A several-month end to the budget showdown?

This might be good news.

House Republicans enjoy the government shutdown so much...

...that they've found a way to undermine the compromise deal that was developing in the Senate. Read all about it at TPM.

Things that make a person say, "hmmmm......"

Here's an interesting post by Steve Benen over on the Maddow Blog  about the fate of the Affordable Care Act.

Ending the Shutdown

As I noted in my most recent post, the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government is not the act of anarchists, but the work of elitists trying to overcome the effects of popular rule. This recent post from thenation.com makes this even clearer:

The shutdown (and the threat to allow a debt default) seeks to undo the results of the 2012 election by giving a minority within the losing party the power to decide whether government will operate or not. The founders of the American experiment established a separation of powers, but that is not the cause of today’s crisis. In 2012, Barack Obama won the presidency by 5 million votes. He won 51 percent of the overall vote, and he won the Electoral College 332 to 206. But the Democratic victory did not end there. The Democrats were expected to lose Senate seats, but they actually gained, and the overall turnout in those races gave them a 10 million–vote advantage. In House races, Democrats secured an overall margin of 1.7 million votes; the chamber is under Republican control not because of the desires of American voters, but because of a combination of gerrymandering, big money and winner-take-all voting structures.

So House Republicans are “governing” by other means. Worse yet, the House leadership is compelled to take the most extreme position because the vast majority of GOP districts have been so gerrymandered that even reasonable Republicans are more fearful of a Tea Party primary challenge than of a November challenge in which the whole electorate might hold them to account.

The editors at The Nationoffer this solution to the situation:

Groups like Common Cause and FairVote, which have campaigned on behalf of democratic reform for years, are at the ready with smart proposals—from nonpartisan redistricting commissions to proportional representation to creation of multi-member districts. Obama should use his bully pulpit not just to end the immediate crisis but to call for a national dialogue about the tattered state of our democracy. And he should call for reforms to ensure that Americans will never again be forced to live from crisis to crisis.

I would be pleasantly surprised if the president took those actions, but I am not going to hold my breath.

Democrats resort to mindless name-calling in budget battle

About a week ago, blogger Nathan Schneider posted this thoughtful commentary about the relationship of anarchists to government. Scheider was reacting to a statement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in which Reid called House Republicans "anarchists" because they were trying to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund the Affordable Care Act.

Schneider pointed out that:

(A)narchists today disagree about how to relate to institutions like the pseudo-democratic U.S. government. Some, much like their counterparts on the libertarian right, advocate total withdrawal and non-participation, refusing to do things like vote or pay taxes. Others believe that for now government can be a means for pursuing anarchist-friendly ends; “it’s completely realistic and rational to work within structures to which you are opposed,” writes Noam Chomsky, “because by doing so you can help to move to a situation where then you can challenge those structures.”

Most people with anarchist tendencies fall somewhere in between. They’re less fixated on debating whether government is good or bad than on rebuilding political life from the ground up, starting in local communities that are connected through global networks. When the anarchist-inspired Occupy movement sprang up two years ago, commentators were quick to compare it to the Tea Party — and to judge it by whether, like the Tea Party, it elected politicians to office. But this standard seemed beside the point for Occupy participants, who tended to hold a different strategy for making change. The more useful right-wing analogue would be not the Tea Party but churches, whose massive political power stems from being effective centers of mutual support and community. Megachurch pastors generally keep aloof from elected office, but nobody can deny their influence.

In the current budget stalemate in Washington D.C., I would like to be sympathetic to the Democrats, because the Republicans are just being so hateful. Simple-minded tactics such as Reid's name-calling make it difficult for me to support the Democrats, though. Calling House Republicans "anarchists" -- when they clearly aren't -- isn't any more principled than the old right-wing habit of calling liberals and moderates "communists."

What's really disappointing is that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has such an honorable history, resorted to the same sort of simple-minded insults, as you can see in the video clip below. The name-calling mars what was otherwise an impassioned but thoughtful speech. In the short run, Democrats might gain some political advantage by using such tactics. In the long run, they'll reinforce the apathy and disgust of citizens with the U.S. political process -- a result that can only benefit the most extreme Republicans.

Illegal, Immoral, and Dangerous

Thanks to Feminist Peace Network on Facebook for sharing this careful analysis by Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies on why a US missile attack on Syria would be not only wrong, but stupid. As Bennis notes:

A US military strike on Syria will increase levels of violence and instability inside the country, in the region, and around the world. Inside Syria, aside from immediate casualties and damage to the already shattered country, reports are already coming in of thousands of Syrian refugees returning from Lebanon to "stand with their government" when the country is under attack. It could lead to greater support to the brutal regime in Damascus. In Kosovo, more Kosovars were forcibly expelled from their homes by the Serbian regime after the NATO bombing began than had happened before it started; Syrian civilians could face similar retaliation from the government.

