[There have been daily protests in Quebec for over a 100 days by hundreds of thousands of people. Starting over steep increases in student fees/tuition, accelerated by the citizen response to bill 78 which attempted to force students to get permits for any march over 50 people (and fines of 7,000 for student leaders and at least 25,000 for student groups that didn't do this), it has now become a broad based public protest of citizens (one nights march was app. 400,000 people). Watch this five minute video and see something amazing -- I think it is beautiful and ask myself, why does the Canadian government fear it ......? ]
by Jeremie Battaglia
More reports:
Riley Sparks: Large, peaceful night protest after talks break down: 'I hope it’ll go all summer'
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Jim McGovern: Rescuing "We the People"
Rescuing 'We, the People'
by Representative Jim McGovern (MA)
Huffington Post
Defenders of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and the ascendant corporate rights doctrine that underlies it must be getting nervous.
Why else would George Will resort to arguing, as he so outrageously does ("Taking a scythe to the Bill of Rights", May 6) that the bipartisan People's Rights Amendment I have introduced in the House is "comparable" to condoning infanticide?
A large majority of Americans believe that corporations exert too much influence on our daily lives and our political process. A Hart Research poll released last year found that nearly four in five (79 percent) of registered voters support passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Resolutions calling for such an amendment have passed in several states and cities across the country. Eleven state attorneys general have written to Congress demanding action.
We are already witnessing the corrosive effects of Citizens United: an election system awash in a sea of millions of dollars in unregulated money, drowning out the voices of individual citizens. Politicians are increasingly beholden to wealthy special interests. A multi-national oil company that doesn't like a particular member of Congress can now simply write a big, undisclosed check to "Americans for Apple Pie and Puppies" and watch the negative advertisements work their magic.
But the effects of the corporate rights doctrine go far beyond campaign finance. A Vermont law to require that milk products derived from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be labeled to disclose that information was struck down as a violation of the First Amendment. A federal judge has found that tobacco companies have a free speech right that prevents the government from requiring graphic warning labels on cigarettes. A pharmaceutical corporation has claimed that their corporate speech rights protect them from FDA rules prohibiting the marketing of a drug for "off-label" uses.
As Justice Stevens rightly noted in his dissent in Citizens United (and contrary to what Mr. Will would have us believe), the majority ruling was "a radical departure from what has been settled First Amendment Law." These corporate "rights" are relatively new, appearing in the last few decades. They overturn centuries of established jurisprudence and national consensus. The Supreme Court used to repeatedly affirm that the elected governments of the states and the nation could regulate corporations. Chief Justice John Marshall described the corporate entity as "an artificial being ... existing only in contemplation of law." No less an authority than James Madison viewed corporations as "a necessary evil" subject to "proper limitations and guards." Thomas Jefferson wished to "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
To Read the Rest of the Commentary
by Representative Jim McGovern (MA)
Huffington Post
Defenders of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United and the ascendant corporate rights doctrine that underlies it must be getting nervous.
Why else would George Will resort to arguing, as he so outrageously does ("Taking a scythe to the Bill of Rights", May 6) that the bipartisan People's Rights Amendment I have introduced in the House is "comparable" to condoning infanticide?
A large majority of Americans believe that corporations exert too much influence on our daily lives and our political process. A Hart Research poll released last year found that nearly four in five (79 percent) of registered voters support passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Resolutions calling for such an amendment have passed in several states and cities across the country. Eleven state attorneys general have written to Congress demanding action.
We are already witnessing the corrosive effects of Citizens United: an election system awash in a sea of millions of dollars in unregulated money, drowning out the voices of individual citizens. Politicians are increasingly beholden to wealthy special interests. A multi-national oil company that doesn't like a particular member of Congress can now simply write a big, undisclosed check to "Americans for Apple Pie and Puppies" and watch the negative advertisements work their magic.
But the effects of the corporate rights doctrine go far beyond campaign finance. A Vermont law to require that milk products derived from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be labeled to disclose that information was struck down as a violation of the First Amendment. A federal judge has found that tobacco companies have a free speech right that prevents the government from requiring graphic warning labels on cigarettes. A pharmaceutical corporation has claimed that their corporate speech rights protect them from FDA rules prohibiting the marketing of a drug for "off-label" uses.
As Justice Stevens rightly noted in his dissent in Citizens United (and contrary to what Mr. Will would have us believe), the majority ruling was "a radical departure from what has been settled First Amendment Law." These corporate "rights" are relatively new, appearing in the last few decades. They overturn centuries of established jurisprudence and national consensus. The Supreme Court used to repeatedly affirm that the elected governments of the states and the nation could regulate corporations. Chief Justice John Marshall described the corporate entity as "an artificial being ... existing only in contemplation of law." No less an authority than James Madison viewed corporations as "a necessary evil" subject to "proper limitations and guards." Thomas Jefferson wished to "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
To Read the Rest of the Commentary
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Inside Job Director Charles Ferguson: Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
"Inside Job" Director Charles Ferguson: Wall Street Has Turned the U.S. into a "Predatory Nation"
Democracy Now
Two years after directing the Academy Award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” filmmaker Charles Ferguson returns with a new book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.” Ferguson explores why no top financial executives have been jailed for their role in the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We also discuss Larry Summers and the revolving door between academia and Wall Street, as well as the key role Democrats have played in deregulating the financial industry. According to Ferguson, a "predatory elite" has "taken over significant portions of economic policy and of the political system, and also, unfortunately, major portions of the economics discipline."
Guest:
Charles Ferguson, the Academy Award-winning director of Inside Job, a documentary about the financial crisis. His film on the war in Iraq, No End in Sight, was nominated for an Academy Award. His new book is called Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.
To Watch the Interview
Part 2: “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America”
We continue our conversation with Charles Ferguson, director of the Oscar award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” about the 2008 financial crisis. In his new book, “Predator Nation,” he argues “the role of Democrats has been at least as great as the role of Republicans” in causing the crisis. Ferguson notes the Clinton administration oversaw the most important financial deregulation, and since then, “we’ve seen in the Obama administration very little reform and no criminal prosecutions, and the appointment of a very large number of Wall Street executives to senior positions in the government, including some people who were directly responsible for causing significant portions of the crisis.” Ferguson also calls for raising the salaries of senior regulators and imposing stricter rules for how soon they can lobby for the private sector after leaving the public sector.
To Watch the Interview
Trailer for Inside Job
Watch Inside Job online for free at Film for Action
Democracy Now
Two years after directing the Academy Award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” filmmaker Charles Ferguson returns with a new book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.” Ferguson explores why no top financial executives have been jailed for their role in the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We also discuss Larry Summers and the revolving door between academia and Wall Street, as well as the key role Democrats have played in deregulating the financial industry. According to Ferguson, a "predatory elite" has "taken over significant portions of economic policy and of the political system, and also, unfortunately, major portions of the economics discipline."
Guest:
Charles Ferguson, the Academy Award-winning director of Inside Job, a documentary about the financial crisis. His film on the war in Iraq, No End in Sight, was nominated for an Academy Award. His new book is called Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America.
To Watch the Interview
Part 2: “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America”
We continue our conversation with Charles Ferguson, director of the Oscar award-winning documentary, “Inside Job,” about the 2008 financial crisis. In his new book, “Predator Nation,” he argues “the role of Democrats has been at least as great as the role of Republicans” in causing the crisis. Ferguson notes the Clinton administration oversaw the most important financial deregulation, and since then, “we’ve seen in the Obama administration very little reform and no criminal prosecutions, and the appointment of a very large number of Wall Street executives to senior positions in the government, including some people who were directly responsible for causing significant portions of the crisis.” Ferguson also calls for raising the salaries of senior regulators and imposing stricter rules for how soon they can lobby for the private sector after leaving the public sector.
To Watch the Interview
Trailer for Inside Job
2010 Oscar Winner for Best Documentary, 'Inside Job' provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse. Through exhaustive research and extensive interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, and academics, the film traces the rise of a rogue industry which has corrupted politics, regulation, and academia. It was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.
Watch Inside Job online for free at Film for Action
Benjamin Shingler: Protesters finding creative ways around controversial new Quebec law
Protesters finding creative ways around controversial new Quebec law
by Benjamin Shingler
The Star
Only a day after becoming law, protesters were finding creative ways around Quebec’s controversial legislation aimed at restoring order in the province.
In an attempt to avoid hefty fines, one prominent student group took down its web page Saturday that listed all upcoming protests. Another anonymous web page with listings quickly popped up in its place — with a note discouraging people from attending.
The disclaimer is meant to evade new rules applying to protest organizers, who must provide an itinerary for demonstrations and could be held responsible for any violence.
The website also accepts submissions for future protests and suggests using software that blocks a sender’s digital trail.
Meanwhile, Montreal police were trying to figure out how to use the legislation without heightening tensions during the city’s nightly marches through the city.
Spokesman Ian Lafreniere said the force was still considering its options.
“I’ve got a lot of people working on it now,” Lafreniere said in an interview. “We don’t want to cause a commotion, we want to prevent one.”
Lafreniere said police would likely set up a website or email address where organizers could submit planned protest routes.
Bill 78 lays out strict regulations governing demonstrations of over 50 people, including having to give eight hours’ notice for details such as the protest route, the duration and the time at which they are being held.
Failure to comply could bring stiff penalties for the organizers, but the law could be difficult to enforce.
A late night protest has started in the same downtown square at 8:30 p.m. every night for nearly a month. There’s no clear organizer for the march, and the route is determined by the marchers on a street by street basis.
Still, the law says that student associations who don’t encourage their members to comply with the law could face punishment. Fines range between $7,000 and $35,000 for student leaders and between $25,000 and $125,000 for student unions or student federations.
To Read the Rest of the Article
by Benjamin Shingler
The Star
Only a day after becoming law, protesters were finding creative ways around Quebec’s controversial legislation aimed at restoring order in the province.
In an attempt to avoid hefty fines, one prominent student group took down its web page Saturday that listed all upcoming protests. Another anonymous web page with listings quickly popped up in its place — with a note discouraging people from attending.
The disclaimer is meant to evade new rules applying to protest organizers, who must provide an itinerary for demonstrations and could be held responsible for any violence.
The website also accepts submissions for future protests and suggests using software that blocks a sender’s digital trail.
Meanwhile, Montreal police were trying to figure out how to use the legislation without heightening tensions during the city’s nightly marches through the city.
Spokesman Ian Lafreniere said the force was still considering its options.
“I’ve got a lot of people working on it now,” Lafreniere said in an interview. “We don’t want to cause a commotion, we want to prevent one.”
Lafreniere said police would likely set up a website or email address where organizers could submit planned protest routes.
Bill 78 lays out strict regulations governing demonstrations of over 50 people, including having to give eight hours’ notice for details such as the protest route, the duration and the time at which they are being held.
Failure to comply could bring stiff penalties for the organizers, but the law could be difficult to enforce.
A late night protest has started in the same downtown square at 8:30 p.m. every night for nearly a month. There’s no clear organizer for the march, and the route is determined by the marchers on a street by street basis.
Still, the law says that student associations who don’t encourage their members to comply with the law could face punishment. Fines range between $7,000 and $35,000 for student leaders and between $25,000 and $125,000 for student unions or student federations.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Noam Chomsky: Palestinian Hunger Strike a Protest Against "Violations of Elementary Human Rights"; Occupy Wall Street "Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist" in U.S. — Solidarity; On WikiLeaks, Obama’s Targeted Assassinations and Latin America’s Break from the U.S.
Democracy Now
Noam Chomsky: Palestinian Hunger Strike a Protest Against "Violations of Elementary Human Rights"
We begin our hour-long interview with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky by discussing the Palestinian hunger strike. A tentative deal has reportedly been reached to end a landmark action that’s seen an estimated 2,000 jailed Palestinians go without food to pressure Israeli prison authorities to end the use of solitary confinement and ease a wide range of restrictions. "The hunger strikes are a protest against ... violations of the elementary human rights," Chomsky says. He is Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of dozens of books, most recently, "Occupy."
Chomsky: Occupy Wall Street "Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist" in U.S. — Solidarity
Noam Chomsky says the Occupy movement has helped rebuild class solidarity and communities of mutual support on a level unseen since the time of the Great Depression. "The Occupy movement spontaneously created something that doesn’t really exist in the country: communities of mutual support, cooperation, open spaces for discussion ... just people doing things and helping each other," Chomsky says. "That’s very much missing. There is a massive propaganda—it’s been going on for a century, but picking up enormously—that you really shouldn’t care about anyone else, you should just care about yourself. ... To rebuild [class solidarity], even if it’s in small pieces of the society, can become very important, can change the conception of how a society ought to function." Chomsky also gives his assessment of President Obama, whom he says has attacked civil liberties in a way that has "gone beyond [George W.] Bush."
Noam Chomsky on WikiLeaks, Obama’s Targeted Assassinations and Latin America’s Break from the U.S.
As the United States carries out another deadly drone strike in Yemen, Noam Chomsky compares the counterterrorism policies of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. "If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers," Chomsky says. "If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them." Chomsky also praises the whistleblowing activities of WikiLeaks, as well as the ongoing Latin American shift away from Washington’s long-running political and economic dominance.
Links to this post
Noam Chomsky: Palestinian Hunger Strike a Protest Against "Violations of Elementary Human Rights"
We begin our hour-long interview with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky by discussing the Palestinian hunger strike. A tentative deal has reportedly been reached to end a landmark action that’s seen an estimated 2,000 jailed Palestinians go without food to pressure Israeli prison authorities to end the use of solitary confinement and ease a wide range of restrictions. "The hunger strikes are a protest against ... violations of the elementary human rights," Chomsky says. He is Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of dozens of books, most recently, "Occupy."
Chomsky: Occupy Wall Street "Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist" in U.S. — Solidarity
Noam Chomsky says the Occupy movement has helped rebuild class solidarity and communities of mutual support on a level unseen since the time of the Great Depression. "The Occupy movement spontaneously created something that doesn’t really exist in the country: communities of mutual support, cooperation, open spaces for discussion ... just people doing things and helping each other," Chomsky says. "That’s very much missing. There is a massive propaganda—it’s been going on for a century, but picking up enormously—that you really shouldn’t care about anyone else, you should just care about yourself. ... To rebuild [class solidarity], even if it’s in small pieces of the society, can become very important, can change the conception of how a society ought to function." Chomsky also gives his assessment of President Obama, whom he says has attacked civil liberties in a way that has "gone beyond [George W.] Bush."
Noam Chomsky on WikiLeaks, Obama’s Targeted Assassinations and Latin America’s Break from the U.S.
