 have failed to report for duty since combat began in Iraq, while military recruiters have fallen notoriously short of their goals. In March, members of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War marked the third anniversary of the invasion by marching with Katrina survivors from Mobile, Alabama to New Orleans, Louisiana, calling on the government to “Abandon Iraq, not the Gulf Coast!” Iraq Veterans Against the War are also offering active-duty soldiers free DVDs of the recent film Sir, No Sir!: The Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the War in Vietnam, directed by David Zeiger. Along with the book Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War, written by David Cortright, and recently reissued with a new introduction by Howard Zinn, it provides an illuminating antidote to the right-wing’s revisionist history of the 60s and 70s.

One canard those works refute is the idea that the US could have won the war if only cowardly Washington politicians had not tied the military’s hands and prevented it from unleashing its awesome power against Vietnam. Cortright argues that opposition to the war from within the rank and file forced the Pentagon to wind down the ground war. One problem was personnel shortages. By the Pentagon’s own figures, well over 500,000 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. 206,000 never reported for the draft. From 1970 to the end of 1972 (shortly before the draft ended) 145,000 successfully applied for Conscientious Objector status. It wasn’t just the enlisted ranks affected, either: college ROTC ranks, the main source of junior officers, dropped precipitously. Disciplinary problems further depleted the ranks. Administrative discharges for “unfitness, unsuitability, or misconduct” – including antiwar activity– grew steadily through 1971. After resistance of the soldiers on the ground led the US government to shift to an air war, such discharges increased in the Air Force, peaking in 1973.
Cortright calls these extra-legal rebellions the “GI Resistance”; which includes the instances of “fragging” in which soldiers killed their commanding officers, often using fragmentation grenades, as well as mutiny and sabotage. The GI Resistance wasn’t always overtly political or collectively planned, but it reinforced the efforts of what Cortright calls the “GI Movement,” referring to carefully planned opposition within the military and purposeful protest-- actions that were designed to exert pressure on politicians and the higher echelons of the military. GIs signed petitions, placed advertisements in newspapers, formed picket lines, and marched at the head of peace demonstrations. They built organizations, created media, set up networks and agitated.

Another myth challenged by both Cortright’s book Soldiers in Revolt and Zeiger’s film Sir! No Sir! is that draftees led the GI opposition to the war. In fact, the greatest dissent came from those who had volunteered, the vast majority of whom were from working-class backgrounds. Many enlistees felt betrayed. One summed up the dynamic when he said, “draftees expect shit, get shit, aren’t even disappointed. Volunteers expect something better, get the same shit, and have at least one more year to get mad about it.” Soldiers in Revolt cites a number of studies that found that the bulk of organized resisters in the military had volunteered. Dissent and sabotage also occurred in the Navy and Air Force, neither of which used conscripts. Finally, the rejection of – and more than occasional rebellion against – the war effort among combat soldiers who were overwhelmingly enlistees confirms Cortright’s assessment.

On the other hand, as Rob Saute points out in a review of Soldiers in Revolt in Citizen Soldier,
many enlistees volunteered so that they could avoid being drafted, and the presence of the draft heightened civilian opposition to the War. The same forces that affected the rest of American society – the counter-culture, the civil rights movement, the general loosening of authority – influenced servicemen. Black soldiers, who led much of the opposition, brought with them consciousness and political insights from the civil rights and Black power movements. And far from spitting on returning vets (an urban legend that Sir! No Sir! takes pains to debunk) Civilian anti-war activists provided moral support, counseling, and other forms of legal and political aid.

In an essay in the May 8th issue of the Nation magazine, Christian Parenti argues that the military response to the Vietnam-era GI Movement and Resistance has shaped the current armed forces:
Ending the draft, he writes, excised much of the disgruntled element from the ranks, and by professionalizing the services, it has helped create a deepening military-civilian divide. Within today's all-volunteer military, there is much more intense solidarity than during the Vietnam era. After Vietnam the military also improved its housing, wages, benefits, food and training; it reached out to the families of soldiers and modernized its disciplinary systems and promotions methods, all of which improved morale.

Another key difference between this war and Vietnam is the use of whole-unit rotations as opposed to individual rotations. In Vietnam a soldier was dropped into a unit for 365 days and then, if he survived, plucked out. In Iraq and Afghanistan, battalions of 500 to 800 soldiers train together, deploy together and come home together. During Vietnam the constant flow of men in and out of line companies fighting the war seriously undermined unit cohesion and camaraderie.

