Talking to Myself

The apprentice librarian shows off to her technology class

2012-01-30T22:18:00.000-06:00

This was one of my contributions to a discussion of our favorite information technology hardware:

I couldn’t resist posting a picture of a computer hardware project I did back in 1996 that I was terrifically proud of. This is a working computer on the outside of a trash can. After painting the trash can a beautiful sparkly shade of motherboard green, I mounted the motherboard, adaptor boards, hard drive and floppy drive, and power supply on the outside of the can. The monitor, keyboard, and printer were free-standing, but were plugged into the motherboard.

This system was a PC-XT clone with a 8088 processor operating at 4.77 megahertz. It had 640k of random access memory, and most likely a Seagate ST225 20 megabyte hard drive, along with a 360 KB floppy drive that used 5 ¼ inch disks. There was also a 2400 b.p.s. “internal” modem. All or most of this hardware was about 10 years old and quite obsolete when I got my hands on it. However, back in Eugene, Oregon, where I put this contraption together as an entry in the Mayor’s Art Show, a system with this configuration could be connected to the Internet via Eugene Freenet. This system was fully operational, and at one time or another I powered it up and used it to check my e-mail. At the time I took the picture, some friends were keeping it at their house for me, and they took advantage of the fact that it was also a fully operational trash can.

Sadly, I had to recycle this hardware before I left Oregon for Oklahoma. But the picture still serves as a reminder that one day in the near future, your bright, shiny, new cutting-edge piece of IT hardware will be trash.

Working computer on the outside of a trash can

The apprentice librarian struggles with her management class

2012-01-19T10:11:00.000-06:00

Some parts of library school are going to be a struggle for me. My required class in "management of knowledge organizations" (or something like that) is a good example. The self-introduction I wrote for this online class explains why:

Hello, everyone. I’m hoping we have a great semester together, and I’m looking forward to what I know will be an interesting class. I think it will be a tough class for me (I’ll explain why in a little bit), but I know it will be interesting.

About me: I was born in Philadelphia, and have lived in Idaho, Oregon, and for the past 10 years, Oklahoma. I got my bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the University of Idaho in 1979. People often want to know what a person can do with a philosophy degree. I’ve done lots of things. I’ve fought forest fires, worked in a bookstore, and been a busperson in a public market. For eleven years I was a custodian for the City of Eugene in Oregon. (About half of that time I worked at the Eugene Public Library.) Since moving to Oklahoma City, I’ve worked as a stock clerk at PetSmart and as a production worker and custormer service associate at FedEx Office. Most recently, I’m a public computer specialist at the Midwest City Public Library.

You will notice that I’ve never been a manager, but I think I’ve learned a few practical lessons about management in the course of working these and other jobs. Management, planning. organization, and leadership are activities that are done by ordinary people all the time, every day. The success of any organization depends not only on the hard work of its ordinary workers, but also on their intelligence and their own ability to plan and organize their work. If ordinary workers did nothing beyond what their managers directly tell them to do, everything would fall apart. In other words, every worker is a knowledge worker.

When I worked for PetSmart and for FedEx, I experienced a great deal of mismanagement perpetrated by people on upper corporate levels who seemed to have read a lot of management textbooks, but who had no clue about the conditions that ordinary workers actually faced. Either that, or corporate management was deliberately manipulative, dishonest, and oppressive. The goal seemed to be to suck every last drop of blood out of the workers, while paying us as little as possible. “Customer service” wasn’t about helping people, it was about sucking up to customers to manipulate them into spending money they couldn’t afford for things they didn’t need.

I apologize for ranting, but I wanted to explain why I approach the subject matter of this course with a great deal of caution. I have worked for large and small businesses, and I have worked for several levels of government. Over the past twenty years or so, it has become a fad to say that we should run government more like a business. This is the approach that seems to be taken by the authors of the textbooks for this class. My experience tells me this is a very bad idea, and even in its most humane and enlightened forms, it’s downright undemocratic. I think there is something obscene about reducing citizens to “customers” and “marketing” our services to them. That is not what libraries are all about. Libraries are about recognizing that ordinary people possess extraordinary capabilities, including the capability of being fully informed citizens who are the ultimate bosses of every public enterprise. That is why I want to be a librarian.

So, I think I’m going to struggle a lot with this course, but as you can see I am very interested in it. I appreciate all the hard work and good planning that Dr. Kim has put into this class, and I look forward to our discussions and projects.

Robin Morgan on feminists occupying Occupy

2012-01-04T12:03:00.000-06:00

Hat tip to Elaine Barton for the link to this fascinating post by Robin Morgan on the Women's Media Center blog. Here's just a sampling of Morgan's analysis:

Having caught the world’s imagination with an admirable energy, seemingly spontaneous and seemingly grassroots, the Occupy movement is now poised at a crossroads. It has enormous potential—but lasting change will require consciousness that doesn’t ignore the majority of humanity. It needs to break free of being “a guy thing” or risk drowning in its own rhetorical generalities.

It’s not as if certain models aren’t there. The women of England’s Greenham Common “occupied” turf decades before OWS—they endured, and won. Irish women barred doors to keep men from storming out of Northern Ireland peace talks. Women in Liberia sat singing for months in a soccer field to birth a revolution. Market women in Ghana brought down a government. Gandhi acknowledged copying the concept of satyagraha—nonviolent resistance—from India’s 19th century women’s suffrage movement. These are different—and long-lasting—techniques of protest, by which at first it seemed the Occupy movement was influenced. (At the risk of offending anarchists, I’ll paraphrase two of the Women’s Media Center slogans: “You have to name it to change it,” and “You have to see it to be it.” As a woman who once agreed “Level everything, then we’ll talk politics,” I recommend examples and clearly articulated demands as pretty good stuff.)

What Morgan is calling for is necessary, but not sufficient. Making the movement less of a guy thing--and less of a white thing--is a very good starting place, however. Do yourself a favor and read her entire post.

Tuesday, November 29: Time to act to support Occupy OKC

2011-11-29T10:15:00.000-06:00

According to a press release sent by Occupy OKC Outreach Moderator Beth Isbell,:

Despite police assuring us that OKC had no intention of evicting us on 11/28 at 2 of our past three General Assemblies, Occupy OKC received a letter from OKC Police Chief Bill Citty today doing exactly that - calling for our eviction if we did not vacate park & take all equipment by 11pm tonight! We have attorneys helping us, including the National Lawyers Guild & the ACLU. We tried to pay permit fees first thing today as instructed, but were called to meeting with police this afternoon & provided Chief's letter. Our attorneys asked for more time & have asked for mediation. We have been called to a meeting with Chief Citty tomorrow morning at 8:15am. We do not know if they still intend to carry through on their eviction threat for tonight. We are cooperating and attempting to avoid confrontation.

As a resident of Oklahoma City, I object to my city government acting to suppress the free speech rights of ordinary citizens. I decided to express my objections in an e-mail I just sent to Mayor Mick Cornett and to Ed Shadid, who represents me in the OKC City Council. Here is what I said:

Dear Mayor Cornett and Councillor Shadid:

I am writing to express my concern about the possible eviction by the city of the Occupy OKC encampment at Kerr Park. As a resident of City Council Ward 2 in Oklahoma City, I support the right of Occupy OKC to carry out its continuing peaceful protest in Kerr Park. I oppose any efforts by my city government to evict the occupiers.

The Occupy OKC encampment is a peaceful gathering of citizens using their First Amendment rights to work for political change. The occupiers have faithfully paid for a permit to stay in the park overnight. Recently, the occupiers have been told by City of Oklahoma City representatives that they would be permitted to remain in the park so long as they continued to pay the permit. Despite these reassurances, the occupiers received a letter from Police Chief Bill Citty warning them that they needed to evacuate. This eviction notice seems to be a clear attempt by city officials to suppress the expression of ideas they don't like. This is not how a free society is supposed to work.

Citizen involvement in OKC's city government is shockingly low. City Council meetings are held at a time when most ordinary working people can't attend. Extremely few people even bother to vote in city elections, probably because they think it won't make any difference in the way things are done. This has long a city government by the Chamber of Commerce and for the Chamber of Commerce, and the needs of average citizens are most often ignored. The Occupy movement's presence in Kerr Park is a constructive first step toward ordinary people learning to take back their own city government. Such citizen involvement should be encouraged and not stifled.

Again, I urge you to do everything in your power as elected officials to make sure that Occupy OKC is permitted to remain in Kerr Park. Please let me know what action you will take on this issue.

Sincerely,
Elizabeth G. "Betsy" Brown

I encourage other supporters of Occupy OKC -- especially OKC residents -- to contact Oklahoma City's elected representatives to express your support in your own words. You can find contact information for Oklahoma City's elected officials here. If you don't know which city council ward you live in, you can find that information on this ward map. Occupiers are also calling for supporters to gather at Kerr Park to support them. For more information, you can see the Facebook page for Occupy OKC Official, or visit the Web site.

OWS library destroyed, site created

2011-11-17T06:00:00.003-06:00

Last night we were offered the vain hope that the materials that made up Occupy Wall Street's public library had been preserved by the police. It turns out that the police actually destroyed most of the library. Thanks to Kevin Hicks for posting the link to this article in American Libraries about the destruction and re-birth of the OWS library. Christian Zabriskie writes:

Library staff were assured that they would be able to recover their materials from a city sanitation depot. Indeed, the firestorm of public hue and cry that followed the clearing of the park, the destruction of the library was the only aspect of the action to which the city directly responded. However, when library staff attempted to collect the library’s property on the morning of November 16, they found the laptops smashed, much of the collection missing, and many of the books that were recovered damaged beyond recovery. The damage to the library’s archives of zines, writings, art, and original works is devastating and irreparable.

Protesters were allowed back into Zuccotti Park less than 24 hours after they were cleared out, following a variety of legal decisions. The library was immediately restarted with a half a dozen paperbacks. Within two hours the collection was up to over 100 volumes and the library was fully functioning—cataloging, lending, and providing reference services. “The library is still open” was repeated like a mantra. “This is why I became a librarian, this is why I went to library school,” Library Working Group member Zachary Loeb said of the rebuilding. He was also quick to point out that, while he had helped to build and maintain the collection knowing full well that the park would probably be cleared eventually, the manner in which it was done hit him hard.

Tents and tarps are strictly forbidden in Zuccotti Park now. During the reoccupation on the evening of November 15, it started to rain so library staff put a clear plastic trash bag over the collection. Within minutes a detail of about 10 police descended and demanded that the covering be removed because they deemed the garbage bag to be a tarp. There were a few tense minutes as staff tried to convince them otherwise, but ultimately it was removed—leaving the collection open to the elements. As the police withdrew, scores of people chanted “BOOKS … BOOKS … BOOKS … BOOKS.” There was still concern that the park might be cleared again that night, and one officer made it clear that “unclaimed property will be removed and disposed of” in reference to the collection. Library staff quickly set up umbrellas over the bulk of the books and began sending librarians home with bags of books to keep the collection safe in remote locations.

Nonetheless, the library remains open.

Zabriskie's article contains a link to Occupy Educated, a site created by the OWS Practical Change Working Group as an emergency response to the library's destruction. According to the creators of the Occupy Educated site:

If you are curious about why Occupy Wall Street has turned into Occupy Everywhere, if you want a basic understanding of the problems in the system that make this stand necessary, these are the books to start with, in no particular order.

Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
Debt: The First 5000 Years - David Graeber
End of Growth – Richard Heinberg
In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan
Griftopia – Matt Taibbi

I don't know if this is the same five books I would pick. I do know that I think I picked a good time to start library school.

Occupy OKC to march for change in OKC politics November 17

2011-11-16T22:21:00.000-06:00

This just in from Occupy OKC:

Occupy Wall Street announced a National Day of Action for November 17th and plans for the NYC protestors to occupy the New York Stock Exchange before the bell rings and NYC subways throughout the morning, and are calling for thousands to converge on Foley Square and proceed to Occupy the Bridges to shut down NYC’s business district for a day to protest financial corruption. http://occupywallst.org/action/november-17th/.

In solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, Occupy OKC supporters will begin gathering at
2pm at Kerr Park (now renamed Poet’s Park) to march to City Hall this Thursday at 3pm
and conduct a protest rally against Maps III to highlight local corruption and protest the undue amount of big corporate money influencing local campaigns, to demand raises for police, firefighters, and teachers and show support for Oklahoma City municipal workers.

This link should provide more information about the November 17 protest: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=266340980079556.

Wall Street Re-Occupied?

2011-11-15T19:31:00.000-06:00

It's almost seven o'clock at night. I have schoolwork to do, and a novel to write. I'm taking a few minutes away from everything to write a brief blog post about Occupy Wall Street trying to reoccupy LibertyZucotti Park. A USTREAM video of events at the park right now, on the evening of November 15, can be found right here.

Rachel Signer has an excellent post at thenation.com about how the New York City movement is reacting to the a New York state supreme court justice's refusal to extend an order that would have allowed the occupier to retake the park.

A young man named Tim Weldon, who has been active in running a daily debate group in Zuccotti Park called Think Tank, said that he’d heard that Mayor Bloomberg had said, at a press conference that morning, that the protesters would now have to occupy the park only with their ideas. “What have we been doing all along?” said Weldon. “We’ve been here, discussing ideas about how to make the world a better place. Where has Mayor Bloomberg been?” He said that Think Tank would find a way to go on, even if they couldn’t hold it in the park.

“Mayor Bloomberg has been saying that we could stay here. But then he gave into his authoritarian temptations and kicked us out,” said Bill Dobbs, who has been involved with the Occupy Wall Street public relations working group, and has been at the park nearly every day over the past seven weeks.

“It’s too early to tell what will happen. This is a setback but we will regroup, continue organizing, and be stronger than ever,” Dobbs continued, as protesters swarmed around him, yelling, “Whose park? Our park?”

The Nation's John Nichol's has a moving editorial on how the raid on the park in the dark of the night also represented a direct attack on the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma City the Occupy OKC Official Facebook Page has a link to a new Web page for the group at okcupy.com. The other Web site for the group, at http://www.occupyokc.com/, is also still up.

I've heard that city governments across the nation are simultaneously evicting Occupy movements from their camping places, but I really have to get back to my school work and don't have time to research that.

Honoring peace workers on Armistice Day

2011-11-11T10:50:00.000-06:00

As I remind readers of my blog every November 11th, the holiday we celebrate today was originally called Armistice Day. This interesting essay explains why:

Believe it or not, November 11th was not made a holiday in order to celebrate war, support troops, or cheer the 11th year of occupying Afghanistan. This day was made a holiday in order to celebrate an armistice that ended what was up until that point, in 1918, one of the worst things our species had thus far done to itself, namely World War I.

World War I, then known simply as the world war or the great war, had been marketed as a war to end war. Celebrating its end was also understood as celebrating the end of all wars. A ten-year campaign was launched in 1918 that in 1928 created the Kellogg-Briand Pact, legally banning all wars. That treaty is still on the books, which is why war making is a criminal act and how Nazis came to be prosecuted for it.

As usual on Armistice Day, I want honor those who work for peace. This year I would like to honor the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. WILPF was founded in 1915, at the height of the Great War whose ending is celebrated by Armistice Day. Nearly 100 years later, this organization continues to work for peace, disarmament. economic justice, the environment, racial justice, and human rights. Plus, they sponsor this really cool site dedicated to ending corporate personhood.

WILPF, I salute you. In the words of Holly Near, "the bravest warriors are the ones who stand for peace."

(Hat tip to Coleen Rowley for the link to the post about Armistice Day.)

Occupy OKC protests at governor's mansion

2011-11-10T11:07:00.002-06:00

Occupy OKC on way to governor's mansion 11-09-11

Yesterday evening on my way home from work I tried to stop by Occupy OKC's march on Governor Mary Fallin's official residence. My efforts didn't quite work the way I hoped they would. First, I didn't remember the location of the march, and when I arrived at the Oklahoma State Capitol about 6:30, no one was there.

Perplexed, I got back in my car at about 6:45 and continued driving west on Twenty Third Avenue. Soon I saw a string of protesters marching east on Twenty Third marching noisily but peacefully behind a US flag. I also saw the flashing lights of a police vehicle. I parked my car and tried to catch up on foot with the marchers. This took a few minutes, as I don't walk quite as fast as I used to.

I caught up with the demonstrators near the capitol. There were between 25 and 30 protesters. Just as I arrived, I witnessed an interesting conversation between the marchers and the police officers (probably state police, but I'm not sure). They were discussing the specifics of the marchers' permit.

Occupy OKC marcher talking with officer

I couldn't hear most of the conversation, but at the end of it, a member of the Occupy OKC group shook an officer's hand. Using the "human microphone," marchers told the police that they loved them, and thanked them for serving and protecting the community.

"You are part of us, just as we are part of you," the human microphone said. Although I am personally skeptical about the role the police as an institution play in our society, I was touched by this proclamation. The great potential of the Occupy movement is to bring together the vast majority of us who are ill-seved by the current corporatocracy.

Reassured that no harm was about to come to the demonstrators, I made my way back to my car and continued on to the regular weekly meeting of the Mary Daly feminist discussion group.

This USTREAM video seems to have been recorded in front of the governor's mansion. According to the event listing on Facebook:

As a legislator, Mary Fallin voted in favor of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout that has destroyed our economy and sold our futures to the highest bidder. Her 2012 "balanced" budget includes cuts to the Departments of Education, Public Safety, Health and Human Services, and OETA--while refusing to raise taxes on the richest 1% of Oklahomans.

Occupying the super committee

2011-11-09T09:01:00.001-06:00

When I turned on the radio this morning, I heard news that Occupy Wall Street is marching on Washington D.C. to support the end of Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest US citizens. When I checked out their Web site, I saw this this is so.

According to OWS, "On November 23rd, the Congressional Deficit Reduction Super-Committee will meet to decide on whether or not to keep Obama's extension to the Bush tax-cuts - which only benefit the richest 1% of Americans in any kind of significant way." This is actually the deadline for the committee to complete its work--so this is the day on which it would be voting on its entire plan for deficit reduction.

The OWS march will leave today, November 9, and march 20 miles every day:

A major draw for this march is to encourage more people in rural communities to get involved as well as bring spreading the word along the highway. We are hoping people will join the march along the way; whether for an hour, a day, or the full two weeks, we feel its imperative for OWS to be involved in the historical signiﬁcance of long distance marches to support, promote, and encourage economic and social equality. We will be walking from 9am to to 5pm (banker hours) and will hold nightly GA's and/or discussions at 7pm in each town where we camp. We will be spending two days off at Occupy Philly and Occupy Baltimore. We are hoping a few people from these occupations will join us in the march to the White House and Occupy DC!.

This raises the question, what is the super committee and what is it doing? The committee was created by the August congressional compromise that ended the standoff over raising the national debt. The Economist has a good summary of that standoff and what the super committee does.

The deal, hammered out just days before that deadline, promises $917 billion in spending cuts over the next decade in return for a two-stage increase in the debt ceiling of $900 billion. After that, a 12-member congressional committee, equally composed of Republicans and Democrats, is to find $1.5 trillion in further deficit reductions that Congress must approve by December 23rd, in return for a similar-sized increase in the debt ceiling. If the committee fails to reach agreement or its proposal is rejected, $1.2 trillion in spending cuts will be triggered, drawn equally from domestic spending and defence.

