Demographics

The while [male] establishment is finished. Bill O'Reilly says so. This clip has gained a lot of attention over the past few days, and I want to keep a record of it on my blog because it may mark a historic turning point in US and world history.

O'Reilly's arrogance is annoying, to say the least. He says that Democratic voters "want stuff," meaning unearned handouts. In other words, he is against a humane society in which we all recognize our interconnection and help out people who are having a difficult time. And he ignores the "stuff" that the present system has given to white people, to men, to the 1 percent of the wealthiest US citizens whose greed in endangering the well-being of the 99 percent and the rest of the planet.

But he's acknowledging that US society is becoming more ethnically diverse, and with that change, our society is becoming much more progressive. He is mourning something that I would personally celebrate--the passage of racist, capitalist patriarchy.

With a lot of hard work, those who welcome a changing United States can make this come true.

The lesser of two evils?

If the Green Party's presidential candidates had been listed on the Oklahoma ballot, I would have voted for Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala.

Given Oklahoma's extremely restrictive ballot access laws, the only two choices I had were Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Obama is the lesser of two evils by a large margin. Romney demonstrates a complete lack of core integrity, a willingness to shift from progressive to extreme conservative opinions based on whatever is popular at the moment, and an alliance with the most regressive economic and political forces in the United States.

Nevertheless, I wish I'd had the option to vote for Jill Stein today. For one thing, living in the reddest of red states, I know that Oklahoma will go solidly for Romney. Given the reality of the way the Electoral College operates, a vote for anyone else is a protest vote. I would like my protest vote to be for the candidate I prefer.

As Doug Henwood put it in a recent post for The Nation:

...I wish, just once, an endorsement of a Democratic presidential candidate coming from the left would mull over some serious structural issues that are at stake.

There are certain eternally recurrent features of these endorsement editorials, and they are depressing. The shortcomings of this year’s Democrat are acknowledged, only to be dismissed, because this is always the most important election since 1932, or maybe 1860. If the Democrats lose, brownshirts will move into the Oval Office. It will be repression and immiseration at home and aggressive war abroad. Sure, there will be some repression, immiseration and war even if the Dem wins, but see above re dismissal of shortcomings.

The persistence of the pattern is no exaggeration. Here’s something from a 1967 essay by Hal Draper on the imminent 1968 election: “Every time the liberal labor left has made noises about its dissatisfaction with what Washington was trickling through, all the Democrats had to do was bring out the bogy of the Republican right. The lib-labs would then swoon, crying ‘The fascists are coming!’ and vote for the Lesser Evil.”

And what is the consequence of that swoon? Draper’s answer: “the Democrats have learned well that they have the lib-lab vote in their back pocket, and that therefore the forces to be appeased are those forces to the right.” Almost every editorial urging a vote for this year’s Dem will lament the rightward move of our politics without ever considering the contribution of such calls to the process.

In other words, the Democrats will continue to ignore and disrespect the progressive vote, because they've learned that they can get away with it.

I would much prefer to have the opportunity to vote for candidates who actually respect my views.

Oklahoma State Ballot Questions

Oklahoma Policy Institute has an excellent page explaining the 2012 Oklahoma State Questions. This page has links to further information about each ballot measure. I especially like their explanation of the many flaws of SQ 759. Here's one example:

Extensive research on affirmative action has so far uncovered no evidence of a new regime of ‘reverse racism.’ In fact, White women have benefited enormously. In the thirty years following the onset of equal opportunity, White women reached their proportionate share in management occupations and more than tripled their rate of college completion.

Equal opportunity initiatives do not advance women and minorities over Whites and men; they privilege fair and equal access for all groups. A scholarly analysis of thousands of ‘reverse discrimination’ cases in federal courts in the mid-1990s found that almost all of them lacked legal merit. Most of these cases failed because disappointed applicants erroneously believed that a woman or minority got the job based on race or sex, not because their qualifications were superior to their own.

