Andy Worthington: The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison

Alleged 9/11 Mastermind and 4 Other Gitmo Prisoners to Stand Trial in NY Federal Court
Democracy Now



Attorney General Eric Holder ... announce[d] today that five men accused of plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks, including alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be tried in a criminal court in New York instead of a military commission. The move marks one of the first major steps by the Obama administration to close the prison at Guantanamo. To assess the future of Guantanamo Bay and the more than 200 men still in detention there, we speak with British journalist and historian Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

Andy Worthington, British journalist and historian. He is the author of the book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. He’s just directed a documentary film with Polly Nash called Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.

To Read/Listen/Watch

Dana Berliner and Michael Cristofaro: Eminent Domain Outrage in Connecticut -- Pharmaceutical Giant Pfizer to Leave New London

Original Dialogic post on this four years ago: Eminent Domain in Action, Pt 5


Eminent Domain Outrage in Connecticut: Pharmaceutical Giant Pfizer to Leave New London, Site of Major Housing Battle
Democracy Now

Homeowners in New London, Connecticut took on the city’s leaders after they announced plans to condemn all of the homes in one neighborhood to make way for a private development project for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. The city said it would bring in thousands of jobs. After a 2005 Supreme Court ruling against the homeowners, the entire neighborhood was bulldozed. This week Pfizer announced it is shutting down its research center.

Guests:

Dana Berliner, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. She represented the homeowners in Kelo v. New London, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that cities could condemn property because other uses may produce an increase in tax dollars and jobs.

Michael Cristofaro, resident of New London, Connecticut, who lost his home in 2006 to eminent domain.

To Watch/Listen/Read

Why Will Won't Pledge--A Boy and His Flag

Why Will Won't Pledge: A Boy and His Flag
Arkansas Times

Will Phillips isn't like other boys his age.

For one thing, he's smart. Scary smart. A student in the West Fork School District in Washington County, he skipped a grade this year, going directly from the third to the fifth. When his family goes for a drive, discussions are much more apt to be about Teddy Roosevelt and terraforming Mars than they are about Spongebob Squarepants and what's playing on Radio Disney.

It was during one of those drives that the discussion turned to the pledge of allegiance and what it means. Laura Phillips is Will's mother. “Yes, my son is 10,” she said. “But he's probably more aware of the meaning of the pledge than a lot of adults. He's not just doing it rote recitation. We raised him to be aware of what's right, what's wrong, and what's fair.”

Will's family has a number of gay friends. In recent years, Laura Phillips said, they've been trying to be a straight ally to the gay community, going to the pride parades and standing up for the rights of their gay and lesbian neighbors. They've been especially dismayed by the effort to take away the rights of homosexuals – the right to marry, and the right to adopt. Given that, Will immediately saw a problem with the pledge of allegiance.

“I've always tried to analyze things because I want to be lawyer,” Will said. “I really don't feel that there's currently liberty and justice for all.”

After asking his parents whether it was against the law not to stand for the pledge, Will decided to do something. On Monday, Oct. 5, when the other kids in his class stood up to recite the pledge of allegiance, he remained sitting down. The class had a substitute teacher that week, a retired educator from the district, who knew Will's mother and grandmother. Though the substitute tried to make him stand up, he respectfully refused. He did it again the next day, and the next day. Each day, the substitute got a little more cross with him. On Thursday, it finally came to a head. The teacher, Will said, told him that she knew his mother and grandmother, and they would want him to stand and say the pledge.

“She got a lot more angry and raised her voice and brought my mom and my grandma up,” Will said. “I was fuming and was too furious to really pay attention to what she was saying. After a few minutes, I said, ‘With all due respect, ma'am, you can go jump off a bridge.' ”

Will was sent to the office, where he was given an assignment to look up information about the flag and what it represents. Meanwhile, the principal called his mother.

“She said we have to talk about Will, because he told a sub to jump off a bridge,” Laura Phillips said. “My first response was: Why? He's not just going to say this because he doesn't want to do his math work.”

Eventually, Phillips said, the principal told her that the altercation was over Will's refusal to stand for the pledge of allegiance, and admitted that it was Will's right not to stand. Given that, Laura Phillips asked the principal when they could expect an apology from the teacher. “She said, ‘Well I don't think that's necessary at this point,' ” Phillips said.

After Phillips put a post on the instant-blogging site twitter.com about the incident, several of her friends got angry and alerted the news media. Meanwhile, Will Phillips still refuses to stand during the pledge of allegiance. Though many of his friends at school have told him they support his decision, those who don't have been unkind, and louder.

