Corporate Media Spins Corporate Media News So Fast I Can't See It Straight

I was just checking through some headlines to see what might have happened in the world while I was nonchalantly switching back and forth between preparing a lecture on 17th century New England and preparing for tomorrow night's book group, and this fascinating headline caught my eye. According to the New York Times, the competition between XM and Sirius Satellite radio has been "costly."

I did a double-take. Competition costly? Didn't the NYT's top mergers & acquisitions reporter take intro to economics at some point? Hadn't he heard that competition makes prices go down, while monopoly makes prices go up?
(Apparently, I'm not the only one who did a double-take. When I first started writing this blog entry, the article was titled: "A Proposed Merger Would End Satellite Radio’s Costly Rivalry", but an hour later had been changed, taking the word "coslty" out. )

Then, when I read the article, I realized that the cost he was talking about wasn't for consumers, but for the businesses in question, who had been forced to compete with each other, which was costing THEM money. After all it's they and their investors who are reading the NYT, right? Perhaps when you consider it from this point of view, it made sense that the only views quoted at any length in the article were the owners and lawyers of the companies involved. Don't worry, the companies say, this won't reduce choice for listeners.

The companies said yesterday that their $13 billion merger — called Project Big Sky by MX — would give consumers a broader range of programming, while eliminating overlapping stations that focus on genres of music. At the same time, they said, they could cut duplicated costs in sales and marketing

Let's take this logic further. Think of how such mergers might eliminate so many advertising, sales and marketing costs for ANY companies in competition with each other. The Gap, Nike and other big clothing companies could save so much money if they didn't have to pay competitive prices to the celebrities who market their sneakers and pants...What if, instead of each company buying different ads, they could pool their resources and just pay for ONE big ad? Isn't a merger really sort of like when two friends from college move in together to split such expenses as the phone and tequila bills?
The only voice in disagreement with the merger in the article is mentioned, not quoted at length, and no one responds critically to the bizarre economic "arguments" cited above. For example, The National Association of Broadcasters is the only named one of a group of "critics" who are "lining up." Instead of discussing actual critiques of media consolidation, such as the results of Benton Foundation, which asks, "Does Bigger Media Equal Better Media" and responds in the negative, the paper suggests quotes a flippant remark about Howard Stern as the main reason for not granting a monopoly to Sirius.
It is notable that the main critic of the satellite network is a much bigger radio competitor. While the Sirius/XM merger is disturbing, the bigger concern when it comes to media consolidation is still the very people who are opposed to the merger: broadcasters like the Clear Channel. Satellite radio, even if these two companies were to merge, will still be relatively small in comparison. Thus, the spin has an extra "english," suggesting that these two companies are underdogs, who need to need to combine in order to successfully compete with the really big dog media monopoly broadcasters, who do make it hard for them to operate.
I was actually beginning to find this persuasive until I looked at this side-to-side comparison of the two radios and checked their huge lists of corporate partners along with thre preponderance of corporate media shows in their talk programming....not to mention the bio of Sirius CEO, the former #2 at Viacom, Mel Karmazin.
As ARomeo puts it on his world music central", while satellite radio has provided an alternative to big corporate broadcasters, it is not as independent as college or local radio stations because corproate "gatekeepers" are ultimately in charge of the programming on the satellite stations.
It's hard not to see this "cost-saving" merger as setting a very bad precedent for the future of American media.

* spelling problems explained here: Some of you have noticed that from time to time I miss typos in my blog. Here's why. Ever since the ethernet card gave out on my desktop computer, I've been writing everything on a rather small laptop. Sometimes I just don't see what's on the screen very well. sigh. Thanks for catching the slips and tipping me off.
Reb

A Victory

My buddy Stein over at The Pagan Science Monitor celebrates the "retirement" of Chief Illiniwek at the University of Illinois with a parallel universe in which Jewish mascots dance at halftime shows.

Interest Rates, Inflation and The Housing Bubble

I'm no economist, but I know a few things, and one of the things I know is that when the higher-ups in charge of interest rates are worried about inflation, it usually means a coming contraction (whether of credit or currency in the olden days) that will send the economy into a recession. As Dr. Dollar Dollars and Sense puts it, inflation is usually the worry of owners (and creditors) while inflationary cycles might actually empower workers.

With inflation rising (albeit slowly, and still relatively mild at around 4.2%), some business sectors will no doubt begin clamoring for tighter monetary policies that sacrifice job-creation and wage growth by slowing the economy growth. But these fears of inflation are probably misplaced. A moderate rate of inflation is conducive to the growth of real investment, and in the context of a decades-long squeeze on workers' wage share, there is room to expand employment without setting off a wage-price spiral. What workers need is not greater fiscal and monetary austerity, but rather a revival of a Keynesian program of "employment targeting" that would sustain full employment and empower workers to push for higher wages. It's not likely, however, that the owners of capital and their political allies would sit idly by were such a program to be enacted.

So, when I saw the news item that Bernanke at the Federal Reserve would hold interest rates or even increase them, I thought, hmm...the housing bubble is going to keep making that hisssssing sound.
Am I wrong? What does this all mean?
I welcome your comments.....

What Reason is there to be Hopeful?

As the coffee started to kick in, I finally left Chowhound for Counterpunch, where John V. Walsh has broken down the numbers for us on the senate. He says that the Senate could filibuster the spending bill on the issue of "surge" funding with one courageous senator (say, Ted Kennedy or Russ Feingold) and 41 supporeters.

Right now there are 18 sitting Senators who voted against the war in 2002. And there are 13 more who voted for the war and now say they regret it. That comes to 31 nominally antiwar Senators.(2) In addition there are 4 new Senators, Barak Obama among them, who claim to be against the war. That brings the count to 35 of the necessary 41, leaving only 6 more needed. And the Democrats now have 51 seats, with at least one or two Republican antiwar Senators to boot. So it would take only 41 out of 51 who claim to be against the war to actually end the war. If they are not lying about their anti-war position, let them stand up and be counted. For example, Hillary Clinton, who is not among those who regret their vote in 2002, were to be one of a handful who refused to vote for cloture, what would happen to her chances in 2008? Let her and others who claim to be against the war go on record for or against the filibuster.

But instead of that bold action, we have this back and forth about a non-binding resolution. I'm sure the Democrats argue that if they were to deny funding, they would not be re-elected because they'd be seen as "unpatriotic" and not supporting the troops. Some pollstell a different story. In the House, the Progressive Caucusis putting forward legislation to bring the troops home and defund the war, but their efforts over the past few years have been unsuccessful. Is there reason to hope that this year will be different?

On the one hand: Most polls say that Americans want the troops out. The daily reports about the US plans to attack Iran continue to frighten.
However, I remain depressed, disappointed, and am beginning to despair. When I checked the New York Times website, the most-blogged article concerned the fracas over two bloggers involved w/ John Edwards campaign, and the most searched term for today's newspaper was....Anna Nicole Smith.
Speaking of which, I guess it's time for me to read some history and go to the gym.

How Marxism Leninism Drives People Away from Socialism

One of the major events of this holiday season for the US left was Freedom Road Socialist Organization member, Stan Goff's public rejection of Marxism-Leninism.
For those who aren't familiar with the US revolutionary left, Freedom Road is a Maoist organization bringing together a number of smaller Maoist groups. My own experience of FRSO was that they combined a bizarre loyalty to Stalin and the Cultural Revolution, solidarity with groups such as the "Shining Path" of Peru, and attempts to build coalitions with liberals within the Democratic party. Thus, they emulated the most pragmatic elements of Stalinism in their own practice, while simultaneously maintaining unquestioning support for far-flung groups of Maoist third-world guerillas (and recently in posts here, for the Baathist elements of the Iraqi resistance) in seeming total disregard for their liberal political associates, not to mention notions of universal human rights and democracy. This made for sometimes shocking experiences for those people who had been members of "coalitions" organized or led by FRSO. Some members of the group I was once a member of, Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, proclaimed their own disillusioning experiences with the FRSO front group, The Progressive Student Network, as their primary reason for rejecting the Marxist left and embracing Anarchism.
By the end of the 1990s, FRSO had split into two groups, one adhering more to the social-democratic practical politics called "refoundation", and the other focusing more on traditional M-L principles of revolutionary cadre organization and retaining solidarity with patently undemocratic movements and regimes. Goff was on the side of the refoundationists. Thus, his break from the movement has led to two responses among its members, summed up by a poster to the Maoist website redflags as:

from the refoundationists: "what connection?" [between Goff's rejection of Marxism and refoundation] and (from the cadres): "told you so, you Refoundation suckers. Now let us praise Kim Jong Il who descended from heaven (okay well, he didn't, but let's just pretend)."