In other words, the not-so-subtle subtext of SQ 759--and other efforts against affirmative action--is the unfounded belief that if someone besides a white guy succeeds, it must be because of "reverse discrimination."

But what about quotas? Aren't those a bad idea? The answer is, quotas have been illegal in Oklahoma since the 1980s:

Many people mistakenly believe that affirmative action is a quota system, where people are hired based on a ‘count’ of minorities that must be selected. Public hiring quotas and contract preferences have been illegal in Oklahoma since the early 1980s. The State Regents for Higher Education have never used minority admissions quotas. The myth is so pervasive, even several legislators think that SQ 759 would eliminate quotas.

What is affirmative action? In Oklahoma, state agencies report annually on the demographic make-up of their workforce, and are encouraged to improve outreach during the hiring process among demographics they find poorly represented. The state Office of Personnel Management says affirmative action involves simply, “identifying departments in which the number of women or ethnic minorities is below that for the general workforce, then recruiting qualified candidates to address the situation.”

I'm voting no on State Question 759.

The Soviet naval officer who prevented WWIII

I was six years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1962. I remember the nuclear air raid drills that we used to do when I was in elementary school. I have vague memories of the 1960 presidential election that happened the year I turned four. I have fairly vivid memories about the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. But I remember nothing of the missile crisis. Did the grownups protect us children from the news about this horror? Or was it so frightening that I simply blocked it out?

One reason that the Cuban Missile Crisis is only an important and frightening historical event that I can't remember, and not something far worse, has to do with the bravery of Vasily Arkhipov, a Russian naval officer who refused to consent to the launching of his submarine's nuclear weapon. 

Edward Wilson, writing for The Guardian, tells what happened:

If you were born before 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved your life. It was the most dangerous day in history. An American spy plane had been shot down over Cuba while another U2 had got lost and strayed into Soviet airspace. As these dramas ratcheted tensions beyond breaking point, an American destroyer, the USS Beale, began to drop depth charges on the B-59, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear weapon.

The captain of the B-59, Valentin Savitsky, had no way of knowing that the depth charges were non-lethal "practice" rounds intended as warning shots to force the B-59 to surface. The Beale was joined by other US destroyers who piled in to pummel the submerged B-59 with more explosives. The exhausted Savitsky assumed that his submarine was doomed and that world war three had broken out. He ordered the B-59's ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to be prepared for firing. Its target was the USS Randolf, the giant aircraft carrier leading the task force.

If the B-59's torpedo had vaporised the Randolf, the nuclear clouds would quickly have spread from sea to land. The first targets would have been Moscow, London, the airbases of East Anglia and troop concentrations in Germany. The next wave of bombs would have wiped out "economic targets", a euphemism for civilian populations – more than half the UK population would have died. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's SIOP, Single Integrated Operational Plan – a doomsday scenario that echoed Dr Strangelove's orgiastic Götterdämmerung – would have hurled 5,500 nuclear weapons against a thousand targets, including ones in non-belligerent states such as Albania and China.

Ironically, there might have been far fewer casualties within the US, Wilson notes, because "The very reason that Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba was because the Soviet Union lacked a credible long range ICBM deterrent against a possible US attack." In other words, the US government considered European civilians to be "acceptable pawn sacrifices" should the Soviets launch a nuclear attack.

Fortunately, we don't know how that war would have turned out. Before the B-59 could launch its nuclear missle, all three of its senior officers had to agree. Two of the three officers said yes. Vasili Arkipov said no.

A recent PBS documentary tells the story. The entire Edward Wilson article is also worth reading for its analysis of how nuclear weapons still endanger the survival of life on Earth.

Hat tip to Brandon Wade for posting about Arkhipov on Facebook.

Enough is enough...

...according to Emma's Revolution:

The major presidential candidates ignore this...

...but Amy Goodman, Bill McKibben, and climate scientist Greg Jones talked about it yesterday on Democracy Now!:



Here's a sample of what you'll hear on the video:

AMY GOODMAN: Bill, you mentioned that the storm is made up of elements both natural and unnatural. What do you mean by that?

