War Funding, Democrats and the Next Step

For the past few weeks, I've been aware of, but not closely following the funding bill's passage through congress and to the president. I knew enough to know that the Democrats had finally voted to approve war funds with no withdrawal time-table on Wednesday. You can imagine my scorn then, when on Thursday, as I was walking down 42nd street at lunchtime, someone from the DNC stopped me and asked me for money. I said, I wouldn't give them any money since they hadn't done anything to end the war. "Yes we have!" the man protested. Looking like a crazy person, or just an irate voter, I shook my head and walked away from him, shouting over my shoulder, "you rolled over!"
Maybe others knew exactly how I felt. With hopes in the power of a Democratic congress dashed, the public's perception that support for the Democratic party is the best way to beat Bush may be changing. Markos Moulitsas, a longtime faithful Democrat, has written several entries at Daily Kos
criticizing the recent "capitulation bill." In one, he declares:

Democrats have lined up to announce that this isn't the endgame, that this is just the first round. They are promising to keep putting pressure on the administration and using other legislative vehicles to impose withdrawal deadlines and other accountability provisions.
They let us down this time. But the opportunities for them to make amends still exist. If Democrats take advantage of them, as they promise they will, then all might be forgiven. They can prove to us that they in fact know what they are doing, and that they, in fact, do plan on honoring their most sacred promise to the 2006 electorate. And if they don't? Well, no one, not even the most rabid partisans, have an endless supply of patience.

David Sirota, who used to be a regular on DNC-friendly Al Franken's Air America show, is calling the Democrats' attempt to spin their vote last week "Orwellian." He was in favor of the "benchmark" funding bill in contrast to what he called the blank checkfor the war that the Republicans and the president wanted (and got).
Meanwhile, Josh Frank's piece on Hillary Clinton's historic hawkishness has been making the internet rounds. On the other side of the political spectrum, Trent Lott's old buddy, Dick Morris is now calling her a hypocrite for responding to the clear demands of voters and changing her vote to oppose the "blank check." I was heartened myself that she and Obama both voted against it, but....I hadn't been following the news very closely over the last few weeks, so I didn't know much more than what they said on NPR about the entire battle.
In all the discussions about linking funding to the achievement of "benchmarks," I did not hear, until I was busy calculating final grades while listening to a week-old Counterspin interview with David Swanson, that the first benchmark is the passage of the infamous "oil law" - a privatization bill promoted by the US administration and opposed by most Iraqis. Truthout's Ann Wright has an article about it today.
I also hadn't heard, in all the talk of Bush's veto and congress's response, that if congress had just let the veto stand, and not brought forth any new legislation, Bush wouldn't have gotten his money for the war. A short comment from FAIR puts it this way:

In order to force the Bush administration to accept a bill with a withdrawal timeline, the Democratic Congress didn't have to pass the bill over Bush's veto--it just had to make clear that no other Iraq War spending bill would be forthcoming. Democrats may not have wanted to pay the supposed political costs of such a strategy, but news coverage should have made clear that this was a choice, not something forced on them by the lack of a veto-proof majority.

Finally, John Stauber, whose article on the Democrats and their supporters is the first one I linked to, has this to say about moving forward following this vote.

There is an organized anti-war movement in America that is not an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Up until now, it has been weak and divided and unable to organize itself into an effective national movement in its own right. In its place, therefore, MoveOn and its Netroots allies have become identified as the leadership of the anti-war movement. It is vitally important, however, that a genuinely independent anti-war movement organize itself with the ability to speak on its own behalf.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, the civil rights movement was most definitely not an adjunct of the Democratic or Republican Parties. Far from it, it was a grassroots movement that eventually forced both parties to respond to its agenda. Likewise, the movement against the Vietnam War was not aligned with either the Democratic or Republican parties, both of which claimed to have plans for peace while actually pursuing policies that expanded the war.

It's the point that those of us to the left of the Democratic party have been making for a long time. However, I wonder what you think. Has the time come when Americans will join a mass movement to end the war? Or is that just a leftover fantasy based on the experiences of the 60s generation? What is the next step?
Maybe the place to get it all together is Atlanta??

