Slavoj Zizek: Apr 12 2006- The Ignorance of Chicken, or, Who Believes What Today | for critical inquiry (University of Chicago) *

http://www.discoursenotebook.com/audio/SZ04-12-2006.mp3


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DEMOCRACY NOW! w/ Amy Goodman

Wednesday, July 23, 2008
http://media.switchpod.com/users/democracynow/ftp/dn2008-0723-1.mp3

HEADLINES

• Admin Seeking to Weaken Workplace Toxin Rules
• FEMA Demands Immunity from Trailer-Contamination Suit
• Ex-Deputy Contradicts EPA Chief’s Testimony on California Emissions Change
• Obama: US Should Recognize Palestinians’ “Legitimate Difficulties”
• 20 Israelis Injured in Construction Vehicle Attack
• US Considers Quashing Report Critical of Israel
• 4 US Soldiers Charged in Killing of Iraqi Prisoners
• Blackwater Claims Intent to Scale Back Private Military Work
• War Crimes Trial Continues at Gitmo
• House Panel to Take Up Bush Impeachment
• ACLU Challenges Alabama Voter Felony Law
• Bush on Economy: Wall Street “Got Drunk”


BODY OF THE SHOW

• Former Arlington National Cemetery Public Affairs Director Says She Was Fired for Refusing to Limit Press at Funerals
• Suicide or Murder? Three Years After the Death of Pfc. LaVena Johnson in Iraq, Her Parents Continue Their Call for a Congressional Investigation
• Performance Artist Laurie Anderson on War, Art and Her Latest Work, “Homeland”

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ALJAZEERAH ENGLISH
Riz Khan - Israel's Separation Wall - 10 July 08

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1iIFoMcr10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5CzHBv2ros
The Israeli separation wall making its way through the West Bank cuts to the heart of the Palestinian-Israeli issue: Will the final settlement between these two peoples be negotiated, or imposed unilaterally by Israel?

Slavoj Zizek:

Sep 11 2004: A Plea for Fundamentalism | for the slought foundation (thrift, mourning, meloncholly, other, etc)

http://www.discoursenotebook.com/audio/SZ09-11-2004_Slought.m4a

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Michael Hardt. About Love. European Graduate School 2007

http://www.egs.edu/ Michael Hardt, the author of Multitude and Empire talks about love, how can love function as a political concept, why love, the proper and improper ways love has functioned politically, love as activism, and evil and its relationship to love. Public open video philosophy lecture for the faculty and students of the European Graduate School, Media and Communication Studies Department Program, EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007. Michael Hardt. Michael Hardt, born 1960 is an American literary theorist and political philosopher based at Duke University. Perhaps his most famous work is Empire written with Antonio Negri. The sequel to Empire, called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, was released in August, 2004, and details the idea of the multitude (which Hardt and Negri initially elaborated in Empire) as the potential site of a global democratic movement.

Sometimes referred to as the "Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century", Empire proposes that the forces of current class oppression, namely - corporate globalization and commodification of services (or "production of affects") have the potential to fuel social change of unprecedented dimensions.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioopkoppabI&feature=PlayList&p=D3501DB6E18F2A74&index=0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P0OU6GlelE&feature=PlayList&p=D3501DB6E18F2A74&index=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTz8AZzLkM&feature=PlayList&p=D3501DB6E18F2A74&index=2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndnkjnMxxLc&feature=PlayList&p=D3501DB6E18F2A74&index=3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cjlxOGHZHw&feature=PlayList&p=D3501DB6E18F2A74&index=4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ZvsQ_hAt0&feature=PlayList&p=D3501DB6E18F2A74&index=5

Born in Washington DC, Hardt attended Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He studied engineering at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1983. In college during the 1970s energy crisis, he began to take an interest in alternative energy sources. Talking about his college politics, he said, "I thought that doing alternative energy engineering for third world countries would be a way of doing politics that would get out of all this campus political posing that I hated."

After college, he worked for various solar energy companies. Hardt also worked with NGOs in Central America, doing tasks like bringing donated computers from the U.S. and putting them together for the University of El Salvador. Yet, he says that this political activity did more for him than it did for the El Salvadoreans. In 1983 he moved to Seattle to study comparative literature. From there he went to Paris where he would meet Negri and write his dissertation under Negri's guidance. Michael Hardt speaks fluent French and Italian, and is Professor of Literature and Italian at Duke University. In 2006, he was a member of the group of 88 Duke professors who signed a statement supporting the accuser in the Duke rape case.


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Published on Thursday, July 17, 2008 by The Boston Globe

Memo to Obama, McCain: No One Wins in a War
by Howard Zinn

Barack Obama and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we “win” and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and “win” in Afghanistan.

For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one “wins” in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

Did we “win” by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people — mostly civilians — died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Did we “win” in Vietnam? We were forced to withdraw, but only after 2 million Vietnamese died, again mostly civilians, again leaving children burned or armless or legless, and 58,000 American soldiers dead.

Did we win in the first Gulf War? Not really. Yes, we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, with only a few hundred US casualties, but perhaps 100,000 Iraqis died. And the consequences were deadly for the United States: Saddam was still in power, which led the United States to enforce economic sanctions. That move led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, according to UN officials, and set the stage for another war.

In Afghanistan, the United States declared “victory” over the Taliban. Now the Taliban is back, and attacks are increasing. The recent US military death count in Afghanistan exceeds that in Iraq. What makes Obama think that sending more troops to Afghanistan will produce “victory”? And if it did, in an immediate military sense, how long would that last, and at what cost to human life on both sides?

The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of US involvement there. There should be sobering thoughts to those who say that attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.

Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a “war on terror.”

Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.

Yes, Al Qaeda — a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics — was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. “We had to do something,” you heard people say.

Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 — exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.

Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: “He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner.” The doctor attending him said: “The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?”

We should be asking the presidential candidates: Is our war in Afghanistan ending terrorism, or provoking it? And is not war itself terrorism?

Howard Zinn is author of “A People’s History of the United States.”

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company


--------------

John Lennon - God
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3ic6OOXns&hl=en

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NEW ALBUM FROM zach de la Rocha- a solo album w/ Mars Volta drummer : ONE DAY AS A LION

anyhone hear it yet?
www.myspace.com/onedayasalion

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vj_tR4p184

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Anguish and loss
it rolls off the tongue again
down the drain
in a toilet.
there it went
there it goes
no more sad goodbyes
we win this time
we win tomorrow
it will all end soon
then we'll rest
then we'll costume
is this the house I live in?


http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/07/2008710202454588484.html


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Dan Rather addresses the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, June 7, 2008. Presented by FreePress.net. For more speakers, press coverage, and info, visit: http://www.freepress.net/conference

oh Dan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97SzcumnYdc&hl=en

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The House I Live In
July 10, 2008
(by Greg Palast)



America is a nation of losers. It’s the best thing about us. We're the dregs, what the rest of the world barfed up and threw on our shores.

John Kennedy said we are "a nation of immigrants." That’s the sanitized phrase. We are, in fact, a nation of refugees, who, despite the bastards in white sheets and the know-nothings in Congress, have held open the Golden Door to a dark planet. We are not imperialists and that’s why Bush lies and Cheney lies and, yes, the Clintons lied.

Winston Churchill didn’t lie to the Brits about their empire: He said, These lands belong to the Crown, we own'm and we’ll squeeze the value from them. "Imperialism," as Karl Marx complained, was a good word in Britain, a word that got you elected in Europe until too recently.

Ignore the fey university hideouts of Europe. Go to Vietnam or to Brazil or to Morocco or to Tibet and you’ll find the same thing: America's music, America's freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of spirit and the heartfelt friendship of Americans for others have made the USA truly “the light unto the nations.” Americans are not liked worldwide, but loved-sometimes. I find that weird, but it’s true-and that drives Osama to bombs and madness.

We are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the cause that all men and women are created equal. It’s silly and precious to point out that these ideals have been mangled, abused, ignored and monstered by those with plans to make us an empire. We know that.

America is indeed exceptional. That's not a boast, that’s a job we have to do. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson burdened us with that exceptionalism in crafting the most important international law signed up until the Geneva Convention: The Alien Torts Act, in which the USA takes onto itself the right to bring civil penalties against any act of torture, political murder and piracy that occurs anywhere in the world. It is now being used in suits brought against Chevron Oil in Ecuador and against IBM for the death of slave laborers in Nazi Germany.

Damn right America is exceptional. It is America that defiantly walked out of the first “world trade organization,” known as the British Empire, announcing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are ENDOWED BY THE CREATOR with INALIENABLE rights, and AMONG THESE are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Now, think about that. These rights don’t come from Congress or Kings or Soviets, they come from The Creator, that is, we are born free-and “we” are Sri Lankans as much as Minnesotans. Our rights are “INALIENABLE”: no one, NO ONE, may take them away, not the Ayatollahs of Tehran or Generalissimo Negroponte at the Department of Homeland Security or the kill-o-crats in Baghdad pre- or post- Saddam.

Will the snarling closet imperialists try to turn America from its cause and soul? Damn right they will. That’s why two U.S. military lawyers resigned from their posts at the Guantánamo prison camp. They wouldn’t put up with Bush-niks tearing up their Constitution. ("We the people" own it, not "them the Republicans.") In Iran, these two guys would have been shot, in Britain arrested. In America, Bush fears them-that their story would come out-as it did. Only in America could that happen.

No question, the USA holds itself exempt from the legal standards of this world-which are execrable. Whose standard should we adopt? China’s torture standard? Britain’s Secrecy Act as a standard? Switzerland’s Nazi-money-protection standard?

Only in America would a Lyndon Johnson order federal troops to protect Black school kids' right to attend class. You don’t have to tell me that Johnson then ordered the slaughter of three million Vietnamese-I know, I went to jail to oppose it. But go to Vietnam today and ask what people they most admire? Mention Russians, they laugh; mention Chinese, they may hit you; mention Americans and they say (to my astonishment, I’ll admit), “We love Americans.”

