Barack Obama the cynical warmaker

As far as I can tell, Barack Obama has always been a nice centrist Democrat in favor of doing government "business as usual" in a slightly kinder and gentler fashion than the Republicans have done it. "Change" was always an advertising slogan, and never a plan of action. This is no where more evident than in Obama's management of the U.S. war machine. Three recent posts from Truthdig demonstrate this.

In the first of these posts, Andrew J. Bacevich describes Obama's leadership of "The Golden Age of Special Operations." Obama is campaigning for re-election as the man who ended the Iraq war and who is ending the war in Afghanistan. But the president is simultaneously conducting more and more secret military operations. While the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) existed long before the Obama presidency, this president is making greater use of it than ever before.

From a president’s point of view, one of the appealing things about special forces is that he can send them wherever he wants to do whatever he directs. There’s no need to ask permission or to explain. Employing USSOCOM as your own private military means never having to say you’re sorry. When President Clinton intervened in Bosnia or Kosovo, when President Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, they at least went on television to clue the rest of us in. However perfunctory the consultations may have been, the White House at least talked things over with the leaders on Capitol Hill. Once in a while, members of Congress even cast votes to indicate approval or disapproval of some military action. With special ops, no such notification or consultation is necessary. The president and his minions have a free hand. Building on the precedents set by Obama, stupid and reckless presidents will enjoy this prerogative no less than shrewd and well-intentioned ones.

Then, Bill Boyarsky analyzes the recent New York Times report that President Obama is personally selecting the names of people to be killed because they are suspected terrorists.

The idea of Obama picking out individuals for the death list brings back memories of President Lyndon B. Johnson selecting targets for bombing in Vietnam. So intent was Johnson on micromanaging the war that he lost sight of how the bombing strengthened the will of North Vietnam. Like Johnson, Obama micromanaging the drone attacks, with their killings of noncombatants, may be strengthening our foes.

In his first campaign for the presidency, Obama pledged to pull most troops out of Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan, capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and defeating al-Qaida. It was his promise to end the Iraq War that got the attention and affection of liberals, who ignored the underplayed but consistent warlike aspects of his foreign policy pitch.

Boyarsky goes on to note that

With drone technology growing more refined and deadly, Obama has dispatched the robotic killers on an increasing number of missions. Two of those assassinated by the machines were Americans—Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric, and Samir Khan, a U.S. citizen traveling with him. Awlaki, a propagandist who called for more attacks on the United States, had plotted with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber” whose attack on an airliner bound for Detroit failed.

The Justice Department produced a memo justifying the killing of citizen-terrorists, saying that internal, secret executive branch deliberations satisfied Fifth Amendment requirements for due process. Such reasoning seems to constitute a threat to the freedom and the lives of any American targeted by the government as a terrorist or an accomplice. The Justice Department memo remains secret.

Finally, Robert Scheer adds his own searing analysis of the New York Timesreport. He mocks the "steely warrior" Obama, who is willing to send drones to attack designated US enemies, even if that results in the death of children.

Scheer argues that the story was "planted" in the Times to promote the president's credentials as a tough military leader in the midst of the re-election campaign. He notes that Pfc. Bradley Manning was held in solitary confinement for many months, accused of releasing information with a much lower security classification.

Pfc. Bradley Manning was held for many months in solitary confinement for allegedly disclosing information of far lower security classification. The difference is that the top secrets in the news article are ones the president wants leaked in the expectation they will burnish his “tough on terrorism” credentials. This is clearly not the Obama whom many voted for in the hope that he would stick by his word, including the pledge he made on his second day in office to ban brutal interrogation and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. “What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes,” the Times now reports concerning the early promises by Obama. “They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric.”

Parse that sentence carefully to learn much of what is morally decrepit in our journalism as well as politics. The word “realist” is now identical to “hypocrite,” and the condemnation of immoral behavior addresses nothing more than “rhetoric” that only the “fervent” would take seriously. The Times writers all but thrill to the lying, as in recounting the new president’s response to advisers who warned him against sticking to his campaign promises on Guantanamo prisoners: “The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice was followed.”

