...and a happy new year to Michael Crichton (and all his stupid fans)
EnergyBulletin.net :: Methane Burps: Ticking Time Bomb: "There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and 'burp' into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren't talking about.
An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists? Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at least twice before.
The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years. "
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Merry Christmas, Rich People!
Holiday Haul Goes to High-End Retailers (washingtonpost.com)
Pay is rising more than twice as fast for the top fifth of wage earners as it is for all others, and the pace of gains at the high end is quickening, according to economists' analyses of government income data through September.
Meanwhile, the top 20 percent of households, ranked by income from all sources and earning $127,000 or more as of 2003, accounts for more than 40 percent of all consumer spending, according to Labor Department figures.
Holiday Haul Goes to High-End Retailers (washingtonpost.com)
Pay is rising more than twice as fast for the top fifth of wage earners as it is for all others, and the pace of gains at the high end is quickening, according to economists' analyses of government income data through September.
Meanwhile, the top 20 percent of households, ranked by income from all sources and earning $127,000 or more as of 2003, accounts for more than 40 percent of all consumer spending, according to Labor Department figures.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Fox News Partners With Clear Channel
Great now the biggest radio network in the country is going to get its news from the most ideologically right-wing news service in the country. Certainly nothing will come of this.
In other media news, most of the complaints (99.8%) about CBS indencency that Michael Powell cited as evidence of the public outrage over seeing a nipple, came from one activist group. I am not sure how unique this is, but it certainly points to there being a less substantial public outcry in the broad sense than was previously indicated.
Great now the biggest radio network in the country is going to get its news from the most ideologically right-wing news service in the country. Certainly nothing will come of this.
In other media news, most of the complaints (99.8%) about CBS indencency that Michael Powell cited as evidence of the public outrage over seeing a nipple, came from one activist group. I am not sure how unique this is, but it certainly points to there being a less substantial public outcry in the broad sense than was previously indicated.
Saturday, December 04, 2004
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas
Lessig has a difficult task. He has to present an argument that most market fundamentalists will find sacreligous, but strongly position himself as pro-market. I am not sure how much of his self-confessed "virulently-pro market" attitude is effected for the sake of this particular audience, or if he is being strategic to keep them from dumping him into the "end of history" pile that lay underneath their pulpits.
Either way, intentionally or not, he is basically asking for us to allow a sliver of socialism to persist--one in which there is a certain anarchy (qua freedom) allowed to continue in the realm of the internet and other new technological innovations. He has compelling arguments for why this is necessary and avoids the kind of history that people like Mattelart or McChesney have written where they recognize the way that every technology of communication--regardless of how communally developed it was--eventually became colonized, enclosed by one economic and political interest group at the expense of others. But what he does focus on is the history of the communal development of the internet, foretelling the coming enclosure of these commons and its subsequent dessication and commodification. He is basicially sounding a warning bell.
Overlooks other types of value creation--that all value is, for the most part a social creation. much of history of capitalism has placed the holder of values at the top of the totem pole, overlooks risks taken by others in the production process
More here on the way that value is changing--as the production has become globalized and the only power north holds is over the intellectual property, this becomes the central stake in the struggle--much harder to keep enclosed.
He is right that this will be a central stake in the struggle of the next century and he is basically asking the market fundamentalists to resist making it so while at the same time subtly encouraging the rest of us to resist this commodification (maybe, though I'm not done. I assume he will have some sort of call to action.)
Lessig has a difficult task. He has to present an argument that most market fundamentalists will find sacreligous, but strongly position himself as pro-market. I am not sure how much of his self-confessed "virulently-pro market" attitude is effected for the sake of this particular audience, or if he is being strategic to keep them from dumping him into the "end of history" pile that lay underneath their pulpits.
Either way, intentionally or not, he is basically asking for us to allow a sliver of socialism to persist--one in which there is a certain anarchy (qua freedom) allowed to continue in the realm of the internet and other new technological innovations. He has compelling arguments for why this is necessary and avoids the kind of history that people like Mattelart or McChesney have written where they recognize the way that every technology of communication--regardless of how communally developed it was--eventually became colonized, enclosed by one economic and political interest group at the expense of others. But what he does focus on is the history of the communal development of the internet, foretelling the coming enclosure of these commons and its subsequent dessication and commodification. He is basicially sounding a warning bell.
Overlooks other types of value creation--that all value is, for the most part a social creation. much of history of capitalism has placed the holder of values at the top of the totem pole, overlooks risks taken by others in the production process
More here on the way that value is changing--as the production has become globalized and the only power north holds is over the intellectual property, this becomes the central stake in the struggle--much harder to keep enclosed.
He is right that this will be a central stake in the struggle of the next century and he is basically asking the market fundamentalists to resist making it so while at the same time subtly encouraging the rest of us to resist this commodification (maybe, though I'm not done. I assume he will have some sort of call to action.)
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
http://www.unit731media.com/
http://www.terroristmedia.com/nukem/index.php
Two sites I have happened upon to this evening. I must say that I am more distubed by these images on these sites than I have been in a long while. Stayed up way too late looking at them, feeling such great sadness and fear. The beheading videos are particularly troubling and make me wonder just how anything will ever get any better. Once a cause becomes so ingrained in someone that they are willing to do this to someone else it is doubtful that any amount of empirical change will lead them to change their mind. I still don't think that war is the answer. I don't think this is because I have some pacifist tendency ingrained in me. it just seems like a stupid strategy, on par with targeted beheadings in its potential to incite rage. They both stem from the same desire to make power visible.
On the other hand, seeing something like this, a beheading, that is done in someone's basement instead of in the halls of state, with the legitimacy of state power around it, it is horifying. It is like something that could happen a few feet away. The ceremony that it performed beforehand means nothing to me; but it is the attempt to give it this kind of legitimacy that only state ceremony can. But it isn't a state ceremony: herein lies my newly reborn ambivalence, which sits alongside what might be a basically pragmatic pacifism.
If a state were to do this, if an American citizen were brazenly executed on television with the sanction of a state, I would feel little compunction to say that the United States should not retaliate with some sort of force, probably militarily. This, of course, is not a natural response--either the one that the US would take or my internal response to their response--but it is one for which the history of my culture has prepared me. That innocent civilians would probably be killed in this retaliation would be ethically and morally repugnant, but in some strange way justified because they can be named as political subjects of the offending regime. Here, again, I am sort of thinking through the dominant logic which I had lived through for most of my life: it's a hard habit to break. Furthermore in this equation, it obviously doesn't matter if the people who are assumed to be legitimate extensions of the state had any hand in placing that state in control, i.e. it doesn't matter if it is a democracy, which, in this scenario, it most likely would not be. State officials worried about re-election don't often provoke wars by publically assassinating the citizens of other countries (though I guess we have special privileges).
When Individuals do this, however, even if they are theoretically part of a movement, I cannot reason this. Not only is there no sense in going to war with a state, but I cannot fathom what the terms of the discussion should be for justice. To talk about punishment seems paltry--what kind of punishment is suitable? Reform is laughable. Revenge? The easiest step to take, right there with the death penalty. But that just seems to bloody more hands. No, I take that back, the easiest thing to do is to simply ignore it, to make those bad men disappear and head off to my half warm bed, where my wife and dog await me. If I was any more able to talk about this at this point, I would want to explore some of the ways that Foucault might discuss this--or not discuss this. I sound totally stupid here, but I am stymied by what this does to my worldview--not because it makes me suddenly think that GWB is the best thing since sliced bread but that I can't understand why the people I read who claim to care about people wouldn't care about these people as well. My knee jerk 2 am answer is that it's just way too hard. I'm going to go with that for now...
http://www.terroristmedia.com/nukem/index.php
Two sites I have happened upon to this evening. I must say that I am more distubed by these images on these sites than I have been in a long while. Stayed up way too late looking at them, feeling such great sadness and fear. The beheading videos are particularly troubling and make me wonder just how anything will ever get any better. Once a cause becomes so ingrained in someone that they are willing to do this to someone else it is doubtful that any amount of empirical change will lead them to change their mind. I still don't think that war is the answer. I don't think this is because I have some pacifist tendency ingrained in me. it just seems like a stupid strategy, on par with targeted beheadings in its potential to incite rage. They both stem from the same desire to make power visible.
On the other hand, seeing something like this, a beheading, that is done in someone's basement instead of in the halls of state, with the legitimacy of state power around it, it is horifying. It is like something that could happen a few feet away. The ceremony that it performed beforehand means nothing to me; but it is the attempt to give it this kind of legitimacy that only state ceremony can. But it isn't a state ceremony: herein lies my newly reborn ambivalence, which sits alongside what might be a basically pragmatic pacifism.
If a state were to do this, if an American citizen were brazenly executed on television with the sanction of a state, I would feel little compunction to say that the United States should not retaliate with some sort of force, probably militarily. This, of course, is not a natural response--either the one that the US would take or my internal response to their response--but it is one for which the history of my culture has prepared me. That innocent civilians would probably be killed in this retaliation would be ethically and morally repugnant, but in some strange way justified because they can be named as political subjects of the offending regime. Here, again, I am sort of thinking through the dominant logic which I had lived through for most of my life: it's a hard habit to break. Furthermore in this equation, it obviously doesn't matter if the people who are assumed to be legitimate extensions of the state had any hand in placing that state in control, i.e. it doesn't matter if it is a democracy, which, in this scenario, it most likely would not be. State officials worried about re-election don't often provoke wars by publically assassinating the citizens of other countries (though I guess we have special privileges).
When Individuals do this, however, even if they are theoretically part of a movement, I cannot reason this. Not only is there no sense in going to war with a state, but I cannot fathom what the terms of the discussion should be for justice. To talk about punishment seems paltry--what kind of punishment is suitable? Reform is laughable. Revenge? The easiest step to take, right there with the death penalty. But that just seems to bloody more hands. No, I take that back, the easiest thing to do is to simply ignore it, to make those bad men disappear and head off to my half warm bed, where my wife and dog await me. If I was any more able to talk about this at this point, I would want to explore some of the ways that Foucault might discuss this--or not discuss this. I sound totally stupid here, but I am stymied by what this does to my worldview--not because it makes me suddenly think that GWB is the best thing since sliced bread but that I can't understand why the people I read who claim to care about people wouldn't care about these people as well. My knee jerk 2 am answer is that it's just way too hard. I'm going to go with that for now...
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
As Drudge put it, "Merry Communist Christmas"
I don't know how I feel about this, but it certainly seems hypocritical for a company so wedded to Republican, free market values. Either way, it's just one more reason to stay away. 70% of Wal Mart goods are made in China, according to the article--I'm sure they have great labor conditions and sweet retirement and health care for their workers as well.
Wal-Mart's China inventory to hit US$18b this year: "Xu Jun, Wal-Mart China's director of external affairs, ruled out the rumour, saying the CEO has never visited that or any other site for a warehouse.
Nevertheless, he said China is Wal-Mart's most important supplier in the world. The overseas procurement home office in Shenzhen, a city of South China's Guangdong Province, has played a key role in the firm's global purchasing business.
...
'If Wal-Mart were an individual economy, it would rank as China's eighth-biggest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada,' Xu said. "
I don't know how I feel about this, but it certainly seems hypocritical for a company so wedded to Republican, free market values. Either way, it's just one more reason to stay away. 70% of Wal Mart goods are made in China, according to the article--I'm sure they have great labor conditions and sweet retirement and health care for their workers as well.
Wal-Mart's China inventory to hit US$18b this year: "Xu Jun, Wal-Mart China's director of external affairs, ruled out the rumour, saying the CEO has never visited that or any other site for a warehouse.
Nevertheless, he said China is Wal-Mart's most important supplier in the world. The overseas procurement home office in Shenzhen, a city of South China's Guangdong Province, has played a key role in the firm's global purchasing business.
...
'If Wal-Mart were an individual economy, it would rank as China's eighth-biggest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada,' Xu said. "
Putinism On the March (washingtonpost.com)
A rare article in which I agree almost totally with George Will on this. I am glad that the Ukranian elections are getting some press here and I hope that it will help us to adjust our understanding of Putin as a leader. For years we have supported his iron fist in Chechnya because he said it was necessary. Then we tacitly supported his subversions of democracy--via control over press, and political intimidation--in his recent election and consolidation of power bacause, again, it was necessary ("this is a new kind of threat.") His only recent error was being more interested in Iraqi oil contracts gained through bribes instead of bombs (our message: bombs are always better.) Now we seem to be moving in a different direction as we realize that perhaps he might be up to something else. Just because you don't call it a dictatorship or fascism, doesn't make it so.
A rare article in which I agree almost totally with George Will on this. I am glad that the Ukranian elections are getting some press here and I hope that it will help us to adjust our understanding of Putin as a leader. For years we have supported his iron fist in Chechnya because he said it was necessary. Then we tacitly supported his subversions of democracy--via control over press, and political intimidation--in his recent election and consolidation of power bacause, again, it was necessary ("this is a new kind of threat.") His only recent error was being more interested in Iraqi oil contracts gained through bribes instead of bombs (our message: bombs are always better.) Now we seem to be moving in a different direction as we realize that perhaps he might be up to something else. Just because you don't call it a dictatorship or fascism, doesn't make it so.
On seeing FahrenHype 9/11...
It is so good to see Michael Moore's film de-bunked. For almost 0.2 seconds I had a sliver of a doubt that governments don't always do the very best thing for their people, that power corrupts, and that George W. Bush wasn't the Lord Almighty's gift to the world. It was scary to have any doubt at all and I have struggled with how to keep my faith in the face of so many facts and alternative opinions. I try to watch FOX news everyday to keep me informed so that I can fight with treasonous liberals and know what to say to counter their "facts." Thankfully, this film clears up about four mistakes in Moore's film (see below)and then makes me feel that, if I didn't believe all was well with the 2000 election, with Bush and the war on Iraq, if I didn't side completely with the president, that I would, indeed, be unpatriotic. Thank God for this film. Now I can sleep at night again!
No really, the film has some interesting points, but it is even more shamelessly propagandistic than the film it criticizes. And Ron Silver, who narrates, is even more annoying than Michael Mooore. Clearly the first film had some factual errors, but the bulk of these do nothing to counter Moore's main argument.
1. Recount: claims that the recount was settled in Florida. This is not really the case. The independent audit by several newspapers after the fact, was mostly inconclusive. the issue that both the Florida Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court said was most important was that they hadn't established a uniform method for counting the votes. The US said that, in that case, they should just stop. The Audit done by five or six major news organizations came up with several different scenarios, depending on whether overvotes and undervotes were counted. I forget all the different ways that they would have counted the votes and in which one Bush definitely won, but basically, if they had applied the same guidelines that Bush had recommended in Texas when he was governor, he would have lost. Make of that what you will. Obviously we've moved on and the bigger problem today is that the most recent election still had severe voting irregularities, compunded by the relentless gerrymandering on both sides that makes elections closer and closer. Big problems. The film doesn't talk about any of them, doesn't at all address the serious problem of African American populations being systematically disenfranchised or the scandalously inept process of purging the Florida voter rolls. As Ron Silver says in the film, there is nothing there. Stop thinking about it. (He sounds pretty serious too; I wouldn't mess with him.) Needless to say, the film is misleading here and doesn't prove anything to counter Moore's film.
2. The Pentograph--this is obviously a flop. Moore inflated a headline from a letter to the editor to make it look like a front page headline. This is probably the only really damning thing the film has to offer. But the headline was about the election in 2000 and, on balance, isn't wholly off the mark based on the evidence. It is like what Moore did in the last film, adding text to a 1988 campaign commercial: the text wasn't authentic, but it still represented a fairly true, or at least arguable statement. Here the tactics of the film maker are certainly questionable. But, as even this film points out, it was for about 10 seconds of footage.
3. Clinton is to blame for terrorism. Okay. Fine. Clinton is the Second worst president of the past decade. You win.
4. Islamofascists, yadda, yadda, yada. Okay we know. there are some serious folks out there who can hurt us. Isn't our real concern how well we're doing at fighting them? Were many of them in Iraq? (crickets, silence) Most of this segment is the ideologue gallery, with the balance of the conversation being that anyone who doesn't agree with Bush therefore doesn't believe that there are bad people and therefore (watch for jump in logic) is unpatriotic, a dope or both.
5. Saudi Arabia: as Hiedegger points out, Moore is taking most of his arguments from Unger (just like he took most of his arguments in _Columbine_ from Barry Glassner's _Culture of Fear_.) This is such a fast portion of the video it is almost laughable. There is very little substantive investigation, mostly blanket condemnations and oversimplifications. There are obviously powerful Bush supporters in the Carlyle group and there have been some suspicious relationships between them and the Suadis. The film denies anything is going on and, like the election, encourages us to dismiss these claims point blank. For a more recent Carlyle Group scandal: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=klein
As for the denial about the Afghan pipline, that is also bullshit and Moore connects it to Clinton just as readily. Here ideology and talking points basically win out over any close examination of one of the most factually rich and densely argued (if not overly so) of Moore's film. I am sure the latter made lots of mistakes and oversimplifications since that is his MO, but looking at those would require actually admitting the ones he's right about, something this film is unwilling to do. Instead it throws up all these canards about how John Kerry, George Soros and Move ON are actually more invested in Carlyle. This is presented as hypothesis, stretching logic beyond possibility, but it stands in the film as if there is some factual basis to it, making clear what the film is intended to do.
