Housing crisis, etc.

Ashlee Andrews wrote:

> I am sure that you and Jill feel a bit unsettled, but it is one of
> those really unique times when nothing is in your hands, which I am
> sure is both liberating and nerve wracking. But there is something to
> be said for a time when prayers or thoughts about the future, or at
> least my prayers about you and Jill don't involve me praying for some
> specific outcome, but, rather, the right outcome, which is totally
> unknown at this time. I guess what I am saying is I am excited about
> what the future holds for you both because I think it will be what is
> right.

Yeah just keep on prayin'. In this case, I actually think that prayer isn't enough--though I appreciate and respect the sentiment. What it comes down to is that our ability to move, our "freedom," has been significantly reduced because of the greed and arrogance of people who believe that the market is a just and accurate measure of value and that we, as citizens, shouldn't attempt to use our collective power to administrate that market for our collective benefit. Whatever we want to call it, and however we want to balance these two forces, the fact is that they must be balanced. The people who object to this seem to think that administrating the market for the benefit of an elect few is somehow NOT social engineering, that the free market is somehow natural despite the numerous regulations that, for instance, we have to impose on other countries to bring it about. If all this sounds polemical and crazy, there's not much I can do about it. I am speaking in response to a polemical worldview, what liberation theologist Franz J. Hinkelammert called Ideological Weapons of Death. Against this, even the most measured response often appears like some crazed rant.

Our problem is minuscule compared to people who are being foreclosed upon--especially people of color who ended up with these loans not because they had bad credit but because of racist assumptions--but that doesn't change the fact that this is precisely the result of deregulating the financial sector over the last thirty years. The thing we didn't talk about the other night is how this fits into the other sweeping changes that we often think about under the heading "Globalization." In the recent news, we keep hearing references to this being the worst possible downturn since the end of WWII or even a possible repeat of the Great Depression. You are right that some of this is self fulfilling prophecy, that it has less basis in any material change. But this is not to say the value we thought we had is not gone; instead, it is to say that the value we thought we had was never there. And, more importantly, the value that people said would be created in the stock market, the faith that we were supposed to put in its mechanisms, was never something that would reward everyone and it was always bound to fail if we put all our faith in it.

The long and the short of it is that, after the Great Depression, which was caused, in part by a failure of the banking sector in almost exactly the same way that the financial sector is failing today, the federal government stepped in and began regulating the banking industry, putting rules on their transactions, trying to make it work better, more reliably, less in line with what economist John Manyard Keynes called the "animal spirits" of the stock market. By this he meant that, if it was allowed to completely dictate the value of everything existing, we would find ourselves in quite a pickle. This has to do with the twofold quality of money: on the one hand, it is meant to be something that represents value in general, that we get paid with and buy things with. But on the other hand, that value is relative and, since money itself is ALSO a commodity, it can be traded and re-valued on a separate market.

This value has less to do with any relative value of what a dollar can buy or how it relates to our wages: it is more about perception on the part of the trading class. Here it doesn't necessarily matter if I think the dollar is going to be more valuable or if it should be: it matters if I think you think it will be. I may buy up a bunch of dollars (or subprime mortgages) less because I believe that they will pay off: I may think they are total crap. But if I believe that you (or the abstract "market") believe they are valuable, then I will buy them up because down the road I may be able to sell them for more than I bought them. This opens up the possibility that the item itself hasn't changed in the least, that nothing will come of it, but that it will still appear more valuable. In this case, the subprime mortgages are only the tip of the iceberg since the reason they were necessary at all was because people were already buying up homes and property on the assumption that it would pay off (again, not because they thought it was valuable in and of itself; not because they thought it would be a good place to live, but because they thought other people in the investing class would, down the road, think it was valuable.)

In the Great Depression--the new Fed Chairman's interpretation aside--the main problem was that this had come to a head in about the same way it is now--largely because the investors and business people at the time had decried any attempt at government intervention in the market as a form of socialism. When the government was basically forced to step in--not just to save the economy but to quell the widespread social unrest (riots, runs on the bank, as well as the more basic problems of homelessness, poverty, starvation, etc.)--they continued to call it socialism, but the regulations that were imposed were largely what made the postwar economy so much more stable than before. On the other hand, it is frustrating for investors because it takes all the fun out of it: instead of playing the game and having the chance to get some astronomical return on your investment (600% instead of 6%) it was just a modest return. It's a gross oversimplification, but in a nutshell, that is one of the causes of the class revolt from above--from the class of investors and owners of capital--in the early 1970s.

The argument made at the time was that all this regulation was a drag on the dynamics of economic growth and one of the main changes in the coming decade (from about the mid 1970s to 1980s) was the deregulation of financial institutions. This made possible not only all kinds of crazy investment schemes in the 1980s (which in turn made possible all kinds of crazy 1980s movies--Less Than Zero, Wall Street (based on a true story), and any film where a maniacal [white, male, heterosexual] trader tries to beat the odds and must have cocaine and hookers to do it) but, since they were also imposed on a grand scheme through bilateral investment treaties, it also made possible the massive trend towards offshoring manufacturing to overseas sweatshops, etc. The latter weren't as big a change in the US economy as is often assumed--i.e. there weren't as many jobs outsourced as we're led to believe--but the constant threat of that possibility made all of us less likely to ask for any increase in our wages or our working conditions and, certainly, to claim that unions or any other form of collective action could be of no help since those were the bohemeths of a previous era. Meanwhile, new bohemeths of transnational corporations, international accounting firms, international insurance firms, and international financial institutions facilitated the integration of networks far above and beyond our collective control.

This has meant that, despite the recent fall in the dollar, none of the usual wage increases that would allow us to live our lives at the same level have happened. Thus, quoting from

What are the immediate effects of such a steep drop in our currency? It puts extreme upward pressure on anything and everything. This has really kicked in especially within the last year to two years, and has been building before that for the better part of this decade.

Metals

* Aluminum: up 76% in 4.5 years
* Copper: up 333% in 5 years
* Platinum: up 353% in 9 years
* Silver: up 272% in 6 years
* Gold: up 300% in 7 years

Food

* Canola: up 133% in 2 years
* Cocoa: up 206% in 7 years
* Coffee: up 170% in 6 years
* Corn: up 150% in 2 years
* Oats: up 160% in 3.5 years
* Rice: up 239% in 6 years
* Soybeans: up 134% in 1.5 years
* Wheat: up 200% in 2 years

Fuel

* Brent Crude Oil: up 900% in 9 years
* Heating Oil: up 450% in 9 years
* Light Crude Oil: up 850% in 9 years
* Propane: up 190% in 9 years

(source: http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-inflation_18.html

During this time, how much have your wages gone up? For the average American, down about 2%. If you made $50,000 a year in 2000, you would need to be at $61,289.20 just to keep pace with inflation today. To actually "get ahead" in the world (to do what raises are supposed to accomplish), you would need to be further ahead of that number.

That high school $8/hr job in 2000 would bring in $9.81 today. How many supermarkets are paying that, though? In many places, they're still paying $8, or even less. That $8/hr job today was worth $6.53 only 8 years ago.

As wages has stagnated and the price of everything has soared, Americans have tended to find another way to get income - the equity that is stored within the value of one's home. From this last gamble to hang on to the American Dream that was the good times of the 1990's, we witnessed what may perhaps be the greatest bubble and crash in our lives: the housing bubble.