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, look, I mean, global warming doesn’t cause hurricanes. We’ve always had hurricanes. Hurricanes cause when a wave, tropical wave, comes off the coast of Africa and moves on to warm water and the wind shear is low enough to let it form a circulation, and so on and so forth. But we’re producing conditions like record warm temperatures in seawater that make it easier for this sort of thing to get, in this case, you know, up the Atlantic with a head of steam. We’re making—we’re raising the sea levels. And when that happens, it means that whatever storm surge comes in comes in from a higher level than it would have before. We’re seeing—and there are a meteorologists—although I don’t think this is well studied enough yet to really say it conclusively, there are people saying that things like the huge amount of open water in the Arctic have been changing patterns, of big wind current patterns, across the continent that may be contributing to these blocking pressure areas and things that we’re seeing. But, to me, that, at this point, is still mostly speculation.

What really is different is that there is more moisture and more energy in this narrow envelope of atmosphere. And that energy expresses itself in all kind of ways. That’s why we get these record rainfalls now, time after time. I mean, last year, it was Irene and then Lee directly after that. This year, this storm, they’re saying, could be a thousand-year rainfall event across the mid-Atlantic. I think that means more rain than you’d expect to see in a thousand years. But I could pretty much—I’d be willing to bet that it won’t be long before we see another one of them, because we’re changing the odds. By changing the earth, we change the odds.

And one thing for all of us to remember today, even as we deal with the horror on the East Coast, is that this is exactly the kind of horror people have been dealing with all over the world. Twenty million people were dislocated by flood in Pakistan two years ago. There are people with kind of existential fears about whether their nations will survive the rise of sea level. We’re seeing horrific drought not just in the Midwest, but in much of the rest of the world. This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened on earth, climate change, and our response has to be the same kind of magnitude.

McKibben's organization, 350.org, is starting a 20-state Do the Math tour to help organize a movement to change human consumption patterns to mitigate climate change before it's too late. Too bad they're not coming to Oklahoma.

Hail and farewell

George McGovern is dead.

Green Party Presidential ticket arrested at debate

This just in. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate Cheri Honkala have been arrested as they attempted to enter the venue for tonight's debate between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.  Stein and Honkala issued a statement calling the debate a "mockumentary."

Although Stein has been approved for presidential matching funds and is on the ballot in 38 states, she has not been permitted to participate in the debates. Neither has Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who is on the ballot in 47 states. A recent NPR story suggested that Johnson, who is polling at about six percent in national polls, could draw enough votes to affect the outcome of the race. Stein and Honkala's statement claims that they have "polled 2-3% in four consecutive national polls."

The Commission on Presidential Debates might argue that because neither Johnson nor Stein is likely to be elected president in November, they are not relevant to the debates. But this is clearly wrong. Given the structure of the Electoral College, both Stein and Johnson have the possibility to affect the race. It would be good for the country and for voters if Obama and Romney were forced to face a wider spectrum of ideas. Personally, given the doleful state of the economy and the clear and present danger of climate change, I would like to learn more about the Green Party's Green New Deal. While I personally think the economic aspects of the Libertarian Party platform would be disastrous, especially in terms of worker rights, I think the public has the right to hear those ideas.

Given that only Romney and Obama will appear on the Oklahoma ballot on November 6--and there isn't even the opportunity to write in a candidate's name--I will certainly vote for Obama. Obama is clearly the better candidate of the two--even though most of his policies are to the right of Richard Nixon's. I understand that some commentators on the left think it's blasphemous for progressives to even think of voting for Stein. Her voice still needs to be heard.

I have signed a petition calling on the CPD to open up the presidential debates to Johnson and Stein. If you would like to sign that petition, you can do so here.

