A quick question

Are there any sane people who think that bombing the holiest site of the Islamic faith would actually deter Muslim extremists from attacking the United States? Although you have to love the idea of deciding who you will attack in retaliation before you even know who has attacked you, or hell, that you'll be attacked. It's so very... PNAC.

Equally amusing is the fact that people who promote this ideas probably consider themselves realists. But anyone with a firm basis in this reality knows that getting the US defense establishment to consider military action against Saudi Arabia would be about as likely as convincing the same folks we should stop sending bombs to Israel.

The New Workout Plan

NPR did a piece last week on the new communication strategy in Iraq (listen here). The U.S military is attempting a Madison Avenue approach, attempting to sell the U.S. occupation as a good thing in the way you would persuade someone to buy Pepsi. The exact tactics are unclear but there is an idea of a new communication strategy. Communication is presented as a new solution but the new solution is full of problems. One problem is the individual person’s inability to be neutral. The second problem is that the new strategy is based on old communication models.

Eric Dezenhall is astute in the NPR piece because he point out the problem with the “evangelical view” of communication. Communication is context-specific, meaning it enters into an existing psychological and cultural framework. Dezenhall points out that a completely neutral audience never exists in advertising. In the case of Iraq, there are a lot of upset people. The marketing strategy, in his estimation, is likely to fail because it is unable to understand the hostility of the Iraqi audience to messages from the U.S. government.

It is unlikely that the military will adapt to a new plan, leadning to the second problem. The military believes a message can be spread through force alone. If a message is repeated loudly and more frequently, then the military believes it will get through. The “Transmission Model” is flawed because it treats communication like a series of mortars. A communicator in any context is simply not able to launch an idea into an enemy territory and hope it does damage. Related to the first problem, the military is not only a believer in a failing plan but a group unable to change plans.

The Consortium for Strategic Communication (FULL DISCLOSURE: I am/was a member of this group) released a report claiming a new communication model was needed for the war on terrorism. The Pragmatic Complexity Model allows for greater adaptation to a specific context but has some disadvantages in presentation. The concept of “failure as the norm” is realistic but unpalatable. Planning small carries fewer political advantages than planning big. It is a tougher model but a new plan for the future. I ask the readers to listen and read, giving some feedback on the best course of action.

Does the New York Times have a hidden agenda? (Or is this just a really big issue?)

The News and Opinion departments at the Times are wholly separate entities. And although trustworthiness is a scare commodity these days, the Times is on my personal list of trusted news sources, so I believe their claim. Which is why today’s paper made me think hard as I flipped back and forth between the front page, the Op-Ed page, and the business section. Below the fold on the front page (where news of ongoing international crimes against humanity belongs,) an article about the Zimbabwean dictator’s efforts to make food more affordable in that country, a brilliant plan that has resulted in severe economic depression, widespread poverty and malnutrition as producers stop making goods they are forced to sell below cost. It reminded me of this article from Tuesday’s Times also about African governments fiddling with the economy, although the famines involved in this one were of a slightly more innocent nature. Rather than a despotic African leader misguidedly immobilizing business and starving his people, in this case the Kenyan government was attempting to protect their own agricultural industry, demanding that the U.S. purchase corn locally to provide to Kenyans working on an American-financed irrigation project. The U.S. couldn’t comply, whether they would have liked to or not, because our food aid program stipulates that American farmers must provide the food supplied. The losers in all this are the Kenyans, who wound up not receiving any corn. And of course the winners in the food aid scheme are the American farmers.

Just a few pages after the photos of empty Zimbabwean grocery store shelves I found Nick Kristof’s column criticizing “the inanity of our farm policy.” His main argument is that his readers (and the rest of the country) shouldn’t be paying him (and hundreds of other rural landowners, dead and alive) not to grow food. I would go so far as to call that policy something worse than inane.