The House and the Senate will both vote on the super committee agreement, if one is reached, but it will be a straight up-or-down vote with no amendments allowed.

In my opinion, the federal deficit and federal debt are much less of a problem than you might believe, based on mainstream news accounts. (Simply explained, the if the government spends more than it takes in any year, this creates a deficit. Deficits accumulating for a number of years create the national debt.) See this analysis, which I posted in May.

Trying to reduce the deficit at this point--that is, reducing the amount of government spending--could prove devastating to our economy as we struggle with chronic high unemployment and increasing poverty.

Over the past 30 years, taxes have been slashed for the wealthiest US citizens and we have wasted money on numerous unnecessary military adventures, such as the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. During this period of time, when we were mostly governed by right-wing Republicans, the national debt has increased.

Now, conservatives argue for slashing much-needed social programs in order to reduce the deficit and debt. They even insist on attacking Social Security, which has not contributed to the deficit in any way. Conservatives insist on keeping the Bush era tax increases and even want to cut tax rates further--although they express willingness to raise revenue by closing tax loopholes.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the committee seem determined to sell out ordinary people in an attempt to reach a compromise with the Republicans, according to The Nation.

Representative Maxine Waters of California has introduced a bill to repeal the supercommittee, and the $1.2 trillion in cuts it’s mandated to make. She believes the committee is “illegitimate” and “borders on unconstitutional.”

At a breakfast meeting with progressive reporters and bloggers today (October 27), Waters said she knows her bill probably doesn’t have the support to pass right now, but she wants it on the table if the supercommittee deadlocks. “Of course its’s a long shot. But right now people are getting more and more agitated, frustrated and concerned about this supercommittee and not happy that there are those who are saying, including the president, they want even bigger cuts,” Waters said. “So it may fall apart. If it falls apart my bill is there to say ‘kill it.’ ” She added that she’s spoken to several Republicans who are equally unhappy with the supercommittee’s power.

Waters’s frustration is shared by many Democrats in the House, who feel not only shut out from the process by colleagues in the Senate—Baucus is reportedly acting with guidance from Senate majority leader Harry Reid, leaving House minority leader Nancy Pelosi on the sidelines—but are also shocked at the level of cuts to Medicare and Social Security being proposed.

Representative Henry Waxman told Politico today that he has “no stake” in the committee and called it an “outrageous process” that is “not open and transparent.” He said the “things put forward by Democrats…I would never vote for.”

Democrats would like to portray themselves as the party of the 99 percent. There are indeed strong progressive Democrats who are fighting to protect the interests of ordinary working people and the poor.

The Democratic leadership, including President Obama, often seems more interested in making nice with the one percent than in protecting the rest of us. Let's hope that the march of the 99 percent on the nation's capital will encourage them to re-evaluate their position.

Update 11-10-11: This morning's Progressive Breakfast reports that super committee Democrats continue to lessen their support for maintaining crucial social programs in hopes of reaching a compromise with Republicans.

Occupying my library studies school work

2011-11-08T09:32:00.002-06:00

This weekend I stayed away from political and social activities and completed three assignments for my Libraries and Popular Culture class. It's a great class, and I'm learning a lot, and it's definitely worth the work. One of my assignments was to write a review of a documentary dealing with popular culture. I picked the movie Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Mass Media.

I watched the movie and wrote the review, I was struck by exactly how applicable Chomsky's ideas were to the current Occupy movement. So I'm posting my review here in the hopes that it will contribute to discussions of ideas and strategy in our quest to rein in the corporatocracy our nation has become. (If you would like to watch the film, you can do so here. If you can't devote three hours in one sitting to this, you could check out the film from the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System.)

My review follows below:

Introduction

On November 4 I watched the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. I’ve read some of Chomsky’s political analyses, and I’ve wanted to watch this movie for years. Recently I checked it out from the public library because it seemed very relevant to our class discussions on corporate hegemony in creating mass culture. Manufacturing Consent also seemed an appropriate choice for our class documentary project.

Summary

This 168-minute film is partly an analysis of Chomsky’s political ideas, partly a biography of Chomsky, and partly an examination of some of his opponents and detractors. Chomsky, a self-described anarcho-syndicalist, says that coercion in human society should take place only for clearly justified reasons. He argues that concentrated private control of economic resources allows the owners of these resources unjustified control over society. In a totalitarian society, elites retain power by using obvious overwhelming force. In a democracy, such as the United States, elites maintain power by “manufacturing consent.”

Chomsky says that the elites who own and control mass media believe that ordinary people must be diverted and controlled for their own good. This is not done by direct censorship. Major newspapers and major television stations control the political agenda through such strategies as selecting topics, framing issues, filtering information, and setting the boundaries of acceptable debate.

As an example of this process, Chomsky compares US media coverage of genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s with coverage of atrocities committed by US-backed Indonesian forces against the people of East Timor in the same time period. He argues that abuses committed by US enemies were exaggerated while abuses committed by US allies were ignored.

Additional Sources

Making a balanced selection of additional sources related to this movie was challenging because Chomsky’s opponents often use such extreme language in attacking him that they undermine the credibility of their own case. My own sympathy with Chomsky’s views undoubtedly made it more difficult for me to be neutral. Nevertheless, I hope this resource list would be useful to library patrons who had a variety of responses to the film.

The IMDB Web page on Manufacturing Consent (Internet Movie Database n.d.) contains reviews from both viewers and critics. While most of these reviews are positive, there are cogent dissenting points of view, as well as links to message boards for further discussion. There is also a link that allows a viewer to watch the movie for free.
Z Magazine was one of the sources of information that Chomsky suggested in the film. This website by the publishers of the magazine (Z Communications n.d.) contains links to much news and analysis from a libertarian socialist point of view, as well as a link to an online version of the magazine. Viewers who found the movie convincing would particularly like this site, and Chomsky himself has a blog here.
This page (Wvong 2001) by Canadian computer programmer Russil Wvong offers a critical assessment of Chomsky’s work. While agreeing with Chomsky in part, Wvong also presents evidence that Chomsky advances his claims in intellectually dishonest ways. Wvong also argues that Chomsky is willing to accept human rights abuses when perpetrated by regimes he supports.
The book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Herman and Chomsky 1988) offer a clearer and more comprehensive explanation of Chomsky’s “propaganda model” than the movie does.

Discussion Topic

Noam Chomsky, a linguist by training, is most emphatically not part of the culture-and-civilization tradition. His work on universal grammar—which he believes is hard-wired into the human brain—has convinced him that ordinary people are creative geniuses. He doesn’t believe that ordinary people are dupes, but simply that they lack resources to gain complete information.

In the 1992 movie, Chomsky advanced a specific model for how corporate elites create and maintain what Antonio Gramsci calls “hegemony” over popular culture. Chomsky argued that most news media outlets are owned by giant corporations that share the interests of the rest of the ruling elite. This allows them to control the terms of popular debate and crowd out dissenting ideas.

Do you think Chomsky’s argument was accurate in 1992? This movie was released before widespread public use of the Internet. How has the existence of the Internet affected the accuracy of Chomsky’s position? Does greater availability of the means to publish mean that corporate control is much less of a problem than it was?

References

Achbar, Mark and Peter Wintonick (directors). 1992. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. Necessary Illusions/National Film Board of Canada. Zeitgeist Films, 2002, DVD. Includes Chomsky’s 2002 reflections on the film, extended excerpts of 1969 Firing Line debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., and a 1971 discussion with Michel Foucault.

Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

Internet Movie Database. n.d. “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104810/. Accessed November 5, 2011.

Wvong, Russil. 2001. “Noam Chomsky: A Critical Review.” http://www.russilwvong.com/future/chomsky.html. Accessed November 5, 2011.

Z Communications. n.d. “Z Net: A Community of People Committed to Social Change.” http://www.zcommunications.org/znet. Accessed November 5, 2011.

Kansas health board pursues Tiller colleague

2011-11-03T10:51:00.000-05:00

Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered by a pro-life zealot in 2009. Tiller was often demonized because he was one of the very few late-term abortion providers in the US. These abortions were not provided for frivolous reasons, however. A typical client might have discovered that the fetus suffered such a serious abnormality that it could not survive outside the mother's body.

Now, as Kate Sheppard reports for Mother Jones, the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts is considering whether to yank the medical license of Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, who certified the medical need for abortions performed at Tiller's clinic. This board has been stacked with anti-choice activists appointed by Republican Governor Sam Brownback. Sheppard writes:

One time, Neuhaus evaluated a 10-year-old girl who had been raped by her uncle, which is one of the files the medical board is investigating. This girl was tiny, maybe 4'8", Neuhaus recalls. There had already been a police investigation, and the uncle was in jail, but it took until the third trimester for the girl to make it to the clinic. "For them to belittle it, to say that its okay for a 10-year-old have a kid by her uncle, and no harm is going to come from it, that's just beyond the realm of decency," she says.

Not all of those details were in the paperwork, however, because Neuhaus says she knew that records weren't truly confidential given the anti-abortion leanings of Kansas law enforcement officials. "I chose to sacrifice details," Neuhaus says. "I risked nothing but my license. I didn't compromise their health care."

At the clinic, Neuhaus' decisions were made in a place that was constantly under threat. Tiller was shot in both arms outside the facility in 1993. To enter, patients had to go through a metal detector. For a while, Neuhaus says, she wore a bulletproof vest to work. She even carried a .40 caliber pistol in her scrubs for a short period and took up target practice. "I was a reasonably decent shot," she says. "I would not have had too much trouble shooting one of those people if I had to." There were also bomb threats. But as time went by, she got more comfortable with the situation: "I think at some point, you get used to it, and you don't have anxiety."

Occupied our state capitol

2011-10-29T17:07:00.000-05:00

On Saturday afternoon Oct.29, Occupy OKC conducted a rally at the Oklahoma State Capitol as part of a nationwide Occupy Your State Capitol event. A variety of speakers and marchers supported clean, publicly financed elections, public schools, public libraries, unions, jobs for all, and an end to corporate dominance of the US political and economic system. I estimated that more than 100 people were in attendance when I arrived at about 1:30 p.m. A friend told me that more people had been present earlier, and one participant estimated peak participation at 200 people. The next Occupy OKC event is a candlelight vigil tomorrow night (Sunday, Oct. 30) in Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City. Kerr Park is located on Robert S. Kerr Avenue between Robinson and Broadway.

Occupy Wall Street and feminism

2011-10-26T11:22:00.000-05:00

Okay, I've got to quit blogging and get back to my school work, but I just discovered something that I liked a lot, a post by Judith Levine on the Web site of the Vermont weekly Seven Days. She says that the Occupy movement is more like the feminist movement of the seventies and the women's peace camp movement of the eighties than it is like the sixties anti-war movement:

The closest ancestor of Occupy Wall Street was the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, England. The encampment started in 1981, after some Welsh feminists called Women for Life on Earth marched from Cardiff to the RAF military base in Berkshire, asking to debate the siting of 96 U.S. cruise nuclear missiles there. Ignored, the women pitched their tents outside the fence. They were told to take their tents down. They slept under tarps or in the open. Over the years, thousands camped out, with as many as 70,000 showing up to link hands and encircle — or, as they put it, “embrace” — the base.

Journalists arrived from everywhere. Other camps sprang up across Europe. The women conducted thousands of acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to slow the war machine. They were repeatedly evicted and arrested. But they stayed — for 10 years, until the missiles left, and nine years more, until a monument to their struggle was erected.

Forget comparisons to the ’60s. What the current Occupy movement is emphatically not like is the old (pre feminist, male) New Left. The Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York’s Zuccotti Park (renamed Liberty Square) is a feminist phenomenon in both deep and quotidian ways — not just in the ubiquity of women protestors but in its group process, nonviolent ethos, aesthetic feel and emotional tenor.

Now, I don't look at things in quite the same way that Judith Levine does. First, I'm a bit puzzled that she didn't mention the U.S. women's peace camps. There were at least two, one at Seneca Falls in New York, and at Puget Sound in Washington State.

Second, having spent some time at the OKC Occupation at Kerr Park, I am pleased and impressed with the movement (and consider myself part of it). But I wouldn't go so far as to call it feminist. Women are active in this movement, and not just at a token level, but it still seems male dominated to me.

Nevertheless, I think that Judith Levine is a hundred percent right in the way she describes the movement's philosophy and organization. She has absolutely described the thing that keeps bringing me back down to Kerr Park.

Now if you'll excuse me, I really do need to catch up on my reading for my classes.

What's going on in Oakland?

2011-10-26T10:49:00.000-05:00

This morning the radio news brought word of an intense ongoing clash between police and Occupy movement members in Oakland California. Once I was awake I got online to find more information. I wasn't sure about what I was going to find. I support the Occupy movement, and consider myself a part of it. I also remember demonstrations back in Eugene, Oregon, where macho-male anarchists seemed to crave confrontations with the police. And yes, the police generally overreacted, but the story was ususally more complicated than a simple one of brutal police squashing peaceful protests. While I still can't be sure what happened in Oakland, what I've seen and read leads me to believe that the protesters were mostly peaceful and the police went off the wall.

So here's what I found. The Los Angeles Times reported that Oakland Police admitted using tear gas and bean-bag rounds against protesters, but said this was necessary to defend themselves against bottles, rocks, and paintballs that protesters were throwing at them. According to the Times, protesters accused the police of also using flash grenades and rubber bullets, and claimed that some paintballs were directed at police, but only after police charged the crowd.

I found this analysis from Colorlines to be really useful and interesting. For one thing, it pointed out that the Oakland police department has a history of deadly unlawful violence and racial profiling -- a history made more complicated by the recent election of an Asian-American woman mayor who appointed an African-American man as police chief:

Miller’s questions to Taylor about the role of race in the policing of Occupy Oakjland points to what is and will continue to be the larger question in Oakland and other U.S. cities where former “minorities” are becoming majorities: What does it mean when those charged with defending elite interests against multi-racial and increasingly non-white activists are themselves multiracial and non-white? The ongoing protests, mayor recall, phone calls, emails and other pressure and pushback of Occupy Oakland are no longer aimed at cigar-smoking white men. They are aimed at a power structure in Oakland whose public face looks more like Miller and other non-white protesters.

Miller and others are calling for the recall of Jean Quan, who made history as Oakland’s first Asian-American mayor (full disclosure: Quan’s daughter is my Facebook friend); and they are complaining about the use of excessive police violence authorized by Interim Chief Howard Jordan, an African American. Such conflicts between former minorities are becoming the norm in what more conservative commentators call the “post-racial” era ushered in by the election of Obama.

Quan and Jordan are in the throes of dealing with a police department plagued by officer-involved shootings and killings, corruption and other crimes—crimes that have forced a federal consent decree to reform the department, after officers were convicted of planting evidence and beating suspects in West Oakland. Taking her cue from the Obama campaign of 2008, Quan announced Jordan’s appointment at a public safety forum titled “Creating Hope in the Community.”

Finally, the folks at Democracy Now! had an excellent segment on the Oakland situation this morning:

It appears that police departments nationwide are trying to create unfavorable stereotypes about the Occupy movement in order to limit free speech rights and peaceful protest.

Consensus in the rain

2011-10-24T11:32:00.000-05:00

Between school and work and other commitments, I can't make it down to the Occupy OKC site in downtown Oklahoma City as often as I'd like. I went down there late Saturday afternoon and caught the end of a performance by local folk musician Peggy Johnson.

I came back later for Saturday evening's General Assembly after I'd found a bite to eat. The GA had already started by the time I arrived. I estimated 30-40 people were present, huddling under the awning of a building in the rain. One of the moderators counted 37 people present. The group adopted a process for working groups and the General Assembly submitted by Beth Isbell. Copies of this document should be available on Facebook and at the info table at the Occupy site. A decision was also made to require a quorum of 30 people present in order to have a valid General Assembly.

I took pretty good notes, but have been too busy and tired to transcribe them. You can read the official minutes here. There is more that I want to write about this meeting, but since I am lucky enough to have a job, I want to make sure that I'm not late getting to it.

You can follow recent developments on the Facebook page and the Web site. You can participate in discussions by signing up on the Forums. This is one of the main places where ideas get worked out before being taken up by the General Assembly. To visit the occupation of OKC, go to Robert S. Kerr Avenue between Robinson and Broadway in Oklahoma City. You'll find an interesting and diverse group of people gathered there.

Remembering Anita Hill

2011-10-23T22:20:00.004-05:00

Like many women I know, I've been very interested lately in keeping up with the Occupy movement that started on Wall Street and has spread all over the United States and even the world. I keep running into my feminist friends down at Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City--and not the same ones, either.

Feminism as I know it is a movement about complete transformation of an oppressive world. Feminist analysis generally starts with an examination of gender, but it's not about keeping the same rotten system except with equal opportunity for women to be oppressors. Even though the Occupy movement has very little explicit feminist analysis, it has the feel of it of something that means to get to the roots of oppression and dig them out.

I was looking through my inbox looking for material for my latest blog post about Occupy OKC when I came across this reminder of events from 20 years ago that brought the nation face to face with the pervasive reality of sexual harassment in the workplace. As Emily Douglas of The Nation writes:

After the hearings in which Anita Hill testified about the harassment she’d been subjected to as an employee working under Clarence Thomas at the Department of Education and EEOC, and after Thomas had been confirmed to the Supreme Court, polls suggested that 70 percent of Americans felt Hill had been treated fairly by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It would take years before Hill would be vindicated in the view of the broader public—but, in the words of Catharine MacKinnon, the hearings served as a “massive consciousness-changing session” for the entire country. Even those who didn’t believe her were forced to admit that if what she said was true, Thomas should not have been confirmed to the Supreme Court—implicitly acknowledging that sexual harassment, long considered “just life,” was wrong, and women shouldn’t have to put up with it.

Of course, feminists had been talking about sexual harassment for years and organizing to end it. But it the grace and courage of University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill forced the nation to deal with this issue as never before.

With Hill's example to inspire them, women in Washington state shared with the press their stories of having been harassed and physically molested by Democratic Senator Brock Adams. Adams was driven from office by the allegations in 1992.

Oregon Republican Bob Packwood was the next to go. He had been narrowly re-elected to the Senate before the reports surfaced that he had a long history of sexually harassing female employees. Packwood finally resigned in 1995, after the Senate Ethics Committee unanimously recommended that he should be thrown out of the Senate.

As Emily Houston's Nation post reported, on Oct. 15 there was a conference honoring Hill at Hunter College in New York. I remember listening to the coverage of Hill's testimony 20 years ago and being filled with awe at her courage and filled with rage at the story that she told. Today, the fight against sexual harassment is not over, but it is less likely to be treated as a joke.

So here's a big thank you to Anita Hill, and a thank you to the feminist movements that have worked so hard to stop harassment. This serves as a reminder that when you move against injustice, people may treat you with disdain. Persistence is our only hope of success.

October 15 OKC rally

2011-10-19T19:31:00.001-05:00

About 100 people gathered in Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City on Saturday, Oct. 15 as part of a global day of action in support of Occupy Wall Street. I counted 80 people listening to speakers and another saw about another 20 in the plaza where the food tables and working areas were located. I also saw nine tents in the camping area. Here are some pictures:


More people were on the steps behind this area.

This is what the Occupy movement is all about.


The daily schedule for the OKC Occupiers.

Some of the tents in the camping area.


The kitchen feeds anyone who needs food.