Wow. Walmart workers are striking

Graduate school has eaten my brain, and I almost missed noticing that Wal-mart workers are striking in several locations across the US. As thenation.com's Bryce Covert points out:

It’s not just the workers who walked off the job that have something at stake in taking on Walmart. As these sorts of jobs increasingly dominate our workforce, we’ll be forced more and more to ask not just how many jobs the economy is adding, but what kind of jobs. If Walmart and its ilk supply most of them, families will have little money to rely on, few benefits and chaotic work schedules. All eyes should be on this historic strike and what gains Walmart’s workers are able to make in negotiating higher pay and better benefits.

Goodbye, Columbus Day

Thanks to commondreams.org for reposting this marvelous essay by Dana Lone Hill about all the reasons not to celebrate Columbus Day--and how South Dakota, alone among all the US states, has given up this celebration.

Here's a sample:

I always felt proud that our state didn't honor someone who murdered, enslaved, and raped indigenous people. Considering that it was the beginning of a genocide, this would be like putting a day aside to honor the memory of Hitler and selling sheets at a discount for the role he played in the world. Mickelson's initiative made me feel like we were a little ahead of the rest of the country: this is the same state that remembers the Wounded Knee Massacre, the Occupation of Wounded Knee, and unsolved deaths of our people in the 1973 incident. So, we celebrated Native American Day, not Columbus Day.

Yet, as Lakota people, we have all experienced racism in the state of South Dakota. Every single one of us, many times. My first time was when I was six years old and moving off the reservation. I was called horrible names, but I survived. And that was only the beginning.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Happy birthday to me

Only four more years until I'm old enough to join Old Lesbians Organizing for Change.

Feminist Library in danger of closing

While doing some advance research for an upcoming project in a library school class, I happened to do a Web search on "feminist library." This is how I discovered The Feminist Library in London, which

is a large archive collection of Women’s Liberation Movement literature, particularly second-wave materials dating from the late 1960s to the 1990s. We support research, activist and community projects in this field.

That's the good news. The bad news is, due to local government cutbacks and a privatization effort, it's in danger of closing.

Activist efforts are underway to save the library. You can read about these on the Save the Women's Library blog and on the library's Facebook page.

Real change is a do-it-ourselves project

So notes Alan Minsky in his excellent analysis of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, posted over on Truthdig.

Minsky notes that leaders of the Democratic party don't live up to the faith placed in them by Democratic party nationalists:

In 1999 Bill Clinton, under the guidance of Summers and Rubin, signed legislation eliminating the Glass-Steagall Act, perhaps the most important piece of financial industry regulation in American history. This move is widely seen as paving the way for the financial collapse of 2007-08 that sparked the current Great Recession.

Wednesday night at the Democratic convention, Clinton said the Republicans want “to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts.”

Furthermore, while the Democrats decry Paul Ryan and his embrace of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, they have forgotten to mention that during the Clinton years, Rubin was “joined at the hip” (according to former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr.) with die-hard Randite and Republican darling Alan Greenspan, working together to block oversight of toxic financial derivatives.

Would the rank-and-file Democrats—defenders of the middle class, lovers of Bill and Barack, kept in the dark about the minutiae of economic policy—ever have supported these policies that boosted the 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent? If not, that’s some serious betrayal.

Voting for the Democrats can be an understandable strategy in a swing state, Minsky says, but it won't lead to the economic, social, and political transformation of this society that the vast majority of us need:

The kindheartedness and generosity of spirit I found in Charlotte are inspiring, but if these people’s political activity still revolves around Obama, aren’t they missing the bigger, more important picture? Sure, but when there’s no other game in town, ameliorating the system so it causes less damage is not something that should be entirely dismissed. Would I vote for someone other than Obama in a swing state? I live in California so it’s not an issue, but I know come early November if I were faced with a choice between the only two candidates who could win and they were in a neck-and-neck race, I’d vote for the less reactionary one. But I’d never lose sight of the fact that the two main political parties are too far down a path to address the nation’s problems in the way they must be addressed. This is not to say we’ve lost hope, not if we recall that the major political parties have never really been the vehicles for progressive change. The New Deal, the Great Society, hell, even the right to vote in this Godforsaken political system were won not by politicians and their big-money backers, but by tremendous social movements that rocked the world. We need hope and change; it’s up to us to produce them.