As the United States carries out another deadly drone strike in Yemen, Noam Chomsky compares the counterterrorism policies of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. "If the Bush administration didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers," Chomsky says. "If the Obama administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them." Chomsky also praises the whistleblowing activities of WikiLeaks, as well as the ongoing Latin American shift away from Washington’s long-running political and economic dominance.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Joshua Clover: Fall and Rise
Fall and Rise
by Joshua Clover
Film Quarterly
...
But Toyota-ization too reached its limits. “Tokyo drift” describes a style of street racing where the cars are made to slide almost frictionlessly through corners, with the low impact grace of a tap dancer in a sandbox. It might just as well be a rubric for the Japanese economy of the ongoing “lost decade”—having avoided a massive economic crash, it is still unable to get back on track or restore profitability, and drifts endlessly through the long turn of late capitalism.
A consultation with reference materials suggests that Tokyo Drift was meant to be out of series and out of time; Fast Five, a less nimble film, takes place earlier. Looks like the present. So Han, a ghost of the Lost Decade, walks into a garage in the emerging economy of Brazil to take his place in the team assembled by Dom (Vin Diesel), who looks like a muscle car with legs, and Brian (Paul Walker), former federal agent. Our heroic band’s admixture of criminal and lawman is matched by the villains: the caper involves a crime lord who is also a political boss. All parties meet at money, obviously. The boss has $100 million socked away in a police station vault. Being street racers, our crew proposes to prise the vault forth from the station cabled to a couple of their vehicles, then flee through downtown Rio. But first they lay hands on an identical vault: a salute to the (remade) Ocean’s Eleven, where the team acquires a replica of the casino vault so as to practice their mechanics. In the event of it, eluding unencumbered pursuit while dragging an enormous steel oblong across pavement proves easier said than done. Call it Rio Friction, the very inverse of Tokyo Drift. Or call it Attack of the BRIC. Abandoning all hope of escape, Dom turns to use the vault as a weapon. Indeed, it has been functioning as such all along; the flight to safety, even before it becomes a demolition derby, has managed to obliterate considerable swaths of the world capital.
Not only is it impossible to imagine the characters thinking this was a good or even plausible idea for getting the dough, it is also impossible to imagine the screenwriters thinking this would make for a good caper. The ten-minute sequence is finally a bit dull; absurdity does have a way of turning to boredom.
But what if we have been thinking of this all wrong, and the entire movie is just a pretext for something else altogether? It may be narrative idiocy of the first water—but it is, we must admit, the single best cinematic representation of the global financial crisis yet contrived, immeasurably better than Inside Job or Capitalism: A Love Story.
A weaponized concentration of capital seems to be dragged about by supermen; it is in fact dragging them around, laying waste to the world before it, destroying houses and urban centers and bodies as it races for safety—before recognizing that there is no safety and it should just turn violently on its pursuers in a festival of destruction.
In the textbook definition, capital is generally self-valorizing value; in a crisis it is inverted, and becomes self-annihilating value. The supermoney that seemed to run the world is revealed as “fictitious capital,” unrealized and finally unrealizable, but still in its auto-destruction capable of laying low the world around it. Which explains what would otherwise be the most intolerable plot device. In the end, it turns out that Dom and Brian have been hauling the fake vault through the city, while the actual box is spirited away, loot enclosed. As a scheme, it’s ludicrous. As a reading of crisis in the world system, it’s immaculate—as if Hollywood had come to an intimate knowledge of volume 3 of Capital without reading, simply by bathing in the current of world money—and should complete the contemporary genre. I am seriously considering renaming this column “The Marx and the Furious.”
Now that we no longer want for figurations of the financial crisis, we can turn to what comes next, if anything, and how one imagines the vectors and contexts of an adequate response. In this arena apocalyptic pictures continue to hold us captive. The signal version this season is Contagion—arriving as an updating of the 1970s disaster flick, and bearing with it some backdated ideas indeed.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Joshua Clover
Film Quarterly
...
But Toyota-ization too reached its limits. “Tokyo drift” describes a style of street racing where the cars are made to slide almost frictionlessly through corners, with the low impact grace of a tap dancer in a sandbox. It might just as well be a rubric for the Japanese economy of the ongoing “lost decade”—having avoided a massive economic crash, it is still unable to get back on track or restore profitability, and drifts endlessly through the long turn of late capitalism.
A consultation with reference materials suggests that Tokyo Drift was meant to be out of series and out of time; Fast Five, a less nimble film, takes place earlier. Looks like the present. So Han, a ghost of the Lost Decade, walks into a garage in the emerging economy of Brazil to take his place in the team assembled by Dom (Vin Diesel), who looks like a muscle car with legs, and Brian (Paul Walker), former federal agent. Our heroic band’s admixture of criminal and lawman is matched by the villains: the caper involves a crime lord who is also a political boss. All parties meet at money, obviously. The boss has $100 million socked away in a police station vault. Being street racers, our crew proposes to prise the vault forth from the station cabled to a couple of their vehicles, then flee through downtown Rio. But first they lay hands on an identical vault: a salute to the (remade) Ocean’s Eleven, where the team acquires a replica of the casino vault so as to practice their mechanics. In the event of it, eluding unencumbered pursuit while dragging an enormous steel oblong across pavement proves easier said than done. Call it Rio Friction, the very inverse of Tokyo Drift. Or call it Attack of the BRIC. Abandoning all hope of escape, Dom turns to use the vault as a weapon. Indeed, it has been functioning as such all along; the flight to safety, even before it becomes a demolition derby, has managed to obliterate considerable swaths of the world capital.
Not only is it impossible to imagine the characters thinking this was a good or even plausible idea for getting the dough, it is also impossible to imagine the screenwriters thinking this would make for a good caper. The ten-minute sequence is finally a bit dull; absurdity does have a way of turning to boredom.
But what if we have been thinking of this all wrong, and the entire movie is just a pretext for something else altogether? It may be narrative idiocy of the first water—but it is, we must admit, the single best cinematic representation of the global financial crisis yet contrived, immeasurably better than Inside Job or Capitalism: A Love Story.
A weaponized concentration of capital seems to be dragged about by supermen; it is in fact dragging them around, laying waste to the world before it, destroying houses and urban centers and bodies as it races for safety—before recognizing that there is no safety and it should just turn violently on its pursuers in a festival of destruction.
In the textbook definition, capital is generally self-valorizing value; in a crisis it is inverted, and becomes self-annihilating value. The supermoney that seemed to run the world is revealed as “fictitious capital,” unrealized and finally unrealizable, but still in its auto-destruction capable of laying low the world around it. Which explains what would otherwise be the most intolerable plot device. In the end, it turns out that Dom and Brian have been hauling the fake vault through the city, while the actual box is spirited away, loot enclosed. As a scheme, it’s ludicrous. As a reading of crisis in the world system, it’s immaculate—as if Hollywood had come to an intimate knowledge of volume 3 of Capital without reading, simply by bathing in the current of world money—and should complete the contemporary genre. I am seriously considering renaming this column “The Marx and the Furious.”
Now that we no longer want for figurations of the financial crisis, we can turn to what comes next, if anything, and how one imagines the vectors and contexts of an adequate response. In this arena apocalyptic pictures continue to hold us captive. The signal version this season is Contagion—arriving as an updating of the 1970s disaster flick, and bearing with it some backdated ideas indeed.
To Read the Entire Essay
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Bruce Schneier, Robert Jensen, Rob Hawkins and David Graeber: The Psychology of Transition (Undoing Millennia of Social Control)
#597 - The Psychology of Transition (Undoing Millennia of Social Control)
Unwelcome Guests
We start the show this week with a short interview of Bruce Schneier on Social Change and Defectors. He assesses the imminent threats to the internet as being layers 8 & 9 - i.e. overregulation and control by corporations and governments keen to prevent innovative use of information technology.
Next we hear Robert Jensen who starts by speaks on the entrenched mindset of hierarchy - focusing particularly on the naturalized violence against women by men, but looking at others such as racism.
Next we hear a 2009 interview by Frank of the Agroinnovations Podcast. Rob Hopkins speaks on the origins of the transition movement and shares some potential pitfalls, and his thoughts on a quote from Charles Eisenstein's 'Ascent of Humanity'. As well as discussing suburban permaculture, he discusses the practical application of the transition model as a grassroots community organizing strategy and its potential for construction of parallel systems to take over from the existing centralised power structures.
We conclude by finishing chapter 7 and starting on chapter 8 of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years.
To Listen to the Episodes
Unwelcome Guests
We start the show this week with a short interview of Bruce Schneier on Social Change and Defectors. He assesses the imminent threats to the internet as being layers 8 & 9 - i.e. overregulation and control by corporations and governments keen to prevent innovative use of information technology.
Next we hear Robert Jensen who starts by speaks on the entrenched mindset of hierarchy - focusing particularly on the naturalized violence against women by men, but looking at others such as racism.
Next we hear a 2009 interview by Frank of the Agroinnovations Podcast. Rob Hopkins speaks on the origins of the transition movement and shares some potential pitfalls, and his thoughts on a quote from Charles Eisenstein's 'Ascent of Humanity'. As well as discussing suburban permaculture, he discusses the practical application of the transition model as a grassroots community organizing strategy and its potential for construction of parallel systems to take over from the existing centralised power structures.
We conclude by finishing chapter 7 and starting on chapter 8 of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years.
To Listen to the Episodes
Michael Parenti: The Costs of Empire at Home and Abroad; Michel Chussodovsky: The International Monetary Fund (IMF)
#3 - The Costs of Empire and the IMF
Unwelcome Guests
Number 2 of our 17 part lecture series with Michael Parenti. His talk this week "The Costs of Empire at Home and Abroad". In the second hour, Economist Michel Chussodovsky.
To Listen to the Episode
Unwelcome Guests
Number 2 of our 17 part lecture series with Michael Parenti. His talk this week "The Costs of Empire at Home and Abroad". In the second hour, Economist Michel Chussodovsky.
To Listen to the Episode
Maggie Sauter: The Visual Life of Occupy Wall Street
The Visual Life of Occupy Wall Street
by Maggie Sauter
MIT Comparative Media Studies
Many visual tropes have accompanied Occupy Wall Street's rise to public prominence. In the beginning, there was the ethereal image of a ballerina poised delicately on the back of the Wall Street bull which graced the original posters and calls-for-action. There were photos of Zuccotti Park crammed with tents and blue tarps. The iconic "I am the 99%" stance, a photo of a single person, holding a handwritten sign dense with text, became a form in and of itself, attracting spinoffs, parodies, and rebuttals.
Two images, in particular, have become highly associated with the Occupy movement in the public eye: the image of Officer Pike pepper spraying students at UC Davis, popularized by the Pepper-Spray Cop remix meme; and the Guy Fawkes mask, first popularized by Anonymous. Each of these images speaks to different aspects of the Occupy movement, its origins, and its challenges, as well as hinting to where the movement will go in the future.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Maggie Sauter
MIT Comparative Media Studies
Many visual tropes have accompanied Occupy Wall Street's rise to public prominence. In the beginning, there was the ethereal image of a ballerina poised delicately on the back of the Wall Street bull which graced the original posters and calls-for-action. There were photos of Zuccotti Park crammed with tents and blue tarps. The iconic "I am the 99%" stance, a photo of a single person, holding a handwritten sign dense with text, became a form in and of itself, attracting spinoffs, parodies, and rebuttals.
Two images, in particular, have become highly associated with the Occupy movement in the public eye: the image of Officer Pike pepper spraying students at UC Davis, popularized by the Pepper-Spray Cop remix meme; and the Guy Fawkes mask, first popularized by Anonymous. Each of these images speaks to different aspects of the Occupy movement, its origins, and its challenges, as well as hinting to where the movement will go in the future.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Common Sense with Dan Carlin: #214 - The Bitter Harvest of Fear
Show 214 - The Bitter Harvest of Fear
Common Sense with Dan Carlin
What happens to "The Land of the Free" when it is no longer "The Home of the Brave"? You get the evisceration of constitutional protections in the name of fighting terrorism. Dan wonders why everyone is surprised.
Notes:
1. ”Detaining US citizens: How did we get here?” by D. Parvas for Al Jazeera News, December 15, 2011.
2.
To Listen to the Episode
Common Sense with Dan Carlin
What happens to "The Land of the Free" when it is no longer "The Home of the Brave"? You get the evisceration of constitutional protections in the name of fighting terrorism. Dan wonders why everyone is surprised.
Notes:
1. ”Detaining US citizens: How did we get here?” by D. Parvas for Al Jazeera News, December 15, 2011.
2.
To Listen to the Episode
Kentucky Rising (Frankfort: June 1, 2012)
Dear Friends and Allies:
I write to invite you to join fellow Kentuckians at the Capitol in Frankfort this June 1 to demand the end of corporate interference in (what should be) OUR politics, especially the overwhelming influence of the coal industry. The time to demand a participatory society for all Kentuckians is NOW!
A broad-based group of citizens is organizing a mass convergence we are calling Kentucky Rising: Occupy the Capitol. By drawing upon the energy of the Kentucky Rising sit-in of February 2011 and the momentum of the nationwide Occupy movement, we intend to create a critical mass of citizens to form a People's Assembly to give voice to concerns about injustice and to work together to find creative and positive solutions to the problems we face. We will respectfully occupy public space and the occupation will also serve as a base for teach-ins, sit-ins, and other non-violent direct actions.
We wish to encourage Kentuckians of all political inclinations to attend. While we may not all agree with each other on some things, most people can agree that corporate domination of Kentucky politics has got to go. This event will be a space for Kentuckians of all backgrounds to come together to talk with each other and find common ground. However, oppressive behavior of any sort will not be tolerated, and there will be a process for dealing with it when it arises.
As a citizen activist or organizer, you are in a crucial position to assist the event organizers in mobilizing a large and diverse group of Kentuckians on June 1 and the following days of the occupation. Will you reach out to inform and invite people in your networks to rise up, united by our love for the land and people of Kentucky?
Over the next month, please make calls and send out emails letting people know and direct them to the event website Ketucky Rising for information and updates. They can also visit the the facebook event page: here
Finally, if you would like to be more involved in organizing this event, please send your contact info, skills, and capacity to help via this web form. We believe that we are all leaders, so the organizing will be decentralized and horizontal, rather than top-down. If you know someone who would like to help organize or reach out, please forward them this email.
More than anything, we want this convergence to be a fun and family-friendly experience as well as a learning opportunity. The problems we face are dire, but if we face them together in a spirit of love and comradeship, we can create the Kentucky we want to pass on to future generations.