The next page in the paper (for those of us who don’t get the Metro section) is the front page of the business section. And this, page C1, is when I began to wonder if the Times was trying to tell me something. Front and center, a story about New Zealand dairy farmers entitled “Surviving Without Subsidies.” Yes, it was rough when the subsides were first eliminated, back in 1984, the article read, but now the farmers are doing better than ever, producing products the market wants to buy. It was like I was being hit over the head: farm subsidies are bad (whack.) Farm subsidies are bad (whack.) Farm subsidies are bad (whack.)

And yet, less than a week ago, the House of Representatives, in all their partisan political wisdom, passed a farm bill maintaining these ludicrous agribusiness subsidies. Does Nancy Pelosi need to be whacked over the head while someone informs her that farm subsides are bad for American consumers and taxpayers, not to mention poor African farmers? The sad fact of the matter is that her previous comments would imply she’s aware of all three side effects. She’s also, no doubt, aware that corn prices have been pushed sky-high by ethanol R&D. Yet corn remains among the products most heavily subsidized by the new bill, along with other row crops like wheat. In fact, their historically privileged position is the explanation for that broad orange base of the familiar food pyramid. Although if you’ve been paying attention to the government’s nutritional advice recently (and maybe you shouldn’t be, last I read they were advising obese Americans to buy dogs) they’ve reformed their pyramid in the post-low-carb era, and the orange band is now somewhat more reasonable. It’s still larger than any of the others, but smaller than the green (vegetables) and red (fruit) combines. In another nod to nutrition, Friday's farm bill did include some new subsidies for vegetable and fruit growers. It also lowered the eligibility level for subsidies from annual incomes of less than $2.5 million to $1 million. But as the New York Times editorialized, “reducing an outrageous cap to a lower outrageous cap is not exactly our idea of reform.” And although I don’t want to sound like a cheerleader for the Times, I have to say, it’s not mine either.

Bush Threatens to Veto The Best Thing to Happen to Young People in Years

Anya Kamenetz is a writer whose work I've been reading a lot of recently, and she definitely deserves our attention. Kamenetz, at just 26, has made herself a spokesperson for the new generation of college students and graduates, most of whom come out of college with the heavy burdens of student loan debt, credit card debt, low-paying jobs, high rent, poor (or no) health insurance benefits, and are struggling to survive.

This is becoming an increasingly important issue in light of the recent scandals dealing with student loan providers, and the bills that Congress has been considering to limit the rights of loan providers and make college more affordable for students.

The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 (HR 2669) has just been pass in the House, and the Higher Education Access Act of 2007 (S 1762) has just been passed in the Senate. Both of these bills, once combined through conference committee and sent to President Bush for signing, will crack down on subsidies to private loan companies and give debt-laden students a crucial break that they need in order to secure stable jobs, pay off their debts, and put their costly 4-year degrees to use.

So what does our president do? Promise to veto it, of course.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said the House bill "is a big victory for students and families across America who face rising college costs. The time to put the needs of students ahead of the profits of the banks is long overdue. I look forward to passage of similar legislation in the Senate this month." [The Senate did pass similar legislation days after he made that statement].

President Bush, however, has already threatened to veto any college cost legislation that comes his way. A White House statement said: "This costly proposal only benefits students once they leave school, when they can already take advantage of flexible repayment options available under current law and reduce the effective interest rate they pay through the existing tax deduction for student loan interest."

Considering that today's college students are the future of this nation, Bush needs to pay more attention to legislation that affects them. People under 30 - Gen Y - are saddled with debt, are facing the threat of social security running out by the time they retire, and will face tax increases in order to finance Iraq war, yet Bush wants to veto legislation that would financially help the people that are the future of this nation. Everyone deserves a good education in today's competitive society, and America's young people need the financial break this legislation will provide. Let's hope our president comes to his senses and reconsiders this legislation.

Is Richistan seceding?

"Richistan" has all the trappings of a new blogging buzzword. It's snarky, a bit cloying, contrived and unabashedly neologistic. Like many bits of the blogger lexicon, "Richistan" is the title of a book. It's a dependable marketing strategy because as any circulation of the word is free press for the book. And, there it is - blogging, though vaunted as an alternative to the mainstream media, is structured at the very level of vocabulary by the big publishing houses and the corporate media that does much of the pushing in the market. But this article isn't about "Richistan" the newly minted catchphrase. It's about Richistan the place.