What about the one percent?

2011-10-17T11:04:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Truthout for reposting this excellent analysis by Mike Konczal of New Deal 2.0. What Konczal shows is the way that income has been redistributed over the past 30 years in a way that favors executives, managers, and stock traders.

     There’s a reason the protests ended up on Wall Street: The top 1% and top 0.1% comprises all the senior bosses and the financial sector.
      One of the best things about Occupy Wall Street is that there is no chatter about Obama or Perry or whatever is the electoral political issue of the day. There are a lot of people rethinking things, discussing, learning, and conceptualizing the kinds of world they want to create. Since so much about inequality is a function of the legal structure known as a “corporation,” I’d encourage you to check out Alex Gourevitch on how the corporate is structured in our laws.
      The paper notes that stock market returns drive much of the manager’s income. This is related to a process of financialization, something JW Mason has done a fantastic job outlining here. The “dominant ethos among managers today is that a business exists only to enrich its shareholders, including, of course, senior managers themselves,” and this is done by paying out more in dividends that is earned in profits. Think of it as our-real-economy-as-ATM-machine, cashing out wealth during the good times and then leaving workers and the rest of the real economy to deal with the aftermath.

In other words, the reason for increasing inequality in our society is not because some people have worked harder or smarter than the rest of us. It's because the very few people with the most wealth also have accumulated the political power to rip off the rest of us.

The advantages of "disunity"

2011-10-15T11:37:00.002-05:00

Donnie is smiling because we're taking our
future back.

It's been a busy week for me with work and grad school, and besides that, I went to hear a presentation by Indian feminist activist Pramada Menon at OU on Wednesday night. Given that, I haven't had chance to get back down to the OKC occupation since Tuesday night. According to the Occupy OKC Web site, there was a march on Chase Bank yesterday afternoon and a rally today at noon. I writing this quickly before I head off to that demonstration.

Tuesday night my girlfriend and I went downtown to check out the occupation. As had been true on Monday night, there were about 50 people present, but although there was some overlap, it wasn't the same 50 people. My sense is that this movement is made up of ordinary people with lots of other responsibilities, folks who mostly aren't able to devote all their time to the movement, but who show up when they can. It would be great if the OKC occupiers developed greater coherence and a more focused strategy. For instance, the Occupy OKC Official Facebook page had no clear announcement that there is indeed a rally at Kerr Park today at noon up until an hour or two before the rally. But the fact that this movement is being put on by overworked ordinary people instead of PR professionals helps to explain that.

The other thing that helps to explain some of the lack of a focused message--both in OKC and in the wider Occupy movement--is that it is indeed a movement of the 99 percent of the population that has been increasingly excluded from the nation's prosperity over the past 30 years. And the truth is, the 99 percent don't have complete agreement amongst ourselves about many important issues.

We don't agree about feminism, abortion rights, gay rights, unions, or the environment. We don't agree about whether the XL pipeline is something we should oppose because of its disastrous environmental consequences, or something we should support because it will provide living-wage union jobs, at least for a short period of time. We don't agree about whether we should eliminate the Federal Reserve.

I believe that disagreement is important, and ought to be treated with the greatest respect. Many people are understandably distressed about the polarization and name-calling that has come to dominate political conversation in the US.

One way to change this is the way that the mainstream Democratic party has chosen--the method of defining an arbitrary "middle ground," and telling everyone else to shut up for the sake of "unity." The other way is for ordinary people to actually start talking to each other across the boundaries of our different beliefs, to reach consensus about what we can, to learn to disagree respectfully when we can't.

I believe that this "other way"is what is starting to happen on the streets of the United States under the auspices of the Occupy movement. And I think that's a good thing.

Wall Street occupation not evicted for now

2011-10-14T08:39:00.000-05:00

Last night my inbox was flooded with messages from progressive groups warning that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was about to evict Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park, under the pretext that it needed to be cleaned. Nation.com blogger Allison Kilkenny reports that the occupiers have won the showdown, at least temporarily:

This was the first protest I’ve ever covered where the activists won – if only a battle, and not the war, and if only temporarily. And the victory is definitely temporary. Major problems have not been resolved and large questions remain: Will the protesters be able to bring their sleeping bags back into Liberty Park? Will they be able to sleep on the ground? Fourteen hours ago, Mayor Bloomberg declared protesters wouldn’t be able to return their gear to the park, and now the decree came down to postpone the cleaning entirely. Why the change of tune?

Many were braced for a disastrous clash with the police and were instead handed not a truce, but ongoing purgatory followed by a run-in with the authorities at a second location. After the cries of victory went up, a group of about a hundred protesters marched up the middle of Broadway. This caused quite a stir at Liberty. Many thought it was bad strategy, abandoning the camp when it was still so vulnerable, but some of the protesters seemed to have gotten a taste of victory and wanted to go on a celebration lap. At the gates of City Hall, protesters clashed with police armed with riot gear, and as of this report, six individuals have been arrested thus far.

Rawstory.com has this link to a live video stream provided by Occupy Wall Street to what is happening right now. (Hat tip to commondreams.org for posting its Twitter feed on its Occupy Wall Street page--that's how I found this link.)

Occupy OKC rally scheduled for Saturday noon

2011-10-13T11:57:00.001-05:00

There are several posts about the Occupy movement that are in my head waiting to be written. For now, the only thing I have time for is a note that a rally to support Occupy OKC is scheduled for this Saturday at noon at the Kerr Park amphitheater, located on Robert S. Kerr Avenue between Broadway and Robinson.

The protest rally this Saturday will be a family friendly event designed to show solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy groups in our country and around the world, and to demand ACCOUNTABILITY from our Government & Wall Street! Occupy OKC fully supports the principles set forth in the Declaration adopted and published by the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street at Zuccoti Park in New York City, NY.,

The text of this declaration can be read here.

Occupy OKC has also adopted "Open Fair Organizational Practices" and a new structure for this group. I'll try to blog more about this later. You might also check out the Occupy OKC Official Facebook Page, the Occupy OKC Web site, and their online forums.

OKC occupation continues

2011-10-11T22:15:00.000-05:00

The occupation continues at Kerr Park in Downtown Oklahoma City, and a march (maybe two) took place on Tuesday afternoon. I hope to provide more details later, but at this moment it's my bedtime.

OKC occupiers to march downtown Tuesday

2011-10-11T00:18:00.001-05:00

When last I blogged, the occupation of Kerr Park by Occupy OKC was tentatively scheduled to begin today, Monday. This evening, after I finally caught up with my schoolwork--and after a brief break to allow my brain to unstick itself from the inside of my skull--I headed downtown to see what was going on.


"I won't believe corporations are people until Texas executes one."

It was a smaller crowd than on Friday night. People were standing and sitting around in small groups getting to know each other, playing musical instruments, and discussing political ideas and strategy. (One fantabulous group of women was playing hacky-sack.) I thought there were about fifty folks when I got there a little after 7 p.m. The General Assembly had taken place earlier in the day, so maybe there were more people earlier.

"Privatized Gain = Socialized Loss"

Talking with several participants and moderators, here is what I found out. Tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday, a march will step off from occupied Kerr Park at 2 p.m. Marchers will visit Chase Bank and travel along Park Avenue. In order to keep this demonstration legal without a permit, marchers are asked to walk single file, to stay on sidewalks, and not to block traffic or entrances to buildings. Signs are encouraged, but please don't carry a sign on a stick or wear a mask.

"Workers Rights Are Human Rights"

Occupy OKC does have permits to be in Kerr Park continuously from October 10 through October 12. They are asking for donations to help cover the cost of permits to stay there for additional days, as well as to cover the cost of porta-potties. There is a kitchen now that is feeding occupiers, and folks have started donating food and blankets for the occupiers. My hunch is that more of these donations would be welcome as well. Kerr Park is located on Robert S. Kerr Avenue between Broadway and Robinson.

While the participants in Occupy OKC have a variety of political opinions--see sign photos included with this post--Friday night's GA seemed to reach consensus that Occupy OKC endorses this statement by Occupy Wall Street. This is, in general, a statement against corporate greed, militarism, environmental destruction and discrimination, and for the rights of workers and other living beings. You can find out more about Occupy OKC on their Facebook page, via Twitter, at their Web site, or through their online forums.


99% of us are being exploited by a ruthless elite.

Updated 10/11/11 to fix some grammatical errors.

Background information

2011-10-08T13:00:00.001-05:00

Occupy OKC is inspired by the Occupy Wall Street demonstration that has fascinated the nation, and is part of the fast growing Occupy Together movement. While many participants in the OKC General Assembly emphasize the need for supporting concerns specific to Oklahomans, there also seems to be widespread suppport for the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.

In addition to its Facebook page, Occupy OKC has a Web site and a forum page where you can join a subcommittee/working group, familiarize yourself with issues and discussions, share information, and discuss your opinions. The subcommittees include the following:

Much of the work of Occupy OKC is done by these subcommittees, so if you want to take a part in shaping the work of these groups, the thing to do is to jump in and volunteer. In order for the work of the general assembly to move quickly, participants need to do the work to understand issues in advance of each meeting. The place to do that is in the forums.

In other news, Occupy OKC has made its first appearance on Channel 9.

How it felt to go the OKC General Assembly

2011-10-08T01:20:00.001-05:00

The General Assembly of Occupy OKC met Friday evening in Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City, and probably agreed to begin its occupation of Kerr Park on the afternoon of Columbus Day. I say "probably," because when you get 300 people trying to do consensus decision making without much prior experience, you get a few rough edges.

You get the tension between wanting to have a coherent strategy and consensus about goals, and wanting to take action while energy is high. You get the tension between wanting to have unified positions, and honoring diversity of experience and belief. You get a meeting that goes on that it probably should have, with people getting a bit cranky because they probably need a nap and a snack. You get all of the complications of communicating via "human microphone" to avoid breaking of laws requiring a police permit to use amplified sound.

This is not paint-by-numbers. This is not the packaged cake mix that is fast to fix, but oh-so-bland and unsatisfying. This is going to be the real homemade work of art, the thing that produces broken eggs and broken crayons and probably a few broken hearts in the process of creating a new world.

I sat there scribbling notes, but now I can't seem to find words for what I feel. Maybe it's irrational hope. For the past thirty years the patriarchs, the capitalists, the race-baiters, the gay-haters, the generals, the right-wing t.v. preachers have made the United States into a meaner, greedier place, a place where 99 percent of us are sinking fast. I feel that I have done what I've known how to do to change it, but that hasn't seemed like much. And now, maybe here is a chance for something to be better.

So it looked like most of the people in the crowd were in their twenties or thirties. The crowd was not entirely white, but there were few people of color there. I felt much more comfortable in this crowd than I'd expected to feel--this was even before I found a few trusty Herland dyke friends to sit with--but much more than half of the people in the crowd were male. But half or more of the moderators and team leaders seemed to be women. And this was a crowd that despite its differences seemed to be united in its egalitarianism.

For instance, when Brittany, the representative of the Action Team, spoke in favor of beginning the occupation on Monday, a large part of her reasoning had to do with the fact that Columbus Day symbolizes the fact that "this land was taken from indigenous people"--and that we have a responsibility to counteract that injustice.

And when one speaker insisted on the importance of having a clear list of demands, one young man standing in the back row said something like, "We all agree that we need the one percent to stop acting like dicks."

Exactly, sir, And I appreciate your dedication to the cause of ending patriarchy.

More on Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-06T11:12:00.002-05:00

If you missed it, my first post is here.

Betsy Reed at The Nation has an interesting analysis of the march and its supposed lack of demands:

t’s not that the demands being suggested by OWS’s volunteer policy advisors in the blogosphere are not worthy ideas. At a time when we desperately need to rein in financial speculation and change the incentives on Wall Street, a financial transactions tax is a terrific policy proposal. Dean Baker has been talking about it for years. The thing is, we on the left don’t have a scarcity of policy ideas. We are positively bursting with them. Create a housing trust fund! A national infrastructure bank! And, yes, sure, eliminate the carried interest loophole so fat cats don’t get a bigger tax break than working people. (Some even have more radical ideas, which are quite sensible too.) But at best, we get a polite hearing for these ideas, which then fade away or are hopelessly watered down. We simply lack the power to put them into practice.

And in the recent past, even the most smoothly organized, expertly messaged mass demonstrations have not made a whit of difference in this regard. Consider the last big march on Wall Street this past May 12. The coalition behind it was admirably diverse, including unions like the teachers and SEIU’s 1199, as well as local community organizations such as Citizen Action NY, Coalition for the Homeless and Community Voices Heard. The “May 12 Coalition,” which turned out thousands of protesters on the appointed day, presented the Bloomberg administration with a proposal that exhibited great thoughtfulness in its rigor and detail, asking banks like JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley to take a 20 percent cut in their contracts to handle functions like child support disbursements or income tax remittances for the city. This would have saved $120 million, part of $1.5 billion that could have been extracted from the banking sector to prevent the city from having to slash education and social services, according to the coalition.

I would also like to nominate this song by Bonnie Lockhart as the movement's unofficial anthem:

Occupied

2011-10-06T10:52:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago I started receiving e-mails from organizations who were sponsoring a protest to occupy Wall Street. I deleted these e-mails without paying much attention to them. Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of the stock market or the financial speculation industry that seems to have eaten the US economy, and I remember how they helped to crash our economy. But I didn't think these protests sounded as if they'd been planned very well, and I couldn't imagine them being effective.

I seem to have been very wrong.

Now, the mainstream and alternative news (and my inbox) seem to be full of news of a movement that has spread across the US in the past two or three weeks. Busy grad student that I am, I am still trying to sort through all of this stuff and make sense of it.

Here is what I've figured out so far.

First, the feminist peace group Code Pink is leading an effort to make sure the demonstrations are inclusive and have a feminist perspective. See this great post on AlterNet by Melanie Butler:

If Week I of Occupy Wall Street was about surviving, Week II has been about finding our voices. This protest is about the 99 percent of people in America who have been on the short end of the economic stick, but it appears the media believes it's 90 percent made up of men. Some of the organizing and facilitation processes we've developed to make our movement inclusive and participatory have proven not to be enough, and we are constantly adapting and regrouping to ensure that everyone's voice in this broad and vibrant coalition is heard.

Via an e-mail from Code Pink, I also found out about Occupy Together. Their Web site says that they're "an unofficial hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.," and they also have a Facebook page.

Thanks to a link shared by a friend on Facebook, I found out that there is a local Occupy OKC group, which as a Facebook page and a Web site. Their next "general assembly" is scheduled for tomorrow, Friday Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. at Kerr Park in downtown OKC. I'm not sure I'll be able to make this, but it looks interesting.

Death of a pioneer

2011-10-06T09:49:00.001-05:00

Nah. I'm not talking about Steve Jobs. I think that the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth probably did more to make the world a better place. Shuttlesworth was a leader of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, and personally faced many dangerous situations in furtherance of the cause. According to a report on NPR's All Things Considered last night, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, himself a civil rights veteran, credits Shuttlesworth's work with making possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"Fred Shuttlesworth had the vision, the determination never to give up, never to give in," Lewis said. "He led an unbelievable children's crusade. It was the children who faced dogs, fire hoses, police billy clubs that moved and shook the nation."

Reporter Allison Keyes had a fascinating retrospective on Morning Edition today.

Against Social Security except for themselves

2011-09-29T23:00:00.000-05:00

The Nation has a fascinating post about right-wing billionaire "free market" proponent Charles Koch writing to economist Friedrich Hayek, encouraging him to sign up for Social Security. The irony in this is that both Koch and Hayek were leading opponents of Social Security and other safety net programs.

A copy of the letter, written in 1973, is available here. Nation reporters Vasha Levine and Mark Ames explain that Koch wanted Hayek to come to the United States to serve as a senior scholar at Koch's libertarian Institute for Humane Studies in 1974. Initially, Hayek turned down the offer. Hayek had health problems. His native Austria had a program of almost universal health care that had provided him with gall bladder surgery. In the United States, he would not be able to afford private health insurance. Not to worry, Kock said. Hayek might be eligible for Social Security, based on his employment at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. In that case, he would also be eligible for Medicare to cover hospital expenses.

The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs—revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.

Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a separate entity that champions the “Austrian school” of economics.

Levine and Ames go on to explain how the Cato Institute (originally called the Charles Koch Institute) carried on a stealth campaign to undermine Social Security and other social safety net programs.

Thanks in part to Hayek’s writings and to the Koch brothers’ decades-long war on the social safety net, Americans are among the Western world’s few citizens without universal healthcare. Not surprisingly, life expectancy here has fallen to forty-ninth place in the world, while medical costs are double those of other Western nations. By contrast, Hayek’s native Austria, which has a public health plan that covers 99 percent of the population, boasts a healthcare system ranked ninth in the world by the World Health Organization.

Asking and telling

2011-09-20T11:27:00.000-05:00

This poem, which I wrote two or three years ago, expresses the complication of my feelings upon hearing about the end of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allowed lesbians and gay men to serve in the U.S. military so long as they did not reveal their (our) identity. It's a long poem. I've got a lot of feelings about this topic.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
how back in 1969,
My junior high school was a school
for smart kids from all over Philadelphia.
But my classmates were all smarter than I was,
because all of them were protesting
the Vietnam War.
Me, I was protesting them,
I was the only one who would pledge allegiance,
I was the only one who would try to sing
the Star Spangled Banner in the school assembly.

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
that back in 1969,
when I was 13 years old,
I wanted to be a man,
I wanted to be free,
not protected and controlled as women were.
I wanted to be free and strong and brave.
I wanted to be the one who did the protecting.
and at the end of the musical comedy,
I wanted to be the one who married the girl.

I would have volunteered to join the army
or maybe the marine corps.
I would have volunteered to go to Vietnam.
to protect the people from communist aggression,
to help them be free from tyrants and dictators.
I wanted to go.
but the army would not take 13-year-old girls,
whether or not they were going to become lesbians.
They didn't allow women into combat at all.
They said that war was too horrific for women,
but years later it crossed my mind that they
didn't really mind women being in combat
so long as
the women couldn't shoot back.

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
this story from the Vietnam War.
How the helicopters brought our soldiers
into the hamlet of My Lai,
with instructions to destroy it,
and to kill all of the enemy there,
and they did.
Our soldiers killed all of the enemy,
but on that day,
the enemy was not strong young men
armed with rifles and shooting back
at our troops.
On that day the enemy was old people,
and babies, and little children,
and of course women,
who could be raped as well
as bayoneted,
shoved into the irrigation ditch,
and slaughtered with bursts of
automatic rifle fire.

Our soldiers followed their orders
so well that in the morning there were 700 people
living in My Lai,
but by the end of that day
fewer than 200 were left.
As the saying used to go,
they destroyed that village in order to save it.
Not only did they butcher the people,
they also killed all of the animals,
burned down all of the buildings,
and poisoned the wells.

This happened in March of 1968,
and the army top brass was modest about it, too,
They said only that 128 of the enemy had
been killed in a fierce fire fight,
and they stuck to that story for over a year,
(well certainly, they admitted, there are
always a few unintentional civilian casualties),
they stuck to that story for over a year,
but then the truth came out.

The truth has a way of coming out,
even if no one asks for it.
People who know the truth, people who feel
the truth, always seem to want
to tell. There were brave men who were
there at My Lai,
brave men who could not stomach what they had seen,
what they had been forced to do,
and they told the truth without being asked.
They told the truth again, and again,
until congressmen and journalists had to listen.