Minsky's post is fairly long, but well worth reading in its entirety.

In honor of Spot, out in the unknown universe

Spot, about 2003, up on the fridge
in my 39th Street apartment

Way back in August of 1997, I was living in a little house in Eugene, Oregon with my old cat Pounce. My long term girlfriend had left me that May, but I was getting over it. I worked at my janitorial job at the Eugene Public Library. I wrote poems, tinkered with old computers, thought about making a Web page. Life was pretty good, actually.

Then, on or about August 3rd, I heard a meow out on my side porch. I thought the neighbor's kitten had gotten loose. When I opened the door, a beautiful little tortoiseshell calico ran inside the house. She was about a year old, so far as I could tell, and she was all fur and bones. She dashed over to Pounce's food dish and gulped down over the food before I could throw her out.

I thought I didn't need another cat. I called the new arrival "Spot," as in "Out, damned Spot!" But it was too late. She had already won my heart.  Pounce tried to be patient, even when the kittens arrived. But that's another story.

Spot and I had almost 15 great years together. She died a month ago tomorrow.

Here's to you, Spotter Cat, to your intelligence, and your sly sense of humor, and your indomitable will. Here's to the way you would hide in the garden or under the house, and to the way you would yowl when I would pick you up and bring you in. And to the way you would come to investigate when I played the harmonica. I hope you are having fun out there in the unknown universe, wherever you are, and that you never have to go inside any more.

Are careerists the root of all evil?

Many years ago, when I was in college, I remember that I believed that most of the evil in the world was done by self-righteous zealots who were completely convinced that they were on the side of the Good. I thought that Hitler, for instance, understood himself to be conducting a great moral crusade, and this belief in his own goodness allowed him to perpetrate unspeakable evil.

Later, I abandoned this idea as simplistic. After all, many "moral crusades" are orchestrated by cynical manipulators to further their own ends. Thomas Frank has famously argued that ultra-wealthy Republican strategists have used the "culture wars" to convince white working-class people to vote against their own economic interests. Do those strategists even think about morality when they're planning those strategies?

Yesterday, thanks to Grandmothers Against Bullshit, I saw a provocative post by Chris Hedges that explores the idea that those who are really the most evil are the minor functionaries who do the mundane dirty work of those with the most power:

These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

It seems to me that Mr. Hedges is on to something. But he leaves unanswered the question of how these functionaries turn off their moral sense. And he doesn't look beyond the bureaucrats to the masters they serve. There is something that doesn't quite ring true to me about his analysis, but I can't quite articulate it at this time of night. Maybe it has to do with the ways that the very concepts of "good" and "evil" have been leveraged to justify oppression--as the philosopher Sarah Hoagland has pointed out.

But is it possible?

Yesterday, I discovered a cool Web site called Role/Reboot. Here's another great post (from a week ago) I found on that site today. Blogger Melissa Byrne writes with excitement about the appointment of a woman named Marissa Meyer to be the CEO at Yahoo. But Byrne is disappointed that Meyer has also agreed to join the board of union-busting Wal-Mart:

I'm worried the values of Wal-Mart—greed at any cost—will seep into the still growing tech sector. Will Marissa become chummies with the Waltons? Will they trade secrets on union busting? Will she influence Yahoo!'s political giving to support conservative, anti-worker candidates?

I want women to succeed at business. But, I want no one to succeed at business who doesn't respect the rights and dignity of workers, especially low-wage workers, most of whom are women.

I do wish Marissa the best. Mostly, I wish that she would spend a few days with low-wage workers and decide to leave Wal-Mart.

I agree with Byrne's sentiments, but wonder if there really are good corporations out there that respect their workers, their customers, and the natural world. Isn't that how corporate owners succeed, by ripping off the rest of us and covering it up with public relations campaigns? Is it possible for women (or anyone) to succeed in business without abandoning their moral principles?