Before discussing responses, it makes sense to quote Goff himself.
In his blog post Doctrine, Goff, a long-time anti-war activist & Maoist, announces that he has

concluded that neither Marxist-Leninist nor “Trotskyist” nor Maoist, nor Guevarist, etc etc etc, organizations are suitable to the task [of building a successful revolutionary movement] no matter the quality of the individuals who populate them. The history of these organizations has been, for more than six decades minimum, a string of failures, punctuated by periodic successes only in mass work that was self-organizing outside Marxism to some extent anyway. I have come to believe this is a failure of the structure and of the over-reaching scope of these organizations.

Marx himself began his career preoccupied not with questions of economics, but of human happiness. What he observed was oppression of one by another, and the sense of personal fragmentation — of alienation — that permeated modern society; and he determined that these two things were related.

Since then, the accumulation of historical experience has provided us with both confirmations and rebuttals of the “lessons” of Marx and Engels. A series of thinkers and leaders after them, in the same tradition, elaborated on that connection between social power and personal alienation.

Unfortunately, the struggle to give these intellectual and practical breakthroughs organizational assertion has been one of hostile encircelment — literal and figurative — which gave rise to a bunker mentality.

This bunker mentality led to the transformation of Marx’s analyticial toolbox into a quasi-religious organizing doctrine, and one that was fought out almost like an epoch religious struggle in painful cycles of orthodoxy and reformation, then reformation itself morphing into orthodoxy.

Marxism-Leninism is a term coined by Stalin to establish an imaginary line of predestination (Stalin had his opposition shot as a demonstration of his own ardency on the issue.) from Marx-the-Godhead to himself as a way of mapping his encircled-and-militarized state leadership onto the collective consciousness of Eurasian mass still steeped in the episteme of hierarchical and patriarchal religion, complete with its struggle-to-salvation teleology.

It was this disciplinary regime that inherited and ossified in its own image the notion of a Leninist Party as the last word in political organization, and “democratic centralism” as its organizing principle. It remains to this day the axiomatic faith of Marxism-Leninism and all the other variants.

From the very beginning, however, this principle that worked during the contingencies of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions — both still majority peasant societies (look at Nepal and Haiti today) — was never an organic match to the social conditions nor the prevailing consciousness in the United States. For this reason, I believe, the mismatch between the idea-driven M-L organizations and the lived experience of US society at large has consistently been a history of leadership sects without a solid, organic popular base, especially since the World War II.

** He goes on to say many other things, including these biggies.
Goff argues that the problem is with Marxism itself. He argues three significant big points: 1) Marxism is hopelessly bound up in a man-nature dualism and imagines an "industrial utopia" which current environmentalists tell us won't work. 2) Because of the first problem, Marxism doesn't address patriarchy, which Goff now sees as more fundamental than capitalism as a cause of the problems in the world, and 3) The industrial working-class is not the engine of the revolution because it is dependent on the very industries that are destroying the earth AND this class is privileged to the point that they share more interests with the ruling class than with oppressed racial minorities and third world people. Look at history, he says, and wake up socialists, the working-class is not he engine of socialist revolution.

As I see it, many of the points Goff makes, though couched in anti-ML language, come directly from existing Maoism, and reflect the Maoist-Soviet split of the 1960s about the respective roles of the industrial working-class and the peasantry, about the relative importance of national indepedence struggles against imperialism vs. the industrial working class struggle w/the international bourgeoisie. Other elements of his argument, particularly the emphasis on issues of ecology and anti-authoritarian radical feminism, are more closely connected to the anarchist tradition.
I don't agree with everything Goff says, and I agree with the critics that Goff is on solid ground when criticizing Marxism-Leninism, but not when talking about Marxism in general.
Despite this, when I see people trotting out the usual defenses of Marx with quotations from the original texts, they just seem to verify Goff's criticisms of the hidebound and quasi-religious nature of Marxism. In the article linked above, Louis Proyect argues that Goff isn't a good reader of Marx, because he ignores Marx's writings on technology and the environment. True, and it's fair to say that if Goff is going to criticize Marx and Marxism as the root of the problem, he ought to know what Marx actually wrote.
On the other hand, I don't think that reading Marx is the answer to our current environmental crisis, and I think Goff is right to say that Marxism doesn't have all the answers on this issue. Contemporary environmentalists have much to tell us - even if what they say contradicts Marx. Call me an apostate, but I, perhaps with Goff, think current environmental science is more relevant than what the Old Man wrote in a book more than 100 years ago. I'm sympathetic to Goff's critique of the Marxist parties' rigid adherence to Marx, because like fundamentalists who insist that the world is only a few thousand years old, doctrinaire Marxists refuse to pay attention to actual world circumstances, but cling instead to a holy book! What makes Marx's writings so useful and still applicable in many cases was the fact that he was himself a man of science, not religion. Doctrinaire Marxism, which insists, despite evidence to the contrary, on the truth of its holy books, is, as an anarchist friend of mine once said, "a fine religion, as religions go."
It is for this reason that I agree with the overall points in Goff's essay, which address the failures of the Marxist left to face realities and be flexible. It's for the same reason that I remain attached to anarchism, despite that movement's flaws, while embracing many of the insights and observations of Marx. Anarchism has more potential than Marxism-Leninism to overcome its flaws and to respond to the context of the times without sacrificing real principles because it's not based on doctrinal loyalty to a set of texts. In order for the radical left to succeed, I think it has to embrace the anarchist tendency (without the entire host of works by problematic anarchist philosophers) to creativly draw from and synthesize different movements and to reject dogma as a general rule. In 'Love and Rage" we called this "revolutionary pluralism."
Where Goff goes astray, in my view, relates to the major flaws in anarchism as well as to some of the more pragmatic elements of Stalinist practice. The major flaw of anarchism is its historic resistance to the materialism at the center of Marx's overall philosophy: the idea that the relations of production shape the entire structure of society. I think this point has been confirmed pretty well by historical evidence. If you see the world this way, there is no culture that operates outside of or independently from the class conflicts that shape it. If you neglect the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or dismiss it, as Goff seems to, you wind up talking about "culture" in a "common sense" way, looking at the surface of the society, examining its appearance without knowing its roots.
Goff argues that "patriarchy" is a more fundamental problem in our society than capitalism. It is certainly true that patriarchy is older than capitalism, but I don't know that toppling it would end capitalism, stop war, or save the environment. There has yet to be a feminist analysis that is capable of seriously explaining or collectively responding to imperialism, war, or class inequality. The idea that we are currently at war in Iraq primarily because of "the rule of the father" remains unconvincing to me. Certainly, ideals of masculinity can support a war, and can aid it, but to say that male authority is the root of all war relies too much on naturalized categories of gender that I reject.
Another of Goff's major critiques of Marxism is that it is "alien" to the culture of the United States; this is where I think he borrows a bit from Stalinist pragmatism. On the question of indiginaety, Anarchism seems to have the advantage. Its roots in the varied reform movements of anti-slavery Quakerism, utopian socialism and women's rights struggles, gives it a firm foundation in American "soil." However, these movements, like the current feminist politics than Goff embraces, are also rooted in a society divided by class - and by the institution of slavery. Their advantage is that they address the role of slavery in the American economy in a more central way than Marxists of their time did, but some of the most energetic and radical ante-bellum reformers grew interested in socialism and labor activism in the post-Civil War years. John Swinton, Albert and Lucy Parsons and others chose Marx's theory because of its superior explanatory power on so many fronts.
There's another problem with the notion of Marxism as an "alien" philosophy in the US. The notion of a "native American culture" itself is based on a historical fallacy. The "culture" of America, like that of other countries, is a product of changing historical circumstances. The American working-class was and continues to be imported. The people who brought Marxism to the US were European workers such as Louis Lingg of Chicago via Germany. They chose Marxism because his theories fit their own experiences - in both America and in Germany. Marxism's continuing relevance for people all over the world, who have joined Marxist parties, suggests that Marx's analysis of capitalism, and the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will continue to exist internationally. Marxism has only incresed in relevance since the fall of the Soviet Union, as I see it.
Finally, Goff's intense pessimism about the revolutionary potential of the industrial working-class, where he enters an ideological battle that currently divides a good deal of the left, centers around the role of race and empire.
Goff at this point, quotes Joaquin Bustelo's rhetorical question:

I can’t imagine how it is possible to deny that there is not now nor has there been for a very long time a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States (a “class-for-itself” movement). Does anyone disagree? Does someone want to correct me on the half-century long decline in union membership, the decline in the number of strike-days, etc.? Does someone want to let me know about the thousands of Anglo workers who organized their workplaces to walk out last May Day in solidarity with Latino and immigrant protests?