This commentator points to only the latest way for us to do this. Before people were taking out home equity loans (where, as I mentioned the other night, people are taking out second or third mortgages on their homes based on the market *perception* that they have had a vast increase in the value of their homes), before people were, as Doug Henwood says, "using their homes as credit cards," they were just using credit cards. And, likewise, before marketeers were trading mortgage backed securities, they were trading credit card debt, again bundled into securities that were assumed to pay off at a certain rate. To help make sure that this happened, a few years ago, congress passed legislation to make it almost impossible to declare bankruptcy on the basis of credit card debt. Some have pointed out that this made people more concerned with paying off their credit cards than paying their mortgages--on which they could still declare bankruptcy--and that this attempt to suture one of the places the economy was about to burst made it more likely to do so at the tender seams of the housing bubble.

In other words, the deregulation of the 1980s and 90s did indeed make the capital markets more dynamic, but we could also ask whether it was really the creation of new wealth or just shifting it from a more equitable distribution to one that was more top heavy. What this meant for each of us was less security in the workplace, almost no increase in real wages (i.e. wages that increased to keep up with inflation) and, as you know first hand, an increasingly ineffective heath care system--one that was, again, left up to the market and is thus inevitably skewed towards giving the best health care money can buy, but only if you have the money to buy it. It's worth mentioning that a good amount of those credit card debts that were being traded were for medical expenses.

The discourse around this development in US culture in recent years has mostly centered on criticism of people for racking up credit card debt. The prototypical character who does this on a mainstream TV show is assumed to be a profligate and irresponsible spender, someone who simply "lives beyond their means." It is especially women who do this because they can't stand not to have some $400 pair of boots. It is this kind of spending that is assumed when people come on news programs to caution us against the dangers of high credit card debt. The contradiction is, of course, that a few moments before or after this, we are, in one way or another being asked to fulfill our role as consumers. This is our basic role in the US (and world) economy. In fact, when I mentioned that China was buying up a lot of US treasury bonds for years before this crash happened--despite the fact that they were basically buying into a crashing system--was largely understood as an attempt to help prop up the US consumer--who, incidentally, was the main consumer of goods from China.

In this, the kinds of critiques made by the Situationists of the 1970s which I think Travis is interested in, are mostly interesting as an early description of this separation of the spectacle from the material existence: the early sense that our role as producers (our focus on collective action in the workplace) was being subverted by a sense of our main goal being individual consumers. Their critique was largely that this consumer understanding of freedom was a pale comparison of what real freedom was, which involved some sort of authentic communal experience which lifted us to a new dimension of humanity and made our individual consciousness more improved. But this critique has gotten stalled at the level of simply critiquing consumerism, often seeing the great number of people in the world--and especially in US society--as some sort of sad, deluded carcass of humanity.

The question of the avante garde should still be asked of course--whether we could shake people out of this through some cultural production--but it cannot be an excuse for seeing the problem in its totality. The problem isn't just that we all became mindless consumers: its that we didn't see how the pleasure we got from this was often bought with borrowed money; that this was the result of us abandoning other kinds of collective pressure to make the country more liveable; and that, in the meantime, we were colluding with the very people who helped create the political, economic, social and cultural environment in which the "spectacle" could be perfected.

The answer isn't to destroy the pleasure of consumption, the real and genuine feeling we get when we can enjoy something--whether because it has some authentic cultural content which we have the expertise to appreciate or because of the superficial joy we all have to admit exists in crass consumerism--but to figure out how to re-engineer the system so that these joys we have found can still exist, on a more widespread basis with an even more diverse set of pleasurable objects, without us having to bargain our future on it and make it so that our enjoyment depends on misery elsewhere--whether through degrading workshop conditions, unsustainable environmental practices, or the violence of war to secure resources and political power. At the moment, the latter are absolutely necessary for the continuation of the system as it stands, even if we are able to save the financial institutions from collapse.

In any case, one level of what we are seeing today is effectively the result of leaving these financial institutions to their own devices. The argument was that this would create this amazing new period of growth and development and that this rising tide would lift all boats. But since the essence of this system is to privilege individual innovation in the greedy extraction of money from wherever it can be extracted, the effect was not to lift all boats but to create a whole new way of getting even more rich off the fact that the average person was suffering financially. The credit card debt and home equity loans that people were using to make up for the fact that they weren't making enough money to meet their basic expenses and sometimes to pay for costly healthcare that was not covered by their insurance; the subprime mortgages made necessary by the fact that wages weren't rising fast enough to keep up with the investor class's inflation of the housing bubble (following the dot.com bubble of the 1990s); these were securitized and turned into instruments of debt that could be traded and profited from even more.

The changes in the US economy that made it necessary for people to go to these extremes also made it possible for the class of people who were already profiting from the changes to profit from them further, turning people's precarious situation into a commodity itself. That anyone in the financial sector was truly surprised by any of this is astonishing: like the intelligence that led up to the Iraq war, either they knew they were lying or they are so amazingly incompetent at their jobs that we should fire all of them and reform the entire institutions.
I normally wouldn't go all out socialist on this point but there is a pretty coherent view of the historical roots of what's happening today here.

And if all of this is too serious, then I'll just end by returning to my own troubles, namely that I don't know if we'll be able to do anything but stay put for the foreseeable future since we can't compete in a market dominated by houses being sold at reduced prices by banks who have foreclosed for non-payment. This is a pattern that is very bad for an economy that depends on people being able to move across the vast united states for work. It is also, as I began this now overly long tirade, a real limit on our individuality, our freedom to move. In this, I like to think of these words from Oscar Wilde's nice essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" where he contrasts private property with what it might be like otherwise:

[T]he Individualism generated under conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of a fine or wonderful type, [...]. The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a nuisance. Some years ago people went about the country saying that property has duties. They said it so often and so tediously that, at last, the Church has begun to say it. One hears it now from every pulpit. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. It involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother. If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it.

Of course when people talk about property, they aren't usually talking about private homes. However, in today's market, where my house is not just a place where I live, but a potential income generating investment, the distinction becomes blurred.

> Thanks for talking the other night. Sorry I had to cut short. I know
> you felt like you rambled, but I really was interested and Friday
> evening I had the opportunity of talking about how crazy securities
> and the concept of using debt as money are with Meagan and Ben when we
> hung out with them. Anyways, I wouldn't have had the opportunity of
> sharing in that intellectual conversation (which nowadays are pretty
> hard to come by in a world of post-graduate working life) had I not
> gotten some background knowledge.

Well I've certainly overdone it today, but in any case, I've given you something more to read. I'd be interested in what the three of you talked about, particularly since you all have had some interesting experiences with it. And, obviously, I haven't been having many of those conversations (though I did rant to Jill a bit the other day).

> That reminds me, you mentioned the possibility, in our previous
> discussion, reading assignments to keep me involved in the
> intellectual community. I would love that. Some days, when I am tired
> and chose to sit in front of a DVD for hours, I feel my brain
> withering away. So, if you would like and have something you think
> might be a good read (keep in mind I am a bit rusty) I would be very
> thankful to have something to involve me in the academic community
> again. Sometimes I do become afraid that once the time comes for me to
> apply for graduate programs and provide writing samples, that I will
> realize that I am too rusty to even be considered, thereby making my
> undergrad work unhelpful (that is, of course, an extreme but it is my
> fear).