A US strike will do nothing to strengthen the secular armed opposition, still largely based in Turkey and Jordan, let alone the heroic but weakened original non-violent democratic opposition forces who have consistently opposed militarization of their struggle and outside military intervention. Those who gain will be the most extreme Islamist forces within the opposition, particularly those such as the Jubhat al-Nusra which are closest to al-Qaeda. They have long seen the US presence in the region as a key recruitment tool and a great local target.

There is also the danger of escalation between the US and Russia, already at odds in one of the five wars currently underway in Syria. So far that has been limited to a war of words between Washington and Moscow, but with the G-20 meeting scheduled for next week in St Petersburg, President Putin may feel compelled to push back more directly, perhaps with new economic or other measures.

US not morally superior to Syria

Over on Truthdig, Juan Cole makes a cogent argument for why diplomacy, not cruise missiles, are the best tool for defusing the Syrian crisis. For instance:

I am not arguing that because the United States and its allies have indiscriminately killed large numbers of innocent noncombatants in the past, the Syrian government should be held harmless for its own gas attack at Ghouta, which killed hundreds of innocent civilians. Two wrongs never make a right. I am arguing that the United States is in no moral or legal position to play the Lone Ranger here. The first steps Washington should take are to acknowledge its own implication in such atrocities and to finish destroying its chemical stockpiles and join the ban on land mines and cluster bombs.

Now that we’re in the 21st century, moreover, it is time to cease using the supposedly macho language of violence in response to political challenges. Tossing a couple of Tomahawk cruise missiles on a few government facilities in Damascus is not going to deter the Syrian government from using chemical weapons, and it will not affect the course of the war. Sonni Efron, a former State Department official and now a senior government fellow at Human Rights First, has argued that the United States and Europe could have a much more effective impact by announcing that in response to the Baath provocation they were going to close the loopholes that allow Syrian banks to continue to interface with world financial institutions. This strategy would involve threatening third-party sanctions on Russian banks that provide Damascus with a financial backdoor. A united U.S.-EU push on this front would be far more consequential for the Syrian government than a limited military strike.

Women's Equality Day

Mother Jones posted this on Facebook. The comments are interesting.

The split personality of the second March on Washington

On Saturday, 50 years after the original March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a commemorative march took place.
 
Ari Berman says this recent march marks the emergence of a new civil rights movement. Berman's colleague at The Nation,  Dave Zirin is not so sure.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation used Saturday's march as a an occasion for organizing. Meanwhile, over at Black Agenda Report,  editor-in-chief Glen Ford describes the inclusion of President Obama in this year's march as a betrayal of everything the original march stood for.

Meanwhile, another commemorative march is scheduled for the actual 50th anniversary of the first march on August 28.

Our war did not liberate them

Thanks to Feminist Peace Network for sharing a link to this CounterPunch post about the failure of the US-led war effort to free the women of Afghanistan.

As Mohadesa Najumi writes:

Ask a women in Wardak or Kandahar if she feels the “liberation” of the western intervention and she will look at you with bewilderment. This is because the bells of freedom do not reverberate through Afghanistan. 87% of women continue to be illiterate. As many as 80% have faced forced marriages and life expectancy is 44 years. Why dont Oxfam or ActionAid publish these statistics? Or are they too telling of the failed war on Afghanistan? These figures are ones that expose Afghan women as the biggest losers of the war.

Laura Bush said it was the duty of the humane world to alleviate of the plight of women and children. Yet alleviate they did not.. 18 billion dollars and an occupation later, 1 in 4 children before they turn five and Afghanistan is still the worst place in the world for a woman to give birth. It may not even be wrong to argue that the situation has since exasperated. All the money, time and “noble” rhetoric did not manifest into reality. And the western world is still scared today to admit they failed Afghan women.

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.

Oh, cool.

Really, this won't crack my cynicism about Facebook, but I just found this on Facebook, which led me to the annotated online version of Dyke, A Quarterly.

Kewl.

A complicated mess

I'm actually rather cynical about Facebook, and don't log on there much. But when I do, I often find some amazing stuff. For instance, Kathleen Barry and Feminist Peace Movement both linked to this extraordinary post. Here's a short sample:

We, the undersigned 1960s radical feminists and current activists, have been concerned for some time about the rise within the academy and mainstream media of “gender theory,” which avoids naming men and the system of male supremacy as the beneficiaries of women’s oppression. Our concern changed to alarm when we learned about threats and attacks, some of them physical, on individuals and organizations daring to challenge the currently fashionable concept of gender.