Bustelo, who's a member of "Solidarity" a "non-sectarian" Trotskyist group, doesn't therefore wash his hands of the working class, but argues, much like new abolitionists, such as Noel Ignatiev and David Roediger, that whiteness must be destroyed before there can be a genuine working-class movement in the United States. FRSO, Goff's organization, has tended to be much more active and serious in dealing with race than the Trotskyists have on the whole, but even they, Goff implies, still fetishize the existing labor movement as if it were an expression of the "working-class."
On this point, I am in total agreement with Bustelo and Goff, and I think that the fetishization of the white/advanced European industrial working-class that you see in most Trotskyist formations is one of the biggest obstacles to working-class unity that exists today.

Who's Listening to the Sounds of the American Street? DC March Coverage Round Up

According to the folks at DC Indymedia, hundreds of thousands of people showed up in Washington yesterday to protest the war and called for the impeachment of President Bush.
After reading many different stories, I'd say that the protest again reflected a wide cross-section of Americans, but there were a few differences between this march and previous ones.

Most big DC demos don't include actions by any Black Bloc, but this one did:
Indymedia activists are the only ones to say much about the action at the capital, a rush of black-clad anarchists chanting "our congress," that sounds as if it was quite dramatic. These photos show what it looked like, and the comments feature the usual discussion of whether mass demonstrations put on by UFPJ or ANSWER do any good. One of the more interesting threads at the DC Indymedia page, (NY indymedia does not feature the anti-war protest in its coverage today) is about the overall decline of indymedia as evidenced by the lack of coverage of the demonstration. I for one, am disappointed in NY Indymedia, and not only because they removed me from their blogwire last year.

While it is often the case that the mainstream media will over-report anything resembling disorder at a demonstration, the capital action - damn unusual for a DC protest, especially because it did not result in arrests - got almost no coverage from the mainstream media. The lack of coverage suggests one of two possibilities: 1) the action was a huge success and reporting on it would have made the anti-war movement look stronger than the current coverage does 2) The reporters at major newspapers are more sympathetic to the anti-war movement than they used to be and chose to focus on the majority of people at the demonstration rather than the small "black bloc" contingent of 300.

Which do you think it is, readers, or is there another explanation?

The first news article I saw mentioning it came from the AP, which referred to it as an attempt to "rush the capital." and said:

The rally on the Mall unfolded peacefully, although about 300 protesters tried to rush the Capitol, running up the grassy lawn to the front of the building. Police on motorcycles tried to stop them, scuffling with some and barricading entrances. Protesters chanted "Our Congress" as their numbers grew and police faced off against them. Demonstrators later joined the masses marching from the Mall, around Capitol Hill and back.

* *
Another major element of this protest that deserves emphasis was the organized contingent of active duty military at the demonstration, described at Commondreams before the fact.
The AP story was also the main one to feature significant presence of active-duty members of the military in the anti-war march:

A small contingent of active-duty service members attended the rally, wearing civilian clothes because military rules forbid them from protesting in uniform.
Air Force Staff Sgt. Tassi McKee, 26, an intelligence specialist at Fort Meade, Md., said she joined the Air Force because of patriotism, travel and money for college. "After we went to Iraq, I began to see through the lies," she said.
In the crowd, signs recalled the November elections that defeated the Republican congressional majority in part because of
President Bush's Iraq policy. "I voted for peace," one said.
"I've just gotten tired of seeing widows, tired of seeing dead Marines," said Vincent DiMezza, 32, wearing a dress Marine uniform from his years as a sergeant. A Marine aircraft mechanic from 1997 to 2002, he did not serve in Iraq or
Afghanistan.

This growing group of "anti-war" GIs is probably the most significant element of the anti-war movement, begun by Iraq Veterans Against the War.

For more general march news....

Predictably, the New York Times reported - on page 21, though its front page blurb refers readers to p. 22, that "Tens of thousands of protesters" out to oppose the "troop surge" but also gives the UFPJ's estimate of 400,000 protesters toward's the article's end.
The Chicago Sun Times, gave the same number.
The Washington Post gave no numbers, but focused on the Hollywood presence.
The bloggers at The DailyKos had a contingent at the big march, and have a number of discussions going on about it - here and here and here and here, including personal photo diaries and with long comment threads addressing such points as "why Jane Fonda" and the ever-popular crowd counting problem.
Daniel Manattt has a "video blog" of the march at the Huffington Post.
The Middle East Online reported 1/2 a million Americans protested against Bush's escalation of the Iraq war.

In my search for YouTube march videos, I came across this video promotion of the march, which is quite moving. Its focus is American casualties.
I don't know what casualty counts were mentioned most at the protest, but given the number of protesters, if they were as high as UFPJ says (between 400,000 and 600,000) they would come into range of the current, and most reliable, estimates of Iraqi casualties. (you can read a shorter article about the latest Lancet study here)If you doubt this number, I strongly suggest that you listen to the report "What's in a Number?" from the radio show "This American Life" about the Lancet study's methodology, and the credentials of the leader of the research team, whose numbers on other humanitarian crises are accepted as valid. The only reason for the dispute about the Iraq casualty numbers is that they just sound too high. hmmmm.

and that's all for now. If you were at the march, please post comments about your experiences and links to any coverage I missed.

Politics and Medicine

This blog entry starts with the story of my recent experience of what I'm guessing was probably what is often called "defensive medicine" in practice, and I leave it open for your comments.
To begin with, you should know something about me. Over the last few years, I've become a bit of a hypochondriac, imagining the worst when I get any little twinge. A headache? It must be a brain tumor! A shoulder pain? Probably my heart gasping for blood!
I know it's silly, but when I started having "skipped heart beats" while exercising a few years ago, I became obsessed with the idea that I was going to die mid-work out from a mystery defect that no one had caught. Although I exercise regularly, this functioned to make me pretty tense. I finally wound up going to a cardiologist to check it out, and it turned out that the skipped beats were premature atrial contractions,"" which are common and harmless. So, I went about my business and stopped worrying about them. The doctor had suggested back then that I follow up, but I never did.
However, this year, when the "PACs" started coming back, and because I was also having a lot of pain in my left arm, I decided to see the cardiologist again. The guy I had seen before wasn't there anymore and there was a new, youunger doctor. He told me he thought the left arm pain probably originated in a back problem, but "just to be sure" signed me up for a large number of tests, including a "plain stress test" - the kind where a person runs on a treadmill and the heart is monitored for changes in rhythm under stress.
My experience of the test was fine, although before the test began, the technician made a comment about athletes "keeling over" after races that freaked me out and probably led me to start hyperventilating before I got on the treadmill. Despite this, I walked and then ran for something over ten minutes, never felt short of breath or had any chest pain or "PACs" and I could talk during the whole thing with no problem. I was surprised when the doctor told me after the test that the result had been "positive" for ischemia. He was, he said "90% sure" that it was a false positive, because I didn't have any symptoms and spent enough time on the treadmill. However, he ordered a nuclear stress-test to follow up and "clarify" the result. Thankfully, I managed to schedule this test pretty soon after the initial plain test so that I didn't spend much time being a nervous wreck. I continued to work out in the interim, and because this doctor had also prescribed a "loop monitor" as part of my many tests, I was able to record my heart and phone in reports periodically, which I did during all my work-outs. So, yesterday, I spent almost the entire day in the hospital cardiac clinic doing my nuclear test, which was, as the doctor expected, normal. Now, I've taken off the loop monitor because the sticky tapes were ripping up my skin.
So, I guess the doctor HAD to do the nuclear test because I had the positive stress test, but my question to you is: why did he order the plain stress test in the first place? It seemed unnnecessary given my general profile, did it just add to my general anxiety level for no good reason? A 30-day loop monitor also seems excessive, even if it's pretty cool technology.

* * *
My experience seems to validate on the superficial level, the right wing's characterization of the entire American medical apparatus suffering from doctors' fear of malpractice suits, recently brought up again in Bush's State of the Union address. The administration's medical plan includes this point:

The glut of frivolous lawsuits are driving good doctors out of practice and driving up costs by forcing many doctors to practice defensive medicine – ordering unnecessary tests and writing unnecessary prescriptions. The total cost of defensive medicine to our society is an estimated $60 billion to $100 billion per year, including $28 billion billed directly to taxpayers through increased costs of Medicare, Medicaid, VA, and other Federal health programs. Junk lawsuits are a national issue requiring a national response. The House has passed a good medical liability reform bill, and it is time for the Senate to act.

