Howard Zinn: It's Not Up To the Court

It's Not up to the Court
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive

Excerpt:

There is enormous hypocrisy surrounding the pious veneration of the Constitution and "the rule of law." The Constitution, like the Bible, is infinitely flexible and is used to serve the political needs of the moment. When the country was in economic crisis and turmoil in the Thirties and capitalism needed to be saved from the anger of the poor and hungry and unemployed, the Supreme Court was willing to stretch to infinity the constitutional right of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. It decided that the national government, desperate to regulate farm production, could tell a family farmer what to grow on his tiny piece of land.

When the Constitution gets in the way of a war, it is ignored. When the Supreme Court was faced, during Vietnam, with a suit by soldiers refusing to go, claiming that there had been no declaration of war by Congress, as the Constitution required, the soldiers could not get four Supreme Court justices to agree to even hear the case. When, during World War I, Congress ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech by passing legislation to prohibit criticism of the war, the imprisonment of dissenters under this law was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, which included two presumably liberal and learned justices: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis.

It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice.

The distinction between law and justice is ignored by all those Senators--Democrats and Republicans--who solemnly invoke as their highest concern "the rule of law." The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine right of the king.

The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance.

The Brown decision on school desegregation did not come from a sudden realization of the Supreme Court that this is what the Fourteenth Amendment called for. After all, it was the same Fourteenth Amendment that had been cited in the Plessy case upholding racial segregation. It was the initiative of brave families in the South--along with the fear by the government, obsessed with the Cold War, that it was losing the hearts and minds of colored people all over the world--that brought a sudden enlightenment to the Court.

The Supreme Court in 1883 had interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment so that nongovernmental institutions hotels, restaurants, etc.-could bar black people. But after the sit-ins and arrests of thousands of black people in the South in the early Sixties, the right to public accommodations was quietly given constitutional sanction in 1964 by the Court. It now interpreted the interstate commerce clause, whose wording had not changed since 1787, to mean that places of public accommodation could be regulated by Congressional action and be prohibited from discriminating.

Soon this would include barbershops, and I suggest it takes an ingenious interpretation to include barbershops in interstate commerce.

The right of a woman to an abortion did not depend on the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. It was won before that decision, all over the country, by grassroots agitation that forced states to recognize the right. If the American people, who by a great majority favor that right, insist on it, act on it, no Supreme Court decision can take it away.

The rights of working people, of women, of black people have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the other branches of the political system, the courts have recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for themselves.

This is not to say that we should ignore the courts or the electoral campaigns. It can be useful to get one person rather than another on the Supreme Court, or in the Presidency, or in Congress. The courts, win or lose, can be used to dramatize issues.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

AlterNet: What's Wrong with Samuel Alito

A special series of reports at AlterNet:

ALITO'S WAY
Karen Pearl, Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court constitutes an emergency for anyone concerned about women's self-determination.


ALITO'S ENVIRO PAST
Amanda Griscom Little, Grist Magazine
Environmentalists are joining many progressives and Democrats in crying foul over Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.

THE PUPPET PRESIDENT
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
In nominating Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, Bush gave up any pretense of being his own man.

THE NEXT ANTONIN SCALIA
Mary Lynn F. Jones, AlterNet
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is a doggie treat to the rabid conservative base of the Republican party. Now, the real fight begins.

Merriam-Webster Word of the Day: Zenith

(Also a heads-up to the wordsmiths out there, Merriam-Webster Dictionary is putting out an open call for new words and neologisms, claim your stake to wordly-fame today!)

zenith \ZEE-nith\ noun

1 : the point of the celestial sphere that is directly opposite the nadir and vertically above the observer
2 : the highest point reached in the heavens by a celestial body
*3 : culminating point : acme

Example sentence:
"Winning a gold medal at the Olympic games would be the zenith of my career," said the skier in a recent interview.

Did you know?
When you reach the zenith, you're at the top, the pinnacle, the summit, the peak. "Zenith" developed from Arabic terms meaning "the way over one's head." As long ago as the 1300s, English speakers used "zenith" to name the highest point in the celestial heavens, directly overhead. By the 1600s, "zenith" was being used in English for other high points as well.

Harlequin Knights: noulipo--Experimental Writing Conference

For those of us who couldn't make it to the noulipo: Experimental Writing Conference, Joseph at Harlequin Knights has been posting detailed notes on the proceedings.

Bill van Auken: A Silver Lining for Rumsfeld in the Bird Flu Threat

(Courtesy of Jodi at I Cite)

A silver lining for Rumsfeld in the bird flu threat
By Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Web Site

In the midst of the Bush administration’s belated response to the threat of a global bird flu pandemic, the Pentagon last week quietly issued a legal memorandum concerning Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s participation in the government’s plan to confront the danger.

This is not a small matter for the Bush administration, given the president’s single-minded determination to exploit what is a very real public health danger to promote his own political agenda of eliminating constitutional restrictions on the use of the US military on American soil.

