Assasinated in Zimbabwe

The body of Tonderai Ndira was found this week, the 43rd Zimbabwean opposition activist to die in violence since elections in March. Journalist Farai Sevenzo looks back at his life and the circumstances leading up to his murder.

The death of an activist.

David, After a Short Stay in the US

Iron Man as Anti-Imperialism

Favre does anti-imperialism.

Edward S Curtis

Doing some research on Native Americans for a class and I stumbled on THIS! Amazing.

Israel at 60

A discussion On Point.

Cosmopolitan dynamism yet brutal occupier.

How We Discipline the Poor

The United States prison system keeps marking shameful milestones. In late February, the Pew Center on the States released a report showing that more than 1 in 100 American adults are presently behind bars — an astonishingly high rate of incarceration notably skewed along racial lines. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

An editorial from the NY Times.

May 8

A salute to Mordecai Anielewicz on the anniversary of his death.

France 68

Philosophy in the streets. A BBC Radio documentary on the intellectuals of 68 in France.

Shut Down the Userers!

Why shutting down Payday and the like is a good idea.

Ennglish Only!!

Moyers on Wright

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court Justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

Bill Moyers take.

On the 40th Anniversary of My Lai

The logical outcome of a racist empire.

The BBC explores the destruction of villages and free fire zones in Southeast Asia in the context of the Vietnam War.

Bitter?

ABC's debate, bittergate and the Jeremiah Wright treatment have shown us how pathetic our political culture has sunk. And now the Democrats have internalized the narrative! Thanks Hilbillary and the DNC.

Three articles have caught my eye throughout this phase of the agitprop:

Bill Kristol's ominous "The Mask Slips" which exposes the centrist millionaire Obama as the closet Marxist that we know all silver tounged Ivy Leaguers are,


Paul Krugman's opportunistic "Clinging to a Stereotype" which "debunks" for the liberal set the tenuous link between the poor and backward ideas,

and

Mark Schmitt's "What's the Matter With Bitterness?"


All three articles take on the issue of economic stress and reactionary politics. One, Schmitt's take, embraces the link while the others shamelessly exploit the link for partisan political purposes. Schmitt's take goes to the essential politics of the time; if the Democratic Party is to even be a liberal party of the New Deal type they must look at the last 30 years as a time of speculation and supply side redistribution in the upward direction, including the Clinton years. Schmitt correctly realizes that if the US wants to maintain the standards of living and mobility for the working class that existed from 1945 to 1970 a new deal has to be dealt. He gives up on the answer but the below post on Germany is at least a swat in the right direction.

From Schmitt's article:


"While Tom Frank's claim was that Republicans had, in effect, tricked voters, Obama was suggesting something different -- that the Democratic Party had tricked them as well. "They fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not," he said, in the context of explaining (to a supporter who was planning to go to Pennsylvania on his behalf) why people might be cynical about another 10-point plan or promise from a politician.

That's an indictment of the Clinton years as sharp as Clinton's indictment of Gore and Kerry. Obama is basically arguing that the 1992 campaign that promised "Putting People First," with a sharp, substantive agenda of public investment and health care -- the basic Truman/New Deal package -- instead put the bond market first, delivering balanced-budgets, NAFTA, welfare reform, and symbolic appeals to the suburban middle-class swing vote. The near-full employment economy of the Clinton years was a boon for many poorer areas and families -- many cities recovered from the crisis of the late 1980s, African Americans did well, and much of the Rust Belt economy improved. But it did very little for the coal, steel, and textile towns in the region that Gore lost, areas dependent on transferable industries disproportionately affected by globalization.

Why not bring that critique?"

Social Democracy

The Euro has skyrocketed, regulations keep small and medium size businesses afloat through government regulation, taxes are high, unions are as powerful as ever and the public sector is thriving. A recipe for disaster? If you were to read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the New York Times or any other liberal western media outlet you would think that this a description of a country in the depths of crisis but alas I describe Germany and Northern Europe where the economies, although beginning to slow at the moment, maintain growing wages, trade surpluses and continuing growth BECAUSE of the above recipe of government planning and state intervention, not in spite of it.


German exports boom.

The US on the other hand has thrown over the helm to the speculator class. One does not have to read Monthly Review to get an understanding of the power of finance capital of late. The fight between finance and manufacturing capital was at least a fair battle from the 30's to the 60's but since then the movement of money and capital has become the national religion and we have all, but particularly the working classes in the cities, have paid the price.

Here's how we got here.

The 2008 election will not solve the serious issues that have been in the making for 40 or so years. One of the primary reasons is the bait and switch of racism that much of the white working class has bought into, why exactly are my wages on the decline? It must be those immigrants and welfare! The other reason is that much of the suburban types that hold sway in the Democratic party like Wall Street, they have bet the farm on it and Hillbillary and Barack represent, and have represented, them well. It will take a lot more than a vote to change the direction of this massively leveraged ship.

Free Hu Jia!

Chinese jail dude for talking too much.

What Happened in Iraq Last Week

By Juan Cole

Iraq's "defining moment?" Did the tail wag the dog?