The Bushies would argue that the nuclear test my doctor ordered was expensive, as were the others and that he could have easily ruled out heart disease based on my exercise history (I do about 1 hour of aerobic exercise 3-4 times per week), without sending me for all those tests, which just led my insurance company to spend money and caused needless worry on my part.
Or...maybe he just being exceptionally careful and thorough
There are a surprising number of failed diagnoses, and silent heart-disease is a major killer. According to Kate Steadman at "healthypolicy.typepad.com", 100,000 patients die every year due to medical errors. According to "misdiagnosis.com" heart-attacks are the number one misdiagnosed or undiagnosed major medical problem. A friend pointed out to me while all this was going on, that there was an article in The New Yorker that showed the danger of failing to do tests such as the plain stress test because of the patient's appearance and history.
These realities favor my doctor's choice to do the first, low-cost and non-invasive stress test. If you weigh the outcomes of the risks, the answer seems simple. The worst-case scenario risk of not doing the stress test for a patient with a regular heavy exercise regimen and left arm pain is not catching a potentially fatal condition. The worst-case scenario risk of doing the stress test on a healthy patient is getting a false positive result whose main consequence is patient anxiety until further testing can be done, and additional costs from the other unneccessary tests. What role do the costs of such tests play in raising the cost of American medicine? Even the free-marketeers at Forbes Magazine suggests that people should get "stress tests" which are not expensive. Most studies of this process have concluded that the cost of "unnecessary testing" accounts for less of the increasing health-care costs than do the marketing efforts of the pharmaceutical industry. Some even suggest that improved management of tests would avoid much more costly medical errors.
My other question about these tests was whether this is unique in American medicine, and makes an argument for our system of health care. The common right-wing talking point is that people in countries with "socialized medicine" receive substandard health care. This article from the Washington Post suggests similar problems by comparing US health care with that in other countries. On the testing issue, the article reports that more Americans don't get recommended tests because of not being able to afford them. The complicated bureaucracy in the US leads to doctors ordering duplicating tests and/or not having test results available. There were substantially more medical errors in the US than in other countries, which would suggest that the problem is not unneccesary tests, but some kind of profound inefficiency in the system as a whole.
I don't know the answer to the actual availability of every test in other countries, but I'm currently listening to an interview on "This is Hell" with Marilyn Clement of Health Care Now, who mentioned that some patients in Canada might have to wait two-three weeks for an MRI. That doesn't seem like that much time. I've had enough trouble getting in to see doctors and make appointments in the US that two-three weeks of waiting for a non-urgent test doesn't seem like that long to me.
* * * and that's all for now.

Bush Speech Live Blogging

His health insurance plan?
Will people who aren't insured benefit from this plan?

Lyrics of the Day: Une Annee Sans Lumiere

Hey! The streetlights all burnt out.
Une annee sans lumieres. (a year without lights)
Je monte un cheval, (I mount a horse)
qui porte des oeilleres. (who wears blinders)

Hey, my eyes are shooting sparks,
la nuit, mes yeux t’eclairent. (at night, you light my eyes)
Ne dis pas a ton pere (don't tell your father)
qu’il porte des oeillieres. (who wears blinders)

Hey, your old man should know,
if you see a shadow,
there’s something there.

So hey! my eyes are shooting sparks,
la nuit mes yeux t’eclairent, (at night you light my eyes)
ne dis pas a ton pere (don't tell your father)
qu’il porte des oeillieres. (who wears blinders)

Hey, your old man should know,
if you see a shadow,
there’s something there

The story behind Arcade Fire's brilliant 2004 album "Funeral" which was my favorite album this year is that the band's members all lost family members either before, during or after the recording. I like to think of this song as an expression of the otherworldly feelings associated with grief. I had the idea that with loss, all the lights in the world turn out...and then the light of your lost one's memory is brighter than everything else, "lighting your eyes" for you. In this song, I made all kinds of associations to my friend, Josie, about whom I wrote before here. Her eyes were like "shooting sparks," the song was partly in French, and she spoke French, and another friend of hers sang a song in French at her memorial service. But I think the ambiguity of the lyrics would allow people to associate all kinds of things to it, which is probably why so many different people found profundity in this record.
That said, what initially drew me to "Funeral" was not the lyrics, which I barely listened to at first, but the sound of the music, and the singer who reminded me of David Bowie, so if you're not struck by the lyrics, go listen to the song because the sound is pretty unusual.

And Now, for Serious Business

Perhaps the last post I wrote (I've spent a ton of time thinking about music over the holidays) is a modern day version of "fiddling while Rome burns" but I am not the fucking leader of this country, so I'm going to excuse myself from that particular responsibility of stopping the dance and changing the tune.
Besides, it's a much bigger challenge to come up with the answer to the "what was your favorite music of 2006?" question than it is to come up with the answer to the "What should we do about the war" question. There were a lot of good albums to choose from. There is only one main idea about what to do about the war, and it's simple, and I've said it before.



Bring the troops home NOW.

As my friends of pre-adolescence used to say "Big DUH."

I will be in DC for the January march. I'll be teaching the usual William Appleman Williams version of American history in the Spring, so I'm doing my little bit.

Besides that, I think all the points that could possibly be made have been made already.
Here are the strategies that I've heard people suggest:

1. Get Out in the streets
2. Pressure the Democrats
3. Elect Democrats
4. Run third party candidates
5. Support a GI resistance movement
6. Move with the international community
7. Do something about the media
8. Target the economic infrastructure
9. Impeach the president

Here are the various theories of the causes of it all, which would inform the strategies for the above basic focal points:

1. It's all about oil
2. It's all about global markets, petrodollars, and China
3. It's all about the Israel Lobby
4. It's all about PNAC (perhaps see above)
5. It's all about the Military Industrial Complex
6. It's all about distracting people from domestic crises.
7. It's all about privatization.

Am I missing anything?

Am I being too flip? At this point, I can barely blog about the war because I don't feel there's anything new to say. I will say I am surprised by the Bush "troop surge" idea. Where are these troops going to come from?

My Favorite Albums of 2006

It took me awhile to get to the 2006 records this year. I spent a lot of time listening to a lot of earlier music, including what might have been an excessive amount of Bob Marley. I also was late to pick up a lot of 2005's records: Beck's Guero spent months in my CD player for several months and didn't wear out. I also became obsessed w/Arcade Fire and Sufjan Stevens, and I just started listening to Harlan T Bobo's "Too Much Love" recently. I bopped around on an exercise machine to the New Pornographers' "Twin Cinema" enough that I paid to see them in Central Park this summer.

Despite that, I did pick up some albums released in 2006. I don't claim that these are "the best" albums of 2006, but of those I listened to, my favorites were, in no particular order:

1. The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
This album wasn't as good as "Separation Sunday" but I still love this band, and there are some great songs on the album: "You Can Make Him Like You," expresses profound truths about youthful indie-rock dating life, if that's not a contradiction in terms. "Stuck Between Stations" and "Southtown Girls" are awesome rock anthems with the usual brilliant lyrics "she was a real good kisser/but she wasn't that strict of a Christian/ She was a damn good dancer/but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend" Craig Finn's lyrics have branched out from vaguely Biblical songs about failed attempts at rehab to probe the depths of inebriated teen-aged romance. Musically, they are channeling the early Bruce Springsteen, in a good way.

2. Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther
I read about this band for the first time in Mojo magazine's best of 2006 issue and quickly got their album around New Year's. It lives up to the hype. They have a sort of groovy seventies rock-pop feel. Sweet melodies, great musicianship, that indefinable something that tugs at your heart. I wish I were wearing earth-toned bell bottoms and swooning w/a main squeeze under the soft lights when I listen to them.

3. Califone, Roots & Crowns
I just downloaded this w/my January "emusic" subscription and it was well worth the downloads. Though I admit I didn't listen to it in 2006, it still merits a mention as one of my favorite 2006 records. I'm a sucker for twangy guitars and loopy unstructured songs. This album has that, along with random sounds, dark undertones, and even some rocking riffs.

4. Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror.
Confessional, orchestral, groovy, melancholic. This isn't my favorite of his records, and initially, I found some tracks odd "Deer Head on the Wall" is strange, right? but I even like that one now. When I saw him live this summer, he said he'd stopped playing "Castanets" because he read that it was in George W. Bush's ipod.

5. Tom Waits, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards
Tom Waits can't fail. "What Keeps Mankind Alive" reminds me of the best Kurt Weill songs and "Bottom of the World" is a great ballad. Three whole discs full of Tom Waits magic.

6. The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon
The Coup remains one of the few hip-hop groups that can blend funky sound, a raunchy spirit and political commentary. This is their best album since "Genocide and Juice."

7. The Raconteurs, Broken Boy Soldiers.
Everyone complained about Jack White being dragged down by Meg's lame drumming in The White Stripes when their last record came out. Perhaps he paid attention. This record, a project with fellow-Detroit rocker, Brendon Benson has a much fuller sound, rocking drums, wacky harmonies, wild solos. It all works. Yay to "Storebought Bones" especially. * bonus, not on the album, but DJ A-Trak, whose track can be found on "the Rub's website" did a great mash-up of "Steady as She goes" with Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous Girl."

8. Kinky, Reina
I listen to more electronic music than I used to but mostly as "background." A lot of it sounds dead to me. These folks, however, stand out with their joyous spirit and samples of growling lions.