It is certainly a hard thing to keep primed. On the other hand, a lot of it would probably come back to you pretty quickly once you got back into it. I guess I'd want to know what you think is most important, what you'd like to learn about. I could probably learn a lot from you about feminist and religion as well. For instance, I've been increasingly interested in the way religion is being used in progressive politics. I thought of you in reading an article in last week's The Nation, about how young evangelicals are much more interested in Social Justice than their cranky leaders like Dobson, etc.

None of this is necessarily going to continue, but it is an interesting development and it shows how uncertain it is to use religion to define politics. In reading about the English Civil war for my dissertation I was struck by how old this tradition is in Protestantism--and how difficult it is to contain these energies once they are released. A rather great book on this--and one which, again, reminded me a lot of you, mom, and Uncle Don--was Christopher Hill's book _World Turned Upside Down_. It's an easy to read book but it takes a while to get into it since his discussion about history sounds like a foreign language. Still there are some sections on, for instance, the origins of the Baptist, Presbyterian, and Quaker religion and the political activism they inspired that is really interesting to understand from a historical perspective. Likewise, the newly reissued set of writings from the Putney Debates, where the English Levellers used religion to back up their political program for democracy and, in some cases, redistribution, are an interesting case.

The later writings of Gerald Winstanley, who had a much clearer program in mind about social organization, was also greatly inspired by Christianity in writing his "Laws of Freedom."

These may sound like extremely boring lines of inquiry, but there is also the argument about how new political Islam is a reaction to imperialism and the like. I think I sent you that book _No God But God_ but if not, I think it is a really accessible and is a good place to start on this conversation. I don't really know where it would go next, but considering the connections that can be made across religions and the variation of the role that religion can play as a cultural and social institution seems like a very pressing issue at both the national and international level. I think you are already dealing with some of this in your church situation--and I think the issue of gentrification, urban planning, etc. is also of amazing importance in the current moment.

Again, I don't have a lot of sources to offer here, but since it has such a deep effect on our lives (both the current phase and previous phases) we would all do well to understand these forces better. There are some sections on this in Fast Food Nation and the connection it makes between urban and state policy seems to be mirrored in the Michael Pollin book on food (which I think we gave you for X-mas)

I would say that all of these have issues that relate back to feminist concerns, but they aren't always made explicit. In a lot of cases one of the best strategies is to notice that all the sources I just mentioned are written by men. This is probably because I am a man and there are always hidden biases in the way we choose to look at things. But on the other hand, these men are probably missing a lot of issues that you would be able to see from a feminist perspective. Some really great work is produced by reading books like this--that have become very popular and are in some ways defining the debate at hand--against the grain, or of introducing the important correctives of a feminist perspective. One great work in this regard--which is also quite accessible--is Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches, and Bases where she looks at International Politics through the lens of feminism and comes up with some really striking observations about tourism, nationalism, women married to military and diplomatic personnel, as well as the role of gender in the more discussed elements of globalized food and clothing production. I have some more explicit data on stuff like this, but much of it may be stuff you know already.

Finally, since you're working in a certain convergence between all of the above issues as well as the question of the role of NGOs (like the American Cancer Society) and the issues in the US healthcare system, that also might be an interesting place to study. Here I'm more at a loss but I could likely drum up some sources from some people. Giving at least some cursory study to this might actually make the seeming drudgery of working there more like an extended research project. It might make it hard to tune it out some, but I would think it could also give you a different way to think about it which might be productive to your thinking about what you want to do next.

Re: [lbo-talk] Yes we can

On Feb 7, 2008 10:41 PM, Seth Ackerman <sethackerman1@verizon.net> wrote:
> This is inspired.
>
> http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/002071.html

Yes Obama uses empty platitudes and is likely to do nothing of any
substance altogether different from the current regime (save putting
little bows on the bombs and tying ribbons around the ruins of the US
welfare state. His choice of advisers and rhetoric virtually ensure
that the Obama mania will not extend to the level of actual policy.
But for some reason all this criticism of him (along with the
adoration) resonated strongly with a book review essay in the Nation a
few weeks ago. I'm sure there is some insipid history in relation to
this author (his position makes him sound like he has sleepovers at
Todd Gitlin's place where they reminisce about the times when the
revolution was still strong), but in any case, the description seemed
rather apt:

<Blockquote>
The fate of the student movement of the 1960s, she argued, was
determined when its leaders made the "curiously apolitical" decision
to start thinking of themselves as revolutionaries:

"Because revolution was effectively impossible one did not have to
dirty one's hands in compromise, nor mingle much with the hoi polloi
(meaning: the middle class; the un-Chosen) along the way. And it was
also ahistorical and smug, since it mistook revolution, a rare
historical event, for a moral choice."

That the New Left "mistook revolution...for a moral choice" is the
best one-sentence summary I've ever read of the complexities of
late-'60s radicalism. I would suggest a corollary that seems implicit
in Langer's essay. The movement's revolutionary turn was not so much a
measure of its un- or anti-American character, as conservative critics
would have it, but rather an indication that, if anything, the New
Left might have been a bit too American for its own good. Its
impatience with the half-measures of liberal reformism, its lack of
interest in creating a stable constituency or institutional base, and
its promotion of a politics of confrontation and risk ("putting your
body on the line," as the saying went) revealed the movement as an
exotic but recognizable descendant of the powerful Protestant
antinomian tradition of radical individualism--one whose adherents
defied social custom and religious law to follow the inner promptings
of God's voice wherever they might lead. "John Brown is a good symbol
for us," Langer noted in passing. "At one point he wanted to run a
school for Negroes but he came to find the idea too small: he had to
attack Harper's Ferry."
<end blockquote>

full available here:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080211/isserman

It now seems like every kind of American revolutionary movement has
taken on this antinomian quality, pretty much since the 1960s. I see
shades of it in the Ron Paul Re-love-lution (with the militant stencil
graphic reversing the word love and making me wonder if it is supposed
to make love subversive or if it is really a revolution which subverts
love. I'd say that any pure Libertarian movement is limited to taking
a position at one of these two poles depending on the hour of the
day.) That the Paul is standing out as the anti-Obama for some people
on the list, is striking in this regard.

I would say that the difference between Obama and Reagan or Thatcher
is that the issue of the collective is quite differently articulated.
On one side, there is no society, only individuals; on the other "yes
we can." Perhaps it is a dangerous (or at least naive) illusion to
say that there is something different this--whether as a rhetorical
strategy or as an idea that seems to have a broad resonance. I guess
the question is if we'd rather have a cult of the individual or a cult
of the "we." Obviously both have had their periods of overindulgence
cum political terror, but it seems like Bush has been struggling with
how to carve a path between his own antinomian delight in the rugged
individual (yet evangelical) cowboy and the obvious collective demands
of the country. Yesterday he said this about the tornadoes:

"Loss of life, loss of property — prayers can help and so can the
government," Bush said. "I do want the people in those states to know
the American people are standing with them."
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hEVVdA-Jj41Pg6oB6TwkpA_6ygZgD8UL4MGO0

This is not an uncharacteristic statement, even if there is some
dissonance it creates for people who recognize what he has actually
done i.e. FEMA, Katrina, the Gulf coast rebuilding etc. But it does
speak to something that, try as he and the conservative movement
might, they can't quite get out from under. They have tried to
re-frame it in terms of the government helping to answer their prayers
about circumventing alternative lifestyles homosexuality and tried to
re-frame all the economic and security woes into the xenophobic issue
of immigration. But they can't quite get back to the government's
role of doing nothing. When Romney, who tried to bill himself as the
truly conservative candidate, spoke in Michigan, his most memorable
line was that he would "fight for every last job" in Detroit.