They don’t love Bush. That’s because George Bush is not an American. Look, I didn’t think much of Bill Clinton, and he dropped into some of the worst quasi-imperial habits of the New World Trade Order. But Clinton was also more popular worldwide than the pope and pizza combined because he represented that American sense of giving- a-shit, empathy and sincere friendship which are hallmarks of America’s Manifest Destiny.

Yes, America does have a Manifest Destiny-to Let Freedom Ring-which the evil and greedy and pernicious would twist into a grab for land and resources and ethnic cleansing. And so the Manifest Destiny of the journalists in our shitty little offices in New York and London is to expose these mother[bad word removed]ers.

Ronald Reagan said, "America is the shining city on the hill." And he hated it, doing his best to turn it into a dark Calcutta of the helpless. And when that didn’t work, George II tried to drown us in the Mississippi.

Go back to Taos, New Mexico, Voting Precinct 13. What you’ll find there is Pueblo Native war veterans who raise the flag every day and will fight and die for it knowing full well that the fight must also be taken to the pueblo’s racially biased voting booths.

Howard Zinn, a shining historian on our hill, reminds us, "It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children."

Damn right, they do. That’s what Jefferson meant by "inalienable."

And they won’t get their rights to life and liberty from Osama's Caliphate of oil states or China’s money-crazed "Communism" nor half of Africa’s neo-colonial presidential Draculas or the puppet princes installed today in Iraq by George Bush.

Bush is so far away from his refugee loser roots that he just doesn’t get what it is to be American. So he steals the one thing that every American is handed off the boat: a chance. When they take away your Social Security and overtime and tell you sleeper cells are sleeping under your staircase, you don't take a chance, you lose your chance, and the land of opportunity becomes a landscape of fear and suspicion, an armed madhouse.

You want to say that George Bush is an evil sonovabitch? I’d go further: he’s UN-AMERICAN.

And that’s why he lost the election. TWICE.

**************
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans – Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild from which this is excerpted. Sign up for Palast's investigative reports at http://www.GregPalast.com

back and forth it sways
we rise and get trampled.
why all that yellow cake?
enrichment begins
emotions are silenced
it's coming, can you feel it?

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2008/07/20087813165610303.html
http://recreate68.com/

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NEWSNEWSNEWS (audio here & video at democracynow. org)
http://media.switchpod.com/users/democracynow/ftp/dn2008-0708-1.mp3
Democracy NOW! Tues, July 8, 2008

http://media.switchpod.com/users/democracynow/ftp/dn2008-0707-1.mp3
Democracy NOW! Mon, July 7, 2008

You can watch the program by going to the site through 'past shows' and selecting any specific day.

---------------------------------

Speaking of Gonzo Journalism and Hunter S Thompson and one of the best journalists today, Amy Goodman. There was a different documentary I saw and I can't remember the name of it, about commemorating the life of HST. Anyhow John Cusack was one of the people interviewed and he talked about meeting Hunter and how influential HST was in informing Cusack of how to look at politics. So it was really interesting to me to see Cusack puttin gout a film with such a title as War Inc. I was hesitant to watch it thinking- what does this guy have to say out the situation, he's just an actor that's all I know about him. But to my suprise and delight, the film was most enjoyable. Funny, accurate, you hear a few quotes from the more prominent reporters like Naomi Klein, Chomsky quoting elites, etc. It is a tragic farce indeed. And the best piece of art I think I have seen come out of Hollywood in while.

War Inc

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_cc00XMjY5NzYxMTY=.html
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_cc00XMjY5NzY4MTI=.html

John Cusack ... Brand Hauser
Joan Cusack... Marsha Dillon
Marisa Tomei... Natalie Hegalhuzen
Hilary Duff... Yonica Babyyeah
Ben Kingsley... Walken
Dan Aykroyd... The Vice President

While watching it i had a suspicion that it was inspired by Naomi Klein and low and behold it is loosely based on this essay

Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197


It was so spot on and just ridiculously hilarious. If you would like a way to view a cartoon of a piece of America and the world today, this is a good example.


thanks japan.


If you would like any clarifications of references to reality from the film just let me know. This movie is just littered with truth and analogous truth it's disgusting. I guess that is why it is so funny.


---

For an update about IRAN, please read the article bellow.


Preparing the Battlefield
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.

by Seymour M. Hersh July 7, 2008

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)

Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”

The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh/?currentPage=2

I'm trying to create a bank of accounts. How do things look?

---------------------------------------------

National Converence of Media Reform
http://www.freepress.net/conference

Audio/video of the events from 06/06-08/08

---------------------------------------------

Media Matters w/ Bob McChesney 06/22/08 guest is Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason.
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080622.mp3

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I just picked this book up tonight. We had to get out of the 101 heatwave in PDX- a are one. So we went to the world's biggest independent bookstore downtown and cooled off. I looked around at used book prices and my husband read a Hunter S Thompson book called 'The Curse of Lono'. Color pictures of Ralph Stedman's work. Really crazy. The book was $60. Out of our price range.

anyhow, looking at the roaster of essay writers for the book, i had to grab it. Chris Spannos, Michael Albert, Stephen Shalom, Cynthis Peters, Robin Hahnel, Tom Wetzel, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Richard Franke, Lydia Sargent and Brian Dominick- among others who I am not familiar, but had great essay titles!

Part 1- Defining Spheres of a Participatory Society
Part 2 - Revolutionizing Everyday Life
Part 3 - Assessing Parecon internationally
Part 4 - Looking Backward, Looking Forward: History's Lessons for the Future
Part 5 - Theory and Practice: Institutions and Movement Building
Part 6 - Moving Toward a Participatory Society

Incidentally I asked Brian and Michael on the Z Communication forum boards about why popular musicians haven't been organized with a slew of them coming off their contracts and being so disillusioned by the corporate model that engulfs all of us. I found the following essay in the book- so i kinda answered my own question- but this essay and my comments on the board are similar yet different. I'll have to get back to y'all when they respond.

I am adding the dedication for the book because it's just a great dedication. Probably the best one I've seen.




Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century
Edited by Chris Spannos



Dedication

This book is dedicated...

To the innocence, curiosity, and the wonder of early childhood, before society's defining institutions warp and corrupt.

To youth resistance and rebellion -- another world is possible!

To all adults struggling to change the world, living lives knowing everything is broken while new and better lives are waiting.

To older foils and those before them whose struggles offer lessons so we may stand on their shoulders to grab victory.

To human consciousness and potential waiting within, sometimes impatiently, for liberation.

To all revolutionaries everywhere and the lessons their efforts offer so we may win a new society and world.

....



Chapter 6

A Call to Artists: Support Parecon
by Jerry Fresia

A history of art over the last hundred years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of the decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, definition, and making of art products - and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the people who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust.

I would argue that our responsibility as artists is to help invent institutions that protect and expand the opportunity for autonomous creative work. Our responsibility, in light of our current situation is to help build an economy sympathetic to the notion that art, as access to a creative life, is the province of every human being.

With this in mind, let the following commentary serve as a call to artists to endorse the idea of a participatory economy and in particular the institutional design laid out in Michael Albert's Parecon: Life After Capitalism.

Unless we make building socially just institutions part of our understanding of what it means to be an artist, all the verbiage about "content" and all the pieces of art dedicated to peace, equality, and a better way of life will, in the end, serve only as evidence that we got it wrong, that we fundamentally misunderstood what it is we do. All that stuff will serve as evidence that when we needed to and when we were called upon to build better ways of being creative as a people, we thought that art was simply about things.


A commentary and Call to Action


For the past fifteen years I have made my living entirely as a visual artist. I have been able to do this only by exhibiting outside of the institutionalized academic-museum-gallery system. I exhibited outdoors in the parks of San Francisco so I could control the distribution of my work and enjoy direct and personal relationships with my audience. Additionally, for a ten-year period, I worked with public and private officials and artists in reinventing this mode of exhibition to the point where it was something quite unexpectedly professional, wonderful, enchanting, and lucrative - as opposed to the conventional "swap meet" set of exhibitions that one might expect to find outside established venues.

However, the model was impossible to sustain for a simple reason. Too few artists wanted to take time from their work to build an organization. Most artists had only one set of interests: making their art and promoting themselves within established institutions. In other words, the dominant modus operandi of the artist, as I know it, is the artist as individual and as entrepreneur. However, within the art industry today, entrepreneurialism cannot lead to ownership of any consequence. Decision making with regard to distribution (exhibition), what counts as important art, and what gets funded is not in our hands no matter how "good" any of our art might be. The decisions that structure our life chances are in the hands of an investor class, an oligarchy, that exercises substantial influence over boards of trustees, both academic and museum, non-profit foundations, public art commissions, and the galleries and auction houses that follow in their wake.

The individualist/entrepreneurial approach cannot lead but to utter dependency - a dependency on those who own galleries and control exhibition spaces, on critics, on those who control foundations or access to education, on those who direct competitions, on curators. This list is endless. And because we have become so thoroughly dependent on the institutions within the art industry, we are compelled to adopt as our own the very ideas, assumptions, and practices that the oligarchy uses within those industries that require our marginalization in the first place.

If we provide free inventories to galleries before they take 50 or 60 percent of any sale, we say that that is the nature of things. If the work we make following art school is not salable it is because the public is uneducated. If the cognoscenti define important work as conceptual - that is, a non visual visual art - we make an effort to understand, not to challenge. When we are told that only twelve of us in the city of nearly one million people (San Francisco) can make a living in the gallery system because we have chosen a difficult way of life, we believe it.

It gets worse. According to these cognoscenti, art is not a thing of value, it is the thing of value. We produce that incredibly valuable thing and we are tagged as a class of workers with the moniker "starving." And we accept it! Unlike other trained professionals, we have no expectation of having health insurance, a modieum of security, the ability to buy a home, have kids, send them to college, go out to dinner regularly, or even travel comfortably. Instead, our expectation is that we will have a second job or a partner to support us in order to do the work that transforms the filthy rich into better people.

