tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40700180468249305842023-11-15T10:06:25.755-08:00dannyluciadannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-83799420534898674472011-05-11T12:13:00.000-07:002011-05-11T12:13:31.424-07:00The Exploitation of NineElevenFirst appeared at SocialistWorker.org on 5/5/11.<br />
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<b>The Exploitation of NineEleven</b><br />
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I HAD two responses to the killing of Osama bin Laden. One was sober--it was about September 11.<br />
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I was near the towers that day, working at a UPS facility in lower Manhattan. It was, as you might expect, an awful day. I saw people jumping to their death. I felt fear like I've never known, although it turned out I was never in any real danger.<br />
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But in recent years, I almost forgot I was there as the events of that day got lost behind "NineEleven"--the official celebration of American innocence and victimhood.<br />
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My memories of that day don't fit the typical narrative of instant unity and desires for collective vengeance. When the second tower was hit, it sparked screaming matches across the city between UPS workers and their managers, who wanted the drivers to stay on the job--in some cases so we wouldn't give up prized parking spaces. In the ensuing weeks, I delivered packages to glum office workers who knew they were breathing in dangerous particles, assurances of the Environmental Protection Agency be damned.<br />
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And I remember how Union Square became a 24-hour gathering spot for strangers to cry and sing and debate why the attacks had happened, and what was the appropriate response.<br />
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The only aspect of official "NineEleven" that I can attest to was the heroism of the first responders. While most of us fled the chaos and destruction, they drove in the opposite direction to help those in the middle of it. And when the first tower collapsed, and we stood on the Brooklyn Bridge watching--an unforgettably surreal sight--we knew that some of those who had driven past us minutes earlier were now dead.<br />
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I don't begrudge the friends and family of those who died that day their feelings of satisfaction or vengeance at bin Laden's death. But I also don't forget that their grief has been used to cause widowhood and bereavement for an exponentially greater number of Afghani, Iraqi, Pakistani and Yemeni friends and families, all in the name of finding Osama.<br />
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Some of the loved ones of September 11 victims approve of this, and some don't. Either way, it was never up to them. NineEleven is owned by the White House and Pentagon. It's the get-out-of-jail free card for all future American war crimes, and even past ones--starting with taking the name "Ground Zero" from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.<br />
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Recently, NineEleven was losing its mojo. Rudy Giuliani put it up for election in the 2008 elections, and it didn't even make it past its first primary. The eventual winner of that election was a cosmopolitan professor who promised to move us past the globally embarrassing stupidity of "Bring it on" and "They hate our freedoms."<br />
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But with bin Laden's murder, the hype machine has been cranked back up again. Reporters are breathlessly telling the story of the amazing commando raid, which could turn out to be a production from the same folks who brought you "The Amazing Adventures of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch."<br />
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And on Thursday, Barack Obama is going to Ground Zero (in New York City, not Japan) to enter the pantheon of NineEleven heroes.<br />
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WHICH BRINGS me us to my other response to bin Laden's killing: satire. Here's a speech that I'm offering to Obama to use for use at the World Trade Center site on Thursday:<br />
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When I ran for president, I promised to bring back an America that can do whatever we set our mind to--the America that built the automobile industry, put a man on the moon and ended racial segregation.<br />
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Today, we can proudly tell the world that America may not be what it used to be, but when we work together and spend incredible amounts of money, we can locate any human being on the planet and kill him! Say it with me, everybody: Yes we can! Yes we can!<br />
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Families will remember this day for generations to come--some of us will annually gather around our framed New York Daily News headline: "Rot in Hell." When our children despair of ever finding a job, we'll reassure them: "Now remember, son, what did America do when it looked like we'd never find bin Laden?" And if they say, "Bribe a Pakistani intelligence official," we'll wash their mouth out with soap until they give us the correct answer about persistence and courage.<br />
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Today, we celebrate the daring and the heroism of the elite Special Forces units that tracked down and killed the enemy in central Pakistan. But we should also celebrate the sacrifice and suffering of the hundreds of thousands of American troops who have served hundreds of miles away from the enemy--in Iraq and Afghanistan. These young men and women should feel proud to have participated in the largest decoy operation in military history.<br />
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Now I'm not going to lie. Our nation has spent a tremendous amount of resources in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In fact, some economists have estimated that the total cost of America's wars since September 11 is $3 trillion. But if bin Laden took comfort in that, the final joke was on him, because much of that money stayed right here in the pockets of American weapons manufacturers and military contractors. All together now: USA! USA!<br />
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Perhaps most importantly, today brings closure for the families of those who died in the September 11 attacks. The type of closure that comes not from a criminal trial in which the accused is definitively convicted and punished, but from a secret military operation that leaves no witnesses and breeds conspiracy theories for decades to come.<br />
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Let us remember the spirit of community we felt in the days after the September 11 attacks. Firefighters and construction workers thought nothing of risking their long-term health breathing fumes while they conducted search and rescue operations. Yet today, these same workers are unwilling to give up their health care plans to rescue the American economy. Let's put aside such petty self-interest in the service of our country.<br />
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We all know that Washington has lost some of the unity of those days, too. It's not right for politicians to ask the American people to do one thing while we're doing another. That's why I'm announcing today that for the rest of my term, I promise to agree to all Republican proposals--no matter how insane--and spare the nation the divisiveness of political debate.<br />
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The world is a safer place now that Osama bin Laden is dead. This safety puts us all in great danger from the terrorists who want to avenge his death. These evildoers are still quite capable of attacking us because bin Laden was merely their symbolic leader. In fact, you might say that his murder was the most significant military achievement that has absolutely no military impact in American history.<br />
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Let me conclude by saying that Americans did not choose this fight. And, trust me, you won't get to choose the next three being cooked up in the Pentagon either. But today is a day for all of us to unite in celebration, while keeping our eyes peeled for which one of us might be a terrorist.<br />
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Thank you and God Bless America.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-19527896506104404392011-05-11T12:11:00.001-07:002011-05-11T12:11:59.344-07:00The Still-Groggy GiantFirst appeared at SocialistWorker.org on 3/29/11. <br />
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<b>The Still-Groggy Giant</b><br />
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ALMOST EVERY interview I heard from the Wisconsin protests included some version of the line "Scott Walker woke up a sleeping giant."<br />
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It got to the point where I was hoping to hear that teachers and nurses rampaged through the capitol building chanting, "Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of a Republican!" When workers in Madison finally stood up after taking years of abuse, they did indeed look like a giant towering over the Tea Party, which was suddenly revealed to be a little man with a big Fox News megaphone.<br />
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So what happened when Scott Walker poked the giant in the eye by ramming through his anti-union bill? More than 150,000 workers gathered to let out a mighty roar and vowed to...gather signatures to recall the governor next year.<br />
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Wait a second. Walker is trying to get rid of public-sector unions not next year but now--isn't there something more immediate and direct that can be done?<br />
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The fact that most protesters agreed with the recall strategy pushed by union leaders and politicians shows that even as workers begin to sense their power, they don't know how best to use it. In other words, the giant seems to wake up the way most of us do--groggy and with eye boogers.<br />
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In truth, workers have a weapon more powerful than the campaign contribution or the tri-folded brochure. We don't celebrate the great Flint Phone Bank of 1937 or remember how Eugene Debs organized railroad workers to campaign in swing states. By responding to Walker's passage of the bill with a recall campaign instead of a strike, unions are essentially bringing an online petition to a gunfight.<br />
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It's also a step backward from the participatory democracy that thousands experienced in the Capitol rotunda, where for two weeks a "people's mic" was open to all. Imagine if corporate lobbyists had to do their business in the rotundas of Capitol buildings instead of the private offices:<br />
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Uh, hi everybody. My name is Phil, and I work for Koch Industries. I think we should support this environmental exemption because it will make my company a boatload of money. Thank you, and God bless America. <br />
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On the recall campaign, free expression will be replaced by a script, which will praise the "Fab 14" Democratic senators for standing up to Walker but say precious little about what their party proposes to do if elected.<br />
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That's because the major debate in our two-party system today is whether to fund three wars and corporate tax breaks by stealing workers' pensions or to fund three wars and corporate tax breaks by stealing workers' pensions and busting their unions.<br />
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WHAT THOSE weeks of protest in Wisconsin that captivated the national spotlight showed was that tens of thousands of workers in Wisconsin--and presumably millions across the country--reject that non-debate and were looking for a radical strategy to bring about a different outcome.<br />
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For the first time in generations, people who raised the idea of a general strike were not considered crazy--or French.<br />
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There hasn't been a general strike in this country since a couple of Scott Walker's Republican ancestors named Taft and Hartley passed a law in 1947 that barred workers from striking against anyone other than their direct employer. In other words, you are not allowed to withhold your labor to protest laws or support other workers in the land of the free.<br />
