About what happened in Ferguson, MO

Watch this. It takes a whole hour, but it's worth it:

http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2014/11/25

If you'd rather watch or read the individual stories from Democracy Now!, here are the links:

• Black Lives Matter: Ferguson Erupts After Grand Jury Clears Officer in Michael Brown Killing 
•  "It's Officially Open Season on Black Folks:" Legal Expert Decries Handling of Wilson Grand Jury
• Riot as the Language of the Unheard: Ferguson Protests Set to Continue in Fight for Racial Justice

The Harry Potter Alliance and the Hunger Games

Apparently the release of the second Hunger Games movie has become an occasion for hyper-marketing of cosmetics and fast-food sandwiches. This is, to say the least, ironic, considering the anti-capitalist and anti-militarist themes of the Hunger Games trilogy. The Harry Potter Alliance, a group of fans devoted to working for social justice, has come up with a campaign to resist the hyper-marketing.

This very cool tumblr tells more.

The price of heroism

I am sorry and shocked, but not necessarily surprised, to learn that Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing information to Wikileaks that showed evidence of US war crimes. Manning released an eloquent statement in response to the sentence. The statement is reproduced in its entirety below. This text is a rush transcript posted by Common Dreams, and refers to Manning's decision to seek a pardon from President Obama:

The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We've been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we've had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, "There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.

The Bradley Manning Support Network has a link to a petition in support of a pardon for Manning.

Of tar sands and corporate profits.

This is just a quick post in honor of my friend Stefan Warner, who was arrested with seven others at a civil disobedience action near Schoolton, Oklahoma today. Stefan, working as part of the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance, chained himself to a piece of equipment that is being used to construct part of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance is holding a training camp for activists March 18-22 in the Ponca City area, and encourages people who are interested in working with them to attend.

If this pipeline is constructed, it "could devastate ecosystems and pollute water sources, and would jeopardize public health," according to Friends of the Earth.

According to newsok.com:

Calgary-based TransCanada has proposed a 1,700-mile pipeline, dubbed the Keystone XL, to carry oil derived from tar sands in Alberta to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. Although the northern leg of the project has not received federal approval, the company currently is constructing the 485-mile southern portion of the pipeline that will transport oil from storage facilities in Cushing, Okla., to Texas, said TransCanada spokesman David Dodson.

The man who locked himself to the machinery, called a side boom, was removed after he was lowered to the ground and a local fire department used a pair of bolt cutters to free him, Conn said. A spokesman for the environmental group identified the man as Stefan Warner, a youth pastor from Harrah.

For in-depth background about the XL Keystone Pipeline, I recommend Michael Klare's excellent post at CommonDreams.org

Summer begins and the struggle continues

As Starhawk reminds us, today--and tonight--marks the Solstice. For all of its great and sometimes excessive heat, summer is a time of great joy for me. On this Solstice, I like to think of things that help me feel connected to the Earth, other women, the community, and the ongoing struggle to set the world right.

Here are two random things that give me hope:

First, thanks to Spinifex for sharing this radio interview with renowned Indian eco-feminist Vandana Shiva.  Shiva describes not only the peril we face, but the great and growing strength of the movement to undo that peril.

Second, thanks to Tamlyn for sharing this video made by Oklahoma labor activists. The times we live in are both scary and exciting, and seeing that activists here are working to raise the voice of ordinary working people gives me hope.

At the risk of sounding like a pagan, I would like to say that the Earth and her seasons are sacred. Actually, I guess I am a pagan of sorts, an agnostic pagan. So finally, thanks to Beacon Press for sharing this video of poet Mary Oliver reading her poem "The Summer Day."

Michigan, the Oklahoma of the north?

Thanks to Kansas National Organization for Women for a link to this post from Jezebel about an extreme anti-choice bill that has since been passed by the Michigan House of Representatives. Among other provisions, the bill would ban all abortions for any reason after 20 weeks of pregnancy. There are no exceptions.Not even if the life or health of the pregnant woman is endangered by the pregnancy. Not even if the fetus has such serious problems that it will never be able to live outside the womb.

To add insult to injury, according to Jezebel, two pro-choice female legislators have been banned indefinitely from speaking on the House floor. One of these legislators, Democrat Lisa Brown, apparently gave offense by using the word "vagina" in her floor speech opposing the bill.