Of course his plan for how to do this was conventional,

( e.g. "increased government spending for research on advanced fuels
and vehicles, aid to automakers to deal with the costs of health care
and pensions for retirees, and tax cuts for most taxpayers to help
them buy new cars."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/politics/13campaign.html?_r=1&oref=slogin )

but the call to put the wheels of government back in the service of
the people seems to be the basic rallying cry, even if the empty
signifier is as dangerously unstable here as in Laclau's "a people
must be constructed" approach. It does make Frum's comments about
this being the end of the Conservative "revolution" seem more
pertinent, but I can also see why people would be suspicious of a
Clinton, round 2. The problem there was, as indicated above, he ended
up doing things that the right wing free traders would only have
dreamed and made it seem like a really swell thing for everyone (a
consensus that even now doesn't seem to be fading). That Obama would
likely be elected with a similar kind of evangelical support as Bush
(though with him as the leader rather than Jesus
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/05/barack_obama_is_not_jesus/#more
) is certainly important to consider--not because he would not be able
to do all the vague things he says he would, but because he'd be able
to couch whatever he's doing in the same vague terms. If I understand
correctly, this is the other basic reason for resistance to him on the
list.

I also think Edwards losing wasn't evidence that the progressive
message he was using was not appealing: the race got chalked up in
most places to being between the two front runners in most major media
outlets and since Obama was preaching a message of Change as well, it
seemed like a wash, despite the details to the contrary.

what's the difference, really?

Last night in the state of the union Bush said this:

The people's trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks -- special interest projects that are often snuck in at the last minute, without discussion or debate. Last year, I asked you to voluntarily cut the number and cost of earmarks in half. I also asked you to stop slipping earmarks into committee reports that never even come to a vote. Unfortunately, neither goal was met. So this time, if you send me an appropriations bill that does not cut the number and cost of earmarks in half, I'll send it back to you with my veto. (Applause.)

And tomorrow, I will issue an executive order that directs federal agencies to ignore any future earmark that is not voted on by Congress. If these items are truly worth funding, Congress should debate them in the open and hold a public vote. (Applause.)

As he said it, I immediately thought of the hypocrisy of this statement coming from someone who has made a particularly widespread use of signing statements. Now it turns out he'd issued one just earlier that day--that would attempt to establish permanent military bases in Iraq (or at least legalize the ones he's already put there. Think progress has more, here...

President Bush yesterday signed the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act after initially rejecting Congress’s first version because it would have allegedly opened the Iraqi government to “expensive lawsuits.”

Even though he forced Congress to change its original bill, Bush’s signature yesterday came with a little-noticed signing statement, claiming that provisions in the law “could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations.” CQ reports on the provisions Bush plans to disregard:

One such provision sets up a commission to probe contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another expands protections for whistleblowers who work for government contractors. A third requires that U.S. intelligence agencies promptly respond to congressional requests for documents. And a fourth bars funding for permanent bases in Iraq and for any action that exercises U.S. control over Iraq’s oil money.

In his “Memorandum of Justification” for the waiver, Bush cited his Nov. 26 “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship” between Iraq and the United States. This agreement has been aggressively opposed by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress as not only unprecedented, but also potentially unconstitutional because it was enacted without the agreement of the legislation branch.

Today on CNN, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA) voiced concern that this declaration may indefinitely commit U.S. troops to fighting Iraq’s civil wars:

Involved in those declaration of principles, there is an implicit potential for the United States military forces, years from now, being involved in a full-blown civil war in Iraq. And I don’t believe that’s where the American people want us and I don’t think that’s in the best interest of our national security.

Earlier this month, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced legislation requiring the Bush administration “to consult with Congress before moving forward with any agreement that could lead to long term security arrangements and other major economic and political commitments.”

Throughout his presidency, Bush has issued more than 151 signing statements challenging 1149 provisions of laws.

On how (we are supposed to believe) our military apparatus is so incompetent...

we are supposed to believe that a pirate radio broadcast fooled them into almost causing an international incident.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2240533,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

A heckling radio ham known as the Filipino Monkey, who has spent years pestering ships in the Persian Gulf, is being blamed today for sparking a major diplomatic row after American warships almost attacked Iranian patrol boats.

The US navy came within seconds of firing at the Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz on January 6 after hearing threats that the boats were attacking and were about to explode.

Senior navy officials have admitted that the source of the threats, picked up in international waters, was a mystery.

[. . . .]

Last week, the Iranians and the US issued different video versions of what took place.

On the Pentagon's version, a strange voice, in English, can be heard saying "I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes." The voice sounds different from one heard earlier in the recording and there is no background noise that would usually be picked up from a speedboat radio.

In the Iranian version, there is no hint of aggressive behaviour.

The Pentagon said it recorded the film and the sound separately and then edited them together to give a "better idea of what is happening".

[...in other words, just as they were going on their "best intelligence" on Iraq leading up to the war, they got fooled into almost firing on Iranian boats. Leaving aside the possibility that the whole thing was completely fabricated (a la the Gulf of Tonkin) it is amazing when the excuse for this that is supposed to give us confidence in them is, "trust us; it's not our fault. We're just incompetent."]

Jonathan Schell on Reagan and nuclear (non)proliferation

Jonathan Schell's piece in the last issue of The Nation discussing Reagan's legacy of non-proliferation is provocative. His account of Reagan as a committed nuclear abolitionist and the very small opening there was for this idea at a certain moment at the zenith of the Cold War disturbs most understandings of him on the right and the left and gives a good deal of rhetorical force behind the argument that Schell has been making for many decades. As he confesses in an early aside, "It is a perverse pleasure to be able to quote Schwarzenegger, Shultz, Kissinger, Perry, Nunn and Reagan approvingly in a single article in The Nation, which normally does not keep company of this kind." It is not just a random exercise in reinforcing his own position to show that Reagan was committed to something with such a widespread public approval, but which rarely gets a hearing in major policy circles. After pointing out the divergent positions between major Democratic candidates for president, he notes that none of the Republicans have any debate on the issue,

So far, Reagan's legacy has found no takers among the Republican candidates, even as they claim with every other breath to be his heirs. The debate question for them would be whether their admiration for their hero extends to his vision of nuclear abolition, and if not, why not?

I found the account very informative, though I'm sure the nuclear hawks who prop up Reagan's image in front of anything they do would, if they found Schell a worthy critic, present their own more equivocal account of the events. On the other hand, I find Schell's continued interest in this issue to be important. Having grown up with nuclear arms as a sort of common sense background to late twentieth century life, discussion about non-proliferation seems like a relic of a time when they made cars with tail fins. It's not for nothing that Kubric shot Dr. Strangelove, made in 1964, in black and white: though we might not all love the bomb, we've certainly learned to stop worrying.

Schell and others help remind us that the current foreign policy crises in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere are not the just random, unconnected headlines, but the historical consequences of a certain decision made by US policy makers to abandon non-proliferation--and a policy that many of the current candidates for US president are likely to repeat. In speaking about Hillary's position, he comments that, "It's hard to imagine a stance more likely to accelerate nuclear proliferation." He goes on to ask, "Wouldn't this matter be as worthy of a few questions in the debates as, say, driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants or Obama's readiness to get verbally tough with Clinton?" The answer of course, is yes, but unfortunately the issue of non-proliferation seems like such a relic. In some ways it's quite remarkable that the current cultural climate is able to make xenophobic claims about being overrun by immigrants seem like a unique, modern narrative while talking about reducing nuclear arms seems like yesterday's news. It isn't, of course, but for some reason the popular discourse in the US makes it seem that way.