I bet you thought I was never coming back.

Yes, it's been more than a week since my last post, and all I've managed to do lately is post pictures of my flower garden. Sorry about that. I just don't have the gusto I once had for reading and commenting on internet news articles. I'm hoping that it will come back once classes end. Meanwhile, this is the last day of classes at CUNY, and I am sitting in my house averaging my students' quiz grades, listening to Tony Joe White, and generally "taking care of business." It's that time of year when this blog is a welcome respite from the chorus of excuses and cries of unfairness that come from students who have, in the last week of the course, just figured out that they really should have read the syllabus I handed out on the first day.

Since I last wrote, my union's progressive slate has won an election on my campus, and I've been nominated as my campus's representative on the CUNY-wide contract organizing committee. Perhaps that means I'll try to renew my energy for this blog with academic "labor" news a bit this summer. The latest outrage from CUNY management is that they have decided not to pay adjunct professors for their work during the fifteenth week of classes because they're only "proctoring exams" and not really teaching. The cheapness!
CUNY faculty will be protesting next week at lunch time at all the campuses where this is the case, in what's called the Campaign of Outrage

Here are the picket dates:

Monday, May 21 – Baruch, Vertical Campus, 12 - 1:30 pm.

Tuesday, May 22 – Bronx CC, Language Hall, 12 - 1:30 pm.

Wednesday, May 23 – College of Staten Island, Administration Building 1A, 12 -
1:30 pm.

Thursday, May 24 – Queensborough CC, Administration Building, 12:00 - 1:30 pm.

Thursday, May 31 – Kingsborough CC, Administration Building A, 2:00 - 3:30 pm.

For more information, call PSC Organizer Sue Li at (212) 354-1252

and that's all for now.

Gardening in May

 

 

 

 

 

Tribeca Film Fest Review One: Lillie and Leander: A Legacy of Violence

I figured I could handle the matinee prices at this year's Tribeca Film Fest ($14). I'm glad I swallowed my complaints and went, because my choice for today: "Lillie and Leander: A Legacy of Violence" was a movie worth seeing on a big screen, and seeing at a festival. In our culture, so saturated with cathartic stories of violence, justice and redemption, there have been very few films that have dealt seriously with the issue of lynching. "Lillie and Leander" succeeds in tackling this difficult subject because of the way it makes the past so present.
The film, which centers on a hunt for long-buried bodies evokes in the viewer a sense of the South as a haunted place where death and terror are both ubiquitous and invisible. At one point, an archaeologist says of what she expects to find at one promising site something to the effect that "the graves will be shallow. Just dirt thrown quickly to cover the bodies." But, in the end, the bodies can't be found.
It's a bit like a metaphor for the larger problem. During the film, we hear the stories of living communities, both Black and white, who simultaneously have carried around and handed down secrets of extraordinary violence in the midst of the mundanest of lives. A Black family sits on the screened porch as the eldest member talks about the day the white folks came for Uncle Wiley in the middle of the night. Several people say that they knew not to go to that county, where there was a sign on the road that read "Read, Nigger and Run, and if you Can't Read, Run Anyhow."
After a large picnic, the whites whisper and and some laugh nervously about what their uncles and grandfathers did over at the "curve in the road", about a small child finding a skull on the ground near the local church.
The stories match up eerily. In one especially poweful sequence, the film juxtaposes the narrow perspectives of the whites who think the deaths are insgignificant anyway, with the discussions of lost relatives and friends among the Blacks, all punctuated by shovels smacking the dirt of a suspected grave-site. In these interviews, people express great truths without any effort at profundity. The film-maker's 96 year old uncle stumbles along, trying to explain what the outcome will be if they find some bodies now. He looks worried about whay may happen now that times have changed, and says, "Of course, there wasn't much...there wasn't really any...law back then." Despite that concern, the hard evidence has yet to come out in Pensacola. As the film-makers explained in the Q&A after the screening, the more they found out about the bodies, the less interested were the police in investigating the scene.
Like Anna Rasmus, the real woman depicted in the the German film, "The Nasty Girl" , Alice Bruton Hurwitz's research into the story of her own family and town led to controversy. Several outspoken members of her family would much prefer that the past be kept that way and in their efforts to keep the secret within the family, they reveal the same indifference to Black lives as their murderous parents. However, unlike Hurwitz's family, the city of Pensacola has proven to be supportive, and is screening "Lillie and Leander" next fall at their own festival. I look forward to the dialogue that this film may inspire when it does, and when it moves to other Southern venues, but I admit I feel a bit trepidatious when I think about the number of similar buried secrets that may come to light in its wake. That reaction must be a sign that this movie works in some important way; it opens up, but does not neatly resolve or seal up the big problem of racial violence in our society. As the archaelogist suggests at the end of another day of digging, "the fact that we didn't find the body today doesn't mean there aren't bodies there; they just aren't in the spot where we looked." But one reason the bodies were so hard to find was that the smell of the cadavers had, over time dispersed into the soil itself. It's not unlike the way we experience race today: the problem is all around us but it's become so diffuse that it's very difficult for most people to see it, to identify it and do something about it.