In Solidarity,
The Organizers of Kentucky Rising
Anna Kruzynski and Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois: Maple Spring -- Nearly 1,000 Arrested as Mass Quebec Student Strike Passes 100th Day
Maple Spring: Nearly 1,000 Arrested as Mass Quebec Student Strike Passes 100th Day
Democracy Now
More than 400,000 filled the streets of Montreal this week as a protest over a 75 percent increase in tuition has grown into a full-blown political crisis. After three months of sustained protests and class boycotts that have come to be known around the world as the "Maple Spring," the dispute exploded when the Quebec government passed an emergency law known as Bill 78, which suspends the current academic term, requires demonstrators to inform police of any protest route involving 50 or more people, and threatens student associations with fines of up to $125,000 if they disobey. The strike has received growing international attention as the standoff grows, striking a chord with young people across the globe amid growing discontent over austerity measures, bleak economies and crushing student debt. We’re joined by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, spokesperson for CLASSE, the main coalition of student unions involved in the student strikes in Quebec, and Anna Kruzynski, assistant professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University in Montreal. She has been involved in the student strike as a member of the group, Professors Against the Hike.
Guests:
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the spokesperson for CLASSE, the main coalition of student unions involved in the student strikes in Quebec, Canada.
Anna Kruzynski, assistant professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University in Montreal. She’s been involved in the student strike as a member of Professors Against the Hike.
To Watch the Episode
Democracy Now
More than 400,000 filled the streets of Montreal this week as a protest over a 75 percent increase in tuition has grown into a full-blown political crisis. After three months of sustained protests and class boycotts that have come to be known around the world as the "Maple Spring," the dispute exploded when the Quebec government passed an emergency law known as Bill 78, which suspends the current academic term, requires demonstrators to inform police of any protest route involving 50 or more people, and threatens student associations with fines of up to $125,000 if they disobey. The strike has received growing international attention as the standoff grows, striking a chord with young people across the globe amid growing discontent over austerity measures, bleak economies and crushing student debt. We’re joined by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, spokesperson for CLASSE, the main coalition of student unions involved in the student strikes in Quebec, and Anna Kruzynski, assistant professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University in Montreal. She has been involved in the student strike as a member of the group, Professors Against the Hike.
Guests:
Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the spokesperson for CLASSE, the main coalition of student unions involved in the student strikes in Quebec, Canada.
Anna Kruzynski, assistant professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University in Montreal. She’s been involved in the student strike as a member of Professors Against the Hike.
To Watch the Episode
Friday, May 25, 2012
Sharon Kinsella: Men Imagining a Girl Revolution
"Men Imagining a Girl Revolution"
by Sharon Kinsella
CMS Colloquium (MIT Comparative Media Studies)
Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.
To Listen to the Presentation
by Sharon Kinsella
CMS Colloquium (MIT Comparative Media Studies)
Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.
To Listen to the Presentation
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Matthew J. Iannucci: Postmodern Antihero -- Capitalism and Heroism in Taxi Driver
Postmodern Antihero: Capitalism and Heroism in Taxi Driver
by Matthew J. Iannucci
Bright Lights Film Journal
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is a gritty, disturbing, nightmarish modern film classic that examines alienation in urban society. From a postmodernist's perspective, it combines the elements of noir, the Western, horror, and urban melodrama as it explores the psychological madness within an obsessed, inarticulate, lonely antihero cab driver, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). The plotline is simple: Travis directs his frustrated anger at the street dwellers of New York and a presidential candidate, and his unhinging assault is paired with an attempt to rescue a young prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster), from her predatory pimp. Historically, Taxi Driver appeared after a decade of war in Vietnam (1976), and after the Watergate crisis and subsequent resignation of Nixon. Five years later, when it was linked to would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley and his obsession with Jodie Foster, it became prima facie evidence for those on the political right who believed that violence in film translates into crime in real life. It is now almost impossible to separate Taxi Driver from this debate. However, Bickle's antiheroic character is more directly related to a failure of a capitalist system that pits his working-class position as a cab driver against those who have already been disenfranchised according to socioeconomic class, gender, and/or race.
As the film opens, Travis emerges from a forgotten Midwestern form of Americana that appears as obsolete as Travis himself in a big city heterogeneously composed of corporate financiers, political patrons, gun dealers, and prostitutes. In order to survive, he wants to "become a person like other people" as he puts it, but his own disenfranchisement from this nation has left him both intellectually and emotionally bankrupt from the Vietnam War. Freedom, the very nucleus of the American dream, is dependent on individual socioeconomic choices that inform and shape one's identity. But Travis's lack of a distinct identity compels him to cut and paste together what he believes is a heroic identity from an external menu of personages such as the "gunslinger" and the Indian. In actuality, what he does is stitch together a postmodern antiheroic identity that is nostalgic and pop culture-oriented, evidenced by the Mohawk haircut that he sports in the penultimate sequences — because he possesses no internal self.
Taxi Driver implies that identity is not genuine but always synergistic, a kind of potpourri of idolatry and maxims drawn from popular culture, especially from violent movies and television news. In this vein, Robert Ray views Taxi Driver as a postmodern "corrected" Right film, the type of film generally aimed at a naïve audience. Ray explains that a "Right" film presents a traditional conservative philosophy that promotes the application of Western-style, individual solutions to complex contemporary problems. He writes, "Taxi Driver's basic story followed the right wing's loyalty to the classic Western formula: a reluctant individual, confronted by evil, acts on his own to rid society of spoilers. As played by Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver's protagonist had obvious connections with Western heroes…even his name, Travis, linked him to the defender of the Alamo."1 Ray's notion that the film is a "correction" of the right-wing concept of justice is accurate because of its odd plot twist at the conclusion. Normally, such a story would identify Travis's complicity with these criminals and thereby relegate him to some form of institutional punishment. But the film's underlying theme reveals how absurd the Western idealistic depiction of heroism is because the news media in the film not only ignores his actions but also glorifies a psychopathic killer as a noble warrior.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Matthew J. Iannucci
Bright Lights Film Journal
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is a gritty, disturbing, nightmarish modern film classic that examines alienation in urban society. From a postmodernist's perspective, it combines the elements of noir, the Western, horror, and urban melodrama as it explores the psychological madness within an obsessed, inarticulate, lonely antihero cab driver, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). The plotline is simple: Travis directs his frustrated anger at the street dwellers of New York and a presidential candidate, and his unhinging assault is paired with an attempt to rescue a young prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster), from her predatory pimp. Historically, Taxi Driver appeared after a decade of war in Vietnam (1976), and after the Watergate crisis and subsequent resignation of Nixon. Five years later, when it was linked to would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley and his obsession with Jodie Foster, it became prima facie evidence for those on the political right who believed that violence in film translates into crime in real life. It is now almost impossible to separate Taxi Driver from this debate. However, Bickle's antiheroic character is more directly related to a failure of a capitalist system that pits his working-class position as a cab driver against those who have already been disenfranchised according to socioeconomic class, gender, and/or race.
As the film opens, Travis emerges from a forgotten Midwestern form of Americana that appears as obsolete as Travis himself in a big city heterogeneously composed of corporate financiers, political patrons, gun dealers, and prostitutes. In order to survive, he wants to "become a person like other people" as he puts it, but his own disenfranchisement from this nation has left him both intellectually and emotionally bankrupt from the Vietnam War. Freedom, the very nucleus of the American dream, is dependent on individual socioeconomic choices that inform and shape one's identity. But Travis's lack of a distinct identity compels him to cut and paste together what he believes is a heroic identity from an external menu of personages such as the "gunslinger" and the Indian. In actuality, what he does is stitch together a postmodern antiheroic identity that is nostalgic and pop culture-oriented, evidenced by the Mohawk haircut that he sports in the penultimate sequences — because he possesses no internal self.
Taxi Driver implies that identity is not genuine but always synergistic, a kind of potpourri of idolatry and maxims drawn from popular culture, especially from violent movies and television news. In this vein, Robert Ray views Taxi Driver as a postmodern "corrected" Right film, the type of film generally aimed at a naïve audience. Ray explains that a "Right" film presents a traditional conservative philosophy that promotes the application of Western-style, individual solutions to complex contemporary problems. He writes, "Taxi Driver's basic story followed the right wing's loyalty to the classic Western formula: a reluctant individual, confronted by evil, acts on his own to rid society of spoilers. As played by Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver's protagonist had obvious connections with Western heroes…even his name, Travis, linked him to the defender of the Alamo."1 Ray's notion that the film is a "correction" of the right-wing concept of justice is accurate because of its odd plot twist at the conclusion. Normally, such a story would identify Travis's complicity with these criminals and thereby relegate him to some form of institutional punishment. But the film's underlying theme reveals how absurd the Western idealistic depiction of heroism is because the news media in the film not only ignores his actions but also glorifies a psychopathic killer as a noble warrior.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations: Peace and Conflict Studies Archive
Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations
"Axe decides to go ahead with another super-sexist ad." MSN (August 22, 2012)
Ball, Norman. "The Power of Auteurs and the Last Man Standing: Adam Curtis' Documentary Nightmares." Bright Lights Film Journal #78 (November 2012)
Barker, Kim. ""Nonprofits" Tied to Karl Rove, Koch Brothers Spend Millions on Elections and Call it Public Welfare." Democracy Now (August 20, 2012)
Bender, Stephen. "Propaganda, Public Relations, & the Not-So-New Dark Age." LiP(Winter 2006)
Benton, Michael. "Astroturf and Front Group Research: The Center for Union Facts Dialogic (February 22, 2012)
The Century of the Self (UK: Adam Curtis, 2002)
Christina, Greta. "Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, Packing Endless Hard-Ons: The Impossible Ideals Men Are Expected to Meet." AlterNet (June 20, 2011)
Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture Media Education Foundation (Sut Jhally:2010)
"Domestic violence: still not chic, artistic or cutting edge." Feministing (August 31, 2011)
Eisenstein, Charles. "The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies" Reality Sandwhich (June 24, 2009)
Gender Ads Project (Created by Scott Lukas, 2002)
Klein, Melanie. "Make-up and Hot Pink Toenails- Not Just a Girl Thing." WIMN's Voices (April 10, 2011)
Mander, Jerry. "Privatization of Consciousness." Monthly Review (October 2012)
McChesney, Robert W. and John Nichols. "The Bull Market: Political Advertising." Monthly Review (April 1, 2012)
Zelinski, Sarah, et al. "Representations of Gender in Advertising." (Video made for WGST 210, University of Saskatchewan: posted on Youtube April 3, 2013)
"Axe decides to go ahead with another super-sexist ad." MSN (August 22, 2012)
Ball, Norman. "The Power of Auteurs and the Last Man Standing: Adam Curtis' Documentary Nightmares." Bright Lights Film Journal #78 (November 2012)
Barker, Kim. ""Nonprofits" Tied to Karl Rove, Koch Brothers Spend Millions on Elections and Call it Public Welfare." Democracy Now (August 20, 2012)
Bender, Stephen. "Propaganda, Public Relations, & the Not-So-New Dark Age." LiP(Winter 2006)
Benton, Michael. "Astroturf and Front Group Research: The Center for Union Facts Dialogic (February 22, 2012)
The Century of the Self (UK: Adam Curtis, 2002)
Christina, Greta. "Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, Packing Endless Hard-Ons: The Impossible Ideals Men Are Expected to Meet." AlterNet (June 20, 2011)
Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture Media Education Foundation (Sut Jhally:2010)
"Domestic violence: still not chic, artistic or cutting edge." Feministing (August 31, 2011)
Eisenstein, Charles. "The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies" Reality Sandwhich (June 24, 2009)
Gender Ads Project (Created by Scott Lukas, 2002)
Klein, Melanie. "Make-up and Hot Pink Toenails- Not Just a Girl Thing." WIMN's Voices (April 10, 2011)
Mander, Jerry. "Privatization of Consciousness." Monthly Review (October 2012)
McChesney, Robert W. and John Nichols. "The Bull Market: Political Advertising." Monthly Review (April 1, 2012)
Zelinski, Sarah, et al. "Representations of Gender in Advertising." (Video made for WGST 210, University of Saskatchewan: posted on Youtube April 3, 2013)
Michael D. Yates: The Great Inequality
The Great Inequality
by Michael D. Yates
Monthly Review
...
Schutz’s approach here is ingenious, and it takes us directly to a consideration of class not just as a condition—as in, you and I are in different social classes—but as a dynamic relationship in which one class exercises power over another so that society is structured in such a way that there can be no escape from persistent inequalities unless the power (class) relationship is confronted directly and abolished. As we make our choices, we also collectively make “social choices,” that is we structure the very society that faces us with constraints when we choose. However, to say this is to suggest that we are not at all equal in terms of how society itself is constructed. At the level of society, power is critically important. Here is how Schutz defines power: “If person A can get person B to do something in A’s interest by taking advantage of some situation or set of circumstances to which B, were he or she free to choose with full knowledge from among all possible alternatives, would not give full consent, then A has power over B” (66).
While this is a general definition, it is still possible immediately to say some particular things about power. First, power allows a person unilaterally to change another’s constraints, and it can, when exercised long enough, change the habits of subordinates so that the latter act automatically in the interests of their masters. Second, those with personal power will inevitably also have social power, and this will allow them to make the rules that all must obey, and these will benefit the powerful. These rules, in turn, may come to seem normal, which lowers any costs the powerful would have to incur to maintain their power. Third, wherever there is power, there can be no democracy, since if there were, such power would be abolished by majority rule.
After defining power, Schutz examines it in a capitalist context. The most important kind of power is that which employers exert at the workplace. The power advantage capitalists have vis-à-vis their employees is as obvious as it is neglected by mainstream economists. Workers do not have the wealth to withstand periods without employment, and while they might quit a particular job, they cannot quit all jobs. In addition, the ownership of businesses gives capitalists the legal right to structure their workplaces (through detailed division of labor, mechanization, close monitoring to ensure maximum intensity, and so forth) so that the amount of labor used is always a good deal less than the supply of workers. This pool of surplus labor, Marx’s “reserve army,” serves to keep the employed in line, from making excessive wage and hour demands on the bosses. Employers also create artificial job hierarchies to split workers and keep them from seeing their common interests. In larger firms, seemingly impersonal bureaucracies make rules that come to be accepted as inevitable and even fair. All of these things allow employers to extract a surplus of work from their hired hands, a surplus that the employers get to keep. Power always involves a “taking” by the powerful from those without it. What is taken is the fruits of the exercise of their labor time. The control of the labor power of others over a definite period of time, in other words, is the principal basis of economic profit and power under capitalism.