How telling that reporters who might as well be PR flacks are so admiring of the power of “wiggle words” to free a politician from accountability to the voters who put him in office: “A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies—rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention—that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

As Boyarsky and Scheer both point out, Obama has adopted policies that were roundly condemned by progressives when George W. Bush carried them out. Obama seems to be making the shrewd calculation that progressives will have no where else to turn in the upcoming election. As for myself, Obama will most likely get my vote, but he won't get my support in the form of money or volunteer time.

Do Afghan women have free speech?

Thanks to Spinfex Press for posting a link to this intriguing account a the struggles of a feminist newspaper in Afghanistan:

Its masthead claims that it is the first “feminist weekly” paper in Afghanistan. In a highly male dominated society where violence against women is rampant, the word “feminism” sets off alarm bells for some officials. And ringing this bell is a determined 22-year-old woman – Heleena Kakar.

Responding to the inbuilt biases Afghan society has against women, Kakar, the founder and brains behind the paper, is determined to shake up the system.

“One of the major challenges that we are facing is that the government agency responsible doesn’t offer approval for the paper to be registered because of the word ‘feminism.’ We are trying to convince them the word ‘feminism’ doesn’t go against any legislation and law,” says Kakar, who adds that she hopes to lay the foundations for a feminist movement in Afghanistan.

The rest of the post is well worth reading.

Supreme Court to reconsider Citizens United

According to the Washington Post, a recent decision of the Montana Supreme Court  might ultimately result in the US Supreme Court reconsidering its controversial ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Sounds like good news if it happens. Thanks to Progressive Breakfast for the link to the Washington Post news item.

Update: Mother Jones says that a group in Hawaii thinks they can use the 11th Amendment to overturn Citizens United.

The feminist general assembly

Cross-posted from The Daly Planet:

At our weekly Mary Daly Feminist discussion group at Church of the Open Arms, we often talk about the Occupy Wall Street movement and how or if feminism in connected to it. On May 17, several cities around the nation held feminist general assemblies to bring feminist goals, vision, and strategy to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thanks to Occupy Patriarchy for posting two accounts of the feminist GA that took place in Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

One of these posts came from Melanie Butler at the Ms. Magazine blog. Here's a sample:

I arrived to find a diverse crowd of around 300 people. Members of the Occupy Wall Street women’s caucus, Women Occupying Wall Street (WOW), were giving a shout of solidarity to Occupy Maine. The people of Lafayette, Ind.; Bend and Portland, Ore.; Chicago and a handful of other cities were also holding feminist GAs. The Raging Grannies sang “Evolution is too slow, revolution’s the way to go!” and things were off to a raucous start. I pitched in with a paintbrush to help record the shared values we were brainstorming–“Trust!” “Creativity!” “Justice!” “Humor!”–and, ignoring my friend’s smirk, embraced the consciousness-raising exercise as though I were encountering it for the first time. After focusing almost exclusively on women’s organizing for the first six months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), I was happy for the chance to just participate. More importantly, I was happy to see so many new leaders and so many of the elusive “unfamiliar faces” we had spent meeting after meeting trying to attract to the movement.

Sarah Seltzer of The Nation offered a more in-depth analysis of this gathering. Seltzer saw an effort not only to counter sexism within Occupy Wall Street, but also to counter oppressive attitudes within feminist ranks. She also pondered whether this GA might be the start of a new way for Occupy Wall Street to collaborate with other movements.

Aspects of this GA offered a model for how Occupy can work with other progressive movements without accusations of “co-option” on either side. The fact that the organizers of the GA were both new to and familiar with Occupy meant that the attendees came from both inside and outside the movement, an example of horizontalism—rejecting hierarchy—in action. Beyond that, the GA reinforced the notion of Occupy as platform for ideas, rather than organization. The simple act of presenting feminist ideas in the Occupy format--in a public space, welcome to all, mingling with strangers beyond the reach of institutions--was refreshing and inspiring, the opening of a door of possibility, almost like the early days at Zuccotti Park. I realized with a start during the event that I’d never been in a public space that simply existed for feminist-minded conversation before, without a destination or goal or even work-oriented networking.