Anxiety Index: The Cell Phones and the Bees

Since I last posted on flowers, and even though I did notice a single bee busily pollinating one of my perennials just yesterday, I thought I'd post this article on Colony Collapse Disorder.
Not only does it suggest that a collapse in the beepopulation might be linked ot cellphone radiation, but also brings up the issue of the connection between cell phones and brain tumors, which hasn't surfaced in a while.
So, while I start worrying about crop failures and starvation, I'm going to get a new headset for my cellphone.

 

 

Briefly, Imus - Sharpton Links

I see that a lot of people came here yesterday looking for the Al Sharpton - Don Imusargument on the radio. Here they are. I woke up to it this morning being replayed on WBAI's Wake-Up Call. Here's something that I haven't seen anyone talking about, and it speaks to the general politics and economics of talk radio. Sharpton's show, on Syndication Oneisn't on the radio in NY. It is too bad, because listening to this conversation between not only Sharpton and Imus, but also Rev. Buster Sawyers and Byron Monroe, the head of the National Assoc. of Black Journalists was one of the few times when I've heard a number of Black people get together to confront a white dude with his racist statements. Crooks& Liars doesn't have the whole thing, and Syndication One doesn't seem to have podcasts available.
Meanwhile, for other "Blacks in the News", here's the Black Agenda Report's commentary on the Congressional Black Caucus/Fox scandal.
Comments?

Shortcuts Along The Information "Superhighway": You Too Can Be an Expert, or Just Feel Like One.