Big Finance

Kevin Philips on big finance:

Economic, financial and regulatory issues should dominate politics and government in the United States for the next two or three years, which is important enough. National discourse may also have a new and deserving bogeyman. Franklin D. Roosevelt had Big Business, Ronald Reagan had Big Labor, and my guess is that the new president inaugurated next January will have Big Finance.

True, finance has been whupped by presidents before. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, for example. But that was in the quill-pen era when the financial sector was a pup. Today's financial services sector, by contrast, is a grasping, gargantuan combination of banks, stockbrokers, insurancemen, loan sharks, credit-card issuers, hedge fund speculators, securitization mavens and mortgage operators. Over the last five years, financial services has reached a swollen 20-21% of U.S. GDP -- the largest sector of the private economy.

Manufacturing led financial services by 2:1 back in the 1970s, but by 2006 beaten goods production had shrunk to just 12% of GDP.

Do most Americans understand this? Of course not. Newspaper front pages have shunned any discussion; 60 Minutes has not even spared the transformation sixty seconds, despite its vast implications. This upheaval is probably "the greatest story never told" about the two decades between, say, 1986 and 2006.

Nor was it an economic accident. Computerization was a prequisite, as was the rise of financial mathematics. However, I would say that the two most important underpinnings of financialization lay in the rise of public and private debt as a mainstay of American culture and economics and the perpetual liquidity and bail-out support of the Federal Reserve Board under Alan Greenspan. During Greenspan's 1987-2005 tenure, the sum of public and private debt in the United States quadrupled from just over $10 trillion to $43 trillion. Finance became the industry that was not allowed to fail but was permitted to enlarge and metastasize its behavior almost at will. Regulation was minimal. Favoritism was omnipresent.

The result, alas, has been all over recent headlines. America's biggest ever housing bubble, with 57 varieties of exotic mortgages and home prices now plummeting at rates unseen since the 1930s. The United States turned Credit Card Nation, with a citzenry in thrall to plastic, 20% interest rates and late fees for just about everything. Huge banks like Citigroup feel no shame in paying billion-dollar fines for colluding with Enron's tax and accounting deceits. And since mid-2007, national and world credit markets have been panicked and paralyzed by hitherto obscure instruments -- the stand-outs are collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) -- that not even their designers and packagers can explain.



The bit for his upcoming book.

Transcending the 60's

Yes, the Baby Boomer Generation is an annoying self-indulgent group and seemingly blatant hypocrites, have you seen Dennis Hopper hooking for Wall Street lately?, but one thing the Boomers did do is put on the table the hard issues of the time-poverty, identity, imperialism-even though they were maybe the most affluent generation of world history. They could have sat back and counted their change but many didn’t. So why does Barack Obama want to get beyond the debates of the Boomers and "the 60's?" Because the Right has neatly, and effectively, defined the 60's as a time of loose morals, America hating and pervasive lawlessness-read, black people in the streets rioting and committing crimes. So Barack Obama, cleverly, wants to redefine the debate so that he can benefit politically from, as the academics say, a paradigm shift.

Barack Obama wants to become a transcendent politician. He speaks about it all the time and he embodies the idea personally. It's a nice idea but what does it mean in the context of 2008? Two issues, race and empire, are at the center of why his task will be a difficult one.

The recent flare up about Barack Obama’s preacher bundled the issues neatly but earlier we have seen it on Tim Russert’s weekly chat with the powerful on NBC and his questioning of Barack Obama at the Democratic debate with Hillary Clinton a couple months ago. At the debate Russert wanted a denunciation of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and on Meet the Press in 2006 he asked Obama:

I want to talk a little bit about the language people are using in the politics now of 2006, and I refer you to some comments that Harry Belafonte made yesterday. He said that Homeland Security had become the new Gestapo. What do you think of that?


What’s Russert up to here? He seems like a nice muckraking type who asks the hard questions? But he is actually using the terms of the debate framed by the Right over the last 30 years or so. The Right wants to paint anyone who might question US foreign policy or question the institutional responsibility for millions of black and poor in the country as an America hater. There are many examples but the strategy has been so effective that wounded in action Vietnam Veteran John Kerry was easily dismissed as Ho Chi Minh’s secret agent even though the guy ran against a draft dodger. For Russert the way that he can show that he is a fair journalist is by outflanking anyone to the left of Joe Liberman by questioning their patriotism through association. And in this case the fact that his target of attack happens to be black helps link the idea that many black people are potential fifth columnists or sleeper cell Jihadi’s, isn’t that Barack Obama a Muslim? I am not saying that Russert is an active participant of the vast Right Wing conspiracy but that he has internalized the Right’s terms of debate and this makes him seem balanced in a media world that has been labeled liberal and biased.

Transcending race and empire then will be difficult for Obama then because of the way the Right has dominated the debate. If he brings up the issues of empire and the war in Iraq then he will be painted with the soft on “national security” angle. If he brings up race then he will be accused of playing the race card and being an angry black man that is soft on crime. The flag pin, no hand over the heart, is he Muslim flaps all are ways that these issues have been exploited. Combine these examples of Rosenberg type sabotage with a preacher on YouTube ranting “god damn America” and you have a decline in the polls for the transcendent hope.