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Taft-Hartley denies workers their most powerful form of political expression and forces us to compete--with corporations--in the rigged game of American politics. To paraphrase Anatole France, American democracy, in its majestic equality, allows both workers and CEOs to donate a million dollars to candidates or invite them for rides on their private jets.<br />
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(Funny story about Taft-Hartley, by the way. Harry Truman and the Democrats campaigned the year after it was passed on a promise to overturn the law. So unions launched a massive turnout effort, re-elected Truman, won Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, and...we still have Taft-Hartley. Truman himself used it 12 times to break strikes in his second term.)<br />
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Unions have been fighting a losing battle ever since. Somehow, they managed to find $74 million in 2008 to elect a president who visited the Madison protests as many times as he visited the moon. They're vowing to raise even more in 2012. Jesus Christ, how are workers going to come up with that money? There are only so many binder clips and pens we can steal from the office.<br />
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If this strategy wasn't already obviously bankrupt, Republicans like Scott Walker are trying to drive the point home by abandoning the old rules and trying to eliminate unions entirely. You might think that this would be the time to say screw it and fight for survival.<br />
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But that's not how most labor leaders think. If one of these guys saw his house in flames, he would dash off to the bank to get money for a Democrat who promised to put out the fire after his election.<br />
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It's going to be up to the rank-and-file radicals (new and old) to find each other and figure out how to make this giant rise and shine.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-55990996019905044042011-03-27T17:57:00.000-07:002011-03-27T17:57:54.614-07:00A Breath of Fresh Wisconsin AirThe other week Jon Stewart called the Madison protests as “the Bizarro Tea Party.” It’s seems that there’s been so little old fashioned working class rebellion in recent years that even the super-sharp folks at the Daily Show have trouble recognizing it: <i>This is odd. Students and workers are gathering in large numbers to hold signs and march and chant. But they’re saying nothing about anchor babies or false birth certificates. What do you call this strange phenomenon?</i><br />
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Of course, it’s the Tea Party that is a funhouse reflection of genuine grassroots protest movements - - billionaires organizing mad-as-hell rallies against the working class. Getting it reversed is like telling a Kansas City barbeque chef that his food tastes like a Bizarro McRib. <br />
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Conservative commentators, meanwhile, saw the tens of thousands of smiling students and teachers as a sinister gang of “union thugs.” That’s actually the term Rush Limbaugh and others have used to describe members of the Wisconsin Education Association. <i>Ooh, don’t cross Mrs. Mendelson at Osh Kosh Elementary. Your body might end up at the bottom of a sandbox. </i><br />
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Actually, the quality that jumps out at anyone who watches any video from Madison is the humor, something I’ve never seen at any Tea Party Paranoia-palooza. <br />
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I’ve never seen as many hilarious protest sign, ranging from the nerdy – “There’s Still Good in You (Sky)Walker: to the admirably straightforward – “Dick Move Scotty.” <br />
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Wisconsinites taught me two things with their handmade signs. They identify with the Egyptian struggle for democracy. And they really love the Green Bay Packers. I wouldn’t be surprised in some wall in the capitol building now features a Diego Rivera – style mural featuring Vince Lombardi and company marching in Tahrir Square. <br />
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There were also plenty of signs reflecting the gallows humor of public sector workers: “My Kindergarteners Are Better Listeners than My Governor.” “Hey Walker WI Ranger. Who’s Gonna Wipe Your Ass When You Have a Stroke?” “I Protect Your Family From the Criminally Insane. Remember That.” <br />
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Signs like these helped build national support by showing that the protesters are the regular people we all work with. And yet at a typical union rally folks stand around holding pre-printed signs and listen to speakers with a pre-printed message: “Vote for the Democrats in November.” Doesn’t it seem like a poor use of resources to mobilize thousands of working to assemble in one location just to give them a live version of the emails you regularly send them?<br />
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In Wisonsin, the unions had to break this mold because Scott Walker attacked them so hard and so quickly. The same old symbolic protest wouldn’t do; workers and students in Madison had to figure out what they were going to do to try to actually kill the bill. <br />
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That’s how “See you in November” became “We’ll see your ass every day until we win.” That’s how “I’m a union member and I vote” became “I’m a teacher and I call in sick.”<br />
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Walker’s attack forced the Wisconsin labor movement to re-discovered a long-forgotten lesson: Protests can…like, try to win. <br />
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Workers can strike – or at least call out sick for three days like the teachers did. State senators who oppose bad legislation can leave. And the rest of us can stay. <br />
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The massive occupation of the state capitol building has mercifully ended a debate that’s raged in activist circles for over a decade: Is it better to have a tame protest with many people or a disruptive protest with few people? Now it’s clear that this has essentially been an argument about the relative merits of peanut butter versus jelly. How about both? <br />
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Turns out that mass occupations of public spaces have lots of other advantages too. Having a hard time to decide what time to call the rally? Make it all the time! Are you worried that some folks are going to be out of town? They can join us when they get back. Tell them to bring postcards to put up in the rotunda. <br />
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Another logistical task that the Madison protesters have simplified is the follow up meeting, which is now defined as when you get tired of chanting and sit down over some internationally-donated pizza. When should you have the next rally? When there’s no more pizza. <br />
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But occupations and daily protests can’t last forever because most people have to go back to work. That’s one of Scott Walker’s big advantages – he and the Koch Brothers get to plot against us while they’re at work– because that’s their job. <br />
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Now that most of the protesters have gone back home and the union officials are back in charge, the main slogan seems to be, “It’s not about the money.” This slogan hopes to portray union workers are reasonable folk who will pay more for their benefits but just want to keep their bargaining rights. <br />
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Actually, it tells Scott Walker to stand firm because the unions are already starting to cave. And it may tell other workers that the unions will fight for their own “special” rights but not against the cuts to everybody’s health care and education. <br />
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At the capitol building protests, workers were doing a fine job of portraying themselves in ways that no political consultant would have approved. <i>Let me great this straight. You want to compare yourselves to to Egyptian protesters – to angry Arab young men? You’re worse than the one with the sign about wiping Scott Walker’s ass!</i><br />
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So the big question is if Wisconsin workers and students are going to be able to take the spirit of mass participation back to their hometowns, campuses, and union meetings. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks we’ll be hearing not only from the people who make the pre-printed signs but from the ordinary Mubarak-hating, Packer-loving, ass-wiping workers of Wisconsin.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-16794118247755477882011-03-27T17:55:00.001-07:002011-03-27T17:55:50.531-07:00Exodus II: Let the Pharaoh GoFirst published at SocialistWorker.org on February 17, 2011.<br />
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And so it came to pass that thousands of years after God helped Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt, the Egyptians toiled under a new Pharaoh who lived in extreme luxury while they slaved away creating vast pyramids of textiles and oil barrels.<br />
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Pharaoh Hosni seemed to be even more powerful than Ramses because he had turned the tables on history. This Pharaoh had the Israelites on his side, as well as their new god in Washington DC. <br />
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Until January 25, when the Egyptians gathered in the square to declare, “Let the Pharaoh go.”<br />
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But the Pharaoh just laughed and unleashed some of the plagues with which his American god kept him well supplied: tear gas, rubber bullets, water canons. <br />
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But the Egyptians persevered and came back in even greater numbers to the square three days later. So Pharaoh offered them a deal: <br />
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“Ok, I get it. You think I’m working too hard and you’re worried about me. Tell you what: I’ll appoint a vice-Pharaoh and I promise to take more vacations and stop being such a perfectionist.”<br />
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But the Egyptians were unmoved. Again they said, “Let the Pharaoh go.”<br />
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So the Pharaoh unleashed a plague of digital darkness, cutting the Egyptians off from their cell phones and wi-fi. But still they were unbowed. <br />
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And so the Pharaoh’s god issued a statement from the White House: <br />
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“I am the god not only of Pharaoh but also of democracy. This may seem like a contradiction to you guys because he’s your dictator and all. But if you only knew him like I do you would see that on the inside he really wants to do the right thing. So let’s keep it peaceful, ok?”<br />
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But then the Pharaoh issued a plague of violence with police and thugs who rampaged the square, beating and shooting the Egyptians. And for two days and two nights there was great death and suffering. <br />
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But the Egyptians did not give up. They returned to the square and vowed that this time they wouldn’t leave before the Pharaoh. Now the American god was angry, for Pharaoh had made him look bad by trying to crush the Egyptians and failing. <br />
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And so the American god decreed that Pharaoh Hosni had to start leaving “now.” And the Egyptians rejoiced. <br />
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Then Pharaoh called the White House and said, “My god, why have you forsaken me? Have you forgotten that all of your imperial plans in the Middle East and Central Asia depend on people like me? Have you thought about what impact a revolution in the largest Arab country might have? Besides, I assume you think you can replace me with someone from the military. Where do you think I came from, Goldman Sachs? Let’s just say I know a little more about military coups than you and I’ve taken some precautionary steps.”<br />
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Pharaoh’s words had their effect and the next day his god issued a retraction.<br />