I think the lesson I've learned from doing this blog is that answers to questions about major news items are readily available if you are willing to look for them and if you know how to evaluate sources. You don't have to be an expert, or even following a particular news cycle with great attention, to find out more than what the "mainstream" media has to offer.
For example, the first big piece of news I read in the corporate media this morning was the Washington Post story on the problems of Kyoto's "Cap and Trade"efforts to reduce carbon emissions as practiced in the EU. It lays out the idea that the plan is pushing energy prices in the EU so high that even "green" companies can't survive. I found it curious that the paper would be so critical of a policy to reduce carbon emissions, and that it would use the "too expensive" claim that is so important to global warming naysayers. I also found it interesting that the paper reported that companies were able to get around climate regulations by buying products made in developing countries who weren't part of the Kyoto treaty, given the American press's general dismissal of such arguments in other contexts as being against "free trade." As Europeans have long argued, it will be hard to get developing countries to agree to participate in international cap and trade agreements when the world's biggest polluter continues to opt out.
So, I wondered what else had been said about it. The Guardian printed a rather differentstory on the problems with Cap and Trade earlier in the week. According to them, the problem with the "cap and trade scheme" is that large companies have figured out how to get around the system, but they also quote environmental organizations, who say that the second phase, which will "squeeze" more, will be better. Indeed,it has led big companies from polluting countries to "squeal" - to the delight of these environmentalists. US Steel, for instance, is suing over Slovakian allocations. That would suggest that the "cap and trade" policy is working at least a little bit. Then, I learned that a large group of American CEOs had earlier this year, been lobbying the Bush admin. to do a similar "cap and trade" plan.
The support for such a plan by major CEOs made me suspicious again. Finally, by searching "Kyoto too little too late" I found this article on Alternet which calls for "cap and tax" over "cap and trade," and includes a reference to a new book by George Monbiot called Heat which denounces the "trading" part, (ie, buying Carbon offets) as akin to buying absolution from sin in the Middle Ages.
So, in a bit more than an hour I found liberal, conservative, and left critiques of the Kyoto protocol and was able to sort them out.
The problem is, of course, that many people take the common-sense claims of corporate media without skepticism so they don't bother to look up other sources. I find this hard to understand in an age of such intense skepticism. However, if you think about it for 1/2 a minute, you'll realize that a lot of the skeptical impulse has already been channeled into futilty by a host of corporate spin-meisters. The thing that annoys me most about these wacko conspiracy theories is that researching things from "alien abductions" to "the Freemasons" and the great effort of the government to "regulate us to death" with carbon emissions caps, provides the experience of asking probing questions, and hunting up things on the internet (ie doing research). However, without a simple standard for evaluating their sources, lots of people are getting off the superhighway at the exit that says "Willy Wonka's Cognigive Rest Stop Up-Ahead - Don't Criticize, Just Supersize...the Only limitation is your Imagination!"
sigh.

The Once Friendly Tribeca Film Festival Prices the Rest of Us Right Out

I just checked the Tribeca Film Festival program to find that the once fun & public friendly film-fest has changed its ticket pricing policy. Last year, tickets were $12.00 with a $1.00 internet surcharge. This year, most screenings are $18.00 - with $2.00 internet surcharges. Indiewire has a piece about it, and notes that festival promoters in other cities, where ticket prices remain similar to those in local theaters are "surprised."
My reaction is more like disgust - and I see that I'm not alone in that. It already annoys me that the TFF uses the building that I work in and does not give a discount to either students or teachers there, but does give discounts to people who live in Tribeca, among the most expensive zip codes in the United States. Given the facts that many of the good movies shown at the festival will eventually make it to major distribution on DVD or in theaters, that there are many other things to do in NY, that there are a number of good film venues that regularly show better films (Film Forum/MOMA/Anthology/Walter Reade) and that critics have often responded with skepticism to the programming choices at TFF, I can't think of this as a smart business move. I will suck it up and pay to see the restored print of "Attica", & possibly the new Forgacs movie if they have a "cheap" daytime screening. Otherwise, I'll just be waiting for their releases, just like I waited for "Who Killed the Electri Car?"; "Jesus Camp" and that Jonestown doc. to come out on DVD. So for my big festival fun, perhaps I'll be hitting the NY Underground Film Festbefore it's over and then waiting for the Sundance at BAM.
Too bad, too bad! It's really too bad that the prohibitive ticket prices will keep local kids from getting a chance to see Melvin Van Peebles in person at the first screening of "Blackout."

 

Polemicists Parry: The Cockburn- Berube Rumble

Alexander Cockburn has started a fracas with blogger and liberal academic, Michael Berube with his article about the Laptop Bombadiers which lambasts "progressives" who supported the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. In one particularly lyrical paragraph he says:

But today, amid Iraq's dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? Sometimes I dream of them, -- Friedman, Hitchens, Berman -- like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son.