“They [the kids who don't support him] are much more crazy, and out of control and vocal about it than supporters are.”

Given that his protest is over the rights of gays and lesbians, the taunts have taken a predictable bent. “In the lunchroom and in the hallway, they've been making comments and doing pranks, and calling me gay,” he said. “It's always the same people, walking up and calling me a gaywad.”

Even so, Will said that he can't foresee anything in the near future that will make him stand for the pledge. To help him deal with the peer pressure, his parents have printed off posts in his support on blogs and websites. “We've told him that people here might not support you, but we've shown him there are people all over that support you,” Phillips said. “It's really frustrating to him that people are being so immature.”

To Read the Rest of the Article

Maryna Reshetnyak: Drop-in Center -- Ukrainian Experience in Harm Reduction

(Great program! Too bad we insist on stigmatizing, persecuting and locking them up here in the good ol' democratic US of A.)

Drop-in Center: Major Russian Paper Wrote about Ukrainian Experience in Harm Reduction
by Maryna Reshetnyak
Rising Voices

...

10 AM. There is a short line next to entrance of the pharmacology clinic called “Sociotherapy”. I see a poster on the wall in Ukrainian: “Not all people are alcoholics or drug addicts, but all alcoholics and drug addicts are people”. This is “the site” – a place where patients of substitution therapy receive pills of Methadone and Buprenorphine.

There are no very young people in line. Most of them are in their 30's, but there are a few of 40's and older. Each person has a story. There is a person with crutch, a mother holding a small child …

I am entering the site together with Pavel Kutsev. He is a journalist. He is 48 and he is an opiate addict. He and his wife Yanina, the editor-in chief for a newsletter for drug addicts “Motylek” has been in the program for a year and a half.

“Sometimes I hear that substitution therapy is a legalization of drugs” says Pavel. “No, it is the legalization of drug addicts. Addiction is a snowball of problems. Starting substitution therapy you start dealing with them. Later on you can start thinking about givin drugs up completely.”

“What are the most common associations that people have about drugs?” asked Pavel “Everybody would say: death, crime, children without parents, infections, asocial lifestyle. Now let's take a person taking substitute medications. He will not die because of drug overdose. He does not participate in criminal activity. He re-establishes relations with the family. He is able to treat HIV, TB and hepatitis. Moreover, he stops taking drugs intravenously, thus reduces risks of spreading infection. Substitution therapy reduces the most dangerous consequence of the drug addiction.”

A nurse is greeting us. She has to assess the health of the patient, provide the medication, and make sure the patient has taken it (sometimes she crushes the pill with a glass) and make proper records. The nurse is taking three pills from a bottle and, with a piece of folded paper, put them directly to Pavel’s mouth. He is swallowing them up with a bit of water and showing his tongue to the nurse. There is nothing in the mouth. The nurse is nodding and the next person enters the site.

To Read the Rest of the Report

Greg Gordon: How Goldman Sachs Sold Off Billions in Mortgage Securities After Anticipating Housing Collapse

Low Road to High Finance: McClatchy Expose Reveals How Goldman Sachs Sold Off Billions in Mortgage Securities After Anticipating Housing Collapse
Guest: Greg Gordon
Host: Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez
Democracy Now

A five-month investigation by McClatchy Newspapers has revealed that Goldman Sachs made secret bets against the housing market while simultaneously selling off billions in soon-to-be worthless securities. In 2006 and 2007, the bank reportedly peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in US housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Greg Gordon, Investigative journalist with McClatchy Newspapers. He just published a multi-part investigation of Goldman Sachs and how it secretly bet against the housing market.

To Read/Listen/Watch

More:

Greg Gordon: How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash

Solidarity with UIUC Grad Employees -- IFT/AFT Local 6300

UIUC Grad Employees IFT/AFT Local 6300

Dialogic supports the University of Illinois Graduate Student Union's overwhelming vote to strike

Over the course of a three day vote, an overwhelming 92% of participating GEO members chose to authorize a strike against the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. With the vote, GEO members have given the strike committee of the GEO a clear mandate to call a strike at any time. The Graduate Employee’s Organization, American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6300, AFL-CIO, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a labor union representing all teaching and graduate assistants (TAs and GAs) on the UIUC campus. With over 2600 GEO members, and over 2600 graduate employees represented in the bargaining unit, the GEO is one of the largest higher education union locals in the United States.