My argument is that we toil in isolation and buy into the notion that the average person cannot really understand our noble sacrifice, or that it is beyond the intelligence and aesthetic sensibility of the public, because we have lost touch with the history of our profession, particularly as it relates to our life outside the studio. In order to become free artists we need to become free from the institutions that require our marginalization. We need to get back into the game of defining art ourselves, of teaching art independently of universities, of building movement with other members of the community and other artists, of controlling exhibitions, and enjoying direct and personal relationships with the public that artists of Michelangelo to the Abstract Expressionist enjoyed. In short, we need to build alternative institutions that permit us to have say over what we do, what we make, and how it is distributed.

Let's take a look, then, at parecon, a well-thought-out proposal for a participatory economy that would better serve the interests of artists as artists and as living, breathing members of communities. Briefly, I would like to touch upon the concepts of Worker Councils, Balanced Job Complexes, and Participatory Planning, and how each might impact our lives.


Worker Councils


Another word for participatory economics is democracy. Together with other artists and members of the community in which we live, we would decide what work would be produced and for what purpose. I can hear artists screaming bloody murder as I type: we don't want a "big brother" telling us what to do. Agreed. But we haven't been doing too well with the director either. In fact, it would be hypocritical to inveigh against a worker's council without first knowing something about how we are bossed around right now. Consider this, following World War II, a tiny handful of economic elites, by virtue of their right as property owners, together with their political and cultural allies, were able to direct and shape the lives of visual artists in the following ways:

* Important art and important careers - read a modicum of remuneration - had to be divorced from European influences.

* Art that suggested political commentary had to be displaced by art that suggested psychological angst - read abstraction.

* The teaching of art had to be removed from the studio and jurisdiction of the master artist and placed into the hands of corporate representatives or boards of trustees and into the university.

* The studio itself, once a locus of social and public activity, a place of exhibition and distribution, had to become the studio of the isolated, angst-probing artist. By the 1970's, the studio, as the workplace of the individual artist, was transformed further. It now resembled a factory, where the studio floor was the work site of artists' assistants who followed the direction of artists who in turned collaborated with the investor/collector.

* By the late 1960s painting and easel painting, as far as "important work" was concerned, were declared "dead," thus weakening the individual artist's access to and control over his or her means of production.

The question in this: What is it that we want? With worker councils, we, as participant decision makers, would enjoy far more power over our work and our lives than we have yet experienced.


Balanced Job Complexes


The principle central to this concept is a principle that most artists probably already accept: creative work is the province of every human being. As an artist interested in finding more people responsive to what I do, I find it a terribly exciting possibility that everyone might have the opportunity to engage in creative work themselves. Indeed, if my chances of making a living as a creative person are under assault, as in fact they are, it is in my interest to have involved as many people as is possible in creative work; work not only where workers alo make decisions but work where the creative process is central to the work process.

In helping to design balanced job complexes we would have much to contribute. Our work is not governed by the clock. We make time for reflection. An aesthetic dimension is always paramount. Mind and body are not separate. Could it be a rewarding experience to play a meaningful role helping to construct way of working rooted in the knowledge we possess? Might it be fulfilling to have this kind of ingoing discussion with the broader community? Might it broaden the interest in what we do? Would these types of personal contacts be a welcomed balance to the isolation of the studio?

Besides, artists are already deeply involved in what could be described as a balanced job complex. If we are painters, we are already photographers, web designers, mailing list managers, marketers, promoters, frame-makers, grant writers, and expert application makers. If we have jobs in addition to making art we are even more extended. In a participatory economy, much of the competitive work, such as making applications, might be reduced in favor of teaching and sharing our knowledge of design, color, writing, song, dance, theater, and various other aesthetic considerations with a population who have not had the opportunity, in their everyday lives, to explore the various ways they could creatively and rewardingly accomplish socially useful tasks.


Participatory Planning


Participatory Planning is the negotiation among workers' and consumers' councils that is intended to replace the market system of distribution, a system of distribution based upon price and one's ability to pay. It is important to recognize that while various market relations have existed practically forever, for most of human history social relations (kinship, communal, religious, and political) existed apart from the relationships of buying and selling. But we happen to live in a very unusual period, historically - one where virtually all social relations are embedded within the market, where decision about what we make, who gains access to it, how we live and use our time are determined by the impersonal imperatives of price and profit. But this is an historical anomaly, a convention that we can be changed.

Second, the irony for artists in this regard is that the market relations that we enter in order to gain access to the material means of life are skewed to the advantage of the very wealthy largely because planning mechanisms already have been inserted within the market. But these planning mechanisms, unlike the participatory model that Albert and Hahnel advocate, are exclusionary and elitist. If you have strong misgiving about challenging market forces of distribution, as an artist you ought to be quite upset already. The investors and owners of culture are quite adept as using an array of planning mechanisms - art commissions and auction houses that utilize market forces, for example - to control the goose that lays the golden egg.

The question becomes, If market-planning mechanisms are already in place, why do we permit them to be controlled by a few whose interests run counter to ours? And arguably against the interests of many? If we are the goose that lays the golden egg, how does it come about that our precious golden egg is taken from us? With our cooperation?

My suspicion is that we are too busy making art to take a good look at the institutional matrix that has us by the short hair. One example, along these lines, is our acceptance of one planning mechanism that was designed to mitigate against popular influence in the arts: the public benefit corporation, better known as the non-profit.

Non-profits are planning mechanisms. They are run by community elites, generally with artists representation, for the purpose of protecting culture within a market environment from popularizing influences. The sociologist Paul DiMaggio notes that non-profits, while claiming service to the entire community, actually function to mystify art and separate the community from the world of art and artists. Alice Goldfarb Marquis concurs and points to the "high-art" worlds of museums, operas, and symphonies where financial and social elites use the non-profit planning mechanisms for the same purpose. She notes that this capturing of culture is often accomplished by "pasting an altruistic, morally chase veneer over basically self-serving activities." Wealthy donors and trustees, she explains further, have long aligned themselves with "liberal, reformist intellectuals and critics who see themselves as guardians of high culture" and who has campaigned "against almost every artistic innovation of the past two centuries."

The non-profit as planning instrument by the investor class may be most visible in the creation of "art centers." In the creation of the Lincoln Center in New York City and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, for example, redevelopment interests, together with cultural elites and non-profits, use the rhetoric of public access around art to acquire monopoly control over the distribution of the art product. There "art centers" then become the site for glitzy chic-chic art events in order to anchor the array of upscale hotels, restaurants, and retailers that return competitive dividends to real estate investors. Many of us work with non-profits and do our best to make them function in a way that serves the community. but I ask, Is it not the case that we are always poor? That we are always beseeching the rich? That our non-profits are not dedicated to challenging the starving artist paradigm or amplifying public involvement as decision makers?

Artists today cannot have it both ways. We cannot run from parecon-type market alternatives in the name of artistic freedom and at the same time play our role as sidekicks within existing planning mechanisms that permit the wealthiest among us to direct and control all that we do.


Summary


I am not criticizing the intention of artists. We contribute much to rallies, marches, and numerous exhibitions, plays, music, and stories that inveigh against war and injustice. My concern is that this art spirit is not part of an institutional critique. We need a critique of our institutions so that we can develop a concrete strategy to build new ones. Artists opposed to war, to use on example, might be more effective by using their creative talents to build institutions that make the kind of war in Iraq impossible The good artist and the justice good artists seek cannot exist unless we first create institutions that require both.

Our history is replete with such transformations. While the Impression period is often referred to as the moment where visual art was first ridiculed and later accepted as prescient, let us recall that it was ridiculed not by the unsophisticated masses in need of education but by the educated and powerful whose control over culture had to be eliminated. Impressionism was a frontal assault to artists upon art institutions that, in the words of the rebellious artists, erected artificial barriers between themselves and the public.

Ditto jazz, rock n' roll, and Beethoven. Recall also that Michelangelo said of a statue that is was only by the "light of the public square" that it could be judged. The point is that we as artists are of the public and we are of the community. No better. No worse. And together it is necessary for us to regain control over our lives in order to become the artists we wish to become. Our best chance is to create the institutions necessary to give our voice best purchase. Democratic institutions. Participatory economics. Parecon.

Finally it is important, I believe, to explore further the artistic sensibilities that were widespread one hundred years ago, sensibilities that suggested revolutions required dancing, that suggested that, if what we create is not a better world, what is the point of our work? Creating better institutions, ones in which our voices are heard meaningfully, is both our responsibility and a pragmatic solution. It must also be our art. As Bertlot Brecht said:

Canalising a river
Rafting a fruit tree
Educating a person
Transforming a state
These are instances of fruitful criticism
And at the same time instances of art."

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!

http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080615.mp3

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Sunday, June 08, 2008

Our guest is Noam Chomsky, the linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The originator of the Theory of Generative Grammar, which revolutionized the study of linguistics, Chomsky is equally - if not more - well known for his work as a social activist and critic. His work with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, provides an analysis of news media coverage of international affairs, resulting in a five-filter model to explain the deficienices and shortcomings of the US news media.

Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974, Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state.”

http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080608.mp3

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(exerpt from Ch5: Remembering Tomorrow by Michael Albert)

The Incongruous Star: Noam Chomsky

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that

degree or certainty which the evidence warrants.

—Bertrand Russell


For all the famous people who passed through MIT during my stay, or whom I have known in any other capacity since, for all the great achievers, to me the most important has been Noam Chomsky. His example has illuminated many paths I have followed. I met Chomsky when taking his course "Intellectuals and Social Change." We became friends, he a mentor, me a student, and we have stayed close for decades.

Chomsky is often asked what makes him so productive. He flusters and says the only thing he can see in his makeup that seems different from most other people is that he can sit down at a project after having been away for a time and pick it back up instantly, getting immediately back in gear. Noam is right. Other writers typically waste time rereading what we have written and reintegrating ourselves when we return from time off. He is wrong, however, in believing that this is the main thing that differentiates him from the rest of us.