6. Bush didn't take very much vacation. And when he was on vacation, it wasn't really a vacation. Again, this is one of the places where they have probably got Moore for hyperbole. But it is hardly a damning correction and anyone who was awake during that time, found Bush's oft vacationing ways a bit unsettling. He was in Crawford, TX for all of August and HE said he was on vacation; Moore shoudl be able to call it a vacation if the president does--it's one of the few points they agree on.
7. Oregon Coast: the film points out that, contrary to Moore's assertion, the Oregon State Troopers aren't responsible for patrolling the Oregon Coast--that's the coast guard. However, it doesn't tell us if he is wrong about there being only one trooper patrolling the stretch of highway along the Oregon Coast and it implies that federal funds for homeland security wouldn't be well used in having first responders staffed to the full. this is a continuing problem and the film seems content to say that Moore stretched the truth than to examine the more substantive underlying problem.
SIDE NOTE: This is also the first time that the film makes use of the easily explicable, but key production flaw in Moore's film: He didn't shoot all of it nor was he even there for the whole thing. He bought a good deal of his footage, e.g the interview with the Trooper, interviews w/ injured soldiers at Walter Reed, footage from Iraq. The implication of this segment and every other segment that relies on this problem, is that Michael Moore, by buying existing footage rather than shooting it himself is somehow lying or misleading us. This is a total bullshit argument meant to make him look dishonest when it is standard documentary practice. All those people interviewed signed releases; the footage was owned by someone and sold to Moore. There may be ethical problems with this, but it is not Moore who is making these standards, they exist already.
8. The patriot Act: again, the balance of this is just that there are never any problems: it's a good thing; don't worry about it. The problems that Moore's film points out aren't addressed, such as the Peace activists in CA that are infiltrated by a local sherrif. Ann Coulter, however, does brag about all the "terrorists" being rounded up by Bush's administration, noting that it "isn't public knowledge" but failing to note, as one poster has already, that they have about a 0 to 5000 conviction rate. None of their evidence will hold up in court: this isn't a problem with the courts, who are just enforcing the constitution, but with the unconstitutional methods being employed to arrest people. Perhaps some folks see this as a good thing--then the terrorists don't win! But the truth is, if we're abandoning the constitution to do this, they've already won.
9. Saddam/Iraq: Here the film almost competely leaves Moore's text to speak to general arguments about the war. The most interesting argument, and probably the only one that has anything more than ideological support for it, is that France, Germany, and Russia had oil deals with Iraq. I am sure this is true. But the argument is a bit like little Billy beating the shit out of some kid on the street and then saying that the reason he did it was that none of the other kids would help him beat up this kid because this kid had bribed them not to agree to beat them up. The question of whether the kid should have been beat up in the first place is gently overlooked. This is done by dividing the problem into two halves. France, Germany, etc., wanted to lift the sanctions on Iraq and didn't want to go to war to disarm him because they had something to gain. Therefore we couldn't go through the UN to disarm him. Okay, fine. But then jump ahead in the film...Bill Morris is asking Ed Koch--great foreign policy expert that he is--if we should have gone to war even though there were no weapons. This of course leads to all the diatribes on how bad Saddam was. (Telling quote here: Koch says that they've found 300K bodies in mass graves, "they expect ot find one million--we can't walk away from that anymore." Anymore? Yes. Anymore--like we did when he did it in the early 90s. well, Koch doesn't say this, but let's just pretend he did.) Anyway, on balance, the argument is that Saddam is the equivalent to some copperheads Zell Miller found under a rock in his garden. They are a threat and he shouldn't have to ask the city council or even his wife before he goes in there and chops their heads off with his hoe. Beautiful. Ann Coulter says that, even if everything Moore and "liberals" say is true, Iraq was "a purely Humanitarian war." Leaving aside the fact that these are basically the things we've all heard before and it presents absolutely nothing new in the way of facts or voices, the glaring gaping hole in this segment is that everything after the france-germany-russia bit basically admits that there were no weapons and we knew there weren't any weapons. So why shoudl we fault France-Russia-Germany for not supporting our resolution to disarm him of weapons he didn't have: because we're right, dammit!
The only other fact pointed out in this segment is that Clinton signed some policy that said Iraq regime change was US policy. Here's the deal, for all you republicans who think this is about you: Bush is taknig the heat because he's in the white house. But most of us don't find Clinton to have been any gift to humanity. He bombed Iraq incessantly; His secratary of state Albright sid that the lives of 500K children who starved or died because of the sanctions we're "worth the cost" of keeping Saddam isolated. The NAFTA and WTO, both Clinton brain children, were a gift to corporations and plenty has been written on his economic policies: check out Contours of Decent by Robert Pollin. Clinton is an asshole too. He was just nicer about it. Moore gave him plenty of shit in the last movie he made when he connected Columbine to the largest bombing day in Kosovo. The problem is that the people who made this movie think that Republicans=patriotic americans and therefore anyone who critiques the government (especially while republicans are in charge of it), must not be a patriotic American and, since you're either with us or against us, you must be a democrat aka unpatriotic aka terrorist. This is a brilliant way to make any argument you make criticizing the government actions easily dismissed. This is basically the perspective that the film is coming from; one speaker even says that "Terrorists count on people like Moore to make his films this way."
And that is basically the thrust of the film. The last section of the film begins with calling Moore a propagandist. This is, in a way, fair game, since it is the same sort of tactic Moore himself uses. Except this time, instead of using footage from the press, speeches by the president or quotes by government officials to back up these sentiments (something that Moore did well--by reminding us just how over the top the press was about the war) they use footage from Hitler's propagandists and explicitly say that Moore is working to help the terrorists win. This is basically ridiculous for anyone who has seen the film, as is the claim that Moore doesn't respect the military or the ethos of "America" (remember, that means "war" "support the president" "Republican.") Though Moore is just as ridiculous in the last part of his film, this one is almost denying that that segment even exists. It critiques of Moore's depiction of US soldiers have no factual basis and totally depend on your perspective. It is also difficult to tell if these people even saw the film. That is okay because these filmmakers have made this film for everyone who didn't risk seeing the original and has just been waiting for something to rebut its arguments. Then they can simply deny Moore's legitimacy, overlook any substance to his argument, and go on believing what they did in the beginning.
Finally, before anyone claims that this film won't be premiered because of a liberal bias I will say this: if this film doesn't appear in theatres it is not because the people who own the movie distributors or movie theatres don't agree with it. It will be because this film is surprisingly dull and is basically just fodder for anyone who vehemently wants a quick way to deny anything critical about the past four years. Unlike F 9/11 which makes pains to be funny and use pacing and the interweaving of clips and quotes to keep things moving, this film is basically an extended chant or mantra. Though Moore definitely had a point and his humor might be lost on those who disagreed with him, at least he tried to make it entertaining. This film is just dull by comparison. And dull, ideological mantras don't fill the theatre seats.
It is so good to see Michael Moore's film de-bunked. For almost 0.2 seconds I had a sliver of a doubt that governments don't always do the very best thing for their people, that power corrupts, and that George W. Bush wasn't the Lord Almighty's gift to the world. It was scary to have any doubt at all and I have struggled with how to keep my faith in the face of so many facts and alternative opinions. I try to watch FOX news everyday to keep me informed so that I can fight with treasonous liberals and know what to say to counter their "facts." Thankfully, this film clears up about four mistakes in Moore's film (see below)and then makes me feel that, if I didn't believe all was well with the 2000 election, with Bush and the war on Iraq, if I didn't side completely with the president, that I would, indeed, be unpatriotic. Thank God for this film. Now I can sleep at night again!
No really, the film has some interesting points, but it is even more shamelessly propagandistic than the film it criticizes. And Ron Silver, who narrates, is even more annoying than Michael Mooore. Clearly the first film had some factual errors, but the bulk of these do nothing to counter Moore's main argument.
1. Recount: claims that the recount was settled in Florida. This is not really the case. The independent audit by several newspapers after the fact, was mostly inconclusive. the issue that both the Florida Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court said was most important was that they hadn't established a uniform method for counting the votes. The US said that, in that case, they should just stop. The Audit done by five or six major news organizations came up with several different scenarios, depending on whether overvotes and undervotes were counted. I forget all the different ways that they would have counted the votes and in which one Bush definitely won, but basically, if they had applied the same guidelines that Bush had recommended in Texas when he was governor, he would have lost. Make of that what you will. Obviously we've moved on and the bigger problem today is that the most recent election still had severe voting irregularities, compunded by the relentless gerrymandering on both sides that makes elections closer and closer. Big problems. The film doesn't talk about any of them, doesn't at all address the serious problem of African American populations being systematically disenfranchised or the scandalously inept process of purging the Florida voter rolls. As Ron Silver says in the film, there is nothing there. Stop thinking about it. (He sounds pretty serious too; I wouldn't mess with him.) Needless to say, the film is misleading here and doesn't prove anything to counter Moore's film.
2. The Pentograph--this is obviously a flop. Moore inflated a headline from a letter to the editor to make it look like a front page headline. This is probably the only really damning thing the film has to offer. But the headline was about the election in 2000 and, on balance, isn't wholly off the mark based on the evidence. It is like what Moore did in the last film, adding text to a 1988 campaign commercial: the text wasn't authentic, but it still represented a fairly true, or at least arguable statement. Here the tactics of the film maker are certainly questionable. But, as even this film points out, it was for about 10 seconds of footage.
3. Clinton is to blame for terrorism. Okay. Fine. Clinton is the Second worst president of the past decade. You win.
4. Islamofascists, yadda, yadda, yada. Okay we know. there are some serious folks out there who can hurt us. Isn't our real concern how well we're doing at fighting them? Were many of them in Iraq? (crickets, silence) Most of this segment is the ideologue gallery, with the balance of the conversation being that anyone who doesn't agree with Bush therefore doesn't believe that there are bad people and therefore (watch for jump in logic) is unpatriotic, a dope or both.
5. Saudi Arabia: as Hiedegger points out, Moore is taking most of his arguments from Unger (just like he took most of his arguments in _Columbine_ from Barry Glassner's _Culture of Fear_.) This is such a fast portion of the video it is almost laughable. There is very little substantive investigation, mostly blanket condemnations and oversimplifications. There are obviously powerful Bush supporters in the Carlyle group and there have been some suspicious relationships between them and the Suadis. The film denies anything is going on and, like the election, encourages us to dismiss these claims point blank. For a more recent Carlyle Group scandal: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=klein
As for the denial about the Afghan pipline, that is also bullshit and Moore connects it to Clinton just as readily. Here ideology and talking points basically win out over any close examination of one of the most factually rich and densely argued (if not overly so) of Moore's film. I am sure the latter made lots of mistakes and oversimplifications since that is his MO, but looking at those would require actually admitting the ones he's right about, something this film is unwilling to do. Instead it throws up all these canards about how John Kerry, George Soros and Move ON are actually more invested in Carlyle. This is presented as hypothesis, stretching logic beyond possibility, but it stands in the film as if there is some factual basis to it, making clear what the film is intended to do.
6. Bush didn't take very much vacation. And when he was on vacation, it wasn't really a vacation. Again, this is one of the places where they have probably got Moore for hyperbole. But it is hardly a damning correction and anyone who was awake during that time, found Bush's oft vacationing ways a bit unsettling. He was in Crawford, TX for all of August and HE said he was on vacation; Moore shoudl be able to call it a vacation if the president does--it's one of the few points they agree on.
7. Oregon Coast: the film points out that, contrary to Moore's assertion, the Oregon State Troopers aren't responsible for patrolling the Oregon Coast--that's the coast guard. However, it doesn't tell us if he is wrong about there being only one trooper patrolling the stretch of highway along the Oregon Coast and it implies that federal funds for homeland security wouldn't be well used in having first responders staffed to the full. this is a continuing problem and the film seems content to say that Moore stretched the truth than to examine the more substantive underlying problem.
SIDE NOTE: This is also the first time that the film makes use of the easily explicable, but key production flaw in Moore's film: He didn't shoot all of it nor was he even there for the whole thing. He bought a good deal of his footage, e.g the interview with the Trooper, interviews w/ injured soldiers at Walter Reed, footage from Iraq. The implication of this segment and every other segment that relies on this problem, is that Michael Moore, by buying existing footage rather than shooting it himself is somehow lying or misleading us. This is a total bullshit argument meant to make him look dishonest when it is standard documentary practice. All those people interviewed signed releases; the footage was owned by someone and sold to Moore. There may be ethical problems with this, but it is not Moore who is making these standards, they exist already.
8. The patriot Act: again, the balance of this is just that there are never any problems: it's a good thing; don't worry about it. The problems that Moore's film points out aren't addressed, such as the Peace activists in CA that are infiltrated by a local sherrif. Ann Coulter, however, does brag about all the "terrorists" being rounded up by Bush's administration, noting that it "isn't public knowledge" but failing to note, as one poster has already, that they have about a 0 to 5000 conviction rate. None of their evidence will hold up in court: this isn't a problem with the courts, who are just enforcing the constitution, but with the unconstitutional methods being employed to arrest people. Perhaps some folks see this as a good thing--then the terrorists don't win! But the truth is, if we're abandoning the constitution to do this, they've already won.
9. Saddam/Iraq: Here the film almost competely leaves Moore's text to speak to general arguments about the war. The most interesting argument, and probably the only one that has anything more than ideological support for it, is that France, Germany, and Russia had oil deals with Iraq. I am sure this is true. But the argument is a bit like little Billy beating the shit out of some kid on the street and then saying that the reason he did it was that none of the other kids would help him beat up this kid because this kid had bribed them not to agree to beat them up. The question of whether the kid should have been beat up in the first place is gently overlooked. This is done by dividing the problem into two halves. France, Germany, etc., wanted to lift the sanctions on Iraq and didn't want to go to war to disarm him because they had something to gain. Therefore we couldn't go through the UN to disarm him. Okay, fine. But then jump ahead in the film...Bill Morris is asking Ed Koch--great foreign policy expert that he is--if we should have gone to war even though there were no weapons. This of course leads to all the diatribes on how bad Saddam was. (Telling quote here: Koch says that they've found 300K bodies in mass graves, "they expect ot find one million--we can't walk away from that anymore." Anymore? Yes. Anymore--like we did when he did it in the early 90s. well, Koch doesn't say this, but let's just pretend he did.) Anyway, on balance, the argument is that Saddam is the equivalent to some copperheads Zell Miller found under a rock in his garden. They are a threat and he shouldn't have to ask the city council or even his wife before he goes in there and chops their heads off with his hoe. Beautiful. Ann Coulter says that, even if everything Moore and "liberals" say is true, Iraq was "a purely Humanitarian war." Leaving aside the fact that these are basically the things we've all heard before and it presents absolutely nothing new in the way of facts or voices, the glaring gaping hole in this segment is that everything after the france-germany-russia bit basically admits that there were no weapons and we knew there weren't any weapons. So why shoudl we fault France-Russia-Germany for not supporting our resolution to disarm him of weapons he didn't have: because we're right, dammit!
The only other fact pointed out in this segment is that Clinton signed some policy that said Iraq regime change was US policy. Here's the deal, for all you republicans who think this is about you: Bush is taknig the heat because he's in the white house. But most of us don't find Clinton to have been any gift to humanity. He bombed Iraq incessantly; His secratary of state Albright sid that the lives of 500K children who starved or died because of the sanctions we're "worth the cost" of keeping Saddam isolated. The NAFTA and WTO, both Clinton brain children, were a gift to corporations and plenty has been written on his economic policies: check out Contours of Decent by Robert Pollin. Clinton is an asshole too. He was just nicer about it. Moore gave him plenty of shit in the last movie he made when he connected Columbine to the largest bombing day in Kosovo. The problem is that the people who made this movie think that Republicans=patriotic americans and therefore anyone who critiques the government (especially while republicans are in charge of it), must not be a patriotic American and, since you're either with us or against us, you must be a democrat aka unpatriotic aka terrorist. This is a brilliant way to make any argument you make criticizing the government actions easily dismissed. This is basically the perspective that the film is coming from; one speaker even says that "Terrorists count on people like Moore to make his films this way."