The GEO has been negotiating with UIUC administrators for over six months. The GEO seeks a contract that will set the minimum salary for a 50% nine month appointment at the University’s estimate of a living wage for a graduate student in Urbana-Champaign and protect tuition waivers for TAs and GAs. While the GEO presented the administration with a full contract proposal on the first day of negotiations, the UIUC administration declined to offer a counterproposal until August 11th, just four days before the GEO’s previous contract expired. The UIUC administration’s initial contract proposal sought to freeze GEO wages for three years, reserve the right to furlough and layoff graduate employees in good standing, and to count “in-kind” compensation such as housing or meal vouchers toward the minimum salary mandated in the contract.

The GEO understands that the state of Illinois is in dire economic straits, but as University administrators pointed out in their FY 2010 budget request, this is the result of long standing deficiencies in state level budget prioritization and not a sudden result of the recent national recession. Instead of championing the university’s historic land grant mission, UIUC administrators have embraced the national tendency toward the corporatization of the public higher education system. Their consequent failure to secure adequate state funding leaves the social science, humanities, and fine arts especially vulnerable. Worse, it jeopardizes access to higher education for many who have the capacity and desire, but not the financial resources to attend the University. If increased state funding is also necessary to providing at least a living wage for all campus employees, then the GEO expects the UIUC administration to forcefully make that case to the Higher Education Appropriations Committee, other state legislators, and the Governor.

Instead of advocating on the behalf of students and workers, administrators were granting costly favors to state politicians. The former Chancellor diverted $450,000 of discretionary funds to provide jobs and scholarships for politically well-connected but undeserving applicants. Another $400,000 went to the attorneys who represented the University before the Governor’s investigative committee, and another $550,000 to new faculty appointments for the former President and Chancellor. In this context, the GEO finds it hard to trust the UIUC administration when it argues that there is not enough money to provide a living wage. From the GEO’s perspective, it appears that budget priorities are simply out of place. When campus revenues rose by 7% in FY 2009, only 0.8% ($2.7 million) went to undergraduate instruction. Meanwhile, the Chief Information Officer’s budget rose by 10.9 percent ($1.6 million), and the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics budget increased 6.2 percent ($4.1 million).

GEO bargaining unit members teach 23.1% of all undergraduate course hours at UIUC, and perform comparably to faculty in official student evaluations of instructor performance as measured by the University of Illinois’ Center for Teaching Excellence. Yet our salaries draw only 6.5% of state funding, including salaries for GAs and Research Assistants, who don’t teach. By contrast, faculty salaries draw over 55% of the University budget. Graduate employee labor is vital to the fiscally efficient provision of the University’s core service, academic instruction. Should graduate employee salaries be set to a living wage, the University would still have a large pool of inexpensive and high quality instructional and administrative labor.

GEO members have been working hard to avoid a strike. Hundreds of GEO members have participated in three major rallies, and GEO members have also lobbied the Illinois House of Representatives Higher Education Appropriations Committee, spoken with state legislators from Champaign, actively informed campus community members about the issues, and maintained a constant presence in Urbana-Champaign print, radio and television media. The Illinois Student Senate has passed two resolutions in support of the GEO and the decision to authorize a strike, and GEO supporters in the faculty senate are working to pass a similar resolution. GEO members and allies will hold a rally at the University of Illinois Board of Trustees Meeting in Springfield, IL on November 12.

As with any labor negotiation, however, the most effective pressure has been the threat of a strike. Only after GEO members at a General Membership Meeting voted unanimously to file an “intent to strike” notice did the University administration offer their first compromise proposals. Accordingly, the Coordinating Committee and Steward’s Council of the GEO voted unanimously to hold a strike authorization vote from November 4-6. By voting to authorize a strike, GEO members have taken a vital step in holding the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign administration accountable to its stated commitment to excellence in research and undergraduate education.

For more information

More:

Michael Verderame Address to the Board of Trustees

Veteran's Day

Veteran's Day--To those that hurt--I'm sorry because as a citizen of this country we do not give you the healthcare you need...To those that hurt someone that should not have been hurt--I'm sorry I didn't do more to stop these wars... To those that hurt--American, Iraqi, Afghanistan, [anywhere where we have our 400+ ba...ses]--I remembered you yesterday... and I remember you today and I will think about you tomorrow.

Veterans to Obama: Do Not Escalate the War in Afghanistan

Brave New Films



Rethink Afghanistan (New Documentary)

David Bakan: On Concealing Knowledge in the Interest of the Public

Bakan, David. “Power, method, and ethics: a reflection on Bateson’s view of moral and national character.” The Individual, Communication, and Society. Ed. Robert W. Rieber. NY: Cambridge UP, 1989: 31-47.