I have been Noam's publisher for nearly forty years and talked with him many hundreds of times. I have regularly had his input on my work and occasionally offered my input on his. I have seen him in all kinds of interactions and shared all kinds of moments with him, personal and political, social and private, on stage and off. It has been a highlight of my life to not only have Noam as a friend and guide, but also to learn from and enjoy so many of his engagements and undertakings. It hasn't even been annoying that whenever I go someplace to speak, from Florida to Ohio, New York to Alaska, Greece to Brazil, England to India, Poland to Australia, invariably considerable time goes to answering questions about Chomsky. How is Noam doing? What does Noam think about the invasion? Why did Noam say that stuff about Cambodia? How does Noam do it? And even, can you explain Noam's linguistics to me? So here are some answers.

Lydia Sargent and I went to Poland in 1980. The trip occurred because South End Press had published young Polish writer Slawomir Magala's book on the uprisings in that country and the emergence of the Polish Workers' Party led by Lech Walesa. Lydia and I went to Frankfurt for the International Book Fair, and continued on to meet Magala in Warsaw and to see events in Poland. I remember being in an apartment talking with Swavek—the author's nickname—and with a number of his friends as well.

At one point, as I was replying to questions about America, the subject of Chomsky's political writings came up. Later, after a break, there was more general discussion, and as there was a biologist and a linguist present, Chomsky's linguistic theories came up for some airing. As I was telling my hosts about Chomsky's views on linguistics, just as I had relayed information about his views about Poland and Russia shortly before, someone interrupted and said, "Wait a minute, how could you know both Chomskys personally? That's quite a coincidence."

I had heard right. It turned out these Poles, who were certainly among the most cosmopolitan people in Poland, all thought that there was one Chomsky who was political and who wrote the books about Vietnam, and another who was a linguist and wrote about grammar and human nature. On reflection, I realized it was a far more likely explanation that there were two special people with one name than that there was one person with two incredibly stellar but thoroughly unconnected professions. So what does make Chomsky special? First, what makes Chomsky so insightful and productive? Second, what makes Chomsky someone worth admiring and emulating?

Partly what makes Chomsky insightful and productive is inborn. Genetic endowment, obviously desirable, isn't something we should praise, and can't be emulated. I can be awed by attributes someone was born with, even if the capacities had to be nurtured to emerge, whether we are talking about Jackie Robinson's speed, Fyodor Dostoevsky's prose, Bob Dylan's song, Emmy Noether's mathematical creativity, or Barbra Streisand's voice. I can enjoy seeing these traits at work. I can be wowed by them. I can be fascinated and enlightened by them. But it doesn't make sense that the owner is worthy of special respect, admiration, or emulation based simply on being born with special abilities.

Noam's inborn abilities include an incredible memory that retains both broad strokes and also fine detail with computer-like recall. Memory declines with age, but even at seventy five Noam's remains formidable. In the 1960s, Noam would routinely give references from books he'd read referencing a page, or even a part of a page. But Noam's memory was by no means photographic, just profound, at least for things he found important. Even now, at speaking engagements, people will query all manner of topics, completely off the assigned agenda, and Noam will reply with singular information in a field other than his own that even experts in that subject can only marvel at.

Second, Noam can think rapidly and clearly. If he was in physics, say, or math, I would have a better feeling for whether this part of his capacity is just incredibly substantial, like von Neumann, or phenomenal, like Feynman. But there is another trait Noam has for which I suspect there are both inborn and also trained aspects that involve effort and discipline.

Noam can, and routinely does, extricate himself from habit and familiarity to consider possibilities that are strikingly different than most people contemplate. It isn't only that there is a wealth of data at hand, or that he can make connections and test logical possibilities that would try another person's capacity. Others who have these talents mostly just collect, enumerate, and detail what is known, or maybe discover some new facts, but don't repeatedly generate dramatically new insights. Noam asks the unexpected question. He raises the odd possibility. He sees the hidden connection.

Think of Einstein. What Einstein did that was phenomenal was to extract general physical truths from snippets of physical reality, generating previously untried insights. To think about what would happen if someone ran alongside a light ray, or to think through the dynamics of a falling elevator, two of Einstein's guiding thought experiments, didn't require tremendous calculating capacity or following a logical train of thought through endless byways. The genius Einstein exhibited was not in the number of steps in his deductions, or in their technical difficulty, but in undertaking the key steps at all and following them down paths that others would habitually avoid. The genius was in the innovation. It was in his leaps off the beaten path. Einstein often leaped, and his main catapult was what scientists call thought experiments. His mental gymnastics pared away reality's inessentials and highlighted its key aspects. To do this, Einstein envisioned unattainable contexts, rendered pure and pristine, ready for him to turn inside out.

I think one of the ways Noam innovates is by employing analogies far more often and far more effectively than other people do. Noam takes a familiar situation—and this is a trait that we can learn from and try to emulate—and finds another that is structurally like it, regarding which, however, his (and our) habits and biases operate less powerfully or not at all. He uses this technique both to try to communicate to reticent audiences views that affront their prejudices or expectations, and, I believe, to discover new views for himself as well. He does this magic by analyzing the less-controversial and less-familiar situation that he invents or sometimes remembers in analogy, and then demonstrating the possible meaning it holds for the situation that is under discussion and obstructed by preconceptions.

Physicists do something similar, which is what may have attuned me to the importance of this trait in Noam, when they abstract away countless details, assume all kinds of features that are unattainable, and view in their mind's eye what occurs in the imagined world to discern innermost dynamics without endless cluttering facts and personal prejudices interfering. Noam's analogy trick is quite similar, but is more suited to the realm of worldly affairs, though I would guess that regarding linguistics he probably uses both analogies and thought experiments, or a cross between the two.

The analogy technique Noam uses can be found all through his writings. Thus he switches from talking about the U.S. in Vietnam (fraught with preconception and prejudice) to the role of Russia in Eastern Europe (where an American sees more clearly). He switches from discussing the possibility of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (biased for someone from the U.S.) to the possibility of Iran invading Afghanistan (clearer for someone from the U.S.). He switches from assessing the possibility of the U.S. punishing Syria for housing terrorists who attack the U.S. (confused) to Britain punishing the U.S. for housing and financing IRA acts in Britain (clearer). Or he switches from talking about the media emphasizing 9/11 as terrorism to the rest of the world seeing the U.S. embargo of Iraq as chemical and biological terror waged on civilians, or from comparing U.S. and old Soviet media dynamics, or U.S. foreign policy and the behavior of Mafia dons, and so on.

Noam also works hard. Is he driven, compulsive, and even over the top when it comes to work? If you named twenty prominent athletes, actors, and musicians over the past thirty years, Noam would probably have heard of two or three, or maybe five at most, but he would be able to offer essentially zero information about any of them. Noam sees maybe two or three movies a year. He sees a few hours of TV a year. He listens to almost no radio.

Carol Chomsky and Noam have a summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. They have a motor boat and a small sailboat and they live on a lake in the summers and in a home in Lexington, Massachusetts, the rest of the year. Over the course of each summer they probably get out on the water in either boat three or four times. They visit the beach more often, walking down to the lake and sitting for a time, often with guests, and Lydia and I have been there many times. Mostly, though, Noam is ensconced in his study, writing, in the summer just like during the rest of the year. Hour upon hour he reads and writes. Combine this diligence with the quick start and with very little editing, since the writing winds up pretty much the way it first comes out, and you get a lot of output, and actually way more output than most people realize.

Noam often answers short letters from unknown folks with long letters back, to the tune of a small book's worth of correspondence each month. Noam revolutionizes an intellectual discipline—linguistics and what is called cognitive science—not once, but every few years. He teaches a seminar each Friday, or did so for decades, and people came from all over the planet just to attend. Why? Each week Noam presented new, original material. This alone is an unfathomable pace of production.

Meanwhile, another Noam churns out scathing denunciations of U.S. foreign policy, media machinations, and other political phenomena, speaks dozens of times a year, each time for hours, does many interviews each week, travels the globe giving talks, and wherever he goes he addresses that place's history and context with the same incredible precision and innovation he offers about the U.S.

Anyone's hard work is worthy of admiration but maybe in a desirable world not everyone should be so driven as Noam. Indeed, I suspect in a desirable world, while Noam would still have worked tirelessly on his science out of the joy and accomplishment of it, he would also have been out sailing on the water, weeding in the garden, and even laughing at movies considerably more often than he does in our current world. So his sacrifice for justice also merits admiration. But what is really most admirable about Noam, it seems to me, is he is scrupulously honest. He has the thing we call integrity in large supply. He respects but does not condescend to others. And he cares.

Honesty is easy to understand. Noam says what is on his mind, sometimes at a cost. Indeed, bad comes with good. Noam's death grip on the truth can interfere, at times, with other virtues, such as sensitivity to the impact words may have on others. Assessing someone in Noam's position, my tendency is to think truth-telling should take precedence over sensitivity, though others might disagree, and it certainly isn't one size fits all.

Integrity is harder to pin down. It means being true to one's values, when one has values that one can be true to. Noam does have values and is true to them. This too can reach levels that cause problems. Noam eschews people affecting the choices of other people by anything other than logic and evidence. This causes Noam to be tremendously wary of his notoriety, worrying that his words will be overweighted by his listeners. It makes Noam loathe giving advice, to the point that quite often he will withhold words that might usefully have been heard. Respecting others is tricky for Noam. He is constantly queried by people who are relatively ignorant of what they ask about. A person in a position like his gets used to these kinds of questions. Respecting the people involved means taking them seriously and answering honestly with patience and attention to communicating clearly. Noam does that. But he also quite reasonably wants such exchanges to move along and a problem arises because Noam is a quick study.

When someone starts to ask Noam something familiar, Noam tends to fill in the blanks, deducing the person's real intent, and interrupting to begin answering sometimes well before the person finishes their question. This can sidetrack Noam's hearing what is actually being said in the interests of saving time and even imposing accuracy. Experience counts and often Noam helps the questioner by making the question more precise and complete. Other times, however, Noam jumps too quickly and misrepresents the questioner, due to thinking he recognizes the questioner when in fact he doesn't. In other words, sometimes a person accosting Noam or disagreeing with him knows more than those who typically use essentially the same initial words. Noam may miss this difference, thereby seeming to be oblivious to the person's true intents and insights. It is not pleasant when it happens to you, and I have undergone it plenty of times, but it is not ill motivated, either.