And that is basically the thrust of the film. The last section of the film begins with calling Moore a propagandist. This is, in a way, fair game, since it is the same sort of tactic Moore himself uses. Except this time, instead of using footage from the press, speeches by the president or quotes by government officials to back up these sentiments (something that Moore did well--by reminding us just how over the top the press was about the war) they use footage from Hitler's propagandists and explicitly say that Moore is working to help the terrorists win. This is basically ridiculous for anyone who has seen the film, as is the claim that Moore doesn't respect the military or the ethos of "America" (remember, that means "war" "support the president" "Republican.") Though Moore is just as ridiculous in the last part of his film, this one is almost denying that that segment even exists. It critiques of Moore's depiction of US soldiers have no factual basis and totally depend on your perspective. It is also difficult to tell if these people even saw the film. That is okay because these filmmakers have made this film for everyone who didn't risk seeing the original and has just been waiting for something to rebut its arguments. Then they can simply deny Moore's legitimacy, overlook any substance to his argument, and go on believing what they did in the beginning.
Finally, before anyone claims that this film won't be premiered because of a liberal bias I will say this: if this film doesn't appear in theatres it is not because the people who own the movie distributors or movie theatres don't agree with it. It will be because this film is surprisingly dull and is basically just fodder for anyone who vehemently wants a quick way to deny anything critical about the past four years. Unlike F 9/11 which makes pains to be funny and use pacing and the interweaving of clips and quotes to keep things moving, this film is basically an extended chant or mantra. Though Moore definitely had a point and his humor might be lost on those who disagreed with him, at least he tried to make it entertaining. This film is just dull by comparison. And dull, ideological mantras don't fill the theatre seats.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
The book would be better titled the structural transformations... as it is really about a couple of different movements in the socio-structural totality and the way that the public sphere fits into them. The final couple of chapters provide a nice overview of the changes that happened most recently, but all of them are somewhat related. His basic argument is that the public sphere isn't just an incedental attribute of modern bourgeois society (here "bourgeois" as the translator indicates, is often synonymous with "civic" or "civil" society, but since the German doesn't have a precise translation into English, he uses this to be safe) Actually this ambivalent terminology is somewhat central to his argument. Several of the pivotal terms in his social history are important precisely in the way that they change in their meaning over time. "Public opinion" is the most central but "publicity" and "representative power" are also extremely important in his account of the movement from Feudal society through the various bourgeois revolutions and the formation of liberal society to the "interventionism" of the welfare state. And, of course, the relationship between the terms "public" and "Private" is central to his argument.
As I said above, the title would be better as "transformations" because it moves through these various permutations. It is also deceptive for it to pretend its focus is solely on the "structural" level. For throughout he adopts a very nice dialectical understanding of the mutual constitution of various formations at both the structural and subject level. In fact, though the social structure is very important, he is very vehement about the importance of the stance of the individual and the state of mind it inspires. He is also very careful to speak to both of these levels and any in between throughout the process.
Though he has a much longer account of how this happened, he basically has a few important levels on which he stops to account for these changes, not really giving any determinant primacy ( so far as I can tell) to any one level. To start, he begins looking at the level of the absolutist state and its monarchical authority. The public at this point would be anyone not in the monarchy, all of the subjects of the kingdom (subject here being another pivotal term). the Private sphere as such was something that was left only to the monarch. This was not only because of the lack of the notion of private property or the inability of anyone other than the powerful to claim any private sphere. Power was assumed to be legitimate by some higher authority or simply based on the control of the state. PUBLICITY at this point was basically the REPRESENTATION of that power in a public forum. Likewise, representation was simply a matter of portraying this power BEFORE the people rather than FOR the people.
In a complex and decades long transformation, based largely on the expansion of the bourgeoisie--both in itself and across the globe via merchantilism--this gradually began to change. This change was not only based on the rough economics that most discussants stop with but had as much to do with more cultural and social factors. In terms of ideology, the bourgeois notions of the family and the rise of the practice of letter writing and the interiority of the individual. The rise of letters also aided in the distribution of news and information--especially in the very physical locales of the coffeehouse and the solon. The rise of the novel--which, incedentally, began in the European tradition in an epistolary form (this is my addition; might be wrong, but its what I remember, especially in the rise of the American Novel)--also inspired a sort of critical discussion about cultural affairs. Here it is important to note that it isn't so much the substance of these letters--whether in the form of newsletters or belles lettres--but the critical subjectivity of the interaction around them. In turn, this interaction is only made possible by the individuation of the new bourgeois family (this, he notes is also reflected in its architecture.)
The development of both this consciousness as well as the interactions that they helped to constitute in either the coffeehouses or in the salon led this newly formed public sphere to begin to demand more of power, namely the notion that this rational critical debate and the formation of a public consensus was the best way of establishing a general norm. Thus the idea of a "law" based on something other than absolutist decree was becoming more prominent.
I find this a very important point because it makes clear the goal of this public sphere was precisely to have an effect on the way that power worked. Moreover, it was in this context that the notions of bourgeois liberalism were formed and thus all of our constitutional norms and forms of government are based on this notion of the way that civil society and the state should function. This is important because it is not only a problem of the transformation of the way that the state works, or the relationship between the state and civil society, but the interactions of civil society are paramount in and of themselves, interactions which are founded on a certain notion of the private individual and the preferred stance they should have. The media certainly play a role in this process as the dominant modes of publicity and the mediation between the spheres of civil society and the state, but the transformation is far from being only located at that interaction alone. This, perhaps, shows the way that Habermas is very much rooted in the Frankfurt School tradition which takes the psychological stance of the individual as a very important jumping off point.
In this case, Habermas focuses on what he calls the "ambivalence of the privatized individual" as both a Bourgeoisie (citizen, owner of goods) and a homme (one human being among others). The former was more related to the male realm of the public sphere, mainly in the political journalism and coffeehouse tradition in which they would debate as owners in the political realm concerning the regulation of their private sphere. Habermas readily admits that, though this was a more open dialogue than before women were traditionally (and perhaps even legally) excluded from this dicsussion. On the the other hand, women and even other non-property owners such as apprentices and servants, took part in the discussion and debate over the world of letters in salons etc. And, although Habermas says that these dual roles, were each equally important and not necessarily separate, this is certainly one of the places that he is roundly dismissed, especially by feminists.
It is also clearly based on a notion of class that excludes a large portion of the population, a contracition that Habermas highlights in section 11. In between, he looks at the development of the PS in various different contexts and points to the ways that civil society in Britain, France, and Germany insisted on both the publicity of the government and the legitimation of public authority and laws through some sort of deliberative process, often mediated by (oppositional) political journalism. Here he works up to the moment of the institution of the bourgeois consitutional state in its various contexts and its relationship to the understanding of the market economy, which basically limited the ability of the state have dominance over anyone without their consent.
Though it may not be accurate in historical terms (I'm not sure--it does seem to match the ideological history as I understand it but I'm not sure if that means it's necessarily false) I like his understanding of this process because it firmly places the agency of this change in the formation of legitimacy in the hands of the civil society. Unlike other theorists, like Foucault, who seem to make no distinction between the absolutist monarchy and the rising bourgeois except from the perspective of the style of legitimacy "power" uses under each regime. Habermas sees the uniqueness of the challenge provided by liberalism and eventually explains its "refeudalization" as the logical conclusion of its own philosophy and its attempt to overcome the inherently "contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere in the bourgeois constitutional state."
The contradiction is multifaceted, but it can roughly be summed up in the already mentioned ambivalence of the citizen/human individual of civil society and the presumption that the rational critical discussion of that civil society would be more legitimate than absolutist domination. This understanding of power, as Habermas tells it, was an extension of the belief in the self-regulating functions of market competition which assumed that no one would be able to enact any form of coercion or domination via the market. Leaving aside the faulty assumptions of this underpinning, the point was that, according to Habermas
The first problem is that there would have to be some form of power enacted via this public sphere to have an effect on the current system meaning that it would have some form of domination in that regard (82-83). But, "nowhere did the constitutional establishment of a public sphere in the political realm [. . . .] betray its chracter as an order of domination more than in its central article stating that all power came from the people"(84). This is, for Habermas, because there was obviously a large number of people who were disenfranchised in this process so that it wasn't really all of the people
The book would be better titled the structural transformations... as it is really about a couple of different movements in the socio-structural totality and the way that the public sphere fits into them. The final couple of chapters provide a nice overview of the changes that happened most recently, but all of them are somewhat related. His basic argument is that the public sphere isn't just an incedental attribute of modern bourgeois society (here "bourgeois" as the translator indicates, is often synonymous with "civic" or "civil" society, but since the German doesn't have a precise translation into English, he uses this to be safe) Actually this ambivalent terminology is somewhat central to his argument. Several of the pivotal terms in his social history are important precisely in the way that they change in their meaning over time. "Public opinion" is the most central but "publicity" and "representative power" are also extremely important in his account of the movement from Feudal society through the various bourgeois revolutions and the formation of liberal society to the "interventionism" of the welfare state. And, of course, the relationship between the terms "public" and "Private" is central to his argument.
As I said above, the title would be better as "transformations" because it moves through these various permutations. It is also deceptive for it to pretend its focus is solely on the "structural" level. For throughout he adopts a very nice dialectical understanding of the mutual constitution of various formations at both the structural and subject level. In fact, though the social structure is very important, he is very vehement about the importance of the stance of the individual and the state of mind it inspires. He is also very careful to speak to both of these levels and any in between throughout the process.
Though he has a much longer account of how this happened, he basically has a few important levels on which he stops to account for these changes, not really giving any determinant primacy ( so far as I can tell) to any one level. To start, he begins looking at the level of the absolutist state and its monarchical authority. The public at this point would be anyone not in the monarchy, all of the subjects of the kingdom (subject here being another pivotal term). the Private sphere as such was something that was left only to the monarch. This was not only because of the lack of the notion of private property or the inability of anyone other than the powerful to claim any private sphere. Power was assumed to be legitimate by some higher authority or simply based on the control of the state. PUBLICITY at this point was basically the REPRESENTATION of that power in a public forum. Likewise, representation was simply a matter of portraying this power BEFORE the people rather than FOR the people.
In a complex and decades long transformation, based largely on the expansion of the bourgeoisie--both in itself and across the globe via merchantilism--this gradually began to change. This change was not only based on the rough economics that most discussants stop with but had as much to do with more cultural and social factors. In terms of ideology, the bourgeois notions of the family and the rise of the practice of letter writing and the interiority of the individual. The rise of letters also aided in the distribution of news and information--especially in the very physical locales of the coffeehouse and the solon. The rise of the novel--which, incedentally, began in the European tradition in an epistolary form (this is my addition; might be wrong, but its what I remember, especially in the rise of the American Novel)--also inspired a sort of critical discussion about cultural affairs. Here it is important to note that it isn't so much the substance of these letters--whether in the form of newsletters or belles lettres--but the critical subjectivity of the interaction around them. In turn, this interaction is only made possible by the individuation of the new bourgeois family (this, he notes is also reflected in its architecture.)
They formed the public sphere of rational-critical debate in the world of
letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the
conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself
(51). [through an "audience oriented privacy]
The development of both this consciousness as well as the interactions that they helped to constitute in either the coffeehouses or in the salon led this newly formed public sphere to begin to demand more of power, namely the notion that this rational critical debate and the formation of a public consensus was the best way of establishing a general norm. Thus the idea of a "law" based on something other than absolutist decree was becoming more prominent.
A political consciousness developed in the public sphere of civil society which,
in oppostion to absolute soveriegnty articulated the concept of and demand for
general and abstract laws which ultimately came to assert itself (i.e. public
opinion) as the only legitimate source of this law. (54)
I find this a very important point because it makes clear the goal of this public sphere was precisely to have an effect on the way that power worked. Moreover, it was in this context that the notions of bourgeois liberalism were formed and thus all of our constitutional norms and forms of government are based on this notion of the way that civil society and the state should function. This is important because it is not only a problem of the transformation of the way that the state works, or the relationship between the state and civil society, but the interactions of civil society are paramount in and of themselves, interactions which are founded on a certain notion of the private individual and the preferred stance they should have. The media certainly play a role in this process as the dominant modes of publicity and the mediation between the spheres of civil society and the state, but the transformation is far from being only located at that interaction alone. This, perhaps, shows the way that Habermas is very much rooted in the Frankfurt School tradition which takes the psychological stance of the individual as a very important jumping off point.
In this case, Habermas focuses on what he calls the "ambivalence of the privatized individual" as both a Bourgeoisie (citizen, owner of goods) and a homme (one human being among others). The former was more related to the male realm of the public sphere, mainly in the political journalism and coffeehouse tradition in which they would debate as owners in the political realm concerning the regulation of their private sphere. Habermas readily admits that, though this was a more open dialogue than before women were traditionally (and perhaps even legally) excluded from this dicsussion. On the the other hand, women and even other non-property owners such as apprentices and servants, took part in the discussion and debate over the world of letters in salons etc. And, although Habermas says that these dual roles, were each equally important and not necessarily separate, this is certainly one of the places that he is roundly dismissed, especially by feminists.
It is also clearly based on a notion of class that excludes a large portion of the population, a contracition that Habermas highlights in section 11. In between, he looks at the development of the PS in various different contexts and points to the ways that civil society in Britain, France, and Germany insisted on both the publicity of the government and the legitimation of public authority and laws through some sort of deliberative process, often mediated by (oppositional) political journalism. Here he works up to the moment of the institution of the bourgeois consitutional state in its various contexts and its relationship to the understanding of the market economy, which basically limited the ability of the state have dominance over anyone without their consent.
Though it may not be accurate in historical terms (I'm not sure--it does seem to match the ideological history as I understand it but I'm not sure if that means it's necessarily false) I like his understanding of this process because it firmly places the agency of this change in the formation of legitimacy in the hands of the civil society. Unlike other theorists, like Foucault, who seem to make no distinction between the absolutist monarchy and the rising bourgeois except from the perspective of the style of legitimacy "power" uses under each regime. Habermas sees the uniqueness of the challenge provided by liberalism and eventually explains its "refeudalization" as the logical conclusion of its own philosophy and its attempt to overcome the inherently "contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere in the bourgeois constitutional state."
The contradiction is multifaceted, but it can roughly be summed up in the already mentioned ambivalence of the citizen/human individual of civil society and the presumption that the rational critical discussion of that civil society would be more legitimate than absolutist domination. This understanding of power, as Habermas tells it, was an extension of the belief in the self-regulating functions of market competition which assumed that no one would be able to enact any form of coercion or domination via the market. Leaving aside the faulty assumptions of this underpinning, the point was that, according to Habermas
The bourgeois idea of the law-based state, namely, the binding of al state
activity to a system of norms legitimated by public opinion (a system that had
no gaps, if possible), already aimed at abolishing the state as an instrument of
domination altogether. Acts of soveriengty were considered apocryphal per
se. [. . . .] The domination of the public, according to its own idea, was an
order in which domination itself was dissolved. (82)
The first problem is that there would have to be some form of power enacted via this public sphere to have an effect on the current system meaning that it would have some form of domination in that regard (82-83). But, "nowhere did the constitutional establishment of a public sphere in the political realm [. . . .] betray its chracter as an order of domination more than in its central article stating that all power came from the people"(84). This is, for Habermas, because there was obviously a large number of people who were disenfranchised in this process so that it wasn't really all of the people
This from an article by Jared Diamond called "why Societies make disasterous decisions." Although he talks about the "tragedy of the commons," which neo-classical and libertatian economists are quick to point out as one of the few important hypothetical scenarios for us to think about in terms of the choice of economic system, he also, below, alludes to the much more widespead problem of what we might call the "fortress society." Market Fundamentalists affinity for the former scenario is that they claim it as evidence for the need to have property rights for all property rather than leaving some property "common" or, heaven forbid (no, they really think it does) creating any sort of communal society. I have spoken a little about this before.
The latter scenario, of the Fortress society, which, in effect, is what Diamond speaks to below, is one that these economists are less likely to find problematic--or at least problematic in a way that the market can't solve on its own. But the truth of the matter is that if problems like these are to be solved, the guilt must be spread evenly, the externalities compensated for by their creators. In this case I have found it very curious that the most publicized public fines have been the indecency fines levied by the FCC. I suppose it makes sense for the media to pay extra attention to the fines being levied against it, but it seems like there is a more public interest in these fines as being something that actually goes after the "bad guys." But does it really make sense for these to be the big fines? Who really believes that Janet Jackson's tit was that damaging? Could it even be proven? Of all the public agencies to stand up and start enforcing the penalties on its books--and even raising the penalties to make them actually punitive, why this one? And if there was any WAY that these penalties could be enforced, why this one? Certainly there are many media conglomerates that could be defined as defying all sorts of ownership rules--why not penalize them for this? Instead, its all about content, a fairly banal measure in material terms but something that makes good press in the red states.
On the one hand, I am glad that a public agency is trying to protect the public from an industry and its externalities; but on the other it seems like there are so many other industries that do far more damage. In the latter case, the difference seems to be that these economists would stand up and oppose that sort of leveling of the playing field or enforcing of penalties for other industries but, for ideological reasons, probably find the FCC fines appropriate. Not only is this contradictory and probably indicative of a deep seeded conflict of interests, but it is yet another example of one of the many ways that our own growing fortress society, which sees the protection of the public as secondary to the protection of a select group--notice I am diffusing the agency of who is making this emphasis possible--as drifting towards the route of "sociteies which make disastrous decisions."