We consider the possibility that the very power inherent in a mode of thought might be a determining factor in connection with the academic neglect of that mode of thought. We consider how the urge to conceal knowledge is benign. Thus, the argument can be made that librarians should censor books on explosives that might be useful to terrorists. However, we have always to ask whether terrorists do not already have that information; and whether the public interest demands a widespread knowledge about explosives in order that the public may be in a proper position to defend itself against terrorists. We soon conclude that every argument in favor of concealing knowledge is unacceptable. The only reasonable, reliable, and enduring protection against dangerous knowledge is the widest dissemination of knowledge. (35)

CBS: NC Middle School Sells Test Points To Students For $20 As Novel Fundraiser

NC School Sells Test Points For $20 To Raise Money
Cash For Grades: NC Middle School Sells Test Points To Students For $20 As Novel Fundraiser

Kirk Boyle: Children of Men and I Am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood

Children of Men and I Am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood
by Kirk Boyle
Jump Cut





...

In addition to indulging the fantasies of late capitalist consumers, Legend targets its audience with “anamorphic advertising.” Lawrence replaces Cuarón’s background commentary on forced migrations and terrorism — newspaper clips that read, “Refugees Blamed for Increase in Terror Attacks” and “Immigrants Protest Against Government New Racist Policies” — with identifiable storefronts, billboards, and products. The “hyper-commercialization” of Hollywood is not a new phenomenon. Product placements, tie-ins, merchandising, and cross-promotions have proliferated in the age of media conglomeration to the point where younger generations no longer experience them as baleful, let alone disruptive. That the Shelby Mustang is clearly the choice of the post-apocalyptic sportsman — along with the Ford Explorer and Escape Hybrid — will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with this latest version of the culture industry.

Nonetheless, Children makes Legend’s participation in these dubious marketing trends look egregious. Brandchannel.com lists thirty-two corporate brands that appear in Legend (on average, a new one every three minutes) while Children features “almost zero brands” (Sauer 2007: unpaginated).[17] Beyond the quantity of ads lies an issue of quality. Where Children harnesses the political potentials of anamorphosis — especially in scenes where anamorphic advertisements of invented products ironize the consumerism of late capitalism — Legend exploits the same artful techniques to peddle products and promote corporate brand recognition.[18] Most disturbing of all, Lawrence uses anamorphosis to naturalize the corporate structure of neoliberal capitalism. Signs of multinational corporations litter the backgrounds of Legend. A mega-disaster has destroyed the signs’ referents within the film's diegesis, but their spectral presence sends the subliminal message to an early twenty-first century audience that corporate capitalism is all but indestructible. The first few minutes of Legend where Neville’s Shelby zips past strategically placed advertisements for XM Satellite Radio, Staples, and Hyatt, assure us that the world is more likely to end before capitalism does.

One final indication that Legend cuts ties with reality in order to enact a consumerist fantasy stems from what Popular Mechanics calls the “junk science” of the film. Popular Mechanics’ assistant editor Erin McCarthy consulted

“experts in the fields of structural engineering, virology, and wildlife to determine what could happen — and what certainly won’t happen” regarding Legend’s portrait of the future (McCarthy 2007: 1).

Pointing out the scientific inconsistencies of a film does not meet the criteria most moviegoers take to the theater, nor will it prove to be an ideological indicator in many cases. But as with Legend’s prevalent product placements, its “junk science” is symptomatic of a larger ideological problem. New York City would be in worse condition due to water and fire damage, and Neville would run into problems with powering his home that the film glosses over. Disbelief could be suspended if these vital infrastructural issues had not been ignored precisely because Neville exists in the fantasy space of a consumer and not a producer. In one representative scene, he harvests ears of corn in Central Park. That the corn is ripe is no accident. Legend cannot represent how the things Neville consumes were produced because labor does not exist in the consumerist fantasyland of the Last Men. Everything Neville needs or wants is simply there for the picking.

Legend creates a capitalist utopia by immersing its protagonist in a world that defies the laws of physics, a playground of consumer goods that hides the labor power of its construction and sustenance (and the problems that would inevitably plague its sole survivor). The film’s “anamorphic advertising” weaves its consuming public into this fantasy world to naturalize neoliberalism as if to say, “the world as we know it will never end, and we will always feel fine.”