Will that door of possibility lead to a new coalition or plan for action? That remained unclear. None of the goals mentioned in the report-backs included targeted plans like “organize a sit-in in the US Conference of Catholic Bishops offices.” No specific march or strike or radical art project is in the works, and no one appeared as a representative from an established feminist organization to start building a formal coalition. At this point, the OWS ethos may not mesh with most institutional organizations, and perhaps that’s okay. What the feminists at the GA wanted more than a formal partnership was to keep converging and talking. So the one thing there will definitely be? Another GA.

This is bound to be a complicated and difficult process. I thought I detected from both Selzer and Butler an expectation that Occupy Wall Street and its feminist participants would eventually reach consensus on a complete range of goals. I don't think this is going to happen.

My own feelings about this are contradictory. On the one hand, I would join Selzer and Butler in wanting to push OWS to support women's reproductive freedom. The idea that abortion rights are "too divisive" and can be ignored just doesn't sit well with me. Besides everything else, reproductive freedom is a basic economic issue.

On the other hand, both Butler and Selzer take for granted that support for "transgender rights" is something that there is, or should be, a feminist consensus to do. I find myself balking there, because I believe there is a still a substantial segment of the feminist movement that sees the gender system itself as oppressive. We see the goal as eliminating gender entirely, not reforming the gender system to make it "more diverse."

Censorship or editorial judgment?

Occupy Together has posted on Facebook a controversial TED talk given by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. Hanauer says it's a mistake to claim that increasing taxes on the rich will interfere with job creation. He calls this "an article of faith for Republicans" that is "seldom challenged by Democrats."

Jobs are not created by rich people or by capitalists, Hanauer argues, but by a "circle-of-life" type of "feedback loop" between consumers and businesses. If ordinary consumers don't have the resources to make purchases, no jobs are created. Capitalists such as himself only hire more workers as a last resort after demand has increased so much that more workers are absolutely necessary. If tax policies adopted in the US since 1980 that favor the rich really worked, "we would be drowning in jobs."

TED originally failed to post Hanauer's talk, as reported by Ezra Klein and GeekWire. A National Journal post said that TED decided Hanauer's lecture was "too partisan." TED curator Chris Anderson insisted that this was not a matter of censorship, but of editorial judgment, then released the Hanauer video so that viewers could judge for themselves.

I thought that Hanauer gave a vivid description of a fairly standard progressive argument about what causes prosperity or unemployment. What do you think?

Standing her ground

Many people have understandably questioned Florida's "stand your ground" law, which says that a person who is being attacked may use deadly force without being required to retreat first. This is the law that encouraged the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Oddly enough, this law has been ruled not to apply to the case of Florida resident Marissa Alexander, who fired a warning shot into her kitchen ceiling to keep her abusive husband away from her. This sounds like a case in which most sane people would feel that no criminal charges would be appropriate, especially since Ms. Alexander didn't actually shoot her attacker. Why then, is Ms. Alexander facing a sentence of 20 years in prison? I found this interesting and thoughtful video discussion on thenation.com Web site.

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

Occupying the Left

Katha Pollit at thenation.com tells it like it is.

Do no evil?

Okay, I really need to quit writing blog posts and get seriously to work on my term paper about open access journal publishing for my library management class. But I think this post from Jaqui Cheng on Ars Technica is worthy of note. Google is negotiating with the FCC over the amount of the fine it will face for "unintentionally" bypassing privacy protections on the Safari Web browser. Reader comments on this post make much of Google's continuous violations of its own motto, "Don't be evil."

This caught my attention because it was so closely related to the subject of my most recent post. Although I didn't mention it, David Sirota used Google to illustrate his concerns that folks who store material on the cloud could lose important rights to their work.