Berube has responded to Cockburn at the blog "Crooked Timber." In his response, he calls Cockburn intellectually dishonest, primarily offering evidence of this dishonesty by quoting articles by Ed Herman, which is OK for him, because according to Berube, everyone in the "Z/Counterpunch crowd" is interchangeable. (Herman responds to Berube here.)
After reading both articles, and the original article by Berube, which, before the war, ignited the ire of anti-war activists, I'd say that Cockburn is more honest than Berube.
Both are polemicists and employ a similar style of argument; Berube attacks everyone associated with the anti-imperialist left as being oddly obsessed with the notion of "sovereignty"- which is a neat way of avoiding the words empire and imperialism. Cockburn writes that everyone who supported the Clintonian sanctions regime, the bombing of Kosovo, and the attack on Afghanistan is also, regardless of their stated opposition to it, essentially responsible for the current debacle in Iraq.
While I do think it's weird to refer to "anti-imperialists" as the "sovereignty left," I don't think that's intellectually dishonest of Cockburn to make the argument that support for other US military interventions paved the way for the current one, or that public condemnations of the anti-war movement such as the one that Berube wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, effectively amount to support for US imperialism - and therefore for the current war.
I also think that it's an important argument to make as we talk about solutions to the current crisis. As Gilbert Achcar pointed out redeployment is not withdrawal, and as CODEPINK is currently arguing, funding the war is not an anti-war strategy. Most democratic policy proposals, as they did in the case of the war in Vietnam, have opposed the Bush administration's bad strategy in Iraq, not the immorality, criminality, etc. of the war in the first place.
So, why be a non-interventionist and why does it matter for the current situation? I opposed the 1990s sanctions regime and I opposed the bombing in Kosovo, not, as Berube suggests in his response to Cockburn et al, because I loved either Saddam or Milosevic, but because I thought "no good can ever come from US-led military intervention." In my study of history, no matter what the US may say about its reasons for intervention, it has never really been humanitarian (nor has any major empire) and it wasn't in those wars. Berube suggests that a humanitarian intervention is possible, and says that he wouldn't sign major anti-war statements in 2002 and 2003 because they opposed interventions generally. I also read enough about the specificso each situation to believe that neither was any good. The sanctions regime was devastating to the Iraqi people and actually strengthened Saddam Hussein's power, while the Kosovo campaign has not, even according to one of my enthusiastic Albanian students, done much to "liberate" the Kosovar Albanians.
From the point of the view of the anti-imperialist left, those who, like Gitlin, Berube, and others on the "right wing" of the opposition to war in Iraq in 2003, hurt the anti-war movement because their public critiques of the left were more both more audible and more meaningful than their arguments against the war itself; they gained the public ear by echoing what was said in the corporate media. While they may have argued that they opposed the war in the "right" way, what was heard publicly was not "I oppose the war," but "I am a well recognized liberal and I oppose the anti-war movement because it is composed of a bunch of far-left wingnuts."
Criticizing the left publicly in the same terms that one can find in the "mainstream" news organizations, the "Dissent" crowd, has helped marginalize critics of US imperialism by calling them anti-Semites, lovers of Milosevic, supporters of Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinists, etc. etc. THEY argue that members of ANSWER discredit the anti-war movement with their bad politics. However, I would argue that the public condemnations of ANSWER (of whom I'm no fan) and Not in My Name (a slightly better group) by this crowd have done much more to discredit and dissmiss the left in the public's eye than anything you will see at an ANSWER demonstration, particularly if you don't listen to the speeches, as most people don't. In addition to that, despite their bad politics, ANSWER has done more to build the anti-war movement than have Gitlin, Berube, et al.
Those who have insisted that the anti-war movement should NOT talk about the Clinton era as part of the history of the current crisis, should NOT talk about US imperialism, and should NOT talk about Israel, would narrow the terms of debate and limit the range of critique because they see making the opposition to the war about opposing ongoing US policies in the world, not just the current war, as narrowing the number of people who can join the anti-war movement. They worry that being too left will marginalize the movement and keep it tiny and ineffective. Pragmatism, they say, demands building bridges on the narrow issue of...well, not exactly pulling the troops out NOW.
Those who oppose the war as part of a larger imperialist project would argue that just opposing the war as the Bush debacle will not stop the larger problems, and might, if it is done in such a way to reduce opposition in the US while continuing the exploitation of the region, actually make things worse. This demand that anti-imperialists shut up in order to stop imperialism doesn't make sense to anyone who knows anything about US foreign policy in the long term, nor does it make sense as a strategy to anyone who's ever been "radicalized" in the process of political organization. It would mean that instead of offering people who are new to an anti-war movement arguments about the deeper roots of the conflict, that people in the anti-war movement just...
wait a minute, I think I know the answer:
agree that the answer to our problems is ANYBODY BUT BUSH.
I suppose that if you really, really believe that Bush is the *only* reason that the US is in the current mess that it is with the rest of the world, or that the real problem with the war in Iraq was that it was "unilateral" (as Berube's earlier argument suggests) anything else is just beside the point and a bunch of sectarian nonsense.