For me, it is a reminder of an earlier moment in the US and British Left, a time when one of the biggest issues to unite the left was not labor rights or the war in Vietnam, but the increased production of Nuclear Arms. As Dennis Dworkin discusses in his book on Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, one of the early issues that inspired the New Left "Originating as a force opposed to the spread of nuclear weapons, it came to symbolize a wider discontent with the institutions of modern society. It was the only genuine mass political movement between the Popular Front in the 1930s and the student revolt of the late 1960s." (64) But even the latter was, in part, an outgrowth of the earlier unity in the CND. Specifically, the different factions that eventually became identified with Stuart Hall and E. P. Thompson and the journals that they worked on (The Universities and Left Review [ULR] and The Reasoner respectively, which were eventually merged to form The New Left Review) were initially united over the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The ULR, Dworkin contends, "saw themselves as possible mediators between the CND and the mainstream labor movement" while

Even before the founding of the nuclear disarmament movement, Thompson was writing in the New Reasoner about the relationship between nuclear disarmament and socialist strategy: "The bomb must be dismantled; but in dismantling it, men will summon up energies which will open the way to their inheritance. The bomb is like an image of man's whole predicament: it bears within it death and life, total destruction or human mastery over human history."

The issue, in other words, that eventually brought forth the energy of the left that created what became known as Cultural Studies, was the proliferation of Nuclear Arms. Now the latter seem largely to be a hegemonic commonplace and the question is less about whether they should exist than who should possess them. The shift mirrors the shift in the conversation of Cultural Studies more generally. The original concern was with what defined the culture of capitalist democracies and what mechanisms were used to reproduce this culture by the ruling classes of nation states that adopted this as the dominant mode of production. Now this is basically accepted as "the" mode of production; it forms the background of conversations about identity politics which no longer question the dominant organization of commercial media and instead look at the issue of who gets represented and how. This shift is being reversed--or, more accurately, the dialectic of the relevance of the earlier concern with present ones is being realized--but for a time, the acceptance of the status quo was seen as a precondition for critiquing the surface manifestations of more fundamental inequalities.

Whether the issue of Nuclear Proliferation should become some sort of guiding question in Cultural Studies is likely connected to the question of whether one of our major concerns should shift to issues of war--particularly the US war in Iraq (especially for US CS thinkers). Paul Smith said as much at the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies conference and there is certainly some shift in this direction. Since, for the time being, my work on IPR is dealing with what could be seen as an incidental concern in this kind of global environment I'll defer any grand pronouncement on the issue. But I will note that the current strategy used to counter proliferation faces roughly the same problem which faces interests who hope to create a common worldwide legal regime for intellectual property rights. Namely, that they face a world in which they have done everything they can to tear down states which might protect the interests of their citizens over the interests of the international regime. In doing so they have effectively weakened--both in terms of the institutions of government and their popular legitimacy--the very instruments that might be needed to enforce such a regime. The flipside of this argument could be that the state was never so strong except in the metropolitan center, and either way the attempt to stem what is basically a sort of mercurial flow of knowledge and ideas is a Herculean task even the strongest Leviathan would be hard pressed to execute. Still, it ironically points to the continued need for executive instruments even in seemingly the most immaterial of issues.

Peter Vlach

So it has taken me a few weeks to get it together, but I've finally been able to scan in the photos I had of Peter. I also have something I've written, but I had to do it freehand and will have to transcribe it when I have more time. It was really upsetting to hear the news about him and it took me quite some time to really get my head around why. I don't know that I have, but at least I'm not thinking about it all the time anymore.



Here is Peter the way many people seem to remember him. As best I can recall I took this picture in the Summer of 1995, after I had just bought my first SLR camera. Peter had already gone to school but had come back to Lewisville to visit. I was hanging out a lot with John, Syd, and Chris who all lived together in some apartments off of Main St. One night peter took John, Joel and I cruising in his awesome red car. I feel like it was earlier that year that John and Peter introduced me to the music of Tom Waits and we had all been listening to him pretty much non-stop for several months. Something about that car just screamed Tom Waits (or maybe Tom Jones and Tom Waits) and he might have gone for a ride with us had he been around that night. I don't think he would have joined John and Peter at the destination, however.

Here's the photo as it appeared in my photo album. I thought it was a good snapshot of a moment. The top is taken of John at his place. I don't know the provenance of the T-shirt, but I know that Peter eventually ended up with it for at least a time as he's wearing it in the photo his brother has of him on his website. The middle, is, of course, Peter and the bottom is Andy from our road trip from TX to OR later that summer. Andy was also hanging out at John and Syd's quite a bit that summer, as was Joel. Speaking of...


I don't know why there's a picture of Cliff on this page, but the other two are of John and Joel in the backseat of Peter's car on the way that night to the railroad trestle. I don't know what inspired the trip, but I know that Pete and John ended up jumping off the top and I got these two shots.

I know that by the end of that summer a lot had changed for everyone. And after I went to school, I lost touch with Peter and John and Syd moved into a new place (the apartments where my Brother lives now and Leah's brother used to live. ) I hung out with them quite a lot when I moved back to TX, but when I went to school in Georgetown, TX, I lost touch with them. I tried to remain in contact, but they were doing their own thing. I can't remember how that little clique parted, but I know that by the following year (maybe the fall of 1997) Syd had moved somewhere to work on acting and John had moved down to live with Peter in Austin. I think the last time I saw Peter was at their place around that time. Here are a few photo's from that night.




the book in the foreground is Umberto Eco's "A Theory of Semiotics." What I remember most about that evening was that we had just discussed Eco in one of my classes and in conversation with Peter I discovered that he was studying semiotics. Thinking that I could therefore hold my own in a conversation on this topic, I started asking some questions. Peter, of course, effortlessly and with no pretense, began speaking at a level way beyond my comprehension. I tried, briefly, to play along, but he was quick to realize that I had no idea what he was talking about. So he gently pulled back the throttle on his big brain and we chatted for a bit longer about something mundane.

I remembered him that way for several years. Hearing about his exploits second or third hand, I knew that this calm, humble, effortless genius, this singular, quirky spirit was traveling East Asia, meeting interesting new people and having adventures. Though I didn't keep in touch with him, there was something comforting in knowing that he was out there, that Peter existed.

Bill O'Reilly: cultural anthropologist

Although I think Bill O'Reilly is, indeed, an asshat, the clip from his radio show that Media matters has picked up as evidence of him being a bigot shows something much more sickening--Juan Williams chatting with him like Bill's as pluralistic and aware as the next guy. I heard Williams on NPR a few weeks ago in a short segment about the role African-Americans journalists play in the news. As an illustration of the pressure he felt as a spokesperson for Black issues he said:

"I remember once I was covering Marion Barry here in D.C. and I remember standing at a bus stop one day [back when I had to ride the bus]. And this guy comes up to me and he says, "You know that White newspaper you work for, The Washington Post, you know that paper goes all over the country, all over the world and it's creating a real bad image of Black people, you know, you should know what you're doing, you know, working for the Man and putting down Black people."

