Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Glenn Greenwald: OWS-inspired activism
OWS-inspired activism
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon
It was only a matter of time before a coordinated police crackdown was imposed to end the Occupy encampments. Law enforcement officials and policy-makers in America know full well that serious protests — and more — are inevitable given the economic tumult and suffering the U.S. has seen over the last three years (and will continue to see for the foreseeable future). A country cannot radically reduce quality-of-life expectations, devote itself to the interests of its super-rich, and all but eliminate its middle class without triggering sustained citizen fury.
The reason the U.S. has para-militarized its police forces is precisely to control this type of domestic unrest, and it’s simply impossible to imagine its not being deployed in full against a growing protest movement aimed at grossly and corruptly unequal resource distribution. As Madeleine Albright said when arguing for U.S. military intervention in the Balkans: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” That’s obviously how governors, big-city Mayors and Police Chiefs feel about the stockpiles of assault rifles, SWAT gear, hi-tech helicopters, and the coming-soon drone technology lavished on them in the wake of the post/9-11 Security State explosion, to say nothing of the enormous federal law enforcement apparatus that, more than anything else, resembles a standing army which is increasingly directed inward.
Most of this militarization has been justified by invoking Scary Foreign Threats — primarily the Terrorist — but its prime purpose is domestic. As civil libertarians endlessly point out, the primary reason to oppose new expansions of government power is because it always — always — vastly expands beyond its original realm. I remember quite vividly the war-zone-like police force deployed against protesters at the 2008 GOP Convention in Minneapolis, as well as the invocation of Terrorism statutes to arrest and punish them, with the active involvement of federal law enforcement. Along those lines, Alternet‘s Lynn Parramore asks all the key questions about the obviously coordinated law enforcement assault on peaceful protesters over the last week.
But the same factors that rendered this police crackdown inevitable will also ensure that this protest movement endures: the roots of the anger are real, profound and impassioned. Just as American bombs ostensibly aimed at reducing Terrorism have the exact opposite effect — by fueling the anti-American sentiments that cause Terrorism in the first place — so, too, will excessive police force further fuel the Occupy movement. Nothing highlights the validity of the movement’s core grievances more than watching a piggish billionaire Wall Street Mayor — who bought and clung to his political power using his personal fortune — deploy force against marginalized citizens peacefully and lawfully protesting joblessness, foreclosures and economic suffering. If Michael Bloomberg didn’t exist, the Occupy protesters would have to invent him.
* * * * *
After visiting numerous Occupy sites over the past few weeks, I’ve repeatedly said that the protests are among the most exciting, inspiring and important political developments over the last decade. That’s true for several reasons: its innovative, pioneering tactics, its refusal to be pigeonholed with partisan identity, its resistance to translating itself into establishment media language, its organic form, its appropriate contempt for the nation’s political and legal institutions, its singular ability to force discussions of wealth inequality into the discourse. But I think its most impressive attribute is that it has inspired a level of activism and a sense of possibility like few other things have. It’s worth highlighting a few representative examples.
Ever since the Occupy movement began, the blog FireDogLake, with very little attention or self-promotion, has overwhelmingly devoted itself not only to covering the protests but also to creating an amazing new template to help sustain it. Exclusively relying on reader donations, FDL has sent one of its youngest and most relentless activists, Kevin Gosztola, around the country for the last two months, visiting over 20 different encampments from every region in the nation. Gosztola has been able to provide first-hand, on-the-scene reporting from all of these sites, but more important, has built a network of representatives and liasons to enable coordination and communication among site organizers.
Over the past month, FDL — with the construction of this network — has done something truly amazing. In addition to police crackdowns, it has long been assumed that the greatest challenge to sustaining the Occupy movement would be the approaching harsh winter in Northern cities. The assumption — not unreasonable — was that few people would be willing to occupy outdoor spaces in zero-degree weather or below. FDL, with its “Occupy Supply” project, is all but ensuring the elimination of this problem.
Again using nothing more than reader donations, FDL designed and then purchased a full line of winter clothing for free distribution to the various Occupy sites around the nation: hats, sweaters, scarves, gloves, socks, blankets, jackets, thermal underwear, face masks, and more. Every penny FDL raises — 100% — goes exclusively toward the manufacture and free distribution of these products to Occupy protesters. They have thus far raised close to $90,000, and spent roughly $85,000 of it on the purchase of almost 7,000 items. They have also furnished heat generators, tents, and sleeping bags to numerous sites as well.
To Read the Rest and To Access Hyperlinked Resources
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon
It was only a matter of time before a coordinated police crackdown was imposed to end the Occupy encampments. Law enforcement officials and policy-makers in America know full well that serious protests — and more — are inevitable given the economic tumult and suffering the U.S. has seen over the last three years (and will continue to see for the foreseeable future). A country cannot radically reduce quality-of-life expectations, devote itself to the interests of its super-rich, and all but eliminate its middle class without triggering sustained citizen fury.
The reason the U.S. has para-militarized its police forces is precisely to control this type of domestic unrest, and it’s simply impossible to imagine its not being deployed in full against a growing protest movement aimed at grossly and corruptly unequal resource distribution. As Madeleine Albright said when arguing for U.S. military intervention in the Balkans: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” That’s obviously how governors, big-city Mayors and Police Chiefs feel about the stockpiles of assault rifles, SWAT gear, hi-tech helicopters, and the coming-soon drone technology lavished on them in the wake of the post/9-11 Security State explosion, to say nothing of the enormous federal law enforcement apparatus that, more than anything else, resembles a standing army which is increasingly directed inward.
Most of this militarization has been justified by invoking Scary Foreign Threats — primarily the Terrorist — but its prime purpose is domestic. As civil libertarians endlessly point out, the primary reason to oppose new expansions of government power is because it always — always — vastly expands beyond its original realm. I remember quite vividly the war-zone-like police force deployed against protesters at the 2008 GOP Convention in Minneapolis, as well as the invocation of Terrorism statutes to arrest and punish them, with the active involvement of federal law enforcement. Along those lines, Alternet‘s Lynn Parramore asks all the key questions about the obviously coordinated law enforcement assault on peaceful protesters over the last week.
But the same factors that rendered this police crackdown inevitable will also ensure that this protest movement endures: the roots of the anger are real, profound and impassioned. Just as American bombs ostensibly aimed at reducing Terrorism have the exact opposite effect — by fueling the anti-American sentiments that cause Terrorism in the first place — so, too, will excessive police force further fuel the Occupy movement. Nothing highlights the validity of the movement’s core grievances more than watching a piggish billionaire Wall Street Mayor — who bought and clung to his political power using his personal fortune — deploy force against marginalized citizens peacefully and lawfully protesting joblessness, foreclosures and economic suffering. If Michael Bloomberg didn’t exist, the Occupy protesters would have to invent him.
* * * * *
After visiting numerous Occupy sites over the past few weeks, I’ve repeatedly said that the protests are among the most exciting, inspiring and important political developments over the last decade. That’s true for several reasons: its innovative, pioneering tactics, its refusal to be pigeonholed with partisan identity, its resistance to translating itself into establishment media language, its organic form, its appropriate contempt for the nation’s political and legal institutions, its singular ability to force discussions of wealth inequality into the discourse. But I think its most impressive attribute is that it has inspired a level of activism and a sense of possibility like few other things have. It’s worth highlighting a few representative examples.
Ever since the Occupy movement began, the blog FireDogLake, with very little attention or self-promotion, has overwhelmingly devoted itself not only to covering the protests but also to creating an amazing new template to help sustain it. Exclusively relying on reader donations, FDL has sent one of its youngest and most relentless activists, Kevin Gosztola, around the country for the last two months, visiting over 20 different encampments from every region in the nation. Gosztola has been able to provide first-hand, on-the-scene reporting from all of these sites, but more important, has built a network of representatives and liasons to enable coordination and communication among site organizers.