The government’s 396-page response plan, posted on the Internet this week (http://www.pandemicflu.gov), speaks of using military forces to seal off towns and communities declared to be stricken with the disease, imposing what the document refers to as a cordon sanitaire, or sanitary barrier. Presumably this would mean armed troops manning roadblocks with orders to use deadly force to prevent people from either entering or leaving.

In a statement last month, Bush called for the use of the military in this fashion, and urged Congress to consider changing the law to give him greater latitude to deploy military forces domestically. The statement drew sharp criticism from public health officials, who suggested that Bush was proposing what amounted to martial law, a policy that has little efficacy in dealing with the threat of a pandemic.

Last week’s Pentagon memo indicated that Rumsfeld could participate in the martial law component of the government’s plan. He is recusing himself only from decisions regarding the use of drugs to prevent or treat bird flu.

The problem, it seems, is that the defense secretary is a major stockholder in Gilead Sciences, the company that holds the patent on the prescription antiviral drug Tamiflu, which is said to be the most effective medicine to prevent influenza or ameliorate the symptoms among those already infected.

From 1997 until he came back to Washington in 2001 to head the Pentagon and prepare for the war against Iraq, Rumsfeld was Gilead’s CEO. He separated with the corporation on very profitable terms and still holds Gilead stock worth up to $25 million, according to his recent federal financial disclosures. The stock’s price has soared from $35 to over $50 over the past six months as fears of the pandemic have grown.

As Fortune magazine put it on its web site, “The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it’s proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu...”

According to the government’s estimates, the pandemic could claim nearly 2 million lives in the US and 50-60 million worldwide. But for Rumsfeld and his friends, the danger has already produced windfall profits worth millions. According to Fortune, the spiraling stock price has “made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.”

To Read the Rest of the Article

Sign From 2004, Still Meaningful Today; Why I Support LiP Magazine

RNC Protests Gallery

The image is from LiP Magazine. I'm so impressed by this new magazine that I recently subscribed (a big decision as reading time--and funds--is limited) I highly recommended this publication, both the online site and their print edition. Here are examples of what is on their site right now!

Vandana Shiva Interview: The River vs. Water, Inc.

Chip Berlet: Conveying Correctness--The Prefabrication of Political Speech

Tim Wise: Of Natural Disasters and Otherwise

Lisa Jervis: If Women Ruled the World, Nothing Would Be Different

Jennifer Whitney: MAKE MEDIA, MAKE REAL TROUBLE--What's Wrong (and Right) with Indymedia

Tim Wise: What's the Matter With White Folks--Race Privilege, Electoral Politics and the Limits of Class Populism

I'm impressed by the range of their subjects, the quality of their essays, the sprinkling of big names with lesser known writers, and, very importantly, that they are reflective about their own perspectives. A recent issue was called "Sacred Cows" and it was composed of articles reflecting on the problems associated with certain frameworks/perspectives that the magazine supports (the last three links are examples).

How Much Confidence Do You Have In Your Government?

(The link for the survey is now fixed)

A message from Jeffrey Thomas of Eastern Kentucky University:

Dear Friends and Colleagues

I am working on a piece of research with the University of Kentucky. Specifically, I am looking at how much confidence people have in government, and I am particularly interested in the views of gays and lesbians (though not exclusively). Identifying gay and lesbian people is somewhat of a problem, since gays and lesbians are not fully included in the Census and other similar surveys of Americans. Finding gay and lesbian people (as well as their friends and families) is a little more difficult. This is where I need your help.

Will you take a few minutes to click on the link below and fill out the survey? Then, would you forward this information to other people who might do the same? Forward it to as many people as you are willing regardless of their sexual orientation. It will be helpful for me to have a substantial number of heterosexual people in the survey that I can use for comparisons.

All surveys are anonymous. I won' t be able to match responses with a particular person , so you can feel free to respond honestly without fear that I will know how you respond. I will only see the overall results of the data, which will be merged with everyone else 's answers. I need to get as many people to respond as possible in order to make my analysis more meaningful.

Thanks in advance for your help, and let me know if you have any questions about this research.

Here' s the link and more information about the study.

____________________________________________

CONFIDENCE IN GOVERNMENT

A research study about the level of confidence and trust that Americans have in government in the United States is seeking participants. We are particularly interested in finding out why confidence might vary across different groups of Americans (for example, GLBT citizens and heterosexual citizens). This study is being conducted by Jerry Thomas, MPA, Ellen D.B. Riggle, Ph.D., and Sharon Scales Rostosky, Ph.D., of the University of Kentucky. You will be asked to complete an on-line survey that asks questions about you and your feelings about government. The survey will take about 10-15 minutes. This study is open to all United States citizens or residents over the age of 18. If you are interested in participating in the survey please click on this link

Jerry D. Thomas
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Government
Eastern Kentucky University
117 McCreary Hall
521 Lancaster Avenue
Richmond, KY 40475

Alternative Press Review: Thought Control and Professional Journalism

Thought Control and "Professional" Journalism, Part 1

"Professional" journalism accepts that powerful interests - the political and economic allies of the corporate media - should be allowed to set the news agenda. Reporters are to channel the words of officialdom without expressing their own personal opinions. To express criticism of the powerful in news reports is deemed "unprofessional" - that is, "crusading", "committed", "polemical" and "radioactive". Curiously, the myth of professional "objectivity" exists alongside the clear fact that expressing support for the claims and actions of the powerful is not considered unprofessional.