JOS of Feministing reports that the bill passed on June 13 by a vote of 70 to 39 after only 20 minutes of debate. The anti-choice Michigan Senate is likely to consider the bill in September

Besides the ban on all abortions after 20 weeks, the bill is what pro-choice advocates call TRAP legislation. According to the National Abortion Federation, the acronym stands for Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. The goal is to drive abortion providers out of business under the pretense of regulating clinics to make sure they meet proper medical standards.

According to Feministing blogger Chloe, the Michigan bill includes:

: state-mandated scripts for doctors that masquerade as faux concern for women who are being coerced into abortion, new TRAP laws to make insurance more complicated and expensive for providers, stricter regulations for clinics, new rules about the disposal of fetal remains that would affect women who have miscarriages as well as abortions, and a new measure requiring the presence of a doctor for a medical abortion in a state where many women rely on tele-med prescriptions because so few counties have a provider on the ground.

Chloe provided a link to the text of the bill, and recommended reading the ongoing coverage of the Michigan situation by Angi Becker Stevens at RH Reality Check. Robin Marty, also of RH Reality Check, wrote another excellent analysis of the bill.

Michigan state lawmakers seem to want to vie with the Oklahoma Legislature for the honors of producing the most extreme and ridiculous laws to limit women's lives and freedom. Of course, in Oklahoma, valiant and well-organized activists managed to defeat one of the worst anti-choice bills considered in the recent legislative session. Maybe our Michigan sisters will be able to do the same.

Occupying the Left

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

The advantages of "disunity"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Occupy Wall Street

If you missed it, my first post is here.

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

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

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

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

Occupied

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

I seem to have been very wrong.

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

Here is what I've figured out so far.

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

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

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

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

Malalai Joya allowed visa, calls for US withdrawal

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

Thoughts on WikiLeaks

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

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

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

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

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

Equinox

It is the first day of Spring, and in my little neighborhood in northwest Oklahoma City, there are several inches of snow on the ground. Snow covers large parts of the state of Oklahoma. But I am fairly confident that hell has not frozen over. Therefore, there is no way that my Congressional representative, right-wing Republican Mary Fallin, will vote for the health care bill when it comes before the House of Representatives some time tomorrow. Therefore, I can safely ignore the pleas that have been flooding my email inbox, urging me to call her and ask her to vote for the bill.

As I've noted recently, my overwhelming reaction to the current health care bill is ambivalence. I hope that in 20 years, we will all look back and see this bill as a historic first step toward achieving meaningful health care for all. I fear that we will look back at this as the moment when a Democratic president and Congress sacrificed the well-being of ordinary people in order to serve the interests of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and for-profit health-care providers.

Regardless of my hopes and fears, despite the united opposition of Republican lawmakers, it now appears that the bill is almost sure to pass. You can see this from several recent posts on Talking Points Memo. The Democrats have abandoned a controversial parliamentary maneuver and now the House Will Hold Straight Up or Down Vote on Senate Health Care Bill. Progressive skeptics are now falling in line to vote for the bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is refusing to allow anti-choice zealot Bart Stupak the opportunity to amend the Senate bill, which is slightly less destructive to women's reproductive freedom than the version originally passed by the House. It may not be a done deal. It will be a close vote that could still go the other way. But even the racist and anti-gay ugliness perpetrated today by "Tea Party" protesters at the Capitol suggests a desperate last-ditch effort to stop the inevitable.

So it's Spring, y'all. There was so much snow that the local protest that had been scheduled to mark the seventh anniversary of the Iraq War had to be canceled. It may be rescheduled, and other protests took place nationwide. Tomorrow, immigration rights activists will march on Washington, DC to demand reform of our nation's unjust immigration laws. Activists continue working for single-payer health care. And frankly, my friends, I don't believe there is a hell.And I still believe that if we work really hard, we can make this world better without waiting for torment or paradise in some world to come. I hope you are having a lovely Equinox. As for myself, I am going to go for a walk in the snow.

Seven years is too much

There will be a peace rally in OKC on Saturday to protest continued US military interference in Iraq.