"Failure to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of interest between the elite and the rest of society are much less likely in societies where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. For example, the modern country of which the highest proportions of its citizens belong to environmental organizations is the Netherlands. I never understood why until I was visiting the Netherlands a few years ago and raised this question to my Dutch colleagues as were driving through the countryside. My Dutch friends answered, "Just look around you and you will see the reason. The land where we are now is 22 feet below sea level. Like much of the area of Holland it was once a shallow bay of the sea that we Dutch people surrounded by dikes and then drained with pumps to create low-lying land that we call a polder. We have pumps to pump out the water that is continually leaking into our polders through the dikes. If the dikes burst, of course the people in the polder drown. But it is not the case that the rich Dutch live on top of the dikes, while the poor Dutch are living down in the polders. If the dikes burst, everybody drowns, regardless of whether they are rich or poor. That was what happened in the terrible floods of February 1, 1953, when high tides and storms drove water inland over the polders of Zeeland Province and nearly 2000 Dutch people drowned. After that disaster, we all swore, 'Never again!' and spent billions of dollars building reinforced barriers against the water. In the Netherlands the decision-makers know that they cannot insulate themselves from their mistakes, and that they have to make compromise decisions that will be good for as many people as possible."
The latter scenario, of the Fortress society, which, in effect, is what Diamond speaks to below, is one that these economists are less likely to find problematic--or at least problematic in a way that the market can't solve on its own. But the truth of the matter is that if problems like these are to be solved, the guilt must be spread evenly, the externalities compensated for by their creators. In this case I have found it very curious that the most publicized public fines have been the indecency fines levied by the FCC. I suppose it makes sense for the media to pay extra attention to the fines being levied against it, but it seems like there is a more public interest in these fines as being something that actually goes after the "bad guys." But does it really make sense for these to be the big fines? Who really believes that Janet Jackson's tit was that damaging? Could it even be proven? Of all the public agencies to stand up and start enforcing the penalties on its books--and even raising the penalties to make them actually punitive, why this one? And if there was any WAY that these penalties could be enforced, why this one? Certainly there are many media conglomerates that could be defined as defying all sorts of ownership rules--why not penalize them for this? Instead, its all about content, a fairly banal measure in material terms but something that makes good press in the red states.
On the one hand, I am glad that a public agency is trying to protect the public from an industry and its externalities; but on the other it seems like there are so many other industries that do far more damage. In the latter case, the difference seems to be that these economists would stand up and oppose that sort of leveling of the playing field or enforcing of penalties for other industries but, for ideological reasons, probably find the FCC fines appropriate. Not only is this contradictory and probably indicative of a deep seeded conflict of interests, but it is yet another example of one of the many ways that our own growing fortress society, which sees the protection of the public as secondary to the protection of a select group--notice I am diffusing the agency of who is making this emphasis possible--as drifting towards the route of "sociteies which make disastrous decisions."
"Failure to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of interest between the elite and the rest of society are much less likely in societies where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. For example, the modern country of which the highest proportions of its citizens belong to environmental organizations is the Netherlands. I never understood why until I was visiting the Netherlands a few years ago and raised this question to my Dutch colleagues as were driving through the countryside. My Dutch friends answered, "Just look around you and you will see the reason. The land where we are now is 22 feet below sea level. Like much of the area of Holland it was once a shallow bay of the sea that we Dutch people surrounded by dikes and then drained with pumps to create low-lying land that we call a polder. We have pumps to pump out the water that is continually leaking into our polders through the dikes. If the dikes burst, of course the people in the polder drown. But it is not the case that the rich Dutch live on top of the dikes, while the poor Dutch are living down in the polders. If the dikes burst, everybody drowns, regardless of whether they are rich or poor. That was what happened in the terrible floods of February 1, 1953, when high tides and storms drove water inland over the polders of Zeeland Province and nearly 2000 Dutch people drowned. After that disaster, we all swore, 'Never again!' and spent billions of dollars building reinforced barriers against the water. In the Netherlands the decision-makers know that they cannot insulate themselves from their mistakes, and that they have to make compromise decisions that will be good for as many people as possible."
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Monday, November 15, 2004
Snow Likes His Strong Dollar Weaker
Dan Ackman, 11.15.04, 9:55 AM ET
NEW YORK - Once a year or so we like to check in on the dollar to find out if it is strong. Inevitably it is, but it is strong in different ways each time.
More From Dan Ackman
Four years ago we had a strong dollar that bought about 1.19 euros. Two years later, by mid-2002--around the time that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was later fired, was wondering publicly about the strong dollar policy--the dollar was still strong, and it could buy .91 euros. Today, a dollar buys about .78 euros. Technically, the dollar is "weaker" than is has been in recent years. Officially, though, and as a matter of policy, the dollar is still strong.
Today in Dublin, O'Neill's successor John Snow said, "Our policy on the dollar is well known. We support a strong dollar. A strong dollar is in America's interest." That was the second thing Snow said, according to reporters traveling with him on his European tour. The first thing he said was "I've had a tradition of never commenting on the relative exchange value of the dollar." The second comment seems, in a general way, to contradict the first comment. Next he said currency values should be set in open markets: "Markets are driven by fundamentals...and fundamentals are best determined by the operation of open, competitive markets," he said on Monday.
These are Snow's first remarks on the currency since George W. Bush was re-elected president on Nov. 2. In his statements he essentially repeated what he has said ever since coming into office in January 2003. He is also essentially repeating remarks made by O'Neill, and by President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin, now chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), and Lawrence Summers and by Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton's first Treasury Secretary, before that.
While the policy never changes--at least in rhetoric--the value of the dollar against major currencies certainly has. In the last week, the euro hit an all-time high of $1.30 (meaning a dollar bought just 0.77 euros, 35% less than four years ago).
It all seems a tad confusing, but specialists have no trouble deciphering Snow's meaning.
"[The strong dollar policy] is an implicit compact with the market not to say anything unpredictable," says Daniel Katzive, an economist who specializes in foreign exchange strategies at UBS (nyse: UBS - news - people ) in Stamford, Conn. Whenever the dollar weakens, as it has been, Snow "will always say 'strong dollar' because to say anything else would be dangerous."
While the dollar--though forever strong--has been falling, the U.S. trade deficit has continued to get worse. The difference between U.S. exports and imports grew from $380 billion in 2000 to $519 billion in 2003. More remarkable, in recent years, the value of U.S. exports, adjusted for inflation, actually declined, though that trend has reversed itself in recent quarters. (See: "So Long, Don Evans.")
This is a big problem for U.S. manufacturers, and the National Association of Manufacturers is one group that has objected to U.S. dollar policy, saying it has reduced America's international competitiveness and its share of world exports. While the U.S. currency has declined against the euro and, to a lesser extent, the Japanese yen, it has declined much less compared to other Asian currencies, notably China's, which tend to be more "managed." (Some leading exporters like Boeing (nyse: BA - news - people ), Caterpillar (nyse: CAT - news - people ) and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) have seen their fortunes rise recently, but the share prices of other top multinationals like Coca Cola (nyse: KO - news - people ) and IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) have declined.)
The trade deficit has continued to expand even as the dollar weakened. "The sensitivity of the trade deficit to currency movements is very weak," Katzive says. Though owing to the large and growing deficit, most economists, including UBS, expect the dollar's slide to continue. Thus the strong dollar will be weaker, and Snow will like it just fine.
Dan Ackman, 11.15.04, 9:55 AM ET
NEW YORK - Once a year or so we like to check in on the dollar to find out if it is strong. Inevitably it is, but it is strong in different ways each time.
More From Dan Ackman
Four years ago we had a strong dollar that bought about 1.19 euros. Two years later, by mid-2002--around the time that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was later fired, was wondering publicly about the strong dollar policy--the dollar was still strong, and it could buy .91 euros. Today, a dollar buys about .78 euros. Technically, the dollar is "weaker" than is has been in recent years. Officially, though, and as a matter of policy, the dollar is still strong.
Today in Dublin, O'Neill's successor John Snow said, "Our policy on the dollar is well known. We support a strong dollar. A strong dollar is in America's interest." That was the second thing Snow said, according to reporters traveling with him on his European tour. The first thing he said was "I've had a tradition of never commenting on the relative exchange value of the dollar." The second comment seems, in a general way, to contradict the first comment. Next he said currency values should be set in open markets: "Markets are driven by fundamentals...and fundamentals are best determined by the operation of open, competitive markets," he said on Monday.
These are Snow's first remarks on the currency since George W. Bush was re-elected president on Nov. 2. In his statements he essentially repeated what he has said ever since coming into office in January 2003. He is also essentially repeating remarks made by O'Neill, and by President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin, now chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), and Lawrence Summers and by Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton's first Treasury Secretary, before that.
While the policy never changes--at least in rhetoric--the value of the dollar against major currencies certainly has. In the last week, the euro hit an all-time high of $1.30 (meaning a dollar bought just 0.77 euros, 35% less than four years ago).
It all seems a tad confusing, but specialists have no trouble deciphering Snow's meaning.
"[The strong dollar policy] is an implicit compact with the market not to say anything unpredictable," says Daniel Katzive, an economist who specializes in foreign exchange strategies at UBS (nyse: UBS - news - people ) in Stamford, Conn. Whenever the dollar weakens, as it has been, Snow "will always say 'strong dollar' because to say anything else would be dangerous."
While the dollar--though forever strong--has been falling, the U.S. trade deficit has continued to get worse. The difference between U.S. exports and imports grew from $380 billion in 2000 to $519 billion in 2003. More remarkable, in recent years, the value of U.S. exports, adjusted for inflation, actually declined, though that trend has reversed itself in recent quarters. (See: "So Long, Don Evans.")
This is a big problem for U.S. manufacturers, and the National Association of Manufacturers is one group that has objected to U.S. dollar policy, saying it has reduced America's international competitiveness and its share of world exports. While the U.S. currency has declined against the euro and, to a lesser extent, the Japanese yen, it has declined much less compared to other Asian currencies, notably China's, which tend to be more "managed." (Some leading exporters like Boeing (nyse: BA - news - people ), Caterpillar (nyse: CAT - news - people ) and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) have seen their fortunes rise recently, but the share prices of other top multinationals like Coca Cola (nyse: KO - news - people ) and IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) have declined.)
The trade deficit has continued to expand even as the dollar weakened. "The sensitivity of the trade deficit to currency movements is very weak," Katzive says. Though owing to the large and growing deficit, most economists, including UBS, expect the dollar's slide to continue. Thus the strong dollar will be weaker, and Snow will like it just fine.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Thursday, November 04, 2004
http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004/11/four-more-years-aka-take-that-you-sons.html
http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004/11/four-more-years-aka-take-that-you-sons.html
This is certainly a super sentiment. I am not sure whether I am more disturbed by this:
"If anyone needs to work to “bring the country together” it’s those on the left who have divided it so badly. Those who sought to destroy this great man should get down upon their knees and beg the victors for mercy. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll let a few of them linger on for the simple reason that they amuse us. My life’s goal is to see the Democratic Party virtually obliterated and left as a rump of people like Stephanie Herseth who both mostly agree with us anyways and are easy on the eyes.
That’s the future of the Democratic Party: providing Republicans with a number of cute (but not that bright) comfort women."
or this:
"Let’s face a hard truth: this was the bitterest Presidential campaign in living memory. The Democrats and their allies staked everything on the defeat of this President. All of the resources they had accumulated over a generation of struggle were thrown into this battle: and they have failed. Despite all of their tricks, despite all of their lies, the people have rejected them. They mean nothing. They are worth nothing. There’s no point in trying to reach out to them because they won’t be reached out to. We’ve got their teeth clutching the sidewalk and out boot above their head. Now’s the time to curb-stomp the bastards."
nope, no fascism here. Just a joyous celebration of democracy in action. god bless america.
This is really quite scary and it seems to me that, despite all the rhetoric of the neoliberal cohort in the administration, there is a vast number of people in the country who could care less about foriegn policy and are perfectly happy with good old fashioned bigotry as the main motivation behind their electoral outlooks. This oversight seems to be a continuation of the misunderstanding much of the rest of the country has about what is important to all those folks in the red states--and what they are willing to support to get it. Perhaps not explicitly "curb stomping" but certainly its political equivalent.
The Republican party is mostly attempting to be both a forward looking party based on a re-articulation of liberalism (at least where it is convenient) and a conservative party, hell bent on restricting liberty wherever it doesn't fit with their values. Aside from our own organizing, it seems that the best thing that can happen in the next four years is that this deep division, this fundamental internal contradiction, will encounter its own dialectical implosion and the Dems can truly take hold of liberalism as a value (a moral value even) and begin to peel off more of the Republicans that don't want the constitution replaced by the bible (assuming there are some). In the long run, it may be very good that Arnold won in CA because it is only that contingency of Repubs which gives the party its "moderate" appeal--and who have any hope of winning in the next four years.
This is, of course, assuming that American society on the whole doesn't drift any further to the right. This depends on what we should only understand as a hegemonic struggle to keep whatever shred of Enlightenment rationality and traditional liberalism alive as ideologies in themselves. At this point, the left has to understand that all of their beliefs are ultimately founded on those premises. The problems we have with them are almost all based on what we take for granted as "rational" meaning that form of rationality that we inherited from the Enlightenment and is every day being challenged when it doesn't gel with Evangelical interpretations of the bible. In order for a claim that these theocrats are irrational, we must keep the ground we stand on, problematic as it is, logocentric as it is, from being pulled out from under us. Otherwise, we are just party to our own extinction and the next fifty years may very well be a clash of fundamentalisms reminescent of the crusades. I have no doubt which class of society will get the boot first and it isn't the anti-intellectuals.
This is true not only for our own country, but for countries around the world up against their own forms of fundamentalist fascism. As we halt the retrenchment on enlightenment rationality in our own country, we should simultaneously be looking for similar traditions in those that face much more entrenched foes in their own cultures.
Polanyi predicted/observed that the double movement that society would make would be economic in character in response to the ascendency of the free market liberalism. But this attempted defense, he proposed, wasn't really about economics. The free market, in many ways, provided some material benefits in the long run. The protections were there to keep the market from overrunning society and wreaking destruction on established cultures. He considered fascism, isolationism and nationalism to be the final consequences of a scientific brand of economics that couldn't account for labor, land or money as anything more than common commodities. Going off gold was part of the same movement that ultimately produced WWII and the rise of fascism of one form or another in, according to him, many countries around the world in which it is not normally considered, namely, the US where FDR attempted to take complete control over the economy and its social role.
The conjuncture we seem to be at, though mostly very different, seems to have produced a sort of double movement, but this time society doesn't see the economy as the main culprit of the production of cultural and social degradation thus their cures don't include labor rights challenges to the free market system. These ideologies seem too ingrained and reified to be contested on any large scale. On the other hand, religion is a powerful force and has always been able to get people to overlook their material oppression or degradation to find a more visible object of scorn. Perhaps the only difference here is that, I assume, inlike in past mass xenophobia, this "other" doesn't have a readily available visual signifier. Thus part of the fear is that not only does one not understand it or agree with it, but it is difficult to know where it might be lurking (one of the Oklahoma candidates for the senate Tom Coburn was quoted as saying: lesbianism is “so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”) This kind of fear-mongering is hard to understand for those of us who aren't afraid. But if it is seen by evangelicals (who, incedentally, are only as common in the red states as they aren't in the blue ones which is to say that they are just present in opposite proportions rather than monolithic--this consideration is more to show that I am at least trying not to make too many generalizations) as the main threat, a sort of metonym or synecdoche or good old fashioned scapegoat for the problem they might have otherwise. Thus if there is a double movement in this context, it is inspired not to change the economic policies but to protect itself from what is perceived as the gathering threat which cannot be overlooked. And, more importantly, the threat is ultimately something that is mostly unknown as opposed to mostly reified as a way of life.
This would be an important corrective to Polanyi and somewhat expose the way that, although he is certainly critical of Marxism, his outlook is still heavily influenced by that set of assumptions. The double movement thesis may certainly be true, but the character of the double movement is very much influenced by the available ideologies of the time. The nineteenth century was not only the water that marxism swam in, as foucault said, but its powerful presence in the water at the time affected the water itself. Or, in less moronoic, metaphoric terms, it was a powerful ideology in that context which meant that, when people were looking for some sort of answer to helping their social and cultural envoronment, it was readily avialable. To update that theory for today, the dominance of evangelical, fundamentalist religion in these social environments make it a logical answer to altering their reality--or halting what is perceived to be a cultural degradation. It should also be noted that this is almost the identical process that has taken place in contexts where radical islam has taken hold. this is not just about identity or its disintegration. it is about a fundamental understanding of the world and a process of gathering social legitimacy that enlightenment rationality has all but abandoned simply because it assumed it had won. Though the latter assumption was powerful for a while and postcolonial, postmodern, and poststructural critics find themselves in rare agreement with its oversights and atrocities, scrapping it altogether without something built up in its place could very well bring us back to a world where the arguments are more akin to the dark ages--only with the scientific advances of the enlightenment (i.e. nukes) to help move things along.