Over the past month, FDL — with the construction of this network — has done something truly amazing. In addition to police crackdowns, it has long been assumed that the greatest challenge to sustaining the Occupy movement would be the approaching harsh winter in Northern cities. The assumption — not unreasonable — was that few people would be willing to occupy outdoor spaces in zero-degree weather or below. FDL, with its “Occupy Supply” project, is all but ensuring the elimination of this problem.
Again using nothing more than reader donations, FDL designed and then purchased a full line of winter clothing for free distribution to the various Occupy sites around the nation: hats, sweaters, scarves, gloves, socks, blankets, jackets, thermal underwear, face masks, and more. Every penny FDL raises — 100% — goes exclusively toward the manufacture and free distribution of these products to Occupy protesters. They have thus far raised close to $90,000, and spent roughly $85,000 of it on the purchase of almost 7,000 items. They have also furnished heat generators, tents, and sleeping bags to numerous sites as well.
To Read the Rest and To Access Hyperlinked Resources
Eric Hoover: Protesters Plan a National 'Student-Debt Refusal' Campaign
Protesters Plan a National 'Student-Debt Refusal' Campaign
By Eric Hoover
The Chroonicle of Higher Education
Occupy Wall Street protesters are poised to announce a national "student-debt refusal" campaign that would begin next week, says a prominent scholar within the movement.
On Wednesday night, Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, said members of an Occupy Wall Street working group were finalizing drafts of three "pledges" related to student debt, including a debtors' pledge, whose signers would refuse to make payments on their loans after one million signatures have been collected.
The other pledges are one for faculty members who support those who refuse to pay, and another for nondebtors, including parents and sympathizers, who also want to show their support.
The pledges, Mr. Ross said, are to be based on four beliefs: that student loans should be interest-free; that tuition at all public institutions should be federally funded; that private and for-profit colleges should open their financial records to the public; and that students' "debt burden" should be written off.
Mr. Ross, an expert in academic-labor issues, is a member of Occupy Wall Street's Education and Empowerment working group. On Wednesday, he described how his personal interest in student-debt issues had developed.
"Like many faculty, I see a lot of suffering and humiliation among students in taking on this debt," Mr. Ross said. "There was the recognition that my own salary is debt-financed. ... There's an element of complicity. It's an incredible burden for faculty to bear."
The campaign is scheduled to begin with an event at Zuccotti Park, in New York, on Monday afternoon, followed by a protest at the City University of New York's Baruch College.
By Eric Hoover
The Chroonicle of Higher Education
Occupy Wall Street protesters are poised to announce a national "student-debt refusal" campaign that would begin next week, says a prominent scholar within the movement.
On Wednesday night, Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, said members of an Occupy Wall Street working group were finalizing drafts of three "pledges" related to student debt, including a debtors' pledge, whose signers would refuse to make payments on their loans after one million signatures have been collected.
The other pledges are one for faculty members who support those who refuse to pay, and another for nondebtors, including parents and sympathizers, who also want to show their support.
The pledges, Mr. Ross said, are to be based on four beliefs: that student loans should be interest-free; that tuition at all public institutions should be federally funded; that private and for-profit colleges should open their financial records to the public; and that students' "debt burden" should be written off.
Mr. Ross, an expert in academic-labor issues, is a member of Occupy Wall Street's Education and Empowerment working group. On Wednesday, he described how his personal interest in student-debt issues had developed.
"Like many faculty, I see a lot of suffering and humiliation among students in taking on this debt," Mr. Ross said. "There was the recognition that my own salary is debt-financed. ... There's an element of complicity. It's an incredible burden for faculty to bear."
The campaign is scheduled to begin with an event at Zuccotti Park, in New York, on Monday afternoon, followed by a protest at the City University of New York's Baruch College.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Nathan Brown: Five Theses on Privatization and the University of California Struggle
Five Theses on Privatization and the UC Struggle
Reclaim UC
The following speech by Nathan Brown was delivered at the UC system-wide strike rally held at UC Davis on November 15:
Hello Everyone!
It’s beautiful to see so many of you here today. On four day’s notice, this is an incredible turnout. Let’s remember how much we can do in so little time.
I’m an English professor, and as some of you know, English professors spend a lot of our time talking about how to construct a “thesis” and how to defend it through argument. So today I’m going to model this way of thinking and writing by using it to discuss the university struggle. My remarks will consist of five theses, and I will defend these by presenting arguments to support them.
THESES
1. Tuition increases are the problem, not the solution.
2. Police brutality is an administrative tool to enforce tuition increases.
3. What we are struggling against is not the California legislature, but the upper administration of the UC system.
4. The university is the real world.
5. We are winning.
THESIS ONE: Tuition increases are the problem, not the solution.
In 2005 tuition was $6,312. Tuition is currently $13,218. What the Regents were supposed to be considering this week — before their meeting was cancelled due to student protest — was UC President Yudof’s plan to increase tuition by a further 81% over the next four years. On that plan, tuition would be over $23,000 by 2015-2016. If that plan goes forward, in ten years tuition would have risen from around $6,000 to around $23,000.
What happened?
The administration tells us that tuition increases are necessary because of cuts to state funding. According to this argument, cuts to state funding are the problem, and tuition increases are the solution. We have heard this argument from the administration and from others many times.
To argue against this administrative logic, I’m going to rely on the work of my colleague Bob Meister, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and the President of the UC Council of Faculty Associations. Professor Meister has written a series of important open letters to UC students, explaining why tuition increases are in fact the problem, not the solution to the budget crisis. What Meister explains is that the privatization of the university—the increasing reliance on tuition payments (your money) rather than state funding—is not a defensive measure on the part of the UC administration to make up for state cuts. Rather, it is an aggressive strategy of revenue growth: a way for the university to increase its revenue more than it would be able to through state funding.
This is the basic argument: privatization, through increased enrollments and constantly increasing tuition, is first and foremost an administrative strategy to bring in more revenue. It is not just a way to keep the university going during a time of state defunding. What is crucial to this argument is the way that different sources of funding can be used.
State funds are restricted funds. This means that a certain portion of those funds has to be used to fund the instructional budget of the university. The more money there is in the instructional budget, the more money is invested in student instruction, in the quality of your education. But private funds, tuition payments, are unrestricted funds. This means there are no restrictions on whether those funds are spent on student instruction, on administrative pay, or anything else.
What Professor Meister uncovered through his research into the restructuring of UC funding is that student tuition (your money) is being pledged as collateral to guarantee the university’s credit rating. What this allows the university to do is borrow money for lucrative investments, like building contracts or “capital projects” as they are called. These have no relation to the instructional quality of the institution. And the strong credit rating of the university is based on its pledge to continue raising tuition indefinitely.
Restricted state funds cannot be used for such purposes. Their use is restricted in such a way as to guarantee funding for the instructional budget. This restriction is a problem for any university administration whose main priority is not to sustain its instructional budget, but rather to increase its revenues and secure its credit rating for investment projects with private contractors.
So for an administration that wants to increase UC revenues and to invest in capital projects (rather than maintaining the quality of instruction) it is not cuts to public funding that are the problem; it is public funding itself that is the problem, because public funding is restricted.
To Read the Rest of the Speech
Reclaim UC
The following speech by Nathan Brown was delivered at the UC system-wide strike rally held at UC Davis on November 15:
Hello Everyone!
It’s beautiful to see so many of you here today. On four day’s notice, this is an incredible turnout. Let’s remember how much we can do in so little time.