The irony of the entire debate is that Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton for that matter, are no threat to the empire or fundamentally changing the way race is mediated in United States society. Obama is not calling for closure of the hundreds of bases around the world that help maintain US power across the planet, he actually is calling for an increase in US combat troops. He is not calling for a serious change in the way the economy is organized that concentrates poverty and incarceration in the minority population. He does have a plan that concentrates “a few billion” at rural and urban areas but an increasingly globalized capitalism will not be simply tamed by a few billion dollars and a Charter School in Detroit.

Obama will have difficult time changing our interventionist policies around the world and race relations for two primary reasons 1) his liberal program does not fundamentally alter the ends of US power internationally which supports the free movement of capital and a world of inequality and 2) the Right will challenge his patriotism and loyalty because they will oppose anyone who does not embrace their program of maintenance of an international war machine to support US corporate power and a policy towards race that blame the victim.

Obama Takes the Race Bait

Barack Obama made a fine speech yesterday but to paraphrase Bill Clinton on racial matters, he made it because of a “mugging” and he shouldn’t have had to have made it. The entire incident is a text book case of how the political class operates today and how woefully unprincipled many of them are both on an institutional and individual level. The news cycle is very quick these days and which issue has legs usually depends on the lack of “real” news-a major speech by someone in power, a celebrity/political sex scandal, explosions or a fast moving automobile in traffic, you get the idea. Not to say there isn’t enough chatter about all issues, at any given moment you could probably find a discussion on Canadian tariff policy on cable, but the news cycle is swift and if you get caught up in one you can easily be Spitzed.

Barack Obama’s “problem” with his middle class place of worship, the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, began in earnest with bluster from Fox News’s Offensive Noseguard Sean Hannity. Hannity’s researchers found some inflammatory rhetoric from a few years ago and off went running the usual suspects, including moral watchdog Bill Kristol who played it cool by saying Barack’s problem was not that he hangs out with radical Black Nationalist’s, which was Hannity and Tucker Carlson’s line, but that Obama is too much of a politician and Americans want more than that, this from the guy who supported George Bush. After the media storm front crashed down upon us the liberal types started the hand wringing at the New York Times, National Public Radio, and other sober bastions of normalcy. There line in general was that there is no place for such rhetoric in the United States where calm and balanced debate is the norm. Bull.

Contrary to what the political class is saying discussion of race in the United States is a raucous affair. At the workplace, at the bar, on call in radio, at school, at Thanksgiving dinner all types of people are having wide open, vulgar, racially insensitive, amusing, ignorant and insightful conversations about how the “other” lives. Debate out here with the hoople is honest, often ill informed and visceral. In everyday discussion people get annoyed, irritated and angry. Debate for the most part is a contact sport where bruises and scratches occur and most people have fairly stable positions that have been hardened over the years of investment. This is not to say that minds are not changed in this dialectic but rough point counterpoint is more the norm than a meeting of the minds.

That’s why the brouhaha over Obama’s former preacher is a red herring. Unless a complete tara-ra-goon-de-ay most people know that Black Nationalism is a major theme in discussion of race today. It’s a major theme in Hip Hop, in the academe, in literature and in the Black Church. It’s usually combined with a bit of self help; pick yourself up by your bootstraps rhetoric, a historical analysis of racial injustice and an appeal for social justice. It also has a little whitey bashing. Big deal. We all know this and to act as if it doesn’t happen, and worse needs to be denounced, is dangerous. It is actually a call for censorship. We all do not aspire to speak with the $8 words of William F. Buckley or speak in the mild tones of Tom Brokaw. Real debate makes people uncomfortable; it challenges the premise of your argument and hopefully in the long hall alters our views. In the 1960’s Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael demanded Black Power and made Martin Luther King look the moderate even though for the most part he was regarded as a trouble maker by the establishment. Without the pressure of social movements, both Right and Left, the center holds and nothing changes. Social movements are not led by the NPR types in the world.

Barack Obama is no radical and we all know it. He chose a moderate Black Church because he wanted some connection with his history. He is of both the white and black world and he has heard the honest discussion on both sides. Depending on where you work and live most of us have actually heard the honest debate. That’s actually a good thing. Let’s keep up that debate not try to be contained to the hushed tones of NPR. Otherwise nothing will change.

Gridlock!

Capital likes to talk about about how they can solve problems but we know what they mean is that they can take advantage of a situation and make money. A case in point, the absolute disaster that is transportation in the United States. We certainly can get around fairly quickly except at rush hour when we actually need to get places quickly, except at Christmas time when time is most important. The cost of this system is mind boggling. Even capitalists know that it is slowing the accumulation of capital. But like our health care "system" certain interests that make huge profits can block the greater good.

Here's a decent article on the crisis in transport in the US.

We know how to change it but our political system makes it almost impossible.