As The Los Angeles Times reported, Google’s announcement of its “Google Drive” came with the promise that users will “retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content.” But when you save files to Google’s new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google “a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content” as the company sees fit.

As Sirota notes, Google has an innocent explanation for this--they insist they're merely getting your permission to allow you to share your stored material with others. But keep in mind that Google, like Facebook and other "free" online services, makes its profits from mining and selling our personal information. Maybe it's time to reconsider whether this kind of "free" is a good deal.

Partly cloudy?

Over at Truthdig, David Sirota has this interesting essay about cloud computing and how you might surrender rights to your own work by storing material on the cloud.

Raspberry Pi

I want one of these. It's a tiny little computer that costs $35 and runs Debian Linux. A person needs a power adapter, a USB keyboard and mouse, a compatible monitor (or t.v.), and an SD card bigger than 4 GB to make it all work, so the total cost would be a bit higher.

Of course, I could probably have just as much fun playing with the various old computers I already have lying around the house. The really fun thing would be to find a similar variety of Debian Linux that would run on my existing obsolete machines. But the Raspberry Pi is made by a nonprofit organization with the goal of inspiring kids to do computer programming, so I may eventually decide to get one. Apparently there's quite a waiting list, anyway.  Unfortunately, the hardware is not open source, but it still seems like a cool project.

Oklahomans unite against War on Women at 4/28 rally

This afternoon I took a brief break from the end-of-semester madness to enjoy an hour or so of sanity at the Oklahoma Unite Against the War on Women rally at the state capitol. This was part of a nationwide day of events in support of women's liberation from an increasingly obnoxious right-wing backlash against our well-being and freedom.

I estimated that about 300 people, mostly women but some men, attended the event in front of the capitol's north steps.

When pregnancy begins

Hat tip to Planned Parenthood of Oklahoma for a link to this informative post about how pregnancy happens and how the extreme right intentional distorts this information to limit women's reproductive freedom.

Correction--down to the wire April 26

I mistakenly posted that yesterday was the last day that the Oklahoma House could hear SB 1433, the bill that would declare fertilized eggs to be persons. (Once upon a time we had a "personhood bill" for adult women. It was called the Equal Rights Amendment, and unfortunately it didn't pass, in Oklahoma or the nation.) I finally made it down to the capitol last night after an emergency tweet asked for supporters when Rep. Reynolds attempted an obscure parliamentary maneuver to bring SB 1433 to a vote. It failed! Things are looking good for the bill to finally go down today, but the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice--which has played such a crucial role in stopping this monstrosity--is still calling for supporters to join the Pink Wave at the Capitol today. You can follow how things are going on Twitter, or you can even listen to the Oklahoma House live.

Down to the wire on April 25th

The anti-choice backers of Oklahoma Senate Bill 1433 were angered by the reported death of the bill that would declare that a fertilized human egg is a person with all of the rights thereof. Yesterday, the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice and others worked to stop the consideration of SB1433 and reported that the bill was still dead, replaced by a non-binding resolution that was passed by the OK House. Today is the last day for bills that originated in the Senate to be heard on the House floor. Anti-choice activists were not appeased by the passage of the non-binding resolution, and according to newsok.com, pressure is growing on lawmakers to hear SB 1433 while they still can.(Hat tip to Oklahomans Against the Personhood Act for the link.)

The daring pro-choice Pinkwave is still making its presence felt in the House. I tried to join them on my way to work, only to discover that the House is in recess until 1:45 today. You should join them if you can, or consider calling your representative.

Finally, good news from the OK Legislature

The Tulsa World reported this morning that SB 1433, the so-called "personhood bill" will not get a vote in the Oklahoma House. House Speaker Kris Steele described this decision as representing the collective will of the Republican caucus. The extreme right-wing Rep. Randy Terrill said it was "stunning and unbelievable" that the bill wouldn't come up for a vote. Whatever. The bill would have declared that from the moment a human egg was fertilized, it had all the rights and privileges of a person. (Unlike the adult female human who carried it.)