Thought Control and Professinal Journalism, Part 2

Reith Lectures 2005: Alec Broers--The Triumph of Technology

BBC: Radio 4

Lecture 1: Technology will Determine the Future of the Human Race
Lecture 2: Collaboration
Lecture 3: Innovation and Management
Lecture 4: Nanotechnology and Nanoscience
Lecture 5: Risk and Responsibility

Full transcripts and audio available

University of Kentucky FEMSEM Series: Susan Bordo--The Trouble with Difference

THE UK WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAM: FEMSEM SERIES

PRESENTS

SUSAN BORDO
A slide illustrated discussion of her new piece,

The Trouble with `Difference'

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
4:30-6:30
245 (old) Student Center

**WORKING DRAFT**
To appear in Material Feminisms, Susan Hekman and Stacey Alaimo, editors, Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2006

A copy of this paper is available electronically and should be read prior to the seminar.

Contact Betty Pasley at bpasley@uky.edu

Paul Harris: The Paradox That Divides Black America

(This is the whole article--it raises a lot of unanswered questions about race and economics in America)

The paradox that divides black America
by Paul Harris
The Observer

It was once a street so rich and central to black America that Atlanta's Auburn Avenue was known simply as 'Sweet Auburn'.

It was the site of America's first black-owned daily paper and first black radio station. It was here Martin Luther King was born. It was here King preached freedom from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

In the 1960s, as the civil rights struggle raged, Sweet Auburn was wealthy and middle-class. Its businesses prospered, its nightclubs boomed. Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin played at the Top Hat Club and partied at the Palamat Motor Lodge opposite. As American blacks freed themselves from oppression, Sweet Auburn stood ready to reap the benefits.

It never happened. Sweet Auburn is not very sweet today. The Palamat is overgrown with weeds. Auburn's sidewalks line abandoned lots and shuttered buildings. Homeless men (all black) cluster on street corners. Freed from segregation, Auburn became an impoverished ghetto.

Perhaps nothing else so encapsulates the endless paradoxes of being black in America. Never have blacks had so much legal freedom, yet there are record numbers in jail. Traditional black neighbourhoods have collapsed into drug-ridden crime strongholds, even as the black middle class is the biggest in history.

It is now 40 years since the Voting Rights Act that secured the black vote. It is 10 years since hundreds of thousands of blacks came to Washington in the Million Man March to demand a way out of poverty. It is a single month since Hurricane Katrina exposed the racial faultlines that fracture the big cities.

Almost four decades after King was killed, there are still two Americas. One is largely white and wealthy, one largely black and poor. They live cheek by jowl in the same country yet in separate worlds. The shocking thing about the TV pictures from New Orleans was not black poverty, it was the reaction of whites. 'Most whites were shocked about the amount of poverty in New Orleans, but black media have talked about poverty for the past 20 years,' said David Canton, professor of history at Connecticut College.

Bare statistics tell the story. Black life expectancy is six years shorter than that of whites. Black unemployment is twice as high. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to die from disease, accident or murder at every stage of their lives. About 24 per cent of black families live below the poverty line, compared with 8 per cent of the white population.

Yet nothing about race in America is that simple. In the Savoy Bar of Atlanta's Georgian Terrace Hotel, young blacks sip Martinis and flirt, dressed up to the nines. Outside, crowds spill out of the Fox Theatre dressed for an evening out.
They are all black.

'It is great to be black in Atlanta,' said Monique Williams, a pretty 26-year-old legal clerk at the bar. 'This is our city.'

Certainly Atlanta, unofficial capital of the New South, can sum up the best of black America. It has a majority black population, a black mayor and an economy that is home to some of the biggest businesses in the world, including Coca-Cola and CNN. It has wealthy black suburbs, black universities and offers every opportunity for aspiring young blacks. It is a long way from the city of Gone With the Wind, where the only blacks were maids and slaves.

Mayor Shirley Franklin seems to sum up this hopeful city, often hailed as a beacon for black Americans. As Atlanta's first black woman mayor, she has won a national profile after a term aimed at rejuvenating a rundown downtown. She is hard-working, putting in 12-hour days and seven-day weeks, and has ended a series of corruption scandals that plagued previous administrations. She is likely to win re-election next month, backed by black voters and white business.

But Atlanta's politics are defined by race. A new law, backed by Franklin, made begging illegal in the downtown area last month. The move triggered a race row, with some politicians saying the law targeted young black men. When it finally passed, emotions ran so high that police arrested seven people, including a clergyman and a former city councillor.

At every level of US politics race is never far away. King, were he alive, would have rejoiced at the fact that successive Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice, have been black. He would also have been impressed that one of the hottest Democratic tips for the White House, and a possible running mate of Hillary Clinton in 2008, is Barack Obama, who is black.