So there is some rambling thoughts on that...the last point I would like to remember is that this must be something that we understand in a very global sense because in the same way that Islam is helping to define the middle east, evangelical religion is a powerful force in latin america. the results of that coalition could be quite devastating.
http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004/11/four-more-years-aka-take-that-you-sons.html
This is certainly a super sentiment. I am not sure whether I am more disturbed by this:
"If anyone needs to work to “bring the country together” it’s those on the left who have divided it so badly. Those who sought to destroy this great man should get down upon their knees and beg the victors for mercy. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll let a few of them linger on for the simple reason that they amuse us. My life’s goal is to see the Democratic Party virtually obliterated and left as a rump of people like Stephanie Herseth who both mostly agree with us anyways and are easy on the eyes.
That’s the future of the Democratic Party: providing Republicans with a number of cute (but not that bright) comfort women."
or this:
"Let’s face a hard truth: this was the bitterest Presidential campaign in living memory. The Democrats and their allies staked everything on the defeat of this President. All of the resources they had accumulated over a generation of struggle were thrown into this battle: and they have failed. Despite all of their tricks, despite all of their lies, the people have rejected them. They mean nothing. They are worth nothing. There’s no point in trying to reach out to them because they won’t be reached out to. We’ve got their teeth clutching the sidewalk and out boot above their head. Now’s the time to curb-stomp the bastards."
nope, no fascism here. Just a joyous celebration of democracy in action. god bless america.
This is really quite scary and it seems to me that, despite all the rhetoric of the neoliberal cohort in the administration, there is a vast number of people in the country who could care less about foriegn policy and are perfectly happy with good old fashioned bigotry as the main motivation behind their electoral outlooks. This oversight seems to be a continuation of the misunderstanding much of the rest of the country has about what is important to all those folks in the red states--and what they are willing to support to get it. Perhaps not explicitly "curb stomping" but certainly its political equivalent.
The Republican party is mostly attempting to be both a forward looking party based on a re-articulation of liberalism (at least where it is convenient) and a conservative party, hell bent on restricting liberty wherever it doesn't fit with their values. Aside from our own organizing, it seems that the best thing that can happen in the next four years is that this deep division, this fundamental internal contradiction, will encounter its own dialectical implosion and the Dems can truly take hold of liberalism as a value (a moral value even) and begin to peel off more of the Republicans that don't want the constitution replaced by the bible (assuming there are some). In the long run, it may be very good that Arnold won in CA because it is only that contingency of Repubs which gives the party its "moderate" appeal--and who have any hope of winning in the next four years.
This is, of course, assuming that American society on the whole doesn't drift any further to the right. This depends on what we should only understand as a hegemonic struggle to keep whatever shred of Enlightenment rationality and traditional liberalism alive as ideologies in themselves. At this point, the left has to understand that all of their beliefs are ultimately founded on those premises. The problems we have with them are almost all based on what we take for granted as "rational" meaning that form of rationality that we inherited from the Enlightenment and is every day being challenged when it doesn't gel with Evangelical interpretations of the bible. In order for a claim that these theocrats are irrational, we must keep the ground we stand on, problematic as it is, logocentric as it is, from being pulled out from under us. Otherwise, we are just party to our own extinction and the next fifty years may very well be a clash of fundamentalisms reminescent of the crusades. I have no doubt which class of society will get the boot first and it isn't the anti-intellectuals.
This is true not only for our own country, but for countries around the world up against their own forms of fundamentalist fascism. As we halt the retrenchment on enlightenment rationality in our own country, we should simultaneously be looking for similar traditions in those that face much more entrenched foes in their own cultures.
Polanyi predicted/observed that the double movement that society would make would be economic in character in response to the ascendency of the free market liberalism. But this attempted defense, he proposed, wasn't really about economics. The free market, in many ways, provided some material benefits in the long run. The protections were there to keep the market from overrunning society and wreaking destruction on established cultures. He considered fascism, isolationism and nationalism to be the final consequences of a scientific brand of economics that couldn't account for labor, land or money as anything more than common commodities. Going off gold was part of the same movement that ultimately produced WWII and the rise of fascism of one form or another in, according to him, many countries around the world in which it is not normally considered, namely, the US where FDR attempted to take complete control over the economy and its social role.
The conjuncture we seem to be at, though mostly very different, seems to have produced a sort of double movement, but this time society doesn't see the economy as the main culprit of the production of cultural and social degradation thus their cures don't include labor rights challenges to the free market system. These ideologies seem too ingrained and reified to be contested on any large scale. On the other hand, religion is a powerful force and has always been able to get people to overlook their material oppression or degradation to find a more visible object of scorn. Perhaps the only difference here is that, I assume, inlike in past mass xenophobia, this "other" doesn't have a readily available visual signifier. Thus part of the fear is that not only does one not understand it or agree with it, but it is difficult to know where it might be lurking (one of the Oklahoma candidates for the senate Tom Coburn was quoted as saying: lesbianism is “so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”) This kind of fear-mongering is hard to understand for those of us who aren't afraid. But if it is seen by evangelicals (who, incedentally, are only as common in the red states as they aren't in the blue ones which is to say that they are just present in opposite proportions rather than monolithic--this consideration is more to show that I am at least trying not to make too many generalizations) as the main threat, a sort of metonym or synecdoche or good old fashioned scapegoat for the problem they might have otherwise. Thus if there is a double movement in this context, it is inspired not to change the economic policies but to protect itself from what is perceived as the gathering threat which cannot be overlooked. And, more importantly, the threat is ultimately something that is mostly unknown as opposed to mostly reified as a way of life.
This would be an important corrective to Polanyi and somewhat expose the way that, although he is certainly critical of Marxism, his outlook is still heavily influenced by that set of assumptions. The double movement thesis may certainly be true, but the character of the double movement is very much influenced by the available ideologies of the time. The nineteenth century was not only the water that marxism swam in, as foucault said, but its powerful presence in the water at the time affected the water itself. Or, in less moronoic, metaphoric terms, it was a powerful ideology in that context which meant that, when people were looking for some sort of answer to helping their social and cultural envoronment, it was readily avialable. To update that theory for today, the dominance of evangelical, fundamentalist religion in these social environments make it a logical answer to altering their reality--or halting what is perceived to be a cultural degradation. It should also be noted that this is almost the identical process that has taken place in contexts where radical islam has taken hold. this is not just about identity or its disintegration. it is about a fundamental understanding of the world and a process of gathering social legitimacy that enlightenment rationality has all but abandoned simply because it assumed it had won. Though the latter assumption was powerful for a while and postcolonial, postmodern, and poststructural critics find themselves in rare agreement with its oversights and atrocities, scrapping it altogether without something built up in its place could very well bring us back to a world where the arguments are more akin to the dark ages--only with the scientific advances of the enlightenment (i.e. nukes) to help move things along.
So there is some rambling thoughts on that...the last point I would like to remember is that this must be something that we understand in a very global sense because in the same way that Islam is helping to define the middle east, evangelical religion is a powerful force in latin america. the results of that coalition could be quite devastating.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Today sucks. A crushing defeat, not because Kerry lost but because George Bush won. He has lied and denied his way through an outstanding centralization of power and a fundamental reordering of international and domestic policy. I had faith that people would see through this guy even as they accepted Kerry as less than perfect. This is, in hindsight, a difficult position to ask others to take and it is much more palatable to simply expect that the stories of Bush's shortcomings are all politically motivated and vote for the guy who seems to be in charge. But I am not going to waste too much time psychoanalyzing such an inexplicable phenomenon. Bush will be president for four more years. This makes me feel completely defeated and alienated by this country. There may be two Americas, but when a president consistently ignores the one you're a part of, it makes it hard to accept his leadership. There was no way for this election to be anything but divisive. I just didn't expect it to make me feel divided from my formally confident self. The difference between the way I feel today and the way I felt a week ago (after having watched the response to Eminem's new vid--foolish fantasies multiplying) is something I wasn't prepared for. And the gloating of the "other side" is incomprehensible. I can barely be angry at it because I have a hard time understanding how they can truly believe the things that they claim. It was just dirty politics for a while, but now it seems everyone should just admit that most of it was based on lies.
Monday, November 01, 2004
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Monday, October 25, 2004
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Some advertising collections for the vis cult class
The Gender Ads Project
and though it's mostly british ads,
http://www.visit4info.com/
and
http://www.creativeclub.co.uk/
http://ad-rag.com/
http://www.adcritic.com/
http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php
http://dt.prohosting.com/70s/video/video.html
http://dt.prohosting.com/70s/adulttv/adulttv.html
Not just ads but other archives:
http://www.coudal.com/moom.php
The Gender Ads Project
and though it's mostly british ads,
http://www.visit4info.com/
and
http://www.creativeclub.co.uk/
http://ad-rag.com/
http://www.adcritic.com/
http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php
http://dt.prohosting.com/70s/video/video.html
http://dt.prohosting.com/70s/adulttv/adulttv.html
Not just ads but other archives:
http://www.coudal.com/moom.php
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | Joseph Stiglitz: Bush is dead wrong: "The resounding answer is that Bush is to blame. Every president inherits a legacy. The economy was entering a downturn when Bush took office, but Clinton also left a huge budget surplus - 2% of GDP - a pot of money with which to finance a robust recovery. But Bush squandered that surplus, converting it into a deficit of 5% of GDP through tax cuts for the rich.
stiglitz on Bush's economic legacy.
stiglitz on Bush's economic legacy.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Blogging Sells, and Sells Out: "But as long as blogs remained on the commercial fringes, the playing field at least was relatively level. Audience was largely a function of reputation � for the frequency or quality or ideological appeal of the blogger's posts. Costs were low, and few bloggers were trying to make a living at it, so money wasn't an issue. It may not have been egalitarian, but it wasn't strictly hierarchical, either."
though it is probably a bit premature, he will ultimately be correct. At this point it would take a lot to create a "tipping blog" from scratch. But then again, it took a long time for people to get to this point.
though it is probably a bit premature, he will ultimately be correct. At this point it would take a lot to create a "tipping blog" from scratch. But then again, it took a long time for people to get to this point.
New Democrat Network
Some really interesting ads--the most vibrant and direct that I have seen--that are geared toward the spanish speaking population. If only there was a movement that was trying to inspire as much hope among english speakers.
other things I would read today i I wasn't reading Habermas...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26BLOGS.html?pagewanted=1 on the blogs covering the converntions and other recent events
http://harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html Naomi Klien on Iraq
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green?ca=ZylnpoS9tWz%2B384zl5EGISsgVsrssaIe5iIZmRrDHug%3D on "bush's brain"
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5240190 on bush assertions re: Iraq
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6098633/site/newsweek more screed on blogs
http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary092704.asp resonding to the other two articles on blogs--all of these from Sully
Some really interesting ads--the most vibrant and direct that I have seen--that are geared toward the spanish speaking population. If only there was a movement that was trying to inspire as much hope among english speakers.
other things I would read today i I wasn't reading Habermas...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26BLOGS.html?pagewanted=1 on the blogs covering the converntions and other recent events
http://harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html Naomi Klien on Iraq
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green?ca=ZylnpoS9tWz%2B384zl5EGISsgVsrssaIe5iIZmRrDHug%3D on "bush's brain"
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5240190 on bush assertions re: Iraq
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6098633/site/newsweek more screed on blogs
http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary092704.asp resonding to the other two articles on blogs--all of these from Sully
Saturday, September 25, 2004
The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Republicans Admit Mailing Campaign Literature Saying Liberals Will Ban the Bible
Can't believe that they actually admitted they did it.
Can't believe that they actually admitted they did it.
New media era dawns in U.S. - 09/22/04
It is so strange that these articles are only happening now. This phenomenon has been happening for years and only now are the big media picking up on it. Nevertheless, what is so absent from any of these is any admission that this is still affecting only a small amount of people--and that the people it is affecting are predominantly the more wealthy members of the culture.
It is so strange that these articles are only happening now. This phenomenon has been happening for years and only now are the big media picking up on it. Nevertheless, what is so absent from any of these is any admission that this is still affecting only a small amount of people--and that the people it is affecting are predominantly the more wealthy members of the culture.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Read Thomas Hazlett article for class today and was a bit surprised at the tack it took. I tried very hard not to scoff at much of the first part which speaks about the only problem the FRC was assigned to solve was the problem of transmission overlap. Of course his minor argument is that prior to the court decision that invalidated the 1912 ruling that allowed the secretary of commerce to regulate the spectrum, Hoover (in that role) was pretty much letting the market take care of it and not having to use the big boot of government that often to keep things in order.
I was fairly certain that he was going to agree with Coase (1958?9) that the auction would have been the best approach to redistributing the wavelengths and that it would have been much more efficient to simply sell spots on the dial to the highest bidder, thus reducing the possibility for "rent seeking" behaviour on the part of networks or regulators. This is the party line and I expected him to follow it. Surprisingly, he was much more interested in looking critically at this moment and, except for his unwillnigness to admit the inequities of power among the "interest groups" involved (this is where McChesney is really useful in that he focuses on the civil society aspect, however ineffectual it actually was) Hazlett ultimately has a fairly rich understanding of what went on. It was really refreshing to see that it is possible to employ those methodological tools and still come up with an ideologically complex understanding of a social, political event.
And he also inadvertently indicates something that is often overlooked in this debate, it was always about the audience and the legitimacy that an institution builds for itself within that audience. He uses the analogy of Homesteading, which is really politically problematic when we think of the way that practice has been used (somewhere between squatting and genocide) but nonetheless, he is right that from that perspective handing out bandwidth to the major networks made the most sense. And, furthermore, both he and McChesney (in the chapters we read for today anyway) say that one of the fundamental weaknesses of the movement for non-profit media allocations is that those people didn't really have a product to present yet. It makes projects like Pacifica and Democracy Now! so much more important in our current day because they are doing what these eariler folks seem to have been unable to do--and what more people should be doing. It is so easy to bitch about all of this, to look at the problems and get pissed off. But if there are people out there--or if we believe at all that things on TV begin to create their own demand--who are interested in alternative ideas, then why not just use the model that exists instead of fighting tooth and nail to get someone else to pay for it. Ultimately that is what it will take. Except for the internet (and even this takes precious labor time as well as al sorts of energy) all of these forms of media production will cost money--to get it produced, distributed, etc. And if the goal is to reach as many people as possible, our ancestors have already built this great big megaphone for us to use. The bandwidth allocation is small potatoes compared to the problems of funding the adventure until you can get some public (i.e. popular) support for it. If we have faith in people to really be ready and willing to hear the ideas we think should be out there, then we should do something about it. There is obviously an issue to be resolved, and watching the FCC ownership rules to keep the consolidation from getting any more insane is imperative, but we should also make the media change ourselves rather than begging them to do it b/c we happen to be loud and, sometimes, smart.
I was fairly certain that he was going to agree with Coase (1958?9) that the auction would have been the best approach to redistributing the wavelengths and that it would have been much more efficient to simply sell spots on the dial to the highest bidder, thus reducing the possibility for "rent seeking" behaviour on the part of networks or regulators. This is the party line and I expected him to follow it. Surprisingly, he was much more interested in looking critically at this moment and, except for his unwillnigness to admit the inequities of power among the "interest groups" involved (this is where McChesney is really useful in that he focuses on the civil society aspect, however ineffectual it actually was) Hazlett ultimately has a fairly rich understanding of what went on. It was really refreshing to see that it is possible to employ those methodological tools and still come up with an ideologically complex understanding of a social, political event.