Kudos to the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice for its hard work in stopping this nonsense.

Who wants an Oklahoma income tax cut?

On Wednesday, the Oklahoma Senate passed a bill to cut the state's income tax to a top rate of 4.9 percent. While this might sound appealing on the surface, it would result in cutting important public services--like healthcare and education. And to get to this lower top rate, deductions and credits for ordinary working people would have to be sacrificed, meaning that rich people would pay lower taxes and poor people would pay higher taxes. Vital public services have already been cut drastically in the wake of the Great Recession.

The Oklahoma Policy Institute has been doing a lot of work on analyzing this issue, and they have a page of links devoted to information about this important topic. This morning, a post on OPI's OKPolicy Blog shows that most of the support comes not from Oklahomans--even business groups are wary of it--but from outside pressure groups. Among these groups (no surprise) is the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC):

So where is it coming from? It’s no coincidence that very similar efforts to eliminate the income tax are popping up in Kansas and Missouri. All three campaigns rely heavily on a report by Arthur Laffer, a former Reagan advisor who has dedicated his career to restricting taxes in numerous states. Governor Fallin mentioned Laffer’s numbers in this year’s state of the state speech, though she cited them as coming from Americans for Prosperity, a national lobbying group founded by David and Charles Koch. Most recently, Governor Fallin wrote the introduction for a report by Laffer and others at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that ranks states based on how closely they follow ALEC’s economic policy agenda. It’s clear that these national groups have the governor’s ear.

Does housework count as real work?

Some time in the foreseeable past, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney described his wife, Ann, as his primary advisor on women's issues. His wife told him that women didn't care about feminism, they cared about the economy.

Democratic campaign consultant called Hilary Rosen set off a kerfuffle when she said that Ann Romney knew nothing about economics because she hadn't worked a day in her life. Staying home to raise five sons counted as working, Ann Romney said. This ignited a silly media row that I did my best to ignore. However, a couple of interesting items showed up on the Web as a result of this silly row.

One such item was Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne's commentary. I think he's supposed to be a liberal. I found his post on the Truthdig Web site. Mr. Dionne basically agrees with the Romneys when he says

For millions of American moms and dads, debates about “feminism” or “social conservatism” are irrelevant. It’s about money.

He goes on to chastise Republicans and conservatives for undermining the economic foundation of most families that would allow one parent to choose to stay home.

This points to a contradiction that few conservatives want to confront. When trying to win votes from religious and social traditionalists, conservatives speak as if they want to restore what they see as the glory days of the 1950s family. But they are reluctant to acknowledge that it was the high wages of (often unionized) workers that underwrote these arrangements.

Yet on the right, economic conservatism almost always trumps social conservatism, and market imperatives almost always get priority over family imperatives. As a result, the United States has the weakest family-leave laws in the industrialized world. We have done far less than other well-off countries to accommodate the difficult work-family dilemmas that most moms and dads deal with in the new economy.

There's much in that second quote to agree with, but I'm left with the strong impression that Dionne considers women's freedom and women's lives irrelevant, unless these are considered as part of a family economy that affects men.

A much more interesting conversation about the topic of women and housework took place on Democracy Now!, where host Amy Goodman interviewed long-time activist and theorist Selma James. Back in 1952, James wrote a brilliant pamphlet called "A Woman's Place," and now James has published a book called Sex, Race, and Class, a collection of her essays.

James argues that the work of stay-at-home mothers is crucial to the operation of capitalism, because mothers reproduce labor. The housewife becomes the servant of the working husband, who relates to her in the same way the capitalist relates to him. That is, he pays her just enough to live on, while capturing goods and services with a value far beyond that.

Selma James says it better than I do. Here is the interview as it aired on Democracy Now! on April 16:



On the Democracy Now! Web site, you can view a longer version of the interview, complete with written transcript.

Right here in Central Park

Peak Oil Hausfrau has a post about a great project that goes on right in my neighborhood.