To understand caring is hard. There are people who routinely evidence extreme sympathy and concern for others, but who, in my view, don't really give a damn. Something that looks and sounds like caring is present, to be sure, and many people are very impressed by its symptoms, but minutes or even seconds later the seeming concern is gone. It has no staying power and few implications beyond appearances. With Noam the caring is less evident, less demonstrative, and less of a show, but it lasts and it has implications.

Noam believes strongly in civility, though I think many people who have gotten into debates with him and had their views dismissed or even annihilated—sometimes with words like "stupid" and "trivial" punctuating the dissection—would find that hard to believe. But for Noam, calling an idea stupid or calling a claim trivial is not uncivil but truthful. In this, he is a scientist in the sense that scientists routinely debate and skewer one another in no uncertain terms. Finding the truth and escaping falsehoods, which is the scientist's reason for being, demands this behavior.

But Noam does not denigrate others to build himself up. Likewise, Noam does not evidence the kind of condescending and self-promoting or guilt-salving concern for others that is all too frequent in many circles, particularly, I hate to say it, in progressive (politically correct) circles. Noam's caring is real. There is no pomp or circumstance. He does not weep wildly or gush effusively. But Noam remembers people's needs. He fulfills requests. He notices pain and tries to do real things to alleviate it. He is quite civil. You could even call Noam very conservative in daily life characteristics. If there is a sign to stay off a lawn, Noam obeys. Noam routinely abides almost all rules unless higher values take precedence.

For Noam's seventieth birthday, as a present, I oversaw a kind of testimonial tribute. I put on the Internet a means by which people could write a message that he would see on his birthday. About two thousand people entered messages and the results went online. Most of these folks were people who Noam had never closely met but who had read his work, or heard him speak, and had been dramatically affected and wanted to register their thanks. Many other people who contributed did know Noam, but also wanted to say their piece to their friend, ally, teacher, coworker, or what have you.

The entry I was most moved by was written by Fred Branfman, who was himself a very effective advocate of human rights and supporter of the Indochinese people against U.S. violence.

When you visited me in Laos in 1970, I was at a real low point, anguished by the bombing and feeling almost totally isolated. Your passion, commitment and shared pain about the need to stop the bombing, and warm, personal support and caring, meant more to me than you will ever know. It also meant a lot to me for reasons I can't quite explain that of the dozens and dozens of people I took out to the camps to interview the refugees from the bombing you were the only one, besides myself, to cry. Your subsequent article for the New York Review of Books and all the other writing and speaking you did on Laos, was also the only body of work that got it absolutely right. It has given me a little more faith in the species ever since to know that it has produced a being of so much integrity, passion and intellect. I feel a lot of love for you on your birthday—and shake my head in amazement knowing that you'll never stop.

Noam and I have had plenty of arguments over the years. Noam can be a very ornery fellow, and he is world-class stubborn, even if not demonstrative or flailing about it. He expects to be right, since he most often is, and he doesn't like to lose an argument—ever.

This may be a bit like someone not liking to fall down when crossing the room, or to slip in the tub—in other words, not liking to do something that is highly unfamiliar and which has a negative aspect. Still, it is an unendearing trait that makes Noam the human he is. It can be and has been for numerous people immensely annoying, frustrating, and even hurtful. All in all, though, I have never known anyone smarter, with a better memory, with a greater facility for creatively escaping the bounds of acceptable thought, or, more admirably, a person with more honesty, integrity, respect, and real universal concern. Noam is a package deal. As with everyone, Noam travels through life warts and all. It is just that in Noam's journey there are few warts, and the "and all" is a big deal.

Oftentimes Noam and I will see what's out in the world a bit differently or feel responses ought to have slightly different aspects. Sometimes we have larger disagreements. Here are two such disputes, each important, I think.

The first was about what I call the crowding-out effect, borrowing the label from economists. Noam goes out and speaks a huge amount to very large audiences. Everyone wants Noam to come and talk. Very few people want any of the many others who, while perhaps not as excellent as Noam, would be much more than ample. The result is that Noam talks a huge volume but even with his great industry, many places, settling for no one other than Noam, have no speaker. Other undeniably worthy speakers, lacking fame, won't fill the bill because they won't attract sufficient audience. What to do?

Over the years, I urged Noam to tell those asking him to come speak that he would not do so unless there could be a second speaker on the bill with him whom he would select. Each time he would go out, in that scenario, so too would Steve Shalom go, or Holly Sklar, Cynthia Peters, or Clarence Lusane, and so on. In this way, others would be seen, word of mouth about the quality of their talks would spread, and in time these people would get more invitations. Then these additional people, becoming better known, could themselves do the same thing, bringing along still another generation. After a bit, many more people, steadily more diverse in background and experience, would be going around speaking and many more talks would be given and heard.

Noam never did this and we argued about it quite a few times. His resistance was partly ideological and partly personal. He didn't want to use his "bargaining power" to impose conditions—he would also deny that he could get a positive response by making such demands, which was of course false—and he also, I am sure, didn't want to share the stage with a co-speaker, since that would mean traveling just as far, taking as much time away from other work, but speaking and dealing with questions for a lot less time, not to mention having to listen to the other speaker. I speak publicly recently much more than earlier, though still only a fraction as often as Noam does, and I now understand better his side of this dispute. I now think what's needed is not largesse by prominent speakers placing demands on hosts, but for speakers' bureaus to impose the condition for us.

A second disagreement has been over matters of vision, economic mostly, but otherwise as well. This is a far more important debate, I think, and one where I have to say, years passing or not, I haven't given an inch. Noam feels that trying to describe a future society can overstep existing bounds of knowledge, crowd out creativity by establishing aims prematurely, and tend toward sectarianism. He feels broad values are what we need, plus practice, practice, and more practice that in turn yields day-to-day innovations that in turn lead to people experimenting with and implementing new ways of being from the bottom up. I feel this is all well and good, true on every count, but after a couple of hundred years of it we should have something more to show. How do the lessons of thinking hard, analyzing, and experimenting become part of the general popular movement if they are not presented, debated, refined, and finally advocated?

To me, it seems obvious that we need answers to the question "what do you want" that can provide hope, direction, and a positive tone able to inform both analysis and strategy. This entails more than a list of broad values and aspirations. It requires institutional pictures. Noam's concern is to ensure participation and avoid elites imposing a view on movements. My answer is that I agree with this priority but I feel we will get what Noam fears if we don't have movements full of participants who understand, advocate, and continually refine a full vision able to motivate and orient participation. The alternative to elitist vision isn't having no vision, but having the most accessible, widely shared, compelling, and substantial vision we can write up, debate, refine, and advocate.

Our differences aside, I once wrote a piece built around the experience of reading Chomsky and its impact on people and also around how Noam manages to constantly immerse himself in so much data about pain without becoming jaded himself. It isn't that his burrowing in the tombs of injustice doesn't take a toll—it does. There are times when Noam is brought down low by the news he wades through, and times when he is wired tight and becomes difficult. How Carol Chomsky gets through all that may be as amazing as some of Noam's accomplishments. At any rate, the essay I wrote with these personal dimensions and of course also the problem of changing the world in mind was called "Stop the Killing Train." For me, this was an infrequent attempt at being poetic and it later became the lead essay of a book going by the same name. Over a decade old, written in the lead-up to the first Gulf War, I think the essay is no less timely now than when it was written, and perhaps it is a good way to move on from Noam—so here is the key part.

Evolution has given humans the capacity to perceive, think, feel, imagine. At a time of war—as now in the Gulf—if we get aroused to action we begin to see the whole train as it persists day in and day out. When this happens, what do we do about it. Become depressed? Cynical? Anguished? Cry? Day dream of Armageddon? Day dream of justice? Hand out a leaflet?

Suppose a hypothetical god got tired of what we humans do to one another and decided that from January 1, 1991 onward all corpses unnaturally created any where in the "free world" would cease to decompose. Anyone dying for want of food or medicine, anyone hung or garroted to death, shot or beaten to death, raped or bombed to death, anyone dying unjustly and inhumanely would, as a corpse, persist without decomposing. And the permanent corpse would then automatically enter a glass-walled cattle car attached to an ethereal train traveling monotonously across the U.S., state by state, never stopping. One by one the corpses would be loaded onto the cattle cars and after every thousand corpses piled in, higgeldy piggeldy, a new car would hitch up and begin filling too. Mile after mile the killing train would roll along, each corpse viewed through its transparent walls, 200 new corpses a minute, one new car every five minutes, day and night, without pause.

By the end of 1991, on its first birthday, the killing train would measure over 2,000 miles long. Traveling at 20 miles an hour it would take about five days to pass any intersection. By the year 2000, assuming no dramatic change in institutions and behavior in the interim, the train would stretch from coast to coast about seven times. It would take about six weeks from the time its engine passed the Statue of Liberty to when its caboose would go by, God still wondering when pitiful, aspiring humanity would get the message.

Think how a young child sometimes points to a picture in a book or maga zine and asks for an explanation, "Tell me about a tree?" A car? A boat? A train? A big train? The killing train? Go ahead, answer that.

If the ecologists are right that this planet is a single super-organism, they are wrong that pollution, toxic waste, and other human-created garbage is the most deadly virus attacking it. The killing train is worse.

Think about the pain that radiates from the Vietnam War monument with its 50,000 names in Washington, D.C. Imagine the lost opportunity and lost love and the network of negative influences that radiate from the unnecessary deaths enumerated on that monument. Now think about the killing train stretching from coast to coast and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Consider its impact, not only on those on board, but on every person that any of those corpses ever loved or would have loved, fed or would have fed, taught or would have taught.

Who rides the killing train? Citizens of the "Third World," selling their organs for food, selling their babies to save their families, suffering disappearances and starvation. They live in Brazil, the Philippines, El Salvador, and New York. They are headed for the killing train. Every day. Millions.