Recent developments: A U.S. environmental organization that also calls itself radical feminist is attacked for its political analysis of gender. Feminist conferences in the U.K., U.S. and Canada are driven from their contracted locations for asserting the right of women to organize for their liberation separately from men, including M>F (male to female) transgendered people.

Deep Green Resistance (DGR) reports1 that queer activists defaced its published materials and trans activists threatened individual DGR members with arson, rape and murder. Bookstores are pressured not to carry DGR’s work and its speaking events are cancelled after protests by queer/transgender activists. At “RadFem” conferences in London2, Portland3 and Toronto4, trans activists accuse scheduled speakers of hate speech and/or being transphobic because they dare to analyze gender from a feminist political perspective. Both M>F transgender people and “men’s rights” groups, operating separately but using similar language, demand to be included in the Rad Fem 2013 conference in London called to fight against women’s oppression and for liberation.

I'm too tired to do justice to this topic tonight. In some ways, I have a lot of empathy with trans activists. In my own life, the question "Are you a boy or a girl?" has been a life-or-death issue. I don't doubt that trans people face violence and threats. But ultimately, I think the idea of "transgender" reinforces gender instead of undermining it. And I believe that people born into female-sexed bodies have the right to organize female-only space as a matter of resistance to our oppression.

That's not hate. That's a political opinion that trans activists strongly disagree with.

My admiration for the radical feminist post is tempered by a peculiar circumstance. it seems that the current operators of www.pandagon.net may have scooped up a Web address that the original operators inadvertently allowed to expire. The original Pandagon now appears at www.rawstory.com.

One of the original Pandagon folks, Amanda Marcotte, reacted with outrage to this. (Hat tip to Feminist Peace Network on Facebook for that link.) It's not clear exactly what connection the current operators of pandagon.net have to the authors of the radical feminist post, but it's a disquieting situation. I'm sad to see this difficult issue of gender politics blurred by this sort of confusion. It almost looks as if some radical feminists tried to get attention for their position (which I very much support and admire) by trying to make it appear that it came from people who are actually their political opponents.

I can't at all agree with Amanda Marcotte's characterization of radical feminists as "transphobic bigots," but I don't blame her for being pissed off that her url was swiped.

Fighting back against online sexism

Hat tip to Spinifex Press for posting this commentary by social psychologist Brianne Hastie about the persistence of online woman-hating and the need to resist it:

Rather than sticking with the commonly advocated refrain of “don’t feed the trolls”, women (and other minority groups) are starting to bite back against this online abuse. Increasingly, bloggers are calling on women to sink to the level of misogynists and out their attackers.

An abusive email sent to Feministing from a university student email address – which just happened to belong to the public relations officer for the Republican club of Southern Illinois University College in the US – is just one example. He was outed and various faculty members were contacted by blog supporters. As a result, he was removed from the Republican club and made a public apology on the blog comments (although this was more of a “sorry to have been caught” than a “sorry I did it”).

Criado-Perez and Creasy’s treatment has resulted in the arrest of one man on harassment charges and forced Twitter to address the way abusive tweets are reported.

A recent campaign targeting Facebook resulted in a commitment from them to address gender hate as strictly as other forms on their site.

Hastie reports that Caroline Criado-Perez (mentioned in the block quote above) was brutally threatened with rape and murder on Twitter because of her campaign to put novelist Jane Austen on the 10 pound note.

This definitely belongs in the "stranger than fiction category." As Rebecca Mead writes for the New Yorker, "Who could object to the honoring of genteel, beloved Jane?" As Hastie and Mead both report, quite a few somebodies could. And in this case, resistance has proved both necessary and effective.

Still trying to make sense of this heartbreaking news...

...I found this amazing interview with Alice Walker that Democracy Now!  did right after Trayvon Martin was murdered in March of 2012. Walker talks about how Trayvon came from the same section of Florida as Zora Neale Hurston. I can't really describe it at the moment, but it is well worth watching:



Ironically during this time period, the poet Adrienne Rich had also just died , of natural causes, after a a long and productive life devoted to poetry, essay writing, feminism, anti-racism and social justice. In my own experience, and in my reading of history, I have seen how anti-racism and feminism have been portrayed as somehow in opposition to each other. Rich, in her life, demonstrated the possibility of radical integrity.