But those stories have twists. Powell and Rice sprang from solid middle-class backgrounds. They have risen by playing down race. They have also emerged in the
Republican Party, not the traditional home of black support. Moreover, Obama's
blackness does not come from America. It is a legacy of a Kenyan father. He was born in Hawaii and his mother is a white woman from Kansas. In the world of race in America in 2005 nothing is ever as simple as black or white.

Yet the racial line often seems starkly clear. Nowhere more so than in New Haven, Connecticut: home both to Yale University and one of America's poorest black communities. The border is well known and obvious. It is where Elm Street, lined with Oxbridge-style student cloisters, suddenly changes to Dixwell Avenue, main thoroughfare of the black ghetto.

On one side is the world of the elite, where Ivy League students bustle from lecture halls to cafes. On the other side is north-west New Haven, where Dixwell's shops struggle to make ends meet, houses are in decay and drugs and crime are rife. One world is mostly white, the other almost all black.

As he sits on New Haven's famous green, surrounded by the trappings of Yale's wealth, there is no doubt on which side of the divide Nelson Brown falls. Black, poor and homeless, he pushes a shopping cart full of metal cans he picks up to
recycle. The cart is draped with a faded and dirty US flag. 'It's all I can do to survive,' he said of his latest haul of soft drink cast-offs.

New Haven is the reality of America's urban black poor. 'People like the Katrina
victims are living in every American city. We just ignore it,' said Robert Brown, a political scientist at Atlanta's Emory University. It is this world Katrina exposed to a white America that barely knew it existed outside of gangsta rap videos on MTV. This is the world abandoned by America in the post-civil rights era. It is a black underclass that failed to leave the inner city as whites fled to the suburbs, gutting cities of cash and jobs.

But there are other issues at work too. The divide of black and white masks another chasm just as deep: the gulf between poor and rich blacks. In fact, this divide is even more unbalanced than the racial one. The wealth of black America is far more concentrated in its top few per cent than white America.

Poor urban blacks have been abandoned by wealthy black Americans who move into the suburbs and mainstream America as fast as they can. The underclass they leave behind is a grim place and getting worse. In 1940 the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 19 per cent; today it is 70 per cent. Only 30 to 40 per cent of black men graduate from high school. That fact has prompted a bout of soul searching by middle-class blacks. Some have condemned what they see as self-perpetuating joblessness, poor education and a culture that worships crime. Others have appealed for more help, an increase in the affirmative action which has done apparently little to end black poverty.

The argument was crystallised in a spat between the black comedian Bill Cosby and the black author Mike Dyson. Cosby began it with a public excoriation of bad (and single) parenting, slang English, unplanned pregnancies, dropping out of education, and high crime. He even slammed black names 'like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap'. Cosby then went on tour holding town hall-style 'call-outs' in black communities.

It was an argument Dyson had little time for. He dubbed Cosby's roadtrip the 'Blame the Poor Tour' and wrote a book called Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Dyson said poor blacks could not be blamed for a society geared up to see them fail and which had stacked the odds against them before they were born. Many leading blacks have joined the fight against Cosby. 'He unerringly and wrongly blames the poor. He seems to think that if they would only change their minds, all their problems would go away,' said Ronald Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland.

There is one thing both sides agree on: the black experience of America has been unique. Other immigrant groups have followed a familiar pattern of four stages. They arrived poor, suffered prejudice, assimilated, then prospered. So it went for the Irish, Italians, Asians and many others. In fact, Asians are now more successful than white Americans. They are more educated and get better jobs.

But much of black America is stuck at stage two, as it has been for generations. Unless one believes in racist theories, the answer must lie within black America's own historical experience. They were the only ethnic group brought to America involuntarily. For 250 years they were kept as slaves. Until the late 1960s blacks in the South were denied the vote, forced to eat in separate restaurants and segregated from society. Lynchings were still happening in the 1960s as the Beatles played in Liverpool and Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup in London. The exhibits of the Martin Luther King museum on Auburn Avenue are most shocking for showing how recently an apartheid system was the norm in swaths of America. That history lies heavy on black America's back. It is not a burden to be unshouldered in a generation or two.

Certainly that racist past is still alive for Robert Howard, a black civil rights worker in rural Georgia. He remembers vividly the days when white people in and around his home in Walton County could beat - or even kill - black people with little fear from the law. It was a time of segregation and deference, of living in fear when the word 'nigger' came from the lips of white people and not rap artists.

A tall, thin, graceful man, Howard exudes a calm when talking about race relations now versus then. 'Things are better. Of course they are. But you'd be amazed by how much is still to change,' he said.

Howard has worked tirelessly for a memorial to a Walton County lynching from 1946 when four local blacks were butchered by their white neighbours. It has earned him both praise and insult. 'There's some black people here right now who are still scared,' he declared.

But things have changed. Walton, like so many southern counties, used to be cotton country. No longer. The cotton fields have surrendered to strip malls or to forestry. It used to be strictly segregated. No more. That everyday racism is long gone too. Blacks have political power here, as they do now even in the deepest parts of the Deep South. Where segregation still exists, it is largely voluntary and economic, and not a matter of law.