I’m an English professor, and as some of you know, English professors spend a lot of our time talking about how to construct a “thesis” and how to defend it through argument. So today I’m going to model this way of thinking and writing by using it to discuss the university struggle. My remarks will consist of five theses, and I will defend these by presenting arguments to support them.
THESES
1. Tuition increases are the problem, not the solution.
2. Police brutality is an administrative tool to enforce tuition increases.
3. What we are struggling against is not the California legislature, but the upper administration of the UC system.
4. The university is the real world.
5. We are winning.
THESIS ONE: Tuition increases are the problem, not the solution.
In 2005 tuition was $6,312. Tuition is currently $13,218. What the Regents were supposed to be considering this week — before their meeting was cancelled due to student protest — was UC President Yudof’s plan to increase tuition by a further 81% over the next four years. On that plan, tuition would be over $23,000 by 2015-2016. If that plan goes forward, in ten years tuition would have risen from around $6,000 to around $23,000.
What happened?
The administration tells us that tuition increases are necessary because of cuts to state funding. According to this argument, cuts to state funding are the problem, and tuition increases are the solution. We have heard this argument from the administration and from others many times.
To argue against this administrative logic, I’m going to rely on the work of my colleague Bob Meister, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and the President of the UC Council of Faculty Associations. Professor Meister has written a series of important open letters to UC students, explaining why tuition increases are in fact the problem, not the solution to the budget crisis. What Meister explains is that the privatization of the university—the increasing reliance on tuition payments (your money) rather than state funding—is not a defensive measure on the part of the UC administration to make up for state cuts. Rather, it is an aggressive strategy of revenue growth: a way for the university to increase its revenue more than it would be able to through state funding.
This is the basic argument: privatization, through increased enrollments and constantly increasing tuition, is first and foremost an administrative strategy to bring in more revenue. It is not just a way to keep the university going during a time of state defunding. What is crucial to this argument is the way that different sources of funding can be used.
State funds are restricted funds. This means that a certain portion of those funds has to be used to fund the instructional budget of the university. The more money there is in the instructional budget, the more money is invested in student instruction, in the quality of your education. But private funds, tuition payments, are unrestricted funds. This means there are no restrictions on whether those funds are spent on student instruction, on administrative pay, or anything else.
What Professor Meister uncovered through his research into the restructuring of UC funding is that student tuition (your money) is being pledged as collateral to guarantee the university’s credit rating. What this allows the university to do is borrow money for lucrative investments, like building contracts or “capital projects” as they are called. These have no relation to the instructional quality of the institution. And the strong credit rating of the university is based on its pledge to continue raising tuition indefinitely.
Restricted state funds cannot be used for such purposes. Their use is restricted in such a way as to guarantee funding for the instructional budget. This restriction is a problem for any university administration whose main priority is not to sustain its instructional budget, but rather to increase its revenues and secure its credit rating for investment projects with private contractors.
So for an administration that wants to increase UC revenues and to invest in capital projects (rather than maintaining the quality of instruction) it is not cuts to public funding that are the problem; it is public funding itself that is the problem, because public funding is restricted.
To Read the Rest of the Speech
Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life
(This is from 2009 and rose out of the California student occupations and protests against the privatization of the state university system. In this it was a predecessor for the current Occupy movements at Berkeley, UC Davis, and other campuses.)
Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life
Research and Destroy
WE LIVE AS A DEAD CIVILIZATION. We can no longer imagine the good life except as a series of spectacles preselected for our bemusement: a shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-filled life and our own imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more lavish and inhumane than anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally beyond reach. No one believes in such outcomes anymore.
The truth of life after the university is mean and petty competition for resources with our friends and strangers: the hustle for a lower-management position that will last (with luck) for a couple years rifted with anxiety, fear, and increasing exploitation—until the firm crumbles and we mutter about “plan B.” But this is an exact description of university life today; that mean and petty life has already arrived.
Just to survive, we are compelled to adopt various attitudes toward this fissure between bankrupt promises and the actuality on offer. Some take a naïve romantic stance toward education for its own sake, telling themselves they expect nothing further. Some proceed with iron cynicism and scorn, racing through the ludicrous charade toward the last wad of cash in the airless vault of the future. And some remain committed to the antique faith that their ascendingly hard labor will surely be rewarded some day if they just act as one who believes, just show up, take on more degrees and more debt, work harder.
Time, the actual material of our being, disappears: the hours of our daily life. The future is seized from us in advance, given over to the servicing of debt and to beggaring our neighbors. Maybe we will earn the rent on our boredom, more likely not. There will be no 77 virgins, not even a plasma monitor on which to watch the death throes of the United States as a global power. Capitalism has finally become a true religion,wherein the riches of heaven are everywhere promised and nowhere delivered. The only difference is that every manner of crassness and cruelty is actively encouraged in the unending meantime. We live as a dead civilization, the last residents of Pompeii.
Romantic naïvete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment. The university and the life it reproduces have depended on these things. They have counted on our human capacities to endure, and to prop up that world’s catastrophic failure for just a few more years. But why not hasten its collapse? The university has rotted itself from the inside: the “human capital” of staff, teachers, and students would now no more defend it than they would defend a city of the dead.
Romantic naïvete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment: these need not be abandoned. The university forced us to learn them as tools; they will return as weapons. The university that makes us mute and dull instruments of its own reproduction must be destroyed so that we can produce our own lives. Romantic naïvete about possibilities; iron cynicism about methods; scorn for the university’s humiliating lies about its situation and its good intentions; commitment to absolute transformation — not of the university, but of our own lives. This is the beginning of imagination’s return. We must begin to move again, release ourselves from frozen history, from the igneous frieze of this buried life.
We must live our own time, our own possibilities. These are the only true justifications for the university’s existence, though it has never fulfilled them. On its side: bureaucracy, inertia, incompetence. On our side: everything else.
I
LIKE THE SOCIETY TO WHICH IT HAS PLAYED THE FAITHFUL SERVANT, THE UNIVERSITY IS BANKRUPT. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.
Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.
For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.
But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.
It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.
We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.
This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile. No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them. And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.
If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.
Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear attainable by credit.
Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one. Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life
Research and Destroy
WE LIVE AS A DEAD CIVILIZATION. We can no longer imagine the good life except as a series of spectacles preselected for our bemusement: a shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-filled life and our own imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more lavish and inhumane than anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally beyond reach. No one believes in such outcomes anymore.
The truth of life after the university is mean and petty competition for resources with our friends and strangers: the hustle for a lower-management position that will last (with luck) for a couple years rifted with anxiety, fear, and increasing exploitation—until the firm crumbles and we mutter about “plan B.” But this is an exact description of university life today; that mean and petty life has already arrived.
Just to survive, we are compelled to adopt various attitudes toward this fissure between bankrupt promises and the actuality on offer. Some take a naïve romantic stance toward education for its own sake, telling themselves they expect nothing further. Some proceed with iron cynicism and scorn, racing through the ludicrous charade toward the last wad of cash in the airless vault of the future. And some remain committed to the antique faith that their ascendingly hard labor will surely be rewarded some day if they just act as one who believes, just show up, take on more degrees and more debt, work harder.
Time, the actual material of our being, disappears: the hours of our daily life. The future is seized from us in advance, given over to the servicing of debt and to beggaring our neighbors. Maybe we will earn the rent on our boredom, more likely not. There will be no 77 virgins, not even a plasma monitor on which to watch the death throes of the United States as a global power. Capitalism has finally become a true religion,wherein the riches of heaven are everywhere promised and nowhere delivered. The only difference is that every manner of crassness and cruelty is actively encouraged in the unending meantime. We live as a dead civilization, the last residents of Pompeii.