Of course, a “pure” model of power in capitalism, one in which the capitalists merely exploit workers and the analysis stops there, is too simple, even if it remains the essential starting point, and Schutz devotes chapters to other classes, such as managers and professionals, to the hierarchy of businesses (with the largest monopoly capitals at the top), to political power, and to the power represented by complex social networks and cultural institutions such as colleges and universities and media. Each of these other power hierarchies has a certain degree of independence from the basic economic hierarchy, but each is, in the end, connected to it. Together, they serve inevitably to reinforce it; they make it more impregnable to change by, in large part, making it appear normal, the consequence of human nature, and creative of the best world possible. All of these other power structures make our economic system extraordinarily complex and difficult to penetrate, but they do not negate the essential importance of the capital-labor power inequality. They come into being because of it, and they make it stronger. We cannot understand any of them if we do not grasp it.
Once Schutz has laid out his theoretical position on inequality, he addresses the question of why it has risen so dramatically in the United States. He critiques several mainstream hypotheses, the most important of which is that the information technology revolution has raised the skill requirements (education and training costs) at the upper end of the wage hierarchy, while these costs at the lower end have either not risen or fallen. Since, according to neoclassical theory, wages equal the costs of entry into an occupation, this implies that wages at the top are rising disproportionately to those at the bottom. Schutz points out that wage equality began to rise at least a decade before the IT revolution took off. Also, education and training have become more equally distributed, and this should have been reflected in more equality. And if we consider a particular skill group, say those with college degrees in a certain field, inequality has risen within such groups. Schutz might have noted as well that the de-skilling practices associated with Frederick Taylor are deeply ingrained in what all managements do, so that any argument concerning widespread and long-lasting increases in skill requirements is implausible.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Michael D. Yates
Monthly Review
...
Schutz’s approach here is ingenious, and it takes us directly to a consideration of class not just as a condition—as in, you and I are in different social classes—but as a dynamic relationship in which one class exercises power over another so that society is structured in such a way that there can be no escape from persistent inequalities unless the power (class) relationship is confronted directly and abolished. As we make our choices, we also collectively make “social choices,” that is we structure the very society that faces us with constraints when we choose. However, to say this is to suggest that we are not at all equal in terms of how society itself is constructed. At the level of society, power is critically important. Here is how Schutz defines power: “If person A can get person B to do something in A’s interest by taking advantage of some situation or set of circumstances to which B, were he or she free to choose with full knowledge from among all possible alternatives, would not give full consent, then A has power over B” (66).
While this is a general definition, it is still possible immediately to say some particular things about power. First, power allows a person unilaterally to change another’s constraints, and it can, when exercised long enough, change the habits of subordinates so that the latter act automatically in the interests of their masters. Second, those with personal power will inevitably also have social power, and this will allow them to make the rules that all must obey, and these will benefit the powerful. These rules, in turn, may come to seem normal, which lowers any costs the powerful would have to incur to maintain their power. Third, wherever there is power, there can be no democracy, since if there were, such power would be abolished by majority rule.
After defining power, Schutz examines it in a capitalist context. The most important kind of power is that which employers exert at the workplace. The power advantage capitalists have vis-à-vis their employees is as obvious as it is neglected by mainstream economists. Workers do not have the wealth to withstand periods without employment, and while they might quit a particular job, they cannot quit all jobs. In addition, the ownership of businesses gives capitalists the legal right to structure their workplaces (through detailed division of labor, mechanization, close monitoring to ensure maximum intensity, and so forth) so that the amount of labor used is always a good deal less than the supply of workers. This pool of surplus labor, Marx’s “reserve army,” serves to keep the employed in line, from making excessive wage and hour demands on the bosses. Employers also create artificial job hierarchies to split workers and keep them from seeing their common interests. In larger firms, seemingly impersonal bureaucracies make rules that come to be accepted as inevitable and even fair. All of these things allow employers to extract a surplus of work from their hired hands, a surplus that the employers get to keep. Power always involves a “taking” by the powerful from those without it. What is taken is the fruits of the exercise of their labor time. The control of the labor power of others over a definite period of time, in other words, is the principal basis of economic profit and power under capitalism.
Of course, a “pure” model of power in capitalism, one in which the capitalists merely exploit workers and the analysis stops there, is too simple, even if it remains the essential starting point, and Schutz devotes chapters to other classes, such as managers and professionals, to the hierarchy of businesses (with the largest monopoly capitals at the top), to political power, and to the power represented by complex social networks and cultural institutions such as colleges and universities and media. Each of these other power hierarchies has a certain degree of independence from the basic economic hierarchy, but each is, in the end, connected to it. Together, they serve inevitably to reinforce it; they make it more impregnable to change by, in large part, making it appear normal, the consequence of human nature, and creative of the best world possible. All of these other power structures make our economic system extraordinarily complex and difficult to penetrate, but they do not negate the essential importance of the capital-labor power inequality. They come into being because of it, and they make it stronger. We cannot understand any of them if we do not grasp it.
Once Schutz has laid out his theoretical position on inequality, he addresses the question of why it has risen so dramatically in the United States. He critiques several mainstream hypotheses, the most important of which is that the information technology revolution has raised the skill requirements (education and training costs) at the upper end of the wage hierarchy, while these costs at the lower end have either not risen or fallen. Since, according to neoclassical theory, wages equal the costs of entry into an occupation, this implies that wages at the top are rising disproportionately to those at the bottom. Schutz points out that wage equality began to rise at least a decade before the IT revolution took off. Also, education and training have become more equally distributed, and this should have been reflected in more equality. And if we consider a particular skill group, say those with college degrees in a certain field, inequality has risen within such groups. Schutz might have noted as well that the de-skilling practices associated with Frederick Taylor are deeply ingrained in what all managements do, so that any argument concerning widespread and long-lasting increases in skill requirements is implausible.
To Read the Entire Essay
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Rick Perlstein: Chicago History Repeats Itself As Cops and Protesters Clash
Chicago History Repeats Itself As Cops and Protesters Clash
by Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone
In 1972, writing in Rolling Stone about a looming confrontation between protesters and police in the streets in front of the Republican National Convention in Miami, Hunter S. Thompson described the moment he slipped off his watch. "The first thing to go in a street fight is always your watch, and once you've lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know it's time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket." Times have changed: Few people wear watches any more. So when the first objects starting flying in Chicago yesterday night on the corner of Cermak and Michigan, I buttoned my cell phone into my cargo pants pocket instead.
I'd begun marching, four hours earlier, from the bandshell behind the Art Institute of Chicago to a temporary protest zone with 2,000 people (by city estimates) protesting NATO’s role in the Afghanistan war. Our destination was a half mile east of the NATO summit taking place at the south-of-downtown McCormick Place Convention Center; it had been an awkward traipse. I was following legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild; they were watching the police, who were everywhere: thousands were deployed for the summit, plus ringers from forty other agencies from as far away as North Carolina. At least a few hundred were in my field of vision at all times. Volunteers surrounded the parade column with yellow cord; just outside that perimeter hundreds of officers kept stride, all of us starting, stopping, slowing up at a pace dictated by the police wagons inching along ahead.
Up ahead, from sidewalk to sidewalk, marched another row of cops, walking backward, sometimes joining hands red-rover style. Flying squadrons of riot police in those fearsome security-visored blue helmets, chest-protectors that make them look like black turtles, and massively bulging shiny shin guards sometimes appeared, then disappeared down abandoned side streets. Then, at the march's culmination at a makeshift stage 800 yards and innumerable eight-foot-tall steel security barriers west of where 65 world leaders were gathering to talk, largely about the course of the war in Afghanistan, they were suddenly among us, en masse: black turtles, row upon row, arrayed on the elevated median strips that afforded them the high ground for whatever battle might ensue.
This was Chicago in May of 2012, where all week citizens have been cordially invited by authorities to savor what it would feel like to live in a police state – 7.5 miles of street closings; several "maritime security zones"; the thwukthwukthwuk of helicopters and the continuous scream of jet fighters overhead; those infamous "Long Range Acoustic Devices" that make it too painful to stand, poised at the ready; and, in one particularly surreal touch in my tranquil Hyde Park neighborhood, a misplaced suitcase that shut down the 57th Street train station as well access to the two adjacent nerdy used bookstores, a full forty blocks from the NATO zone. (An email to every University of Chicago student, staffer, and faculty member: "Police activity 57th Street at Metra. Avoid area. Additional information to follow." Thirty-nine minutes later: "All clear 57th Street and Metra. Will resume normal operations.")
Just as intended, the city thrummed with fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the most effective tool the powerful possess to keep the rest of us in line; so pervasive was the dread that people working downtown wore jeans on Thursday (no one showed up to work on Friday), lest they be randomly attacked by "self-described anarchists" – in the news media's odd formulation – mistaking them for members of "the 1%."
That night, it all came to a head with the warrantless violent police raid of an apartment in the gentrifying neighborhood of Pilsen, followed by the "disappearing" – no other term for it – of three anarchists, Jared Chase, 27, Brian Church, 22, and Brent Betterly, 24, for over twenty-four hours. They resurfaced Saturday in a Cook County courtroom, where they were charged with "conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit," including "plotting to attack President Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters, the Chicago mayor's home and police stations." What the suspects said was home-brew equipment the city insisted was the makings of Molotov cocktails. Bail was set at $1.5 million.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone
In 1972, writing in Rolling Stone about a looming confrontation between protesters and police in the streets in front of the Republican National Convention in Miami, Hunter S. Thompson described the moment he slipped off his watch. "The first thing to go in a street fight is always your watch, and once you've lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know it's time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket." Times have changed: Few people wear watches any more. So when the first objects starting flying in Chicago yesterday night on the corner of Cermak and Michigan, I buttoned my cell phone into my cargo pants pocket instead.
I'd begun marching, four hours earlier, from the bandshell behind the Art Institute of Chicago to a temporary protest zone with 2,000 people (by city estimates) protesting NATO’s role in the Afghanistan war. Our destination was a half mile east of the NATO summit taking place at the south-of-downtown McCormick Place Convention Center; it had been an awkward traipse. I was following legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild; they were watching the police, who were everywhere: thousands were deployed for the summit, plus ringers from forty other agencies from as far away as North Carolina. At least a few hundred were in my field of vision at all times. Volunteers surrounded the parade column with yellow cord; just outside that perimeter hundreds of officers kept stride, all of us starting, stopping, slowing up at a pace dictated by the police wagons inching along ahead.
Up ahead, from sidewalk to sidewalk, marched another row of cops, walking backward, sometimes joining hands red-rover style. Flying squadrons of riot police in those fearsome security-visored blue helmets, chest-protectors that make them look like black turtles, and massively bulging shiny shin guards sometimes appeared, then disappeared down abandoned side streets. Then, at the march's culmination at a makeshift stage 800 yards and innumerable eight-foot-tall steel security barriers west of where 65 world leaders were gathering to talk, largely about the course of the war in Afghanistan, they were suddenly among us, en masse: black turtles, row upon row, arrayed on the elevated median strips that afforded them the high ground for whatever battle might ensue.
This was Chicago in May of 2012, where all week citizens have been cordially invited by authorities to savor what it would feel like to live in a police state – 7.5 miles of street closings; several "maritime security zones"; the thwukthwukthwuk of helicopters and the continuous scream of jet fighters overhead; those infamous "Long Range Acoustic Devices" that make it too painful to stand, poised at the ready; and, in one particularly surreal touch in my tranquil Hyde Park neighborhood, a misplaced suitcase that shut down the 57th Street train station as well access to the two adjacent nerdy used bookstores, a full forty blocks from the NATO zone. (An email to every University of Chicago student, staffer, and faculty member: "Police activity 57th Street at Metra. Avoid area. Additional information to follow." Thirty-nine minutes later: "All clear 57th Street and Metra. Will resume normal operations.")
Just as intended, the city thrummed with fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the most effective tool the powerful possess to keep the rest of us in line; so pervasive was the dread that people working downtown wore jeans on Thursday (no one showed up to work on Friday), lest they be randomly attacked by "self-described anarchists" – in the news media's odd formulation – mistaking them for members of "the 1%."
That night, it all came to a head with the warrantless violent police raid of an apartment in the gentrifying neighborhood of Pilsen, followed by the "disappearing" – no other term for it – of three anarchists, Jared Chase, 27, Brian Church, 22, and Brent Betterly, 24, for over twenty-four hours. They resurfaced Saturday in a Cook County courtroom, where they were charged with "conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit," including "plotting to attack President Obama's Chicago campaign headquarters, the Chicago mayor's home and police stations." What the suspects said was home-brew equipment the city insisted was the makings of Molotov cocktails. Bail was set at $1.5 million.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Monday, May 21, 2012
Jake Olzen: Police Entrapment of Nonviolent Movements
Police Entrapment of Nonviolent Movements
by JAKE OLZEN
Counterpunch
The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.
The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.
The mainstream media and blog reports, both nationally and in Cleveland, have emphasized that the young activists were part of Occupy Cleveland and self-identified anarchists (here, here, and here). The men — Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of nearby Lakewood; Connor C. Stevens, 20, of suburban Berea; and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, and Anthony Hayne, 35, both of Cleveland — were arrested and remain in jail after they attempted to detonate a false bomb that they had set, in conjunction with the FBI.
It’s an old script: Violence-prone anarchists devise a nefarious plan and, just before they can carry it out, law enforcement swoops in to save the day, catching them red-handed. But there’s another script being acted out here too, one much more sinister, complex, and morally and legally dubious: Agents of the state infiltrate an activist group and, through techniques of psychological manipulation, lead its most vulnerable members into a violent plan — for which explosives, detonators, contacts and case mysteriously become available — until SWAT teams and prosecutors suddenly arrive and haul the accomplices off to jail for the rest of their lives. In both cases, at the end of the story, officials congratulate each other for their bravery and bravado and the public breathes a sigh of relief as more of their civil liberties are stripped away.
I recently spoke with Richard Schulte, a veteran activist who has known the Five from groups like Food Not Bombs and is helping to organize their legal and jail support. Schulte explained that under the influence of undercover federal agents and informants, the activists — particularly the youngest, Baxter and Stevens — found themselves increasingly vulnerable and reliant on their informant. Baxter’s lawyer, a public defender named John Pyle, recently identified the informant working with the group as Shaquille Azir, a 39-year old ex-con.
“[Azir] became something of a role model, stepping in as a father figure, offering guidance on emotional and social stuff,” said Schulte. “Connor and Brandon thought he was a rad dude but getting more and more pushy.”
Collectively, according to accounts from friends and associates, statements from lawyers, and the FBI affidavit, members of the Cleveland Five have backgrounds that include mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness and social marginalization.
Brandon and Connor had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it “passive gradualism” — the Five were encouraged by Azir to break off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, “The People’s Liberation Army.” At first it was mostly just a graffiti crew — tagging the phrase “rise up” around the city and putting up stickers, said Schulte.
Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by JAKE OLZEN
Counterpunch
The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.
The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.
The mainstream media and blog reports, both nationally and in Cleveland, have emphasized that the young activists were part of Occupy Cleveland and self-identified anarchists (here, here, and here). The men — Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of nearby Lakewood; Connor C. Stevens, 20, of suburban Berea; and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, and Anthony Hayne, 35, both of Cleveland — were arrested and remain in jail after they attempted to detonate a false bomb that they had set, in conjunction with the FBI.
It’s an old script: Violence-prone anarchists devise a nefarious plan and, just before they can carry it out, law enforcement swoops in to save the day, catching them red-handed. But there’s another script being acted out here too, one much more sinister, complex, and morally and legally dubious: Agents of the state infiltrate an activist group and, through techniques of psychological manipulation, lead its most vulnerable members into a violent plan — for which explosives, detonators, contacts and case mysteriously become available — until SWAT teams and prosecutors suddenly arrive and haul the accomplices off to jail for the rest of their lives. In both cases, at the end of the story, officials congratulate each other for their bravery and bravado and the public breathes a sigh of relief as more of their civil liberties are stripped away.
I recently spoke with Richard Schulte, a veteran activist who has known the Five from groups like Food Not Bombs and is helping to organize their legal and jail support. Schulte explained that under the influence of undercover federal agents and informants, the activists — particularly the youngest, Baxter and Stevens — found themselves increasingly vulnerable and reliant on their informant. Baxter’s lawyer, a public defender named John Pyle, recently identified the informant working with the group as Shaquille Azir, a 39-year old ex-con.
“[Azir] became something of a role model, stepping in as a father figure, offering guidance on emotional and social stuff,” said Schulte. “Connor and Brandon thought he was a rad dude but getting more and more pushy.”
Collectively, according to accounts from friends and associates, statements from lawyers, and the FBI affidavit, members of the Cleveland Five have backgrounds that include mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness and social marginalization.
Brandon and Connor had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it “passive gradualism” — the Five were encouraged by Azir to break off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, “The People’s Liberation Army.” At first it was mostly just a graffiti crew — tagging the phrase “rise up” around the city and putting up stickers, said Schulte.
Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Trevor Link: Polisse
Polisse
by Trevor Link
Spectrum Culture
It goes without saying that the subject matter of Polisse is dispiriting and heartbreaking: a group of police officers working for the Child Protection Unit (or CPU) in Paris deal, on a daily basis, with cases involving rape, abuse, prostitution and organized crime. To compound this bleakness, the details of these cases were, in fact, drawn from real life: director and co-writer Maïwenn spent time following actual officers and constructed her film from events she witnessed or heard about during that time. This patina of ultra-realism coats the events in the film, making them reverberate beyond the screen and suggesting, for each unimaginable horror, a series of unseen but real-life analogues. Maïwenn wisely eschews the tedious offering of answers; her film is instead satisfied in tracing the outline of a vast problem, letting its shape impress an urgent tenseness upon us. Unable to intervene, Maïwenn’s camera can only observe, bringing us back once again to a fundamental question of cinema: to what extent can merely seeing the events of the world—bearing witness to them—actually matter?
Polisse is most interesting when it stays faithful to this ocular theme. As Carol J. Clover has noted in her study of horror films, the eye itself, despite being considered a source of domination (the gaze), is actually quite vulnerable and penetrable (the eyeball-impaling sequence from Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 drives this point home quite strikingly). Filmmakers have moreover understood the camera, like the eye, to be an instrument of control and even aggression—its phallic associations reached a climax in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which coupled masculine ineffectuality and truth’s elusiveness: together, a lack of mastery. These associations are reversed in Polisse through the character of Mélissa (played by Maïwenn herself), a photographer tasked with documenting the work of the CPU. Mélissa embodies the eye’s vulnerability, and her camera bestows upon her the power of empathy, an uncontrollable receptivity that manifests as an openness to the plight of others. Following the CPU around, she becomes shaken by the horror she sees, the documentation of which cannot console her, but her role is to look—to look only—and take in what she sees, the camera and the eye functioning in tandem.
To Read the Rest of the Review
by Trevor Link
Spectrum Culture
It goes without saying that the subject matter of Polisse is dispiriting and heartbreaking: a group of police officers working for the Child Protection Unit (or CPU) in Paris deal, on a daily basis, with cases involving rape, abuse, prostitution and organized crime. To compound this bleakness, the details of these cases were, in fact, drawn from real life: director and co-writer Maïwenn spent time following actual officers and constructed her film from events she witnessed or heard about during that time. This patina of ultra-realism coats the events in the film, making them reverberate beyond the screen and suggesting, for each unimaginable horror, a series of unseen but real-life analogues. Maïwenn wisely eschews the tedious offering of answers; her film is instead satisfied in tracing the outline of a vast problem, letting its shape impress an urgent tenseness upon us. Unable to intervene, Maïwenn’s camera can only observe, bringing us back once again to a fundamental question of cinema: to what extent can merely seeing the events of the world—bearing witness to them—actually matter?
Polisse is most interesting when it stays faithful to this ocular theme. As Carol J. Clover has noted in her study of horror films, the eye itself, despite being considered a source of domination (the gaze), is actually quite vulnerable and penetrable (the eyeball-impaling sequence from Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 drives this point home quite strikingly). Filmmakers have moreover understood the camera, like the eye, to be an instrument of control and even aggression—its phallic associations reached a climax in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which coupled masculine ineffectuality and truth’s elusiveness: together, a lack of mastery. These associations are reversed in Polisse through the character of Mélissa (played by Maïwenn herself), a photographer tasked with documenting the work of the CPU. Mélissa embodies the eye’s vulnerability, and her camera bestows upon her the power of empathy, an uncontrollable receptivity that manifests as an openness to the plight of others. Following the CPU around, she becomes shaken by the horror she sees, the documentation of which cannot console her, but her role is to look—to look only—and take in what she sees, the camera and the eye functioning in tandem.
To Read the Rest of the Review
Belén Fernández: Tom Friedman’s War on Humanity
Tom Friedman’s War on Humanity
by Belén Fernández
Jacobin
Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, once offered the following insight into his modus operandi: “I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself.”
Some might see this as an unsurprising revelation in light of Edward Said’s appraisal: “It’s as if … what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.”
According to Friedman, the purpose of the auto-interviews is merely to analyze his feelings on certain issues. Given that his feelings tend to undergo drastic inter- and sometimes intra-columnar modifications, one potentially convenient byproduct of such an approach to journalism is the impression that Friedman interviews many more people than he actually does.
For example, while one of Friedman’s alter-egos considered blasphemous the “Saddamist” notion that the Iraq war had anything to do with oil, another was of the opinion that the war was “partly about oil,” and another appeared to be under the impression that it was entirely about oil, assigning the blame for U.S. troop deaths in Fallujah to Hummer proprietors. Despite Friedman’s identification as “a liberal on every issue other than this war,” competing layers of his persona defined said conflict as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” as well as part of a “neocon strategy.”
Other novel interviewing techniques employed by Friedman have meanwhile resulted in anthropological discoveries such as that “[t]he people of Sri Lanka” understand that it is “stupid” to oppose US-directed corporate globalization, which our columnist learns by chatting with the owner of a Victoria’s Secret factory in the village of Pannala in 1999. Friedman testifies that, “in terms of conditions, I would let my own daughters work in” the factory—an offer that is not revisited in 2012 when Friedman produces a glowing report on an Apple factory in China.
The gist of the report is that, because the factory reached a daily output level of over 10,000 iPhones simply by rousing 8,000 workers from their dormitories in the middle of the night and administering them each a biscuit and cup of tea, Americans must understand that “average is officially over.” Friedman’s exuberance at the above-average abilities of the Chinese factory workers is occasioned by a “terrific article in The Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China.” The fact that the same Duhigg produces another co-authored article four days after the terrific one—in which other aspects of Apple factory life in China are discussed, such as explosions, exposure to poisonous chemicals, and worker internment in overcrowded dormitories surrounded by safety netting to impede suicides—raises questions about what sub-average American laborers will have to do to woo jobs back to the U.S.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Belén Fernández
Jacobin
Thomas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, once offered the following insight into his modus operandi: “I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself.”
Some might see this as an unsurprising revelation in light of Edward Said’s appraisal: “It’s as if … what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.”
According to Friedman, the purpose of the auto-interviews is merely to analyze his feelings on certain issues. Given that his feelings tend to undergo drastic inter- and sometimes intra-columnar modifications, one potentially convenient byproduct of such an approach to journalism is the impression that Friedman interviews many more people than he actually does.
For example, while one of Friedman’s alter-egos considered blasphemous the “Saddamist” notion that the Iraq war had anything to do with oil, another was of the opinion that the war was “partly about oil,” and another appeared to be under the impression that it was entirely about oil, assigning the blame for U.S. troop deaths in Fallujah to Hummer proprietors. Despite Friedman’s identification as “a liberal on every issue other than this war,” competing layers of his persona defined said conflict as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” as well as part of a “neocon strategy.”
Other novel interviewing techniques employed by Friedman have meanwhile resulted in anthropological discoveries such as that “[t]he people of Sri Lanka” understand that it is “stupid” to oppose US-directed corporate globalization, which our columnist learns by chatting with the owner of a Victoria’s Secret factory in the village of Pannala in 1999. Friedman testifies that, “in terms of conditions, I would let my own daughters work in” the factory—an offer that is not revisited in 2012 when Friedman produces a glowing report on an Apple factory in China.
The gist of the report is that, because the factory reached a daily output level of over 10,000 iPhones simply by rousing 8,000 workers from their dormitories in the middle of the night and administering them each a biscuit and cup of tea, Americans must understand that “average is officially over.” Friedman’s exuberance at the above-average abilities of the Chinese factory workers is occasioned by a “terrific article in The Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China.” The fact that the same Duhigg produces another co-authored article four days after the terrific one—in which other aspects of Apple factory life in China are discussed, such as explosions, exposure to poisonous chemicals, and worker internment in overcrowded dormitories surrounded by safety netting to impede suicides—raises questions about what sub-average American laborers will have to do to woo jobs back to the U.S.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Democracy Now: U.S. Army Vets Join With Afghans For Peace to Lead Antiwar March at Chicago NATO Summit
U.S. Army Vets Join With Afghans For Peace to Lead Antiwar March at Chicago NATO Summit
Democracy Now
Sunday’s antiwar march at the NATO summit in Chicago was led by members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and Afghans For Peace. "We’re here to protest NATO and call on all NATO representatives to end this inhumane, illegal and barbaric war against our home country and our people," says Suraia Sahar, a member of Afghans For Peace who marched alongside Afghan war veteran Graham Clumpner during anti-NATO protest in Chicago. "I feel honored standing next to this veteran because in my opinion they are doing the right thing by speaking out against the occupation and war alongside us." Clumpner says, "I reject any affiliation with this war."
Guests:
Suraia Sahar, member of Afghans For Peace.
Graham Clumpner, Afghan war veteran who is now a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War.
To Watch the Report
Democracy Now
Sunday’s antiwar march at the NATO summit in Chicago was led by members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and Afghans For Peace. "We’re here to protest NATO and call on all NATO representatives to end this inhumane, illegal and barbaric war against our home country and our people," says Suraia Sahar, a member of Afghans For Peace who marched alongside Afghan war veteran Graham Clumpner during anti-NATO protest in Chicago. "I feel honored standing next to this veteran because in my opinion they are doing the right thing by speaking out against the occupation and war alongside us." Clumpner says, "I reject any affiliation with this war."
Guests:
Suraia Sahar, member of Afghans For Peace.
Graham Clumpner, Afghan war veteran who is now a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War.
To Watch the Report
Andrew Martin and Andrew W. Lehren: A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College
A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College
By ANDREW MARTIN and ANDREW W. LEHREN
The New York Times
ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.
“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.
Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.
“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”
With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.
About two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients borrow money to attend college, either from the government or private lenders, according to a Department of Education survey of 2007-8 graduates; the total number of borrowers is most likely higher since the survey does not track borrowing from family members.
By contrast, 45 percent of 1992-93 graduates borrowed money; that survey included family borrowing as well as government and private loans.
For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports. Average debt for bachelor degree graduates who took out loans ranges from under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.
Here at Ohio Northern, recent graduates with bachelor’s degrees are among the most indebted of any college in the country, and statewide, graduates of Ohio’s more than 200 colleges and universities carry some of the highest average debt in the country, according to data reported by the colleges and compiled by an educational advocacy group. The current balance of federal student loans nationwide is $902 billion, with an additional $140 billion or so in private student loans.
“If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.
Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise. But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government.
The roots of the borrowing binge date to the 1980s, when tuition for four-year colleges began to rise faster than family incomes. In the 1990s, for-profit colleges boomed by spending heavily on marketing and recruiting. Despite some ethical lapses and fraud, enrollment more than doubled in the last decade and Wall Street swooned over the stocks. Roughly 11 percent of college students now attend for-profit colleges, and they receive about a quarter of federal student loans and grants.
To Read the Rest of the Article
By ANDREW MARTIN and ANDREW W. LEHREN
The New York Times
ADA, Ohio — Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.
“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.
Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.
“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”
With more than $1 trillion in student loans outstanding in this country, crippling debt is no longer confined to dropouts from for-profit colleges or graduate students who owe on many years of education, some of the overextended debtors in years past. As prices soar, a college degree statistically remains a good lifetime investment, but it often comes with an unprecedented financial burden.
About two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients borrow money to attend college, either from the government or private lenders, according to a Department of Education survey of 2007-8 graduates; the total number of borrowers is most likely higher since the survey does not track borrowing from family members.
By contrast, 45 percent of 1992-93 graduates borrowed money; that survey included family borrowing as well as government and private loans.
For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports. Average debt for bachelor degree graduates who took out loans ranges from under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.
Here at Ohio Northern, recent graduates with bachelor’s degrees are among the most indebted of any college in the country, and statewide, graduates of Ohio’s more than 200 colleges and universities carry some of the highest average debt in the country, according to data reported by the colleges and compiled by an educational advocacy group. The current balance of federal student loans nationwide is $902 billion, with an additional $140 billion or so in private student loans.
“If one is not thinking about where this is headed over the next two or three years, you are just completely missing the warning signs,” said Rajeev V. Date, deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog created after the financial crisis.
Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise. But its roots are in fact deep, and the cast of contributing characters — including college marketing officers, state lawmakers wielding a budget ax and wide-eyed students and families — has been enabled by a basic economic dynamic: an insatiable demand for a college education, at almost any price, and plenty of easy-to-secure loans, primarily from the federal government.