After that, the generals said what
generals always say,
They said what they said after
Wounded Knee,
after the fire-bombing of Dresden,
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
after Kent State and Jackson State,
after they overthrew the democratically
elected governments of Guatemala and Iran,
after they trained the Islamic militants
who eventually became Al Qaeda,
after they mined Nicaragua's harbors,
after they blockaded Iraq and allowed
half a million children to starve,
after the revelations about the abuses
at the prison at Abu Ghraib.

They said that the My Lai massacre was
a tragic mistake,
that civilians cannot imagine the stress
of soldiers in combat,
that those men went a little bit
over the edge in what they did
but they were defending our way of life,
our freedom of speech,
our right to be ungrateful and criticize
our government for its conduct of a war
in defense of innocent people,
a few of whom, unfortunately, must always
be sacrificed in furtherance of that goal,
that now of all times was not the time
to cut and run, just because a few bad apples
had gone to a slight extreme in their
defence of liberty.
And they took one lieutenant and
locked him away for a four and
one-half months to show just how sorry they were.

In the middle of everything that was
happening to me when I was 13 years old,
I could not comprehend that my
government was lying to me.
I didn't know that
it hadn't been our civil war
until my government decided to take charge
after the Vietnamese drove the
French colonialists away.
I didn't know we had stopped elections
from taking place,
because we knew our side would lose.
I didn't know we'd installed a president
in South Vietnam, then murdered him
when he didn't do what we wanted.
I didn't know about people
being forced to live
in strategic hamlets, and if they didn't
stay there, they would be in free-fire
zones where my government would attack
them with napalm and rockets and bombs.
I wanted to believe my government when
it told me My Lai was a mistake.
I could not bear to ask
whether my government
might be
lying.

But the truth has a way of telling itself
even when you don't ask to hear it,
and later, when I was just a little older,
I fell in love with a woman who was a
little bit older than myself, a woman
who had been a protester.
I fell in love with a woman who knew
what our government had done, and I
believed what she told me,
I read for myself,
and I thought about what I'd read,
and then I understood that my government
hardly ever told the truth,
especially when it talked about its
foreign adventures.

I found that my government had a nasty
habit of supporting dictatorships
in the name of democracy,
in the Phillipines, in Latin America,
in Iran. I learned that
my government
has the nasty habit of supporting dictatorships
in the name of democracy,
and overthrowing elected governments
in the name of democracy,
and it crossed my mind
that my government was giving
democracy
a bad name.

And since then I have spent many
hours standing on many street corners
holding up protest signs,
sometimes in the freezing cold,
sometimes in the pouring rain,
I have stood on street corners
sometimes by myself,
often with just a few others,
I have stood on street corners
trying to tell my sister and
brother citizens the truths
that my government doesn't want them
to hear.

And in my own way I am doing my best to
serve my country,
I am doing my best to
defend democracy,
because free speech cannot be defended
with bullets or bombs,
democracy cannot be defended by
shoving helpless people into a ditch
and slaughtering them with bursts
of automatic weapons fire.
Free speech can only be defended by
speaking out,
by writing,
by doing your best to think for yourself.

And so,
to my gay brothers
and lesbian sisters,
here is what I want you to know:
If you say it is your country,
and your right to serve,
and I look at the world through your eyes,
I have to admit that this is so.
But can you look at the world
through my eyes?
Can you understand why once,
I would have volunteered to join
the army, or maybe the marine corps,
but now that is not so.
Can you understand why,
that if they asked me,
I would not go?
That even if the generals ordered me,
I would not go. I would say no.
I would say, "Hell, no."

Enough is enough

2011-09-11T19:12:00.000-05:00

Janinsanfran at Can It Happen Here? has the best reflection I've seen on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. Noam Chomsky also has some interesting things to say.

Supporting workers and saving the planet.

2011-09-02T10:48:00.001-05:00

Hat tip to Progressive Breakfast for serving up this eloquent post by former AFL-CIO officer Joe Uehlein at Common Dreams.org.

The broad public interest that ordinary Americans truly seek is sustainability. Even those who are misled into believing that government budget deficits are the greatest threat to our future are motivated by a concern to put that future on a sustainable basis.

Our greed-driven society is economically unsustainable – witness the renewed catastrophe of the global economy. It is socially unsustainable – witness the destruction of the middle class and the polarization of rich and poor worldwide. And it is environmentally unsustainable – witness the melting of the Arctic, the rise in sea levels, and the unprecedented increase in extreme weather events caused by our failure to halt climate change.

Sustainability includes but goes beyond the environment to encompass social and economic sustainability as well. This is often summed up in the “triple bottom line” that calls on corporations to be accountable not only for their environmental performance, but for their economic and social performance as well.

To have a future itself, organized labor needs to reorient itself around the objective of providing a sustainable future for all working people and the world we inhabit. That means putting millions of people to work creating a sustainable economy, society, and environment.

Uehlein describes the personal history that led him to understand the connection between the environment and the well-being of workers in an earlier post at Common Dreams. This earlier post is also an excellent introduction to the issues involved in the effort to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-28T00:49:00.000-05:00

I'd rather be suffering through record heat in Oklahoma than going through Hurricane Irene back home in Philadelphia, thank you very much. According to the New York Times, the storm made landfall in North Carolina about 7:30 Saturday morning, and continued to move slowly northward along the Atlantic Seaboard as of a little after midnight Sunday morning. New York City shut down in anticipation of the the storm's arrival, including the city's subway system.

A variety of online written and live video sources reported that there were some deaths. The highest number I heard so far was nine. This seems like a remarkably low number given that the hurricane is affecting the nation's most heavily populated area. The relatively weak but massive hurricane seems to be causing widespread flooding and power outages.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a time-lapse video of the storm as it made its way from Puerto Rico and the Bahamas to the East Coast of the United States, and a graphic that will let you track the storm.

Given that it is seriously past my bedtime, I am reminded of this old folk song.

More news on the student exchange from hell

2011-08-18T08:22:00.001-05:00

The New York Times has picked up the story, which I found re-posted by the National Guestworker Alliance. The Times has a lot more information than what I was able to find online yesterday.

Yesterday, someone asked me, "But why didn't the students find out exactly what kind of job they would have?" I think that's a good question, but on the other hand, look at the Web site for the Council for Education Travel, USA, which the Times identified as "the organization that manages the J-1 visa program for the State Department." (This is the student cultural exchange program.) There is nothing on the organization's site that would arouse my suspicion.

On the other hand, the response given by their spokesperson to the Times didn't sit right with me.

Rick Anaya, chief executive of the council, said he had brought about 6,000 J-1 visa students to the United States this summer. Mr. Anaya said he had tried to respond to the Palmyra workers’ complaints. “We are not getting any cooperation,” he said. “We are trying to work with these kids. All this negativity is hurting an excellent program. We would go out of our way to help them, but it seems like someone is stirring them up out there.”

If people are being overworked and ripped off--apparently the tipping point came when the students discovered they were being charged much more for rent than other tenants in the apartment complex where they are housed--you can't expect them to have a positive attitude.

The student cultural exchange from hell

2011-08-17T19:01:00.002-05:00

On Wednesday, an incredible story showed up in my e-mail inbox from the folks at Jobs With Justice.

According to Jobs With Justice, this summer the Hershey's Company has been exploiting hundreds of student guest workers who thought they were coming to the United States on a cultural exchange. These students reportedly paid between three and six thousand dollars to take part in this program. Instead of a cultural exchange, they have been packing chocolates for Hershey's under abusive conditions. After automatic deductions for rent in company housing, the students are said to make only $40-$140/week.

Some of the students themselves tell their grim story. I found a link to the following video included with the Harrisburg Patriot News coverage of a Wednesday protest at the warehouse where the students work. A civil disobedience action that was part of the protest resulted in three arrests.

These jobs would otherwise be living-wage union jobs for people living in Central Pennsylvania, who could surely use the work. The students' supporters have blamed the Hershey company's willingness to subcontract the jobs for creating the situation.

According to the Associated Press, "An official for the The Hershey Company said the packing plant is run by another company, Excel(sic), and like all vendors is expected to treat workers fairly." The Harrisburg Patriot-News reports that "The warehouse [where the students work] is operated by Exel, an Ohio-based logistical firm that provides services for businesses in the Harrisburg area."

A Hershey's company Web page says that company seeks to "provide high-quality Hershey products while conducting our business in a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable manner." If they're sincere about being socially responsible, doesn't that include some responsibility to make sure that their contractors are also socially responsible?

The protester are demanding the end of exploitation of the student workers, the return of the fees they paid to come to the US, and that Hershey's hire local workers at a living wage to do this work. The students have also filed a complaint with the State Department alleging violations of the J-1 visa program under which they were brought to the United States. You can find more information about the protest at Web sites of the National Guestworker Alliance and Jobs With Justice.

Obama as the New Nixon?

2011-07-27T22:41:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman has a link to a fascinating and thoughtful post by Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser to Ronald Reagan and Treasury Secretary under George H.W. Bush. Bush argues that Barack Obama has been a moderate conservative president who continues the policies of his Republican predecessors--just as Richard Nixon was a moderate liberal who continued and expanded the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson.

In the process, Barlett gives a concise and cogent analysis of much of the political and economic history of the United States since the Second World War. For instance:

Liberals initially viewed Bill Clinton the same way conservatives viewed Eisenhower – as a liberator who would reverse the awful policies of his two predecessors. But almost immediately, Clinton decided that deficit reduction would be the first order of business in his administration. His promised middle class tax cut and economic stimulus were abandoned.

By 1995, Clinton was working with Republicans to dismantle welfare. In 1997, he supported a cut in the capital gains tax. As the benefits of his 1993 deficit reduction package took effect, budget deficits disappeared and we had the first significant surpluses in memory. Yet Clinton steadfastly refused to spend any of the flood of revenues coming into the Treasury, hording them like a latter day Midas. In the end, his administration was even more conservative than Eisenhower’s on fiscal policy.

And just as pent-up liberal aspirations exploded in the 1960s with spending for every pet project green lighted, so too the fiscal conservatism of the Clinton years led to an explosion of tax cuts under George W. Bush, who supported every one that came down the pike. The result was the same as it was with Johnson: massive federal deficits and a tanking economy.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Oklahoma City and Oslo

2011-07-25T13:02:00.000-05:00

Today both The Southern Poverty Law Center and Common Dreams have interesting analytical pieces comparing the recent tragic act of terrorism in Oslo with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Both posts point out that it's wrongheaded and dangerous to scapegoat Muslims as a threat to peace when right-wing Christian fundamentalists pose a serious threat.

The Common Dreams post is authored by Pierre Tristam, and crossposted from FlaglerLive.com. Tristam points out that after both incidents, news media initially made the assumption that the attacks were the work of Muslims:

After the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, speculation flew on television news stations about Arab terrorists seen in the vicinity of the federal building. The thought that a home-grown, Midwestern Army veteran of the first Gulf war could possibly murder 168 people, including 19 children at a day care center, seemed as foreign as those Islamic lands that were then inspiring so much of bigotry’s latest American mutant. McVeigh turned out to be as all-American as he could possibly be, with extras. His paradoxical worship of the Second Amendment was the faith that fueled his hatred of a government he felt had betrayed American ideals by enabling what he called “Socialist wannabe slaves.” His idealism of a golden-age white America was the Christian translation of al-Qaeda’s idealized caliphate.

It became quickly evident that the bombing in Oslo and the massacre on Utoya Island on Friday had been carried out by Anders Breivik, who surrendered to police 40 minutes after beginning his killing spree on the island. Yet the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on Saturday putting the blame for the attack on Islamist extremists, because “in jihadist eyes,” the paper said, “it will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West."

Of course, the problem is that there are is a strong, right-wing contingent of Anglo Westerners that is very much in opposition to such notions as freedom of speech and equality between the sexes. As SPLC's Heidi Beirich points out, Oslo terrorist Anders Breivik recently published a 1500-page tirade in which he accused something called "cultural Marxism"--meaning liberalism and multiculturism--with destroying "European Christian Civilization." Lest we merely dismiss Breivik as a lone fanatic, we should keep in mind that

Fears of “cultural Marxism” have a long pedigree in this country. It’s a conspiratorial kind of “political correctness” on steroids — a covert assault on the American way of life that allegedly has been developed by the left over the course of the last 70 years. Those who use the term posit that a small group of German philosophers, all Jews who fled Germany and went to Columbia University in the 1930s to found the Frankfurt School, devised a cultural form of “Marxism” aimed at subverting Western civilization. The method involves manipulating the culture into supporting homosexuality, sex education, egalitarianism, and the like, to the point that traditional institutions and culture are ultimately wrecked.

A number of hate groups, including the racist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), have raised the spectre of cultural Marxism as a way to explain contemporary events (click here to watch the CCC’s DVD on the theory). Some prominent conservatives also adopted the conspiratorial theory (culturalmarxism.org features MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan and Texas Congressman Ron Paul). In 2002, William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, a far-right outfit long headed by the now deceased Paul Weyrich (one of the founders of the Moral Majority), gave a speech about the theory to a Holocaust denial conference. Saying he was “not among those who question whether the Holocaust occurred,” Lind went on to lay blame for “political correctness” and other evils on so-called “cultural Marxists,” who, he said, “were all Jewish” (Lind is mentioned in passing in Breivik’s manifesto).

As an apprentice librarian, I believe it's important to uphold everyone's right to free speech, even when this speech is hateful. But it's important to recognize that hateful speech does have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are extreme.

A synonym for "debt crisis"? How about "charade"?

2011-07-22T17:22:00.000-05:00

Economist Michael Hudson, interviewed on Democracy Now! has an unusual way of pronouncing the word "charade," but his analysis of the artificial crisis around raising the federal debt ceiling is very revealing:

AMY GOODMAN: So, Michael Hudson, what could President Obama do?

MICHAEL HUDSON: He could say, "This debt ceiling has nothing to do with policy. You want to argue about the tax policy? Fine, let the Democrats and Republicans do it under non-crisis conditions. But this has nothing to do at all with the debt ceiling. If you want to refuse to increase the debt and plunge the economy into disaster, maybe you’d better talk to your campaign contributors and see what they want, because I know what they say. Your campaign contributors, in the Republicans, are my campaign contributors. They don’t like crises." And you’ll find that it’s all—the charade will—it’s just like pricking the balloon.

I've almost decided to just stop worrying about the debt limit. As Dean Baker points out, there could be some positive effects from failing to raise the debt limit:

If the question is default, that would end the supremacy of the U.S. financial industry. The downturn from a default would be very bad news for all of us, but the end of the supremacy of the U.S. financial industry would likely be good news for the rest of us. This would radically reduce the political power of this sector and their ability to steer the government to serve Wall Street's agenda. We could instead pursue economic policies that serve the rest of the economy with the resources consumed by the financial sector redeployed to more productive uses.

All work and no pay (but you could run off to Camp NaNoWriMo)

2011-07-01T08:44:00.000-05:00

Over at Truthout, they've picked up this excellent description of the conditions faced by US workers today, from "part time" college instructors, to working mothers, to blue collar workers, to the people who work in your local big-box chain store. The original article, by Monica Bauerlein and Clara Jefferey, comes from Mother Jones.

On a bright spring day in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled "on the side." It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.

"Ah," he said, "the speedup."

His old-school phrase gave form to something we'd been noticing with increasing apprehension—and it extended far beyond journalism. We'd hear from creative professionals in what seemed to be dream jobs who were crumbling under ever-expanding to-do lists; from bus drivers, hospital technicians, construction workers, doctors, and lawyers who shame-facedly whispered that no matter how hard they tried to keep up with the extra hours and extra tasks, they just couldn't hold it together. (And don't even ask about family time.)

I so wish I had written it myself. I have so lived every sentence and paragraph of this article, and I bet you have, too. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, because it holds the open secret to why ordinary people are getting kicked in the teeth by this economy. Fewer workers are working harder and harder for no increase in pay, while corporate profits are up 22 percent. (And the f***ers don't even want to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains.)

But enough ranting for the moment. I'm heading off for Camp NaNoWriMo to play with my novel. You could go, too.

Sharing the pain to reduce the deficit

2011-06-29T11:18:00.003-05:00

Richard Eskow at Campaign for America's Future has a good analysis of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders "Shared Sacrifice" plan for addressing the federal debt and deficit. As Eskow points out:

The question is whether we reduce the deficit only through spending cuts, or also by raising taxes on the rich. This should be an easy issue for Democrats to stand on ... and run on. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 72% of of those surveyed agreed that federal taxes should be raised for households making more than $250,000 - including 55% of Republicans. Yet even with the GOP leadership far to the right of the country on this issue, Democrats haven’t taken an unequivocal position.

Who's speaking for this Republican majority (and most everybody else) in Washington? Only Sen. Bernie Sanders, Socialist from Vermont. Sanders has unequivocally said that he won't support a deal to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes higher taxes on on the rich. Where are the Democrats? Nancy Pelosi's been marginalized from the discussions, even though a deal won't be possible without the support of Democrats in Congress. The White House and Harry Reid have refused to take a firm stand.

Sanders has gained lots of positive attention from progressives for his speech on the Senate floor Monday, in which he called for each dollar of cuts in social programs to be matched by a dollar of tax increases on the wealthy and corporations in order to achieve deficit reduction, as well as "significant cuts to unnecessary and wasteful Pentagon spending."

As has been noted in this space, the federal deficit and debt are something of a long-term problem for the United States, but their impact has been greatly exaggerated by Republicans looking for an excuse to help the wealthy at the expense of ordinary people. CAF has a useful Web page that examines this issue in light of the current controversy. A link on that page leads to a commentary by Dave Johnson that illustrates the dangers of crashing the economy if Democrats cave in to Republican demands in order to raise the debt limit.

Most progressives understand that the deficit is not a serious immediate economic concern in a country that is on the verge of a double-dip recession. Cutting government spending at this point is likely to make the problem worse. But the Republicans are not likely to concede any of this. What Senator Sanders has offered is a practical and principled compromise. If Republicans truly believe that reducing the deficit and debt is the most serious problem facing the country, they need to be willing for the wealthy and the powerful to share the sacrifice necessary to make that possible.

If you would like to add your support to this position, Senator Sanders has started a petition to President Obama to urge him to follow this approach. CAF has a page that allows you to contact your senators and congressperson about this issue. Maybe this time the Republicans have gone too far. Maybe ordinary people will be willing and able to take their country back.

Update: If even a Fox News commentator thinks that US corporations should pay more taxes, maybe there is real hope for this solution. (Hat tip to US Uncut for that link.)

Sexual harassment is not the same as private misconduct

2011-06-11T00:07:00.002-05:00

In a blog post at thenation.com, Amanda Marcotte dismisses "Weinergate" as destructive gossip. Dana Goldstein begs to differ, expressing anger that Rep. Weiner, an advocate for progressive issues such as universal healthcare, "would risk his important role in the public debate by giving strangers access to such embarrassing photographs He must have—should have!—known there was a chance the pictures could leak, putting his career at risk."

Echidne of the Snakes gets right down to the real issue, which is sexual harassment. (If you follow the link, you'll have to scroll down a bit to find the relevant section):

The case of Gennette Cordova is the one I have most evidence about. She did not invite Weiner's underpants picture and she was not pleased to receive it.