Feminist abortion activist Jody Howard dies

Our Bodies Ourselves on Facebook has posted a link to the obituary for Jody Howard at chicagotribune.com. Howard was a co-founder of "Jane," the abortion service provided by the Chicago Women's Liberation Union before Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure.

According to the obituary, Howard became a feminist at Michigan State University,.After graduation, she moved with her husband to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. She became involved in a variety of progressive causes, including the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and the American Civil Liberties Union. She was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease while pregnant with her daughter. She needed an abortion for health reasons as the result of a later, unexpected pregnancy. In order to get a legal abortion, she was required to go through two psychiatric evaluations. This experience helped to inspire Howard to co-found Jane.

A forceful advocate for causes she backed, Ms. Howard "had a great deal of personal charisma and (at the same time) could offer a very nice analysis of the issue," [former Jane member Martha] Scott said.

With her daughters, Ms. Howard participated in a blockade of the Rock Island Arsenal to protest war. At an ACLU fundraiser at Hugh Hefner's Gold Coast mansion, she showed up with small pictures of naked men that she posted here and there.

"She was escorted out," her ex-husband said.

A commenter on Our Bodies Ourselves Facebook post pointed out that more information about Jane can be found at this page on the Chicago Women's Liberation Union herstory site.

A tempest in a teapot?

The publicity and influence granted to right-wing political groups often outweighs their real popularity. I was reminded of this today by this item on the Right Wing Watch site of  People for the American Way. It was a critique of the speech given by right-wing activist Tom Tancredo at the opening session of the Tea Party Convention in Nashville this weekend.

Rep. Tom Tancredo’s deeply offensive remarks embodied the worst of today’s Republican Party, calling President Obama a ‘socialist ideologue,’ raving about the threat of immigration and multiculturalism, and longing for those good old days when literacy tests and other obstacles to the ballot were used to keep the ‘wrong’ people from voting. He would be nothing more than a bad joke if he did not represent a corrosive spirit that is far too prevalent in our politics today.

Too many conservative and Republican politicians, pundits, and political strategists have been eager to inflame racial and ethnic resentments for short-term political gain. And far too many have followed Tancredo’s path of demonizing immigrants in ways that dishonor our nation’s history and heritage.

Tancredo and the spirit of the ‘tea party’ groups that shouted down discussion of health care reform are destructive to civility and democracy. As President Obama said this week, it is possible to disagree strongly on policies and still engage in civil, respectful debate. But that’s not the path that GOP leaders, right-wing pundits, and behind-the-scenes backers of the tea party crowd have chosen.

PFAW's press release ended with a confident statement that ultimately the people of the United States will "reject this kind of ugly scapegoating and the political leaders who embrace it." I think they're right. But I was left to wonder why news of this convention was so prominent on public radio and on the web.

I came of age as a political activist in the years after Ronald Reagan won the US presidency in 1980. The mainstream news media described this as a huge change in the nation's political direction, but I remember it as a moment that set off a large wave of demonstrations by left-wing activists, against nuclear weapons and nuclear power, against US support for right-wing dictatorships in Central America, against US support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. Feminist women's peace camps sprang up in the US and other nations. As I remember it, the mainstream news media ignored this movement. Unless you had other sources of information -- such as the small feminist newspapers that were still widespread in the 1980s -- you would have thought that the entire nation accepted Reagan's right-wing politics.

Although Barack Obama is not the ideologue that Reagan was, his presidency has also been presented as a major change in course for US politics. Now, at every possible moment, malestream news outlets are telling us that there is a significant part of the electorate that opposes Obama, and any political policy that deviates from the hard-right politics of  his predecessor. The publicity given to the so-called Tea Party Movement is merely one example of this. Not that we should ignore Obama's opponents, but it seems to me that this onslaught of publicity has given them much more influence than they deserve.

The reason for this is not too hard to find. Rachel Maddow pointed it out last summer. This "tea party" isn't a grassroots movement, it's astroturf, orchestrated and financed by long-established right-wing Republican organizations with lots of money. This is not a reason for despair. But it is a reason to look for ways to minimize the influence of money in politics. For instance, even here in Oklahoma, efforts are mounting to promote a US constitutional amendment for campaign finance reform.

We can create an egalitarian society in the United States. But we're going to have to fight for it.