Where Legend celebrates the Last Men and their late capitalist utopia, Children critiques their narcissism, cynicism, and classism (as soon will become apparent), by depicting their world — our world — as dystopian. With the dreamworld of wealth comes the catastrophe of crimes against humanity in the guise of free markets, illegal immigration, homeland security, and the War on Terror — all of the specious policies which Cuarón catalogues in his backdrops, the very same policies that Naomi Klein argues bankroll the well-orchestrated “disaster-capitalism complex.”

I Am Conservative-Corporatist

In The Shock Doctrine, Klein claims that the neoliberal era ushered in a “capitalist Reformation” that doubled as a counterrevolution to Keynesianism and Third World developmentalism (Klein 2007b: 53). Like Harvey, she views neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices that seek to restore class power through deregulation, privatization, and cuts to social spending, a free-market trinity bent on redistributing wealth as much as generating it. Put into practice, neoliberalization morphs into corporatism, a vast collusion between Big Government and Big Business to transfer public wealth to private hands while an ever-widening chasm opens up between “the dazzling rich and the disposable poor” (Klein 2007b: 15). The recent $700 billion financial bailout of banks by the U.S. government provides a clear example of this collusion.

Klein charts how the rise of corporatism spawned a disaster-capitalism complex that at once extends and supersedes the military-industrial (and congressional) complex President Eisenhower diagnosed in his 1961 farewell address. With the emergence of the disaster-capitalism complex, the latent “creative destruction” that fueled the engines of capital since its inception surges to the surface to become the recognized modus operandi of the economy. Today, crisis opportunism entwines superprofits with megadisasters to the point where

“all conflict- and disaster-related functions (waging war, securing borders, spying on citizens, rebuilding cities, treating traumatized soldiers) can be performed by corporations at a profit” (Klein 2007c: 50).

Although “disaster capitalism” has been part of neoliberal policy for over three decades, it did not develop into a full-scale complex until after 9/11 with the War on Terror. As Klein writes,

“Although the state goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex — a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad” (Klein 2007b: 299).

Under the auspice of fighting terrorism, the disaster-capitalism complex insidiously developed into a fully articulated state-within-a-state, a corporate shadow-state, that carries out the normal functions of a nation-state but at a heftier price.

To Read the Entire Essay



Naomi Klein: Shock Doctrine (Videos on YouTube)

Pascale Bourgaux: Rape in the Ranks: The Enemy Within

“Rape in the Ranks: The Enemy Within”
Host: Amy Goodman
Democracy Now

As with suicides, the rate of sexual assaults within the US military now exceeds that of the general population. A Pentagon report earlier this year found one in three female service members are sexually assaulted at least once during their enlistment. Sixty-three percent of nearly 3,000 cases reported last year were rapes or aggravated assaults. Rape in the Ranks: The Enemy Within is a documentary that focuses on the cases of three female service members victimized by rape and other forms of sexual assault. We air excerpts of the film and speak to filmmaker Pascale Bourgaux.

To Watch/Listen/Read

Gregg and Jannett Keesling, Parents of Soldier Who Killed Himself in Iraq Speak Out About President Obama's Refusal To Send a Letter of Condolence

Parents of Soldier Who Killed Himself in Iraq Speak Out
Host: Amy Goodman
Democracy Now

Gregg and Jannett Keesling are the parents of Chancellor Keesling, a US soldier who took his own life on June 19th of this year. Chancellor was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. During his first deployment, he suffered mental health issues so severe he was placed on suicide watch. After getting back to the United States, Chancellor had turned down a bonus offer to return to Iraq in the hopes he wouldn’t be redeployed. But he was called back in May. One month later, he took his own life. Since Chancellor’s death, Gregg and Jannett Keesling have yet to receive a letter of condolence from President Obama. After making inquiries, they discovered that this was not because of an oversight. Instead, it’s because of a longstanding US policy to deny presidential condolence letters to the families of soldiers who take their own lives.

To Watch/Listen/Read

Ted Striphas: The Late Age of Print - Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia UP, 2009)

In the midst of hysterical rants about the end of print culture it was a pleasure to read Striphas' book. Essential sections include the strange history of ISBNs and their transformation (especially as "control" devices), the development and effect of big-box bookstores, the Oprah-effect on book sales, the global Harry Potter lawsuits, and corporate attempts at controlling culture.



Late Age of Print--The Video

Mythmakers and Lawbreakers (AK Press: ed. Margaret Killjoy, 2009)

Received this in my AK Press friend subscription this month and immediately devoured it. It is a collection of interviews and an annotated bibliography of anarchist fiction writers. A valuable resource that will help me extend my imaginative derives and has even inspired me to start writing fiction again.