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“Um, maybe Pharaoh should stick around and help with the transfer to democracy. Technically, he’s already ‘started’ to leave in the sense that every day that passes is another day towards when he leaves. See what I mean?”<br />
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The Egyptians were puzzled by this god’s changing positions but steadfast in their own: “Let the Pharaoh go.”<br />
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For his next plague, Pharaoh summoned the sprit of Glenn Beck to spread a tale through his state-run media that the protesters were secret agents of those well-known allies Israel and Iran.<br />
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But the Egyptians were unmoved. Thousands more gathered in the square. <br />
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Pharaoh announced he would sacrifice his second-born son, Gamal. <br />
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But the Egyptians in the square continued to grow. And now some of them left the square and went back to their jobs, not to stop the protest but to lead their co-workers out on strike. And Pharaoh’s God took notice. <br />
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And so the next day word spread that Pharaoh would soon announce his departure. The Egyptians gathered in the square in larger numbers than ever before to wait for Pharaoh’s speech. But instead of resigning, he proposed yet another compromise: <br />
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“Ok, how about this? I’ll only be the all-powerful ruler on Mondays and Thursdays and on the other five days you guys can have a democracy? What do you think?”<br />
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But this only made the Egyptians furious and they raised their shoes and vowed to gather and strike the next day in their largest numbers yet. And the Pharaoh’s god said “enough is enough” and was unconvinced even by Pharaoh’s warnings of a global conspiracy led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Justin Beiber. <br />
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So it came to pass than on February 11, Pharaoh departed, and Egyptians celebrated with their brothers and sisters around the world. <br />
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Nobody knows what the next chapter of Egypt’s revolution would be. <br />
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And across the ancient Biblical lands, other Pharaohs are suddenly vowing to hold elections, claiming that they wanted all along to spend more time with their families, and that their sons are actually poets and accountants who have no interest in succeeding them in power. <br />
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The Egyptians have spread a powerful message across the world. Pharaohs aren’t all-powerful. And neither is their god in Washington DC.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-33994848197190828092011-03-27T17:54:00.000-07:002011-03-27T17:54:14.982-07:00Billionaires Take a Stand for the Working ManFirst published at SocialistWorker.org on January 24, 2011.<br />
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Who says the corporate media doesn’t care about the opinions of ordinary people? There have been lots of articles lately about what workers think, written by the people who study them the most - bosses. <br />
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As a vice president of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and a Wall Street Journal columnist, William McGurn naturally has his finger on the pulse of the American working class:<br />
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"The notion that Wall Street and Main Street are fundamentally at odds with one another remains a popular orthodoxy. So much so that we may be missing the first stirrings of a true American class war: between workers in government unions and their union counterparts in the private sector."<br />
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According to McGurn, a true American worker doesn’t mind having his 401Ks cut by a CEO looking to increase his year-end bonus. But he’s fighting mad at his daughter’s teacher because she has a union that’s been able to keep her pension fully funded. This analysis truly does go against “popular orthodoxy” – i.e. what most people think. <br />
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But McGurn’s observations must have merit because they are corrobrated almost word for word by Mort Zuckerman, real estate billionaire and owner of US News and World Report:<br />
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"We really are two Americas, but not those captured in the stereotypical populist class warfare speeches that dramatize the gulf between the rich and the poor. Instead there is a new division in America that affronts a sense of fairness. That division is between the workers in the private sector and the workers in the public sector."<br />
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In Zuckerman’s vision, government workers are different than you and me. They live in gated communities like Fireman Estates and flaunt their wealth on shows like “Lifestyles of the Defined Benefit Plan” and “Who Wants to Marry a Child Services Case Worker?”<br />
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In Public Sector America, unionized postal workers and crossing guards pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for exclusive private schools while the rest of us - Starbucks baristas, bank presidents, etc. - send our kids to overcrowded public schools. <br />
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This obscene inequality is apparently spurring a backlash from ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Mort the Media and Real Estate Mogul. <br />
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In New York, these plain folk have formed the modestly named “Committee to Save New York”. (Presumably they couldn’t get the rights to “The Super Friends.”) <br />
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The Committee calls itself a “voice for the general public.” Go to their website to see what they mean. All around the edges are pictures of us, the general public, in our hard hats and our various skin colors. And right in the middle you can see our voice! It’s a list of names and titles reflecting New York in all its diversity: some of them CEOs, some presidents, and some “presidents and CEOs.” <br />
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The plan to save New York is similar to the ones being proposed across the country: Cut public sector jobs to pay for lower taxes on business, who will use that money to create new jobs – maybe even as many as they just got rid of!<br />
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Okay, so maybe it doesn’t make much sense, but economic logic isn’t what’s motivating the attack on public sector unions. It’s about fairness. <br />
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Our bleeding heart bosses are bothered that private sector workers – their workers – are suffering from layoffs and falling wages more than government workers who are often protected by union contracts. They don’t think it’s right that only some workers should be made to pay for the government’s bailout of the banks. Nor is it right for a few privileged workers to have access to government representatives via their unions. If most workers are shut out of having a political voice, then all workers should be. <br />
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In short, folks like Mort Zuckerman and the Committee to Save New York would like to see a reverse civil rights movement, the kind where MLK would have fought for whites to also not have the right to vote.<br />
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You might think that this situation presents unions with opportunity as well as danger. After all, bosses are giving them free advertising about the advantages of collective bargaining. Unions could pass out flyers to Walmart workers that read, “Want to be a part of that powerful special interest group the governor’s been warning you about?<br />
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Instead, most public sector unions have meekly responded to the attacks with calls for “shared sacrifice” among business and labor. I’ve never taken a class on negotiations but I thought you weren’t supposed to announce your willingness to make concessions right from the start. Not only that, calling for workers and bosses to share the sacrifice during this recession gives the false impression that we shared the loot during the boom – or the bailout afterward. <br />
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There’s only one way government workers will win the support of their private sector neighbors. Fight and win. Show them that having a union can provide you with things that you can’t have without one. <br />
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Not an easy plan but at least it’s simple.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-18068870791870606992011-03-27T17:52:00.000-07:002011-03-27T17:52:31.457-07:00Review of The American Way of WarFirst published at SocialistWorker.org on January 11, 2011.<br />
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Last week the Obama administration ordered over a thousand more Marines to Afghanistan to “solidify progress” being made in the Kandahar campaign. Last year Obama sent more troops because the war wasn’t going well. This year it’s because the war is going well. <br />
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Tom Engelhardt, creator of the TomDispatch website, has been following this trend for years. Before Obama’s first troop surge in 2009, government officials had an unusually public discussion about whether to send more soldiers or to increase the training of Afghan army. In the introduction to his excellent The American Way of War, Engelhardt comments on the inevitability of the outcome" <br />
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"The essence of this “debate” came down to: More of them versus more of us (and keep in mind that more of “them”…. actually meant more of “us” in the form of extra trainers and advisers.) In other words, however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally the public viewed the war….the only choices were between more and more." <br />
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This September will mark the tenth year since the September 11 attacks launched the U.S. government and society into a permanent state of war. The initial years of this era saw major protests against the invasions of Afghanistan and, especially Iraq. Today, although the Afghanistan War is less popular than ever, there is little public opposition. Most Americans seem to have resigned themselves to its inevitability. <br />
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One reason the prospect of “bringing the troops home” seems more remote than ever is the growing realization that the problem is not one mistaken war or dimwitted president but something more deeply rooted. Engelhardt doesn’t use the term ‘imperialism’, but he perfectly captures what it looks like in the U.S. today:<br />
<br />
"Because the United States does not look like a militarized county, it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere (usually, in fact, many places) at any moment."<br />
<br />
Anyone who wants to rebuild an anti-war movement that understands this imperial reality should read The American Way of War. Engerhardt explores the profound changes that have taken place since the launching of the Global War on Terror. His aim is not so much to explain why these changes have taken place as to understand their effects on American society. <br />
<br />
Reading this book feels like poking around with a flashlight in the unexamined corners of the post-9/11 American imperial mindset. Each chapter poses questions that many readers will wonder whey they never bothered to ask: Why do reporters “embed” with ground troops but not with Air Force units, the strategic heart of every American war of the last fifty years? What will the world look like when aerial drones proliterate and the Pentagon’s precedent of cross-border aerial assassinations becomes the international norm? How can politicians and pundits claim we are teaching good government around the world even as they declare that our own in Washington is broken?<br />
<br />
A skilled writer, Engelhardt is especially drawn to the ways the changing shape of American imperialism is reflected in its language: <br />
<br />