But therein lies the problem. Even as the old racism lies dead, its legacy endures in the American economy. As the black middle class grows and black politicians rise to the pinnacle of power, wealthy America - both black and white - has still not come to grips with the problems of its millions of poor black citizens. 'We are grappling with that. Protest will not win these issues. All the old racist laws have been stricken from the books. Now it's economics,' said Brown.

It is a problem that cannot be ignored for ever.

Martin Luther King's most famous words summed up the optimism of the 1960s' civil rights struggle with: 'I have a dream.'

Now the poet Langston Hughes best describes black America at the start of the 21st century. 'What happens to a dream deferred?' he wrote. 'Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore - And then run?'

Two worlds

In 2005 black unemployment in the US was 10.8 per cent, compared to 4.7 per cent for whites.

More than 70 per cent of whites own their homes. Fewer than 50 per cent of blacks do.

Blacks are twice as likely as whites to die from disease, accident or murder.

Black life expectancy is six years less than white life expectancy.

Blacks are three times as likely as whites to be jailed and their sentences are often six months longer.

Net worth of a black household is 10 times less than a white one.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor: Why Bill Bennett is Stupid, But Not Racist

Why Bill Bennett is Stupid, But Not Racist
By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Berkeley Daily Planet, AlterNet


Many of Mr. Bennett's supporters have made the argument that while Bennett never argued for eliminating African-Americans, his assertion that less blacks would mean less crime was essentially correct. "Some identifiable groups, considered as a group, commit crime at a rate that is higher than the national rate," former federal prosecutor and present columnist Andrew McCarthy wrote in the National Review online. "Blacks are such a group. That is simply a fact. ... The rate being high, it is an unavoidable mathematical reality that if the number of blacks, or of any group whose rate outstripped the national rate, were reduced or eliminated from the national computation, the national rate would go down."

But the truth of that conclusion is dependent on Mr. McCarthy's original premise that "some groups commit crime" at a higher rate, and that "blacks are such a group." That is not a necessarily provable fact. What we do know is that some groups are caught and prosecuted for crime at a higher rate, and that African-Americans are certainly such a group.

But to believe that the actual commission of crime in America would go down with the elimination of African-Americans is to believe, for example, that the drug cartels, seeing the elimination of their black b-boy dealers on America's inner city street corners, would turn in their six-guns to the bartender and start hoeing spuds, as the cattleman Rufus Ryker once facetiously suggested to the gunfighter Shane. More likely, they would simply find other methods of dealership.

But Mr. Bennett's statement was wrong in another sense; wrong in the sense that it should not have been said, because it allows the subject of black genocide as a way to solve America's problems to be raised as a topic of discussion. That Mr. Bennett does not believe in such a practice, or that he said immediately afterwards that such a program of black genocide would be "impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible" is not nearly enough. Some things have no business being said by people considered to be "responsible."

For African-Americans, this is not an issue of being offended; this is an issue of physical survival. In my lifetime, men representing significant and responsible sections of some American communities felt it acceptable to plant bombs in African-American houses of worship, and worse. In another context, African-Americans used to sing a song called "Gone Are The Days." Gone, yes, but not long enough to feel comfortable about that they might not quickly come back.

Thursday's New York Times, for example, reports the social aftermath of a fire set last December by young Ku Klux Klan members that destroyed 10 houses and heavily damaged 16 others, most of which were owned by black families in a largely white Charles County, Maryland, D.C. suburban community.

To these like these young Klansmen, the term "racist" properly applies. But for people like Mr. Bennett? As I said, we need to come up with another term.

To Read the Entire Essay

Jacques Derrida: On Justice

No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (1994).

More from Spectres of Marx:

What is Ideology?

Robert L. Schrag: Living Life in TiVo Time

Living Life in TiVo Time
by Robert L. Schrag
Flow: Online Journal of Television and Media Studies

Then I realized it may have nothing to do with manners, it is all about TiVo, technology, and the fracturing of interpersonal time and space. Think about it. TiVo is not about the digital recording of video. That is only part of it. TiVo commercials tell us that TiVo is all about being able to “pause live TV.” We can be watching something unfolding “in real life,” - a hurricane striking the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana, or the Hurricanes playing hockey - and then a parallel “real life” intrudes. Your spouse needs help, a child cries, the dog scratches at the door, the phone rings, whatever. No problem, you hit a button and the “live event” on the TV screen freezes. You then tend to the more immediate reality. Afterwards you return to the screen, hit a button, and resume the frozen reality.

It is an increasingly common scenario with very uncommon implications. The notion of the “here and now,” that usually seems so solid, just got a bit strange. The question of “Which ‘real life’ do you mean?” is no longer the sole property of philosophers or absurdist playwrights, it has wiggled its way into our living rooms and our classrooms, into the coffee shop and the faculty meeting.