What happened to her next is disgusting. First, the press invaded her campus:

Media outlets from all over the world are calling and sending emails to staff at Whatcom Community College after a lewd photo was sent to a student from the Twitter account of a New York congressman.
Students at the college are being careful about talking to strangers on the campus, said KIRO 7 Eyewitness News North Sound reporter Lee Stoll.
WCC student Kelsey Rowlson said the campus has had a lot more visitors than usual this week.
"(The) 'Today' show was here today and then 'Good Morning America' called yesterday, … New York Times," said Rowlson, laughing.

This is a private individual, mind you. And here are the consequences, as she wrote about them some time ago:

The last 36 hours have been the most confusing, anxiety-ridden hours of my life. I've watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I've ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.
My friends have received phone calls from people claiming to be old friends of mine, attempting to obtain my contact information. My siblings have received tweets that are similar in nature. I began taking steps, though not quickly enough, to remove as much personal information from the Internet as possible.
Not because I "was exposed as Weiner's mistress" or because I "was responsible for the hack," as Gawker has suggested. I removed my information because I, believe it or not, do not enjoy being harassed or being the reason that my loved ones are targets of harassment.
I have seen myself labeled as the "Femme Fatale of Weinergate," "Anthony Weiner's 21-year-old coed mistress" and "the self-proclaimed girlfriend of Anthony Weiner."

It's like being pecked to death by vultures. Those labels she mentions appear to come mostly from the right-wing blogs. A summary can be found here, though I should warn that the quotes are sexist and racist and just plain nasty. Vultures. Did I already say that?

My only disagreement with Echidne is that vultures actually play a useful role in the circle of life. If vultures could read, they would probably be offended at being compared to the perpetrators of this media circus.

We're not broke

2011-06-02T09:29:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to Mike Hall at the AFL-CIO NOW BLOG for posting a link to this eye-opening position paper from the Economic Policy Institute. According to the paper's author, EPI President Larry Mishel

To fully understand the growth trends in income and wealth in recent decades, one must recognize that the growth has been very unequal: households at the top of the scale have seen much faster growth in their incomes and wealth accumulation than have those in the middle or bottom of the distribution. For instance, the top 10% of the income distribution has claimed almost two-thirds of the gains in income since 1979, with the top 1% alone claiming 38.7% of those overall gains. Moreover, the wealth of the median (or ‘typical’) household was lower in 2009 than in 1983, in spite of the 40.3% growth in the average household’s wealth.4 When the median is substantially lower than the average, it indicates very lopsided growth, which has been the case for the past 30 years: there was no growth in wealth for the bottom 80% of households, while those in the top fifth enjoyed a 50% increase.

So if the private sector has grown for the past 30 years (albeit very lopsidedly), and the projections for the next 30 years indicate comparable total income growth for the economy, then what is the story for the public sector?

It is true that all levels of government are facing budget difficulties as a result of falling revenues during the recession. Higher unemployment and depressed economic activity have certainly depressed tax revenues, and past tax cuts at all levels of government have seriously eroded revenues as well. But some policymakers and pundits want to have it both
ways: choke off the revenue stream to governments while slashing budget expenditures. For instance, the current domestic spending cuts proposed by the House of Representatives for this year were smaller than the revenues lost from extending the upper-income Bush tax cuts and the inheritance tax cut legislated last December

In other words, the extremely rich have benefited much more than everybody else from the nation's increase in productivity over the past 30 years. The extremely rich have also enjoyed huge tax cuts. If the rich paid a bit more in taxes, we could afford government programs that help poor and middle-class people. Choosing not to raise taxes on the rich is just that--a choice.

The full EPI report is easy to read and fairly brief. You can see it (and download it) here.

The real apocalypse is unfolding slowly

2011-05-25T10:51:00.000-05:00

Just as everyone was about to forget last week's Rapture hoax, here in Oklahoma we saw genuine apocalyptic forces at work yesterday afternoon. At least 13 people died in tornadoes that roared across the Midwest and South on May 24. This followed a tornado that killed more than a hundred people in Joplin, Missouri the day before.

Mother Jones environmental blogger Julia Whitty makes a convincing case that this month's dramatic increase in killer tornadoes has been fueled by a warming ocean:

Unusually warm surface waters in the Gulf of Mexico—about 2 degrees Fahrenheit/3.6 degrees Celsius warmer than normal—may be a factor in this season's tornado frequency and strength, according to National Weather Service director Jack Hayes.

Add that to an uncommonly southward jet stream track, reports Scientific American, and you've got a recipe for the kinds of disasters we've been seeing so far this year.

Her entire post, which includes many useful links and graphics, is well worth reading.

Targeting Justice for Workers

2011-05-24T21:46:00.001-05:00

Thanks to the Facebook page of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, I've learned that workers at Target Stores in the New York City area are trying to form a union. The UFCW provides several links to sources of information about this effort.

First, here's an article in the New York Times. Second, here is a post on Gawker. Finally, here is coverage of a controversy over CBS refusing to rent the union billboard space in Times Square to spread their message.

The Times reports that major issues for the workers are low pay and schedules that offer very few hours of work each week. Employees at a Target store in Valley Stream, N.Y. said that they rely on Medicaid and food stamps in order to support their families.

Predictably, a Target vice president told the Times that the company has “great benefits, flexible scheduling and great career opportunities for workers in all stages of life,”and that bringing in a union would wreck this lovely state of affairs.

Writing at Truthout, Mark Provost gives an eloquent explanation of why this argument doesn't hold water. Provost wasn't writing about Target specifically, but his argument certainly applies to the situation of the Target workers:

In the boardrooms of corporate America, profits aren't everything - they are the only thing. A JPMorgan research report concludes that the current corporate profit recovery is more dependent on falling unit-labor costs than during any previous expansion. At some level, corporate executives are aware that they are lowering workers' living standards, but their decisions are neither coordinated nor intentionally harmful. Call it the "paradox of profitability." Executives are acting in their own and their shareholders' best interest: maximizing profit margins in the face of weak demand by extensive layoffs and pay cuts. But what has been good for every company's income statement has been a disaster for working families and their communities.

I agree with Provost almost entirely. Corporate executives must be in really deep denial about what they're doing to their workers, or they wouldn't be able to live with themselves. But the bosses are going to hurt themselves in the long run if they keep shafting their employees. Workers who are badly paid and badly treated are workers who find it harder and harder to give a damn about doing a good job.

We can't count on corporations to have enough enlightened self-interest to know this. Workers need to be able to look out for their own needs. Individual workers do not have the power to defend themselves against corporate employers. This is why workers need the organized power of unions. When workers have what they need to provide a decent life for themselves and their loved ones, everyone benefits.

The end of the world? Been there, done that.

2011-05-21T12:02:00.002-05:00

Harold Camping is old enough to know better. Relying on a combination of complicated arithmetic and the interpretation of Biblical prophecies, the 89-year-old California engineer predicted that the world would end today, May 21, 2011. As Chris McGreal of The Guardian explains, one of the signs that the world was nearing its end was (you knew it) the growing acceptability of gay marriage:

Camping has also said that "gay pride" and same-sex marriage are "a sign from God that judgment day is very near". "No sign is as dramatic and clear as the phenomenal worldwide success of the Gay Pride movement. In the Bible God describes His involvement with this dramatic movement … We will learn that the Gay Pride movement would successfully develop as a sign to the world that Judgement Day was about to occur," he writes.

Camping predicted that the apocalypse would begin at six p.m. sharp in each time zone and proceed around the globe, with the saved rising up to heaven and the damned being destroyed by earthquake and fire. Predictably, he was wrong. (I'm no prophet, but my hunch is that God is not nearly so interested in enforcing patriarchal sexual standards as Camping thinks She is.)

Our friend Harold could have saved himself a fair amount of trouble and embarrassment if he'd read some history. One famous example is that of the Millerites in the 1840s. William Miller analyzed the Book of Daniel, chapters 8 and 9, and

counted 2300 years from the time Ezra was told he could return to Jerusalem to reestablish the Temple. The date of this event was calculated to be 457 B.C. Thus, 1843 became the date of Christ's return. As the appointed year grew closer, Miller specified 21 March 1843 to 21 March 1844 as his predicted climax of the age. The date was revised and set as 22 October 1844.

The resulting failure of the world to end became known as The Great Disappointment. This reminds one of the famous words of Jesus, that "no one knows the day or the hour" when the end will occur. But the idea of all the troubles of the world ending in an instant, the righteous receiving their just reward, and the evildoers going straight to hell appears to be irresistible to many. Harold Camping is the latest, but he won't be the last.

Back in 1998, PBS's Frontline produced a show called Apocalypse! The show's web page has an analysis of "apocalyptism" by University of Texas Professor L. Michael White and a historical timeline of the apocalyptic world view, up through 1999. It's too late for Harold Camping, but I hope the rest of you pay attention.

Pink Wave at the Oklahoma State Capitol, May 12

2011-05-12T14:11:00.000-05:00

This is what pro-choice activism looks like:

The Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice and Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma were among the sponsors of The Pink Wave.

Dollars & Sense on the budget deficit

2011-05-08T14:15:00.000-05:00

As I was working on my term paper about the federal deficit, I came across this article on the Web site of the progressive magazine Dollars & Sense. I may or may not use it in my paper, but it's a good read, and author Marty Wolfson manages to take on some common misperceptions. In the current economic situation, in which ordinary people are still suffering, massive government spending would be very useful. But we're not likely to get it. Wolfson explains why:

The ideological opposition to government spending remains a major obstacle. There are those who see an increase in the role of government as something to be avoided at all costs—even if the cost is the jobs of the unemployed.

Even among those who are not subject to such ideological blinders, there is still a political argument that resonates strongly. The argument is that government spending to create jobs will create large budget deficits, which will have terrible consequences for the American people. Politicians, pundits, and other commentators—in a frenzied drumbeat of speeches, op-eds, and articles—have asserted that the most urgent priority now is to reduce the budget deficit.

It is important to note that this argument is focused on current policy, not just the long-term budgetary situation. There is room for debate about long-term budget deficits, but these are affected more by the explosive growth of health-care costs than by government discretionary spending to create jobs.

For more information, read the rest of the article.

An interesting post on deficits and health care...

2011-05-07T15:36:00.000-05:00

...which I found on Health Beat while working on my term paper on the national debt. Here is a representative paragraph:

For the GOP, this goal of de-funding the health reform law has been increasingly intertwined with efforts to cut the federal deficit. The most recent conflation was House passage of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget plan that included privatizing Medicare and turning Medicaid into a block-grant program—ideas that provoked outcry among seniors and others in town hall meetings around the country. Yesterday, Rep. Dave Camp, (R-MI) who is chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, said that in the face of opposition from Democrats, he will not push forward with the Medicare privatization proposal.

Vermont passes health insurance reform

2011-05-07T14:25:00.000-05:00

Something I found while working on my term paper on the national debt: Vermont is "getting closer and closer to enacting a bill that’ll move the state toward a single-payer health-care system," according to blogger Ezra Klein.

Klein links to The Incidental Economist, who plans to summarize that bill next week. (Gotta love a blog with a name like "The Incidental Economist.")

Good news and bad news

2011-05-05T11:33:00.000-05:00

Bad news first. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that the US House has passed a draconian piece of legislation to drastically reduce both public and private insurance for abortion.Among other things, the report says that HR 3 would make permanent the Hyde Amendment prohibition on public abortion funding for poor women and prohibit the District of Columbia from using local funds to pay for abortions. Up until this time, the Hyde Amendment has faced renewal each year.

The good news is that House Republicans seem to have backed off on their plan to privatize Medicare. Thanks to Women's eNews on Twitter for pointing me towards that news item.

Mother Jones Speaks

2011-05-04T17:29:00.002-05:00

Hat tip to the AFL-CIO blog for posting this YouTube video of the marvelous labor organizer Mother Jones, reportedly recorded on her 100th birthday:

What is so disturbing about the killing of Bin Laden

2011-05-02T13:20:00.000-05:00

Naomi Klein on Facebook posted a link to this useful and disturbing article at thenation.com. Jeremy Scahill reports that Osama bin Laden was killed by sailors from the Joint Special Operations Command. To me, here is the most important part of Scahill's report:

Both President Bush and President Obama have reserved the right for US forces to operate lethally and unilaterally in any country across the globe in pursuit of alleged high value terrorists. The Obama administration's expansion of US Special Operations activities globally has been authorized under a classified order dating back to the Bush administration. Originally signed in early 2004 by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it is known as the “AQN ExOrd," or Al Qaeda Network Execute Order. The AQN ExOrd was intended to cut through bureaucratic and legal processes, allowing US special forces to move into denied areas or countries beyond the official battle zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Gen. David Petraeus, who is poised to become director of the CIA, expanded and updated that order in late 2009. "JSOC has been more empowered more under this administration than any other in recent history," a Special Ops source told The Nation. "No question."

If elements in the US executive branch, intelligence services, and military think that they have the right to take out bad guys without any kind of international due process, aren't they operating under the same ethical model that the terrorists are?

Things a person finds out late at night in the library

2011-05-02T01:16:00.002-05:00

Really and truly, I was looking for something for a school assignment when I found a blog post by Tom Hayden at thenation.com, commenting on the reported death of Osama bin Laden. Hayden has some interesting things to say:

If bin Laden is gone, and his network heavily damaged, what is left of the terrorist threat to our national security that justifies so many trillions of dollars and costs in thousands of lives? Because of a fabricated fear of bin Laden, we invaded Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was to deny sanctuaries to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In response, Al Qaeda moved into Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed tonight. So why are the Taliban in Afghanistan a threat to the security of the United States with bin Laden gone? Surely there are terrorist cells with lethal capacity scattered around the world, surely there might be revenge attacks, but there is hardly a centralized conspiratorial threat that justifies the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American troops.

Hayden goes on to compare bin Laden to Che Guevara, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo. Sometime after school lets out, I'm going to have to research this a little bit better, but there is something about this comparison that makes me uneasy. I think all three of those other guys, were, well. freedom fighters. And as best I've been able to tell, bin Laden was an advocate of an oppressive and thoroughly sexist world view. I'm not comfortable with the foreign policy that resulted in his death, but I still don't think that he was an admirable person.

So, Hayden is a regular commentator at The Nation, and I would like to think that he wouldn't act like some bad stereotype of a 1960s male radical and make a hero out of bin Laden because bin Laden was a macho guy who opposed the US. But he's been known to write blatantly sexist diatribes in the past. Maybe someone ought to clue him in that clinging to outdated macho posturing undermines his credibility.

What do you think?

Pornography, abuse, and free speech

2011-04-21T12:40:00.001-05:00

This started out as a post for my online library school class, but it got way too long. So I'm going to use it for a blog post:

Principles are always difficult to follow in real life, because principles are abstractions, and real life is messy and complicated. It’s not possible to draw up a principle that will account for all situations. That being said, my ethical approach to free speech has to do with the distinction between ideas and actions. Ideas that are “offensive” should be protected. Actions that harm actual people should not be protected, even if those actions are connected to the creation of ideas. (This standard certainly isn’t original with me, but I can’t remember the Supreme Court case that established it.) I’m going to limit my discussion to the subject of pornography and sexual abuse.

When Wendy Kaminer argues that simulations of child sexual abuse should be permitted, darn it, I’m gagging as I say this, but I think she’s right. (Now, I have to tell you that I have no idea how realistic these simulations are. If there’s any question, I think the burden of proof should fall on the defendant to prove that no actual children were harmed in the making of the film.) If I’m reading Kaminer correctly, when she defends portrayals of cruelty to animals, she doesn’t differentiate between simulations and the use of real animals. In that case, I disagree with her. Animal abuse that would be illegal if you did it in your back yard shouldn’t be protected just because you made a movie out of it.

This article about banning sexual offenders from the library has similar gray areas. It’s not clear how, in Attleboro, Mass., a Class II or Class III sexual offender is determined. But I think it’s defensible to ban people from the library who’ve been convicted of sexual or physical assault. The library needs to be a place where patrons can be physically safe. If I have a reasonable fear that my physical safety is endangered when I enter the library, my freedom to access information has been compromised. The nature of libraries is to have lots of secluded nooks and crannies (think rows of book stacks) that could be dangerous. Banning people who have committed assaults seems like less of a civil liberties encroachment than installing surveillance cameras.

Back in the 1980s when Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin proposed a model anti-pornography law, I thought they were taking the wrong approach. Pornography, I said, is a form of hate speech, and as such is constitutionally protected. (I was using the particular radical feminist approach that erotica is egalitarian, and pornography is sexist.) In retrospect, I think my condemnation of the model ordinance might have been too simplistic. The law didn’t create any criminal penalties for producing pornography, but allowed people who had been harmed by pornography to sue its creators. It’s similar to laws which allow someone who has been shot by a criminal to sue the gun manufacturer. In theory, the pornography industry could be using consenting adults to create sexually explicit videos for consenting adults, but the reality is much different.

This is a test...

2011-04-20T11:48:00.001-05:00

...in which I am demonstrating to a friend how to take a picture from her camera, put it on her computer, and upload it to a web site...

This was more fun than a trip to the vet.

A poor standard

2011-04-20T10:28:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the rating agency Standard and Poor's issued a warning about a possible future downgrade of the US government's credit rating. This was meant to underscore the supposedly precarious position our federal debt and deficit put us in. Dave Lindorff at This Can't Be Happening has a useful analysis of this announcement and the debt situation in general:

At least one economist burst out laughing on hearing about the S&P announcement. “They did what?” exclaimed James Galbraith, a professor of economics at the University of Texas in Austin, who formerly served as executive director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. “This is remarkable! It certainly will confirm the suspicions of those who have questioned S&P’s competence after its performance on the mortgage debacle.”

S&P, as well as the other two big ratings firms, all notoriously failed completely to spot the looming disaster of the banking collapse and financial crisis, and famously issued A ratings to mortgage-backed securities that later proved to be virtually worthless paper, as well as to the banks that had loaded up on the financial dreck.

As Galbraith explains it, “US debt consists of bonds issued in US dollars, which I assume the S&P analysts know. How can the US possibly default on its own currency? The obligation is in nominal dollars, which is to say when the bond retires, the US issues a check in dollars to cover it.”

Since the US prints its own currency (or actually just issues electronic payments to create new money) whenever it needs it, as Galbraith puts it, “As long as there is diesel fuel to power up the back-up generators that run the government’s computers, they will have the money to back their own bonds.”

Hat tip to Common Dreams, where I first found this article.

Deficit attention disorder

2011-04-15T12:50:00.000-05:00

Over on AlterNet, Joshua Holland calls out President Obama for giving a deficit speech that was long on "flowery talk" and short on substance:

The reality is that while our private profit-driven health-care system is unsustainably expensive, the U.S. spends less on the public sector than almost every other developed country. We're running large deficits because we're maintaining costly military operations in several countries and the federal government collected less tax revenue in 2010 than in any year since 1961.

Progressives will no doubt celebrate Obama's deft dissection of the GOP's budget gimmicks and his full-throated defense of the welfare state. But it was ultimately some thin political gruel with unemployment remaining at 9 percent and the foreclosure crisis continuing unabated. When Obama's on, as he was today, it's easy to forget that our biggest national debate is little more than a distraction from the real issues plaguing our economy.