In some cases, "sectarian" arguing of this type is important for clarifying the issues and can't be avoided. Perhaps you disagree? Let me know, oh commenters....

 

The 2007 garden begins. I thought the crocuses would all be dead, but it looks like at least one made it through the late frost.

 

Teaching the Alien and Sedition Acts in the Age of 9/11....

Since I've been teaching American history survey courses, I've noticed very strong student reactions to three pieces of legislation that I always include in the primary sources for particular topics. They get agitated about The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, The Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1918, and The Korematsu decision.
The sedition act includes the following:

That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government, then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.

When I teach this document, I also have the students read excerpts from the newspaper "The Aurora," a partisan paper from Philadelphia whose editors were thrown into prison under the terms of the Sedition Act because of their opposition to the Adams administration. The "Alien Acts," of which James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, On May 20, 1798, the "Alien bill proposed in the Senate is a monster that must forever disgrace its parents" gives the President the authority to deport people from nations with whom the US is at war, and also to deport "Alien Friends". Since there was no war between the US and France in the 1790s, it was actually against Irish and English supporters of Thomas Paine, who had fled Britain's suppression of the political clubs, that the Federalists used their handy law.
Three years ago, I recall that my entire class was united in opposition to the law, and that they were highly critical of the one person in the classroom who thought it was a valuable piece of patriotic legislation. Ironically, perhaps, the one person who supported the law was an immigrant. She may have been, as some anti-immigrant activists of the 1890s would have argued, unfamiliar with American "institutions" and therefore not appreciative of just how directly these laws undermined the basic freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights. She might have just been trying to impress her teacher, not realizing that advocating everything those in power have ever done was not the way to do so. Last Fall, when my classes were discussing the similar Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during WWI, my class was so unified in opposition to the laws that the only person creating controversy later admitted that he was just arguing for the laws to "stir things up, like in Professional wrestling."
Nonetheless, this semester, the balance of the class has shifted. While many of my current students found the sedition bill puzzling, and asked "how can they pass this law? Doesn't it violate the Bill of Rights?" several students responded by defending the laws, arguing that it was necessary to protect the government from "alien enemies" and to curtail the freedom of the press. One student, clearly thinking of present day issues, made a big point of hidden, alien subversion of the government. I wonder who he thought these alien enemies were in 1798? Would he have had the same reaction if he'd known the immigrants being subjected to interrogation and deportation were the Irish supporters of Thomas Jefferson?
Immigrant students tend to be the most vehement in their opposition to the laws, which they associate with current anti-Immigrant sentiment, while native born Americans seem more likely to support them. I find this all very interesting. I see it as a sign of the times that students, even in a school with a large percentage of immigrants, would be willing to deny rights to "aliens" as a matter of course, but I am shocked that they are so willing to trust the government wih the suspension of freedom of the press, even though I am aware that ACLU poll results sometimes show that about 60% Americans would probably scrap the First Amendment if they could.
Most of the time, I hold back from expressing my own views in the classroom when students are discussing documents, in order to let the conversation play itself out among the students. This time, however, partly due to time considerations, I had to just come out and say that OF COURSE the Sedition Act of 1798 violated the First Amendment. I wish I didn't have to come in and settle that particular question. These are indeed, strange times, and I may have to come up with some kind of lesson on the rest of the amendments that addresses this other problem that Americans seem to have with the Constitution.