"If war is now our permanent situation, it has also been sundered from a set of words that once accompanied it. It lacks, for instance, “victory.” …[which] no longer seems to matter. War American-style is now conceptually unending, as are preparations for it."<br />
<br />
He makes a chilling comparison to the official language in George Orwell’s 1984 - “we live in a world of American Newspeak in which alternatives to a state of war are not only ever more unacceptable, but ever harder to imagine.” At the same time, he understands that the rulers of American society are vulnerable because they are often fooled by their own propaganda. Imperial hubris can blind American leaders to some basic facts of life outside the Green Zones.<br />
<br />
"[The CIA reported the death of] Abu Layth al-Libi, whom U.S. officials described as ‘a rising star’ in the group.” “Rising star” is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with Empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it’s not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped version of themselves – hierarchical, overly reliant on leaders, and top heavy.<br />
<br />
What is hard for Washington to grasp is this: “Decapitation,” to use another American imperial term, is not a particularly effective strategy with a decentralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a headless guerilla movement is nowhere near as brainless or helpless as a headless Washington would be.”<br />
<br />
This sharp wit runs throughout the book. The section about the lack of media coverage of air campaigns, for example, is wonderfully titled “On Not Looking Up.” Not only does this humor make The American Way of War a surprisingly entertaining read given the subject matter, it reminds us of something all great anti-war movements have known: the war machine is not just evil; it’s often absurd. <br />
<br />
Absurdity is the theme of the Joseph Heller’s classic anti-war novel Catch-22, a dizzying ride through the twisted logic of the Air Force in World War II. The book’s title, for example, refers to a rule that airmen can be declared insane from the stress of fighting and sent home but that anyone who asks to be sent home is clearly sane and therefore must continue flying. <br />
<br />
It’s hard not to think of Catch-22 when reading accounts from Afghanistan like this one from the New York Times.<br />
<br />
“Please don’t walk on my fields, they are newly sown,” a farmer, waving a packet of seeds, called to the soldiers as they patrolled.<br />
“Hajji, you know the deal,” an American sergeant answered. “The Taliban put mines on the paths, so we have to walk in the fields.”<br />
<br />
The farmer’s concern presented a quandary for the soldiers, who would like to keep villagers on their side. “I think the farmers are laying the I.E.D.’s because we are walking through their fields,” said Sgt. Michael Ricchiuti. “They get paid to do it.”<br />
<br />
The reporter, Carlotta Gall, doesn’t seem to notice the circular logic of soldiers walking in fields to avoid mines planted by farmers because the soldiers walk in their fields. Or at least she doesn’t comment on it. All in all, a pretty apt metaphor for a pointless war whose very pointlessness has become a nonstory. <br />
<br />
Of course, there is a point to the occupation of Afghanistan, a country located near both the world’s greatest concentration of natural gas and the United States’ main future rivals China and India. Likewise, Engelhardt is clear that for all its madness, the War on Terror has succeeded very well in obscuring this truth and many others in a cloud of fear"<br />
<br />
"Opinion polls indicate that terrorism is no longer at the top of the American agenda of worries. Nonetheless, don’t for a second think that the subject isn’t lodged deep in national consciousness. When asked “How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism,” a striking 39 percent of Americans were either “very worried” or “somewhat worried,”….<br />
<br />
People always wonder: What would the impact of a second 9/11-style attack be on this country? Seldom noticed, however, is that all the pinprick terror events blown up to apocalyptic proportions add up to a second, third, fourth, fifth 9/11 when it comes to American consciousness."<br />
<br />
In other words, we face the opposite dilemma than the one faced by Yossarian of Catch-22. Yossarian is considered crazy because he’s upset that anti-aircraft gunners are trying to kill him and doesn’t care that this homicidal behavior can be explained by the context of war. Today, on the other hand, it’s proper to be upset that terrorists are trying to kill us but crazy to look at the context of wars that might explain why.<br />
<br />
We’re not the ones who are crazy. But if we want to build an effective opposition to these endless wars, we can’t be afraid of being called crazy – or unpatriotic or soft on terrorism. Flag waving “support the troops”- style activism has been proven ineffective. It does nothing to puncture what Engelhardt calls the “almost religious glow of praise and veneration, what might once have been called ‘idolatry,’” in which the Pentagon has been embraced since 9/11. <br />
<br />
The American Way of War shows what a different anti-war war movement could look like: one that clear-sightedly calls out the murderous nature of our war state and holds up in contrast the warmth and humor on the side of humanity.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-23905175727359361922011-03-27T17:48:00.000-07:002011-03-27T17:48:17.826-07:00PoemThe Senator snorts at the City Councilwoman’s<br />
ignorance of how things really get done.<br />
She shakes her head <br />
at the impracticality of the Professor who <br />
pities the working conditions <br />
of the Non-Profit Executive Director who despises <br />
- in his weaker moments<br />
the fanaticism of all of us <br />
who do it for free after work<br />
- or during work.<br />
<br />
When the call to march finally takes hold<br />
and we go from shouting slogans on our laptops<br />
to finally meeting face to face<br />
<br />
we’ll have lots of support<br />
from those who know so much about these things<br />
that they’ve made it a career<br />
and that will be helpful.<br />
Still it’s worth remembering that <br />
ignorant, impractical, <br />
pitiable, fanatical <br />
though we may be,<br />
we are learning.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-63664996640396886662011-03-27T17:46:00.000-07:002011-03-27T17:46:22.278-07:00Why Do We Bother With Elections?<i>This was first posted at SocialistWorker.org on November 23, 2010.<br />
</i><br />
The midterm elections are over and the general plan for economic policy is now clear. Oddly, these two things are unrelated. <br />
<br />
A mere week after voters went to the polls, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the Democratic and Republican co-chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, announced their proposals to cut taxes for the rich and cut Social Security and Medicare for the rest of us. <br />
<br />
So the Republicans would have won even if they had lost. Am I the only one who now feels silly for having even paid attention? That was valuable time I could have spent perfecting my mix of all-time songs with “monkey” in the title. <br />
<br />
It’s worth taking a minute to appreciate come of the moral and logical gymnastics just performed by our political class. <br />
<br />
Republicans and Democrats made us watch hundreds of bitter campaign ads over the past year – at the same time that they were quietly getting along just fine in the Commission’s large stately room in the Senate building.<br />
<br />
Democrats warned us that we needed to vote for them to protect Social Security but forgot to tell us how to protect it from fellow Democrat Bowles. Republicans launched paranoid Tea Parties to protest Obama’s every act of Big Government Tyranny – except his creation of an unelected government body tasked to decide our economic future.<br />
<br />
And political commentators barely finished catching their breath from hailing the significance of the elections when they began hailing the significance of a Commission whose report would have been the same regardless of the elections.<br />
<br />
At least Jon Stewart might be pleased that Bowles and Simpson didn’t display any of the “insanity” that the comedian deplored at his Washington rally. There were no rabid delusional speeches tailored for Fox News. If you check out the videos of the Commission’s sessions, you’ll see a model of the old-school decorum that used to rule Washington: old white men working across party lines for the purpose of screwing the majority of the population. <br />
<br />
But despite their drowsy septuagenarian good cheer, Bowles and Simpson produced recommendations straight from the Tea Party’s “fuck society” doctrine. <br />
<br />
We all knew that these guys were going to call for cutting Medicare and Social Security. Their main role as retired politicians was to be a shield for both of their parties to go after America’s two most popular social programs. But it’s a little nutty to then call for the rich to pay lower taxes when your assignment was supposedly to find ways to increase government revenue. Presumably, if Bowles and Simpson served on a task force to reduce childhood obesity their main recommendation would be to abolish all taxes on millionaires, who could then donate used Shake Weights to needy schools. <br />
<br />
Perhaps the co-chairs veered so far right because some their staffers were on loan from hard right think tanks funded by billionaire Pete Peterson. The commission’s executive director Bruce Reed defended this arrangement as a model of government thrift: “"We have a very small budget…Part of our job is not to add to the problem ourselves." <br />
<br />
What an innovative way to reduce government spending! In fact, why even bother having to pay all those salaries for Congressional representatives and their staffers? We can save a boatload by replacing them with folks whose salaries are generously paid directly by BP, Goldman Sachs, and other corporations devoted to the call of public service. <br />
<br />
When Obama created the Fiscal Commission, he assigned it to deliver its report after the elections on the premise that democracy isn’t a good way to make the “tough choices necessary to solve our fiscal problems.” The conventional wisdom voiced by pundits - usually in a tone reminiscent of Bill Cosby on “Kids Say the Darnedest Things!” - is that Americans don’t like the deficit but they also don’t want to cut their favorite programs. <br />
<br />
In fact, there are two very expensive programs that the majority of Americans tell pollsters they are quite willing to cut: the Bush tax cuts and the war in Afghanistan. Oops. Wrong “tough choices.” <br />
<br />
That’s the real reason for this unelected commission: No matter how many Tea Parties they fund, the American plutocracy still can’t convince most of us to pay for its bailout. <br />
<br />
Of course, most Tea Partiers are not exactly black belts in the art of political persuasion. Rand Paul’s argument for cutting social programs is that “people don’t understand why they have to balance their family budget, but Congress doesn’t.” <br />
Apparently, most families would like to tighten their budgets even further from lower Social Security checks in order to feel more metaphorically connected to the federal government. <br />
<br />
Here’s a better analogy. Cutting Social Security and Medicare and slashing state budgets while lowering taxes for the rich is like a family that decides to cut off Junior’s allowance, take Sis out of college, force Mom to get a second job, and cut off Grandpa’s medication to make sure that Dad can keep himself deep in pure Bolivian cocaine and upgrade to business class for his weekly Vegas binges. <br />
<br />
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that Rand Paul’s ideas are actually quite popular. After all, his party just dominated the midterm elections. But actually, only about twenty percent of Americans voted for the Republicans. While that’s better than the nineteen percent who voted Democrat, it’s dwarfed by the numbers who stayed home because they didn’t think their vote would make a difference. <br />
<br />
I wonder what gave them that idea?dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-9202376000631996322010-11-21T10:11:00.000-08:002010-11-21T10:11:01.140-08:00Obsessed With Their ConstitutionFirst published at SocialistWorker.org on 11/3/10<br />
<br />
<h1 class="headline">Obsessed with their constitution</h1><div class="body">THE TEA Party revolution has arrived--exhaustively televised. So what's their plan to restore the economy and rescue America? Since they don't want to tax the rich or end our pointless and expensive wars, they're going to have to come up with something really innovative. What's it going to be?<br />
<br />