The use of a geographic metaphor is apt. In summarizing the lifestyles of the multi-millionaire second estate documented in Robert Frank's book, Paul Harris of the Observer writes:

a huge bubble of multi- millionaires lives almost in a parallel world of private education, private health care and gated mansions. They have their own schools and banks. They even travel apart - creating a booming industry of private jets and yachts.

And I would ad to that that they work separate jobs and tend to socialize with people of similar income. The wealthiest members of our society, for large portions of their lives, occupy spacially distinct social compartments that serve to reinforce class separation by ensuring that the rich and poor have few avenues by which to bond. Suburban secessionists pull their families and funds away from flagging inner cities and class apartheid is normalized through educational districting and zoning laws. We can all probably think of a few places - restaurants, schools, neighborhoods - that we think of being predominantly used by (or available only to) people of a certain class.

If we compared the schedules of rich, poor and middle-class in the US, we'd certainly find spacial differentials along the lines of: hours spent inside a social service, hours spent at a public health centers, number of trips to restaurants and grocery stores (and which ones?), and certainly many others.

And this leads to a question that has always puzzled me - why aren't social conservatives more concerned about class issues? I don't accept the answer that most conservatives, or even a substantial of conservatives, just "don't believe" in what they say. But once we grant the reality of their convictions one would have to note that the emerging American caste system leaves few avenues for social participation for the poor, and almost no avenues for cross-class mingling. Anyone who takes a serious concern to the moral character of the country should be wondering how we can expect to find common values amongst people who never eat together, work together or live together. People whose radically different experiences and day-to-day schedules leave them with few shared frames of reference, figures of speech or experientially tested principles - the very informal social cues, lore and vernacular from which more cognizable political and moral values emerge.

Throughout this piece I've compared the US class structure to apartheid, secessionism and the caste system. Some would object that these are too extreme, but I invite them to reflect on the specific manner in which those divisive classificatory sociopolitical practices impede conversation, and even mutual comprehensibility, between citizens. The idea that equal opportunity could ever be enough to hold a society so stratified together seems naive when consider the profound impacts of spatial separation on less tangible social codes. The separatist leanings of "Richistan" further demonstrates the impossibility of reconciling unity with inequality.

You Tube You Can’t: The Failure of a Medium

You Tube is democracy on the cheap, with all its anti-elitist pretensions. The world’s intellectual elite took one look at it, and probably had an apoplectic fit. But so did the politicians – initially suspicious by its all-too-democratic overtones. Dross and drivel mark its promotions, but perhaps that’s the point. Keep the public happy, a chattering channel that enables this amorphous creature to vent opinion and bile.

Then came along CNN, that Centre for Neutered News. It has happily taken a medium that was theoretically for the public, to promote its name. Politicians have hopped on board. Here was a chance for collaboration: a ‘debate’ by U.S. presidential candidates might be jointly had. Members of the public would film clips and post them to a panel to be forwarded to the aspirants. Evidently, the public is not allowed to run the show with its own amusements. That would be akin to allowing the spillage of Onan’s seed, with all the self-pleasuring that supposes, before an ever watchful priest.

The Democrats came first, courting You Tube and CNN at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C. on July 23. MSNBC called it a ‘provocative, video-driven debate’. One wonders what they were looking at. The same sad themes were hammered home with all the custom-made drudgery that modern politics spouts. Suddenly, You Tube was not simply about idiotic dogs dazzled by hoses or sizzling rip-offs from pay-television networks. We just had to let the politicians in on the game.

We could gauge that the most interesting videos were mere fizzle to the censors of the neutered news brigade. A video, featuring a bespectacled individual, asks the candidates what they can do about a voting public (at least in California) where 88 percent believe its governor Arnold Schwarzeneger to be a cyborg. Such is the state of ‘reality’ in the CNN sieve that such a statistic, far from being a worry, was just ‘fact’. Supposedly in a state once run by a man Gore Vidal considered a ‘triumph of the embalmer’s art’ (Reagan), one might understand.