On the other hand, Parenti notes that activist vets all point out that unit cohesion can cut two ways: It works like Kryptonite to stop rebellion, but after a tipping point unit cohesion can serve to make rebellion even more intense.

If 1960s activism was fueled by disillusioned outrage, Parenti suggests, then today's activism is fettered by a type of world-weary cynicism. Iraq Veteran Against the War Fernando Braga says most of the guys in his unit assume the war is based on lies and that it's all about oil, but they won't get involved in peace activism because "They say, 'You can't change anything.' But if you read history you see that usually people already have changed things," he says. "Movements have made lots of things happen."

coincidence?

2006-05-11T19:13:00.000-07:00

Is there any relation between the willingness of companies like AT&T and Verizon to hand over phone records to the NSA, and their wish to censor the internet so they can make more money by forcing us to go only to commercial sites? Inquiring minds want to know.

qwest gets something right

2006-05-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

I've had my annoyances with their billing practices and so on, but at least they haven't been turning all their customer data over to the NSA.

boom goes london, boom paris

2006-04-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

Even the U.S. will not dare to unilaterally break 60 years of nuclear taboo and drop a nuke on an Iranian city. However, it probably can get away with using "tactical nuclear bunker buster" bombs against ostensibly military targets. The world will be outraged, of course. But after a few months of media spin, the U.S. would likely quell the opprobrium.

says Pravda

no wonder I feel stupid

2006-04-08T21:32:00.000-07:00

Moderate Drinking Good for Women's Brains

Women who had up to two drinks a day scored about 20 percent higher on a test of mental ability than women who had less than one a day or didn't drink at all, according to a report in the April 7 issue of Stroke.

huey

2006-03-26T20:47:00.000-08:00

When I first learned about Huey Long , my mother (b.1921, grew up in Louisiana, among other places) said he was a demagogue. But I thought he sounded like a pretty good guy. He believed in Sharing the Wealth, provided free textbooks, built roads, wanted to provide minimum and maximum income levels. Stuff like that. He wasn't so great on free speech issues. But there's still good to be said of him.

He comes off pretty badly in All the King's Men, at least in the 1949 movie version. (Who knows what the 2006 version will be like.) But it still doesn't seem quite right to have named All the President's Men after the earlier work. Nixon was no populist.

wrr: attacks on higher education

2006-03-26T13:11:00.000-08:00

The Well-Read Red has been reading up on right-wing attacks on higher education.

I don’t mean the targetted assasinations of Iraqi academics, nor even the denials of visas to foreign scholars who have been invited to US conferences or hired to teach at US universities. I mean something more local, what Henry Giroux has called “the relentless attempt to destroy critical education as a foundation for an engaged citizenry and a vibrant democracy.” Giroux points out that

the attack on all levels of education is evident not only in the attempts to corporatize education, standardize curricula, privatize public schooling, and use the language of business as a model for governance, but also in the ongoing effort to weaken the power of faculty, turn full time jobs into contractual labor, & hand over those larger educational forces in the culture to a small group of corporate interests. Public schooling is increasingly reduced to training and modeled after prisons -- with its emphasis on criminalizing student behavior and its prioritizing of security over critical learning. Educators are now viewed largely as deskilled technicians, depoliticized professionals, paramilitary forces, hawkers for corporate goods, or grant writers.

Giroux doesn’t mention it, but those educators who don’t fit such descriptions are liable to be attacked, as, well, “dangerous”: Last month David Horowitz published a book called “The Professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America,” listing scholars to the left of center, including luminaroes like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Another figure on the list, Journalism professor Robert McChesney, responded that

If Horowitz believes that publicly supported universities have an obligation to have faculties that represent the range of U.S. political opinion, and that it currently tilts too far to the left, he should follow the logic to its obvious resting place. Generals and military officers are far more important to the functioning of a government – and, as history shows in depressingly frequent detail, a much greater threat to democratic governance -- than [are, say,] anthropology professors. In the United States the military is enormous, it is entirely funded by taxpayers, and the officer corps is significantly right-wing Republican. If Horowitz is going on some sort of rampage about getting political balance in important publicly funded professions, he can only be taken seriously if he starts at the Pentagon. When he has established how to do it there we can proceed to the campuses.