In his victory speech last night, Kentucky's new Sen. Rand Paul proclaimed that the message of the Tea Party is "fiscal sanity, of limited constitutional government and balanced budgets."<br />
<br />
Expect to hear more about the U.S. Constitution in the next couple of days. It's a big Tea Party theme. The now Republican-led House of Representatives may pass a number of resolutions this year in favor of having three branches of government and a bicameral legislature.<br />
<br />
At least, that's what I remember to be the main points of the Constitution. It's a document that lays out the structure of the U.S. government, not a guide to action. A candidate who pledges to vote according to the Constitution is like a football coach whose strategy against an upcoming team is to read and re-read the rulebook.<br />
<br />
Most of the Constitution is about as inspiring as the minutes of a local PTA meeting--if, that is, right before the report from the bake sale committee was a resolution extending the international slave trade for 20 years.<br />
<br />
And yet, Tea Partiers can't get enough of it. In September, they organized nationwide public readings of the Constitution. I have to imagine that stopped seeming like such a great idea at about the two-hour mark of people awkwardly cheering on lines like: "In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction."<br />
<br />
Some of the new members of Congress talk about truly understanding the Constitution with an intensity that I can only compare to my feelings about the Smiths when I was 15 years old. Like today's conservatives, I was frightened and angry, and I thought the world sucked. I knew things would be better if everyone would just sit on my bed and just...<i>like...listen</i>.<br />
<br />
One reason that conservatives are so rapturous about something so boring may be that they're thinking of a totally different document. That's what you have to conclude after reading the preamble of the Constitution Party, a nutty group with close connections with the newly elected Rand Paul. The preamble states that the Constitution "established a Republic rooted in Biblical law," and that America "was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ."<br />
<br />
If these guys are right, then Jesus must be pissed, because he's not given credit even once in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or any of the Amendments. On the other hand, this would explain our government's lack of support for storm victims from New Orleans to Pakistan--after all, Biblical law is pretty tolerant toward the occasional apocalyptic flood.<br />
<br />
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -<br />
<br />
THE MORE a Tea Party politician talks about the Constitution, the less likely he's actually referring to anything in the Constitution. It's just another cultural code word meant to conjure up a time when men were men, youth had respect, and there was no such thing as a Black president.<br />
<br />
But opposition to Obama has merely added a new twist to the traditional right-wing silliness that the Constitution prohibits all measures not foreseen and approved by its authors--otherwise known as "progress." Social Security, Medicare and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were all opposed in their times as unconstitutional intrusions by the federal government into areas best handled by the states.<br />
<br />
For some reason, conservatives view state capitals as idyllic paragons of popular democracy--while to the rest of us, they're just places where politicians live after they're elected and before they're sent to jail or busted for having an affair.<br />
<br />
This "strict construction" view of the Constitution may have made some sense when it was first written, and We the White People were mostly small farmers who had fought a revolution to create their own independent communities, free from a tyrannical government.<br />
<br />
But today's pseudo-libertarians are led by business owners and professionals whose lives are far from self-sufficient--unless Sarah Palin feeds and clothes her family exclusively with hunted moose. They only oppose those laws that limit their ability to exploit their workers or the environment that we all must share. At the same time, they're all for any government intervention that can help such exploitation--from ICE raids to anti-strike injunctions to publicly funded cleanups of privately caused oil spills.<br />
<br />
And you can bet that the new rebels in Congress aren't planning to take on the real government tyranny of the ever-expanding Wars on Drugs, Immigrants and Terror. In fact, when it comes to these aspects of the state that are actually Orwellian, their main complaint is that the government isn't playing dirty enough--because it's too wedded to the Constitution!<br />
<br />
Sarah Palin is the darling of the right because she isn't intimidated by this kind of faulty logic; instead, she revels in it with a narrow-mindedness so pure it inspires her audience. In a speech she gave earlier this year, she spoke for and against the Constitution in such rapid succession that somewhere in heaven Rick James must have been jealous:<br />
<blockquote> Our vision for America is anchored in time-tested truths: Government that governs least governs best. That the Constitution provides the path to a more perfect union--it's the constitution! By the way, it's within our own borders and the homeland that we should feel safe and not condone any violence. That makes me want to say, in these volatile times, when we are a nation at war is when we need a commander in chief, not a constitutional law professor. </blockquote>To Palin and her friends, there's no contradiction here: The Constitution is for us, not them. And those two categories aren't just defined by what side of the border you're on. For Rand Paul, "us" are business owners who shouldn't have been forced by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to have to serve African Americans, who obviously fall into the category of "them" for Kentucky's newest senator.<br />
<br />
At the end of the day, the true Tea Party plan is to preserve the minority's sacred Constitutional right to its wealth by cutting the majority's benefits and services to the bone. The Democrats will meekly follow and hope we forget that they still control the White House and Senate.<br />
<br />
If we want to stop them, we'll have to build an opposition in the streets and reclaim this country's revolutionary tradition for our side. We're the ones who fight for the freedoms of religion and speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. We're the ones organizing against an empire that denies self-government to peoples across an ocean.<br />
<br />
The only thing today's new Congress-people have in common with the original Tea Party is that they don't give a shit about polluting our waterways.<br />
</div>dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-77206941308804689912010-11-21T10:09:00.000-08:002010-11-21T10:09:24.767-08:00Democrats Stoop A Little LowerOriginally posted at socialistworker.org on 10/15/10<br />
<br />
<h1 class="headline">Democrats stoop a little lower</h1><div class="body">LAST WEEK, the White House unveiled its two-pronged October Surprise for the midterm elections. First, reject the growing call for a moratorium on foreclosures. Second, accuse the Republicans of receiving "secret foreign money" from the Chamber of Commerce.<br />
<br />
Rather than give us hope by actually doing something to limit the power of American financial institutions, the Democrats' plan is to make us frightened and angry about fictional non-American financial institutions. In other words, we now have a choice between Tea-Party-Dee and Tea-Party-Dumb.<br />
<br />
"This is a threat to our democracy," Obama warned last week about the supposed foreign donantions to the Republicans. "The American people deserve to know who's trying to sway their elections."<br />
Do you know what's actually a threat to our democracy? The fact that no matter who we vote for, we end up with the same stupid shit.<br />
<br />
Before you get too frustrated, though, a word of warning: If you're reading this Web site, chances are the White House is already very disappointed in you. Facing an impending disaster at the polls, Democratic leaders have figured out that you're the culprit.<br />
<br />
Joe Biden thinks you're spending too much time "whining" about bank bailouts and Afghanistan, and not enough time being scared about the Tea Party. In fact, you probably are nervous about some of these right-wing cranks who may take over Congress next year. But you can't get it out of your head that right now, with huge Democratic majorities, that same Congress has been unable even to end unpopular policies like tax cuts for millionaires and "don't ask, don't tell."<br />
<br />
Your reckless live-in-the-moment attitude isn't entirely your fault, according to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. You've been misled by the "professional left," a shadowy network that ranges from Jon Stewart to revolutionary socialists, and includes all those in between who rigidly cling to their values, even when they come into conflict with the political strategies of a Democratic administration.<br />
<br />
Gibbs throws up his hands at the impossibility of dealing with crazies who will only "be satisfied when we have Canadian health care, and we've eliminated the Pentagon."<br />
<br />
Gibbs may be right that you actually like the sound of his dystopian nightmare of world peace and free medicine. But you may be wondering why the White House spokesperson sounds so much like Glenn Beck when he describes anybody who just wants his boss to fulfill his campaign promises.<br />
<br />
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -<br />
<br />
SINCE POLLS show that you haven't been getting the hint, President Obama himself felt the need to set you straight in a recent interview with <i>Rolling Stone</i>:<br />
<blockquote> [T]here's a turn of mind among Democrats and progressives where a lot of times we see the glass as half-empty...[W]e made a series of decisions that were focused on governance, and sometimes there was a conflict between governance and politics. So there were some areas where we could have picked a fight with Republicans that might have gotten our base feeling good, but would have resulted in us not getting legislation done. </blockquote>Ouch. The guy who once seemed like the only politician who respected your intelligence now views you as a simple-minded zealot who would rather scream at Republicans than pass any laws.<br />
It's funny, but you don't remember that being the reason for your excitement when Obama was elected, do you? Come to think of it, one reason you were so happy was that you thought with the Democrats having a majority of 18 seats in the Senate and 75 seats in the House, you'd barely even have to know the Republicans existed.<br />
<br />
And you're pretty sure that there was all sorts of legislation you expected to be passed. Not just ending "don't ask, don't tell" and ending millionaire tax cuts, but laws protecting homeowners, the environment, abortion rights--the list goes on and on. Of course, back then, you were naïve enough to think that with super-majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama and his party could pass those laws just by, you know, voting for them.<br />
<br />
You were still dealing with your disappointment in Team Obama's performance over the past two years when they started semi-mocking you for believing all of their talk about "change" to begin with. And now, to top it all off, the folks telling you to shut up and vote have embarked on what may be the dumbest political strategy in recent history.<br />
<br />
Barack Hussein Obama: Nativist.<br />
<br />
"Where has the Chamber been getting some of their money lately?" asks an ad from MoveOn.org. "From foreign corporations in countries like China, Russia and India--the same companies that threaten American jobs." "It's incredible," says another ad from the Democratic National Committee. "Republicans benefiting from secret foreign money."<br />
<br />
First of all, there must be some bitter laughter coming from Venezuala, Iran and all the other countries with opposition parties funded by the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy.<br />
<br />
Closer to home, the real money influencing our elections is coming from the very American bankers that Obama is afraid of pissing off with a moratorium on foreclosures--precisely because their money influences our elections.<br />
<br />
One other hole in the "secret foreign money" argument: It's probably not true. Campaign finance watchdog groups say there's no evidence behind the accusation. When Obama's aide David Axelrod was asked on <i>Face the Nation</i> for proof that the Chamber was funneling foreign money to Republican candidates, he cleverly responded, "Well, do you have any proof that it's not?"<br />