As for the video, it could not be put to the candidates, for all its merry reflections. All is serious and monochromatic in the get-real world of CNN and Capitol Hill.

The questions got dimmer as the You Tube sessions heated up – or rather petered out, a bland rehashing of mantra and Democratic neuroses. Obama had to justify whether he was ‘black’ enough, at least for those voters who probably still think he is either Osama or white. Given that CNN has spelling difficulties with the name Obama, this might have provided the viewer with some comic relief.

Hillary Clinton had to justify why she was not simply some other de-sexualised woman with the erogenous zones of a mannequin. ‘I am woman enough,’ and all that that entails. Senator John Edwards refused to accept the vote of anybody who would otherwise not vote for either a black man or a woman (sexual or de-sexualised), then rallied behind a more sophisticated façade to steal his own march. To paraphrase his efforts of the deep thinker tormented by the age’s moral messages, he was wrestling with the idea of a civil partnership. Predictably, two men in the sack struck him as irksome, though is wife apparently does not object.

Technology cuts both ways: the radio, George Orwell reminds us, did nothing to help democracy and everything to build the bunkers of totalitarian states. There is a fine line between a medium that emancipates and the Ministry of Truth. The point here is that You Tube, now in the lecherous arms of the political elite, will see battle again done for the ‘grass roots’ with political tofts and populists.

Once such media becomes the standard practice of viewers, it is inevitable that private and public interests will muscle in. Politicians, and Ted Turner, have now worked out that they must do battle through another medium rich with propaganda. The Republicans are following suit. You Tube is simply becoming another idiot box, and one that is no longer ours.

This piece was first published in Counterpunch, July 24, 2007.

Ethanol and Iowans

I recently made a trip to Iowa where I learned about ethanol. Corn and soybeans abound in North East Iowa, where you're more likely to 90-degree-turn your way for hours through farm land then you are to see a stop light. I already new ethanol was important and with rising fuel prices and a depleted supply of fuel there was more love for ethanol than I every really understood.

Ethanol has brought many benefits to agricultural producers in Iowa. Counties are now building economic development strategies around attracting new ethanol plants. Farm land has become more and more expensive as the demand for ethanol soars.

This can be great for some and not so great for many more. Family farms are being replaced by the Monsantos and ADMs of the world. This is not news for most folks who have at least had passing aquitance with the notion of corporate farming. These corporations are heavily involved in ethanol production as well. I saw a 200-car ethanol freight trail rolling down a track just south of Cedar Rapids--the ADM logo affized to every tanker car.

As land prices increase, starting a farm is a difficult if not impossible dream. Farming is expensive and much of that expense is the land. As prices rise, Iowa is facing a "farmer drain" much like many areas without institutions of higher learning or large corporate presences claim to be battling a "brain drain." Young farmers are moving on to school, manufacturing jobs, and other positions that do not require the tremendous outlay of funds.

Is this bad? Yes and no. To think about the agricultural United States slipping away into an antiquated oblivion is surely a tragic thought. Development is good, economic development specifically. Iowa is not the richest state in the U.S. and without ethanol's rise, I wonder how many more families would slip below the poverty line. The landscape is surely changing, but it seems that even though a very central tenant of American identity is fading, economic development is bringing new opportunities and breathing new life into a struggling segment of the population.

Farms will always exit in the United States and Iowa will always farm corn. It runs in the blood. I'm not sure how long ethanol will stay around, but for now King Ethanol rules the land.

We'll have to see where ethanol takes the country and what ethanol does in the long run for Iowa's farmers.

Costs of living

Much political rhetoric on poverty invokes the "vulnerability" of the poor. It's an appropriate term, I think. It does not hold that the poor are helpless or that they are necessarily victims. Neither does it deem poverty a source of shame. What it does emphasize is the capacity of the poor to become victims. The support structures that middle-class Americans enjoy and take for granted cannot be depended upon by those who live on so little. Simple things like health care or a well-funded school that can be so crucial in preventing something like childhood asthma or being held back a year in school from developing into a life-long impediment to success. And I think that, as those examples illustrate, no one is truly more vulnerable than children living in poverty.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation - which takes it's mission to be "helping vulnerable kids & families to succeed" has released it's KIDS COUNT report on children living in poverty. The extensive research reveals a lot of heartbreaking information about the inequalities that are weighing down so many lives.