Horowitz is also the man responsible for promoting versions of what he calls an “Academic Freedom Bill of Rights”— a title that needs to be interpreted as we do the “Clear Skies” initiative, or the “liberation” of Iraq.

Bills allowing college students the power to sue "dictator professors" who offend their beliefs by teaching material which contradicts those beliefs have been proposed in several states, and Pennsylvania has a congressional board set up to investigate such cases of ‘bias’ in the classroom.

The satirical website fafblog last year put it this way:

Freedom is ever-marching, and its latest target for emancipation is none other than the Gulag Academia, where millions of students are held hostage by totalitarian educators whose cruel practice of teaching them things they don't already believe could soon be put to an end.

For far too long, higher education has been concerned with "education" and "instruction," mere euphemisms for harsh indoctrination into the totalitarian ideology of Fact. But now students will be given the tools to fight back, to free themselves of their oppressive enslavement to a world in which life evolved over millions of years through natural selection, dinosaurs weren't wiped out six thousand years ago by the flood of Noah, and the evil Xemu was not responsible for the existence of body thetans.

Will students learn more in such an environment? Of course not. But this is precisely the point: America has done so much to oppose tyranny in the form of earthly despots that it can only proceed to liberate humanity from the greatest dictator of all: Reality, which tyrannically insists that we acknowledge That Which Is rather than That Which Would Be More Convenient For Us.

Freed from the tyranny of Reality and the dangerous threat of its advance guard, Information, America's youth will be free to live in a world consisting solely of their own pre-existing beliefs, where messy ideological review and examination of fact have become unnecessary.

More seriously, and more recently, Sophia McClennen on Counterpunch
noted that although

These attacks have typically been disguised as a defense of student rights . . . really the assault is on the student.
. . . the right now claims that students are victims of indoctrination. Brainwashing and mind control in classrooms constitute a parent's worst fears. . . [and the idea] immediately makes the public suspicious of professors. But let's consider for a moment what such charges presume, especially when they are bundled with the . . . claim that students need more access to conservative faculty.

Throughout the Bush reign the public has been repeatedly asked to uncritically believe, to have blind faith, to sacrifice, and to obey. The connections between the type of public ideally imagined by the administration and the nation's youth should be obvious. If you require an obedient populace, then it is essential that you begin training the youth accordingly. Favoring tests over critique, memorization over engagement, loyalty over social commitment, individualism over community, and so on implies a student educated to passively consume what the government provides rather than to actively participate in the construction of a democratic society. This negative view of the unthinking student repeatedly appears in arguments that assume that students are docile and submissive, easily persuaded to accept their professors' politics. The right also confuses the necessary confrontations that arise in an atmosphere of critical pedagogy with hostility towards students’ views.

What really worries the right, McClennan argues, is not left-leaning faculty, but the intellectually sphisticated students such faculty hope to encourage.

She concludes,

As education becomes increasingly privatized and . . . students increasingly consider education as a consumer product, it will become more and more difficult to encourage students to use the university as a site of social engagement and collective critique. On the positive side, the greatest advantage the left may have in this battle is its respect for the student. Fostering wakefulness over dreams, engagement over loyalty, vigilance over obedience, political activism over passive consumption, and hope over fearfulness may very well be our best weapon.

don't drink and drive

2006-03-23T15:52:00.000-08:00

Make that don't drink ~~and drive.~~ Texas has been arresting people for public drunkenness in bars. See also.

no more parables

2006-02-26T19:58:00.000-08:00

Octavia Butler died yesterday. She had planned to someday write a follow up to the fabulous Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, dealing with the Earthseed community on its new planetary home. But that won't happen now. Her last interview was February 6. There's one thing you can predict about the future: we will die.

not flying

2006-02-26T12:16:00.000-08:00

If you get to the airport and find out you're on the no-fly list, can you get a refund for your plane ticket?

uses of the erotic

2006-02-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

from Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power" (1978):
The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?
The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need--the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.
The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, …or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Another way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility . . . not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.
Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.

guns don't kill people, bullets kill people

2006-02-12T23:31:00.000-08:00

Or, guns don't wound people, Vice Presidents wound people. Dick Cheney shot a fellow hunter. After the first few hours, spin control takes hold and headlines start to include the word "accidentally." He shot him in the face and chest.
Spoof headline: Cheney Accidentally Shoots Leak Case Lawyer.
Here's the Mefi thread.
And then there's this Eric Idle song.