Romantic naïvete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment. The university and the life it reproduces have depended on these things. They have counted on our human capacities to endure, and to prop up that world’s catastrophic failure for just a few more years. But why not hasten its collapse? The university has rotted itself from the inside: the “human capital” of staff, teachers, and students would now no more defend it than they would defend a city of the dead.
Romantic naïvete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment: these need not be abandoned. The university forced us to learn them as tools; they will return as weapons. The university that makes us mute and dull instruments of its own reproduction must be destroyed so that we can produce our own lives. Romantic naïvete about possibilities; iron cynicism about methods; scorn for the university’s humiliating lies about its situation and its good intentions; commitment to absolute transformation — not of the university, but of our own lives. This is the beginning of imagination’s return. We must begin to move again, release ourselves from frozen history, from the igneous frieze of this buried life.
We must live our own time, our own possibilities. These are the only true justifications for the university’s existence, though it has never fulfilled them. On its side: bureaucracy, inertia, incompetence. On our side: everything else.
I
LIKE THE SOCIETY TO WHICH IT HAS PLAYED THE FAITHFUL SERVANT, THE UNIVERSITY IS BANKRUPT. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.
Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.
For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.
But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.
It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.
We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.
This is the prospect for which we have been preparing since grade-school. Those of us who came here to have our privilege notarized surrendered our youth to a barrage of tutors, a battery of psychological tests, obligatory public service ops—the cynical compilation of half-truths toward a well-rounded application profile. No wonder we set about destroying ourselves the second we escape the cattle prod of parental admonition. On the other hand, those of us who came here to transcend the economic and social disadvantages of our families know that for every one of us who “makes it,” ten more take our place—that the logic here is zero-sum. And anyway, socioeconomic status remains the best predictor of student achievement. Those of us the demographics call “immigrants,” “minorities,” and “people of color” have been told to believe in the aristocracy of merit. But we know we are hated not despite our achievements, but precisely because of them. And we know that the circuits through which we might free ourselves from the violence of our origins only reproduce the misery of the past in the present for others, elsewhere.
If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience. First we pay, then we “work hard.” And there is the split: one is both the commander and the commanded, consumer and consumed. It is the system itself which one obeys, the cold buildings that enforce subservience. Those who teach are treated with all the respect of an automated messaging system. Only the logic of customer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What’s the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can’t be serious. A moral preparation? There are anti-depressants for that.
Meanwhile the graduate students, supposedly the most politically enlightened among us, are also the most obedient. The “vocation” for which they labor is nothing other than a fantasy of falling off the grid, or out of the labor market. Every grad student is a would be Robinson Crusoe, dreaming of an island economy subtracted from the exigencies of the market. But this fantasy is itself sustained through an unremitting submission to the market. There is no longer the least felt contradiction in teaching a totalizing critique of capitalism by day and polishing one’s job talk by night. That our pleasure is our labor only makes our symptoms more manageable. Aesthetics and politics collapse courtesy of the substitution of ideology for history: booze and beaux arts and another seminar on the question of being, the steady blur of typeface, each pixel paid for by somebody somewhere, some not-me, not-here, where all that appears is good and all goods appear attainable by credit.
Graduate school is simply the faded remnant of a feudal system adapted to the logic of capitalism—from the commanding heights of the star professors to the serried ranks of teaching assistants and adjuncts paid mostly in bad faith. A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine abbey, and all the strange theological claims for the nobility of this work, its essential altruism. The underlings are only too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester to pad the paychecks of the one-tenth who sustain the fiction that we can all be the one. Of course I will be the star, I will get the tenure-track job in a large city and move into a newly gentrified neighborhood.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Behind the News with Doug Henwood: Recent Reports on the Occupy Movement and Related Issues of Concern
Behind the News with Doug Henwood
November 12, 2011 Yanis Varoufakis on the latest developments in the Eurocrisis • Ramsey Kanaan, co-founder of PM Press, on the theory and practice of anarchism
November 5, 2011 Erica Seifert of Greenberg Quinlan Rossner Research on the public mood: pissed off about Wall Street and inequality • Dorian Warren of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs on Occupy Wall Street as politics and social movement
October 28, 2011 back after three-week fundraising hiatus! sociologist Alex Vitale on cops and protest • journalist Sarah Jaffe on OWS, mostly
September 24, 2011 I visit the Occupy Wall Street demos (my report in words and pictures is here) • Rohit Malpani, Oxfam advisor, on land grabs (see here for report) • Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics, debunks economics
November 12, 2011 Yanis Varoufakis on the latest developments in the Eurocrisis • Ramsey Kanaan, co-founder of PM Press, on the theory and practice of anarchism
November 5, 2011 Erica Seifert of Greenberg Quinlan Rossner Research on the public mood: pissed off about Wall Street and inequality • Dorian Warren of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs on Occupy Wall Street as politics and social movement
October 28, 2011 back after three-week fundraising hiatus! sociologist Alex Vitale on cops and protest • journalist Sarah Jaffe on OWS, mostly
September 24, 2011 I visit the Occupy Wall Street demos (my report in words and pictures is here) • Rohit Malpani, Oxfam advisor, on land grabs (see here for report) • Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics, debunks economics
Sarah Jaffe and Joshua Holland: Which Bank Is the Worst for America? 5 Behemoths That Hold Our Political System Hostage
Which Bank Is the Worst for America? 5 Behemoths That Hold Our Political System Hostage
by Sarah Jaffe and Joshua Holland
AlterNet
We've ranked the banks based on how shamelessly they game the political process through lobbying, revolving door politics and campaign donations.
The economic crash led to the loss of 9 million jobs and the biggest drop in American home-ownership since the Great Depression. Long-term unemployment, poverty and hunger have increased dramatically. People are angry. The Occupy Wall Street movement, a stand against Wall Street's greed, excess and criminality, has captured the imagination and participation of millions across the nation and the globe.
The giant mortgage bubble and the irresponsible and corrupt practices that caused the catastrophic economic crash didn't emerge out of thin air. They were a consequence of decades of pay-to-play politics rife with conflicts of interest; a political system awash in cash and legal pay-offs, designed to undermine the checks and balances that could have prevented the meltdown.
Many of these checks and balances were implemented during the Great Depression. How they were eroded and eventually abandoned is the story of a small group of banks, financial companies and elites involved in major conflicts of interest, revolving-door politics and backroom deal-making -- all to protect the interests of the global elite at the expense of the American public.
Big Finance has a long history of working hard to deregulate the American economic system on behalf of global capitalism run amok. One of its biggest coups was the overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that created a firewall between investment banking and the commercial banks that hold deposits and make loans.
The first victory in the quest to overturn this major protection came in 1986. Under intense pressure from Wall Street, the Federal Reserve reinterpreted a key section of Glass-Steagall, deciding that commercial banks could make up to 5 percent of their gross revenues from investment banking. After the board heard arguments from Citicorp, J.P. Morgan and Bankers Trust, it loosened the restrictions further: in 1989, the limit was raised to 10 percent of revenues, and in 1996, they hiked it up to 25 percent.
Then, according to a report by PBS' Frontline, “In the 1997-'98 election cycle, the finance, insurance, and real estate industries (known as the FIRE sector), spen[t] more than $200 million on lobbying and [made] more than $150 million in political donations” – most of which were “targeted to members of Congressional banking committees and other committees with direct jurisdiction over financial services legislation.”