9. Calexico, Garden Ruin
I listened to a huge amount of Calexico this summer while I was writing my book. Mostly, I listened to "The Black Light," a much more typical "Calexico" album: mariachi horns, long winding western sounding guitars. It all makes you think of a car rattling down a highway strewn with tumbleweed. However, "Garden Ruin" shows they can infuse pop songs w/their signature Southwestern horn section.


10. The Roots, Game Theory
I always have high expectations when it comes to this group, and sometimes they are gratified. Definetely yes with this one.

OK, commenters, what were your favorite records of 2006?

Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I'm a Liberal!

As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has explained, The New Republic has been cited as an example of the credibility and justice of right wing ideas, even among "Leftists." As Anna Kossoff and Steve Rendell put it,

For decades, journalists and pundits have invoked the New Republic magazine to prove that a conservative idea has support across the spectrum. Drawing on the magazine's historical association with the American left, the phrase "even the New Republic "—as in "even the New Republic supports the Contras"—has become journalistic shorthand for "even liberal opinion leaders.

So, Matthew Yglesias's comment on my previous post about "the Dersh" should not come as a surprise to anyone. It is to be expected that the American home of the "Euston Manifesto" would be at TNR. This document claims to promote liberal values around the world in the name of a group of "left progressives" who have united to deplore the "anti-Americanism" and "anti-Zionism" of the Western left, to declare "Islamic fascism" the greatest threat to liberal values currently alive in the world, and to declare their support for "humanitarian intervention" by powers such as the US and Britain. While they are agreed on the above values, they claim to be of differing views on the Iraq war of 2003.

Some people would argue that these are conservatives flying the "liberal" flag, and to some extent that's true. To paraphrase the right, EVEN Christopher Hitchens found the Euston Manifesto to be conservative, and wrote in a column last April:

I have been flattered by an invitation to sign it, and I probably will, but if I agree it will be the most conservative document that I have ever initialled. Even the obvious has now become revolutionary. So call me a neo-conservative if you must: anything is preferable to the rotten unprincipled alliance between the former fans of the one-party state and the hysterical zealots of the one-god one.

However, if you check the signatory page for it, Mr. Hitchens didn't sign after all.

It's also true that the Wilsonian, patriotic, interventionist view articulated in the document is part of the liberal tradition. The TNR authors who signed the manifesto refer to themselves as liberals in the tradition of FDR and Harry Truman, who, they claim, began the west's ultimately victorious, and peaceful victory against Communism. He was so peaceful, that Truman, when he dropped two atomic bombs on Japan just to intimidate the USSR. FDR was oh-so peaceful and democratic when he divided Korea with the USSR. Truman was so peaceful in agreeing to help France take back their "colony" in Indochina, and democratic and peaceful again when he supported the mission of Edward Lansdale in the Philippines.
A few words should suffice to point out the inaccuracy of the statement that the US was "peaceful" during the cold war: Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, the Congo, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic....and the list goes on.
This must be why a lot of left/progressives refuse to call themselves "liberals" even if they can't quite imagine themselves to be socialists or Marxists.

What this manifesto represents is a new form of what used to be called "Cold War Liberalism," proclaiming the new "cold" war against radical Islam instead of communism, and drawing a sharp line between which views are acceptable and reasonable to hold "on the left" and which are not. Such a document is pernicious because it attempts to police the left from "within" while really collaborating with the powers of the far-from-liberal state. It declares certain kinds of political statements to be beyond the pale of acceptable discourse, no longer legitimate points of view, but guilty by association with Stalinism and radical Islam. Of course, the usual "anti-semitism" charge appears front and center, and the manifesto declares that anti-Zionism is synonymous with anti-semitism.

Most problematic in this brand of liberalism is the silence on the issue of empire, and the reductive transformation of all anti-imperialist views into irrational "anti-Americanism." Again, there is no contraadiction between imperialism and liberalism, as several recent and not-so-recent academic studies show. Although some great American liberals: Mark Twain most notably, saw a fundamental contradiction between enjoying liberty at home and imposing our will on other nations, the fundamentally undemocratic nature of imperialism has never bothered those who view the countries being invaded as in need of being "forced to be free." Ah, it's the height of irony! For who was it that said people would have to be "forced to be free"? Not Marx, Not Lenin. Rather, it was that Enlightenment era political theorist, Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Yes, Phil Ochs said it best.

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

More on the Propaganda Machines....

I could probably devote a post-per-day to the outrageous conduct of Alan Dershowitz, and then I realized that there's already someone on the case. I'm glad Norman Finkelstein has the patience for that job, because I certainly do not. I saw Finkelstein on the subway a few weeks ago, and decided not to go up and say hello - not out of some kind of respect for the celebrity privacy (most academic celebrities LOVE it when people recognize them on the street), - but because I thought if people on the train in Brooklyn knew who he was they might lynch him based on all the slander printed about him, including Dershowitz's recent suggestion that Finkelstein was in Teheran at the Holocaust Denial conference...when in fact Professor Finkelstein was testifying at a trial in Chicago that day.
So, I'm sure you've heard the latest. Dershowitz is part of the media blitz attacking Jimmy Carter. In his critiques of Carter he marhsals the usual set of fabrications, falsehoods, and misquotations. Dershowitz's articles are peculiarly characterized by comments suggesting that Carter's evangelical Christianity is behind his critiques of Israeli policy (which in Dershowitz's eyes are not critiques of policy but, an "unrelenting attack against Israel."). Perhaps he's mad that Carter refused to debate him at Brandeis on the basis that Dershowitz knows nothing about what's going on in Israel/Palestine.
If you google "Carter" and "Dershowitz" you will quickly discover, if you hadn't figured it out yet, that the Blogosphere's axis tilts to the right, and most of the headlines scream about Carter's refusal to debate Dershowitz as if the latter were the great savior of the Western world. (To explain their inconsistancy, if you follow the links, the Freepers describe Dershowitz as a "Hitchens liberal" who's "wised up" in the aftermath of 9/11.)
I used to find Finkelstein's single-minded pursuit of errors in Dershowitz's work to be a bit maniacal, but I understand it much better now. Dershowitz functions in the same way as Bill O'Reilly does at Fox News. He lies and distorts, but his impact is greater than O'Reilly's because he claims to be a liberal and he teaches at Harvard. If only people would recognize that Dershowitz is a fraud and a plagiarist, Finkelstein argues, based on the evidence he has provided, his propaganda for the state of Israel would be much less effective. And yet, as Finkelstein also points out, despite his own thorough expose of Dershowitz's scholarly dishonesty, it is Dershowitz who gets the podium, who is described as an expert, while good people everywhere might imagine that Finkelstein is some kind of wing-nut "Holocaust denier."
As my colleague at work demonstrated in his arguments against every critique of Israel that I presented, the propaganda machine has an effective method for warding off reality. Zionist propagandists meet every critic of Israeli policy, from Human Rights Watch to Jimmy Carter with the accusation of participation in a world-wide anti-semitic conspiracy. Therefore, regardless of what the critic says, the very fact of his or her criticism becomes evidence for the Zionist cause. For social psychologists, it may suggest that propaganda techniques are based in paranoid defenses.
Even thinking about this debate is tiring. I'm already exhausted and it's not even 9am yet.

My Friend at TPSM Blogs Against Zombies

Go check it out. It's funny, it's a reminder to keep memory alive and the dead presidents in their graves. Go check it out at:
The Pagan Science Monitor where truth never sleeps.

Let's All Face it: The War on Christmas makes the Holidays More Fun.

Back before the ideologues of the far-right started the hype about the "War on Christmas," there was so little to laugh about during the holiday season. The holidays were a time of panic about the expense of holiday shopping, hordes of sidewalk clogging tourists, and weight gain brought on by the cookie-baking mania and excessive partying. It was easy to feel resentful as a fully secular communist Jewish type when I was struggling through the crowds at Macy's to buy holiday gifts for my secular pinko-communist Jewish friends and family, or tripping through the pine-scented streets on my way home from work.
But the very propaganda of the "War on Christmas" has given me something to be part of during the holiday season. Instead of feeling excluded, I now belong! I belong to an army of disgruntled secularizers. It's kinda fun. In fact, the "war on Christmas" and the Christian right's excesses have brought all the cranky Jews and Pagans out of the closet to celebrate the holiday in all its non-Christian glory. I used to, in respect for other people's' religious beliefs, say "Merry Christmas" quite jovially to people far and wide. Not now. Commercial culture is even catching on and giving up the holly and sleighbells. In a hip, commercial decorating magazine, I read about how I might craft my very own Festivus party.
Everywhere you look, there are people cracking jokes about this ludicrous claim that began with a bunch of Fox news hacks and wacko evangelicals. Check out the Cafe Press items on sale. Look at the battlefield photos at Flickr, and Stephen Colbert has a whole season's worth of material.