The big question on my mind is, how much, in the end, will Obama going to cave in to the extreme budget agenda of House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan. Dean Baker explains exactly how bad Ryan's budget proposal is. It will "leave the vast majority of future retirees without decent health care by ending Medicare as we know it. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, most middle-income retirees would have to pay almost half of their income to purchase a Medicare equivalent insurance package by 2030." Baker also notes that:

he ostensible rationale for this attack is the country's huge budget deficit. This is garbage. As all the pundits know, the country has a huge deficit today because the Wall Street boys drove the economy off a cliff. If the government deficit were not propping up the economy, we would be looking at 11 or 12 percent unemployment, rather than 8.9 percent. Spending creates jobs, and at this point, it is not coming from the private sector, so the government must fill the hole.

Over the longer term, the projections of huge deficits are driven by the projected explosion in health care costs. President Obama's health care reform took steps toward constraining these costs, although probably not enough. Remarkably, Ryan's plan abandons these cost control measures, virtually guaranteeing that quality health care becomes unaffordable for all but a small elite.

Finally, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out how expanding Medicare could actually lower both health care costs and the federal deficit:

For starters, allow anyone at any age to join Medicare. Medicare’s administrative costs are in the range of 3 percent. That’s well below the 5 to 10 percent costs borne by large companies that self-insure. It’s even further below the administrative costs of companies in the small-group market (amounting to 25 to 27 percent of premiums). And it’s way, way lower than the administrative costs of individual insurance (40 percent). It’s even far below the 11 percent costs of private plans under Medicare Advantage, the current private-insurance option under Medicare.

In addition, allow Medicare – and its poor cousin Medicaid – to use their huge bargaining leverage to negotiate lower rates with hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies. This would help move health care from a fee-for-the-most-costly-service system into one designed to get the highest-quality outcomes most cheaply.

Estimates of how much would be saved by extending Medicare to cover the entire population range from $58 billion to $400 billion a year. More Americans would get quality health care, and the long-term budget crisis would be sharply reduced.

Home and Garden TV...

2011-04-13T10:48:00.000-05:00

...sounds like the place to find a surprising amount of diversity on television. Or that's what they say on NPR.

Last week...

2011-04-12T06:00:00.004-05:00

...was not a quiet week in Oklahoma City.

First, populist candidate Ed Shadid defeated bank officer Charlie Swinton in the runoff election for the Ward 2 City Council seat.Doug Dawgz Blog has the complete story.

Then there were the fires out by Spencer. Sadly, several peoples lost homes due to these blazes. Happily, no one got hurt seriously. I have some good friends who live out there who came through okay with their house and outbuildings intact. But it was a stressful and exhausting few days for them.

On Thursday night I took off my eyeglasses, picked up a shovel and a bucket, and did my best to help out by mopping up some hot spots. (I can sort of see without glasses, and fine ash can destroy a pair of plastic lenses very fast.) The shovel did a pretty good job, but I kept wishing for something to cut branches out of my way and something to break apart burning logs. In other words, I kept wishing I had a pulaski. When I described this to my friends afterward, they were baffled. You might have thought I was asking for a mythical contraption like a left-handed smoke shifter. But no, it's a wildland firefighting tool invented by the renowned fire boss Ed Pulaski, whose experiences in the great 1910 fire also brought about worker's compensation insurance. The firefighting tool he invented combines an axe with a grubbing hoe. You can see a picture here.

Being not only a former wildland firefighter, but also a former Girl Scout, I decided I wanted to be prepared for future occasions. After much searching, I was able to find what I needed at a chain home improvement store. They called it a "landscape axe." I would like to hope that this purchase would work to prevent my needing to use this tool in the future--a form of magic sort of like rolling down the car windows to bring on a rain storm. But I'm not optimistic. Maybe one dry spring doesn't prove anything, but I'm thinking this climate change thing is for real.

Below is a photo from back in the day. That's me on the right:

High technology reconsidered in a leisurely way

2011-04-11T10:13:00.000-05:00

A while back--on April 1, to be exact--National Public Radio inspired much interest and controversy with a story about the Slow Internet Movement. The idea was presented as being similar to the Slow Food Movement. Going back to dial-up Internet access could have as many positive effects as going back to preparing and eating food in a leisurely fashion.

Yes, of course it was an April Fool's joke. But at least one blogger confessed to wishing that the movement was real. In a way, the proprietor of Joy and Wonder might have her wish. Blogging pioneer Rebecca Blood discussed the concept in a post in June 2010. The idea is not to use slower technology (like dial-up modems) to access the Web. The idea is for bloggers to create posts in a slower and more thoughtful fashion:

The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time.

I love the Fast Web, and I value the work that is done there. But no matter how informed, intelligent, and talented a writer may be, an idea that has been returned to and then turned away from, repeatedly, is simply different from one that is formed in a few hours, based on that afternoon's best available facts. (via @ebertchigago)

Of course, anyone who has broadband Internet access knows that it isn't always fast. And dial-up Internet access was not always slow. The trick to making it work at an acceptable speed was to use text-based tools such as the Lynx web browser. Ten years ago, a very large part of the Web was still mostly text. Using the Internet has indeed become a richer experience because of the widespread sharing of audio and video files. But for someone who is in love with the written word, the text-based Internet had its virtues.

The newest and fastest technology isn't necessarily the best. Which reminds me of the original reason for this post, which was a story from April 7 that I found on Foreign Policy in Focus. Mark Engler contemplates the history of the Luddites. Engler notes that those who demonstrate in favor of global economic justice are often accused of being "Luddites," of wishing to destroy beneficial new technology in order to bring back a bygone day. But that's not what the global justice movement is trying to do, and it's not what the Luddites were trying to do, either:

This argument was ridiculous from the start. Global justice protesters never opposed modernity; they merely had the gall to ask whether a global society should be managed by and for multinational corporations. As part of a fundamentally transnational movement—linking environmentalists, unionists, indigenous rights, and other activists across borders—they proposed a very different type of internationalism than the one favored by the U.S. Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund.

As the historians among us will already know, the Luddites have been similarly slandered. They did not oppose technology per se, but rather asked some important questions about the ends to which new technological discoveries were being used and who in society would benefit from them.

Engler's entire post is well worth reading. And it's worth remembering that while the conventional wisdom is indeed conventional, it isn't always wise.

Is this typical springtime in Oklahoma?

2011-04-06T22:29:00.001-05:00

It seems a bit extreme to me. Wildfire Forces Evacuation Order In Spencer - News9.com

Why federal budget cuts will hurt women most

2011-04-05T16:51:00.000-05:00

Katha Pollit of I The Nation explains why women will be hurt the most by proposed cuts to the federal budget. I thought her analysis of the differential treatment by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker of predominately male and predominately female public employees union was especially insightful:

Governor Scott Walker sparked widespread outrage for limiting the bargaining rights of public sector unions to wages. Less noted was the curious fact that public safety workers—cops, firefighters and security officers—were exempted from his ire. The obvious, cynical reason is that unions representing teachers, nurses and social workers tend to support Democrats, while public safety workers are solid for Republicans. (That also explains why right-wingers like Walker feel free to bash teachers as incompetent, lazy freeloaders but never allude to the well-known romance between cops and doughnuts, let alone their generous retirement packages.) But is it entirely an accident that the workers deemed unworthy of full bargaining rights are overwhelmingly women, engaged in stereotypically female caring work, and that those whose rights are sacrosanct are men? In a statement on the budget, the University of Wisconsin System women’s studies consortium notes that union membership is crucial for a working woman’s advancement: it not only raises her wages by as much as a year of college but improves her chances of having healthcare even more than earning a college degree would have done, and gives her a measure of job security and a voice in the conditions of her work. Apparently Governor Walker thinks only men deserve those things. After all, this is a man who wants to repeal the state law requiring health insurers to cover birth control, eliminate the Title V family planning program, cut funding for sexual assault victims services and even reduce funding for a pregnant women’s smoking cessation program—oh, and eliminate Badgercare, the state healthcare plan, for 55,000 families a bit over the poverty line.

Meanwhile, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research explains some of the other shortcomings of the House Republicans budget cutting plan, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. And this CEPR report gives a brief but cogent analysis of the budget deficit issue.

Anti-choice bills advance in Oklahoma, other states

2011-03-30T19:02:00.004-05:00

The National Partnership for Women & Families: has the sad details.

Malalai Joya allowed visa, calls for US withdrawal

2011-03-28T11:35:00.001-05:00

Recently, the US government refused a visa to Afghan activist Malalai Joya for a trip to the US to promote the sescond edition of her autobiography, A Woman Among Warlords. Following a public outcry, the Obama administration has relented and allowed Joya into our country. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviewed Joya on Monday morning. Part I of the interview describes the recent situation in Afghanistan and why the US government initially denied Joya entrance into the US. In Part II of the interview, Joya calls for the end of the US occupation of Afghanistan.

Even abortion rights opponents agree THIS is unconstitutional...

2011-03-24T11:25:00.000-05:00

...according to the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Egypt faces possible counter-revolution

2011-03-23T06:00:00.001-05:00

Blogger Mark Levine on Opinion - Al Jazeera English interviews Egyptian pro-democracy activists who fear for the future of their revolution. One of these activists, Ramy Essam, was arrested and tortured by Egyptian security forces last week.

Ramy: What most people who have heard of what happened to me do not realise is that I was not there protesting that day. I was actually on my way to a concert downtown, but while I was on my way, I heard sounds and attacks coming from Tahrir, so I rushed there to see what is going on. I saw the army attacking the people on one hand, and on the other hand there was that group of thugs, pointing out certain people to the army officers so they would arrest them, and they pointed me out too, so I got arrested.

I decided to stay calm and not react in any violent way and see what happens when I meet the higher rank officers and talk to them to see what is going on. But as soon as we entered the museum, for 4 hours they kept beating us constantly, stripped us, shocked us with teaser guns, and even cut my pony tail. They were beating me so hard; at one point they held me on the floor and one of the officers jumped up in the air and then landed with his both feet right on my face.

Supporting one dictator while bombing another

2011-03-22T10:37:00.002-05:00

Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman discusses the US government's covert support for the dictatorship in Yemen with author and journalist Jeremy Scahill. On Friday, the forces of President Ali Abudullah Saleh killed 45 people and wounded 350 when they fired into a peaceful demonstration in the capital of Sana’a. This massacre prompted the resignation of a dozen of Yemen's top military leaders on Monday. Jeremy Scahill describes how President Saleh, a master manipulator, cooperated with the US "War on Terror" in order to defuse the hostility of George W. Bush--and used US aid to attack his own internal opponents. The clip takes about nine minutes to watch, and it's fascinating:

Look at this way cool Web site

2011-03-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

I'm talking about the Web site of MADRE :: Demanding Rights, Resources & Results for Women Worldwide. When I visited the site, they had excellent analyses of the US war in Afghanistan, a shelter for rape survivors in Haiti, the situation of women in Guatemala, the pro-democracy movement in Iraq, and the work of the Zenab women's organization in Sudan.

I discovered this website by following a link to this thoughtful post about the situation in Libya, posted on Facebook by Feminist Peace Network.

The Libya Dilemma

2011-03-21T12:52:00.001-05:00

Once again, a US president has launched military action against a brutal tyrant that our government previously courted as a friend. The contradictory history of the US government's relationship with Libya raises serious questions about whether the US can be trusted to intervene in Libya in a helpful way. As a feminist, I wonder why macho strategies involving missiles and bombs are promoted as the most effective way of dealing with foreign dictatorships?

The editors of The Nation pointed out recently that creating a "no-fly zone" is far from a foolproof plan for helping Libya's pro-democracy rebels. There is a serious risk of civilian casualties, and military action can divert attention from other, more effective means of pressure:

Financially strangling the regime by cutting off all sources of money from abroad, sharing real-time intelligence with the rebels, working with others to facilitate the flow of assistance to them while stopping the flow of pro-Qaddafi mercenaries into the country, if done in cooperation with the Arab League, all have as much or more promise with less risk than does the far more dramatic gesture of a no-fly zone.

Veteran journalist Robert Fisk argues that the motive for these military strikes is racist and imperialist rather than benevolent:

Yes, Gaddafi is completely bonkers, flaky, a crackpot on the level of Ahmadinejad of Iran and Lieberman of Israel – who once, by the way, drivelled on about how Mubarak could "go to hell" yet quaked with fear when Mubarak was indeed hurtled in that direction. And there is a racist element in all this.

The Middle East seems to produce these ravers – as opposed to Europe, which in the past 100 years has only produced Berlusconi, Mussolini, Stalin and the little chap who used to be a corporal in the 16th List Bavarian reserve infantry, but who went really crackers when he got elected in 1933 – but now we are cleaning up the Middle East again and can forget our own colonial past in this sandpit. And why not, when Gaddafi tells the people of Benghazi that "we will come, 'zenga, zenga' (alley by alley), house by house, room by room." Surely this is a humanitarian intervention that really, really, really is a good idea. After all, there will be no "boots on the ground".

Of course, if this revolution was being violently suppressed in, say, Mauritania, I don't think we would be demanding no-fly zones. Nor in Ivory Coast, come to think of it. Nor anywhere else in Africa that didn't have oil, gas or mineral deposits or wasn't of importance in our protection of Israel, the latter being the real reason we care so much about Egypt.

Fisk's analysis rings true to me. As horrified as I am by Qaddafi's atrocities, when I think back over the history of US military intervention in my lifetime, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan (to mention a very few instances), it has not gone well. Before this weekend, my country was already immersed in two undeclared wars. Now, as John Nichols points out, we've got a third. Nichols says that the results are as corrosive to our own democracy as they are destructive to the people we are purporting to help. I agree with him.

Finally, this morning Democracy Now! broadcast an interesting analysis of how the US government has orchestrated the war against Qaddafi under the cloak of a UN Security Council Resolution.

US government censors Afghan woman activist

2011-03-20T00:11:00.000-05:00

Can it happen here? reports that the US government has refused to allow Afghani feminist and peace activist Malalai Joya to enter the US to promote her book A Woman among Warlords. As blogger Janinsanfran notes:

Apparently the current State Department doesn't want people in this country to hear from a distinctive Afghan voice -- a woman's voice at that -- opposing our war in Afghanistan. Several Congress members are pushing for a reversal of the denial of Joya's visa.

Now that we live in age of YouTube, visa deniers have a harder time keeping us from hearing people they wish they could silence. Here's a clip of Malalai Joya taking on some folks who are a lot more dangerous than the average US consular flunky. At Afghanistan's Constitutional Assembly nearly a decade ago, she denounced war lords who intended to keep their power by becoming politicians under the newly imposed regime. Her daring act was electrifying; the response was ugly.

Here is the video Janinsanfran posted so you can judge for yourself:

Who's afraid of radical feminism?

2011-03-16T17:13:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Dean has an interesting analysis of radical feminism in the context of the case of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who faces sexual assault charges in Sweden. Dean questions the idea that Assange couldn't get a fair trial because Sweden's chief prosecutor is allegedly a "malicious radical feminist."

So what is radical feminism? Historically, radical feminism was a specific strand of the feminist movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late 1960s. Distinctive to this strand was its emphasis on the role of male violence against women in the creation and maintenance of gender inequality (as argued by the likes of Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon). And while a minority of radical feminists – most infamously Valerie Solanas – were hostile to men, radical feminism was much more instrumental in generating widespread support for campaigns around issues such as rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment.

However, in Britain at least, radical feminism has never been particularly dominant, partly because – in the eyes of many socialist and postcolonial feminists – it has been insufficiently attentive to the intersections between gender inequality and other categories, such as race and class. So Rod Liddle's peddling of the tiresome rightwing idea that radical feminism has destroyed the family, along with Dominic Raab's assault on "feminist bigotry" and the Vatican's efforts to address "distortions" caused by radical feminism, rest on at least two implausible assumptions. First, they reduce feminism to a horrifying caricature that never really existed and second, they make the frankly bizarre suggestion that radical feminism is the dominant ideology of our times. It would seem that not only do these radical feminists commit the outrage of not wearing makeup, but they use the time this frees up to consolidate their world domination. Or an alternative explanation might be that these are the paranoid anxieties of fearful anti-feminists.

Iowa woman jailed for thinking about abortion

2011-03-15T10:39:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Feminist Peace Network for a link to this story about an Iowa woman who was thrown in jail after confiding some of her thoughts and fears about her pregnancy to an emergency room nurse. Christine Taylor had become light-headed and fallen down a flight of stairs in her home. As blogger fiver explains:

Yes, as if Ms. Taylor's existing problems weren't enough, the anti-choice zealots got her jailed for 2 days for thinking of having an abortion, even though she voluntarily went to the ER to assure the health of her fetus. Funny how "pro-lifers" have never met a victim they don't want to punish. After three weeks, the District Attorney declined to prosecute, but not because of the obvious encroachment on a woman's right to choose (similar laws for which this woman was held exist in 37 states), but because she was only in her second trimester, and not third when she fell.

Fiver provides a link to the original story on change.org.

Register NOW to vote in OKC council runoff April 5

2011-03-10T17:09:00.001-06:00

If you live in Oklahoma City Council Ward 2, you'll have the opportunity to vote in a runoff election April 5. The candidates will be BancFirst Senior Vice President Charlie Swinton and Dr. Ed Shadid. If you're not already registered to vote, you need to have your voter registration form postmarked by tomorrow, March 11, if you want to vote in this run-off. According to the Oklahoma Elections Board "Voter registration applications are available at your County Election Board, post offices, tag agencies, libraries and many other public locations." Or you can download a voter registration form right here.

How can you tell if you're in Ward 2? In general, Ward 2 is bounded on the north by Northwest 122nd Street, on the south by Northwest 23rd Street. For the most part, the eastern boundary is I-235, and the western boundary is Portland Avenue. If you want to be sure, you can consult this handy map.

Why does OKC have so little citizen involvement?

2011-03-04T20:50:00.000-06:00

Last week's Oklahoma City election for city council members was, by local standards, a high-profile event. The Sooner Tea Party and the firefighter's union jointly supported two candidates. The local business elite had its own de facto slate of candidates, funded in part by the shadowy Committee for Oklahoma City Momentum.

All this excitement drew droves of voters to the polls March 1, according to NewsOK.com. In this case, "droves of voters" translates into oh, eleven or twelve percent of registered voters.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Oklahoma City has less citizen involvement in local government than any place I've ever lived. Is it because ordinary people who want to be politically involved use their limited time to work on state and national issues? It is because of a lack of high-quality journalism covering local political issues?

I moved here from western Oregon nine years ago, and frankly, I don't get nostalgic for the place very often. It rained eight months out of the year, and despite its liberal reputation, it was infested with neo-Nazis and the anti-gay, anti-woman Oregon Citizens Alliance. But one thing Oregon did have--at least in Eugene, where I lived--was widespread citizen involvement in local issues. The business elite usually triumphed in the end, but at least we put up a fight.

As far as I can tell, there were two concrete differences between Oklahoma City and Eugene.

First, in Eugene, city council meetings were held in the evening. When controversial issues came up, those meetings were sometimes very well attended. In Oklahoma City, by contrast, city council meetings take place on Tuesday mornings. In all the years I've been here, I've never been to a city council meeting. Have you?

Second, in Eugene, city council elections are held in even years, when voters are also voting for statewide and national elected offices. In Oklahoma City, city council members are elected in off-year elections when fewer voters are likely to head to the polls.