My kind of tea party

Saturday night, after the poetry reading at Herland, I headed over to the Blue Door to the fundraiser for the Voices of Oklahoma community radio station. I regretted missing the opener by Miss Brown to You, but loved the show by Emma's Revolution. One of their funniest numbers was a send-up of the Tea Party Movement called "Taxed Enough Already." Below you can watch the version that's out on YouTube:



It would be interesting to ponder the complexities of a duo named in honor of the anarchist Emma Goldman producing a defense of government. But I'll leave that conversation aside in favor of noting the appropriateness of "Taxed Enough Already" as an anthem to opponents of the Buffett Rule that is coming up for a vote in the US Senate today.

Occupying patriarchy

Lucinda Marshall is always wonderful. You can read her latest post either at Feminist Peace Network or at Occupy Patriarchy.

It is not sufficient to say that we have to come together as the 99% against the 1%. The needs of the 99% are not homogenous and it is not acceptable to say that it is divisive when we point this out.

While the Occupy movement has been developing, the war on women has become a nightmare of hateful, ignorant, daily attacks on women’s human rights. It is urgent that this be stopped and presents an opportunity for the Occupy movement as a whole to stand up for women’s lives and say that this war must stop. On April 28th there will be rallies in all 50 states and in Washington, DC calling for an end to the war on women.

Thank you, Lucinda. In Oklahoma City, we will have a march at the state capital starting at noon on April 28. I will be there. What about you?

Oklahoma not the only anti-woman state

The woman governor of Arizona (!) has signed into law one of the most extreme anti-choice laws in the US.

Some complexities of the Trayvon Martin case

Sean Thomas-Breitfeld over at colorlines.com has written a really good analysis of some of the complexities involved in the Florida shooting of African American teen Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer whose ethnicity has become a source of controversy in the case. Here's a brief sample:

George Zimmerman’s unconscious biases and his racial identity did not cause Trayvon Martin’s death. The gun he carried while volunteering his time as a neighborhood watch captain is what made the difference between a misunderstanding leading to insults and hurt feelings, and the death of an unarmed black teenager who was walking home from the store. But rather than talk about the laws in play in this case, we get mired in a debate over the motivation of individual actors.

The new black/brown terms of this case were a convenient distraction for conservatives (particularly the National Rifle Association) who would rather we not focus on how Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law fosters a vigilante mentality. The leaking of details about how Trayvon Martin was a normal (rather than perfect) teenager helped the Sanford Police shift the focus away from how their inaction the night of Trayvon’s death and showed a too-familiar disregard for the well-being of black men.

There are legitimate questions to raise about how gated communities—as modern-day, segregated enclaves—foster a racialized paranoia that George Zimmerman was caught up in. There’s a real discussion to have about the many ways that structural racism and criminal justice collide and conspire to rob Trayvon Martin of fair and just protection by the police. We must not lose sight of the structural factors at work in situations like this one.

There's much more to this eloquent post, and it's well worth reading the whole thing.

Unique Kenyan village empowers women

Hannah Rubenstein of Inter Press Service has written a fascinating article about a woman-only village in Kenya:

Umoja’s history began in 1990, when a collective of 15 Samburu women, who called themselves the Umoja Uaso Women's Group, began selling beadwork and other goods to raise money for themselves and their families. As the group began to grow financially lucrative, they found themselves facing increasing harassment by men in their communities who felt that economic growth was not appropriate for the women, who traditionally play a subordinate role.

In response, the women, led by matriarch Rebecca Lolosoli, decided to break away and begin their own village, in order to ensure security and cooperation for themselves out of the reach of those who sought to undermine them.

Today, Umoja is home to 48 women who have come from all over the country. Their stories vary – some were young girls fleeing forced marriages to old men, others were raped or sexually abused, and several were widows who were shunned by their communities. Moreover, several women residing in the village are Turkana, taking refuge from the tribal violence currently raging in the central region of Isiolo.

Only women are permitted to sleep in the village. An exception is made for men who were raised there. Many women who live in Umoja plan to marry eventually, and conduct courtships outside the village--on their own terms.