That certainly is a great burden to bear. It's a good thing he's over that. Now he appears on Bill O'Reilly's show, effectively, as a member of the black upper class, assuring Bill's 70+ year old white, male audience that there are some Negros out there who are civilized and well mannered and not corrupting our youth. In the segment he has the keen insight to say that it's really okay for white kids to listen to Gangsta rap because that has no effect on them except for providing them an outlet for rebellion (oh, and creating a certain impression of race relations--but who could that hurt?) It's the Black youths that have a problem here because:

too many of the black kids take it as, "Oh, that's what it means to be authentically black. That's how you make money. That's how you become rich and famous and get on TV and get music videos." And you either get the boys or the girls. The girls think they have to, you know, be half-naked and spinning around like they're on meth in order to get any attention. It really corrupts people, and I think it adds, Bill, to some serious sociological problems, like the high out-of-wedlock birth rate because of this hypersexual imagery that then the kids adapt to some kind of reality. I mean, it's inauthentic.

It's like it came from the script of a movie drafted by Reaganite propagandists about race. I'm not going to really engage with the argument about the effect a certain set of role models has on young people: obviously it has some effect but since the "black kids" we're talking about here are cardboard cut outs fashioned by the minds of these two stooges I'll leave that to one side. What I will point out is that, as these two guys with their major public presence on the US airwaves forget to mention, is that this image of "gangstas" etc. is hardly new and their widespread promotion isn't just some random, democratic result of us having sorted through all the possible Black entertainers and coming up with these guys. Up at the top there are some White homies that are making plenty of bank off of this--and have been for some time--and their marketing and promotion tactics are keen to the popular impressions they've helped to create.

But all of this is sort of beside the point. Because what Bill begins his segment saying is that he's so unfamiliar with the way that "Black America" (as if such a thing exists) works that a stroll through Harlem is his only source of authority for talking about "Black America." Juan Williams should have called him on that right off. If you're such a stranger to these areas, how do you know so much about the children in them? The answer is that he simply doesn't. And I'd imagine Juan Williams doesn't know much more. The effect they are talking about (kids imitating gangsta rappers) is simply presumed from the content of the media. The ridiculous idea that they can blame the increase in out-of-wedlock births on "Gangsta Rap" would be charmingly back-woods if these two fools weren't having their rap session on a nationally syndicated radio show.

I mean, everyone knows Reggaeton is much more popular than Gangsta rap in most US cities!



MOREOVER...

In thinking a little longer about this, I really do wonder what the larger context for Bill and Juan's little diatribe is and my suspicion is that it was addressing the events in Jena, which, if it was the case, really disgusts me. This lead into the whole discussion makes me suspect that it had something to do with what is going on there, in which case Williams should really be ashamed of himself for playing along:

Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they've had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don't think there's a black American who hasn't had a personal insult that they've had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don't think there's one in the country. So you've got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] "You call me that, I'm gonna be more successful." OK, it depends on the personality.

Right. I guess those kids in Jena just didn't take up the challenge those nooses posed with the right frame of mind.

[okay, I admit, I'm jumping to a conclusion here. But since I am not going to pay to listen to the 9/19 version of his radio show, I'm going to assume that, since the story aired the day before the big rally in Jena it is hard to imagine any story about race (especially one that focuses on the age old white problem of having to put up with uppity, yet uncivilized, Negros) not beginning from that point. And if it wasn't starting from that point, then it is even more disconnected from reality than I imagined.-]

Politics in Black and White - New York Times

Krugman says, of the changes that the protests of Jena help illustrate :

In other words, it looks as if the Republican Party is about to start paying a price for its history of exploiting racial antagonism. If that happens, it will be deeply ironic. But it will also be poetic justice.

I think calling it poetic justice is inadvertently giving the Democrats too much credit for actually doing anything minority issues on their own accord. If the Republicans are still committed to the southern strategy (fully evoking the antebellum meaning of the term) then the Democrats are just as committed to a Northern Strategy (i.e. where race was definitely an issue throughout the 19th century, and where full equality for African Americans was never on the agenda) have done little more than cash in as the "other party." The real justice would be if minorities of all races (and classes) created a third party that was actually committed to the issue of racial equality. It would mean that the Democrats couldn't just wait for electoral windfalls from simply being the "less evil" party. One could say the same at this point for issues of gender (especially reproductive freedom) but I've seen way too many haughty middle class white women lately who seem to think that the Republicans are their party to expect a mass of women to move any closer to protecting their own interests than possibly jumping to the Democrats. I don't know if Hillary makes that any more or less possible, but either case isn't very promising in terms of the issues that should matter most.

On that note, I've been really struck lately at how much women--especially new mothers--will put up with in terms of the boundaries their employers put on them. I guess at that point there is not much that can be done by an individual, but in an earlier age having to use vacation time for maternity leave (as one new mother I know has) or having to quit work altogether because the employer won't work with you on child care issues and flexible work schedules after only six weeks of maternity leave--these are the kinds of things that would get people pissed off and start rallying other mothers for some sort of expansion of maternity rights on a national level. It would seem that the absence of this even in the face of all the "culture of life" bullshit the GOP likes to brand itself with really goes to show how cowed we all are. Maybe there is some "netroots" going on about this somewhere, but most of the energy seems to be channeled into the dead end catacombs of the old party apparatuses, which seem to be committed to the "culture of life" in proportion to the life giving force of Dick Cheney's womb.

All of that will, of course, come to a head in the next few days when Bush commits the rhetorical/PR blunder of vetoing a bill on children's health care. I have no illusions right now about the robustness of the Democrats desire or ability to really change the health care industry, but it is actually poetic irony to have Bush signing such a veto: "Life begins at conception, but our responsibility for protecting it ends at birth." Sign on, you fanatical hypocrite; sign on.

[I suppose I should follow that by saying that the ideological framework of the Republican party is fully able to make this seem completely coherent. The danger, on the other hand, of cornering them on this point, is that the neither of the pure ideologies--19th century capitalism or 15th century theocratic absolutism--are all that appealing, though both find plenty of adherents within different sectors of the US public. If they were to choose one of the two for the sake of consistency, then it might turn off some of the swing voters, but I don't have complete faith that either would be stomped at the polls. There seems to be a genuine longing among a good portion of the US populace for the comforting arms of fascism or totalitarianism of some stripe so I wouldn't put it past them to overturn the rest of the 20th century for the committed adherence of any party to a comprehensive (and easily comprehendable) master narrative. I know this is a fairly cliched thing to say in this post-post-modern era, but I say it as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.]

Alexander Cockburn: On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"

Cockburn makes a good general case for some of the absence of novelty in Naomi Klein's thesis of "Disaster Capitalism"

The Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, but 125 years earlier a million Irish peasants starved to death while Irish grain was exported onto ships flying the flag of economic liberalism. Klein writes about "the bloody birth of counter-revolution" in the 1960s and 1970s, but any page from the histories of Presidents Jackson, Polk or Roosevelt discloses a bleak and blood-stained continuity with the past. Depatterning? Indian children were taken from their families and punished for every word spoken in their own language, even as African slaves were given Christian names and forbidden to use their own, or to drum. Amid the shock of the Civil War the Republicans deferred by several years the freeing of slaves, while hastening to use crisis to arrange a banking and monetary system to their liking.

but even as he is saying this, he really seems to be missing the point. As obvious as this may be to the average leftist with some sense of history, she does have a point in that the rise of American Empire (or, if you want to sound like the more PC Liberal version, "The American Century") has been accompanied by a significant ideology of "freedom" and "democracy." And there is a very clear bias towards remembering the last half century as one of the peaceful progress towards the "End of History."