The roots of the borrowing binge date to the 1980s, when tuition for four-year colleges began to rise faster than family incomes. In the 1990s, for-profit colleges boomed by spending heavily on marketing and recruiting. Despite some ethical lapses and fraud, enrollment more than doubled in the last decade and Wall Street swooned over the stocks. Roughly 11 percent of college students now attend for-profit colleges, and they receive about a quarter of federal student loans and grants.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Democracy Now: Scott Olsen, U.S. Vet Who Nearly Lost Life at Occupy Protest, Brings Antiwar Message to NATO Summit
Scott Olsen, U.S. Vet Who Nearly Lost Life at Occupy Protest, Brings Antiwar Message to NATO Summit
Democracy Now
We’re joined at the NATO summit in Chicago by Scott Olsen, who survived two tours in Iraq but almost died when he was hit with a police projectile at an Occupy Oakland protest last year. Olsen returned four of his medals at Sunday’s antiwar march. When asked why he’s joined the Occupy movement and is protesting against the heavily-policed NATO summit, Olsen says, "I am going to make every effort I can to show them that we’re doing the right thing. No matter what they do to any of us, we’ve got each other’s backs and we’re going forward."
To Watch the Interview
Democracy Now
We’re joined at the NATO summit in Chicago by Scott Olsen, who survived two tours in Iraq but almost died when he was hit with a police projectile at an Occupy Oakland protest last year. Olsen returned four of his medals at Sunday’s antiwar march. When asked why he’s joined the Occupy movement and is protesting against the heavily-policed NATO summit, Olsen says, "I am going to make every effort I can to show them that we’re doing the right thing. No matter what they do to any of us, we’ve got each other’s backs and we’re going forward."
To Watch the Interview
Veterans/Soldiers: Peace and Conflict Studies Archive
Veterans/Soldiers
Berends, Andrew, et al. "The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans." Making Contact (July 1, 2009)
Bhagwati, Anuradha, et al. "Many Lines of Fire: Women at War." Making Contact (May 27, 2009)
Carlin, Dan. "Secret Leakage." Common Sense #248 (March 2, 2013)
Cioca, Kori, Kirby Dick and Trina McDonald. "The Invisible War: New Film Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic in U.S. Military." Democracy Now (January 30, 2012)
Clumpner, Graham and Suraia Suhar. "U.S. Army Vets Join With Afghans For Peace to Lead Antiwar March at Chicago NATO Summit." Democracy Now (May 21, 2012)
Cuellar, Claudia, Phil Donahue and Tomas Young. "Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Explains Decision to End His Life." Democracy Now (March 21, 2013)
Espirit de Corps To the Best of Our Knowledge (May 16, 2008)
Greenwald, Glenn. "Bradley Manning: the face of heroism." The Guardian (February 28, 2013)
Hedges, Chris. "War is Betrayal: Persistent Myths of Combat." Boston Review (July/August 2012)
Holland, Joshua. "Scary Flashes of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in the LAPD's Manhunt for Chris Dorner." AlterNet (February 8, 2013)
"Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace and Zach Choate of Iraq Veterans Against War on the 8th anniverary of the invasion of Iraq." Raising Sand Radio (March 18, 2011)
Miller, T. Christian. "Invisible Wounds of War." Pro Publica Podcast (March 28, 2011)
""No NATO, No War": U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Return War Medals at NATO Summit." Democracy Now (May 21, 2012)
Olsen, Scott. "U.S. Vet Who Nearly Lost Life at Occupy Protest, Brings Antiwar Message to NATO Summit." Democracy Now (May 21, 2012)
Peebles, Stacey. "Stories from the Suck: The First Wave of Iraq War Narratives." Berfois (April 15, 2011)
"Sebastian Errazuriz: American Kills." Design Bloom (August 19, 2010)
"US Military." History Commons (Ongoing Historical Timeline)
Zeese, Kevin. "Bradley Manning and the Rule of Law." TruthOut (January 14, 2011)
Berends, Andrew, et al. "The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans." Making Contact (July 1, 2009)
Bhagwati, Anuradha, et al. "Many Lines of Fire: Women at War." Making Contact (May 27, 2009)
Carlin, Dan. "Secret Leakage." Common Sense #248 (March 2, 2013)
Cioca, Kori, Kirby Dick and Trina McDonald. "The Invisible War: New Film Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic in U.S. Military." Democracy Now (January 30, 2012)
Clumpner, Graham and Suraia Suhar. "U.S. Army Vets Join With Afghans For Peace to Lead Antiwar March at Chicago NATO Summit." Democracy Now (May 21, 2012)
Cuellar, Claudia, Phil Donahue and Tomas Young. "Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Explains Decision to End His Life." Democracy Now (March 21, 2013)
Espirit de Corps To the Best of Our Knowledge (May 16, 2008)
Greenwald, Glenn. "Bradley Manning: the face of heroism." The Guardian (February 28, 2013)
Hedges, Chris. "War is Betrayal: Persistent Myths of Combat." Boston Review (July/August 2012)
Holland, Joshua. "Scary Flashes of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in the LAPD's Manhunt for Chris Dorner." AlterNet (February 8, 2013)
"Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace and Zach Choate of Iraq Veterans Against War on the 8th anniverary of the invasion of Iraq." Raising Sand Radio (March 18, 2011)
Miller, T. Christian. "Invisible Wounds of War." Pro Publica Podcast (March 28, 2011)
""No NATO, No War": U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Return War Medals at NATO Summit." Democracy Now (May 21, 2012)
Olsen, Scott. "U.S. Vet Who Nearly Lost Life at Occupy Protest, Brings Antiwar Message to NATO Summit." Democracy Now (May 21, 2012)
Peebles, Stacey. "Stories from the Suck: The First Wave of Iraq War Narratives." Berfois (April 15, 2011)
"Sebastian Errazuriz: American Kills." Design Bloom (August 19, 2010)
"US Military." History Commons (Ongoing Historical Timeline)
Zeese, Kevin. "Bradley Manning and the Rule of Law." TruthOut (January 14, 2011)
Democracy Now: "No NATO, No War" -- U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Return War Medals at NATO Summit
"No NATO, No War": U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Return War Medals at NATO Summit
Democracy Now
We broadcast from Chicago, site of the largest NATO summit in the organization’s six-decade history. On Sunday, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as members of Afghans For Peace, led a peace march of thousands of people. Iraq Veterans Against the War held a ceremony where nearly 50 veterans discarded their war medals by hurling them down the street in the direction of the NATO summit. We hear the soldiers’ voices as they return their medals one by one from the stage. "I am giving back my global war on terror service medal in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jason Heard, a former combat medic who spent 10 years in the U.S. Army. "I am deeply sorry for the destruction that we have caused in these countries and around the globe."
Guest:
Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, returning their medals outside the NATO summit in Chicago.
To Watch the Coverage
Democracy Now
We broadcast from Chicago, site of the largest NATO summit in the organization’s six-decade history. On Sunday, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as members of Afghans For Peace, led a peace march of thousands of people. Iraq Veterans Against the War held a ceremony where nearly 50 veterans discarded their war medals by hurling them down the street in the direction of the NATO summit. We hear the soldiers’ voices as they return their medals one by one from the stage. "I am giving back my global war on terror service medal in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jason Heard, a former combat medic who spent 10 years in the U.S. Army. "I am deeply sorry for the destruction that we have caused in these countries and around the globe."
Guest:
Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, returning their medals outside the NATO summit in Chicago.
To Watch the Coverage
Reports and Images from the NATO Protests in Chicago (May 20-21, 2012)
Was going to post some of this collection here, but lets give credit where it is due by sending you to Richard Reilly's Facebook page and I'll try to catch up on some other reports throughout the day. I'm curious how this is being covered in other parts of the world, if you are so inclined, please share your perspective or reports.
CHIASMOS: McQuire Gibson and Fred Donner -- Iraq before Saddam Hussein; Salim Yaqub and Rashid Khalidi -- Constraining and Shaping Nationalism: The United States and Iraq; John Mearsheimer and Robert Pape -- The War in Iraq and America's Role in the World
[These are all from 2003 in the aftermath of the USA's invasion and occupation of Iraq, but they provide a good glimpse into the knowledge/understanding about the causes and consequences at that time. Also very useful for those still seeking to understand about the causes and consequences.]
CHIASMOS (University of Chicago Area and International Studies Multimedia Outreach Source)
From the Rethinking America in the Middle East Series, presented by: International House Global Voices Program, the Norman Wait Harris Fund of the Center for International Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Human Rights Program.
"Iraq Before Saddam Hussein"
McGuire Gibson, Oriental Institute and Departments of History, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Fred Donner, Oriental Institute and Near Eastern Languages and Civilization
To Listen to Gibson and Donner
"Constraining and Shaping Nationalism: The United States and Iraq"
Salim Yaqub, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Rashid Khalidi, Director, Center for International Studies and Professor, Departments of History andNear Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Yo Listen to Yaqub and Khalidi
"The War in Iraq and America's Role in the World"
John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Political Science; Director, Program on International Security
Robert Pape, Director, Program on International Security and Department of Political Science
To Listen to Mearsheimer and Pape
CHIASMOS (University of Chicago Area and International Studies Multimedia Outreach Source)
From the Rethinking America in the Middle East Series, presented by: International House Global Voices Program, the Norman Wait Harris Fund of the Center for International Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Human Rights Program.
"Iraq Before Saddam Hussein"
McGuire Gibson, Oriental Institute and Departments of History, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Fred Donner, Oriental Institute and Near Eastern Languages and Civilization
To Listen to Gibson and Donner
"Constraining and Shaping Nationalism: The United States and Iraq"
Salim Yaqub, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Rashid Khalidi, Director, Center for International Studies and Professor, Departments of History andNear Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Yo Listen to Yaqub and Khalidi
"The War in Iraq and America's Role in the World"
John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Political Science; Director, Program on International Security
Robert Pape, Director, Program on International Security and Department of Political Science
To Listen to Mearsheimer and Pape
Friday, May 18, 2012
Margaret Flowers and Raymond Offenheiser: Occupy G8 -- Peoples’ Summit Confronts World Leaders at Camp David, Urging Action on Poverty, Hunger
Occupy G8: Peoples’ Summit Confronts World Leaders at Camp David, Urging Action on Poverty, Hunger
Democracy Now
World leaders are convening at the heavily guarded Camp David in Maryland today for the G8 Summit. Leading nonprofits such as Save the Children and Oxfam are urging G8 leaders to live up to a 2009 pledge of $22 billion towards food security in developing nations of which only a quarter has been met. Activists are also urging G8 leaders to build on their previous commitments and partner with developing countries to urgently tackle hunger. We’re joined by Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, and Dr. Margaret Flowers, a physician and organizer with the Occupy G8 Peoples’ Summit.
Raymond Offenheiser, President of the international relief and development organization, Oxfam America.
Dr. Margaret Flowers is a pediatrician, single payer advocate, co-director of Its Our Economy and organizer of Occupy Washington, D.C. She helped organize the Occupy G8 Peoples’ Summit outside of Camp David.
To Watch the Episode
Democracy Now
World leaders are convening at the heavily guarded Camp David in Maryland today for the G8 Summit. Leading nonprofits such as Save the Children and Oxfam are urging G8 leaders to live up to a 2009 pledge of $22 billion towards food security in developing nations of which only a quarter has been met. Activists are also urging G8 leaders to build on their previous commitments and partner with developing countries to urgently tackle hunger. We’re joined by Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, and Dr. Margaret Flowers, a physician and organizer with the Occupy G8 Peoples’ Summit.
Raymond Offenheiser, President of the international relief and development organization, Oxfam America.
Dr. Margaret Flowers is a pediatrician, single payer advocate, co-director of Its Our Economy and organizer of Occupy Washington, D.C. She helped organize the Occupy G8 Peoples’ Summit outside of Camp David.
To Watch the Episode
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Best of the Left: #605 The climate of our discontent (Climate Change)
#605 The climate of our discontent (Climate Change)
Best of the Left
Ch. 1: Intro – Theme: A Fond Farewell – From a Basement On the Hill
Ch. 2: Act 1: Climate change denial think tank industries – Green News Report
Ch. 3: Song 1: Nantes – The Flying Club Cup
Ch. 4: Act 2: Fox Guest: Obama Wants High Gas Prices – Young Turks
Ch. 5: Song 2: Acorn Factory – Time To Die
Ch. 6: Act 3: Big Oil More Powerful Than Government – Rachel Maddow
Ch. 7: Song 3: Crystalised – xx
Ch. 8: Act 4: Climate Change Predictions Made 30 Years Ago Prove Accurate – Majority Report
Ch. 9: Song 4: Walking On Sunshine – Anthology
Ch. 10: Act 5: Fox News Lie Wind Farms Cause Global Warming – David Pakman
Ch. 11: Song 5: Peace of Mind – Popular Music That Will Live Forever – EP
Ch. 12: Act 6: Climate Change Coverage Plummets On Broadcast Networks Study – Young Turks
Ch. 13: Song 6: Ignore the Ignorant – Ignore the Ignorant
Ch. 14: Act 7: The Conservative Smear Campaign to Discredit Climate Scientists – Majority Report
Ch. 15: Song 7: Circle of Life – The Lion King (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Ch. 16: Act 8: The Human Race & Other Evil Little Bastards – Lee Camp
Ch. 17: Song 8: Across the Universe – I Am Sam (Music from and Inspired By the Motion Picture)
Ch. 18: Act 9: Charlie Foster: The most invasive species – Story Collider
To Listen to the Episode
Best of the Left
Ch. 1: Intro – Theme: A Fond Farewell – From a Basement On the Hill
Ch. 2: Act 1: Climate change denial think tank industries – Green News Report
Ch. 3: Song 1: Nantes – The Flying Club Cup
Ch. 4: Act 2: Fox Guest: Obama Wants High Gas Prices – Young Turks
Ch. 5: Song 2: Acorn Factory – Time To Die
Ch. 6: Act 3: Big Oil More Powerful Than Government – Rachel Maddow
Ch. 7: Song 3: Crystalised – xx
Ch. 8: Act 4: Climate Change Predictions Made 30 Years Ago Prove Accurate – Majority Report
Ch. 9: Song 4: Walking On Sunshine – Anthology
Ch. 10: Act 5: Fox News Lie Wind Farms Cause Global Warming – David Pakman
Ch. 11: Song 5: Peace of Mind – Popular Music That Will Live Forever – EP
Ch. 12: Act 6: Climate Change Coverage Plummets On Broadcast Networks Study – Young Turks
Ch. 13: Song 6: Ignore the Ignorant – Ignore the Ignorant
Ch. 14: Act 7: The Conservative Smear Campaign to Discredit Climate Scientists – Majority Report
Ch. 15: Song 7: Circle of Life – The Lion King (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Ch. 16: Act 8: The Human Race & Other Evil Little Bastards – Lee Camp
Ch. 17: Song 8: Across the Universe – I Am Sam (Music from and Inspired By the Motion Picture)
Ch. 18: Act 9: Charlie Foster: The most invasive species – Story Collider
To Listen to the Episode
Michael Atkinson: Archival Trouble -- The fiction-free science fiction of Adam Curtis
Archival Trouble: The fiction-free science fiction of Adam Curtis
by Michael Atkinson
Moving Image Source
...