However, the fact of its absurdity doesn't make the "War on Christmas" rhetoric a mere comedy vehicle. The war-on-Christmas story is a case of first time as farce, second time as tragedy. There's something truly pathetic about the fact that some people actually believe that such a war exists, and are willing to spend their money to fund the Christian soldiers of the solstice season. Last night on the train, I chatted briefly with a trainer from my gym, and before heading back to my earphones the 12/16/06 podcast of my favorite radio show, which right then, was doing an interview with the Reverend Barry Lynn of "Americans United for the Separation of Church and State" about his new book and what the Bible actually say, I said to this dark haired, small sized New Yorker, "Happy Holidays!" After all - he might be celebrating Channukka, and I was feeling friendly. "Merry CHRISTMAS!" he responded with vehemence and a fierce teeth-bearing grin.
OY!
Since when has saying "Merry Christmas" been a way to release your aggression at unsuspecting Jews? I thought that was an EASTER tradition, for Chrissake!

Propaganda Machines Part Two

As promised, here's my second round of responses to right-wing Zionist talking points. One of these general points, applied in many situations is this one: The Arab nations want to "sweep Israel into the sea" and won't stop until they do. Thus, Israel must defend itself all the time.


3.According to Zionist history, in 1948, Israel had to defend itself against annihilation by the united force of all the Arab countries - whose primary motivation was anti-semitism. The Arab nations told the Palestinians to flee.
It is true that Israel was "born in the midst of a war with the Arabs of Palestine and the neighboring Arab states." (Shlaim, 28), but it is not clear that the motivation for this war was the hatred of Jews, nor is there any evidence to suggest that the Arab leadership issued orders to Palestinian Arabs to flee. From 1946-1947, David Ben Gurion united Zionist forces in Palestine into an army to pursue the formation of an Israeli state. In 1947, only one Arab leader supported such a Zionist state in Palestine, King Abdullah of Transjordan. The not-nearly as well organized Palestinian nationalists, a total of 4000 fighters united under the leader, al-Husayni, attacked Jewish targets in Palestine immediately following the UN decision to partition Palestine in the fall of 1947.(Pape, 65,77).
The response was as follows:
Ben Gurion's army pursued the objective of "Plan D" which was to attack Arab villages in Palestine (civilians) and thus remove Palestinians from Israel, beginning in April, 1948. In all, 350 villages were evacuated or abandoned, and 700,00 to 750,000 Palestinian refugees fled to the West Bank, to Gaza, and to Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The very worst atrocities of the war (massacres of villagers) occurred in October and November of 1948. The goal was not simply to create a new state, but a state that was ethnically pure, or at least dominated by a Jewish population. Who then, are the people with a strong case of ethnic nationalism or "tribalism"?
Another part of the Zionist version of this history regards the combined invasion of Palestine by Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, which is usually portrayed by Zionists as a group that numerically overwhelmed Israel. In fact, as Avi Shlaim points out, the Israeli forces outnumbered the combined Arab military force; Arab troops numbered 25,000, Israel troops went from 65,000 to 97,441. Moreover, the war aim of the Arab nations was not the single goal of "sweeping Israel into the sea" but a complicated mix of individual national objectives.
(on 1948, see Pape, Shlaim, and Morris).

4. Modern American zionism came to its full fruition following the 1967 war, when Israel expanded its territory significantly. This war has been portrayed in Zionist history as a heroic victory over hostile forces, and a necessity for Israel to defend itself from the hostile Arab world.
In 1967, Israel faced Palestinian attacks that were supported by the Syrian government. In response, Israel's Yitzhak Rabin threatened to "overthrow the Syrian regime" (Shlaim, 236). As Egypt, under Nasser, closed off the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, massed troops on the Sinai border, and asked for the UN emergency forces to be removed from the Sinai, Israel responded with an attack now known as the "six day war" during which Israel was victorious and took the following territories: the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. This expansion of Israel's borders and its attempts to keep these territories remains the bone of contention today, and the proposal of many peace groups (including Jewish ones) is that Israel withdraw to its pre-1967 borders. In my next post, I will go into more detail on the history of the fate of territories occupied in 1967. In general, one could say that this occupation, and effort to make it permanent, and not anti-semitism, is the real source of continuing hostility to the state of Israel.

5. Another common event used to support the hypothesis of unrelenting Arab hostility is the "Yom Kippur War" of 1973
The surprise attack on Israel by Syria and Egypt in 1973 was a response to the continued Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. In fact, it was Moshe Dayan who told Time magazine in July of 1973, "There is no more Palestine. Finished" and his policy was to move settlers into the occupied territories "won" in 1967, including the Golan Heights, which were once part of Syria, and sought an Israel whose authority extended "from the Jordan to the Suez canal." The reason that Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in October of 1973 (The surprise "Yom Kippur war") was to put pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Occupied territories.

* For all of the above references, see Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.

and that's it for now.

Propaganda Machines

Once a week, my colleagues and I go out for happy hour, which is a testament to our general collegiality. Last week's happy hour, however, was marred slightly by the eruption of the Israel/Palestine question into our otherwise comradely chatter. I mentioned something about the occupation and my colleague, from across the table said," Occupation?!" as is if I had just asserted the reality of something that was in doubt. I'm not sure whether it's the insistance that I treat total propaganda as an "alternative view" or distortions and lies as "facts" or whether it's the pure racism involved in saying things like "Palestinians?" and "Occupation?" as if these were facts in question, but I was shocked and dismayed. The same colleague asked me yesterday if I knew about the group "CAMERA" which he described as a general mid-east media watch group with no political affiliation, out to give the "truth" on American news reporting from the Middle-East. "No," I said, "is it associated with AIPAC?"
"Oh, no" he responded.
The gist of his conversation was that he wanted to have a civil dialogue with me about the issues and offered to exchange information resources. This is the man who refused to read Tom Segev, on the basis that he was a "revisionist!" in the previous conversation. Finally, I had to tell him that I just didn't see the arguments he was making as an even a bit legitimate and that I couldn't have such a conversation with him on that basis at all. I said, "If you had a friend who loved Rush Limbaugh and insisted that he was telling the truth, and kept coming to you with things Rush had said, and asking you to take them seriously, wouldn't it drive you crazy?"
I could see that this hurt his feelings, and I felt bad about it, but on the other hand, he's coming to me with offensive, racist propaganda and asking me to accept it as a rational argument. If we were acquaintances in Mississippi in the 1960s, and he was talking about how inaccurate the Northern media was to depict Mississippi as a racist backwater, I'd have had to say the same thing.
Most of the time, I live in a bit of an alternative news "bubble" and unless I encounter students with very conservative views (this almost never happens where I teach) I don't often encounter right wing views, some of which seem like they are coming from another planet. In case you have the same experience...here's my report from the land of ultra-Zionist propaganda...part one.


The Right Wing Spin Machine on Israel/Palestine
1. "There are no Palestinians." This is the first departure point, and it's the one that Golda Meier made in her infamous statement, "There is no such thing as a Palestinian." Here is a web-site that promotes this point of view and a column from Ha'aretz that argues against it on this simple basis: no one gets to decide whether someone else's identity is valid or not.
Moreover...
* This justification for seizing other people's land is as specious as the justification used by the Puritans who came over to North America and seized Native American land on the basis that they a) didn't have the same concept of private property and farming as the Europeans and therefore couldn't make a legitimate ownership claim and b) weren't a nation in the European sense of the term.
I don't know what else to call it but racism when the basis for denying the existance of a people and their rights to stay where they are is that they are different from and therefore inferior to you. It doesn't matter whether the Palestinians have always called themselves Palestinians or not. The fact is, Israel was built on land that was inhabited by people, and the leaders of Israel expelled those people from their homes (about which, more later).
But let's see....what IS the basis of the Palestinian national identity?...It began in the 19th century, and you can find out more about it in the most serious scholarly history of it by Rashid Khalidi. For those who would claim that the Palestinians are not a "real" nation, it might be useful to think about the history of nationalism more generally. The "French" and "German" identities were also "made up" for political reasons. European historians generally agree with Benedict Anderson's description of the nation as an "imagined community" , not a biological reality.