Gender nonconformity lives

This post by Dorothee Benz at thenation.com is well worth reading.

Adrienne Rich dead

Adrienne Rich died a couple of days ago, at the age of eighty, due to complications of rheumatoid arthritis. Why did I think that she was going to live forever? Death is part of life, but the death of someone wonderful always seems to come too soon.The Advocate notes that she had been with her partner Michelle Cliff (a notable feminist writer in her own right) since 1976.

Adrienne Rich was that rare poet who made an impact both in the mainstream world of arts and poetry and among radical lesbian feminists. She had an obituary in The New York Times and John Nichols wrote an analysis of her life and work for thenation.com. My favorite was this remembrance by a woman whose life her work had touched.

For myself, I will always remember Adrienne Rich as someone who pushed the feminist movement to be its best self, who pushed women with privilege to challenge their own racism, classism, antisemitism. Rich was a leader in the best sense--someone who inspired all of us to find and express our own ideas and ideals. She had a broad understanding of feminism as a movement that challenges all forms of oppression.

I will miss her.

Three views on Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin is the African American teenager who was shot to death by Sanford, Florida neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in late February. This tragedy took place in a social context in which young black men are considered dangerous criminals because they are black males.

Here are three posts about this story that I have found to be useful and informative:

1. Pamela Merritt, who writes the blog Angry Black Bitch,  points out that if Trayvon Martin did the things George Zimmerman accused him of, Martin was "standing his ground" and should be considered the innocent party.
2. Judd Legum at Think Progress provides a point-by-point summary of the case.
3. In an interview on Fox News, posted at MEDIAite, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson denounces the so-called "New Black Panthers" for offering a "dead or alive" reward for Zimmerman's apprehension. For me, the most interesting and significant part of this interview was Jackson's prediction that this case could provide an inspiration to the civil rights movement equivalent to that provided by the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. This offers hope that this tragedy will ultimately fuel the cause of justice.

It's not about epistemology

You may wonder, gentle reader, what the heck is "epistemology," besides a funny looking big word that is fun to say in order to impress your friends? It is, very simply, that part of philosophy that is devoted to studying what we know and how we know that what we know is true.

This is a very important question. I think I know all kinds of things--that all people should have equal rights and power, that climate change is a serious problem and needs to be stopped, that US military intervention always makes things worse rather than better. There are large numbers of people who think I am exactly wrong about all of those things. How do I know that I am right and they are wrong?

Yes, that's an important question, but as you read in the title of the post, this is not about epistemology, so we'll take that question up at another time.

This post is actually about the Affordable Health Care Act, which has made its way to the Supreme Court. Right-wing opponents of the law have challenged its constitutionality, saying that the federal government doesn't have the right to require citizens to purchase health insurance. Liberal supporters of the law say that it provides a huge step forward in making health care available to all citizens.

As for myself, I just don't know. I expect that the law is constitutional, but I don't think it fixes what's broken about the US health care system. The US health care system is designed to allow private companies to make enormous profits by providing services that cost lots of money but may (or may not) improve anyone's health. Despite its name, I'm not sure the health care act will really make health care more affordable.

Robert Reich has written a blog post that expresses very well my reasons for ambivalence about the ACA. (You may recall that Reich served as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. Reich is now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley.)As Reich writes:

The dilemma at the heart of the new law is that it continues to depend on private health insurers, who have to make a profit or at least pay all their costs including marketing and advertising.

Yet the only way private insurers can afford to cover everyone with pre-existing health problems, as the new law requires, is to have every American buy health insurance – including young and healthier people who are unlikely to rack up large healthcare costs.

This dilemma is the product of political compromise. You’ll remember the Administration couldn’t get the votes for a single-payer system such as Medicare for all. It hardly tried. Not a single Republican would even agree to a bill giving Americans the option of buying into it.

But don’t expect the Supreme Court to address this dilemma. It lies buried under an avalanche of constitutional argument.