On the other hand, as vitriolic as 1960s leftists like Cockburn were in their disdain for the welfare state, many of the social wage gains it provided were not just some corporate fleece job. Ditto the gains of civil rights. Yes these were won through struggle, but the international image of the US was in the forefront of the minds of the leaders who eventually had to re-write some of the hegemonic discourse to allow for these new articulations of freedom. No it was not an unmitigated success and yes there was still plenty of problems with the normalizing "regime of truth" through which the institutions of the state produced the ideal national subject.

The change in the 1970s, which Klein seems to be pointing to, is one in which many of those gains were articulated as some sort of special pleading by weenies who couldn't cut it rather than the hard won gains of people who actually contributed to the society--or as social supports for people who the state's actions (in line with the interests of globalizing capital) left in increasingly dire straits.

If Cockburn's argument is that there is never any difference in the relationship between capital and labor or capital and the state, then that, also, is an "interesting perspective" (as he says of David Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism). But it seems no more historically specific than Klein's account to say that nothing has really changed. On this point, I have recently been having some fairly unpopular thoughts.

I don't know much about Soviet history. I grew up in the Reagan presidency so my earliest understanding of it was as an "Evil Empire" But it seems like much of what was gained in the 20th century in the US was gained because the Soviet Union was always lurking as a counterbalance. I'm certain that the propagandistic image of that society that I had in the US was as filled with inaccuracies as the official version promoted by the Kremlin, so I can't say anything about how good it was for the Soviet people. It doesn't seem that it was a whole lot better than the social ruptures caused by capitalism and imperialism in the 19th century, but in world politics, it was at least there to keep the US (more) honest. The civil rights movement in the US and the anti-imperialism movements throughout the world not only had a friend in the Soviet Union, the possibility that they could be more friendly with the USSR than the USA made the latter pay a little more attention to (appearing) consistent. That, it seems, has been lost.

This brings me to Cockburn's example of India. I don't have sources handy on this, but I recall accounts of the pressure placed on India with the fall of the Soviet Union to transition quickly to an alliance with the US. I believe the discussions were related to the recent Nuclear alliance between the US and India, but the point was that there was a crisis that led to the Indian adoption of the neo-liberal model: the loss of its key strategic ally in the world. And clearly the Indian elite--like the Soviet elite, the Chilean elite, and the "global North" in general--were the greatest champions of this model at the time and its greatest beneficiaries. But there was certainly a cataclysmic change that took place.

It is in this context that the adoption of these policies appears to be natural and where people like Jeffrey Sachs can present a striking unawareness of the history of where the good stuff in the US came from in the interest of establishing a model that has rarely, if ever, existed in human history. The intervention Klein is making is to inform a new generation of the "global north" that it isn't just "brand bullies" we have to contest, but the entire model itself. And to do this sometimes requires the expulsion of some nuance from the argument in order to focus on some other nuances. Since her other recent work--such as the documentary The Take--is focusing precisely on the resistance to the model, I can't help but think Cockburn's critique is basically just another crusty leftist trying to retain his authority.

For even the most well organized, grassroots change in Latin America could be easily branded as some communist (or "terrorist") campaign by the sympathizers of global capital, which, because the repressive arm of the US state is currently tied may not result in the kind of intervention we saw in the cold war, but can let them legitimize local thuggery in its interests. This has been the tack taken, for instance, in the recent dealings of the Ecuadorian state with the indigenous movements there when they try to resist oil or mining on their lands--and they have one of the most well respected movements in Latin America. In other words, it is very public condemnations of the current model of capitalism that help provide the counter-hegemonic lens through which people in the North can better understand what their Southern neighbors are up to. In the end that may not help much since many of them wouldn't bother to stop some rent-a-cops from shocking an unarmed student five feet away, but every little counts, right.

Cindy Sheehan's resignation

I won't say that I followed all her movements these long three years, and maybe she wasn't the most stable person to begin with. But I can't say I'd have done much better than she did under the circumstances she describes. On the one hand there is the party politics that are intractable yet almost indistinguishable (as the recent war funding bill is further evidence). It is a little naive to think that we could sort out Then there is the anti war movement which she describes in this way:

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Over the weekend we watched Children of Men. Though the decent into fascism in that film is as obviously the end point of the present trajectory of the state (made, again, ever more evident with the banal xenophobia displayed in conversation over the most recent iteration of the immigration bill) the really depressing part of the film is that the people most able to help change things--or at least who we often look to to change things--seem to be identical to the group Cindy speaks of, only with the added ingredient of violence and armed struggle. Likely, we could look closely at the Iraqi insurgency and see pretty much the same thing: the people positioned to fight against the occupation are corrupt and driven by their egotistical desire to hold some pitiful piece of the country their helping to destroy. In this, though Children of Men was meant to be tragic, there were moments when it really just seemed like a black satire of our own present circumstances.

And most important of all, it seems, is Cindy's observation that,

Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance.

I fully agree even as I'm guilty of this crime. I don't pay as close attention as I should be to the actual events on the ground in Iraq. It becomes a dull hum in the background that is much easier to ignore than confront head on. All that I start to notice is when the deprivation gets particularly bad--such as the story today in the NYT with the headline


Desperate Iraqi Refugees Turn to Sex Trade in Syria

to quote from the story:

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months.

According to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees now live in Syria; the Syrian government puts the figure even higher.

Given the deteriorating economic situation of those refugees, a United Nations report found last year, many girls and women in “severe need” turn to prostitution, in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members. In many cases, the report added, “the head of the family brings clients to the house.”

Aid workers say thousands of Iraqi women work as prostitutes in Syria, and point out that as violence in Iraq has increased, the refugee population has come to include more female-headed households and unaccompanied women.

Iraqi Freedom indeed. And, compared to this, watching American Idol is a lot more fun. On the other hand, I don't necessarily fault people for doing that. Many of them work hard all day--many of them much harder than their parents did with a lot less hope of getting ahead--and it seems like, as decadent as it sounds, sitting down in front of the TV for a few hours at night is a reasonable thing to do. This reminds me of Walter Lippmann who, in his pessimistic anti-democratic polemic The Phantom Public, says

The socialist scheme has at its root the mystical fallacy of democracy, that the people, all of them, are competent; at its top it suffers from the homeopathic fallacy that adding new tasks to a burden the people will not and cannot carry now will make the burden of citizenship easily borne. The socialist theory presupposes an unceasing, intiring round of civic duties, an enormous complication of the political interests that are already much too complicated. (27)

In other words, as per Lippmann's solution, people are tired and overwhelmed already so how does adding more things for them to consider solve the problem. And besides, most of them are incompetant: better to leave it up to the experts. In effect, the two party system that Sheehan talks about in her letter is the end result of the solutions to the crisis arrived at by Lippmann's generation. The issue became less about asking people what they thought in order to make decisions than it was telling them what they should think through press agents, advertising and "news" and then sponsoring polls to make sure the propaganda was working--and that people still felt that, despite the fact they were even further from the decision making process than before, the were still included in it.