The following year, after 12 unsuccessful attempts, Glass-Steagall, which would have made the crash of 2007-2009 impossible, was finally repealed. And it was only then that the explosion of shaky mortgage-backed securities began. “Subprime” loans, which made the mortgage system so vulnerable, made up 5 percent of all mortgages in the U.S. the year before repeal, but had skyrocketed to 30 percent of the total at the time of the crash.
The Glass-Steagall act was killed by financial interests seeking to maximize deregulation. The result was a casino-like environment that almost destroyed the U.S. and global economy. The giants of Wall Street enjoyed a massive bailout courtesy of American taxpayers, and they're still hard at work gaming the system, lobbying hard against new regulations that might avert the next bubble-led crash.
AlterNet, in partnership with the Media Consortium, looked at the five banks that exert the most influence on our democracy. Based on their size, the amount of money they spend on campaign donations and lobbying, and the number of employees who’ve gone through the revolving door into public service, or vice versa, we determined which banks have had the worst impact on the country. We’ll rank each one based on our research, and come up with the worst of the worst--the big bank that’s done the most damage to America's economy and society.
A word of caution is in order. This report is based only on what the banks are forced to disclose. It doesn't include lobbying by corporate front-groups like the Chamber of Commerce, and it doesn't include the “independent” campaign spending that has exploded in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which corporations are no longer required to disclose to the public. This is a classic story of American political corruption writ large.
Meet the Big Banks and Read the Rest
by Sarah Jaffe and Joshua Holland
AlterNet
We've ranked the banks based on how shamelessly they game the political process through lobbying, revolving door politics and campaign donations.
The economic crash led to the loss of 9 million jobs and the biggest drop in American home-ownership since the Great Depression. Long-term unemployment, poverty and hunger have increased dramatically. People are angry. The Occupy Wall Street movement, a stand against Wall Street's greed, excess and criminality, has captured the imagination and participation of millions across the nation and the globe.
The giant mortgage bubble and the irresponsible and corrupt practices that caused the catastrophic economic crash didn't emerge out of thin air. They were a consequence of decades of pay-to-play politics rife with conflicts of interest; a political system awash in cash and legal pay-offs, designed to undermine the checks and balances that could have prevented the meltdown.
Many of these checks and balances were implemented during the Great Depression. How they were eroded and eventually abandoned is the story of a small group of banks, financial companies and elites involved in major conflicts of interest, revolving-door politics and backroom deal-making -- all to protect the interests of the global elite at the expense of the American public.
Big Finance has a long history of working hard to deregulate the American economic system on behalf of global capitalism run amok. One of its biggest coups was the overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that created a firewall between investment banking and the commercial banks that hold deposits and make loans.
The first victory in the quest to overturn this major protection came in 1986. Under intense pressure from Wall Street, the Federal Reserve reinterpreted a key section of Glass-Steagall, deciding that commercial banks could make up to 5 percent of their gross revenues from investment banking. After the board heard arguments from Citicorp, J.P. Morgan and Bankers Trust, it loosened the restrictions further: in 1989, the limit was raised to 10 percent of revenues, and in 1996, they hiked it up to 25 percent.
Then, according to a report by PBS' Frontline, “In the 1997-'98 election cycle, the finance, insurance, and real estate industries (known as the FIRE sector), spen[t] more than $200 million on lobbying and [made] more than $150 million in political donations” – most of which were “targeted to members of Congressional banking committees and other committees with direct jurisdiction over financial services legislation.”
The following year, after 12 unsuccessful attempts, Glass-Steagall, which would have made the crash of 2007-2009 impossible, was finally repealed. And it was only then that the explosion of shaky mortgage-backed securities began. “Subprime” loans, which made the mortgage system so vulnerable, made up 5 percent of all mortgages in the U.S. the year before repeal, but had skyrocketed to 30 percent of the total at the time of the crash.
The Glass-Steagall act was killed by financial interests seeking to maximize deregulation. The result was a casino-like environment that almost destroyed the U.S. and global economy. The giants of Wall Street enjoyed a massive bailout courtesy of American taxpayers, and they're still hard at work gaming the system, lobbying hard against new regulations that might avert the next bubble-led crash.
AlterNet, in partnership with the Media Consortium, looked at the five banks that exert the most influence on our democracy. Based on their size, the amount of money they spend on campaign donations and lobbying, and the number of employees who’ve gone through the revolving door into public service, or vice versa, we determined which banks have had the worst impact on the country. We’ll rank each one based on our research, and come up with the worst of the worst--the big bank that’s done the most damage to America's economy and society.
A word of caution is in order. This report is based only on what the banks are forced to disclose. It doesn't include lobbying by corporate front-groups like the Chamber of Commerce, and it doesn't include the “independent” campaign spending that has exploded in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which corporations are no longer required to disclose to the public. This is a classic story of American political corruption writ large.
Meet the Big Banks and Read the Rest
Pepper sprayed UC Davis student leads peaceful shaming of Chancellor
(Courtesy of Dan Bellini)
Pepper sprayed UC Davis student leads peaceful shaming of Chancellor
"A pretty remarkable thing just happened. A press conference, scheduled for *4:00pm* between the UC Davis Chancellor and police with local press on campus, did not end in an hour, as planned. Instead, a mass of Occupy Davis students and sympathizers mobilized outside, demanding to have their voice heard. After some initial confusion, UC Chancellor Linda Katehi refused to leave the building, attempting to give the media the impression that the students were somehow holding her hostage.
A group of highly organized students formed a large gap for the chancellor to leave. They chanted “we are peaceful” and “just walk home,” but nothing changed for several hours. Eventually student representatives convinced the chancellor to leave after telling their fellow students to sit down and lock arms (around 7:00pm).
One of the students pepper sprayed yesterday by chemicals that blew into his mouth (he was standing near the students huddled on the ground), a young man wearing a brown down coat over a tie-dye shirt, said he met with Kotehi and personally showed her a video of the pepper spraying attack. Speaking to about a thousand students with the “human mic,” the young man said he personally asked for her resignation..
A few commenters and people on Twitter have asked why the chancellor is at the center of this firestorm over the police pepper spraying. Chancellor Katehi approved of the police action (though specifics of what she ordered exactly are still a mystery), and ordered the UC Davis cops to evict the protesters, resulting in the heinous pepper spraying video now plastered everywhere on the web. She has not apologized to the students or worked to remedy the situation — for instance, one student who was pepper sprayed told me she still has health problems after the incident, and no one from the administration contacted her to see if she’s okay. Katehi’s refusal to condemn the police action has only made a bad situation worse."
Pepper sprayed UC Davis student leads peaceful shaming of Chancellor
"A pretty remarkable thing just happened. A press conference, scheduled for *4:00pm* between the UC Davis Chancellor and police with local press on campus, did not end in an hour, as planned. Instead, a mass of Occupy Davis students and sympathizers mobilized outside, demanding to have their voice heard. After some initial confusion, UC Chancellor Linda Katehi refused to leave the building, attempting to give the media the impression that the students were somehow holding her hostage.
A group of highly organized students formed a large gap for the chancellor to leave. They chanted “we are peaceful” and “just walk home,” but nothing changed for several hours. Eventually student representatives convinced the chancellor to leave after telling their fellow students to sit down and lock arms (around 7:00pm).
One of the students pepper sprayed yesterday by chemicals that blew into his mouth (he was standing near the students huddled on the ground), a young man wearing a brown down coat over a tie-dye shirt, said he met with Kotehi and personally showed her a video of the pepper spraying attack. Speaking to about a thousand students with the “human mic,” the young man said he personally asked for her resignation..