Curtis's brand of deep politics isn't theorist Peter Dale Scott's—he's concerned less with deliberate conspiracy than with the cascade of sociopolitical dominoes, beginning somewhere mysteriously decades ago, tumbling in a semi-secret dialectical train of disaster since, and culminating in flat-out catastrophe, be it 9/11 or the world economic meltdown or merely the Reagan-era state of rampaging consumerist narcissism. Formally, Curtis manufactures his flowcharts with the simplest means available: archival footage, talking heads, calm but ominous narration, associative montage, a pervasive sense of doomsday. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is paradigmatic: Curtis begins, as his Richard Brautigan-quoting title suggests, with the familiar suspicion that the mechanization of our lives is winding inexorably toward a dystopian nightmare in which the matrix of microprocessors and A.I.'s will end up commanding us, not vice versa.
But right away it's clear that Curtis isn't hypothesizing about a terrifying future, but unearthing the hidden patterns that have created the present moment. The villains are not machines. Curtis trips backward, as is his wont, to the '50s and the rise of Ayn Rand, whose Objectivist creed in turn gave fitful birth to a spate of influential ideologies, all of which decided that both nature and human society were essentially self-sustaining, equilibrium-seeking logical mechanisms, and could be managed thus. "This is the story," Curtis intones, "of the rise of the dream of the self-organizing system, and the strange machine fantasy of nature that underpins it." The tales he tells to illustrate this harrowing and almost completely overlooked social saga all intertwine, and run from the "spaceship Earth" ideas of Buckminster Fuller, the communes that followed, the pessimistic forecasts of the Club of Rome, the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, the genesis of the wholly fabricated Tutsi-Hutu dichotomy that turned Rwanda into a killing field more than once, the career of Dian Fossey, the late-century rollercoaster of economic feast and famine, and the work of theorist/geneticist George Price, who believed that humans were ultimately the slaves of their own genetic imperatives, and who demonstrated mathematically that both altruism and genocide were therefore rational acts, from "a gene's eye view" of things.
There's more, all of it reflecting back upon now; Curtis is nothing if not a staunch proselytizer for the idea of the past never being quite past. All Watched Over is more than a counter-story. Like all of Curtis's work it is approximately half well-circulated history and half "deep" background—that is, storylines and historical angles that have been pervasively and deliberately neglected by the gatekeepers of knowledge and information. The film feels something like a Craig Baldwin delusion-farce turned chillingly, menacingly factual, and the facts accrete into an interrogation of psychotic hubris. The Frankenstein monster constructed by the scientists and demagogues and politicians in All Watched Over is the last half-century or so of life on Earth, which in its ultimate tally amounts to a scoresheet of unimaginable injustice, mountains of bodies, and untold environmental ruin.
Curtis is in reality telling just one story, again and again in various threads and tangents and in dazzling three- or four-hour chunks, reaching back to the immediate postwar years and then forward to the present over and over, limning an infinitely complex genogram of our present existence. Ironically, for a history-rewriting filmmaker/producer boxing so much information into evenings of television, Curtis is fierce about the disastrous effects brought about by the artificial and intellectualized imposition of order. He began in his present mode with 1992's Pandora's Box, a massive autopsy on the worldwide cataclysms that unrolled as a result of every kind of postwar effort to systematize, organize, compel, and codify humanity, from Soviet over-industrialization to game-theory Cold War strategies to Keynesian economics to nuclear-power utopianism. Politically, this is a rocket targeted not at the Right per se, but upward, at the power elite, whose perpetual folly in trying to maximize profit and control leads ceaselessly to societal breakdown—a condition very often beside the point for the elite in question, once they've stood to benefit. The Century of the Self (2002) goes all attack-ad on this dynamic, specifically homing in on propagandist/marketing mahatma Edward Bernays, and how he used Freudian psychoanalytic insights to initiate the gold rush of institutionalized thought control—advertising, propaganda, public relations—that could be said to absolutely dominate 20th-century public discourse.
Curtis's vision seemed wholly formed at first, despite the fact that he's obviously digging up unknown connections with each new project. But it took the spiral mindquake of 9/11 for Curtis's reverse-engineered prophecies to gain a global profile. The Power of Nightmares (2004) follows the gunpowder trails from the mid-century (uniting Muslim Brotherhood messiah Sayyid Qutb and neocon pope-king Leo Strauss as complementary agents of desolation) to the attacks of 2001, and then maintains that, just as the farcical depiction of the USSR as a global spider kingdom of evil influence is destroyed by direct testimony from CIA agents and a lying Donald Rumsfeld in old news footage, the sudden postulation of Al Qaeda as a terrifying, organized worldwide threat was a manufactured myth used by Western governments and agencies to broaden and tighten their grip on international power systems and the profit to be gained therein.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
To watch Adam Curtis's documentaries online:
Pandora's Box: A Fable From the Age of Science (1992)
The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past (1995)
The Century of the Self (2002)
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004)
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)
by Michael Atkinson
Moving Image Source
...
Curtis's brand of deep politics isn't theorist Peter Dale Scott's—he's concerned less with deliberate conspiracy than with the cascade of sociopolitical dominoes, beginning somewhere mysteriously decades ago, tumbling in a semi-secret dialectical train of disaster since, and culminating in flat-out catastrophe, be it 9/11 or the world economic meltdown or merely the Reagan-era state of rampaging consumerist narcissism. Formally, Curtis manufactures his flowcharts with the simplest means available: archival footage, talking heads, calm but ominous narration, associative montage, a pervasive sense of doomsday. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is paradigmatic: Curtis begins, as his Richard Brautigan-quoting title suggests, with the familiar suspicion that the mechanization of our lives is winding inexorably toward a dystopian nightmare in which the matrix of microprocessors and A.I.'s will end up commanding us, not vice versa.
But right away it's clear that Curtis isn't hypothesizing about a terrifying future, but unearthing the hidden patterns that have created the present moment. The villains are not machines. Curtis trips backward, as is his wont, to the '50s and the rise of Ayn Rand, whose Objectivist creed in turn gave fitful birth to a spate of influential ideologies, all of which decided that both nature and human society were essentially self-sustaining, equilibrium-seeking logical mechanisms, and could be managed thus. "This is the story," Curtis intones, "of the rise of the dream of the self-organizing system, and the strange machine fantasy of nature that underpins it." The tales he tells to illustrate this harrowing and almost completely overlooked social saga all intertwine, and run from the "spaceship Earth" ideas of Buckminster Fuller, the communes that followed, the pessimistic forecasts of the Club of Rome, the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, the genesis of the wholly fabricated Tutsi-Hutu dichotomy that turned Rwanda into a killing field more than once, the career of Dian Fossey, the late-century rollercoaster of economic feast and famine, and the work of theorist/geneticist George Price, who believed that humans were ultimately the slaves of their own genetic imperatives, and who demonstrated mathematically that both altruism and genocide were therefore rational acts, from "a gene's eye view" of things.
There's more, all of it reflecting back upon now; Curtis is nothing if not a staunch proselytizer for the idea of the past never being quite past. All Watched Over is more than a counter-story. Like all of Curtis's work it is approximately half well-circulated history and half "deep" background—that is, storylines and historical angles that have been pervasively and deliberately neglected by the gatekeepers of knowledge and information. The film feels something like a Craig Baldwin delusion-farce turned chillingly, menacingly factual, and the facts accrete into an interrogation of psychotic hubris. The Frankenstein monster constructed by the scientists and demagogues and politicians in All Watched Over is the last half-century or so of life on Earth, which in its ultimate tally amounts to a scoresheet of unimaginable injustice, mountains of bodies, and untold environmental ruin.
Curtis is in reality telling just one story, again and again in various threads and tangents and in dazzling three- or four-hour chunks, reaching back to the immediate postwar years and then forward to the present over and over, limning an infinitely complex genogram of our present existence. Ironically, for a history-rewriting filmmaker/producer boxing so much information into evenings of television, Curtis is fierce about the disastrous effects brought about by the artificial and intellectualized imposition of order. He began in his present mode with 1992's Pandora's Box, a massive autopsy on the worldwide cataclysms that unrolled as a result of every kind of postwar effort to systematize, organize, compel, and codify humanity, from Soviet over-industrialization to game-theory Cold War strategies to Keynesian economics to nuclear-power utopianism. Politically, this is a rocket targeted not at the Right per se, but upward, at the power elite, whose perpetual folly in trying to maximize profit and control leads ceaselessly to societal breakdown—a condition very often beside the point for the elite in question, once they've stood to benefit. The Century of the Self (2002) goes all attack-ad on this dynamic, specifically homing in on propagandist/marketing mahatma Edward Bernays, and how he used Freudian psychoanalytic insights to initiate the gold rush of institutionalized thought control—advertising, propaganda, public relations—that could be said to absolutely dominate 20th-century public discourse.
Curtis's vision seemed wholly formed at first, despite the fact that he's obviously digging up unknown connections with each new project. But it took the spiral mindquake of 9/11 for Curtis's reverse-engineered prophecies to gain a global profile. The Power of Nightmares (2004) follows the gunpowder trails from the mid-century (uniting Muslim Brotherhood messiah Sayyid Qutb and neocon pope-king Leo Strauss as complementary agents of desolation) to the attacks of 2001, and then maintains that, just as the farcical depiction of the USSR as a global spider kingdom of evil influence is destroyed by direct testimony from CIA agents and a lying Donald Rumsfeld in old news footage, the sudden postulation of Al Qaeda as a terrifying, organized worldwide threat was a manufactured myth used by Western governments and agencies to broaden and tighten their grip on international power systems and the profit to be gained therein.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
To watch Adam Curtis's documentaries online:
Pandora's Box: A Fable From the Age of Science (1992)
The Living Dead: Three Films About the Power of the Past (1995)
The Century of the Self (2002)
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004)
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)
Monday, May 14, 2012
Richard Lang, Noam Chomsky, Michel Bauwens and David Graeber: Occupy 2.0 (Peer Produced Politics)
Episode #594 - Occupy 2.0 (Peer Produced Politics)
Unwelcome Guests
We start the show with some reflections of the various Occupy battles as symptoms of society's auto-immune disease. In this context, we hear a November 2011 open letter from Occupier, Reverend Richard Lang to the Seattle Police Department. Encouraging them to work with, not against the occupiers, he notes their common interest, and that the police who accept their orders to brutalize and provoke protestors are no longer serving humanity or their own interests.
Then we hear an interview of Noam Chomsky about the meaning of the Occupy Movement in the context of US politics. He highlights the need for direct civic engagement by the occupiers to transform their wide mandate of support from a habitually inactive populace into a broad active engagement -- which is the best defense against brutal police. Chomsky notes that the established US political parties will try to coopt Occupy to meet their own ends. He recalls David Hume's observation that "Power is in the hands of the governed" and that the only way that an elite can maintain control is through an enormous and ongoing campaign to shape public opinion. Occupy threatens that control to the extent that it presents a counter narrative independent of commercially controlled media.
Our first hour concludes with a recent interview of Michel Bauwens about the significance of Occupy. He highlights the emerging phenomenon of peer production, which substitutes traditional top down hierarchies such as corporations with a pattern of more amicable and egalitarian interrelationships. Bauwens suggests that Occupy is a manifestation of the same, decentralized spirit in the political arena. This continues into the second hour and we conclude with another half hour of Chapter 7 of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years.
Music: Welcome To The Occupation by REM
To Listen to the Episode
Unwelcome Guests
We start the show with some reflections of the various Occupy battles as symptoms of society's auto-immune disease. In this context, we hear a November 2011 open letter from Occupier, Reverend Richard Lang to the Seattle Police Department. Encouraging them to work with, not against the occupiers, he notes their common interest, and that the police who accept their orders to brutalize and provoke protestors are no longer serving humanity or their own interests.
Then we hear an interview of Noam Chomsky about the meaning of the Occupy Movement in the context of US politics. He highlights the need for direct civic engagement by the occupiers to transform their wide mandate of support from a habitually inactive populace into a broad active engagement -- which is the best defense against brutal police. Chomsky notes that the established US political parties will try to coopt Occupy to meet their own ends. He recalls David Hume's observation that "Power is in the hands of the governed" and that the only way that an elite can maintain control is through an enormous and ongoing campaign to shape public opinion. Occupy threatens that control to the extent that it presents a counter narrative independent of commercially controlled media.
Our first hour concludes with a recent interview of Michel Bauwens about the significance of Occupy. He highlights the emerging phenomenon of peer production, which substitutes traditional top down hierarchies such as corporations with a pattern of more amicable and egalitarian interrelationships. Bauwens suggests that Occupy is a manifestation of the same, decentralized spirit in the political arena. This continues into the second hour and we conclude with another half hour of Chapter 7 of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years.
Music: Welcome To The Occupation by REM
To Listen to the Episode
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Yvonne Ridley: Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia
Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia
by Yvonne Ridley
Foreign Policy Journal
Kuala Lumpur — It’s official; George W Bush is a war criminal.
In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.
Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.
The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.
Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is also asking that the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals for public record.
The tribunal is the initiative of Malaysia’s retired Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who staunchly opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
To Read the rest of the Report
by Yvonne Ridley
Foreign Policy Journal
Kuala Lumpur — It’s official; George W Bush is a war criminal.
In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.
Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.
The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.
Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is also asking that the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals for public record.
The tribunal is the initiative of Malaysia’s retired Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who staunchly opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
To Read the rest of the Report
Michael Benton: My Understanding of Anarchism 3.0
[I visited a Montessori school last Friday to talk about the Spanish Civil War and we had this great conversation in which we ranged through historical/contemporary political theories. I was asked by the students/teacher to return this Tuesday to discuss contemporary Political Theories and I figured I better start with my own particular politics ..... so, here is, my understanding of anarchism and participatory economics 3.0 (with a nod to CROCK, the Peace Meal Garden and the Kenwick Potluck Exchange).