Here is what I think is happening. Reality now flows around us in a variety of different streams. There is the physical reality of my location and the events unfolding in that location, but there are also the parallel realities outside that location that are now in accessible electronically, digitally. My computer, my cell phone, my pda, my Blackberry, my iPod, my Bluetooth prosthesis, all let me select a preferred experience from among those intertwining realities. And TiVo goes one step further, letting me choose which time to designate as “live.”

The power to select from a rack of potential realities makes the designation of “here and now” an idiosyncratic option. I choose my reality on the fly, and utilize the communication protocols appropriate to that choice. The results are not always polite. When varying individual realities share the same physical space there is inevitable friction.

To Read the Entire Essay

Stuzzicamente il blog di Luistar

For more photos check out the intriguing photoblog Stuzzicamente il blog di Luistar

Immanuel Wallerstein: The Mudslide

Commentary No. 171, Oct. 15, 2005
"The Mudslide"

The Bush regime is in the middle of a political mudslide, both nationally and internationally. Two almost simultaneous geological mudslides that occurred this month - one in Guatemala and one in Kashmir - have reminded us of how terrible they are. Once they've started, almost nothing can be done to stop them. We can only pick the dead and the survivors out of the devastation afterwards.

For Bush, the warning signals have been there for a while. The occupation of Iraq has been going steadily worse - more lives lost each month, and a political impasse over the constitution however the vote turns out. Popular support in the United States has been sliding downward. The rising cost of gasoline has been noticed by all households, and the rising level of governmental expenditure has been noticed especially by Republican fiscal conservatives. When the hurricanes struck, the incompetence of the Bush regime was there for all to see. Had everything else been going smoothly, political damage might have been marginal. But everything else has not been going smoothly.

Then came the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Personally, I have no doubt that she is what Bush says she is, someone who shares his own political outlook, and therefore a logical choice for him. But he has stirred up a hornet's nest among his so-called base - the Christian right in the United States. Let us look at why there has been such a negative reaction to her among Bush supporters and why Bush might have nominated her.

The Christian right has always been wary of Bush, never really sure he is one of them. But they have swallowed all their doubts (lately about the Iraq fiasco, the high level of government spending, and the response to the hurricanes) because they wanted one thing out of him above all - the appointment of a Supreme Court justice who would reverse the historic decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade. They had bad memories of both Reagan and Bush father, who appointed justices (Kennedy and Souter) who were not ready to reverse Roe v. Wade. They wanted a guaranteed choice this time. And there exist no doubt a number of prominent jurists available who would have satisfied this demand.

Bush did not choose any of these jurists. Instead he chose his long-time associate and present-day official counsel to fill the post. Why? There are probably several reasons. Bush knew that appointing any of the list that the Christian right wanted would have led to a filibuster in the Senate. And he was not sure, given his decline in the polls, that he would have won the battle. A defeat in the Senate must have seemed more than he could risk. We'll never know if his calculation about this was right.

The second reason may have been that Bush is worrying about a number of cases to come before the Supreme Court in the next three years that are not about abortion but about his own decisions as the president. And he probably wanted to have a sure vote on those issues, which Miers seemed to offer him (more surely perhaps than any of the anti-abortion jurists the Christian right wanted him to nominate). In addition, the other part of his base - the business community - actually likes Miers, who has had long links with them and is seen by them as reliable on the issues that concern them.

The last reason must surely have been that he thought he'd get away with it vis-à-vis the Christian right, since he thought they would "trust" him. But they don't trust him. They might have trusted him even a year ago, but no longer. It's the mudslide. And of course, the fact that they are now launching a major campaign against Miers, hoping to force him to withdraw the nominee, just accelerates the mudslide. The 2006 elections are coming up. And the signs are clear. In the states where the Republicans hoped to oust Democratic senators, their "strongest" candidates are declining to run, clearly afraid they would lose. This nervousness now pervades the Republican members of Congress, and makes it ever more difficult for Bush to get anything he wants. The fact that Sen. McCain could get a 90-9 vote in the U.S. Senate on an anti-torture proposal that is implicitly very critical of the Bush administration, and was actively opposed by Bush, is a measure of how weak Bush's position has become within his own party.

Political mudslides are situations in which, no matter what you do, you lose. Had Bush nominated one of the jurists the Christian right wanted, he would have lost. But avoiding that peril, and nominating Harriet Miers, he lost as well. How much devastation this mudslide will cause in U.S. politics we shall soon see. But of course, it will have consequences as well on the U.S. position in the world political arena. The Iraqi constitutional referendum is another lose-lose situation into which Bush has fallen, and it is too late to pull back. More on that, after we have the exact returns.

by Immanuel Wallerstein

[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.