A few commenters and people on Twitter have asked why the chancellor is at the center of this firestorm over the police pepper spraying. Chancellor Katehi approved of the police action (though specifics of what she ordered exactly are still a mystery), and ordered the UC Davis cops to evict the protesters, resulting in the heinous pepper spraying video now plastered everywhere on the web. She has not apologized to the students or worked to remedy the situation — for instance, one student who was pepper sprayed told me she still has health problems after the incident, and no one from the administration contacted her to see if she’s okay. Katehi’s refusal to condemn the police action has only made a bad situation worse."
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Radio Berkman 175: Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain Take On…the Kill Switch
Radio Berkman 175: Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain Take On…the Kill Switch
[Recently] citizens of the Middle East and North Africa have experienced widespread shutdowns of internet access, coinciding with revolutions to overthrow national leadership. The seeming ease with which the Internet has been silenced in Libya, Egypt, and other countries has raised questions about ethical issues behind an Internet “Kill Switch,” the idea of a single point of access by which any nation’s leadership could shutdown their internet access.
In the United States, debate over so-called “Kill Switch” legislation has focused on the free speech aspect. If it were technologically possible to shutdown internet access singlehandedly who is to say that power wouldn’t be exploited as it has been abroad?
But on the other side of the coin is the question of cyber security. With so much commerce, communication, and security dependent on a loose and non-standardized network infrastructure, it could actually make sense to have an easy way to quarantine a bug or massive cyber attack.
Today, hosts Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain are joined by Andrew McLaughlin — a former Berkman Fellow and White House Deputy Chief Technology Office — and Brett Solomon — Executive Director of Access, a global movement promoting digital freedom. Together with an audience Lessig and Zittrain take on the Kill Switch.
To Listen to the Conversation
[Recently] citizens of the Middle East and North Africa have experienced widespread shutdowns of internet access, coinciding with revolutions to overthrow national leadership. The seeming ease with which the Internet has been silenced in Libya, Egypt, and other countries has raised questions about ethical issues behind an Internet “Kill Switch,” the idea of a single point of access by which any nation’s leadership could shutdown their internet access.
In the United States, debate over so-called “Kill Switch” legislation has focused on the free speech aspect. If it were technologically possible to shutdown internet access singlehandedly who is to say that power wouldn’t be exploited as it has been abroad?
But on the other side of the coin is the question of cyber security. With so much commerce, communication, and security dependent on a loose and non-standardized network infrastructure, it could actually make sense to have an easy way to quarantine a bug or massive cyber attack.
Today, hosts Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain are joined by Andrew McLaughlin — a former Berkman Fellow and White House Deputy Chief Technology Office — and Brett Solomon — Executive Director of Access, a global movement promoting digital freedom. Together with an audience Lessig and Zittrain take on the Kill Switch.
To Listen to the Conversation
Julian Assange In Conversation With John Pilger: The War You Don't See
Julian Assange In Conversation With John Pilger
An extended interview with Julian Assange recorded during filming of John Pilger’s latest film The War You Don’t See.
The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism.
Link
An extended interview with Julian Assange recorded during filming of John Pilger’s latest film The War You Don’t See.
The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism.
Link
Friday, November 18, 2011
Glenn Greenwald: Elite Media Biased Against Occupy Wall Street
[Constitutional lawyer and Salon journalist]
The End of Poverty (USA: Philippe Diaz, 2008: 106 mins)
The aphorism "The poor are always with us" dates back to the New Testament, but while the phrase is still sadly apt in the 21st century, few seem to be able to explain why poverty is so widespread. Activist filmmaker Philippe Diaz examines the history and impact of economic inequality in the third world in the documentary The End of Poverty?, and makes the compelling argument that it's not an accident or simple bad luck that has created a growing underclass around the world.
Diaz traces the growth of global poverty back to colonization in the 15th century, and features interviews with a number of economists, sociologists, and historians who explain how poverty is the clear consequence of free-market economic policies that allow powerful nations to exploit poorer countries for their assets and keep money in the hands of the wealthy rather than distributing it more equitably to the people who have helped them gain their fortunes.
Diaz also explores how wealthy nations (especially the United States) seize a disproportionate share of the world's natural resources, and how this imbalance is having a dire impact on the environment as well as the economy. The End of Poverty? was an official selection at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
Diaz traces the growth of global poverty back to colonization in the 15th century, and features interviews with a number of economists, sociologists, and historians who explain how poverty is the clear consequence of free-market economic policies that allow powerful nations to exploit poorer countries for their assets and keep money in the hands of the wealthy rather than distributing it more equitably to the people who have helped them gain their fortunes.
Diaz also explores how wealthy nations (especially the United States) seize a disproportionate share of the world's natural resources, and how this imbalance is having a dire impact on the environment as well as the economy. The End of Poverty? was an official selection at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
Jeff Biggers: Arizona’s Ethnic Studies Needs No Defense: It Needs More Defenders
Arizona’s Ethnic Studies Needs No Defense: It Needs More Defenders
by Jeff Biggers
AlterNet
In a must read cover story in the most recent Tucson Weekly, acclaimed journalist and fifth-generation Tucsonan Mari Herraras expertly sorts fact from fiction in the controversial Ethnic Studies ban in Arizona.
Yet, underscoring Herraras’ debunking of 10 myths — that “stories of mythical proportions have surrounded the fight for Mexican-American studies — with some truths sprinkled in between the lines” — is one of the most tragic, if not obscene, realities in Arizona’s education showdown: As the state inches toward its centennial in 2012, Mexican Americans — including the 60 percent of the students that make up Tucson Unified School District — still have to defend and justify the teaching of Mexican American history and literature, as if Mexican Americans are not part of the greater American experience.
The final showdown over the extremist witch hunt to outlaw Ethnic Studies in Tucson is only days away; but, the supremely American struggle for democratic education, justice and local control of schools has been playing out in the state’s segregated minds for over a century.
Five years ago, long-time educator Salomon Baldenegro nailed Tucson’s and the state of Arizona’s enduring and shameful problem: “…history is cyclical, and the Mexican haters have resurfaced. We again find ourselves having to prove our legitimacy in our own country.”
Or, at least in the legislative narrative of a modern-day Arizona framed by recalled Tea Party President Russell Pearce and his friends, Canadian-immigrant and violence-invoking Attorney General Tom Horne, and Tea Party extremist John Huppenthal, the embarrassingly incompetent Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Or, in the silence and ineptitude of a school district overseen by a demoralizing figure like TUSD Superintendent John Pedicone, who reneged on his promise to join the Mexican American Studies program in their federal court battle for constitutional rights, unleashed unforgivable and excessive police brutality on the city’s youth and elderly icons last spring, placed obstacles on the program, referred to college-bound students as “pawns,” refused to participate in public forums to heal the divide in the city, and dismissively concluded the historic legacy of Mexican American Studies as a “distraction” in his overwhelmingly Mexican American district.
In a chilling reminder of his acquiescence to the hateful narrative of Horne and Huppenthal, Pedicone refused to publicly rebuke, despite numerous pleas, Huppenthal’s vicious charge in September that his district’s own Mexican American youth could be compared to Hitler’s paramilitary Jugend.
To Read the Rest of the Article
by Jeff Biggers
AlterNet
In a must read cover story in the most recent Tucson Weekly, acclaimed journalist and fifth-generation Tucsonan Mari Herraras expertly sorts fact from fiction in the controversial Ethnic Studies ban in Arizona.
Yet, underscoring Herraras’ debunking of 10 myths — that “stories of mythical proportions have surrounded the fight for Mexican-American studies — with some truths sprinkled in between the lines” — is one of the most tragic, if not obscene, realities in Arizona’s education showdown: As the state inches toward its centennial in 2012, Mexican Americans — including the 60 percent of the students that make up Tucson Unified School District — still have to defend and justify the teaching of Mexican American history and literature, as if Mexican Americans are not part of the greater American experience.