2. The American media is biased against Israel and the Palestinians are manipulating the world media to hate Israel.
Yes, you heard it right. My colleague insisted that the liberal media couldn't be trusted in its reports from Israel. He went on to talk about CAMERA, which is not a neutral organization, which is affiliated with AIPAC, and which spends its time denying the murders of Palestinian children by the Israeli Defense forces. It does focusing on such cases as the image of Mohammed Al Duraduring the Al Aqsa intifada. In that case, the media first decided the photo was accurate, then later decided it was not. And with this one image, groups like CAMERA convince otherwise rational people that the entire record of crimes by the IDF is an elaborate Palestinian hoax. However, if you knew the big picture, you'd know this:

According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Israeli security forces killed 2,038 Palestinians between 29 September 2000 and 11 May 2003. Of these, 366 (18%) were minors under the age of 18. Indeed, by the end of the second day of the al-Aqsa Intifada, the day on which Mohammed al-Dura died, 15 Palestinians had already been killed. Of these, four (27%) were minors. Besides Mohammad al-Dura, whose death was so graphically captured on video, B’Tselem reports these otherwise-invisible child casualties:

· Khaled 'Adli al-Baziyan, age 15, from Nablus, killed by Israeli security forces live gunfire to the head in Nablus/The West Bank

· Nizar Mahmud 'Abd al-'Ayedeh, age 16, from Deir 'Ammar/Ramallah, killed by Israeli security forces gunfire to the chest in Ramallah/The West Bank

· 'Iyyad Ahmad al-Khashashi, age 16, from Nablus, killed by Israeli security forces live gunfire in Nablus/The West Bank

The day after Mohammad al-Dura died, four more minors—including another 12-year-old, Samer Samir Sudki Tabanjeh—were killed by Israeli security forces.

(By comparison, B’Tselem reports that between 29 September 2000 and 11 May 2003 Palestinians killed 483 Israeli civilians and 216 Israeli security personnel, or 699 total. Of these, 92 or 13% were minors. By the end of the second day of the intifada one Israeli soldier but no Israeli civilians, and therefore no Israeli minors, had been killed. Further information is available at www.btselem.org.)

That's all I can manage for now, I'll do some more responses to ultra-right Zionist talking points later in the week.

All New Game in Town

So, the president has said he rejects the "Iraq study group solution." Condoleeza Rice says she doesn't want to make nice with Syria and Iran. According to the NY Daily News, "The White House is totally constipated," a former aide complained. "There's not enough adult leadership, and the 30-year-olds still think it's 2000 and they're riding high." SO. What IS Bush/Cheney's "secret plan" to win the war? I welcome serious attempts and satire:

More Global Warming News

I was just checking my email for the hundreth time today, wondering what I was looking for. It must have been this link to a story from Reuters at "Truth Out" which announces that the Alps are currently undergoing the warmest winter in 1300 years.

It's not reassuring then that the proposed budget (which I have hanging on my office wall) for 2007 included cuts in environmental and energy programs. Since the last congress could not come to agreement on the 2007 budget I hope this means that the new one will be able to monkey around with it a little.

This winter should fuel (sorry, I couldn't resist) the movement to take action to slow down global warming, but the media's portrayal of the issue is making it sound as if any effort to control carbon emissions is some kind of inexcusable government interference in our "way of life." Meanwhile, the same crowd finds the Patriot Act and the rest just fine. ahh...my anxiety is bubbling. For an interesting piece on the latest see Think Progress.

Freaky Friday

Last night, I was walking through the West Village with my Aunt, dodging the partying NYU students who appeared to be on a premature Spring break. As we shuffled along with jackets in hand, I wondered whether this was really the end of winter as we know it. For this reason, I was glad to see this article in New York magazine that attempts to explain the weird weather.
The current warm spell that we're experiencing can be attributed to El Nino, but the larger context for that and other changes is global warming. According to the article,

The computer models reviewed in the “Metropolitan East Coast Climate Assessment”—a 50-year prediction of New York’s changing climate, developed by nasa and Columbia University—suggest that the city will continue to heat up by as much as one degree by 2010, two degrees by 2020, and accelerate on a gentle curve until we reach as much as nine degrees warmer than now in 2100.

I remember back in the warm winter of '97 that people said "it's El Nino, not global warming," but climatologists argue that it's not an "either/or" explanation. We'll continue to have more el ninos because of global warming.
Has anyone else noticed how people keep saying hopefully, "it's really going to cool down this weekend!" and then if you look at the forecasts, it says it will be in the high forties? Sheesh, it's December and I still have time to plant hollyhocks for next year. I was already delaying Fall bulb planting by a month to fit the real temperatures, and it looks like I'm not alone.

National Resistance Movement or Civil War?

The other day, someone from Left Spot, which is, as far as I can tell, the blog of an old friend of mine who's now part of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), argued in a comment on my last post that I shouldn't refer to what's occuring in Iraq right now as a civil war. There are others in the revolutionary socialist left who have made similar arguments, most notably ,the International Socialist Organization (ISO) which, at least the last time I checked, had been arguing that the anti-war movement should support the Iraqi resistance.
Since I'm no longer a member of any sectarian left group, I haven't been involved in such a debate for a while, but I can see the relevance of this particular seemingly far-fetched position denying that there is a civil war going on in Iraq to the US anti-war movement, and had an email exchange about it two years ago with Rahul Mahajan of Empire Notes, who certainly doesn't see the current insurgents as a group that Americans should laud as a national liberation movement. He also argues that the situation in Iraq is now a civil war, or at least close to it, commentng that: "it’s already at somewhere not too far from the level in the Lebanese or Bosnian civil wars."
I haven't seen many articles that characterize the Iraqi resistance as a "heroic national liberation movement," though there is this one which seems to be based more in the theory of resistance than the actual on-the-ground happenings in Iraq. England's Respect party also defines the current action in Iraq as such a movement.
Loretta Napoleoni, whose book may be the most detailed look into the Iraqi insurgency, describes the resistance as follows:

Beyond the myth of Zarquawi there is a much more frightening reality made up of complex forces: independent Iraqi jihadist groups that gravitate toward Al Qaeda in Iraq, Islamo-nationalist and Baath party resistance fighters opposing coalition forces; ethnic conflict among the Sunni, Shi'ites and Kurds; fully armed and active ethnic and religious militias' and an endless stream of foreign suicide bombers. This is a scenario that may well haunt Americans for decades. It is the true nature of the insurgency.

Based on what I've read from people who take the "heroic national liberation movement" line on describing the mass killings of civilians going on in Iraq, it seems like the resistance to calling it a "civil war" has to do with what this means for whether Americans support immediate withdrawl or not, and the relationship of anti-Shi'ite violence to the relationship of the Shi'ites and the US. However, with the current situation, I don't think it's safe to say that the US is simply pro-Shi'ite anymore. Also, the assumption seems to be that if we call it a "civil war" it means we have to stay there. I don't like this particular tendency in the debate, because it seems to me to deny an apparent reality in order to justify a political position, instead of basing a strategy on what's actually happening. Second, I haven't seen anyone who's in any real contact with people in Iraq take this position, which makes me think it's ill-informed. There are plenty of people who say that the Iraqis are in a civil war - and that the civil war is being provoked by the US occupation, although it would probably not end with the occupation's departure. Patrick Cockburn, whose work I linked in the last post, and more recently, Nir Rosen on Democracy Now, and Al Jazeera are perfectly capable of taking a "troops out" now position while also describing the violence in Iraq as a civil war.
But, perhaps LS and others have more to say to explain their position?

Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Civil War

It's distressing to read that in the midst of annual consumer hoopla over "Black Friday" that government officials in Iraq "do not believe that this is a civil war."
Juan Cole's blog has a collection of the ongoing news reports about the continuing Shiite reprisals for Sunni violence, including a translation of Muqtada Al Sadr's address demanding that Sunnis not kill Shia, not join Al Quaeda, and his continuing call for the US troops to set a time-table for withdrawl from Iraq.
Cole says...

Members of Muqtada's bloc in Parliament, such as Faleh Hasan Shanshal, have threatened to pull out of the al-Maliki government if the prime minister follows through with his plans to meet US President George W. Bush in Amman on Wednesday. Bush's spokesman say that the meeting would be held nevertheless. Why US news services feel the need to report the rest of what the spokesman said, especially fairly high up in the article, is beyond me. Nonsense such as that Iraq is not in a civil war or that the violence will be "high on the agenda" at the Amman meeting is only worthy of being ignored or derided. If Bush was able to do anything about the violence in Iraq, he wouldn't have to meet al-Maliki in the neighboring country of . . . Jordan. I think the Pentagon has concluded that Baghdad is just too dangerous and unpredictable to allow Bush to go there anymore.

If the Iraq war is our generation's Vietnam, this latest upsurge in violence may be this war's Tet Offensive - inasmuch as it reveals the true failure of the US occupation to maintain peace or stability. Patrick Cockburn was reporting three weeks ago in the London Independent that Iraq is not "on the way to civil war" but that the entire country is disintegrating and is actively in the midst of a civil war and has been for some time. In his article "Baghdad Under Seige"
he sums it up:

The scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict. An apocalyptic scenario could well emerge - with slaughter on a massive scale. As America prepares its exit strategy, the fear in Iraq is of a genocidal conflict between the Sunni minority and the Shias in which an entire society implodes. Individual atrocities often obscure the bigger picture where:

* upwards of 1,000 Iraqis are dying violently every week;

* Shia fighters have taken over much of Baghdad; the Sunni encircle the capital;

* the Iraqi Red Crescent says 1.5 million people have fled their homes within the country;

* the Shia and Sunni militias control Iraq, not the enfeebled army or police.