Left Forum Part Two: Frances Fox Piven Still Rocks

I have to say something about my second day at Left Forum, even if I'm almost a week late in doing so.
I recovered enough from the stomach flu to return for the Sunday 10am Iraq panel with Gilbert Achcar, Anthony "support the resistance!" Arnove, Christian Parenti, and the ever-pompous AK Gupta. Parenti and Achcar were interesting, though I wouldn't say that anyone there said anything I hadn't already heard before. Experts agree: The situation in Iraq is terrible, and the question that they mostly wound up discussing was whether it would be possible to force the Democrats to take some meaningful action to stop the war. This year, LF had the audience put their questions on slips of paper and pass them to the front. So, predictably, one of the anonymous questions, probably from someone from the ISO, was why people had "stopped supporting the Iraqi resistance" recently, and Achcar explained in detail why he thought there was no national resistance movement in Iraq, but only sectarian resistance that couldn't be supported. If you stop talking about a "mythical, fantasy" "so-called" resistance, Achcar said, and look at what's there, you won't be able to support it. There's a difference between the right to resist and calling the militias currently killing Iraqi civilians a national liberation movement. Parenti said that the Iraqi resistance today is like what would happen in the US if we were occupied by an Islamic fundamentalist power. Iraq, more so than the US, had a completely demobilized left that Hussein had effectively driven underground. So, their resistance is comparable to what would arise here: groups of former CIA and DEA operatives, heavily armed and trained in counter-insurgency on the one hand, and the evangelical Christian right on the other.
Arnove (who has never been to Iraq), had been the featured speaker in a debate two years ago that called on the US anti-war movement to "support the Iraqi resistance." It seems to me that the ISO as a whole has backed down from that position since, but Arnove said, "imagine if there was no resistance and the US had achieved their agenda!" So, even a vicious sectarian resistance that mostly kills Iraqi civilians is better than none? Hmmmm.
* * *
The next session I went to was about globalization, corporatization and public education. I arrived really late, almost at the end of Janelle Scott's fascinating talk about the actual evidence on "school choice" policies. Based on what I've seen of her previous work, it looks as if she moved to her current position, which is highly critical of charter schools, from seeing them as an experiment in democracy. This panel also featured a lively discussion from the audience, almost all of whom were women, and were either parents or teachers, and one of whom was involved in an interesting public ed. project. From there I went to the 3pm session sponsored by the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) on the subject of "financialization." The centerpiece was a talk by Chris Rude, who suggests "financialization," a term which describes the increasing percentage of money made through financial transactions in overall profits, is capital's solution to economic crises. The conclusion of one of the speakers was that in such a context, it might make more practical sense to fight for actual socialism than to try to squeeze out reforms like national health care under the existing system.
Finally, I went to the plenary session on the future of the left. This began with a highly "postmodern" keynote address from Boaventura de Sousa Santos suggesting that people in the "global North" should adjust their paradigms, abandon the search for an overall theory of resistance and follow the lead of the "global South"; and continued with responses from Anarchist anthropologistDavid Graeber, FRSO-soft/Democratic party hopeful, Bill Fletcher Jr, and best of the bunch, as usual: Frances Fox Piven who spoke in no-nonsense terms of practical politics in the current moment of crisis. My fried, D. reflected that she was great as a speaker in the same way that she was great as she blew by us in the crowded book exhibit on her way to the session. She was firm and to the point, not mean. Dr. Piven impressed Bill DiFazio too, and he had a long interview with her on his WBAI show City Watch the following week.
* * *

While the panels were informative and interesting, I was disappointed by the low turn-out at this year's Left Forum. It was dispiriting and felt as if the only participants were members of FRSO, the Brecht Forum, various IS tendencies, members of the CUNY grad center faculty, and the Black Radical Congress. In other words: the usual suspects. I think this was probably an organizing failure from the center and not a reflection of the lack of energy for social movement at the current moment. It's too bad, because this is the moment of peak opportunity for people on the socialist left to reach out to the growing number of people who are unhappy with the war and the current administration.