<br />
Not only are the Democrats trying to out-xenophobe the Tea Party--they're trying to out-stupid them as well.<br />
</div>dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-66779191814773498072010-08-24T12:16:00.000-07:002010-08-24T12:16:41.931-07:00Ground Zero, Hallelujah!Welcome to the Church of NineEleven. Brothers and sisters, we gather today in praise of Ground Zero, a site so holy it has the power to expand its size to encompass any proposed mosque.<br />
<br />
Did you know that the name Ground Zero actually goes back over five hundred years? Grondaseero was an Algonquin word meaning “place where enormous metal trees will be hit by flying machines flown by Muslims.”<br />
<br />
Over time the name faded from usage. Instead the area became known as “downtown”, “the World Trade Center”, and “the porn district.” Then, of course, came DEVINE CHANGE (Day EVerthing INstantly CHANGEd), when Americans discovered that not only had Osama Bin Laden attacked us, his fellow Muslims had occupied most of the world’s oil producing regions. (Note: the Church of NineEleven is not anti-Islam.) <br />
<br />
Islam is an evil religion that teaches its followers to hate America. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Muslims did not attack us during our first 215 years. We refer to this period of American history as “The Big Snooze”, when Presidents Washington through Clinton daydreamed while our enemies patiently waited for the perfect time to strike.<br />
<br />
Due to our generous nature, we did not respond to DEVINE CHANGE with a war against all Muslims – only most of their countries. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia, we’ve shown the Islamic world how a civilized nation goes about using airplanes to kill people. <br />
<br />
Meanwhile, back in the homeland, Saint Rudy (blessed be his name) founded our Church on a few simple beliefs: <br />
<br />
1) NineEleven is not a date. It’s a way of life. <br />
<br />
2) We are born fearful and angry and should strive to return to that pure natural state.<br />
<br />
3) All races and creeds should form a brotherhood of man against Arabs and Muslims. <br />
<br />
In recent years, the Church has gone through some hard times. Americans have disappointed us with their lack of enthusiasm for endless war against Islamo-petroleumism. The 2008 election almost broke our spirit entirely. Not only did people elect a man whose name rhymes with Osama, they didn’t even give the Republican nomination to Saint Rudy (praised be he, a pox on his ungrateful children.) <br />
<br />
But now things are looking up - thanks to Ground Zero. Who would have thought that a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center based on “multifaith dialogue” (yuck!) could turn so quickly into its glorious opposite? Oh NineEleven, you sure do work in mysterious ways! <br />
<br />
Every day more Republicans come back to church. Democrats are quietly coming too, shuffling in the side door with a liberal two-step – “I believe in freedom of religion, just not here.” Smile Democrats! Just because the Church doesn’t allow you to sit up front doesn’t mean NineEleven doesn’t love you. <br />
<br />
It gratifies us to see so many people refer to Ground Zero as “hallowed ground” for those who died there. However, we are afraid that this term is too limiting. Most of the Church elders - like Sister Sarah and Brother Newt – aren’t actually connected to those who died that day. But that doesn’t make us any less qualified to speak to the true meaning of NineEleven. <br />
<br />
In fact, it makes us more able cast out the Judases in our midst: so-called “9/11 families” who oppose endless war. Someone who lost a loved one on DEVINE CHANGE probably wouldn’t be able to scream “shut up!” at a Judas suffering the same grief. Brother O’Reilly could.<br />
<br />
Besides, if Ground Zero is merely hallowed ground, than how can we expand our Church? NineEleven belongs to all Americans. If your town wasn’t lucky enough to have a Ground Zero, you should be able to build your own - federally funded and Church administered. We’ll call them Ground One, Ground Two, etcetera. And maybe they’ll just happen to be located near Muslim houses of worship. <br />
<br />
At this point, some of you may have voice in your head raising questions: Isn’t this a little crude? What about freedom of religion? Here’s how you can put that little guy on mute: Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and repeat these words: “Nine Eleven. Nine Eleven.” Now picture the towers coming down. Forget all those burdensome facts you learned in the days and years after. That moment is the truth.<br />
<br />
Okay, open your eyes. Did you feel the spirit of NineEleven? Welcome to the Church! <br />
<br />
No? Then we’ll see you in hell. Or prison, depending on the next election (good luck Sister Sarah!)dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-17138863642873054252010-08-24T12:14:00.001-07:002010-08-24T12:14:47.182-07:00A Toast to Stephen SlaterFirst published 8/17/10 at http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/17/toast-to-steven-slater<br />
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Today we raise a glass to Stephen Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who gave a vicarious thrill to workers across Great Recession America. <br />
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Stephen, when the light dinged on in your head that you were now free to tell off that rude passenger, pop open the emergency exit, and just slip slide away, you did more than fulfill your own long-held fantasy. <br />
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Thanks to you, Stephen, flight attendants are walking those narrow aisles today with a swagger and air travelers are making eye contact with them to let them know “you wont have any trouble from me.”<br />
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You have taught America that our working class heroes can be gay. Badass gay at that. You escaped from the airport, raced home, and jumped into bed with your boyfriend, which is how the police found you. That is ridiculously cool. <br />
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You’ve showed us that solidarity via Facebook can force media wise-asses to take their narrative (Daily News Day 1: “Planely Nuts”) and shove it (Day 2: “Hero to Working Stiffs.”) <br />
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Finally, Stephen Slater, we toast you because before you left that plane, you stopped and grabbed a couple of beers from the beverage cart. <br />
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That’s what gave your freakout some flair. It transformed the act from postal to rebel. With or without the beers, we still would have identified with your rage. But they made the difference between our saying “Damn I wish I could do that” and not “Lord, I hope that’s not me in five years.” Taking the tallboys signalled that you weren’t a rampaging maniac, just a guy saying “no job is worth this shit.”<br />
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Those are six powerful words that bear repeating. No Job Is Worth This Shit. You don’t hear them too often right now, when folks haven’t been able to find work for two years. <br />
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Stephen, what you did felt like a throwback to the 1970s, like something Lily Tomlin would have done in “9 to 5” or Johnny Fever in “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Back in the Seventies, Ronald Reagan was just a nutty governor and down-sizing wasn’t a word. Being an American worker didn’t mean having your ass handed to you every day; it meant clocking in with your head high and your middle finger ready. <br />
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Here’s what I mean. In 1972, autoworkers in Lordstown, Ohio went on a strike that wasn’t about money or benefits – they didn’t have too many complaints about that. No, what they were pissed about was assembly line speedups. The local union president told author Studs Terkel that the guys were striking for the right to be “able to smoke, bullshit a bit, open a book, daydream even."<br />
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Can you imagine anybody doing that today? Imagine the picket line chants: “No YouTube? No Work!” <br />
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Stephen, you reminded workers in America that the bankers and CEO’s haven’t always gotten their way in this country without a fight. That’s why even talk show hosts like Jimmy Fallon are writing ballads about you.<br />
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Of course, not everybody has a sense of humor about what you did. Incredibly, you face up to seven years in jail for reckless endangerment and criminal mischief. Come on. The only thing you endangered was $25,000 of JetBlue’s money, which apparently is what it costs to replace the emergency slide. <br />
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Speaking of JetBlue, no one seems to be talking about its role in all this. The combination of profit seeking and terrorism paranoia has made air travel a delightful experience. We’re packed into tiny seats like mindless cattle only minutes after our shoes have been given a search worthy of a world-class criminal. Rude passengers are inevitable in this situation and yet airlines let their flight attendants be human shields to face the cabin crackpots.<br />
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For example, a few years ago, one of your co-workers, Mala Amarsingh hadn’t even started work when she was verbally assaulted and spat on by drunken man who had been denied boarding on previous flights. What did JetBlue do to defend its employee? It fired her, officially because she dared to curse at her assailant. Want to know the unofficial reason? Because Mala Amarsingh thought JetBlue flight attendants should join a union.<br />
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With that in mind, I’ll end my toast with a question. What now, Stephen Slater? The same pundits who initially dismissed you now assume that you’re a passing fad whose only shot at lasting significance is landing a spot in a reality show. After all, they say, things have changed since autoworkers went on strike over smoke breaks. <br />
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Indeed they have. But, Stephen, your popularity shows that people haven’t changed that much. As often as we’re told differently, we still can’t get it into our heads that we’re only as good as our production quota or evaluation form.<br />
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So here’s to you, Stephen and here’s to you Mala Amarsingh, are here’s to all the JetBlue flight attendants still talking union. When you guys finally win, we’ll all raise two beers in your honor.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-9347242208051277312010-08-24T12:13:00.001-07:002010-08-24T12:13:40.625-07:00Michael Bloomberg: KleptocratFirst published 7/14/10 at http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/14/kleptocratic-mayor-of-new-york<br />
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In the past year, the mayor of New York City has become two billion dollars riches while his city has grown one billions dollars poorer. <br />
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When this type of thing happens in a country in Africa or Central Asia, we call it a failed state. Their failure, apparently, is a lack of subtlety. Looting your country’s grain reserves to build the world’s largest tetherball arena makes you a kleptocratic dictator. But if you get stinking rich selling information technology to the banks that have looted your treasury through bailouts, well you’re just Mayor Mike. <br />
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Of course, the real saving grace for Michael Bloomberg is that, unlike a banana republic strongman, he hasn’t kept all the wealth to himself but generously shared it with a few thousand of his city’s 8 million inhabitants. <br />
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These hedge funders and investment bankers are too numerous to depict themselves in a 200 foot golden statue that rotates with the sun, as did the late Turkmenestan dictator Saparmurat Niyazov. Instead, various smaller monuments to gluttony dot the city’s boutiques and restaurants in the form of bejeweled flip flops and $150 hamburgers. <br />
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If countries like Nigeria are said to suffer from an “oil curse” because petroleum revenues have corrupted their political system, does New York have a “bank curse”?<br />
