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."

Occupied our state capitol

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

Occupy Wall Street and feminism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's going on in Oakland?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Consensus in the rain

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

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

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

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

Remembering Anita Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 15 OKC rally

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

More people were on the steps behind this area.

This is what the Occupy movement is all about.

The daily schedule for the OKC Occupiers.

Some of the tents in the camping area.

The kitchen feeds anyone who needs food.

What about the one percent?

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

     There’s a reason the protests ended up on Wall Street: The top 1% and top 0.1% comprises all the senior bosses and the financial sector.

      One of the best things about Occupy Wall Street is that there is no chatter about Obama or Perry or whatever is the electoral political issue of the day. There are a lot of people rethinking things, discussing, learning, and conceptualizing the kinds of world they want to create. Since so much about inequality is a function of the legal structure known as a “corporation,” I’d encourage you to check out Alex Gourevitch on how the corporate is structured in our laws.

      The paper notes that stock market returns drive much of the manager’s income. This is related to a process of financialization, something JW Mason has done a fantastic job outlining here. The “dominant ethos among managers today is that a business exists only to enrich its shareholders, including, of course, senior managers themselves,” and this is done by paying out more in dividends that is earned in profits. Think of it as our-real-economy-as-ATM-machine, cashing out wealth during the good times and then leaving workers and the rest of the real economy to deal with the aftermath.

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

The advantages of "disunity"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wall Street occupation not evicted for now

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

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

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

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

Occupy OKC rally scheduled for Saturday noon

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

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

The text of this declaration can be read here.

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

OKC occupation continues

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

OKC occupiers to march downtown Tuesday

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

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

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

"Privatized Gain = Socialized Loss"

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

"Workers Rights Are Human Rights"

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

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

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

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

Background information

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

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

• Public Relations and Message Team
• Action Committee
• Infrastructure
• Visual Arts
• Spiritual Team
• Legal
• Medical
• Media.
  

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

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

How it felt to go the OKC General Assembly

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

More on Occupy Wall Street

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.

Death of a pioneer

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

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

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

Against Social Security except for themselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asking and telling

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

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough is enough

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

Supporting workers and saving the planet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurricane Irene

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

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

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

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

More news on the student exchange from hell

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

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

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

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

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

The student cultural exchange from hell

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Obama as the New Nixon?

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

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

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

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

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

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Oklahoma City and Oslo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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