The final showdown over the extremist witch hunt to outlaw Ethnic Studies in Tucson is only days away; but, the supremely American struggle for democratic education, justice and local control of schools has been playing out in the state’s segregated minds for over a century.
Five years ago, long-time educator Salomon Baldenegro nailed Tucson’s and the state of Arizona’s enduring and shameful problem: “…history is cyclical, and the Mexican haters have resurfaced. We again find ourselves having to prove our legitimacy in our own country.”
Or, at least in the legislative narrative of a modern-day Arizona framed by recalled Tea Party President Russell Pearce and his friends, Canadian-immigrant and violence-invoking Attorney General Tom Horne, and Tea Party extremist John Huppenthal, the embarrassingly incompetent Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Or, in the silence and ineptitude of a school district overseen by a demoralizing figure like TUSD Superintendent John Pedicone, who reneged on his promise to join the Mexican American Studies program in their federal court battle for constitutional rights, unleashed unforgivable and excessive police brutality on the city’s youth and elderly icons last spring, placed obstacles on the program, referred to college-bound students as “pawns,” refused to participate in public forums to heal the divide in the city, and dismissively concluded the historic legacy of Mexican American Studies as a “distraction” in his overwhelmingly Mexican American district.
In a chilling reminder of his acquiescence to the hateful narrative of Horne and Huppenthal, Pedicone refused to publicly rebuke, despite numerous pleas, Huppenthal’s vicious charge in September that his district’s own Mexican American youth could be compared to Hitler’s paramilitary Jugend.
To Read the Rest of the Article
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (United Kingdom: Adam Curtis, 2011)
(Description from Top Documentary Films)
A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.
1. Love and Power. This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy.
2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.
3. The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey. This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed – so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.
Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora’s Box, The Trap and The Living Dead.
Beth Connors Manke: Ciudad Juárez -- Reckoning with Feminicide, part 2
Ciudad Juárez: Reckoning with feminicide, part 2
By Beth Connors-Manke
North of Center
Editor’s note: In part 1 of this series, Beth wrote about the exhibit Wall of Memories: The Disappeared Señoritas of Ciudad Juárez by Lexington artist Diane Kahlo. Here, Beth reports more on the feminicide in Ciudad Juárez.
In 1993, young women began disappearing in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which sits across the border from El Paso, Texas. The young women, often workers at the assembly plants along the border, are found around the city or in the desert, tortured and mutilated. Many believe that the murders are partially the result of neoliberal economic policies, drug trafficking, and governmental corruption. One can only say ‘partially’ because the murders have never been solved and the situation in Juárez is a confusing web of violence, drugs, conspiracies, and fear. While many news reports put the number at 350, scores more women are believed to have been killed under similar circumstances.
The murders in Juárez have haunted me for more than ten years. In the last few months, as I spoke with Diane Kahlo about her exhibit, looked at her portraits of the murdered girls and women, researched the situation in Juárez, the haunting has become more acute. Once one knows that brutality like the feminicide exists in the world, it becomes harder to believe that the civil society we enjoy here in the U.S. sits on an unshakable foundation. What we have here is not indelible; it exists only as long as we demand a just body politic and a safe community. When we relinquish safety and justice, society unravels—and very quickly.
This is the case with Juárez. Charles Bowden, who has reported on the city for years, calls it a “black hole in the body politic.” A black hole destabilizes everything around it.
Bowden’s view on Juárez is bigger than the feminicide: it encompasses the murders related to the drug trafficking—just as torturous as the women’s murders—and the economic shift that is slowly, like a cannibal, eating everything in it’s path. The environment. Governments. The social contract. Men, women, children. As Bowden sees it, what is happening in Juárez (and in other borderlands) is a new beast, a new war:
“[T]his war I speak of cannot be understood with normal political language of right and left or of capitalism and socialism. It is not postcolonial or precolonial or even colonial. It is life against death. For the poor moving north, it is their life against death. For the ground and the sky and the rivers, it is slow death as human hungers outstrip the earth’s ability to feed them.”
These hungers exceed the simple need for a full belly. These hungers are vicious, cruel, careless, and they have created a shadow world with its own rules. “There is a new order in the wind,” Bowden writes in Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez, “and it looks like chaos but it is not. There is a new order in the wind and it sidesteps government, or, if pressed, steps on government. There is a new order in the wind and it cannot be discussed because any discussion might threaten the old order now rolling in the dirt.”
Altogether different
I sat in a sparsely populated room watching the 2001 documentary Señorita Extraviada by Lourdes Portillo. Señorita Extraviada tells the story of Juárez in a way that is now relatively common: a new economic order has made poor women targets of sinister violence. As much as I already knew about the feminicide, the film was still a blow. Portillo’s documentary presents terrifying and gut-wrenching testimony from the families of disappeared women. We meet mothers who investigate and demand justice. We see a government that will not or—worse yet—cannot intercede.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
By Beth Connors-Manke
North of Center
Editor’s note: In part 1 of this series, Beth wrote about the exhibit Wall of Memories: The Disappeared Señoritas of Ciudad Juárez by Lexington artist Diane Kahlo. Here, Beth reports more on the feminicide in Ciudad Juárez.
In 1993, young women began disappearing in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which sits across the border from El Paso, Texas. The young women, often workers at the assembly plants along the border, are found around the city or in the desert, tortured and mutilated. Many believe that the murders are partially the result of neoliberal economic policies, drug trafficking, and governmental corruption. One can only say ‘partially’ because the murders have never been solved and the situation in Juárez is a confusing web of violence, drugs, conspiracies, and fear. While many news reports put the number at 350, scores more women are believed to have been killed under similar circumstances.
The murders in Juárez have haunted me for more than ten years. In the last few months, as I spoke with Diane Kahlo about her exhibit, looked at her portraits of the murdered girls and women, researched the situation in Juárez, the haunting has become more acute. Once one knows that brutality like the feminicide exists in the world, it becomes harder to believe that the civil society we enjoy here in the U.S. sits on an unshakable foundation. What we have here is not indelible; it exists only as long as we demand a just body politic and a safe community. When we relinquish safety and justice, society unravels—and very quickly.
This is the case with Juárez. Charles Bowden, who has reported on the city for years, calls it a “black hole in the body politic.” A black hole destabilizes everything around it.
Bowden’s view on Juárez is bigger than the feminicide: it encompasses the murders related to the drug trafficking—just as torturous as the women’s murders—and the economic shift that is slowly, like a cannibal, eating everything in it’s path. The environment. Governments. The social contract. Men, women, children. As Bowden sees it, what is happening in Juárez (and in other borderlands) is a new beast, a new war:
“[T]his war I speak of cannot be understood with normal political language of right and left or of capitalism and socialism. It is not postcolonial or precolonial or even colonial. It is life against death. For the poor moving north, it is their life against death. For the ground and the sky and the rivers, it is slow death as human hungers outstrip the earth’s ability to feed them.”
These hungers exceed the simple need for a full belly. These hungers are vicious, cruel, careless, and they have created a shadow world with its own rules. “There is a new order in the wind,” Bowden writes in Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez, “and it looks like chaos but it is not. There is a new order in the wind and it sidesteps government, or, if pressed, steps on government. There is a new order in the wind and it cannot be discussed because any discussion might threaten the old order now rolling in the dirt.”