In theory, I don't completely reject certain aspects of this model. In fact, much of it makes sense. It would, indeed, hinder much decision making if there had to be a mandate for every decision made. This is all the more onerous because, in many cases, you have to wrench people's opinions from them. I definitely see the point he's making, but it takes present circumstances to be natural and, in some ways, inevitable. The contemporary answer to this criticism by the closest thing we have to what Lippman refers to as the "socialist scheme" would be that voter turnout would increase if people felt like it actually mattered.

I'm not completely confident of this and I think it is on par with a free market mentality in terms of its idealism ("Democracy hasn't worked yet because we've never really had democracy!"). But I think both are fairly entrenched as ideological fundamentals in the American polity and I'm more inclined to think that, in the long run, we would likely come up with structures of state similar to the ones we have now in order to streamline some of these processes. It doesn't make sense for us all to be expected to examine the evidence presented in a case for approving a drug or food product for the market. As Lippmann himself points out, in most cases, only the interested parties would form "The Public" here. In other words, instead of the version of "The Public" described by John Dewey (Lippmann's contemporary), where it would be described as anyone effected or potentially effected by a transaction, Lippmann said it would more likely just be anyone who understood their interest. Unfortunately, this means that, for instance, the businesses who create the drugs (or, more importantly and accurately, market, sell, and profit from the drugs) would have a much greater understanding of its interest in the drug's approval (and, incidentally, in its being protected by patent laws).

Dewey's feeling, on the one hand, was that people would simply need to be informed better of their interests. I agree with this completely, so long as it isn't the Drug Company doing the informing. But I can't help but think that, over time, the people who knew the most about this , the people who were most passionate about controlling the harmful effects of bad drugs and harnessing the benefits of good ones, would end up being the only ones at that hearing objectively countering the more subjective interests of the drug companies, whatever their size or configuration; and, in so far as they were interested in protecting the public (in Dewey's terms) The Public, in so far as it could be represented, would likely elect those people to watch over that process for them, as their representatives and in their interests. In short, over time, I can't help but think even the most anarchic or libertarian society would eventually develop some form of bureaucracy simply because, once one figures out some of the things that need to be done with a highly specialized knowledge but in the general interest of society, one will not leave it up to the free market alone.

In fact, it is even more likely that something like this would develop with the free market: if consumers are going to act with any confidence, they will want to know that the labeling of items as safe has some assurance. And outside of a completely monopolized marketplace, where the only people allowed to present new products are well known, even new players would likely welcome some sort of inspection protocol (provided it wasn't so onerous as to be unreachable.) I suppose the label of "organic" is undergoing just such a controversy at the moment and, since the state is not doing its job correctly (or is charging people a prohibitive fee for the label) there is emerging a general argument that "it's organic, but..." the labeling is too expensive. (I actually heard this in Starbucks the other day in Portland. The Barista told me that all their coffees were fair trade but the suppliers couldn't afford to get the labeling. This seems completely off the mark to me and if I'd had more information at the time, I probably would have probed a little deeper here.) In any case, this is not a very good analogy because it is not necessarily a life and death issue. Telling people it is "organic" or "fair trade," despite the possible health consequences of the former, is basically a way of placating consumers guilt rather than informing them of whether or not something will kill them. It is best if it is true, but unless they are really committed, most people--like myself--wouldn't probe too much more into it, particularly since it the reason given for the lack of labeling is actually fairly in line with the politics of the consumer anyway: we are supporting local farmers and farmers who are in impoverished areas so it seems completely logical that they might not have the extra funds to get the labelling. That this should also lead us to wonder just how stringent they might be about it often doesn't enter the equation.

On the other hand, I've heard similar claims about drug treatments or other kinds of non-western medicine that isn't approved by the FDA. But the people who begin to agree more with these kinds of claims are also the ones who begin to disengage with those bureaucracies, refusing, for instance, to take an asprin for a headache, despite the fact that this is a pretty old remedy, not some big-pharma ploy to push pills. Still, the problems that we're encountering here have more to do with casting doubt on these supposedly objective institutions. On this, I'm not exactly sure what to make of China's announcement this morning that they have sentenced their own former FDA head to death.

Outside of initially horrified about the death sentence for a corruption charge, I was puzzled this morning when I heard two different reports of what prompted it on NPR. In the morning edition segment, there was the sense that this was in response to the poisoned dog food and other products that had effected consumers on a global scale. As the report was given, there was a kind of breezy account here of the fact that someone was being put to death and this was a particularly problematic form of justice. Instead, the news was reported along just the lines it seems the Chinese government wanted it to be: namely that it was taking action to keep the food supply safe. That this kind of action is condemned by most of the civilized world was downplayed, it seemed, in favor of making people feel a little better about feeding their dogs and cats (and babies and kids) food shipped from halfway across the world.

There was no condemnation from the following segment on the Business focused "Marketplace" but they at least pointed out that this was ostensibly supposed to be in response to the Chairman's role in approving a drug that ended up killing 10 people in China. I guess I can see this logic and, if you're going to have the death penalty, it seems much more just to have it for the administrators who knowingly make decisions that lead to people's deaths as much as you do for poor psychos who go on rampages (or poor minorities who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.) It doesn't make the practice any less barbaric, but it does make it more sensible as a form of justice. If we made administrative corruption a capital offense, I think we'd have less of it here as well. On the other hand, I'm sure that even in this case, pinning it on one person is problematic and an old school Communist PR move so it is only effective for reductive twenty second news bites. Hence the US media will likely gobble it up without checking how healthy it is for civilized consumption.

I could try to bring this back round completely to Cindy Sheehan but I think that would be a bit too contrived. What I will say is that I don't think the answer to the seemingly intractable problems she articulates is to simply smash the state. But I do think that this quote from Dewey's book on the subject holds some insight. It is, perhaps, as idealistic about the possibilities of using rational, experimental methods in the formation of political institutions as it is in the possibility that people will always be able to tell that they are being stifled or moving away from their ideal) by their continued presence and, hence, prone to revolution (pace Sheehan's complaint). In all of this, he's a product of both the progressive era in the US, and the rising public outrage around the world that eventually led to fascism in a majority of countries of the world (at least according to the way Polanyi defined it). Still it is a good quote to end on:

In no two ages or places is there the same public. Conditions make the consequences of associated action and the knowledge of them different. In addition the means by which a public can determine the govenment to serve its interests vary. Only formally can we say what the best state would be. In concrete fact, in actional and concrete organization and structure, there is not form of state which can be said to be the best: not least till history is ended, and one can survey all its varied forms. The formation of states must be an experimental process. The trail process may go on with diverse degrees of blindness and accident, and at the cost of unregulated procedures of cut and try, of fumbling and groping, without insight into what men are after or clear knowledge of a good state even when it is acheived. Or it may proceed more intelligently, because guided by knowledge of the conditions which must be fulfilled. But it is still experimental. And since conditions of action and of inquiry and knowledge are always changing, the experiment must always be retried; the State must always be rediscovered. Except, once more, in formal statement of conditions to be met, we have no idea what history may still bring forth. it is not the business of political philosophy and science to determine what the state in general should or must be. What they may do is to aid in the creation of methods such that experimentation may go on less blindly, less at the mrecy of accident, more intelligently, so that men may learn from their errors and profit by their successes. The belief in political fixity, of the sanctity of some form of state consecrated by the efforts of our fathers and hallowed by traditions, is one of the stumbling blocks in the way of orderly and directed change; it is an invitation to revolt and revolution.