Now Republicans are using this compromise in order to whip up resentment from far-right Tea Party supporters who don't want the government to tell them what to buy. Some of this resentment probably comes from people who, even with subsidies, cannot afford to buy health insurance or pay a fine for not having it.

It seems like a lose-lose situation. If the Affordable Health Care Act is struck down by the Supreme Court, we are left with the same broken system, with all of its skyrocketing costs and inadequate coverage. Plus, it's a big defeat for the whole idea of universal health care. If the ACA is upheld, more people have some kind of coverage, but most of the problems of the existing system are left in place.

Reich, however, sees a silver lining in the possible overturn of the ACA. He argues that no one objects to mandatory participation in Medicare by people over 65, because this is a government program that works well and is universally popular.

So why not Medicare for all?

Because Republicans have mastered the art of political jujitsu. Their strategy has been to demonize government and seek to privatize everything that might otherwise be a public program financed by tax dollars (see Paul Ryan’s plan for turning Medicare into vouchers). Then they go to court and argue that any mandatory purchase is unconstitutional because it exceeds the government’s authority.

Obama and the Democrats should do the reverse. If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

If they did this the public will be behind them — as will the Supreme Court.

I would like to believe that Reich is right.

I have only one minor quibble about what he has to say.

The court debate started off with an argument about whether this is the right time to hear this case. This was a procedural issue based on an interpretation of an 1867 law that says that you can't file a legal challenge to a tax until you've had to pay that tax. People who don't buy health insurance won't need to pay a penalty for several years. The Supreme Court spent the whole first day of argument considering whether the 1867 law applies to this case.

Reich describes this argument thusly:

Not surprisingly, today’s debut Supreme Court argument over the so-called “individual mandate” requiring everyone to buy health insurance revolved around epistemological niceties such as the meaning of a “tax,” and the question of whether the issue is ripe for review.

Um, no. This procedural argument had nothing at all to do with epistemology, it had to do with the way the word "tax" is defined. Maybe Reich meant to use the word "etymological," which has to do with tracing the history of words.

If we had an epistemological discussion about the ACA, we would be discussing whether we have any reliable way of predicting exactly what its effects are going to be. This is not a "nicety," but a very substantial problem. Even big words have meanings, and you can't just throw them around at random to prove how smart you are.

And when do women get to be persons?

I have been too immersed in my schoolwork to give more than passing attention to the daily news. This is not entirely a bad thing. I really don't think it is necessary for me to keep track of every time some wingnut patriarch celebrity or right-wing Republican legislator says something truly stupid about a woman, women, or women's rights. Such nincompoopery has been so widespread for so long that it is hardly worthy of notice, and frankly, some of the nincompoops seem to thrive on the attention, any kind of attention. It's probably a good thing that my attention has been focused on Information and Communications Technology and Management of Information and Knowledge organizations instead.

I do regret that I can't keep up with the anti-woman shenanigans of the 2012 Oklahoma Legislature. This is not merely some kooky talk radio show that a person can turn off. These people are passing actual laws, and one of the laws that they seem poised to pass is called The Personhood Act, which would declare a fertilized egg to be a human being, with all of the rights and privileges of any other citizen or resident of Oklahoma.

I've found what looks like a pretty good explanation of the situation on a blog called God Discussion, including the text of the bill that's making it's way through the Oklahoma Senate. God Discussion reports that House already passed a similar bill on Tuesday.  As other commentators have noted, this is a law that would ban many forms of contraception. The creative and courageous Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice held a "Barefoot and Pregnant" rally at the state capitol in Oklahoma City, and is leading the campaign against the Senate bill (and against a possible ballot measure that would add this type of language to the Oklahoma Constitution). OCRJ also provided this link to help you take action to defend women's control over our own bodies and our own lives.

Not so long ago, the US Supreme Court decided that corporations are persons. The Oklahoma Legislature wants to declare that fertilized eggs are persons. I would like to know when women get our chance to be persons, too.

The apprentice librarian shows off to her technology class

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

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."