Altogether different
I sat in a sparsely populated room watching the 2001 documentary Señorita Extraviada by Lourdes Portillo. Señorita Extraviada tells the story of Juárez in a way that is now relatively common: a new economic order has made poor women targets of sinister violence. As much as I already knew about the feminicide, the film was still a blow. Portillo’s documentary presents terrifying and gut-wrenching testimony from the families of disappeared women. We meet mothers who investigate and demand justice. We see a government that will not or—worse yet—cannot intercede.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Kevin Seal: Occupiers Past and Present – Oakland Union of the Homeless
News of the Occupation: Occupiers Past and Present – Oakland Union of the Homeless
by Kevin Seal
The Occupied Oakland Journal
(Kevin is a member of the Occupy Oakland Media Committee as well as a freelance journalist)
Several new proposals for action are underway in Occupy Oakland. As these initiatives take root, occupiers are careful to note that this movement happens in the context of a lengthy history of protest in Oakland. From the Black Panthers to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights to Color of Change, there is a rich legacy of civil disobedience in Alameda County, and Occupy Oakland is helping bring these varied and long-standing communities together in action.
The occupation is looking at reclaiming foreclosed homes and preventing at-risk homeowners from losing their properties to predatory lenders and fraudulent banking institutions. As this movement evolves and strengthens, it is instructive to study the Oakland Union of the Homeless, and the many successes this group had in the reclamation of abandoned houses.
On December 15, 1987, a homeless man named James Lee was killed by gunshot, prompting a Christmas Eve protest in which activists broke into and occupied an abandoned house. Oakland police evicted the activists two days later, but the seeds were sown for a national movement. With that action, Andrew Jackson, Glenna Jackson, Terry Messman (now the editor and layout designer of the newspaper Street Spirit) and several other activists founded the Oakland Union of the Homeless.
Over the following few years, this group reclaimed Victorian houses in Oakland, demanded low-income housing from then-Senator Pete Wilson, and staged a high-profile act of civil disobedience in which the Union’s members refused to leave Wilson’s office. In 1990, the Union took over three more houses, and successfully petitioned California for an allocation of $1 million to the building of Dignity Housing West, an Oakland low-income housing development. The 26-unit James Lee Court Apartments, just three blocks from Frank Ogawa Plaza at 15th Street and Castro, came from this demand, as did 46 other units in Oakland. Dignity Housing West is in negotiation to acquire 1,000 more units in California and Nevada, and is working to establish a downtown Oakland office building for non-profit clients.
On the national level, 1990 also saw big steps forward from this movement. The National Union of the Homeless got the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development at that time, Jack Kemp, to commit 10% of the agency’s vacant housing stock for the purpose of homeless housing. Kemp ultimately broke his promise, and in response, poor and homeless people in Oakland as well as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities began breaking in and taking over these houses.
To Read the Rest
by Kevin Seal
The Occupied Oakland Journal
(Kevin is a member of the Occupy Oakland Media Committee as well as a freelance journalist)
Several new proposals for action are underway in Occupy Oakland. As these initiatives take root, occupiers are careful to note that this movement happens in the context of a lengthy history of protest in Oakland. From the Black Panthers to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights to Color of Change, there is a rich legacy of civil disobedience in Alameda County, and Occupy Oakland is helping bring these varied and long-standing communities together in action.
The occupation is looking at reclaiming foreclosed homes and preventing at-risk homeowners from losing their properties to predatory lenders and fraudulent banking institutions. As this movement evolves and strengthens, it is instructive to study the Oakland Union of the Homeless, and the many successes this group had in the reclamation of abandoned houses.
On December 15, 1987, a homeless man named James Lee was killed by gunshot, prompting a Christmas Eve protest in which activists broke into and occupied an abandoned house. Oakland police evicted the activists two days later, but the seeds were sown for a national movement. With that action, Andrew Jackson, Glenna Jackson, Terry Messman (now the editor and layout designer of the newspaper Street Spirit) and several other activists founded the Oakland Union of the Homeless.
Over the following few years, this group reclaimed Victorian houses in Oakland, demanded low-income housing from then-Senator Pete Wilson, and staged a high-profile act of civil disobedience in which the Union’s members refused to leave Wilson’s office. In 1990, the Union took over three more houses, and successfully petitioned California for an allocation of $1 million to the building of Dignity Housing West, an Oakland low-income housing development. The 26-unit James Lee Court Apartments, just three blocks from Frank Ogawa Plaza at 15th Street and Castro, came from this demand, as did 46 other units in Oakland. Dignity Housing West is in negotiation to acquire 1,000 more units in California and Nevada, and is working to establish a downtown Oakland office building for non-profit clients.
On the national level, 1990 also saw big steps forward from this movement. The National Union of the Homeless got the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development at that time, Jack Kemp, to commit 10% of the agency’s vacant housing stock for the purpose of homeless housing. Kemp ultimately broke his promise, and in response, poor and homeless people in Oakland as well as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities began breaking in and taking over these houses.
To Read the Rest
Jason Linkins: How Pizza Became A Vegetable Through The Magic Of Influence-Peddling
How Pizza Became A Vegetable Through The Magic Of Influence-Peddling
by Jason Linkins
Huffington Post
On Tuesday, Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. I have to imagine that this news instilled confusion in many Americans, as many Americans are (a) familiar with pizza, (b) familiar with vegetables and (c) sane.
But, to provide specifics that will in no way dispel your lingering thoughts that we are governed by morons but at least allow you some anthropological insight into how a group of morons who have been given permission to sit in a fancy room in Washington, D.C., and grunt at each other actually think, here is their thinking: Pizza is a vegetable for the purposes of determining what goes into public school lunches by virtue of the fact that pizza traditionally includes a schmear of tomato paste. (Botanically speaking, tomatoes are actually fruit, but we're going to have to just let that slide.)
At any rate, you may still be wondering how it came to pass that Congress arrived at the conclusion that pizza could count as a serving of vegetables. Wonder no more! Congress was guided along this path by lobbyists. And lobbyists can do all sorts of things, by magic! (Except provide nutritious lunches for children.)
From the Associated Press:
The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year. These include limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line, putting new restrictions on sodium and boosting the use of whole grains. The legislation would block or delay all of those efforts.
The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.
Nutritionists say the whole effort is reminiscent of the Reagan administration's much-ridiculed attempt 30 years ago to classify ketchup as a vegetable to cut costs. This time around, food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes and lobbied Congress.
To Read the Rest and Access Hyperlinked Sources
by Jason Linkins
Huffington Post
On Tuesday, Congress decided that pizza is a vegetable. I have to imagine that this news instilled confusion in many Americans, as many Americans are (a) familiar with pizza, (b) familiar with vegetables and (c) sane.
But, to provide specifics that will in no way dispel your lingering thoughts that we are governed by morons but at least allow you some anthropological insight into how a group of morons who have been given permission to sit in a fancy room in Washington, D.C., and grunt at each other actually think, here is their thinking: Pizza is a vegetable for the purposes of determining what goes into public school lunches by virtue of the fact that pizza traditionally includes a schmear of tomato paste. (Botanically speaking, tomatoes are actually fruit, but we're going to have to just let that slide.)
At any rate, you may still be wondering how it came to pass that Congress arrived at the conclusion that pizza could count as a serving of vegetables. Wonder no more! Congress was guided along this path by lobbyists. And lobbyists can do all sorts of things, by magic! (Except provide nutritious lunches for children.)
From the Associated Press:
The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year. These include limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line, putting new restrictions on sodium and boosting the use of whole grains. The legislation would block or delay all of those efforts.
The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.
Nutritionists say the whole effort is reminiscent of the Reagan administration's much-ridiculed attempt 30 years ago to classify ketchup as a vegetable to cut costs. This time around, food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes and lobbied Congress.
To Read the Rest and Access Hyperlinked Sources
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