In the midst of this ongoing disaster, it appears that the ever-predictable Fox news was covering something else. Now, Cheney is in Saudi Arabia, while Bush heads off to talk to Al Maliki in Jordan, and Tom Hayden, in articles at Huffington Post, says that he has documents proving that the Bush administration has been secretly negotiating with the Sunni armed resistance. None of us would put it past them to rewind the tape in Iraq to the pre-2003 war solution: ensure stability and keep the Shia out of power by ushering an appropriate Sunni "strongman" into place in the region. Alexander Cockburn puts it this way, "If some Sunni substitute for Saddam stepped up to the plate the US would welcome him and propel him into power..." However, with the carnage and dissaray we see now, "it is too late for such a course."
Who can say what the next step will be. Cockburn continues:

As Henry Kissinger said earlier this week, the war is lost. This is the man who -- if we are to believe Bob Woodward's latest narrative -- has been advising Bush and Cheney that there could be no more Vietnams, that the war in Iraq could not be lost without humiliating consequences for America's status as the number # 1 bully on the block. When Kissinger says a war is lost, you can reckon that it is.

Here is my prediction. Since Cheney is in Saudi Arabia attempting to get the US's "friends" the Saudi Wahabbis to "calm" the Iraqi Sunnis, we are going to try to create some kind of "multi-national" regional force involving the Saudis to attempt to impose order on Iraq and to keep Iran in check. The US will try to sell this group the way they sold the Taliban to us back in 1995....I just wonder where it will lead - especially given parallel efforts on the Iranian side. If a civil war isn't enough to bring on the "endtimes" maybe a regional one will be.

Trying Vietnam All Over Again

If at first you don't succeed "try, try again." This can be a nice motto for many endeavors in life, but it shouldn't be for wars, no matter what John McCainsays.
When Kerry ran for prez. in 2004 he arguedthat he would send more troops, that he wouldn't try to win "war on the cheap," and since then, others of those critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war have made similar arguments that the problem with the war is that we haven't sent in enough troops to win the war. Many in the general population, even those against the war, will say the same thing. Just last night I was talking to a bartender in Windsor Terrace (hardly a lefty neighborhood) who was as critical of US foreign policy as anyone I've met in recent years. He was going on about the US's support of the Saudis and the Shah, and talked about his hatred for the whole Bush family. And he asked me, "in one or two sentences, how do we fix the problem in Iraq?"
My answer began, "first, pull the troops out." He objected strongly and said, "the root of this whole thing is the Sunni Shia conflict," and suggested that if the troops were to come out now, Iraq would be overtaken in chaos and civil war.
I almost replied that the "send in more troops" solution hadn't' worked in Vietnam and it wouldn't work here either, until I remembered that there's a whole popular school of thoughtthat the reason that we lost the war in Vietnam was that we fought it with "one hand tied behind our back."
My students always say on the first few days of class that they think history is important because if you don't know about the past, you'll be doomed to repeat past mistakes, but I beg to differ. It's not complete ignorance about the past, but the knowledge of useful mythologies about the past that allows people to confidently reapply wrong-headed strategies in the present day.
We need people like George McGovern, with all his incapacity to win elections, to remind us that "more troops" didn't work then, and it won't work now. The US occupation is the reason for the insurgency, so if the troops are pulled out, much of the energy and support for the insurgency will disappear, making it much easier for the Iraqis to quell any remaining "sectarian violence."
If your jury's out on what the insurgency is, and what is driving it, I recommend the following reading: Christian Parenti's The Freedom and Loretta Napoleoni's Insurgent Iraq.

The Scandalous Exclusion of Howie Hawkins

There are few better examples of the corporate freeze-out of the public than the Senate race in New York. The candidates are: Hillary Clinton (D), John Spencer (R) and though you wouldn't know it, Howie Hawkins (G). Hawkins is running on an anti-war position, was endorsed by anti-war candidate Jonathan Tasini as well as by Cindy Sheehan, but because Hillary Clinton refused to debate him, and because the mainstream anti-war voices have not covered or endorsed his campaign, despite his meeting all the League of Women Voters' standards for legitimate candidacy(including fundraising and poll numbers), he has received no media attention. In the progressive blogosphere, as represented by the Dailykos, his name appears only once in a diary.
Those who listen to Pacifica radio's "Democracy Now" probably know that the League of Women Voters have withdrawn their approval not only from the debates between Clinton and Spencer, but from a number of debates because of Democratic candidates refusal to appear in debates with third party anti-war candidates.

After reading just a few stories based on "man on the street" feeling about the voters who may turn out again this time around because of their disgust about the war, I'm sure that if some of those New Yorkers knew Hawkins was running, or what he stood for, they would vote for him rather than Hillary C.
New York Newsday puts it like this :

People don't turn out only for cliffhangers," said Miringoff. "They show up when they have something to say or to send a message. For Democrats in New York, it's send a message to George Bush about Iraq and they'll use the congressional races to do that.

But what message are voters who vote for Hillary Clinton sending about Iraq?
Maybe it's to "stay the course" after all, and it doesn't send a good message to the dems about 2008. I think she should be punished at the polls for the greater good, and here's why:

In 2002, Hillary Clinton, made this speech explaining why she would support Bush's resolution to use force in Iraq:

I will take the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a UN resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible. Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause, I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation. If we were to defeat this resolution or pass it with only a few Democrats, I am concerned that those who want to pretend this problem will go way with delay will oppose any UN resolution calling for unrestricted inspections. This is a very difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make -- any vote that may lead to war should be hard -- but I cast it with conviction.

In late 2005, Clinton was critical of the president and presented herself, as well as other members of congress, as being "duped" into voting for war based on faulty intelligence - despite the fact that anyone with a brain was already saying in 2002 that the Bushies were not to be trusted. However, her argument was still for war:
"It is time for the President to stop serving up platitudes and present us with a plan for finishing this war with success and honor," she said,

– not a rigid timetable that terrorists can exploit, but a public plan for winning and concluding the war. And it is past time for the President, Vice President, or anyone else associated with them to stop impugning the patriotism of their critics.

In her other, more recent positions, Clinton continues to triangulate. Like John Kerry, who blew the 2004 election because he refused to take an anti-war position, she is critical of the management of the war "on the cheap," but doesn't call for withdrawl of troops. In fact, the Democratic plan for Phased redeployment that Clinton and other milque-toast dems support does not include a meaningful time-table for withdrawl, and because it suggests little more than the "Vietnamization" strategy that Bush seems already to have put forth, does not inspire confidence in the Dems' will to truly "change course" in Iraq.
As Norm Solomon reminds us:

Tactical critiques of war management are standard ways that politicians keep wars going while they give superficial nods to voters' frustration and anger. Those kinds of rhetorical maneuvers went on for the last several years of the war in Vietnam, while the death toll mounted at the same time that polls showed most Americans had turned against the war. These days, Hillary Clinton must be very appreciative that MoveOn is helping her to finesse the war in Iraq while she continues to support it.

But, say, people, at least Hillary Clinton will be better on domestic issues than Bush. I wonder how true that really is. Medea Benjamin, who went with the "Anybody But Bush" line and cast her support to Kerry in 2004, describes how Clinton thwarted efforts of anti-war activists to be heard at a "take back America" conference, at which CODEPINK was a registered participant organization with a table and an pre-conference agreement with the organizers. Despite this, they were turned away at the door.

A few CODEPINK women did manage to get inside the breakfast, however, as they were legitimate ticket holders. Once inside, the CODEPINK women soon realized that they had been deceived about the second part of the agreement: They would not be allowed to ask the first question, or any question, because Hillary Clinton would not be fielding questions from the audience. “We were really upset that we had been lied to by Take Back America, and that there would be no space at this ‘progressive conference’ to have a dialogue with Hillary Clinton about the most critical issue of our time—the war in Iraq,” said Katie Heald, DC coordinator for CODEPINK. “We got up on our chairs holding up our hands with the peace sign, and were pulled down from the chairs. We tried to take out our banner that said “Listen Hillary: Stop Supporting the War” and it was grabbed from us. And when Hillary started talking about her Iraq strategy, criticizing Bush but not posing a solution, we shouted ‘What are YOU going to do to get us out of Iraq,’ but she ignored us.”

If anything, the complete blackout of anti-war candidates and voices from this year's political races is even worse than it was in 2004, and that may just be because the public's position has shifted so dramatically against the war that the Democrats are running scared, not just from the Republican machine, but from the true wishes of the majority of Americans.