These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]

Discussing Film and Building an Archive of Resources

If you ever want to discuss film, need a place to post reviews/writings, or looking for a handy archive of resources (suggestions/comments/writings/links appreciated)... my civilized, academic alter-ego has set up a place at:

Bluegrass Film Society

Words Without Borders: Jaguar Tongues

JAGUAR TONGUES
Words Without Borders
Edited by Sylvia Schorris and Earl Schorris

From dreamscape to reportage, from transcendence to outrage, these works from the indigenous languages of the Americas represent WWB's first foray into literary archeology, placing ancient works like “The Opening of the Mexican Cantares” alongside those of contemporary writers working in the old traditions, such as Auldárico Hernández's “Dreamhouse.” While some of the new read as if written centuries ago, Juan Gregorio Regino's Mazateco chant in many parts among them, "Nothing Remains Empty," others are surprisingly modern, like Humberto Ak'abal's surrealist poem "The Moon and The Feather" or Marcos Matías Alonso's devastating description of life in Mexico City "Dreams and Memories of a Common Man."

Our heroic guest editors, Earl Shorris and Sylvia Sasson Shorris, begin their extensive table of contents with essays on language, followed by poems, stories, fables, and two descriptive articles on aspects of ancient culture still in existence, one Náhuatl and the other Maya.

In the tradition of passing on the legends, folklore and wisdom of our elders from one generation to the next, the stories, poems and essays in our October issue have been shared from one language to the next. Many of the pieces written in the indigenous languages represented here, among them Comanche, Purépecha, Yucatecan Maya, Náhuatl and Classical Náhuatl, Zapoteco, Mazateco, Mixteco, Mazahua, Ñahñu, K'iche', and Tztotzil, were originally translated into Spanish and then rendered in English by Earl and Sylvia Sasson Shorris.

October Issue of Words Without Borders

Missing Persons Alert: Harry Where Are You?

Scratchings

Thinking About Radical Democracy, Pt. 3

(Radical in reflective reworking involving going back to the origins of the concept and pushing our supposed democracy to live up to its founding concepts. For my students working on social/collective memory projects--the links are all updated. Suggestions for this list are appreciated and needed--please help me to keep up-to-date and to catch up on newly uncovered/ignored histories.)

U.S. Section of Women's International League for Peace

Orion: Environmental Discourse and Dissent

Green Social Thought

Radical Democracy: A Contested Terrain

Rules for Radicals

The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy

Fast Food Nation and McDonaldization

History of Radicalism in the U.S.

Abolitionist Movement

Civil Rights Movement

Marxist Internet Archive

Eugene Debs, Labor Organizer

Feminist Movement

Marcus Garvey, Black Nationalist Leader

Labor Movement

Abbie Hoffman

Populism

Socialism

Utopian Communities

The Student as Nigger

John Taylor Gatto: Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling

Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution of Everyday Life

Resources for Studying Propaganda

The Memory Hole: Freeing of Information in Action

On the Poverty of Student Life

Language of the War on Terror

Independent Media in a Time of War

Indy Media

Nancy Snow: Rebranding of America

Poet/Performer Saul Williams

Politics of University Teaching in Post 9/11 America

Socialist Equality Party Presidential Candidate Bill Van Auken: "An American Tragedy"

Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Democracy

Chris Hedges: The Meaning of War

Stonewall Riot and Its Aftermath

Wikipedia: Stonewall Riots

Stonewall Riots, 1969

Nickle and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America

Barbara Ehrenreich

Crucial Texts of Radical Democracy

Thomas Frank: Architecture of a New Consensus

Culture-Trafficking for the 21st Century

Terry Tempest Williams: Open Spaces of Democracy

Terry Tempest Williams: Ground Truthing

BBC Documentary: The Power of Nightmares

Paul Kivel: Are You Mentoring For Social Justice

Skidmark Bob, Musical Activist

Stokely Carmichael: Architect of Black Power

George Soros: The Bubble of American Supremacy

Race and Collective Memory Bibliography

Without Sanctuary: America's Dark History of Racialized Violence (caution)

Ron Strickland's Marxist Cultural Theory

Tony Kushner: Radical Pragmatist

Race: The Power of an Illusion

Ubu Web: Freedom as Creativity

Martin Luther King's Radical Message

Michael Moore: White Frights

Remembering Johnny Cash

U.S. Prison Boom

How the Other Half Banks

Hakim Bey: Poetic Terrorism

Situationist International: Resisting the Society of the Spectacle

Bureau of Publis Secrets

Howard Zinn: Our War on Terrorism

The Nation: Our Debt to Bill Moyers

Arundhati Roy: Instant Mix, Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free)

Project Censored Annual Reports of Year's Top Censored News Stories

Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle

Slavoj Zizek: The Passion

Raymond Federman: The Real Begins Where the Spectacle Ends

Emma Goldman: Minorities vs. Majorities

Emma Goldman Archives

Anarchist Archives

Mary Wolstoncraft: Vindication of the Rights of Women

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: The Solitude of Self

National Women's History Project

Gloria Steinem

Angela Davis: Radical Activist/Black Feminist

Combahee River Collective Statement: Genesis of Black Feminism

Feminist Writing Space

bell hooks: writing and resistance

The Beautiful Enigma of Radical Democracy

Women's International League for Peace

Peace Women

Extreme Democracy

American Indian Movement

Alcatraz Is Not an Island: Reclaiming Native Land

Alice Paul

Iron Jawed Angels (Katjia von Garnier) Warner, 2004: 125 minutes.