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Consider that Bloomberg is eliminating two thousand public school teachers to close a budget gap caused by bailouts to Goldman Sachs execs who could each pay a teacher’s salary and benefits with the money they spend on their own children’s private school and tutoring. (This isn’t an exaggeration. Wealthy New Yorkers routinely pay $25-$50,000 on private tutors for the SATs and academic help – on top of $30,000 plus tuitions for private schools.) Each of these public school teachers would have taught this year about one hundred children whose parents didn’t love them enough to become bankers. <br />
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Last month, New York’s lame duck governor David Paterson dared to suggest a small tax on hedge funds, the folks who brought you the recession. Parents and teachers might have expected their mayor to back this plan. Not exactly. <br />
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"I think it's the best thing that ever happened to Connecticut,” Bloomberg sneered. “I can't imagine why every hedge fund wouldn't pick up tomorrow and move.”<br />
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Our mayor is advising them to leave. He may even round up some friends and a van to help. In most cities, mayors are civic boosters, tireless pitchmen for their towns armed with pie charts showing why East Shitsburgh is a great place to start a business and raise a family. But the mayor of America’s business and cultural capital can’t think of anything New York City has over Stamford, Connecticut. After all, “Hedge funds are a bunch of desks with terminals on them -- they can be anyplace.” Um, mister mayor, those are “Bloomberg terminals”, correct? There wouldn’t be any conflict of interest going on between your business interests and mayoral duties, would there? <br />
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Nonsense, says Mayor Mike. He’s just following basic economics: "The first commonsense rule of taxation is, 'Don't tax people that can leave,'" Left unstated is the obvious corollary to this rule: grab what you can from everyone who can’t. Like any good predator, Bloomberg has his eyes on the young (public schools), the old (25 senior centers and a day of library service cut), and the sick (cuts to HIV services). <br />
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According to the anti-corruption group Transparency International, the kleptocrat in recent history was Suharto, who embezzled over $15 during his three decade reign in Indonesia. Michael Bloomberg has almost matched that in only nine years as mayor, quadrupling his net worth from $4 billion to $18 billion. <br />
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Here’s the silver lining: Almost everyone on TI’s corruption list was eventually deposed by popular movements, from Suharto to Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillipines to Mobutu Sese Soko in Zaire. <br />
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What would it take for that to happen here? Three simple words: Tax the rich. One of two things would happen. Either they shut up and finally pay their share. Or they leave for the suburbs as threatened and their mayor leaves with them and starts a government in exile, leading search parties for doggie spas and $50 sashimi. <br />
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Then the real New Yorkers, the ones who can’t leave, could go about rebuilding our democratic and civil institutions after years of Bloombergian misrule.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-76810966405368381912010-08-24T12:12:00.000-07:002010-08-24T12:12:39.890-07:00The fear-mongers go to workFirst published 5/14/10 at http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/14/fear-mongers-go-to-work<br />
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THE FAILED car bombing in Times Square has New Yorkers, some of whom still have nightmares from 9/11, on edge once again.<br />
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While most of us can't afford therapy, at least we have universal access to the soothing counsel of politicians and pundits. For the past two weeks, we've received dozens of cheery reminders that none of us are safe from terrorism--ever.<br />
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At times like this, it's nice to know that we have the kind of straight-shooting elected officials who aren't afraid to jump in front of the nearest camera and tell us their foolproof plan to prevent anybody from ever packing a car with common, yet explosive, materials and parking it on a street somewhere in the United States of America.<br />
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Of all their helpful suggestions--stripping suspects of citizenship, eliminating Miranda rights, and adding the phrase "for whites only" to each of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution--none of them have proposed to stop doing the thing that seems to have actually caused the Times Square attempt: our own bombing of Pakistan.<br />
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That, at least, is what the suspected Times Square bomber said his motives were. In the past year, pilotless U.S. planes have dropped bombs that have killed more then 300 Pakistanis. Most of them were non-combatants, many of them were children, all of them lived in a country with whom we are not at war.<br />
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"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" we do not. Of course, the guy who coined that phrase was one of those radical Middle Eastern clerics flagged as a terrorist and taken out by the authorities--2,000 years ago.<br />
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IT'S NOT exactly a secret that the suspected Times Square bomber was motivated to murder by our own murders. A New York Post headline in early May screamed, "Why He Did It: Revenge for U.S. Drone Attacks on Taliban Terrorists."<br />
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The Post ran this cover not to make a point about imperial blowback, but as just another sinister detail of the "Taliban lackey's twisted mission." Which only demonstrates that those in charge of molding public opinion have a moral code that owes less to Jesus Christ than it does to that other Jewish philosopher, Mel Brooks. "Tragedy," Mel once said, "is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."<br />
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Terrorism, according to our conventional wisdom, is when we suffer anxiety from a barbequed Pathfinder. Foreign policy is when you and your family die a fiery death while lying in your beds at night.<br />
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Of course, in case some readers got the wrong idea from its headline, the Post ran another article that day declaring that the "drone attacks have been incredibly successful in the war on terrorists in Pakistan." Seems that the only downside to this incredibly successful weapon against terrorism is that it produces terrorism.<br />
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According to some in the media, the Times Square incident actually proves the wisdom of the drone bombings because it shows that the Pakistani Taliban are growing desperate [1].<br />
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So we've come full circle. George Bush justified his disastrous war in Iraq by saying that we were fighting "the terrorists" over there so that wouldn't have to fight them here. Now Barack Obama can claim that his escalation of the Afghanistan war is so successful that the terrorists we were fighting over there are now fighting us over here.<br />
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By this logic, we'll know that we're really close to winning the war on terror when there's another attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11.<br />
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It would be nice to laugh at this lunacy, but it's obviously not a joke. I'll have to settle for watching the next tough-on-terror press conference at Times Square and rooting for the politician of the day to step into one of my fine city's many open sewers.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-57546703948671277372010-08-24T12:11:00.000-07:002010-08-24T12:11:16.467-07:00Triumph of the ShrillFirst published 5/4/10 at http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/04/triumph-of-the-shrill<br />
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It’s nice to see Republicans raging at their own impotence. We’ve wasted too much time watching this party be taken seriously in the name of “bipartisanship” even as they pander to their lunatic fringe. Here’s a condensed version of the health care debate: <br />
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Obama: So, Republicans. Tell me your suggestions. <br />
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GOP: Go suck it you sleeper cell Indonesian! You want to create secret death panels run by Jewish bankers and Mexican migrants. You’ll never take us alive!<br />
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Obama: Hmm. Interesting point. How about we drop the public option?<br />
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When the Democrats finally decided to pass the bill with their own damned votes, they punctured the Beck-Palin hot air balloon. But the defeat of nutty Republicans was canceled out by the triumph of nutty anti-abortion Democrats. <br />
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These folks insisted that people getting health insurance through the new federal exchange program have to write separate checks for the part that covers abortions. And Obama caved in, even as he claimed there would be no change to “longstanding precedent.” <br />
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Well why is it in the bill then? Does Bart Stupak think that abortions are like cooties that people might catch by touching an infected check? No, Stupak knows that insurance companies wouldn’t cover their own mothers if it ate into the bottom line and that many of them will stop covering abortions rather than pay for the administrative costs of handling double checks. <br />
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Anti-abortionists are the hallowed forefathers of the militias and tea baggers. Some of them probably sit on park benches complaining that in their day “we didn’t have any Fox News or YouTube. Back then, if you wanted to get a tv interview you had to scream at women outside a clinic for months! Maybe throw in a bomb scare or two.”<br />
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These days the movement has gone mainstream with corporate lobbyists and polished ad campaigns. But underneath the expensive suits are people with an idea as fanatical as any Michele Bachmann speech: that removing a lima bean-sized bundle of cells is the moral equivalent to murdering a woman, child, or man. <br />
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Am I being overly simplistic? The conventional wisdom is that abortion is a terribly complicated issue. This is how Obama put it on the campaign trail: <br />
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“I don’t think you’re ever going to get a complete agreement on this issue. If you believe that life begins at conception, then I can’t change your mind.”<br />
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I don’t buy that. Of course some sort of life begins with a fertilized egg. And it’s awesome to ponder that a thinking feeling human being develops from that microscopic little thing – precisely because the two are NOT THE SAME THING.<br />
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The bizarre notion that abortion is murder logically leads to the truly deranged idea that the one in three women who terminate a pregnancy at some point in their lives are murderers. Since this isn’t exactly a mainstream view of humanity, the fertilized-egg saviors have to employ softer gentler arguments to reach out beyond the hard-core. <br />
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These arguments’ only weakness is that they also don’t make sense. Take for example, “abortion changes you.” The is the name of a pseudo-counseling service running ads on New York City subways that show people with their heads in their hands and other very sad poses to demonstrate how they’ve been changed by having an abortion. So according to these folks, if you really don’t want your life to change, have a baby. With that type of advice it’s not exactly shocking to read at the bottom of www.abortionchangesyou.com that “this site is not a professional counseling site.” <br />