But are these two things causes of low citizen participation, or are they an effect? I would sure appreciate any comments from anyone who has some insight into this situation.

Mainstream Politics 101

2011-03-03T06:00:00.001-06:00

Rachel Maddow actually makes a good case that the two mainstream political parties are not exactly like. Who would have thunk it?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Economic Justice 101

2011-03-02T22:05:00.000-06:00

I like this post that commondreams.org picked up from the Guardian. Richard D. Wolff, an emeritus economics professor form the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explains how lower taxes on the ultra-rich have made life worse for the rest of us. For instance:

the richest Americans take the money they don't pay in taxes and invest it in hedge funds and with stockbrokers to make profitable investments. These days, that often means speculating in oil and food, which drives up their prices, undermines economic recovery for the mass of Americans, and produces acute suffering around the globe. Those hedge funds and brokers likewise use part of the money rich people save from taxes to speculate in the US stock markets. That has recently driven stock prices higher: hence, the stock market recovery. And that mostly helps – you guessed it – the richest Americans who own most of the stocks.

The one kind of significant wealth average Americans own, if they own any, is their individual home. And home values remain deeply depressed: no recovery there.

Cutting the taxes on the rich in no way guarantees social benefits from what they may choose to do with their money. Indeed, their choices can worsen economic conditions for the mass of people. These days, that is exactly what they are doing.

The whole post is well worth reading. Professor Wolff also has an interesting web site.

In midst of OKC council election weirdness, I'm voting for Ed Shadid

2011-02-27T21:43:00.000-06:00

Time flies when you're trying to get used to grad school, so I almost forgot that the Oklahoma City Council election is coming up on Tuesday. Council races come on a rotating schedule. This year seats are up for grabs in Wards 2, 5, 6, and 8. You can find a ward map here.

This year's city council race is bizarre, even by Oklahoma standards. In most of the races, voters are getting the moral equivalent of a choice between Lord Voldemort and Count Dracula.

Fortunately, in Ward 2 I've got a better choice. I'll be voting for Ed Shadid. Last fall, Shadid was an independent candidate for the Oklahoma State legislature, running with the endorsement of the Green Party. While Shadid isn't playing up his Green Party ties in the nonpartisan Oklahoma City Council election, I expect him to follow a similar progressive agenda. One or two of the other candidates in the crowded Ward 2 race also seem appealing, but Shadid seems to have the most resources and the best chance of defeating corporate candidate Charlie Swinton.

Meanwhile, in Wards 6 and 8, Sooner Tea Party supporters Adrian Van Manen and Cliff Hearron from Windsor Hills Baptist Church are challenging the incumbents. In Ward 5, incumbent Brian Walters is also an ultraconservative with Tea Party sympathies.(You may remember Walters's vote last year to oppose granting a permit for the gay pride parade.) According to newsok.com, the right-wing candidates in Wards 6 and 8 are supported by a PAC that was established by Oklahoma City firefighters. Is anyone else having a WTF moment here? The firefighters union is apparently supporting these guys because of their opposition to MAPS3. Okay, but the Tea Party isn't exactly a pro-union organization. Haven't the firefighters kept track of what's going on in Wisconsin?

So on one side, you have the populist right wing trying to win control of the City Council, and on the other side, you've got the the city's business elite lining up behind its own slate of candidates. This would be BancFirst Senior Vice President Charlie Swinton in Ward 2, accountant David Greenwell in Ward 5, employment agency owner Meg Salyer in Ward 6 and retired OG&E Vice Chairman Pat Ryan in Ward 8. According to the Oklahoma Gazette (see ward links in this paragraph), all four of these candidates have received $5,000 donations from Chesapeake Energy's PAC and Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon. There is also a shadowy PAC called Committee for Oklahoma City Momentum that is sending out campaign materials supporting the election of all four candidates. The Chamber of Commerce has denied contributing money to Oklahoma City Momentum. I finally found the group's web site, but two days before the election it is still "under construction." You can see ads the group has placed on newsok.com here and here.

If I lived in Ward 6, I would most likely vote for Jessica Holstein, who unfortunately doesn't seem to be running a very well-organized campaign. The big news of her campaign is that the Gazette decided to post some old and embarrassing photos of the candidate. Just when I thought the Gazette was trying to be an actual newspaper.

A great reason to get out on Saturday night

2011-02-03T12:12:00.001-06:00

It's been fun, but Snowpocalypse 2011 seems to be almost over. By Saturday, roads should be open and life should be almost back to normal (at least for a little while). If you're in Oklahoma City, or can get to Oklahoma City, here's a great way to celebrate: OKC's own Lauren Zuniga will be the featured performer at a poetry cafe at Church of the Open Arms on Saturday night (that's Feb. 5th) from 7-9 p.m. The poetry cafe is a benefit for the Oklahoma Coalition For Reproductive Justice.

January 22nd marked the 38th anniversary of the 1973 US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which for the first time guaranteed women in the early months of pregnancy the right to obtain an abortion. Both nationally and in Oklahoma, that right is under increasing attack. In 2010, the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice formed to defend abortion rights, and met with a surprising degree of success. The poetry cafe is free, (and there will be refreshments), but if you can make a donation, 100 percent of all money collected will go to support the work of OCRJ.

In the interests of full disclosure, I ought to say that I am one of the poets who will be reading that evening.

Hope to see you there.

Thoughts on WikiLeaks

2011-01-26T14:29:00.000-06:00

This started out as something I did for an online class assignment, and with some minor modifications, I thought it was worth re-posting:

As citizens of a democracy, we have responsibility to supervise the government bodies that act in our name. One of the major difficulties with official secrecy is that it transforms the relationship between citizens and government. When the government keeps secrets, I am no longer able to fulfill my responsibility as a citizen. Secrecy might allow government officials to perform necessary tasks -- but it might also allow them to support foreign dictatorships or collude in the murder of civilians. Without transparency, I simply have to trust them to do the right thing. Secrecy allows the government to become my master rather than my servant.

But it seems to me that this is a question of fact as well as of theory. In other words, what are the actual effects of the WikiLeaks disclosure? Have catastrophes resulted from this release of classified information, or has it enhanced the functioning of democracy? I suspect that some of you will disagree with me, but so far I think the results have been encouraging.

For instance, documents found on Wikileaks may have helped inspire the overthrow of the corrupt and authoritarian government of Tunisia. In a sort of chain reaction, the uprising in Tunisia seems to have inspired pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt. It looks to me as if the controversy surrounding WikiLeaks inspired the Guardian in the UK to collaborate with al Jazeera TV to release the Palestine Papers. (Controversy is good business for journalists. It increases readership.) The Palestine Papers, in turn, have offered important new information about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and inspired new hope for resolution of that conflict. Finally, the WikiLeaks controversy has opened up much needed discussion of the issue of government secrecy, as evidenced by this Time magazine article and also by this thoughtful post.

Julian Assange may not be an admirable person, (and I think that the rape charges against him are worthy of investigation) but on the whole, it seems to me that WikiLeaks has done good work.

Unions help counter corporate power

2011-01-21T23:46:00.000-06:00

Ellen Dannin persuasively demonstrates the need for workers to have unions in this post on Truthout. Dannin points out that

Today, we are reliving the dynamics of unchecked corporate power that led to the Great Depression. The Great Recession could not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention to the erosion of pay and working conditions and to the steady increase in poverty and unemployment.

We make a grave mistake when we blame unions for doing their job - for being a counterbalance to corporate power. Unions have a legal obligation to be the disloyal opposition. When there is no check on the steady growth of corporate power, we lose the balance and equality necessary to democracy. In fact, unions promote citizenship in the workplace and in their communities. Unions give workers rights of due process and equal protection in their workplaces.

The whole post is well worth reading.

Think globally, act locally March 1

2011-01-19T18:27:00.001-06:00

Some of my best friends don't vote as a matter of principle. They say they that voting merely decorates an oppressive system with the illusion of popular consent. If you have a philosophical objection to voting, well then, don't vote. I have no argument with you. In fact, about 47 percent of the time, I'm inclined to agree with you.

On the other hand, I have other friends who would read the paragraph above and disagree with it so strongly that they would jump up and down in frustration. They would cite the history of people of color and women who fought difficult and dangerous battles to gain the right to cast a ballot. Friends, I have no argument with you, either. In fact, if you live in Oklahoma City, I am writing this post specifically for you, to let you know about the City Council elections scheduled for March 1.

If elections really are important, local elections are possibly the most important elections we have. City governments deal with issues that affect the lives of ordinary people on a day-to-day basis. City governments are potentially easier to reach and to influence than governmental bodies on a state or national level. And in Oklahoma it seems--at least in Oklahoma City--the city government attracts very little attention and draws very little participation. For instance, the vote on the MAPS III tax proposal--which taxed the city's poorest citizens to benefit the most affluent citizens--drew 31 percent of the vote, according to NewsOk.com. This was about twice the usual turnout for a city election.

Business as usual in city government means government by the rich, for the rich. If we want that to change, we need to participate. And given the abysmally low number of people who vote in city elections, if progressives were to educate ourselves about local candidates and issues and make an effort to get ourselves to the polls, we would have a chance of creating real change.

So, here's a little bit of information to start out with. As I said, the next City Council election is March 1, with seats from wards 2, 5, 6, and 8 up for grabs. If you need to know which ward you live in, you can check out this handy ward map. If you would like to find out who your current City Council member is, you can check this page. If you think you might like to run for the City Council yourself, you can find the information about how to do so here. But you need to get cracking. The deadline is coming up very soon.

If you aren't already registered to vote at your current address, you will need to register by 24 days before the election. If I counted right, the deadline would be February 4. But don't trust my ability to count. Get it done as soon as you can. You can download a registration form here. If you're planning to be out of town on March 1, you can sign up for an absentee ballot.

I'll try to write more about this issue as the time approaches. But don't wait for me. Go find some stuff out and report back.

Thank you, and good night.

Is this 2011 or 1984?

2011-01-06T18:37:00.000-06:00

The rulers of the dystopian society portrayed in George Orwell's 1984 had a talent for using language that turned reality on its head. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery, and so forth. We know that such unfortunate manipulation of meaning is not confined to the world of fiction. Today's electronic news brings two examples:

Spinifex Press has discovered an alarming blog post suggesting that Pope Benedict considers child sexual abuse to be "normal." The blog reposted a December 21 article from the Belfast Telegraph. “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said, according to the Telegraph. “It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than' and a ‘worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself.” The Telegraph further reports that victims of sexual abuse by priests were outraged by these remarks. One can only imagine.

Meanwhile, the National Partnership for Women and Families reports that US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia doesn't believe that the 14th Amendment prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. At least, that's what Scalia told California Lawyer magazine:

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?
Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don't like the death penalty anymore, that's fine. You want a right to abortion? There's nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn't mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

The NPWF notes that the New York Times found this view "jarring." The Times went on to note that

No less dismaying is his notion that women, gays and other emerging minorities should be left at the mercy of the prevailing political majority when it comes to ensuring fair treatment. It is an “originalist” approach wholly antithetical to the framers’ understanding that vital questions of people’s rights should not be left solely to the political process. It also disrespects the wording of the Equal Protection Clause, which is intentionally broad, and its purpose of ensuring a fairer society.

On the other hand, should Scalia's strange view of the 14th Amendment prevail, it would all of a sudden become crystal clear that we really do need the Equal Rights Amendment.

The down side to DADT repeal

2010-12-31T12:12:00.001-06:00

This post on Truthout just brightened my morning. Blogger Jess Guh gives a cogent analysis of the drawbacks of the recent repeal of the US military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy for gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members. As Guh observes, "yet another oppressed minority group has been pulled into being exploited by the American military-industrial complex."

Guh asks whether she is the "only queer person in the country that is sad about the repeal of 'Don't Ask Don't Tell'?" I would like to assure her that she is not. Whether she knows it or not, Guh's principled criticism of the US military is not something new. Once upon a time, there was a radical lesbian feminist movement that worked to make the world very, very different.

Like most stories that begin "once upon a time," this one is an oversimplification. For one thing, that movement isn't really gone. (That's a blog post for another time.) For another thing, it wasn't just one movement, it was at least 30 of them. We argued about sexuality, about the best way to get rid of racism, about whether to work with male allies, about dozens of other things. But we were clear that we wanted the world to change in fundamental ways. We didn't just want a piece of the pie, we wanted a whole new recipe. We wanted to get rid of patriarchy, capitalism, US imperialism, and to create an egalitarian world. (I pause after writing that sentence. My Facebook friends--some of whom don't know me very well--are going to see this post. Okay friends, if you didn't know about my radical past, I suppose it's time you found out.)

Sometime during the early 1990s, something shifted. As I recall, it started with the first Gulf War, which, if nothing else, was a great propaganda victory for then-President George H.W. Bush. Or maybe the change was inspired a rash of anti-gay ballot measures in places like Colorado and Oregon. All of a sudden, it seemed that instead of working for radical change, everyone wanted to join the army and get married. In such dangerous and rightward drifting times, I suppose it was a natural response for many activists to try not to appear too subversive to the established order.

But the established order has some fundamental problems of injustice and unfairness, and now new generations of activists are discovering this. As Jess Guh writes:

The American military's track record of inclusion is poor by even the lowest of standards. Black Americans were first allowed to serve in the military during the Revolutionary War, when Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, promised freedom to any runaway slave that fought for the British army. George Washington, needing more soldiers, followed suit. I'll let you guess how many of them actually received their promised freedom. Due to fears of giving Black folks weapons and racist doubts that they were mentally capable of being good soldiers, they were not even allowed to officially serve and enlist until 1862 during the Civil War, despite having fought courageously since the revolutionary war. During WWI, US military leaders decided they would rather use black units for suicide missions where they would likely die, instead of sending their white counterparts. For their valiant efforts, no awards or citations would be given to those soldiers of color until 1996, nearly 80 years later.

This philosophy of contempt and "we'll let you serve, but only on our terms" is not limited to race. Women, even those who meet the physical ability requirements, are officially banned from ground combat. But once again, when bodies are needed, the military conveniently changes its mind. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it's been well known that due to manpower shortages,women have been serving in front-line positions identical to those of men, yet there has been no budge in the official policy. And lest you even entertain the notion that the ban represents some sort of arcane but well-intended form of chivalry, consider that a 2003 survey of female veterans found that 30 percent reported being raped while in the military (women serving in Iraq were reportedly being hospitalized for and even dying of dehydration because they would avoid drinking water in order not to have to make runs to the lavatory alone at night). That's not even counting cases of sexual assault and harassment. In 2007, only 181 out of 2,212 reported sexual assaults were referred to courts martial. The equivalent arrest rate for these charges among civilians is five times that.

It's well worth your while to read Guh's entire post, and then to visit her blog.

Time to stop History from repeating himself

2010-12-24T12:18:00.002-06:00

Nearly 100 years ago, 146 garment workers, mostly women, burned to death at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Workers could not escape because the fire escape doors to this sweatshop were locked. This catastrophe inspired a memorable speech by labor activist Rose Schneiderman.and served as a symbol of the dangers and indignities suffered by workers. According to Wikipedia, the fire also galvanized the International Ladies Garment Workers Union which,

(w)orking with local Tammany Hall officials such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers such as Frances Perkins, the future Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration, who had witnessed the fire from the street below, pushed for comprehensive safety and workers’ compensation laws. The ILGWU leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond. As a result of the fire, the American Society of Safety Engineers was founded soon after in New York City, October 14, 1911.

Although unions have been under attack and workers' rights and protections have eroded during the right-wing backlash of the last 30 years, I'd like to think that a catastrophe such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire would not occur again. I'd like to think that this fire would be replayed only as a historical exhibit, as part of a work of literature such as Beyond the Pale, by Elana Dykewomon or as the occasion for a commemorative event.

But no. Events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire are still taking place today. We know that US manufacturing jobs have been moved to places where workers have even fewer protections than we do in the United States. The results are predictable. According to this post on change.org, those of us who are busily purchasing fashionable clothing as holiday gifts do not know that

the young, destitute women in Bangladesh who produce those clothes in almost slave-like conditions aren’t feeling the holiday spirit after more than two dozen of them were burned to death last week.

28 workers were killed when a massive blaze broke out in an unsafe, multi-story sweatshop known as the "That's It Sportswear" factory in the Ashulia industrial park just north the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. With a number of the exits blocked, most of the victims were burned to death, some trampled to death, some killed by suffocation and others jumped from the flames to their death. Several dozen more suffered severe burns.

According to post author Benjamin Joffe-Walt, the factory, owned by the Ha-Meem group, supplies clothing to more than a dozen US clothing companies and retail stores. The December 14 fire was the latest in "a series of deadly incidents in clothing factories in Bangladesh." For instance, a similar incident in February took the lives of 21 workers. Joffee-Walt also reports that:

Last week's fire also came just days after deadly protests over clothing manufacturers' failure to implement a required 80 percent increase in the minimum wage to 3,000 taka a month (about $42). That's right folks, the workers who were burned alive while making $25 T-Shirts were likely being paid some $24 a month, less than $1 a day.

To sign an online petition calling on US clothing companies and retailers to demand better conditions for the workers, follow this link. More suggestions for activism can be found here. One Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was too many. We don't need any more.

Bernie Sanders is right

2010-12-12T15:04:00.000-06:00

Social media and mainstream news sources have been all a-twitter about Senator Bernie Sanders’s long speech on the floor of the US Senate on Friday against the flawed tax cut deal worked out between Republicans and President Obama.

I haven't been able to find a good summary of the major points made by Sanders in a speech that lasted more than eight hours. But there was a link to this Rachel Maddow commentary on Sanders's Facebook page, and here is a link to the transcript of the entire speech. Here's a brief sample from close to the beginning:

Economists on both ends of the political spectrum believe that if we are serious about addressing the horrendous economic crisis we are in now, 9.8 percent unemployment, there are far more effective ways of creating the jobs we have to create than those tax proposals. With corporate America already sitting on close to $2 trillion cash on hand, it is not that our friends in corporate America don't have any money, we have to help them. They have $2 trillion cash on hand. The problem is not in my view that corporate taxes are too high; it is that the middle class simply doesn't have the money to purchase the goods and products that make our economy go and create jobs.

I think if our goal is to create the millions and millions of jobs we need, and if our goal is to make our country stronger internationally in a very tough global economy, I would much prefer, and I think most economists would agree with me that a better way to do that, to create the millions of jobs we have to create, is to invest heavily in our infrastructure.

If you would like to tell your own US senators and representative how you feel about the tax cut deal, you can do that via usa.gov.

The trouble with Obama's tax deal

2010-12-09T18:28:00.001-06:00

The controversy has been bubbling for several days over President Obama's tax cut deal with Congressional Republicans.

As the Los Angeles Times puts it, this deal would "extend the Bush-era tax cuts for all taxpayers, keep jobless benefits flowing for 13 months and continue a series of tax breaks for the middle class." It would also include "a GOP-backed proposal to revamp the estate tax and lower Social Security payroll taxes by 2 percentage points to put more money into workers' pockets."

Listening to Obama defend this deal, I was impressed by his sincerity. I think the man really thinks he would be putting the economy and ordinary working people in danger if he fights the Republicans instead of compromising. But I think he's wrong.