And he also inadvertently indicates something that is often overlooked in this debate, it was always about the audience and the legitimacy that an institution builds for itself within that audience. He uses the analogy of Homesteading, which is really politically problematic when we think of the way that practice has been used (somewhere between squatting and genocide) but nonetheless, he is right that from that perspective handing out bandwidth to the major networks made the most sense. And, furthermore, both he and McChesney (in the chapters we read for today anyway) say that one of the fundamental weaknesses of the movement for non-profit media allocations is that those people didn't really have a product to present yet. It makes projects like Pacifica and Democracy Now! so much more important in our current day because they are doing what these eariler folks seem to have been unable to do--and what more people should be doing. It is so easy to bitch about all of this, to look at the problems and get pissed off. But if there are people out there--or if we believe at all that things on TV begin to create their own demand--who are interested in alternative ideas, then why not just use the model that exists instead of fighting tooth and nail to get someone else to pay for it. Ultimately that is what it will take. Except for the internet (and even this takes precious labor time as well as al sorts of energy) all of these forms of media production will cost money--to get it produced, distributed, etc. And if the goal is to reach as many people as possible, our ancestors have already built this great big megaphone for us to use. The bandwidth allocation is small potatoes compared to the problems of funding the adventure until you can get some public (i.e. popular) support for it. If we have faith in people to really be ready and willing to hear the ideas we think should be out there, then we should do something about it. There is obviously an issue to be resolved, and watching the FCC ownership rules to keep the consolidation from getting any more insane is imperative, but we should also make the media change ourselves rather than begging them to do it b/c we happen to be loud and, sometimes, smart.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
Monday, September 13, 2004
Friday, September 10, 2004
AlterNet: DrugReporter: 'Crack Babies' Talk Back
This is a somewhat groundbreaking story I think. I have read about the Crack baby myth, but usually I take it with a grain of salt because the critics seem to be so angry at the Reagan administration for the drug policies that came out of this era. The stories of these kids--most of which would probably be about my sister's age now--are important for us to hear at this point when the spectacle of the next horrifying media phenomenon is just around the corner. The only problem is that this article doesn't connect this with the larger political scene and the mandatory drug sentences set for crack which have caused the prison population to explode--and, very likely, caused almost as much family grief as the drugs did in the first place. Odds that the mass media will really pick up on this story: slim
This is a somewhat groundbreaking story I think. I have read about the Crack baby myth, but usually I take it with a grain of salt because the critics seem to be so angry at the Reagan administration for the drug policies that came out of this era. The stories of these kids--most of which would probably be about my sister's age now--are important for us to hear at this point when the spectacle of the next horrifying media phenomenon is just around the corner. The only problem is that this article doesn't connect this with the larger political scene and the mandatory drug sentences set for crack which have caused the prison population to explode--and, very likely, caused almost as much family grief as the drugs did in the first place. Odds that the mass media will really pick up on this story: slim
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Welcome to anncoulter.com!: "Which candidate will best protect America from terrorist attack? Hint: It's not the guy whose running mate (sounding so much like Sean Hayes from 'Will and Grace' it was eerie) said their message to the terrorists was: 'We will destroy youuuuuuu!' "
yet another example of Ann Coulter and the right using some thinly veiled homophobia to criticize the Democrats. It's all just so fascist I don't know how they get away with it. I guess when you are making a joke it's okay to talk that way--you can take a joke, can't you [wuss]? It's just so tremendous to have bullies in charge of the most powerful nation in the world. I'm sure everyone sleeps better knowing that. I sure do.
yet another example of Ann Coulter and the right using some thinly veiled homophobia to criticize the Democrats. It's all just so fascist I don't know how they get away with it. I guess when you are making a joke it's okay to talk that way--you can take a joke, can't you [wuss]? It's just so tremendous to have bullies in charge of the most powerful nation in the world. I'm sure everyone sleeps better knowing that. I sure do.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Friday, September 03, 2004
French Muslims take off scarves
Like women in Iran in the early 1980s who put them on as a statement in defiance to the US feminists telling them to take them off, French Muslims are taking off their scarves in solidarity with their countrymen--in other words, where there might have been more internal protests about the scarves, as there were last spring, the hostage situation actually kept the muslims in france from doing what they might otherwise have done. People really are unpredictable.
Like women in Iran in the early 1980s who put them on as a statement in defiance to the US feminists telling them to take them off, French Muslims are taking off their scarves in solidarity with their countrymen--in other words, where there might have been more internal protests about the scarves, as there were last spring, the hostage situation actually kept the muslims in france from doing what they might otherwise have done. People really are unpredictable.
Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | A terrible lesson from a classroom in Beslan:
"Putin pins the blame for the escalating crisis, perhaps the gravest of his presidency, not on home-grown Chechen fighters but, primarily, on an international Islamist conspiracy linked to al-Qaida.
The evidence for his contention is thin and often contradictory. But one thing is undoubtedly true. Since plunging recklessly back into Chechnya in 1994, Putin, his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and the once proud Red Army have caused such untold misery, such rank injustice, such fury and despair that, like the Americans in Iraq, they created a breeding ground and magnet for the religious extremists they struggle to extirpate. "
An interesting analogy. The fact that both Russia and Israel have suffered some severe terrorist attacks in recent weeks has been raised as evidence that their harsh methods--reminescent of the premptive war of the 2002 strategic doctrine of the US--are actually working against the ultimate goal of ending terrorism in those areas. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan seems hopeful that the French traitors of the Iraq war will finally be brought into the fold now that two of their journalists have been taken captive. He is hoping that the preemptive front will expand and France will stop being a tool for the Jihadists to use against "us".
As compelling as Sullivan's take is--and as sinister as the dispatch is from these would be terrorists--the difference is that, as usual, he is only considering this from a political and ideological level, ignoring completely the material realities. Ideology isn't something people put on like their socks. It is something that only becomes attractive when it seems to explain where you are. If Al Queda operatives are active in Chechnya the only way that their extremism is able to take hold in such a foreign land is that there is the "fury and despair" that was there first. it is much more neat and pat and easy to dismiss as lunacy and criminality when one can assume that everything else is equal except for the way people interpret the world; if these rebels would just sit down and read the Bible, think about Adam Smith, and have faith that someday they'll get a leg up, well they'd just be as happy as clams because, other than murder and repression by an occupying army, what do they really have to complain about?
The French journalist issue actually seems to show more how fragmented this movement that is supposedly the front united against us. We don't really know anything about the people who are holding these journalists (nor do we really about the people in the school--of whom, evidently, over 100 are now dead, including children, thanks, in part to the blunt instrument of "storming the castle" that the Russians used: disgusting. A replay of their use of what turned out to be lethal gas in the theatre two years ago. Gosh if the Russians keep using that doctrine of overwhelming force that is supposed to work so well in dealing with terrorists, you'd think the terrorists woudl have stopped by now. Maybe there is actually something that happens before and after the terrorism that is a clue?) The problem is that, like communism before it, the ideas that we are up against don't have to be centrally dictated. These ideas begin to take hold in areas where there is little else to give people hope. This doesn't excuse their actions, but if we ignore these ideas as a possible explainations and neglect to consider new solutions--or additional solutions--then we have no hope of ever setting this unbalanced world back on its axis.
I am beginning to think that our leaders have figured out the same thing that third world leaders have been exploiting for a long time: that as unsightly as these terrorists are, they are very useful in centralizing control domestically. We have little hope for stability if instability is meant to guarantee the position of those in power. If we are supposed to keep the same party just because we are afraid to do otherwise, that doesn't give us much hope for change in the national leadership or even in the world at large.
It also points to the biggest problem I have with all of these people in charge right now: they really lack imagination. For some reason, I am supposed to believe that the only two options we have are capitalism and communism (or Giddens' "third way" which is basically capitalism but with a happy face.) Isn't that what people were told 100 years ago? Have we really made so little progress that we have nothing better to offer? I don't agree with all the things that are said at venues like the World Social Forum, but I do agree that the new mantra for the 21st century has to be "Amother World is Possible." Bush and the Republicans want us to believe that political liberty is the only thing that has made America what it is today. Perhaps this is why they also seem to believe that the only thing driving our enemies is ideas, bad ideas. We don't need to change anything in the material distribution: we just need to reiterate some different ideas. We don't need to face any material realities or confront hard questions about how much of Iraq our corporations should own: all they need is "liberty." And, like everything else, you don't need to present any evidence: if you say it, it is so. Orwellian era of Performative Politics has arrived in full and people seem to be eating it up.
"Putin pins the blame for the escalating crisis, perhaps the gravest of his presidency, not on home-grown Chechen fighters but, primarily, on an international Islamist conspiracy linked to al-Qaida.
The evidence for his contention is thin and often contradictory. But one thing is undoubtedly true. Since plunging recklessly back into Chechnya in 1994, Putin, his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and the once proud Red Army have caused such untold misery, such rank injustice, such fury and despair that, like the Americans in Iraq, they created a breeding ground and magnet for the religious extremists they struggle to extirpate. "
An interesting analogy. The fact that both Russia and Israel have suffered some severe terrorist attacks in recent weeks has been raised as evidence that their harsh methods--reminescent of the premptive war of the 2002 strategic doctrine of the US--are actually working against the ultimate goal of ending terrorism in those areas. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan seems hopeful that the French traitors of the Iraq war will finally be brought into the fold now that two of their journalists have been taken captive. He is hoping that the preemptive front will expand and France will stop being a tool for the Jihadists to use against "us".
As compelling as Sullivan's take is--and as sinister as the dispatch is from these would be terrorists--the difference is that, as usual, he is only considering this from a political and ideological level, ignoring completely the material realities. Ideology isn't something people put on like their socks. It is something that only becomes attractive when it seems to explain where you are. If Al Queda operatives are active in Chechnya the only way that their extremism is able to take hold in such a foreign land is that there is the "fury and despair" that was there first. it is much more neat and pat and easy to dismiss as lunacy and criminality when one can assume that everything else is equal except for the way people interpret the world; if these rebels would just sit down and read the Bible, think about Adam Smith, and have faith that someday they'll get a leg up, well they'd just be as happy as clams because, other than murder and repression by an occupying army, what do they really have to complain about?
The French journalist issue actually seems to show more how fragmented this movement that is supposedly the front united against us. We don't really know anything about the people who are holding these journalists (nor do we really about the people in the school--of whom, evidently, over 100 are now dead, including children, thanks, in part to the blunt instrument of "storming the castle" that the Russians used: disgusting. A replay of their use of what turned out to be lethal gas in the theatre two years ago. Gosh if the Russians keep using that doctrine of overwhelming force that is supposed to work so well in dealing with terrorists, you'd think the terrorists woudl have stopped by now. Maybe there is actually something that happens before and after the terrorism that is a clue?) The problem is that, like communism before it, the ideas that we are up against don't have to be centrally dictated. These ideas begin to take hold in areas where there is little else to give people hope. This doesn't excuse their actions, but if we ignore these ideas as a possible explainations and neglect to consider new solutions--or additional solutions--then we have no hope of ever setting this unbalanced world back on its axis.
I am beginning to think that our leaders have figured out the same thing that third world leaders have been exploiting for a long time: that as unsightly as these terrorists are, they are very useful in centralizing control domestically. We have little hope for stability if instability is meant to guarantee the position of those in power. If we are supposed to keep the same party just because we are afraid to do otherwise, that doesn't give us much hope for change in the national leadership or even in the world at large.
It also points to the biggest problem I have with all of these people in charge right now: they really lack imagination. For some reason, I am supposed to believe that the only two options we have are capitalism and communism (or Giddens' "third way" which is basically capitalism but with a happy face.) Isn't that what people were told 100 years ago? Have we really made so little progress that we have nothing better to offer? I don't agree with all the things that are said at venues like the World Social Forum, but I do agree that the new mantra for the 21st century has to be "Amother World is Possible." Bush and the Republicans want us to believe that political liberty is the only thing that has made America what it is today. Perhaps this is why they also seem to believe that the only thing driving our enemies is ideas, bad ideas. We don't need to change anything in the material distribution: we just need to reiterate some different ideas. We don't need to face any material realities or confront hard questions about how much of Iraq our corporations should own: all they need is "liberty." And, like everything else, you don't need to present any evidence: if you say it, it is so. Orwellian era of Performative Politics has arrived in full and people seem to be eating it up.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | No 10's silent support for Kerry
"By his manner, his rhetoric and sometimes his actions George Bush has presented to the world an image of America that its friends know is not its true face. That is why those who recognise that American leadership is vital and a force for good in an uncertain world will wish John Kerry well." --Tony Blair's journal Progress from its upcoming Sept. issue
"By his manner, his rhetoric and sometimes his actions George Bush has presented to the world an image of America that its friends know is not its true face. That is why those who recognise that American leadership is vital and a force for good in an uncertain world will wish John Kerry well." --Tony Blair's journal Progress from its upcoming Sept. issue
TomPaine.com - What Ownership Society?
more on the ownership society and how personal debt makes it practically impossible at the current time.
more on the ownership society and how personal debt makes it practically impossible at the current time.
AlterNet: Politics of Risk
On risk society...the difference here is that it points to the way the society itself feels at risk, aka the Culture of Fear that Glassner talks about, where we are basically afraid all the time, but often we are afraid of the wrong things. This of course could never be said in a public forum. Unfortunately, programs for school lunches aren't nearly as newsworthy as military contracts.
The author says that Kerry wants to "democratize risk." Here he misspeaks: Kerry wants to democratize risk management--but only for the risks that most obviously effect every class of people. The real issue if the risk has already been democratized. A few months ago when I was working on the Hummer paper and thinking about the fortress society, I looked at an article in Newsweek in which a mother lamented that her son would have to live in fear. I don't know that I ever really got to the point here, but my first reaction was that her problem wasn't that people had to fear suicide bombers or live with global terrorism--but that she and her children had to live with it. It was something that only "they" had to worry about "over there" and then it was just an unfortunate fact of life, "too bad for them."
But now risk is seen as having been democratized. It isn't of course: people in the third world still have much more to fear than we do. But the appearance of such a democratization is still powerful. But rather than realize just how terrible it is to have this kind of fear in one's daily life, most people, like this mother, just want things to return to the way they were, when people in the global first world had nothing to fear. And the best way to do this, they seem to think, is to create a completely militarized state.
Zell Miller and the Republicans last night--and for most of the week--talk about the need for a strong military force to face "the new threat of terrorism." He gives Kerry trouble for the senator's not voting on certain weapons systems and makes this the example of how Kerry is undermining the fight against terrorism. Nevermind that no one on either side of this nasty rhetorical squabble has bothered to define terrorism or that, in practice, Kerry is really as hawkish as Bush, the problem is that Zell Miller, the codger that he is, seems to believe that huge weapons systems are the way to combat "the new threat of terrorism."
If he wasn't a person in power, just an old man carrying on while sitting in his rocking chair, playing with his teeth, this sentiment would be almost mildly amusing in its nostalgia. As he lists off these weapons systems "the trident missle, the patriot missle, the f-14 tomcat, the f-16 fighting falcon..." one could dismiss his rantings as just that: the things that senile people dwell on so much that they think you too must agree and feel their anguish. Unfortunately, Zell Miller does have some power, or at least enough to give him a national platform on which to recite his litany of products generously produced for us by the military industrial complex.
His laundry list is supposed to make us see big holes in the fortress, to give us the feeling that we have these problems because we don't have enough big guns pointed outwards. This is, of course, the fortress society thinking. And the desire is for us to return to the way things were before, when we could count on mutually ensured destruction to keep anyone from disagreeing with us in any meaningful way.
But these enormous defense systems are largely unnecessary when your primary foe is a person willing to die for their cause and using a box cutter. These old school solutions to external threats posed by rival states are the lumbering artifacts of wars gone by. Unfortunately, the momentum of the corporations that make these systems will make it impossible to fight the war we need to fight--if it can be considered a war at all. The only solutions this administration has are the big industry answers to the threat of thermonuclear war. Obviously this threat is still real--and the more we piss off our allies the more we risk facing a state with nuclear weapons in the near future--but that is not the "new threat" posed by the terrorists.
In the cold war there was always the accompanied war "for hearts and minds." This, it was understood, was essential to combatting the war of ideologies abroad. But this war of hearts and minds wasn't only fought in propaganda, there was also an awareness that actions mattered as well. In one of Nixon's campaign commercials for his 1960 bid, he had this to say about the struggle for civil rights:
I want to talk to you for a moment about civil rights, equal rights for all our citizens: why must we vigorously defend them
On risk society...the difference here is that it points to the way the society itself feels at risk, aka the Culture of Fear that Glassner talks about, where we are basically afraid all the time, but often we are afraid of the wrong things. This of course could never be said in a public forum. Unfortunately, programs for school lunches aren't nearly as newsworthy as military contracts.
The author says that Kerry wants to "democratize risk." Here he misspeaks: Kerry wants to democratize risk management--but only for the risks that most obviously effect every class of people. The real issue if the risk has already been democratized. A few months ago when I was working on the Hummer paper and thinking about the fortress society, I looked at an article in Newsweek in which a mother lamented that her son would have to live in fear. I don't know that I ever really got to the point here, but my first reaction was that her problem wasn't that people had to fear suicide bombers or live with global terrorism--but that she and her children had to live with it. It was something that only "they" had to worry about "over there" and then it was just an unfortunate fact of life, "too bad for them."
But now risk is seen as having been democratized. It isn't of course: people in the third world still have much more to fear than we do. But the appearance of such a democratization is still powerful. But rather than realize just how terrible it is to have this kind of fear in one's daily life, most people, like this mother, just want things to return to the way they were, when people in the global first world had nothing to fear. And the best way to do this, they seem to think, is to create a completely militarized state.
Zell Miller and the Republicans last night--and for most of the week--talk about the need for a strong military force to face "the new threat of terrorism." He gives Kerry trouble for the senator's not voting on certain weapons systems and makes this the example of how Kerry is undermining the fight against terrorism. Nevermind that no one on either side of this nasty rhetorical squabble has bothered to define terrorism or that, in practice, Kerry is really as hawkish as Bush, the problem is that Zell Miller, the codger that he is, seems to believe that huge weapons systems are the way to combat "the new threat of terrorism."