Is this exaggerated? When 10 million children die yearly for lack of basic medical aid that the U.S. could provide at almost no cost in countries whose economies Exxon and the Bank of America have looted, what can you call it other than mass murder? Bloated diseased bodies are victims of murder just as surely as bullet-riddled bodies tossed into rivers by death squads. Denying medicine is no less criminal than supplying torture racks or stealing resources.

Once we begin to see it, how do we face the killing train? Part of me says these crimes are so grotesque, so inhumane, that the perpetrators deserve to die. A little tiny killing train for the killers and no more big killing train for everyone else. An eye for a million eyes. What other step makes more sense?

But that's not the way the world works. People give the orders, wield the axes, withhold the food, pay the pitiful salaries, but institutions create the pressures that mold these people. When an institutional cancer consumes the human patient, what kind of surgeon can cut it all away? Is the weight of repression so intense it can never be lifted?

At first, becoming attuned to our country's responsibility for the corpses the hypothetical God stacked behind transparent cattle-car walls makes handing out leaflets, or arguing for peace with a co-worker, or urging a relative to think twice about paying taxes, or going to a demonstration, or sitting in, or even doing civil disobedience seem insignificant. But the fact is, these are the acts that the hypothetical God, tired of our behavior, would be calling for if she were to actually parade the "free world's" corpses down our main streets in killing trains. These are the acts that can accumulate into a firestorm of informed protest that raises the cost of profiteering and domination so high that the institutions breeding such behavior start to buckle.


"You lose, you lose, you lose, and then you win." Every loss is part of the process that leads to transforming institutions so that there can be no people as vile as Hussein or Bush. No more "Good Germans" or "Good Americans," cremated Jews or decapitated peasants.

Finally, about knowing Noam, I might echo what Bob Dylan had to say about Dave Van Ronk: "No puppet strings on him, ever. He was big, sky high, and I looked up to him. He came from the land of giants."

Robert McChesney: Media and Politics in the United States Today - 88 min (Feb 2005)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6850016691895332498&q=robert+mcchesney&ei=dZ9aSLruMJTqqgOn7PmyCQ&hl=en

Robert McChesney explores the changing relationship between media and politics and the effects of the growing globalization of mass media. Series: Center for Film, Television and New Media at UC Santa Barbara [Public Affairs] [Humanities]

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Sunday, June 08, 2008
Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer on Media Matters w/ Bob McChesney

http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080608.mp3

This week the guest is Noam Chomsky, the linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The originator of the Theory of Generative Grammar, which revolutionized the study of linguistics, Chomsky is equally - if not more - well known for his work as a social activist and critic. His work with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, provides an analysis of news media coverage of international affairs, resulting in a five-filter model to explain the deficienices and shortcomings of the US news media.

Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974, Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state."

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The Ringing Of Revolution
By Michael Albert


Another excerpt in the serialization of Parts One and Two of the memoir 'Remembering Tomorrow' by Michael Albert, this time chapter 10 and 11, distributed in this 40th year since the New Left and May 68.


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PART 2
The Ringing Of Revolution


In the 1960s, we believed we were revolutionaries on the verge of a new society. There was evidence all around, from Berkeley to Boston, New York to Prague, and Washington, DC to Mexico City. It didn't happen that way. The chimes of freedom rang, but with steadily diminishing tone and timbre in subsequent years. Only the most attuned ears continued to hear revolution's message.

Great symphonies rise and fall in volume. When decibels are highest, symphonies are not always greatest. In fact, often, it is precisely when they are least audible that symphonies are laying their groundwork and gathering steam. Similarly, social projects sometimes hang on, reentrench, and get set to climax during calm passages. The low decibel times are often the hard part. They are often the critical part. Nonetheless, Part 2 of Remembering Tomorrow continues exploring high decibel times. Here is a poem, "Wheel of Law," from Ho Chi Minh that meant a lot to me in 1969 and still does.


The wheel of law turns without pause

After the rain, good weather

In the wink of an eye

The universe throws off its muddy clothes

For two thousand miles the landscape spreads out like a beautiful brocade

Light breezes, smiling flowers

High in the trees amongst the sparkling leaves all the men sing at once

Men and animals rise up reborn, what could be more natural

After sorrow comes happiness.



Chapter 10

Bean Town

The Old Mole Forever Surfacing

Revolution is not a onetime event.

—Audre Lorde

The "Old Mole" was Karl Marx's metaphor for revolution. It would burrow below ground, coming up to undermine capitalism's foundations. It would show up uninvited. It would sully the polite gardens of the ruling class. It would ring in a new world. The Old Mole in Boston, circa 1968, however, was an underground newspaper. So was the Berkeley Barb, The Great Speckled Bird from Atlanta, New York's East Village Other, and the Chicago Seed, for that matter, among many others.

Boston's Old Mole operated out of a storefront on Brookline Street running off Massachusetts Avenue, which, in turn, was Cambridge's main street, running from MIT through Central Square to Harvard University and beyond. Each week for a couple of years numerous folks helped produce the Old Mole. We didn't consciously work to create innovative divisions of labor, but Old Mole work was mostly volunteer and largely collective, and made at least some inroads against sexism, as well. Issues were sold or given away throughout Cambridge and Boston. Each time there was a crisis there would be a special issue of the Old Mole, so there was one for the Harvard strike, one for the November Action Coalition, and so on. Many people typed and laid out each issue. Many wrote content, and many more handed out issues or sold them.

There were two communities—one that worked on and distributed the Old Mole and one that "consumed it"—and the ties were close. The Old Mole served the local left and with the network of associated similar weekly papers around the country was a powerful part of our growing movement. These papers incorporated lots of people's labor, including people learning to work together in new ways. They generated a product that could be utilized for consciousness raising, morale boosting, agenda setting, and as an organizing tool providing information useful to undertaking actions including relevant timetables, addresses, etc.

The contemporary counterpart of the sixties underground press is partly local print papers, and partly the network that is called IndyMedia and Web sites more generally, including ZNet, the Web site I work on. Together, all this may well be larger than sixties alternative media. The internal clarity about values and social relations is often stronger now, too, due to lessons we have learned over the years.

The general political awareness of editorial policy may be greater now as well. But there is also unquestionably something missing. The Old Mole and other underground papers were a kind of cultural meeting ground. People identified with these projects and were excited about and personally involved with them. The office of an underground paper like the Old Mole was always alive and bustling. The announcements in the paper were grist for people's weekly agendas much like TV listings currently organize many people's evenings. The lifestyles and culture of people at the Old Mole and similar institutions weren't contrary to those of the public that the papers appealed to, but instead grew from that public. If you looked at the way Old Mole-ers dressed, ate, talked, played, celebrated, and thought, and then did the same for their immediate audience of readers, and then did the same for a much wider pool of people beyond that reading audience, differences would be minor. The sixties counterculture was much bigger than the Left. The counterculture recruited from mass society. The Left recruited from the counterculture. The Left, in that sense, swam in a congenial sea. Old Mole writers and readers had a very large community in which we looked, talked, and celebrated like everyone else, just having somewhat more radical politics. The problematic interface was between that substantial sea of folks—the whole counterculture, which was considerably bigger than the Left—and the rest of society.

Nowadays, the Left has no massive surrounding congenial counterculture. We are no longer swimming in a much larger sea that we communicate well with. We are today right smack dab in society. There is no buffer between us and them, and our engagements with them are uncongenial not least because the gap is so large between how we look, talk, celebrate, and think, and how everyone else looks, talks, celebrates, and thinks. In the heady days of the sixties, in other words, we leftists didn't have nearly as much need to deal with the mainstream. We could grow our movement without learning how to address people of wildly different style, manner, and commitment. We could venture into the nearby friendly and relatively massive counterculture to enlarge our size. Nowadays, to grow, the Left has to recruit among people very different not just in politics, but in tastes and preferences too.


CD Too

Imagine all the people sharing all the world.

—John Lennon

The People's Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ) was analogous, thirty years ago, to the coalition named United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) that is a key organizational locus of widespread U.S. dissent in 2006. There are people, indeed, who were involved then and are still involved now, for example, Leslie Cagan. She has been a key figure in holding UFPJ together and she was active, as well, in PCPJ. For that matter, Cagan, a friend for decades, has been in that position over and over, from coalition and project to coalition and project. PCPJ came together by way of an intersection of religious, secular, welfare, and campus-based organizing. It had New Left and Old Left components. The American Friends Service Committee was prominent. The National Welfare Rights Organization was prominent. I worked mostly in the Boston branch of PCPJ, as did Sid Peck, one of the organization's key conveners, and Dave Dellinger, one of its most prominent members. I attended national meetings as a youthful representative from our area.

PCPJ formed to oppose the war and also to try to broaden the then-surging antiwar opposition into fighting racism, poverty, sexism, and other foreign policy injustices, giving rise to the "J" in PCPJ. There was a second key coalition at the time also planning national events. It was a creation of the Socialist Workers Party, colloquially called the Trots. It had less local infrastructure and wasn't as multi-issue. This parallelism of old style and new style interestingly still exists thirty-five years later, with today's UFPJ paralleled by an outfit called ANSWER, which fronts for the Workers World Party. Whereas I think UFPJ is more politically sophisticated in diverse ways than PCPJ was, having progressed over the years, ANSWER is arguably worse than its counterpart from the past, having devolved politically.

At any rate, PCPJ meetings that I attended could be characterized as having three main dimensions. The first was for members to report the day-to-day achievements of local chapters and member organizations, including their staffs and affiliated organizers. Local venues were where the actual work got done: preparing materials, arranging for and sending out speakers to all manner of sites; welcoming and initiating new participants to ongoing activity in the local offices, at vigils and at places where materials were handed out, and so on; and holding smaller events that fed into larger regional or national ones. Second, we heard about finances, which were handled by committees I wasn't privy to. Financial reports would affect the budgets of national and local events and therefore what staffs and organizers could hope to spend. Third, we would decide matters such as dates of activities and their broad tactical definitions. PCPJ was a coalition of member organizations. Meetings were of representatives from those organizations.