For one thing, as Chuck Collins points out over at AlterNet, this deal tends to further concentrate wealth in the hands of the very richest US citizens, while taking money away from ordinary citizens. For another thing, as The Other 98% point out, we as a nation have a lot better uses for $700 billion than extending a tax break to the very wealthiest citizens. On top of all that, this "compromise" is bad politics for the president. Paul Krugman argues persuasively that this deal makes Obama's re-election in 2012 less likely.

Worst of all, as Dean Baker points out, the temporary two percent cut in Social Security included in the package could actually open the way to a right-wing attack on Social Security:

Democratic officeholders have had difficulty standing behind tax increases for the very richest people in the country. It is difficult to imagine them sticking their necks out for tax increases that will hit low and middle-income workers. In other words, it is very plausible that in the 2012 election, Democrats will feel the need to take the Republican pledge that they will never raise taxes. This means that the reduction in Social Security taxes may not be for just two years, it may be for the indefinite future.

In principle there is nothing wrong with financing a portion of Social Security benefits with money from general revenue. This was in fact the original intention of President Roosevelt when he designed the program. However, the fact is that the program has always been financed exclusively by the Social Security tax that is taken from workers’ wages. This makes the tax regressive, but it has the advantage that workers can quite legitimately say that they have paid for their benefits. This will be to some extent less true if a portion of the funding comes from general revenue rather than payroll taxes. In short, getting funding from general revenue opens a new line of attack on the program.

For all of these reasons, I hope that House Democrats are successful in their attempt to keep this plan from passing without serious renegotiation.

Happy Birthday, Pauli Murray

2010-11-24T17:39:00.001-06:00

In her philosophical autobiography, Outercourse, Mary Daly makes several references to the civil rights activist, lawyer, and professor Pauli Murray, who was also one of the first women in the US ordained as an Episcopal priest. Murray was a fascinating and inspiring woman who maintained a lifelong commitment to the cause of universal human rights. You can start to find out more about her by visiting the Pauli Murray Project, and by reading her Wikipedia biography.

November 21st was the 100th anniversary of Pauli Murray's birth.

Honoring women's peace camps on Armistice Day

2010-11-11T10:24:00.003-06:00

Today, on Armistice Day, I would like to honor the work of activists in women's peace camps who have struggled to end war as a way of solving disputes. A few of those camps included

And here is a link to the Greenham Common Peace Camp Songbooks site.
Enjoy!

If you're wondering what I'm doing this month...

2010-11-03T18:14:00.000-05:00

...Joey Rodman has described it exquisitely over at Red Dirt Chronicles. Doesn't that sound like fun? If you'd like to write your own novel this month, you can sign up at the NaNoWriMo web site.

Jari Askins may have lost my vote...

2010-10-29T09:50:00.000-05:00

...with this statement made during a recent debate:

"I am an Oklahoma Democrat. Oklahoma Democrats are conservative. We are not extreme," Askins said to open the hourlong debate at the University of Central Oklahoma. "I am a pro-life, pro-gun, pro-education, pro-business, protect-our-borders Democrat."

I am a Democrat of a different sort. I am a pro-choice, pro-worker Democrat, in favor of sensible and humane immigration reform. Askins seems to imply that Democrats such as myself are extreme, or even non-existent. If she is going to try steal votes from Mary Fallin by using rhetoric similar to Fallin's, maybe she doesn't want my vote. I am going to vote on Tuesday, but I am sorely tempted to abstain on the governor's race.

Why might the right wing prevail in mid-term elections?

2010-10-25T11:15:00.002-05:00

Truthdig has posted one answer by commentator Chris Hedges:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

Human rights are indivisible

2010-10-20T12:06:00.000-05:00

My life has become very busy and full. One of the things that has kept me from making regular posts on this blog has been a women's studies class I've been taking at the University of Oklahoma, WS 3220, US Women's Movements. We've just finished our study of the first wave of the US women's movement, up to the time that women won the vote in 1920.

One of the saddest features of this history--and one of the elements that has much applicability to social struggles today--is the way that the rich white men with the most power are able to set everyone else at each other's throats, women, people of color, workers, and so forth.

In an effort to protect the safety of freed slaves after the Civil War, was it justifiable for human rights advocates to push for African American men to get the vote, while leaving out all women? In the early 20th century, was it okay for white woman suffragists to tolerate discrimination against African American voters to win the support of the racist South?

Martha Gruening said no.

A Google search doesn't reveal much information about who she was. There doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia profile. There is a link to a New York Times article about her arrest in 1910 for inciting women workers to strike in Philadelphia. There is a brief biographical essay here. She was a lawyer and human rights activist who seems to have been a written brief articles for The Nation.

In September 1912, she also published this eloquent essay in The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP. If I'd been alive in 1912, I hope I would have had the sense to write something like this. Here is an excerpt:

If such incidents have been less frequent in recent years it is not because the profound and close connection between the Negro and women movements no longer exists. The parallel between their respective situations is as clear to-day as it was in 1848, but it is too frequently ignored by the reformers on both sides. Both have made some progress toward complete emancipation, the gains of women in the direction of enfranchisement being seemingly the more lasting. Both, however, are still very largely disfranchised, and subject to those peculiar educational, legal and economic discriminations that are the natural results of disfranchisement. And finally, both are being brought with every onward step nearer to the identical temptation -- to sacrifice the principle of true democracy to the winning of a single skirmish. So when one sees a national body of suffragists refusing to pass a universal suffrage resolution, one is compelled to wonder at the logic of those who, knowing so well what disfranchisement means, would allow it to be inflicted on others. "Let us not confuse the issue," these suffragists plead, some in good faith. Yet the confusion, if any, exists only in their minds. Here are not two distinct issues at stake, but merely the vital principle of democracy. Others insist that the granting of the ballot to women must precede all other reforms because "women have waited long enough" and recall the fact that women were forced to stand aside and see Negro men enfranchised at the close of the Civil War. This is undoubtedly true and was quite justly a source of bitter disappointment to the suffrage leaders of that day -a disappointment we should not underestimate -- but merely to reverse the principles in an unjust occurrence is not to work justice. It is strange to see so many suffragists who point with pride to the action of Garrison in withdrawing from the anti-slavery convention, blind to the larger significance of that action. Stranger still to see them following, not Garrison's lead, but that of the convention in their attitude toward colored people, and forgetting that no cause is great to the exclusion of every other. This Robert Purvis, a noted colored leader, understood, as is shown by his noble reply to the suffragists' appeal: "I cannot agree that this or any hour is specially the Negro's. I am an anti-slavery man. With what grace could I ask the women of this country to labor for my enfranchisement and at the same time be unwilling to put forth a hand to remove the tyranny in some respects greater to which they are exposed?" This is what all suffragists must understand, whatever their sex or color -- that all the disfranchised of the earth have a common cause.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Anna Julia Cooper

2010-09-30T10:35:00.000-05:00

Today I was sitting on my front porch, enjoying my morning cup of tea and re-reading Eleanor Flexner's history of the first wave of the US women's movement, when the mail carrier walked up my street and handed me an envelope. The envelope contained the delightful surprise of a charming birthday card from friend. (I'm not sure why I was surprised by receiving a birthday card, given that it's about to be my birthday, but I was.) Even more delightful than the card was the stamp on the envelope. It bore the name and picture of Anna Julia Cooper.

I did not recall ever having heard of Anna Julia Cooper, although Flexner mentions her briefly in Century of Struggle. According to her Wikipedia biography, she was obviously a remarkable woman. She was a born a slave in North Carolina in 1858, and received her early education at a school founded by the Episcopalians to train teachers to work with former slaves. The school had a "Ladies Course," and "the administration actively discouraged women from pursuing higher-level courses. Cooper fought for her right to take courses, such as Greek, which were reserved for men, by demonstrating her scholastic ability."

She worked many years as a teacher and principal at the M Street High School in Washington, DC, and during that time published an influential book called A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South. At the age of 56 in 1914, she began working on her doctorate at Columbia University, but had to interrupt her education the following year when her brother died, leaving behind five children whom Cooper adopted. She finally finished her doctorate at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1925, at the age of 67. She lived to the age of 105.

In 1893, Cooper addressed the World's Congress of Representative Women at the Chicago World's Fair. Blackpast.org has posted the speech she gave on that occasion to a mostly white audience. Her words have particular poignancy, because the white-dominate women's suffrage movement, once a radical egalitarian movement, had become conservative and segregated. Here is just a small part of this eloquent speech:

Now, I think if I could crystallize the sentiment of my constituency, and deliver it as a message to this congress of women, it would be something like this: Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken. A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier an its weakest element. Least of all can woman's cause afford to decry the weak. We want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this Congress, demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity. The colored woman feels that woman's cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, is sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; not till the universal title of humanity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is woman's lesson taught and woman's cause won—not the white woman's, nor the black woman's, not the red woman's, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman's wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her "rights" will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of earth.

This is supposed to be a controversy?

2010-09-22T19:02:00.004-05:00

Christine O'Donnell, an insurgent Republican candidate who reached out to Tea Party activists, has won the G.O.P. nomination for a US Senate seat in Delaware.

Last night, at a dinner for a friend's birthday, I saw a segment about O'Donnell on CNN (television is ubiquitous in restaurants these days). I couldn't make out what all the fuss was about, but whatever it was, it was seriously weakening her campaign. Had she supported some kind of right-wing hate group? Cheated on her taxes? Engaged in stock market fraud?

Um, no. A little poking around on the Web today established that she admitted to spending a little bit of time practicing Wicca.

I am baffled and amazed that supposedly progressive people are taking the opportunity to -- dare I say "crucify"? -- the candidate for her religious experimentation. Is the candidate otherwise beyond criticism? Is her association with the far-right Concerned Women for America unworthy of comment? Can't she be challenged on policy issues?

Okay, I'll quit asking rhetorical questions now. But I will recommend you read a little post by Wes Isley, who has some really good things to say. For instance:

While O'Donnell's revelation may embarrass her staunchly conservative followers and fill her detractors with glee, there is more going on here. Check out the comments on pagan blogs like The Wild Hunt or Pantheon, and there's obviously more at stake than just O'Donnell's political future. Practicing Wiccans and other pagans--a group I loosely lump myself into--are upset at how their faith is once again being portrayed in the media. Ask yourself: Do you ever hear of anyone "dabbling" in Episcopalianism? Any Jewish "dabbler" stories out there? But whenever someone shows an interest in an alternative spiritual path, it's considered "dabbling," which carries dismissive connotations. But those who try out various Christian or other mainstream faiths are "soul searching."

Also implied in O'Donnell's statements about her brief Wiccan past and the media's treatment of those comments is the opinion that anyone who would practice witchcraft or something like it is simply too silly to be in public office. Someone might want to tell Dan Halloran, a pagan who represents New York City's 19th district. From my own perspective, Wiccan and pagan beliefs are only silly to those who don't know what they're talking about, which appears to be the case with O'Donnell herself. She may have, indeed, been hanging out with some "questionable people," and they may have told her they were witches and worshipped Satan, but her passing experience resembles nothing of what I know about Wicca. A friend of mine from high school is today a practicing witch, and I had the honor of conducting her wedding in 2009--no blood or Satan in sight.

And if pagans aren't considered "silly," then we're "dangerous" or "Satanic." But these weapons are used against other faiths as well. Currently, Muslims are everyone's favorite bogeyman. And don't forget the questions former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney faced about his own Mormon faith when he ran for President in 2008.

Hear, hear. Those of us who want to criticize the Republicans for their religious zealotry, who say that religious freedom is a value that we affirm, would do well to practice what we preach.

What is so bad about socialism?

2010-08-18T20:02:00.000-05:00

The most recent issue of the Oklahoma Gazette has an interesting article about the Oklahoma Sponsoring Committee.

According to the OSC web site, this is a coalition of religious congregations that strives "To work with other institutions, including public schools and civic groups, to learn to use the democratic process effectively so that families can have a voice in what happens to their neighborhoods, schools and the greater community."

The Gazette article explores the controversy that has developed around the group. Although the OSC appears to be a coalition of both conservative and progressive religious groups, they are being accused of being socialists. This accusation seems to be based largely on their affiliation with the Industrial Areas Foundation. According to the Gazette, the "the OSC contracted with the Industrial Areas Foundation last year for training and technical assistance."

The OSC itself takes great pains to disassociate itself from socialism. In a section addressing "common questions" on their web site, they say:

Are you Marxist, Communist or for Socialism?
The answer on all accounts is again "No". We're actually the opposite in that we believe in empowering the individual citizen and decentralizing power and that a free market economy is the best environment to cultivate the strong family values our faith tradtions teach us.

Many people confuse advocating for the common good with socialism. Social justice does not mean socialism. For a more elaborate explanation, click here. If you ask someone who is calling the organization communist or socialist to define what they mean, chances are they won’t even know. The practice of calling people communists or socialists when they don’t fall in line with your ideology is called “red baiting”.

So what is socialism, anyway? According to Wikipedia, "Socialism is an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.^[1]^[2]^[3]" To me, this sounds like a point of view that a reasonable person should be able to propose without being accused of having horn, cloven feet, or elaborate plans to enslave the entire population.

Other reasonable people might believe that capitalism is a better way to organize economic life. According to Wikipedia, "Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit; supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are determined mainly by private decisions in the free market, rather than by the state through central economic planning; Profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses."

Some supporters of capitalism seem to believe that any time that government places any limits on what people are permitted to do with their private property, the very next step is going to be socialism. Placing any limits on what capitalists are allowed to do is exactly the same thing as endorsing the worst excesses of the old Soviet Union.

A reasonable person might note that capitalism without rules results in serious abuses of power, and in results that are catastrophic for society as a whole. Like, say that pesky oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Or the mess on Wall Street that helped to plunge us into the current Great Recession.

I would like to see us all move beyond red-baiting into a rational discussion of the relative merits of capitalism and socialism. In real life, what actually exists seems to be a variety of mixed economies. Do capitalists have the unlimited right to do whatever is most profitable to them in the short term? Is all public involvement in economic regulation a bad thing?

It's time to start discussing and stop name-calling.

Fire and Rain

2010-08-11T12:17:00.082-05:00

In the morning, I wake up in my little house and switch on the radio, and then I usually fall back to sleep for a while. I hear little bits of things and remember them. Lately, I have been hearing about floods in Pakistan and wildfires in Russia, and I've started thinking the obvious question--are these things related to climate change?

CommonDreams.org has picked up a post from Reuters that tries to answer that question. According to this article, you can't really take any individual weather-related catastrophe and blame it on climate change. But the general increase in weather-related disasters probably is a result.

Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs "shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980, and the trend is expected to persist."

The worst floods in Pakistan in 80 years have killed more than 1,600 people and left 2 million homeless.

"Global warming is one reason" for the rare spate of recent weather extremes, said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

He pointed to the heat wave and related forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, rains in China and downpours in countries including Germany and Poland. "We have four such extremes in the last few weeks. This is very seldom," he said.

According to JOTMAN, the Russian wildfires are doing more than spreading deadly levels of carbon monoxide:

As if things in Russia were not looking sufficiently apocalyptic already, with 100-degree temperatures and noxious fumes rolling in from burning peat bogs and forests, there is growing alarm here that fires in regions coated with fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 24 years ago could now be emitting plumes of radioactive smoke.

The Russian situation is serious enough, according to the New York Times, that it might force the Russian government to develop more aggressive policies to moderate climate change.

Recent comments made by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev link climate change and the wildfires, stoking speculation about what Russia may bring to the table in the next round of international climate talks. But once the wildfires' smoke clears, they may not amount to much, according to Alexey Kokorin, the Moscow-based climate negotiator for the World Wildlife Fund.

Medvedev said in a public speech last week, "Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions," according to a published transcript of the speech. "This means that we need to change the way we work, and change the methods that we used in the past," he said.

In another speech, Medvedev said these events must act as a "wake-up call" for heads of state and social organizations, "in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate," as reported by TIME.

"These are not brave statements for European leaders or Obama, but for a Russian president, it's a new statement," said WWF's Kokorin. Even last year, Medvedev's speeches on climate change were more about helping other continents like Europe and Asia without really focusing on the negative and severe impacts for Russia itself, he said.

Meanwhile, environmental writer Bill McKibben discusses the need for a strong grassroots movement to force the US government to take responsible action:

Those demonstrations were just a start (one we should have made long ago). We're following up in October -- on 10-10-10 -- with a Global Work Party. All around the country and the world people will be putting up solar panels and digging community gardens and laying out bike paths. Not because we can stop climate change one bike path at a time, but because we need to make a sharp political point to our leaders: we're getting to work, what about you?

We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together. This movement is starting to emerge on many fronts. In September, for instance, opponents of mountaintop removal are converging on DC to demand an end to the coal trade. That same month, Tim DeChristopher goes on trial in Salt Lake City for monkey-wrenching oil and gas auctions by submitting phony bids. (Naomi Klein and Terry Tempest Williams have called for folks to gather at the courthouse.)

AFL-CIO president speaks on economic revitalization

2010-07-27T10:41:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting post from the AFL-CIO NOW BLOG, reporting union president Richard Trumka's speech at Netroots Nation.

I particularly liked this paragraph:

(J)ust as corporations have taken advantage of immigrants, they have skirted, exploited and violated labor laws that empower workers to form a union and bargain for a better life. The good jobs of the past were good jobs because workers organized and fought for fair wages and benefits. Without labor law reform corporations will continue to take advantage of workers and no matter how much we invest in our economy, how much we increase our productivity, our wages will remain stagnant and we will continue to fall behind.

And I agree with Trumka's conclusion about the need for cooperation between union activists and other progressive movements. Workers' rights are human rights.

This is just wrong

2010-07-19T10:37:00.001-05:00

I do not think that it is cute or amusing that there is a National Parks Edition of Monopoly. Somehow, this game seems ironically appropriate, given the privatization of almost everything since the Reagan years. But what happened to the idea of public land for the public good, and not for private profit?

Go ahead. Call me a socialist. See if I care.

Greek tragedy

2010-07-15T11:29:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning and listen to public radio, I hear the announcers talking about the debt crisis in Greece. They always talk as if this crisis was created by Greece having too many expensive social programs that help ordinary people.

CommonDreams.org has posted a piece by Walden Bello of Foreign Policy in Focus that offers a different perspective:

Although the welfare-state narrative contains some nuggets of truth, it is fundamentally flawed. The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street. The Greek crisis falls into the pattern traced by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly: Periods of frenzied speculative lending are inexorably followed by government or sovereign debt defaults, or near defaults. Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.

In their drive to raise more and more profits from lending, Europe's banks poured an estimated $2.5 trillion into what are now the most troubled European economies: Ireland, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. German and French banks hold 70 percent of Greece's $400 billion debt. German banks were great buyers of toxic subprime assets from U.S. financial institutions, and they applied the same lack of discrimination to buying Greek government bonds. For their part French banks, according to the Bank of International Settlements, increased their lending to Greece by 23 percent, to Spain by 11 percent, and to Portugal by 26 percent.

The frenzied Greek credit scene featured not only European financial actors. Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs showed Greek financial authorities how financial instruments known as derivatives could be used to make large chunks of Greek debt "disappear," thus making the national accounts look good to bankers eager to lend more. Then the very same agency turned around and, engaging in derivatives trading known as "credit default swaps," bet on the possibility that Greece would default, raising the country's cost of borrowing from the banks but making a tidy profit for itself.

If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.