Mythmakers and Lawbreakers (AK Press)

Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters

What Matters
Walter Benn Michaels
London Review of Books

...

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.

The recent furore over the arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ of Henry Louis Gates helps make this clear. Gates, as one of his Harvard colleagues said, is ‘a famous, wealthy and important black man’, a point Gates himself tried to make to the arresting officer – the way he put it was: ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.’ But, despite the helpful hint, the cop failed to recognise an essential truth about neoliberal America: it’s no longer enough to kowtow to rich white people; now you have to kowtow to rich black people too. The problem, as a sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it, is that ‘Gates’s race snuffed out his class status,’ or as Gates said to the New York Times, ‘I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere.’ In the bad old days this situation almost never came up – cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of colour, the way they traditionally treated poor white people. But now that we’ve made some real progress towards integrating our elites, you need to step back and take the time to figure out ‘who you’re messing with’. You need to make sure that nobody’s class status is snuffed out by his race.

In the wake of Gates’s arrest, among the hundreds of people protesting the injustice of racial profiling, a white cardiologist married to a black man put the point best when she lamented that even in the ‘diverse area’ where she lives (Hyde Park, Obama’s old neighbourhood) she’ll hear people nervously say, ‘Look at those black guys coming towards us,’ to which she replies: ‘Yes, but they’re wearing lacrosse shorts and Calvin Klein jeans. They’re probably the kids of the professor down the street.’ ‘You have to be able to discern differences between people,’ she went on to say. ‘It’s very frustrating.’ The differences she means, of course, are between rich kids and poor kids, and the frustration she feels is with people who don’t understand that class is supposed to trump race. But while it’s easy to sympathise with that frustration – rich black kids are infinitely less likely to mug you than poor black kids or, for that matter, poor white kids – it’s a lot harder to see it as the expression of a progressive politics.

Nevertheless, that seems to be the way we do see it. The neoliberal ideal is a world where rich people of all races and sexes can happily enjoy their wealth, and where the injustices produced not by discrimination but by exploitation – there are fewer poor people (7 per cent) than black people (9 per cent) at Harvard, and Harvard’s not the worst – are discreetly sent around to the back door. Thus everyone’s outraged that a black professor living on prosperous Ware St (and renting a summer vacation ‘manse’ on Martha’s Vineyard that he ‘jokingly’ calls ‘Tara’) can be treated with disrespect; no one’s all that outraged by the social system that created the gap between Ware St or ‘Tara’ and the places where most Americans live. Everyone’s outraged by the fact that Gates can be treated so badly; nobody by the fact that he and the rest of the top 10 per cent of American wage-earners have been doing so well. Actually, it’s just the opposite. Liberals – especially white liberals – are thrilled by Gates’s success, since it testifies to the legitimacy of their own: racism didn’t make us all this money, we earned it!

To Read the Entire Essay

More:

New Left Review: Walter Benn Michaels - Against Diversity

Behind the News with Doug Henwood: Susan Marks, author of Aqua Shock, on the water crises; Walter Benn Michaels, on neoliberalism’s use of “diversity”

Behind the News with Doug Henwood

Susan Marks, author of Aqua Shock, on the water crises



Walter Benn Michaels, on neoliberalism’s use of “diversity”



To Listen to the Episode

Democracy Now: After 20 Years of Filmmaking on US Injustices, Michael Moore Goes to the Source in Capitalism: A Love Story

After 20 Years of Filmmaking on US Injustices, Michael Moore Goes to the Source in Capitalism: A Love Story
Democracy Now



Beginning with the 1989 classic Roger & Me, the Academy Award-winning director Michael Moore says his films “come back to this central core concern, which is the economic system we have is unfair, it’s unjust, it’s not democratic.” With his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore tackles the financial system and the interchanging circles of Washington politicians and corporate managers that run it. Moore says, “I thought I’d just cut to the chase and propose that we deal with this economic system and try to restructure it in a way that benefits people and not the richest one percent.”

To Watch/Listen/Read

Stephen Lemons: The Anarchists Own the NAZIs

(Courtesy of Patrick Biggers)



Phoenix New Times: The Anarchists Own the NAZIs

George Lakoff: Politics of Language

George Lakoff -- Politics of Language
Fora TV

George Lakoff makes plain how the words used by politicians translate to the public's support for various political issues. Language matters - especially when it comes to politics.

A founder of the field of cognitive science, Lakoff takes an in-depth look at the ways in which our brains understand politics, breaking down the politics of language.

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