I didn't change my actions much as a result of the birth and growth of PCPJ, other than attending meetings, offering opinions, voting, and so on. I was a kind of roving PCPJ speaker, mostly to student groups, but at times, also to labor gatherings or community groups, which is pretty much what I was doing before working with PCPJ, too. Lydia Sargent and I met through PCPJ, and became interested in each other while attending a national conference. She became a staff person for the organization, handling schedules, literature, timing, and pretty much everything that made PCPJ go. This was when Lydia was first becoming politically knowledgeable. Even before that had fully occurred, however, she was helping make the office more effective, often contributing more than those who'd been involved longer in political activism.

Perhaps the major achievement of the local Boston PCPJ chapter was the work involved in carrying out a key local action timed as a close follow-up to the May Day demonstrations in Washington, DC. May Day was wild in the streets. We went, we dispersed, and we tried to shut down the city. Because of the action's character, even though it was national, my guess would be that only three or four thousand people participated. We were young, highly mobile, and ready to rumble. The Boston follow-up was quite different.

Boston's event was to be a day of highly organized civil disobedience. The target was Boston's Federal Building. The proximate goal was to keep everyone out for the day. In that sense, it was like Seattle's later anticorporate globalization demonstration, though this was local and therefore not as large. About 5,000 Bostonians participated. We surrounded the Federal Building, packing ourselves in, sitting in the streets and on the sidewalks and paths right outside, to block all axis routes. We surrounded the building from well before nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. Periodically some intrepid government worker, or perhaps a police agent masquerading as a worker, would seek to enter the building. The person would have to wade through rows of demonstrators, packed like sardines, with aggressive aid from a phalanx of police. Sometimes there was pushing and shoving. Other times, people were clubbed aside.

The human barrier took different forms and was differently effective at different doors. In some places people blocking paths were older and less physical. At the more active main doors, younger and more militant elements blocked access. Students from different schools arrived early and had different rendezvous and gathering points, as did members of organizations. So, at each site, all around the Federal Building, there were well-prepared contingents who knew how to handle whatever might arise, and how to help others who were less prepared.

There were also people to educate and agitate, and to try to enlist new participants into ongoing involvement. We also brought medics and lawyers, well organized and carefully situated. All this was courtesy of the groundwork done by PCPJ staff and main volunteers. Of course, the real measure of the day was not how many times the government could talk a civil servant into being escorted through our ranks by club-wielding cops. It was, instead, what changes occurred in people's minds and in our organizational infrastructure by virtue of all the work leading to, involved in, and following upon, the events.

How many previously pro war people were shook up a bit? How many new people were, for the first time, willing to talk about issues with others? How many people became dissenters? How many people had their commitment increased (or decreased) and their understanding enhanced (or diminished)? What was the residual gain or loss in ties and organizational infrastructure that would facilitate organizing new talks, rallies, and confrontations leading in turn to a larger and more effective activism? When I went home from the demonstration, thinking through these questions was how I evaluated what had gone on. Many others went home tallying tactical trends, as in "how many people got in" or "did the war end." As a result, I saw events as victories that they saw as defeats. I maintained morale where they felt shattered.

Regarding major decisions in PCPJ, there were always a few prominent fault lines. First was the issue of militancy and tactics. Some favored more aggressive or violent options. Others favored avoiding anything aggressive or violent. Obeying or disobeying the law was another divide. Sometimes an advocate, on either side, felt allegiance to a tactic, per se. Such a person might say le's kick ass, because they liked kicking ass or at least they liked talking about kicking ass. Someone else might say, no, we can't obstruct or maybe we can't even march because obstructing or marching could lead to confrontations in which people might engage in violent acts—because they liked nonviolence, per se. Others of us weren't always for passive nonviolence, active nonviolence, aggressive confrontations, or all-out ass-kicking, but were, instead, intent on choosing tactics that led to desirable outcomes case-by-case.

Other issues that were also nearly always debated included geography, as in doing things locally or centrally. For some people this, too, was a case-by-case matter. Would a greater local or national emphasis yield better results? Was a mix best? For other people, one position or the other was deemed always right. Likewise, small is beautiful meant for some PCPJers that you didn't have to evaluate the actual situation, you just always knew you wanted local and smaller, not national and larger. Other PCPJers always felt the opposite. They always wanted more people centrally together, period. Neither side needed to think through each specific case. Their allegiances were for them a priori true. For me, tactical allegiances about locale, scale, or tone that considered themselves immune to context were incredibly frustrating.

I remember, for example, being in way too many excessively long meetings listening to people argue for big demonstrations in Washington, DC, on the one hand, or for never going to Washington, DC and always having only local demonstrations all over the country, on the other hand. The problem was that people often acted as if opting for one or the other choice was a matter of principle. They thought favoring one or the other option marked a moral divide. In fact, of course, the matter was contextual. We should have always asked what choice, given where we were at, would best propel us forward.

In these engagements, I came to realize that reasonable people could certainly disagree about all these matters, but that it was not reasonable to think tactics were anything other than a contextual matter. To me, then as now, whether we want to have sexism in a better world is a matter of principle. Whether we want popular control over social life is a matter of principle. Whether we want wage slavery is a matter of principle. The decision as to whether movements should embody these dreaded features, or even celebrate them, could by extension also be called principled. But choices of what to do in a particular context, for a particular demonstration, I considered contextual and tactical, not principled. Of course, my not being a pacifist, or much worse, law abiding, was a factor. If I felt that to ever lift my hand, or even my voice, against some target, was simply and irretrievably wrong, then, yes, some tactical decisions might have seemed to me principled. But that was never my situation.

To me, it became clear that whether a movement should be very passive or very militant, abide all laws or go out of its way to break some, seek only to construct or also to destroy, and, finally, whether it should wage violent assaults, even—or war—were all a matter of careful case-by-case judgment. There was a higher burden of proof for some behaviors than for others, certainly, but it was precisely because those approaches risked undermining lasting change.

In the sixties, sometimes I was dead set against aggressive marching, much less civil disobedience. Mostly, though, I favored such things, and even at times favored great militancy and disruption, including rioting. It depended on context. I thought ripping up a legal injunction might help us in one place and be disastrous in another. We had to weigh off implications. I thought moving from peaceful legal marches to civil disobedience might enrich our internal growth and spread our appeal, or maybe not, depending on the time and place. For me, the same held for sitting in, striking, occupying a building, trashing a building, or rioting. The principle was to enlarge, deepen, broaden, and intensify movement opposition to injustice and, in time, movement advocacy of positive goals. The tactic was to accomplish those ends rather than, hands waving and voices soaring, to do something that felt or looked good, but obstructed gains.

Another key fault line in the sixties was activists having various attitudes to the question of representation. There were meetings in which someone would talk or vote who responsibly represented a large organization's members. Then someone else would talk or vote representing no one. Obviously, these should not have been treated alike, yet often they were. This was unsolvable, I think, short of having a much more participatory structure than was typical in the sixties.

Regarding discussion and work, there were fault lines about political differences that existed beyond coalition agreements. How would we deal with the fact that one PCPJ member organization thought x, and another thought y, where x and y were contradictory? Should we just not allow either position in the coalition and not talk about it? Should we recognize and try to address the divide? This was a conundrum, over and over. Later, I came to feel that solving this problem of solidarity along with autonomy was central to making practical progress and that we had never even properly taken up the matter in the sixties.

Another issue was race and gender. Everyone claimed, at least once the women's movement and the Black Power movement had been around awhile, to understand the need for organizational congeniality to and empowerment of women and minorities. But accomplishing this aim wasn't straightforward.

Likewise, many times in PCPJ the face-off was between those who were young and those who were older, and between those aligned to old politics and those aligned to new politics. It seemed to me, then, that the young and the new were more often right. We brought a multi-issue tone into the movement, as well as militancy, dynamism, and civil disobedience. We rejected old-style Leninist organizational hierarchy and sectarianism, even sectarianism toward sectarians. We rejected timid movement legalisms and primness. We asserted self-management, popular participation, militancy, and daily-life innovation. By and large, this made the young better than the old as sources of movement policy. But, there were also serious exceptions.

We young folks often made huge errors and took our insights distressingly too far. We disparaged many people for ignorant reasons. We celebrated ourselves too much, often mistaking bravado for serious achievement. There were older folks we could have learned from, had we listened more closely and had they managed to convey their lessons more adroitly. Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden, for example, were very impressive young people, and were right about a great many things. But Dave Dellinger, old in age though young at heart, would have been a far better role model. The point is, I only later realized, the issue in these disputes isn't age. The issue isn't duration. Among those with a lot of age and duration there will be fools as well as wise and effective activists, just as there will be fools and wise and effective activists among the young. The trick is to find insight and wisdom, whatever package it comes in.

That said, there is no doubt that in the sixties the lifeblood of left enthusiasm, innovation, and membership was youth. At a big meeting, if someone over thirty entered the room, it was reason to look up and smile, maybe even applaud. Nowadays, in 2006, almost the reverse imbalance obtains. For example, at an April 2005 conference in NYC called the Left Forum, opening night had a big panel discussion and a large proportion of the weekend's attendees were there. I looked around and felt the average age might have been fifty, or perhaps older. This is a huge difference between forty years ago and now. It isn't that there are too many old people now—it is that there are too few young people.



White Rioting

Now at midnight all the agents

And the superhuman crew

Come out and round up everyone

That knows more than they do.

—Bob Dylan

One demonstration during the years of siege in Boston and Cambridge was aimed at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA). It was a three-pronged event. First there was to be a large antiwar rally at the Boston Common. This would be entirely peaceful, with no confrontation and no laws broken. It would have speakers, fanfare, and the usual rally protocol. Then there would be a march down Commonwealth Avenue through Boston, over the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge past MIT, and on toward Harvard. This would arrive at a target for a militant demonstration.