If he wasn't a person in power, just an old man carrying on while sitting in his rocking chair, playing with his teeth, this sentiment would be almost mildly amusing in its nostalgia. As he lists off these weapons systems "the trident missle, the patriot missle, the f-14 tomcat, the f-16 fighting falcon..." one could dismiss his rantings as just that: the things that senile people dwell on so much that they think you too must agree and feel their anguish. Unfortunately, Zell Miller does have some power, or at least enough to give him a national platform on which to recite his litany of products generously produced for us by the military industrial complex.
His laundry list is supposed to make us see big holes in the fortress, to give us the feeling that we have these problems because we don't have enough big guns pointed outwards. This is, of course, the fortress society thinking. And the desire is for us to return to the way things were before, when we could count on mutually ensured destruction to keep anyone from disagreeing with us in any meaningful way.
But these enormous defense systems are largely unnecessary when your primary foe is a person willing to die for their cause and using a box cutter. These old school solutions to external threats posed by rival states are the lumbering artifacts of wars gone by. Unfortunately, the momentum of the corporations that make these systems will make it impossible to fight the war we need to fight--if it can be considered a war at all. The only solutions this administration has are the big industry answers to the threat of thermonuclear war. Obviously this threat is still real--and the more we piss off our allies the more we risk facing a state with nuclear weapons in the near future--but that is not the "new threat" posed by the terrorists.
In the cold war there was always the accompanied war "for hearts and minds." This, it was understood, was essential to combatting the war of ideologies abroad. But this war of hearts and minds wasn't only fought in propaganda, there was also an awareness that actions mattered as well. In one of Nixon's campaign commercials for his 1960 bid, he had this to say about the struggle for civil rights:
I want to talk to you for a moment about civil rights, equal rights for all our citizens: why must we vigorously defend them
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: A No-Win Situation
Okay so I just rambled on for hours trying to say what Krugman just did in his 500 words or so. I guess that's why I'm in grad school and he's the NYT columnist.
Okay so I just rambled on for hours trying to say what Krugman just did in his 500 words or so. I guess that's why I'm in grad school and he's the NYT columnist.
AlterNet: Election 2004: Grand Old Attacks on Michael Moore
Nichols is right here that McCain's jab at Moore is certainly something unprecedented. I sincerely doubt that it will make any hardcore Republican go to see it, however, because it has already been branded as something to be avoided. Perhaps if people were exposed to it in any sort of objective-ish setting, they would feel a bit different. I think it would just be interesting for people on the right, who accuse the mass media of being leftist and anti-Bush to actually see what something like that looks like, i.e. to see what it would look like if someone actually was all of these things. Perhaps they won't see the distinction in any meaningful way, but after seeing Moore's film, it is difficult to turn on ABC or CNN and think of it as propaganda for a left wing agenda. It is certainly sensationalistic and dumbs down the conversation--but that is just what the pro-war crowd wanted before the war: black and white, with us or against us, do this now or face a mushroom cloud, etc. NOW they are asking for nuance, for a balanced account of "our" progress in Iraq (the fact that it is usually framed as "our" is telling in itself). I don't subscribe to the Postman theory that TV is incapable of this knid of discussion simply by its virtues as a medium: I think it has more to do with its economic needs of competing with _Fear Factor_ and _Survivor_. This, of course doesn't explain why we aren't reading about Iraqi's surviving life drinking water from a river of sh*t, which is more death defying than eating cockroaches--though I guess less appetizing to show at dinner time. (Susan Douglas actually has some fairly good ideas for Realiy TV shows that haven't been tried yet. She's kidding, but a few of them would be really interesting.)
Anyway, the interesting back and forth between McCain and Moore--who was in the audience, though McCain didn't know it--is also unique, foremost because, in this age when the brilliance of telecommunication is touted, when the President introduces his wife in NY from PA via satellite, we were given an example of how powerful it is to have co-presence, for people who are arguing to occupy the same space. It is becoming rarer these days and makes it much easier to dismiss your opponent as some sort of rogue.
My biggest problem with all of this discussion is that it doesn't get at the conventional wisdom (pun intended) that there was no other way to handle things in Iraq--and that it is okay to give our real reasons for invasion after the fact. It becomes so easy to forget what happened at the time, especially when you have the 1984 history machine out there changing the facts to fit its own needs. The narrative we're asked to accept is that Saddam didn't allow inspectors, that the UN was weak in enforcing it's role, that the opening of Iraq was inevitable (via lifting of sanctions) and that once sanctions were lifted he Iraq would have acquired the weapons we thought they already had. More importantly "everyone" thought that Iraq already had these weapons and we were just as dumbfounded as "everyone" else when we didn't find them. There are, of course, some folks (like the very neo-con Front Page Magazine) that insist we have found WMDs (like 3 or 4--but we should assume there are more where those came from) and that the liberal media is just unable to report these things because they all love Saddam and hate America.
I have seen little evidence that there are any biological or chemical weapons that have been found and I find it not even remotely logical that if there were even a shred of evidence the Bush campaign would be including it in every speech (rather than referring to "WMD related programs" as he did in the state of the union.) Furthermore, the fact that everytime it is mentioned by supporters of the war they say, "we didn't find those, but we did free the Iraqi people," leads me to believe that there is nothing for the really right wingers to rest their claims upon.
Nevertheless, this claim about freeing the Iraqi people seems to be a recurring one. It is ridiculous as a claim at this time when something like 300-500,000 people are in danger of starving to death at the hands of Islamic rebels in Sudan and we are doing almost nothing about it and saying even less about what we could or should do. I am not necessarily an advocate for US intervention around the world, but I do see blatant hipocrisy in a crowd who claims to want to help suffering people AND fight this war against "Jihadistan" and yet they stay away--even rhetorically--from the issue of the Sudan at all costs. (an exemplary exception, again is Front Page Magazine, who claim that it is the liberal human rights organizations who are staying away [an objectively false claim] because they are on the side of radical Islam, aka the new communism.)
But, again I digress, the problem I see with this line of thinking isn't that I want to quibble with how free the Iraqi people are or were, or whether we were the people to do it or this was the time: obviously things weren't awesome under Saddam, obviously many people were happy about getting rid of him; less obvious is how much better they are faring on a day to day level. The real issue is that this wasn't the argument that we presented for going to war: it is an externality. When the president presented the case to the American people, he said it was because Iraq posed a threat, because it had these weapons; when Powell went to the UN, the war was justified on the basis of the threat posed by the WMDs. We didn't try to go to war on the basis of liberating the people of Iraq because that is not how the UN works. The UN is specifically designed to respect the sovereignty of nations.
This, of course has innumerable problems, first of which that it honors obviously oppressive governments with the boon of authority to speak for the people, the resources, and the rights of a state, regardless of how representative they are of the will of that people. From a democratic perspective, this is very problematic. However, it is not enough to simply dismiss this as some sort of bureaucratic nightmare or an ineffective strategy for multilateral cooperation. The attacks on the UN for its implicit support of repressive regimes are completely laughable when made by Americans, Europeans or even Japanese.
Though the UN may give political legitimacy to these regimes, they do it not just so we can all sit around and twiddle our thumbs. This practice of honoring repressive regimes with legitimacy is an old Westphalian tradition that goes back many centuries. And while the UN and its constituent nation-states may grant a government legitimacy, multinational corporations give that government money, support it financially and help it to thrive under this umbrella of legitimacy. The government in Saudi Arabia would have virtually no way to oppress its people if it weren't for the oil revenues that continued to flow into its coffers. The scandal over the UN oil for food program in Iraq, which should be fully investigated, has far less to do with the UN itself as a corrupt organization than with the obscure regime of sanctions we all agreed to impose on Iraq. And if we are to believe that key players in Europe and the US were really ignorant of what was going on until just now, I suppose we should also believe that Richard Nixon wasn't a crook.
But I keep getting away from the point. We never said that freeing the Iraqi people was our mission. That isn't what we said we were gonig there to do. That isn't why many americans agreed to it or believed in it. Fear was used as the primary tactic to rally public support. Freeing the Iraqi people wasn't the argument we presented before the UN because that is not something the UN is designed to do. If it were in the power of the UN to decide when a government can be overthrown, or to agree that a country could overthrow another, without attack, for their own reasons, then the UN would be corrupt. We could have been given the authority to intervene in Iraq for humanitarian reasons. But the fact is that there was no humanitarian crisis in Iraq--or at least not any more so than there had been in the past twenty years. The Kurdish minority was much more in danger across the border in Turkey; in Iraq they were fairly safe thanks in part to the restrictions placed on Saddam by the sanctions. Yes Saddam was a bad guy, but there are lots of bad guys around the world and, believe it or not, that is not necessarily an objective fact. Even America thought Saddam was an okay guy for the first twenty or so years of his reign. That this changed so suddenly should give us some notion of how difficult it is to define "evil" when there are so many different notions of "good."
Unfortunately, most of the pro-war crowd has little doubt that they know the one right way that everyone in the world should be and they have no qualms about imposing that on anyone they can. They actually see their way as the "natural way" and believe that when other regimes are removed, people will naturally revert to the "american way"--except that they won't be allowed to have freedom to do what they want as a country unless the real Americans say it's okay. Somehow these folks have the ability to overlook the sort of dictatorial totalitarian character of this form of action. Even if you agree with the ideas, it is hard to agree with their implementation. Like the Greek empire, it is difficult to extend democracy to other countries against their will. Democracy and empire are incommensurable ideas and the only way that they can seem so is if you overlook the destruction of a culture (good and bad) in favor of seeing only the way that the new culture, post-empire, seems democratic. This has been the favored ideological standpoint of people like Niall Ferguson, who has defended the British Empire for the "civilization" that it brought to places like India.
So these folks are basically mad that the UN isn't designed to give them a blank check to re-make the world in its image. They overlook the fact that the UN was designed to end empires simply because they seemed to be a de-stabilizing factor in the global political economy. That nation-states turn out to be as equally de-stabilizing, should only encourage us to dig deeper for ways to consider global governance, not to revert back to isolationism and imperialism. In one of the more lucid observations about the current war, Johnathan Schell had this to say about the War:
The need for new forms of global governance is inarguable; what form that governance should take is an argument that most neo-liberals don't want to have. They simply want the rest of the world to bow to America as the once and future knig, back on his high horse, dispensing freedom as he (and usually this kind of America would be gendered as "he") sees fit.
This is the kind of America that the republican party wants us to get behind. And to do this, they want us to focus not on the ways that we break with international law to make war or the false pretenses. But that is just here at home. Abroad, they are stuggling--though not very hard, not hard enough--to retain the legitimacy that they might have had in some circles. The whole "beacon of democracy" thing will work only if we can manage to have an uncontested election ourselves this year. The reasons for the war, for anyone who takes the time to remember, are objectively different than Bush, Blair and the other supporters would have us believe. Always reverting to the "freedom" argument, they cover over the "bad intelligence" problem by saying that everyone thought the weapons were there: if we didn't find them, it's not our fault. McCain claims that Saddam threw out or wasn't cooperating with the inspectors. All of these are outright lies.
Though some of the US, UN, and British intelligence pointed to these vast stockholds of WMDs, there was a small group of folks who said there weren't any weapons: the UN weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter--who was withdrawn by the US after Saddam rightfully claimed that the UN was spying for US and Britain--was a weapons inspector who said that there were no weapons. He was simply discredited by the Administration as a child molester, which, regardless of the charges should theoretically have little bearing on his ability to distinguish a barrel of oil from a tub of sarin or anthrax. Hans Blix, who was the head weapons inspector on the ground before BUSH told them to leave because they weren't finding WMDs (go figure), said he didn't think there were any. He f0und a few technical inconsistencies (like some missles that were longer range than they were permitted) but certainly not evidence of the kind of program Powell insisted existed. The international atomic energy comission said that there wasn't evidence of a nuclear program and the two things that inspectors (and Powell and Bush and the Brits) claimed were evidence of the attempt to start a program--the metal tubes and the nigerian uranium--were both discredited by that agency weeks before the war. Finally, the testimony of the Iraqi defector (Saddam's son in law) in the early 1990s, which Powell and others endlessly cited as evidence of the presence of these weapons, actually includes, in the parts they don't talk about, his testimony about how the weapons were all destroyed long before he defected.
And that is just the stuff that I know about and remember. Robert Greenwald's film Uncovered does a much better job of illuminating this silenced dissent in the intelligence community. I won't claim that it says unequivocally that there weren't any weapons, but it certainly was fine intelligence and it said something very different than Bush, Blair and Co. said.
So basically, in a few lines of McCain's speech, he is able to re-write history, along with the rest of the republican party line, so that not only did we go to war for good reasons, but that the thoroughly discredited reasons that Saddam posed a threat to us. I guess if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it.
To sum up...
1. The war can only be justified on the ground of freeing the Iraqi people if that was the reason given to go to war in the first place OR if the reason given to go to war in the first place turns out to be true as well.
2. This is especially true if the second thing you hope the war will do is to discredit the UN as a body for resolving international disputes peacefully. All of our resolutions had to do with WMDs so if the UN didn't approve the war on account of the WMDs, it is difficult to say they were wrong when the WMDs weren't present.
3. Regardless of the co-presence of intelligence saying these WMDs existed, one can't claim to have been ignorant or unaware of a great deal of evidence to the contrary, saying instead that "we didn't know; nobody knew." People knew, people told them, legitimate, knowledgeable people vehemently opposed their interpretation and their assertions: the pro war crowd simply chose not to listen and the media chose not to tell us. This cannot be dismissed as bad intelligence and fixed by having Tenet resign a few days before the reports come out. It was a willful deception of the people and maybe even of these leaders themselves.
4. If these leaders didn't lie, but instead just ignored all the evidence to the contrary, this should really not inspire any confidence in their abilities as leaders to make informed decisions. So far we have at least two events--maybe three with Abu Graib--where the people at the top simply claim they didn't know and expect that to get them off the hook. This is total bullsh*t. In any other setting if someone at the top of the ladder has people under them f*ck up royally time and time again, head need to start rolling or apologies and revolutionary reorganizations need to be visibly taking place. So far niether thing has happened. No one has been fired and no one has apologized: the failure to know the right information and/or to present the right information is simply presented as an accident that should be forgiven. With all of this rhetoric about accountability in regard to teachers and principles, it sickens me to see these same politicians and officials walk around like they shouldn't be help accountable for the decisions they made--however misinformed and however willfully that misinformation was gathered or believed.
5. Since none of the above is objectively true, since none of these things have happened, it is ridiculous to then turn around and try to hold up Iraqi liberation as some sort of token reward we're supposed to accept. Regardless of how "noble" or "good" it was to get rid of Saddam, that wasn't what we said we were there to do. As a mission, it is a failure. It has failed to make us more safe by diverting attention and funds away from the search for Al Queda--there are many reports from both Britain and the US but here is one and the most damning was written by the US Army War College. (The full text pdf is currently available here, but they move these around a lot) . Others have argued that it has opened up a new front for the war on terror, i.e. a place where the terrorists can fight us on the ground. Though this is theoretically and strategically correct, it isn't necessarily true in terms of the people on the ground. It seems to be in line with what Bush and others have claimed, but this seems somewhat unlikely considering the evidence from the Pentagon in July, 2004 that: "Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency." This, however, seems to point to an even more damning problem about Iraq: that all the people we are fighter are domestic insurgents, something Bush and people like McCain would hate for us to know because it undermines even the argument that we are there to free them: if they are fighting us, the only argument that we can make is that, even if freedom and democracy is the natural state of being, some people have to be forced into it and taught how to be natural. The truth of the matter is that the only way we want democracy in the Middle East is if it is a democracy we have total control of because otherwise we risk having another Iran: a popularly supported theocratic regime. (that this regime has stiff opposition is beside the point in this argument because it is ctually just further evidence of the skewed agenda of this administration: if they were really out to support democracy, they would have tried to intervene in Iran where there is a powerful student movement trying to push reforms. Instead they go to Iraq and don't even mention the attempts at democracy in Iran, painting its main problem, again, its attempt to gain WMDs. )
I don't really know why we went to war in Iraq--though lucrative re-construction contracts without real reconstruction, the prospect of privatizing the whole damn thing for American (and now French, German, and British) corporations, the second largest supply of oil and the threat posed to the global supremacy of the dollar by Saddam's trading his oil in euros instead of greenbacks all have their persuasive aspects; but I do know that it wasn't for WMDs, it hasn't made us safer as we were promised and that the liberation of Iraqis seems to be a mixed bag at best. I believe that we should keep an open mind about the last thing, but I don't think the US has any right to take credit for what ordinary Iraqis eventually end up doing with the chaos we have created: we obviously coordinated with the wrong expatriot informers (like Ahmed Chalabi, who gave us much intelligence, was paid by the Pentagon and is now being indicted in Iraq on charges associated with a murder) and miscalculated everything about the culture lying dormant beneath Saddam's oppression--and judging from Najaf, we still are doing so (the Marines decided that they shouldn't plan as the Army recommended but just go in full force that way they could crush them: sound familiar?)