First female US astronaut dies, then comes out

You can see the details here.

A disturbing story with a slightly happy ending

According to theage.com.au, a Kentucky teenager who was assaulted by two teenage males was faced with contempt of court charges when she revealed their names on Twitter. She was distressed by the light sentences her attackers had received. The charges were eventually dropped.

Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, said the motion to withdraw the contempt of court charge was "a huge victory not only for Ms. Dietrich, but for women all over the country." Deitrich told The Courier-Journal that after the sexual assault, the boys posted photos of the attack on the internet. "These boys shared the picture of her being raped with their friends and she can't share their names with her Twitter community? That's just crazy," O'Neill said.

Privileged white men and mass murder

Thanks to the Women's International News Gathering Service (WINGS), for a link to a interesting and thought-provoking post about the Colorado theater massacre. Writing for Role/Reboot, Hugo Schwyzer argues that privileged white men are much more likely than other men to murder strangers in public places.

It’s not that white men are more violent. Rates of domestic violence, including homicide, are roughly the same across all ethnic groups. Statistically, murderers are more likely to kill family members and intimate partners than strangers. But while men from all backgrounds kill their spouses, affluent white men are disproportionately represented in the ranks of our most infamous mass murderers. In other words, the less privileged you are, the less likely you are to take your violence outside of your family and your community.

White men from prosperous families grow up with the expectation that our voices will be heard. We expect politicians and professors to listen to us and respond to our concerns. We expect public solutions to our problems. And when we’re hurting, the discrepancy between what we’ve been led to believe is our birthright and what we feel we’re receiving in terms of attention can be bewildering and infuriating. Every killer makes his pain another’s problem. But only those who’ve marinated in privilege can conclude that their private pain is the entire world’s problem with which to deal. This is why, while men of all races and classes murder their intimate partners, it is privileged young white dudes who are by far the likeliest to shoot up schools and movie theaters.

The observation that such acts of violence are most often committed by men is an old one. For instance, consider this song by Judy Small about the 1989 Montreal Massacre. What makes Schwyzer's post unusual is the way he bases his analysis on personal experience. The whole thing is well worth reading.

The place of the police in a humane society

I have been so absorbed in the process of taking care of my dying cat, Spot, that I had almost forgotten that tomorrow is the Fourth of July. So this evening when it got dark and cool, I folded a towel and put it on the porch, and set out a dish of fresh ice cubes as well. Then I picked Spot up out of the bathtub and took her outside. She is almost too weak to walk now, but going outside is one of her favorite things. She was sitting on the walkway with her front paws crossed and enjoying the cool night breeze and looking very happy.

You know what happened next.

Some nincompoops down the street started setting off large and loud fireworks.

Spot dashed back onto the porch and tried hiding under the bench. I picked her up and took her back inside and put her back in the bathtub.

I have never liked the sound of fireworks, and I have never understood why people think it is clever or fun to endanger their limbs, their eyeballs, and their children's safety by setting off small explosives. This makes even less sense as the weather grows hotter and drier, and the wind is blowing. Add to this the fact that this neighborhood consists almost entirely of old wooden houses. Doesn't this sound like a recipe for disaster?

In Oklahoma City, following this particular recipe for disaster is also illegal.

So yes, I called the police.

My anarchist friends--for whom I have great respect--would say that in a situation like this a person should try to talk reasonably with her neighbors. Point out how important it is not to set the neighborhood on fire.Explain how bad it is to make every little dog ion the street whimper. (Not to mention the fact that they scared the hell out of my poor dying cat.)

But sometimes, under great provocation, a person is not capable of talking reasonably. If I had gone down there, I wouldn't have trusted myself to remain nonviolent. And frankly, calling the police is probably the thing that kept me from going over the edge and going down the block and hurting someone.

With luck, I will still be able to take Spot outside in the morning.