Alice Paul

We discussed the Seneca Falls 1848 Convention as a landmark event in the women's movement.

Seneca Falls Declaration

I mentioned Ida B. Wells the African American activist in the movie who refuses to get in the back of the parade--for more on this important democratic civil rights activist:

Ida B. Wells

Wikipedia: Ida B. Wells

Think about Ida B. Wells argument in the film and then read this important statement from Black Feminists:

Excerpts from the Combahee River Collective Statement

Other women activists of the time that are not featured in the movie, but are very important to know (they are often ignored because they fought for the rights of workers--something a capitalist society rarely honors). These women were as courageous and passionate as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns (have you heard of them?):

Mother Jones: the Angel of the Mines

Wikipedia: Mother Jones

Emma Goldman

Wikipedia: Emma Goldman

Helen Keller is also mentioned many times during the movie. How many of you knew that Helen Keller was an civil rights activist who was pursued by the FBI?

Helen Keller and the FBI

Helen Keller

I mentioned stereotypes about "feminism" and just wanted to post other opinions on the issue:

North Carolina College Student: Stereotypes About Feminism Are Unfounded and Damaging (also click on the only comment at the end of the essay)

The Guerilla Girls a performative activist group has long been fighting stereotypes of women and for equal representation in the arts (if you have taken an art history class you will understand the disparity between the representation of male and female artists):



University of North Texas website on feminism:

What is Feminism?

Public displays, marches and protests are an effective non-violent method for bringing attention to political issues (that are being ignored by mainstream society):

NOW: History of Marches and Mass Actions

Wikipedia: Social Movements

Wikipedia: Protests

Also check out the imagistic critiques of the conceptual artist Barbara Krueger--who questions how stereotypes and behaviors are reproduced through visual media:

Barbara Krueger



And courtesy of Melissa Purdue, an English Studies and Women Studies instructor at the University of Kentucky, an outline of the three waves of feminism (I added the links):

First Wave Feminism-

This term refers to the first concerted movement working for the reform of women's social and legal inequalities in the nineteenth century. Although individual feminist such as Mary Wollstonecraft had already argued against the injustices suffered by women, it was not until the 1850's that something like an organized feminist movement evolved in Britain. Its headquarters was at Langham Place in London, where a group of middle-class women, led by Barbara Bodichon (1827-91) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925), met to discuss topical issues and publish the English Woman's Journal (1858-64).

The key concerns of First Wave Feminists were education, employment, the marriage laws, and the plight of intelligent middle-class single women. They were not primarily concerned with the problems of working-class women, nor did they necessarily see themselves as feminists in the modern sense (the term was not coined until 1895). First Wave Feminists largely responded to specific injustices they had themselves experienced.

Their major achievements were the opening of higher education for women; reform of the girls' secondary-school system, including participation in formal national examinations: the widening of access to the professions, especially medicine; married women's property rights, recognized in the Married Women's Property Act of 1870; and some improvement in divorced and separated women's child custody rights.

Second Wave Feminism-

The term 'Second Wave' was coined by Marsha Lear, and refers to the increase in feminist activity which occurred in America, Britain, and Europe from the late sixties onwards. In America, second wave feminism rose out of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in which women, disillusioned with their second-class status even in the activist environment of student politics, began to band together to contend against discrimination. The second wave was concerned with reproductive rights and the fight against sexual and domestic violence.

The tactics employed by Second Wave Feminists varied from highly-published activism, such as the protest against the Miss America beauty contest in 1968, to the establishment of small consciousness-raising groups. However, it was obvious early on that the movement was not a unified one, with differences emerging between black feminism, lesbian feminism, liberal feminism, and social feminism.

Second Wave Feminism in Britain was similarly multiple in focus, although it was based more strongly in working-class socialism, as demonstrated by the strike of women workers at the Ford car plant for equal pay in 1968. The slogan 'the personal is political' sums up the way in which Second Wave Feminism did not just strive to extend the range of social opportunities open to women, but also, through intervention within the spheres of reproduction, sexuality and cultural representation, to change their domestic and private lives. Second Wave Feminism did not just make an impact upon western societies, but has also continued to inspire the struggle for women's rights across the world.

Third Wave Feminism -

Loosely defined movement starting around late 1990’s with texts like Manifesta, Listen Up, To Be Real, and Body Outlaws. Third Wave Feminism, the movement of feminism beyond the sexual revolution of the 1960's, is focused on young women and men perpetuating and improving upon those rights gained in the past. It is hard to define because the Third Wave is characterized by individualism and a lack of desire to conform to a definition. Third Wavers have never lived in a world without the women's movement.

The front page of the Third Wave Foundation web site explains that the organization strives to combat inequalities that [women] face as a result of [their] age, gender, race, sexual orientation, economic status or level of education. By empowering young women, Third Wave is building a lasting foundation for social activism around the country.

Wikipedia: Feminism

Wikipedia: Suffrage Movement

Wikipedia: Alice Paul

Wikipedia: Lucy Burns