I don't think that John Kerry is the answer to all of these problems. I just know that Bush has had his chance, he's made a mess and can't be trusted to get us out of it. Kerry is evidently the only guy we have to help us clean up. But once he's elected, we must continue to put pressure on him to reverse the neo-conservative/neo-liberal coalition of PNAC and set America back on firm ground. In Fog of War Erroll Morris's documentary about Robert McNamara, the Former Defense Secretary during Vietnam says of that conflict that the biggest mistake that we made --or the first indication that we were making a big mistake--was that our allies wouldn't support us in the UN. Whether it was from self interest or genuine concern, political or moral, for the new doctrine of pre-emption, this war was tainted from the very beginning by that same circumstance. Rather than chide that organization for not following us blindly, we should consider the lessons of history before we decide to go blindly forward in repeating it.
Nichols is right here that McCain's jab at Moore is certainly something unprecedented. I sincerely doubt that it will make any hardcore Republican go to see it, however, because it has already been branded as something to be avoided. Perhaps if people were exposed to it in any sort of objective-ish setting, they would feel a bit different. I think it would just be interesting for people on the right, who accuse the mass media of being leftist and anti-Bush to actually see what something like that looks like, i.e. to see what it would look like if someone actually was all of these things. Perhaps they won't see the distinction in any meaningful way, but after seeing Moore's film, it is difficult to turn on ABC or CNN and think of it as propaganda for a left wing agenda. It is certainly sensationalistic and dumbs down the conversation--but that is just what the pro-war crowd wanted before the war: black and white, with us or against us, do this now or face a mushroom cloud, etc. NOW they are asking for nuance, for a balanced account of "our" progress in Iraq (the fact that it is usually framed as "our" is telling in itself). I don't subscribe to the Postman theory that TV is incapable of this knid of discussion simply by its virtues as a medium: I think it has more to do with its economic needs of competing with _Fear Factor_ and _Survivor_. This, of course doesn't explain why we aren't reading about Iraqi's surviving life drinking water from a river of sh*t, which is more death defying than eating cockroaches--though I guess less appetizing to show at dinner time. (Susan Douglas actually has some fairly good ideas for Realiy TV shows that haven't been tried yet. She's kidding, but a few of them would be really interesting.)
Anyway, the interesting back and forth between McCain and Moore--who was in the audience, though McCain didn't know it--is also unique, foremost because, in this age when the brilliance of telecommunication is touted, when the President introduces his wife in NY from PA via satellite, we were given an example of how powerful it is to have co-presence, for people who are arguing to occupy the same space. It is becoming rarer these days and makes it much easier to dismiss your opponent as some sort of rogue.
My biggest problem with all of this discussion is that it doesn't get at the conventional wisdom (pun intended) that there was no other way to handle things in Iraq--and that it is okay to give our real reasons for invasion after the fact. It becomes so easy to forget what happened at the time, especially when you have the 1984 history machine out there changing the facts to fit its own needs. The narrative we're asked to accept is that Saddam didn't allow inspectors, that the UN was weak in enforcing it's role, that the opening of Iraq was inevitable (via lifting of sanctions) and that once sanctions were lifted he Iraq would have acquired the weapons we thought they already had. More importantly "everyone" thought that Iraq already had these weapons and we were just as dumbfounded as "everyone" else when we didn't find them. There are, of course, some folks (like the very neo-con Front Page Magazine) that insist we have found WMDs (like 3 or 4--but we should assume there are more where those came from) and that the liberal media is just unable to report these things because they all love Saddam and hate America.
I have seen little evidence that there are any biological or chemical weapons that have been found and I find it not even remotely logical that if there were even a shred of evidence the Bush campaign would be including it in every speech (rather than referring to "WMD related programs" as he did in the state of the union.) Furthermore, the fact that everytime it is mentioned by supporters of the war they say, "we didn't find those, but we did free the Iraqi people," leads me to believe that there is nothing for the really right wingers to rest their claims upon.
Nevertheless, this claim about freeing the Iraqi people seems to be a recurring one. It is ridiculous as a claim at this time when something like 300-500,000 people are in danger of starving to death at the hands of Islamic rebels in Sudan and we are doing almost nothing about it and saying even less about what we could or should do. I am not necessarily an advocate for US intervention around the world, but I do see blatant hipocrisy in a crowd who claims to want to help suffering people AND fight this war against "Jihadistan" and yet they stay away--even rhetorically--from the issue of the Sudan at all costs. (an exemplary exception, again is Front Page Magazine, who claim that it is the liberal human rights organizations who are staying away [an objectively false claim] because they are on the side of radical Islam, aka the new communism.)
But, again I digress, the problem I see with this line of thinking isn't that I want to quibble with how free the Iraqi people are or were, or whether we were the people to do it or this was the time: obviously things weren't awesome under Saddam, obviously many people were happy about getting rid of him; less obvious is how much better they are faring on a day to day level. The real issue is that this wasn't the argument that we presented for going to war: it is an externality. When the president presented the case to the American people, he said it was because Iraq posed a threat, because it had these weapons; when Powell went to the UN, the war was justified on the basis of the threat posed by the WMDs. We didn't try to go to war on the basis of liberating the people of Iraq because that is not how the UN works. The UN is specifically designed to respect the sovereignty of nations.
This, of course has innumerable problems, first of which that it honors obviously oppressive governments with the boon of authority to speak for the people, the resources, and the rights of a state, regardless of how representative they are of the will of that people. From a democratic perspective, this is very problematic. However, it is not enough to simply dismiss this as some sort of bureaucratic nightmare or an ineffective strategy for multilateral cooperation. The attacks on the UN for its implicit support of repressive regimes are completely laughable when made by Americans, Europeans or even Japanese.
Though the UN may give political legitimacy to these regimes, they do it not just so we can all sit around and twiddle our thumbs. This practice of honoring repressive regimes with legitimacy is an old Westphalian tradition that goes back many centuries. And while the UN and its constituent nation-states may grant a government legitimacy, multinational corporations give that government money, support it financially and help it to thrive under this umbrella of legitimacy. The government in Saudi Arabia would have virtually no way to oppress its people if it weren't for the oil revenues that continued to flow into its coffers. The scandal over the UN oil for food program in Iraq, which should be fully investigated, has far less to do with the UN itself as a corrupt organization than with the obscure regime of sanctions we all agreed to impose on Iraq. And if we are to believe that key players in Europe and the US were really ignorant of what was going on until just now, I suppose we should also believe that Richard Nixon wasn't a crook.
But I keep getting away from the point. We never said that freeing the Iraqi people was our mission. That isn't what we said we were gonig there to do. That isn't why many americans agreed to it or believed in it. Fear was used as the primary tactic to rally public support. Freeing the Iraqi people wasn't the argument we presented before the UN because that is not something the UN is designed to do. If it were in the power of the UN to decide when a government can be overthrown, or to agree that a country could overthrow another, without attack, for their own reasons, then the UN would be corrupt. We could have been given the authority to intervene in Iraq for humanitarian reasons. But the fact is that there was no humanitarian crisis in Iraq--or at least not any more so than there had been in the past twenty years. The Kurdish minority was much more in danger across the border in Turkey; in Iraq they were fairly safe thanks in part to the restrictions placed on Saddam by the sanctions. Yes Saddam was a bad guy, but there are lots of bad guys around the world and, believe it or not, that is not necessarily an objective fact. Even America thought Saddam was an okay guy for the first twenty or so years of his reign. That this changed so suddenly should give us some notion of how difficult it is to define "evil" when there are so many different notions of "good."
Unfortunately, most of the pro-war crowd has little doubt that they know the one right way that everyone in the world should be and they have no qualms about imposing that on anyone they can. They actually see their way as the "natural way" and believe that when other regimes are removed, people will naturally revert to the "american way"--except that they won't be allowed to have freedom to do what they want as a country unless the real Americans say it's okay. Somehow these folks have the ability to overlook the sort of dictatorial totalitarian character of this form of action. Even if you agree with the ideas, it is hard to agree with their implementation. Like the Greek empire, it is difficult to extend democracy to other countries against their will. Democracy and empire are incommensurable ideas and the only way that they can seem so is if you overlook the destruction of a culture (good and bad) in favor of seeing only the way that the new culture, post-empire, seems democratic. This has been the favored ideological standpoint of people like Niall Ferguson, who has defended the British Empire for the "civilization" that it brought to places like India.
So these folks are basically mad that the UN isn't designed to give them a blank check to re-make the world in its image. They overlook the fact that the UN was designed to end empires simply because they seemed to be a de-stabilizing factor in the global political economy. That nation-states turn out to be as equally de-stabilizing, should only encourage us to dig deeper for ways to consider global governance, not to revert back to isolationism and imperialism. In one of the more lucid observations about the current war, Johnathan Schell had this to say about the War:
Let us admit, however, that the sudden popularity of global imperial ambition in
the United States is not due entirely to arrogance and lust for power, evident
as these are. It is also a response, however perverse, to requirements of the
time that even the antagonists of empire will acknowledge are inescapable. The
earth is fragile, and the earth is becoming one--economically, ecologically and
digitally. A global politics to deal with both conditions is required, and the
idea of empire, especially of global empire, offers the most familiar answer,
historically speaking, to this need. That it is a desperately wrong answer is
shown by the sweeping failure of the Bush policies. But defeating the Bush
Administration will not be enough. The need for a truly global politics--a need
that, in part, called forth America's misbegotten empire--must be met.
The need for new forms of global governance is inarguable; what form that governance should take is an argument that most neo-liberals don't want to have. They simply want the rest of the world to bow to America as the once and future knig, back on his high horse, dispensing freedom as he (and usually this kind of America would be gendered as "he") sees fit.
This is the kind of America that the republican party wants us to get behind. And to do this, they want us to focus not on the ways that we break with international law to make war or the false pretenses. But that is just here at home. Abroad, they are stuggling--though not very hard, not hard enough--to retain the legitimacy that they might have had in some circles. The whole "beacon of democracy" thing will work only if we can manage to have an uncontested election ourselves this year. The reasons for the war, for anyone who takes the time to remember, are objectively different than Bush, Blair and the other supporters would have us believe. Always reverting to the "freedom" argument, they cover over the "bad intelligence" problem by saying that everyone thought the weapons were there: if we didn't find them, it's not our fault. McCain claims that Saddam threw out or wasn't cooperating with the inspectors. All of these are outright lies.
Though some of the US, UN, and British intelligence pointed to these vast stockholds of WMDs, there was a small group of folks who said there weren't any weapons: the UN weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter--who was withdrawn by the US after Saddam rightfully claimed that the UN was spying for US and Britain--was a weapons inspector who said that there were no weapons. He was simply discredited by the Administration as a child molester, which, regardless of the charges should theoretically have little bearing on his ability to distinguish a barrel of oil from a tub of sarin or anthrax. Hans Blix, who was the head weapons inspector on the ground before BUSH told them to leave because they weren't finding WMDs (go figure), said he didn't think there were any. He f0und a few technical inconsistencies (like some missles that were longer range than they were permitted) but certainly not evidence of the kind of program Powell insisted existed. The international atomic energy comission said that there wasn't evidence of a nuclear program and the two things that inspectors (and Powell and Bush and the Brits) claimed were evidence of the attempt to start a program--the metal tubes and the nigerian uranium--were both discredited by that agency weeks before the war. Finally, the testimony of the Iraqi defector (Saddam's son in law) in the early 1990s, which Powell and others endlessly cited as evidence of the presence of these weapons, actually includes, in the parts they don't talk about, his testimony about how the weapons were all destroyed long before he defected.
And that is just the stuff that I know about and remember. Robert Greenwald's film Uncovered does a much better job of illuminating this silenced dissent in the intelligence community. I won't claim that it says unequivocally that there weren't any weapons, but it certainly was fine intelligence and it said something very different than Bush, Blair and Co. said.
So basically, in a few lines of McCain's speech, he is able to re-write history, along with the rest of the republican party line, so that not only did we go to war for good reasons, but that the thoroughly discredited reasons that Saddam posed a threat to us. I guess if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it.
To sum up...
1. The war can only be justified on the ground of freeing the Iraqi people if that was the reason given to go to war in the first place OR if the reason given to go to war in the first place turns out to be true as well.
2. This is especially true if the second thing you hope the war will do is to discredit the UN as a body for resolving international disputes peacefully. All of our resolutions had to do with WMDs so if the UN didn't approve the war on account of the WMDs, it is difficult to say they were wrong when the WMDs weren't present.
3. Regardless of the co-presence of intelligence saying these WMDs existed, one can't claim to have been ignorant or unaware of a great deal of evidence to the contrary, saying instead that "we didn't know; nobody knew." People knew, people told them, legitimate, knowledgeable people vehemently opposed their interpretation and their assertions: the pro war crowd simply chose not to listen and the media chose not to tell us. This cannot be dismissed as bad intelligence and fixed by having Tenet resign a few days before the reports come out. It was a willful deception of the people and maybe even of these leaders themselves.
4. If these leaders didn't lie, but instead just ignored all the evidence to the contrary, this should really not inspire any confidence in their abilities as leaders to make informed decisions. So far we have at least two events--maybe three with Abu Graib--where the people at the top simply claim they didn't know and expect that to get them off the hook. This is total bullsh*t. In any other setting if someone at the top of the ladder has people under them f*ck up royally time and time again, head need to start rolling or apologies and revolutionary reorganizations need to be visibly taking place. So far niether thing has happened. No one has been fired and no one has apologized: the failure to know the right information and/or to present the right information is simply presented as an accident that should be forgiven. With all of this rhetoric about accountability in regard to teachers and principles, it sickens me to see these same politicians and officials walk around like they shouldn't be help accountable for the decisions they made--however misinformed and however willfully that misinformation was gathered or believed.
5. Since none of the above is objectively true, since none of these things have happened, it is ridiculous to then turn around and try to hold up Iraqi liberation as some sort of token reward we're supposed to accept. Regardless of how "noble" or "good" it was to get rid of Saddam, that wasn't what we said we were there to do. As a mission, it is a failure. It has failed to make us more safe by diverting attention and funds away from the search for Al Queda--there are many reports from both Britain and the US but here is one and the most damning was written by the US Army War College. (The full text pdf is currently available here, but they move these around a lot) . Others have argued that it has opened up a new front for the war on terror, i.e. a place where the terrorists can fight us on the ground. Though this is theoretically and strategically correct, it isn't necessarily true in terms of the people on the ground. It seems to be in line with what Bush and others have claimed, but this seems somewhat unlikely considering the evidence from the Pentagon in July, 2004 that: "Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency." This, however, seems to point to an even more damning problem about Iraq: that all the people we are fighter are domestic insurgents, something Bush and people like McCain would hate for us to know because it undermines even the argument that we are there to free them: if they are fighting us, the only argument that we can make is that, even if freedom and democracy is the natural state of being, some people have to be forced into it and taught how to be natural. The truth of the matter is that the only way we want democracy in the Middle East is if it is a democracy we have total control of because otherwise we risk having another Iran: a popularly supported theocratic regime. (that this regime has stiff opposition is beside the point in this argument because it is ctually just further evidence of the skewed agenda of this administration: if they were really out to support democracy, they would have tried to intervene in Iran where there is a powerful student movement trying to push reforms. Instead they go to Iraq and don't even mention the attempts at democracy in Iran, painting its main problem, again, its attempt to gain WMDs. )
I don't really know why we went to war in Iraq--though lucrative re-construction contracts without real reconstruction, the prospect of privatizing the whole damn thing for American (and now French, German, and British) corporations, the second largest supply of oil and the threat posed to the global supremacy of the dollar by Saddam's trading his oil in euros instead of greenbacks all have their persuasive aspects; but I do know that it wasn't for WMDs, it hasn't made us safer as we were promised and that the liberation of Iraqis seems to be a mixed bag at best. I believe that we should keep an open mind about the last thing, but I don't think the US has any right to take credit for what ordinary Iraqis eventually end up doing with the chaos we have created: we obviously coordinated with the wrong expatriot informers (like Ahmed Chalabi, who gave us much intelligence, was paid by the Pentagon and is now being indicted in Iraq on charges associated with a murder) and miscalculated everything about the culture lying dormant beneath Saddam's oppression--and judging from Najaf, we still are doing so (the Marines decided that they shouldn't plan as the Army recommended but just go in full force that way they could crush them: sound familiar?)
I don't think that John Kerry is the answer to all of these problems. I just know that Bush has had his chance, he's made a mess and can't be trusted to get us out of it. Kerry is evidently the only guy we have to help us clean up. But once he's elected, we must continue to put pressure on him to reverse the neo-conservative/neo-liberal coalition of PNAC and set America back on firm ground. In Fog of War Erroll Morris's documentary about Robert McNamara, the Former Defense Secretary during Vietnam says of that conflict that the biggest mistake that we made --or the first indication that we were making a big mistake--was that our allies wouldn't support us in the UN. Whether it was from self interest or genuine concern, political or moral, for the new doctrine of pre-emption, this war was tainted from the very beginning by that same circumstance. Rather than chide that organization for not following us blindly, we should consider the lessons of history before we decide to go blindly forward in repeating it.
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