This started out as a response to Sara P. on the Occupy Education email list in the winter of 2011 and I was reading scott crow's book at the time. Sara asked me to define in greater detail my understanding of Anarchism. There is a lot of confusion about the political philosophy of anarchism, mostly because of the disinformation propagated by corporate media, but also because there is no "one" Anarchism, instead it is a diverse, evolving part of global autonomous movements and participatory economics.]
]
PM Press link for the book
also a full presentation by scott crow on the ideas and experiences in the book
Sara, it is important that we each set down our understandings of anarchism and initiate broader discussions/debates about anarchism:
You asked about the confusion in regards to the many uses of the words libertarian/libertarianism.
First, the political concept of "libertarianism" has many meanings/uses in American political discussions. Because of our corporate media's focus on conservative politicians most Americans are familiar with right-libertarians (also known as economic libertarians)? This is the Tea Party's or Ron/Rand Paul's American version of libertarianism that wants to limit government and privatize everything.
On the other hand, there are the left-libertarians (also known as socialist libertarians). These are the traditional anarchists developing from earlier European versions that branched off from socialism (rejecting its authoritarian impulses) and sought to bring more autonomy into individual/collective lives while realizing the potential of liberated communities.
There are many more types of anarchism, but let me lay out some basics (I would also encourage you to watch scott crow's presentation in the video I provided -- he/Common Grounds is a great example of anarchist direct action. I would suggest going to see the upcoming screening of Howard Zinn's The People Speak (based on his landmark history The People's History of the United States:
For the record Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky both claim they are left-libertarians.
Short descriptions:
Anarchists do not seek complete absence of government. There is a need for basic communal structures to provide everyone with the necessary staples of life, for instance, a good example would be the provision of water for a large community. What anarchists do want is leadership, not leaders; in other words a society in which we cultivate the ability of all to step up and work for the greater collective good. They also demand, yes demand, transparency of actions/processes (the Occupy Movement's general assembly and decision making processes are partly inspired by anarchist principles) and that leadership should always be held accountable. Most anarchists are also opposed to privatization of basic necessities (at the least) under the control of a corporatocracy. These types of monopoly relations rest upon the infantilization of dependent populations, as well as the creation of a plutocracy that dominates all aspects of our state/government/society/culture. We believe democracy doesn't come from a small group of people at the top of society, instead, democratic processes depend on the full involvement of informed/engaged citizens from all sections of a society.
Anarchists do not believe in complete freedom for the individual -- as in free from any responsibility to anything. In fact we have a lot of problem with the word "freedom" which has its origins in slave societies. A master granted freedom to a slave for exemplary service and to hold out hope to the rest of the slaves that one day they might be "freed." With this in mind, we can see the correlation to our current system, were the many toil endlessly in the desperate hope that they might someday be granted "freedom" from want and need (by becoming one of the elites). Former President Bush defined our limited freedom in the aftermath of 9/11 when he exhorted Americans to respond to the attacks on their "freedom" by going about their daily lives of "working and shopping and playing." Is this what it means to be a "free" person in a democracy? Instead anarchists seek "liberty" for individuals and communities through participatory economics and consensus decision making.
For me, I think of liberty in this way: liberty = individual responsibility + consensus decision making + cooperative learning + participatory economics. At every step of this formula is the development of individual liberty in tandem with collective responsibility. Anarchists believe that communities are best served by free-thinking, autonomous individuals (and this is the polar opposite of the "radical individualism" of consumer capitalism and economic libertarians) and that autonomous individuals are best cultivated in liberated, participatory collectives/communities. If anything, Anarchists are truly the most concerned with community because they struggle with the individual's role in communities. Responsibility can only be cultivated through individuals that have the ability to respond. The reason why anarchists hold such value on the creative development of autonomous individuals is because self-direction is a necessary step for the cultivation of individual responsibility to the community. Consumer capitalism seeks fragmented, alienated, anxious individuals/communities because these are people that are the most easily exploited for profits. Furthermore, anxious, detached and fragmented people are incapable of response-ability to anything beyond their basic addictive appetites.
Anarchists are not opposed to profits. There is nothing wrong with co-ops, local markets, exchange of goods with ones neighbors. We just don't want to worship at the altar of profits or genuflect to a mythical corporate free market (lets face it, America has a massive corporate welfare system in place). Instead of our current economic system that values things over people and profits over places, anarchists value people/places over profits. Money is an illusion, a powerful one that has real effects in the world, but an illusion nonetheless.
I view anarchism as a personal philosophy (the personal is political and vice versa). Here is my take on it as my personal philosophy:
Anarchism is a person-centered philosophy. Its focus is on autonomy amidst the social and economic pressures of mass society for superficiality and conformism. It is our responsibility, as free and conscious beings, to create meaning out of life and to develop an authentic existence. It is also, in my opinion, in this regard, our duty to help others develop their response-ability to do the same (for me as a teacher this is the core of an anarchist pedagogy). In this anarchism is radically collective in orientation. We are cultivating autonomous, ethical and responsible individuals who care about their community. Anarchism does not discount other beings in this world, it is holistic, in the sense of recognizing that humans are just one set of beings that live and share in the development and continuation of the broader environment.
Liberty requires a sense of responsibility. Anarchism is a philosophy of liberty. It requires that we step back and reflect/reassess on what we have been doing and what effect our thoughts/actions have on the world. In this sense we are more than just individuals, we are members of larger collectives and our personal ethics always extend beyond ourselves (this anarchism is not vulgar egotism). In this we can only be as "responsible" as we are "liberated." Response-ability, the ability for people to respond to the problems of their society and the impetus for them to care beyond themselves, is only realized by liberated, authentic, free thinking and ethical beings. Where there is mindless conformism, shallow consumerism, or brutal oppression, you will see a breakdown in the development of response-ability (both in the ruled/rulers... or, manipulated/manipulators).
Ethical considerations are the primary questions. We all understand ethics and liberty differently, this is a given, and thus we must bring each of our understandings into play and sharpen our ideas through open/free public discourse. In this we, as individuals, as a community, as a society, and as a global ecosystem, should consider ethical questions as primary steps to building a better world. An autonomous individual is responsible to develop and consider the authenticity of their own personal lives in relation to their society. My authenticity should not be at the expense of your opportunity to realize yourself (for example, we are not bloated ticks that feed off the misery of others in order to realize some twisted sense of self).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I realize I am a flawed and difficult person. This is always a work in progress and I struggle as an individual.
To realize true liberty, autonomous citizens, participatory economics, and cooperative communities .... that is all I have ever dreamed of since I was a little kid.... seriously -- it is all summed up in the usage of the word: "solidarity"
Here is a great discussion of current anarchist thought (esp. cindy milstein) in relation to the Occupy Movement
and once again to circle back again to scott crow -- why does the government/media/corporations fear anarchist so much?
NY Times: For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target
Potter, Will. "FBI Agents Raid Homes in Search of “Anarchist Literature” Green Is the New Red (July 30, 2012)
This started out as a response to Sara P. on the Occupy Education email list in the winter of 2011 and I was reading scott crow's book at the time. Sara asked me to define in greater detail my understanding of Anarchism. There is a lot of confusion about the political philosophy of anarchism, mostly because of the disinformation propagated by corporate media, but also because there is no "one" Anarchism, instead it is a diverse, evolving part of global autonomous movements and participatory economics.]
]
PM Press link for the book
'Black Flags and Windmills' TRAILER from Louisiana Lucy on Vimeo.
also a full presentation by scott crow on the ideas and experiences in the book
Sara, it is important that we each set down our understandings of anarchism and initiate broader discussions/debates about anarchism:
You asked about the confusion in regards to the many uses of the words libertarian/libertarianism.
First, the political concept of "libertarianism" has many meanings/uses in American political discussions. Because of our corporate media's focus on conservative politicians most Americans are familiar with right-libertarians (also known as economic libertarians)? This is the Tea Party's or Ron/Rand Paul's American version of libertarianism that wants to limit government and privatize everything.
On the other hand, there are the left-libertarians (also known as socialist libertarians). These are the traditional anarchists developing from earlier European versions that branched off from socialism (rejecting its authoritarian impulses) and sought to bring more autonomy into individual/collective lives while realizing the potential of liberated communities.
There are many more types of anarchism, but let me lay out some basics (I would also encourage you to watch scott crow's presentation in the video I provided -- he/Common Grounds is a great example of anarchist direct action. I would suggest going to see the upcoming screening of Howard Zinn's The People Speak (based on his landmark history The People's History of the United States:
For the record Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky both claim they are left-libertarians.
Short descriptions:
Anarchists do not seek complete absence of government. There is a need for basic communal structures to provide everyone with the necessary staples of life, for instance, a good example would be the provision of water for a large community. What anarchists do want is leadership, not leaders; in other words a society in which we cultivate the ability of all to step up and work for the greater collective good. They also demand, yes demand, transparency of actions/processes (the Occupy Movement's general assembly and decision making processes are partly inspired by anarchist principles) and that leadership should always be held accountable. Most anarchists are also opposed to privatization of basic necessities (at the least) under the control of a corporatocracy. These types of monopoly relations rest upon the infantilization of dependent populations, as well as the creation of a plutocracy that dominates all aspects of our state/government/society/culture. We believe democracy doesn't come from a small group of people at the top of society, instead, democratic processes depend on the full involvement of informed/engaged citizens from all sections of a society.
Anarchists do not believe in complete freedom for the individual -- as in free from any responsibility to anything. In fact we have a lot of problem with the word "freedom" which has its origins in slave societies. A master granted freedom to a slave for exemplary service and to hold out hope to the rest of the slaves that one day they might be "freed." With this in mind, we can see the correlation to our current system, were the many toil endlessly in the desperate hope that they might someday be granted "freedom" from want and need (by becoming one of the elites). Former President Bush defined our limited freedom in the aftermath of 9/11 when he exhorted Americans to respond to the attacks on their "freedom" by going about their daily lives of "working and shopping and playing." Is this what it means to be a "free" person in a democracy? Instead anarchists seek "liberty" for individuals and communities through participatory economics and consensus decision making.
For me, I think of liberty in this way: liberty = individual responsibility + consensus decision making + cooperative learning + participatory economics. At every step of this formula is the development of individual liberty in tandem with collective responsibility. Anarchists believe that communities are best served by free-thinking, autonomous individuals (and this is the polar opposite of the "radical individualism" of consumer capitalism and economic libertarians) and that autonomous individuals are best cultivated in liberated, participatory collectives/communities. If anything, Anarchists are truly the most concerned with community because they struggle with the individual's role in communities. Responsibility can only be cultivated through individuals that have the ability to respond. The reason why anarchists hold such value on the creative development of autonomous individuals is because self-direction is a necessary step for the cultivation of individual responsibility to the community. Consumer capitalism seeks fragmented, alienated, anxious individuals/communities because these are people that are the most easily exploited for profits. Furthermore, anxious, detached and fragmented people are incapable of response-ability to anything beyond their basic addictive appetites.
Anarchists are not opposed to profits. There is nothing wrong with co-ops, local markets, exchange of goods with ones neighbors. We just don't want to worship at the altar of profits or genuflect to a mythical corporate free market (lets face it, America has a massive corporate welfare system in place). Instead of our current economic system that values things over people and profits over places, anarchists value people/places over profits. Money is an illusion, a powerful one that has real effects in the world, but an illusion nonetheless.
I view anarchism as a personal philosophy (the personal is political and vice versa). Here is my take on it as my personal philosophy:
Anarchism is a person-centered philosophy. Its focus is on autonomy amidst the social and economic pressures of mass society for superficiality and conformism. It is our responsibility, as free and conscious beings, to create meaning out of life and to develop an authentic existence. It is also, in my opinion, in this regard, our duty to help others develop their response-ability to do the same (for me as a teacher this is the core of an anarchist pedagogy). In this anarchism is radically collective in orientation. We are cultivating autonomous, ethical and responsible individuals who care about their community. Anarchism does not discount other beings in this world, it is holistic, in the sense of recognizing that humans are just one set of beings that live and share in the development and continuation of the broader environment.
Liberty requires a sense of responsibility. Anarchism is a philosophy of liberty. It requires that we step back and reflect/reassess on what we have been doing and what effect our thoughts/actions have on the world. In this sense we are more than just individuals, we are members of larger collectives and our personal ethics always extend beyond ourselves (this anarchism is not vulgar egotism). In this we can only be as "responsible" as we are "liberated." Response-ability, the ability for people to respond to the problems of their society and the impetus for them to care beyond themselves, is only realized by liberated, authentic, free thinking and ethical beings. Where there is mindless conformism, shallow consumerism, or brutal oppression, you will see a breakdown in the development of response-ability (both in the ruled/rulers... or, manipulated/manipulators).
Ethical considerations are the primary questions. We all understand ethics and liberty differently, this is a given, and thus we must bring each of our understandings into play and sharpen our ideas through open/free public discourse. In this we, as individuals, as a community, as a society, and as a global ecosystem, should consider ethical questions as primary steps to building a better world. An autonomous individual is responsible to develop and consider the authenticity of their own personal lives in relation to their society. My authenticity should not be at the expense of your opportunity to realize yourself (for example, we are not bloated ticks that feed off the misery of others in order to realize some twisted sense of self).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I realize I am a flawed and difficult person. This is always a work in progress and I struggle as an individual.
To realize true liberty, autonomous citizens, participatory economics, and cooperative communities .... that is all I have ever dreamed of since I was a little kid.... seriously -- it is all summed up in the usage of the word: "solidarity"
Here is a great discussion of current anarchist thought (esp. cindy milstein) in relation to the Occupy Movement
and once again to circle back again to scott crow -- why does the government/media/corporations fear anarchist so much?
NY Times: For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target
Potter, Will. "FBI Agents Raid Homes in Search of “Anarchist Literature” Green Is the New Red (July 30, 2012)
Laura Kacere: The Radical History of Mother's Day
The Radical History of Mother's Day
by Laura Kacere
Nation of Change
There’s a good number of us who question holidays like Mother’s Day in which you spend more time feeding money into a system that exploits our love for our mothers than actually celebrating them. It’s not unlike any other holiday in America in that its complete commercialization has stripped away so much of its genuine meaning, as well its history. Mother’s Day is unique in its completely radical and totally feminist history, as much as it has been forgotten.
Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.
Howe wrote:
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Laura Kacere
Nation of Change
There’s a good number of us who question holidays like Mother’s Day in which you spend more time feeding money into a system that exploits our love for our mothers than actually celebrating them. It’s not unlike any other holiday in America in that its complete commercialization has stripped away so much of its genuine meaning, as well its history. Mother’s Day is unique in its completely radical and totally feminist history, as much as it has been forgotten.
Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.
Howe wrote:
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
To Read the Rest of the Essay
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