Alice Walker notes in this interview (which followed on Democracy Now! the interview she had done about Trayvon Martin),

I think her legacy for all of us is to continue to believe in the power of art, especially in the power of poetry, and to keep moving and not to be dissuaded, not to be discouraged, but to take heart from a woman who lived for 82 years giving her very best, growing out of every shell that society attempted to force her into to become this really amazing figure of inspiration and hope and love.

Now is a time when we need such inspiration.

I hardly know what to say...

...in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin. But let's start by watching this excellent piece from Democracy Now:

This, on the other hand, is definitely bad news

Rachel Maddow's blog posted this excellent but disturbing analysis of nationwide efforts to limit women's access to abortion in the U.S. since the November presidential elections.

Good news and bad news

The bad news is that the US government insists on treating NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden as if her were a criminal. The good news is, the people of the United States aren't falling for it.

Meanwhile, Snowden is reportedly still caught in limbo in the transit zone of a Moscow airport, as he and his supporters try to find asylum for him in a third country.

The Guardian maintains a Web page of background information and breaking news about the Snowden case.

The power of radio

This post by Amy Goodman on Truthdig details the creation of 1000 new low-power community radio licenses by the FCC, and how such licenses could be used to empower local communities and movements. It's good to see some hopeful news for a change.

Weed it and weep

I first learned about library weeding back when I was a custodian at the Eugene Public Library in Oregon back in the late 1990s. In advance of a move to a new building, the librarians removed huge numbers of books from the collection and threw them into trash barrels in the library garage. I discovered these barrels full of books -- including a large number of second-wave feminist classics -- one night when I came on shift.

The librarians assured me that this was a normal part of public library collection management, that the books were being removed because they circulated rarely or not at all. Public libraries needed to provide what was in demand among their patrons. The job of saving books belonged to academic libraries. While I was quite convinced that the librarians believed the story that they were telling me, it seemed to me that the practice of weeding had an unintentionally Orwellian result. Old and unpopular materials were removed from public view and sent "down the memory hole." I wrote about it at the time. Thanks to the miracle of the Wayback Machine, you can read that old essay now, if you'd like.

While it's true that the aggressive weeding of public library collections is a widely accepted practice among librarians, there are professional standards that govern it. The decision to remove an item from a library collection theoretically takes account of several criteria, including how often it circulates, its lasting importance, its physical condition, and its age. One widely used set of guidelines for weeding is published by the Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission, and is known as the CREW Manual. Whatever the shortcomings of this document, it makes clear that weeding is a practice that requires thoughtfulness, planning, and thought. In other words, librarians don't generally go through their collections and toss out every book that is more than 10 years old without considering other factors.

But according to information sent to me by one of my professors, exactly such a bizarre and extreme weeding program may have taken place recently at the Urban Free Public Library in Illinois. The story broke about a week ago in the local online news magazine Smile Politely. According to columnist Tracy Nectoux,

I was contacted about something extremely disturbing that had recently happened at Urbana Free Library (UFL). A weeding process had taken place that had discarded thousands of nonfiction books in a hasty, arbitrary way — a way that utilizes only one of the UFL’s stated selection criteria.*

Both UFL staff and the public (who were alarmed at the rapidly emptying shelves) spoke out, but the weeding continued until a library board meeting (and Mayor Laurel Prussing) was called. JP Goguen, a university library employee, was at the meeting, recorded it, and sent the recording to me (the board normally does not record meetings). The conversation at this meeting is alarming. Urbana Free Library's director, Deb Lissak, made a unilateral decision to weed books in the print collection by date alone. It seems that the Adult Services staff’s expertise and knowledge of the collection was neither consulted nor welcomed. In fact, Anne Phillips, Director of Adult Services, was not even in the country when the project began and was unaware that it was happening at all.

The library planned to mark all of its book with RFID tags. In order to speed up this time-consuming process, library director Lissak may have ordered the removal of any book in the collection that had been published before 2003. There are conflicting reports about this. An update to Tracy Netoux's orginal post has a link to this response on the Urbana Free Libary's Web site. Another update provided a link to an interview of Lissak by a local radio station, in which Lissak said the controversy came about because of miscommunication between the library staff and herself.

Others dispute Lissak's version of events. An overflow crowd of enraged citizens attended Monday night's City Council meeting, as reported by the East Illinois News-Gazette and Smile Politely. There is even a Twitter feed devoted to the controversy. Most tweeters seem outraged by the situation, but some support Lissak's position.

This summer I'm working on finalizing the prospectus for my library studies master's thesis. It's going to be about weeding. I think this is an important area of public policy that ought to be discussed more thoroughly with the public. This controversy shows exactly why public discussion of library weeding is so important.