It was not pre-announced where we were going or what we were going to do there. The idea was to not let the authorities know in advance. There was what we called, in those days, a tactical leadership committee. The same thing had existed for NAC and other events that required secrecy. Usually our movement operated entirely openly, ratifying and carrying out details of broadly agreed plans in public. In this case, though, the tactical leadership was given leeway. And leeway it took. We picked a real target, Harvard's CFIA, but we discretely leaked through various channels that the target was, instead, Cambridge City Hall, about two-thirds of the way from MIT to where the CFIA sat on the outskirts of Harvard Square. The ploy worked. The Cambridge police were squeezed into City Hall waiting for our arrival. They expected to surprise us and quickly squelch our efforts.

I remember the large march crossing the Harvard Bridge. Few of us knew exactly where we were going. About half roughly knew what kind of mayhem was coming. The rest knew only vaguely that something was afoot. There were people rolling baby carriages. There were older folks who would be quite out of place. Some of us circulated in the jolly crowd telling people they should peel off just after Central Square. The message was received. We got about a block from City Hall and the remaining march, now just a few hundred strong, broke into a run right past City Hall and on to the CFIA, our real target.

When the running crowd got to the CFIA, entry was gained after Lydia went around back, found an open door, came to the front, and opened the doors for us all. One group then ran right into the building and trashed it from within, tossing stuff out. The other contingent ran around the building and started trashing it from without, tossing stuff in. It was amazing that there were no serious accidents due to those outside hitting those within or vice versa. There was bedlam and much damage quickly done, but the cops, though initially outwitted, were not resigned to utter failure. They trucked on up from City Hall even as we left the CFIA to avoid a fight with them.

A somewhat similar prior demonstration occurred in 1970, a day after a national Free Bobby Seale demo (he was the head of the Black Panthers and incarcerated at the time). First we held an antiwar rally at Boston Common. Then, as in the CFIA case, a march went to Cambridge, thinning along the way, leading into Harvard Square. At the Square there ensued one of the few organized, rather than spontaneous, sessions of mayhem and destruction that we had in those days.

Mostly the attacks were against large chain stores, luxury designer-type stores, and every bank and office that anyone could find. Bookstores and small restaurants and newsstands, and even small clothing or specialty stores, were spared. Everything else in range was a target for hundreds of stones and bricks. At night, street fighting continued, and considerable looting as well. But this was the sixties and the other side wasn't comatose. I remember not only running around dodging police, but also standing and watching people trying without the slightest success to break massive windows in banks and in one particularly hated upscale clothing store. The owners of these establishments were not fools. They saw the sixties like some Floridians see hurricanes, and they had prepared with seriously shatterproof windowpanes.

The festivities—and these types of events did have a festival atmosphere— went on late into the night. I had an apartment at the time above some stores in Harvard Square and my friends and I were in and out for hours. Was there any point to rioting? Did it matter? Was there a downside? I felt at the time that the rally had the virtues of displaying our numbers, incorporating new people, and developing our capacities. The same was true of the march. The same held, also, for the later CFIA event, though, of course, it had its problematic aspects. But what about the riot itself?

My criteria then, as now, for judging this weren't much different than my criteria for judging anything else. Did it help those involved to arrive at a higher level of comprehension and commitment? (I doubt it.) Did it convey an image to people not involved that prodded them to think about society in ways that increased their likelihood of moving left? (For some yes, for others no.) Were those involved made more likely to stay active due to their involvement? (For some probably yes, for others no.) Were those who viewed the events or heard about them given reason to turn away from the Left rather than toward it? (Again, some yes, some no.) You have to remember, this was an action on top of lots of other actions, leading in turn to more, with recurring opportunity to convey counterimages to the worst that the media presented.

For me, the issue, then as now, wasn't how many windows were broken, how many laws were violated, how many knees were bruised, or how many heads were busted. It was the impact our acts had on the internal and outreach attributes of the movement and on the audience it sought to organize. I don't know the answer. My guess is we could have done better.

Robert McChesney: Media and Politics in the United States Today - 88 min (Feb 2005)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6850016691895332498&q=robert+mcchesney&ei=dZ9aSLruMJTqqgOn7PmyCQ&hl=en

Robert McChesney explores the changing relationship between media and politics and the effects of the growing globalization of mass media. Series: Center for Film, Television and New Media at UC Santa Barbara [Public Affairs] [Humanities]

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Noam Chomsky on US Polyarachy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmJv_wf91W8&hl=en

and to read further...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

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If the Left Debated the Campaign Issues
On foregin policy

May, 01 2008 By Lydia Sargent

and Michael Albert

-- ELECTION DISSENSION --

"Election Dissension" is part of a Z Magazine series on all things electoral. We welcome your contributions to the discussion. The previous interview with Michael Albert, "Serving the Dominant Elites," was published in the April issue. The full discussion is available on DVD via Z Video Productions — Eds.

An interview with Michael Albert by Lydia Sargent

SARGENT: In the last session you established that presidential elections are mostly a PR campaign and that, sincere or not, the campaign has little to do with truth or with fundamental changes in existing institutions and a lot to do with getting elected, with the help of elite funding and false promises to voters. Let's turn to a few specific issues, starting with foreign policy. How would the left or a left candidate go about exposing U.S. foreign policy?

ALBERT: I don't think what the candidates say about foreign policy means much at all. They seek to appeal to funders, media, and various constituencies. They say what their pollsters tell them to say. At times they say what they believe while at other times they say what they don't believe. They sell themselves in the same way Proctor and Gamble sells toothpaste—by saying whatever needs to be said to find a way to get support.

To find out about candidates, the way to go about it is not by looking at what they say, but by looking at the history of American foreign policy. Since the logic of it changes barely at all, there's no reason to suspect it's going to change now—unless, of course, large constituencies force it to change.

As to what their foreign policy is it's relatively simple: U.S. foreign policy is elites in the United States— the Pentagon, the White House, the corporations—pursuing policies designed to enhance their own power, their own options, and their own wealth. So the policies are designed to extract wealth from other places in the world, whether by actual coercive behavior or, more often, just the power of threats.

A case in point is that the United States isn't in Iraq to take Iraqi oil and benefit from it directly, it's rather more in Iraq to be in control of Iraqi and Mideast oil and to be able to use that power, that threat, that position of dominance over a critical resource to coerce outcomes around the world that it wants. It's always been our policy to behave in that way.

So when candidates say that the U.S. should promote democracy and human rights around the world, what do they mean?

I have no idea what's in their heads, but it's a little bit like saying Iran should promote democracy and human rights around the world. It makes no sense. It's like saying domestically the Mafia should promote human rights and democracy in major urban areas of the United States.

The United States doesn't care what polls show the Iraqi people want; the United States doesn't care what polls show the population of any country in the world wants. When Turkey was going to oppose the war in Iraq because the Turkish population was so against war that the Turkish elites were afraid not to, American media described Turkey as a backward country, not a country that was exhibiting democratic behavior— which it was. And the same went for countries throughout Europe. The countries that opposed the war in Iraq, that were critical of it in response to overwhelming sentiments of their populations, the United States treated as somehow backward, peculiar, misbehaving. The countries that ignored their populations and supported the U.S. role in Iraq, the United States was happy about, describing them as enlightened. That's what American foreign policy is all about. The gap between reality and rhetoric is so huge that you can say things that are incredible. So to talk about the United States imposing democracy is like talking about the Mafia imposing non-violence or peace.

What kind of a foreign policy would you present and how should America behave toward the rest of the world?

I think a good leftist—my saying it doesn't mean much—but a good leftist who might be running for office would say something like, "As president, here are some of the things I would do: close American military bases around the world; reorient the funds that would be saved and spend some in parts of the world that have suffered due to policies of the United States and other wealthy first world countries; spend some of it inside the United States—raising the consciousness and a sense of solidarity with others—and improving the life of people in the United States."

I would simply remove from the docket of American behavior occupying, invading, or otherwise using violence to coerce other nations in any way whatsoever. I would make clear that there are several ways to deal with "terrorism" in the world. One is to pursue it, to actually be terrorists. That's what the United States does as its primary policy. That is, the United States engages in coercive violence around the world to pursue its own interests regardless of its effect on populations.

The second thing that the U.S. does is provoke terrorism. We have a foreign policy that is so callous toward, so dismissive of, and so denigrating to, people around the world that people naturally react hostilely. And then we have created an environment in which the only thing that matters is power. If the only thing that matters is power, and you're a third world country, you can't exercise power via a gigantic military apparatus like the United States, you have to do it via terrorism. It's the only avenue open.

I should clarify that terrorism is a real issue. It is possible for there to be a terrorist apparatus that exacts gigantic horror.

Besides the U.S., you mean?

Yes. The U.S. is first in nuclear weapons, first in violence, first in coercion. But you could imagine a situation in which some apparatus got possession of nuclear weapons and used them. So how do you prevent that? Well, one way would be Bush's way, by having a gigantic coercive cop on the beat who, ahead of any threat, goes in and exterminates what it takes to be the likely threat. The problem with that approach, aside from being immoral, is the idea that the U.S. should do it. Everybody in the U.S. would laugh if we said that the Iranians or North Koreans should be the cops of the world. Well, for the rest of the world the idea that the U.S. should be the cops of the world is like that. It's ridiculous.

Imagine that six people decide they're going on a rampage and engage in some horrible violent activity against Las Vegas. And surveillance discovers they are from Phoenix, Arizona. So what should we do? We want to prosecute these people, we think they're in Phoenix—let's bomb Phoenix. Let's launch a massive air assault against the entire state, for that matter, because we believe these six terrorists are in Phoenix. What would the result be? Instead of 6 people, there would be 6,000 people hostile toward the rest of the country.

What should we do with the six people in Phoenix? We might try to catch them without killing everyone else in the city. What if Japan or India decided to bomb the U.S. and cut off food and medicine because there's a bunch of terrorists in Washington?

The idea of solving the problem of coercive violence by the exercise of even greater coercive violence has never and probably will never work. These policies are barbaric and they do not deal with terrorism. On the other hand, they aren't meant to deal with terrorism. They're meant to perpetuate and propel the will of America in the world as the chief sovereign that decides what can and can't be done.

So what's the alternative? The alternative would be internationa