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Another logically impaired ad was the infamous Super Bowl spot football hero Tim Tebow and his mother, who chose to continue her risky pregnancy against the advice of doctors. The ad, paid for by Focus on the Family, attracted controversy because many felt that our country’s most sacred holiday was not the place for Christian extremism. <br />
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Not enough was made of the silliness of the ad’s main message: An abortion would have prevented Tim Tebow from being born and leading the Florida Gators to a national championship. (Football being football, there were surely Tennessee fans watching the ad complaining that they could have won it all too if someone didn’t abort their great quarterback twenty years ago.) <br />
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But there are a million factors that could have prevented Tim from being born before his mother ever got pregnant. What events led Tim’s ancestors to come to this country where his parents met and conceived him? Given that most people don’t emigrate because they’re travel buffs, they may have been wars or famines. Should we celebrate these tragedies since they eventually led to the birth of Tim Tebow? Using this logic, I can proudly claim that if it weren’t for the Nazi Holocaust, I would never have been born - although I’m not sure I could get my mom to do that ad with me. <br />
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It may be satisfying to poke holes in the logic of “pro-life” (Warning: this label does not apply to those suffering loss of life from the U.S. war machine, criminal justice system, extreme poverty, or workplace accident.) But the fact is that they’re winning. Recent polls show that for the first time in decades a minority of Americans identify themselves as pro-choice. <br />
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The problem we face is that while there are many groups that will take your donations to preserve the right to abortion, not enough will put people in the streets to fight for it. Many who used to lead those fights have disappeared into the smothering embrace of the Democratic Party, which promised us the world if we gave them a Congressional majority but instead gave us Bart Stupak. Too often the old leaders now talk like politicians, using cautious words like “choice” and “privacy.” As a result, people who have come of age in the last twenty years have only heard the word abortion spoken by the people holding up doctored photos. <br />
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This is not a complicated debate. We can trust women. That was the simple slogan of the late abortion doctor George Tiller. Or we can trust the folks who scream at women, the folks who care more about fertilized eggs than Iraqi children, think that having a baby won’t change you and that abortions are bad for the Florida Gators, and, oh yes, who supported the murder of Dr. Tiller. <br />
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These deluded people have somehow wandered out of their far right corner of the room and into the mainstream of American politics. We need to escort them back where they belong. dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-75456929811673636752010-08-24T12:08:00.000-07:002010-08-24T12:09:49.615-07:00Duncan's Twisted Vision for Our SchoolsHurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans," according to Arne Duncan, who unfortunately is not a diabolical Hollywood villain but the U.S. Secretary of Education.<br />
Four years after the hurricane, there are barely half as many children in New Orleans public schools. That's 30,000 mostly African American boys and girls who have been driven from their homes, possibly permanently.<br />
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Besides this easily being the Cheneyist thing anybody in the Obama administration has said, Duncan's words are so striking because he claims he thinks of his education policies as "the civil rights issue of our generation."<br />
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But then, Duncan has always been a strange type of civil rights leader. On the day he claimed to speak out for this generation's civil rights issue, he was the "CEO" of the Chicago public schools, which is the fourth most segregated school system in the country, according to a study sponsored by the Center for Urban Research and Learning at Loyola University.<br />
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It's not just Chicago. All around the country, schools are about as racially integrated today as they were before Brown v. the Board of Education. Schools named after Martin Luther King are often exclusively non-white. This is like having a George Washington High with Redcoats for teachers.<br />
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There are no rewards in Duncan's "Race to the Top" program for states that desegregate their schools. To Duncan, however, segregation is so "last generation." If he were to give a Martin Luther King-style civil rights speech, it might go like this:<br />
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I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and give an equal opportunity to some of its children.<br />
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I have a dream that from the streets of Harlem to the hills of Georgia, children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by their score on a test...which is based on the school they attend...which is based on the color of their skin.<br />
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I have a dream that our nation will have enough educated workers to meet our needs without having to actually educate everybody.<br />
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And finally, I have a dream that our most disadvantaged children--the little girl coming to school from a homeless shelter, the boy from Mexico just learning our language, the children struggling with autism--I have a dream that these children will just go away because they are very poor investments. <br />
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The New York Times reports that Duncan is planning "sweeping change" to the notorious No Child Left Behind law pushed through by George W. Bush.<br />
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Like many things in the age of Obama, this sounds great until you keep reading. "Right now, most federal money goes out in formulas, so schools know how much they'll get, and then use it to provide services for poor children," Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, who attended a recent meeting with administration officials, told the Times. "The department thinks that's become too much of an entitlement."<br />
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Amen. If you've ever spent time in a school with poor children, the first thing that strikes you is their sense of entitlement: "I don't want to climb five flights of stairs to get to my 7th period class," they whine about the constantly broken elevator. "I have asthma."<br />
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As Jennings continued: "[Obama and Duncan] want to upend that scheme by making states and districts pledge to take actions the administration considers reform, before they get the money."<br />
Darn right, kids! You don't get any money from this administration before you change your failing ways. Just ask AIG. Or the Pentagon. Or Joe Biden.<br />
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But we all know that children aren't the real villains. Teachers are. The thing that's really insidious about teachers is they're so committed to ruining education that, unlike many school administrators, they devote their whole lives to the field. Well, no more. The heart of the Duncan's plan is to "evaluate teachers based on student test data."<br />
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Using test scores to pay and fire teachers is such a good idea that this method should be applied to all professions. Firefighters should be judged according to the percentage of the fire that they put out--tough luck if you were driving the truck. Doctors should be paid based on survival rates, so when EMTs rush a multiple gunshot wound victim into the emergency groom, they'll find everyone out for a coffee break.<br />
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The other main element of the new policy is charter schools--lots of them. Teachers don't like charter schools in the same stubborn, unreasoning way that 11-year-olds don't like sweatshops.<br />
But charters have proven teachers wrong on one thing. At least some teachers in their darkest moments have looked at their students and thought that if they could just get rid of that one kid--usually the one running a dice game in the corner of the classroom--the entire class would be better off. But charter schools have shown that you can exclude all those kids, as well as the ones with special learning needs or parents who can't spend 20 hours a week at the school, and still not show improvement over regular schools.<br />
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Hopefully, Duncan's education "reforms" will go the way of the health care bill. But don't count on it. The Obama administration might show more backbone taking on teachers and kids than it did with the insurance companies. After all, this is a question of civil rights.dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4070018046824930584.post-85548177522082853942010-08-24T12:02:00.000-07:002010-08-24T12:02:25.067-07:00Inspired by Hunter College, MTA Declares Itself “Best Transportation Value”by Danny Lucia<br />
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The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) proclaimed itself yesterday “New York’s Best Transportation Value.”<br />
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“Studies have conclusively shown that our trains and buses are more affordable than taxis, limousines, and helicopters,” MTA spokesperson Richard Grubnik proudly declared. “Many middle class families can no longer afford a private jet or trans-oceanic hot air balloon due to rising fuel costs. We at the MTA are proud to offer transportation at a lower cost.” <br />
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In making this declaration, the Authority, which as been under fire for it’s plans to reduce service and raise fares, was reportedly influenced by Hunter College’s recent designation by the Princeton Review as the #2 “Best Value College.”<br />
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According to one unnamed MTA official, “Hunter has been raising its tuition and cutting staff. So some people might say ‘Boo hoo! Poor students won’t be able to stay in school. But Hunter is saying, ‘Look everybody! We’re cheaper than Columbia and NYU!’ That’s f*cking brilliant.”<br />
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Other public entities with rising fees and deteriorating services are apparently taking notice. Con Edison is planning a new ad campaign emphasizing its low cost in comparison with creating one’s own electrical grid. Elmhurst Hospital is debating between two new slogans for its emergency room: “Great Value Compared to Fancier Hospitals with their Nurses and Doctors” or “Even if You Die, that’s Still the Second Best Option.”<br />
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According to analysts, a key element of the new strategy is avoiding words like “public,” which imply that lower costs are due to taxpayer funds more than managerial brilliance. Hunter president Jennifer Raab demonstrated this technique in a recent interview on Fox Business. <br />
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When the host asked how Hunter was able to charge lower tuition than many universities, Raab’s response was not “because we’re a public school, you dumb-ass” but the more delicate “well, we are supported by New York State.” <br />
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“That’s very sharp,” notes advertising executive Lance Roachley. “‘Public school’ is a bad brand. It reminds us of those awful places in movies where the white teacher has to come save everyone by making them champions at something quirky and un-ghetto like origami or badminton.” <br />
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Added Roachley, “I’ve heard that the college likes to put fliers up all over campus about Hunter’s affordability. To do that in the midst of tuition hikes is a brilliant use of what we in the business call ‘counter-factual narrative.’”<br />
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“Of course,” Roachley concluded, “I’ve also heard that Hunter has a well-armed police force. That’s probably a good idea too.”dannyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08914426221706084605noreply@blogger.com0