Local newspapers from Indiana to Michigan are already running stories on the plight of poor children in their states. Perhaps this information will act as a corrective to the apathy with which poverty is treated in so many states. My home state of Texas ranks worst in the nation for children living without health insurance - 1 in 5 children under the age of 18 are not covered for health insurance at any point during the year. What makes that figure all the more troubling is that I know how stricken by inequality Texas is. We have wealthy metropolitan suburbs, communities soaked in oil money. And we have cities, especially along the border where stable jobs and decent pay are too hard to come by. Where people still can't expect to take home more than six dollars for an hour's labor. We have rural areas, where agriculture has been sidetracked to agribusiness and tiny underfunded schools have to service two or three counties worth of impoverished kids. These are the places I lived in and traveled through before leaving to college. And I know that in these places it would be met as a welcome improvement if 1 in 5 kids could be insured.

Growing up my sister had a lot of trouble with allergies. She was sick a lot. In the worst patch, which lasted about two years, she missed so many days that we had to petition the school to let her pass. But she got a lot better after that because we did have a good insurance plan from my Dad's government job, and we could take her to a specialist. She also had a speech impediment but there was a teacher at the magnet school who counseled here through that. She's fine now. You would never know she had those problems. For a family without the support that we had, her health problem could have become more serious. She could have been held back and given up on by the education system. She could have had to deal with the consequences of her speech problem for her whole life - stigmatized in classrooms and in interviews for jobs, But we had the material support we needed and now she is going to graduate in the top of her class and go to college next year.

I haven't been back to Texas in awhile. I now reside in Minnesota most of the year. Coincidentally, Minnesota consistently ranks lowest on all the indicators of child poverty. By and large our children are insured, our families make enough money to get by. I've come to like a lot about Minnesota. I even think about living there after I finish school. The people are more tolerant than in Texas, and yes, more liberal. Minneapolis-St. Paul have everything I would want from a city. And even the winters aren't so bad when you've got the right people to share them with.

But as I start to seriously think about what I am going to do with my life, part of me feels that I need to return to Texas. To organize those communities that are so neglected, and so vulnerable, and fight for justice. For a more egalitarian Texas. It wouldn't be easy - not in terms of politics, and not in terms of lifestyle. But how can I turn my back on my home? What am I doing organizing for homeless people and immigrants in Northfield when there are even more poor immigrants and people without homes back in my hometown who don't have a couple thousand idealistic college students willing to go to bat for them? The Texas Republicans won't help them. The Texas Democrats won't fight for them. And our President thinks programs like S-CHIP are irresponsible - as though there could be anything more irresponsible than allowing children to grow up without food and medicine and a decent place to learn. It might take a whole life to just lay the groundwork for a progressive movement in Texas. But if no one is willing to do that work, then there really is no hope. I got out of Texas because I was one of the lucky ones who was never made vulnerable by inequality. That's why, when I'm done with school, I'm going to be able to live wherever I want. Do something I love. That's why I'm even in school right now. And so maybe the only right thing to do is to go back.

Surprise: military culture of abuse

Aimee Allison's truly disturbing post at Alternet reveals yet another facet of the culture of abuse that permeates our military - yet is so often downplayed in order to valorize and glamorize the image of the soldier. This time, the victims are women. And they are being abused before they even put on their uniform.

Recently, the Marine Corps announced a court settlement in a suit brought by two Ukiah, Calif., teenage girls who were raped by recruiters during a 2004 military-sponsored event.

The recruiters, Sgts. Joseph Dunzweiler and Brian Fukushima, were court-martialed and demoted but nevertheless acquitted of serious wrongdoing.

...

An Associated Press investigation revealed that in 2005 one in 200 frontline recruiters were punished for harassment and abuse. The Army alone had 722 recruiters accused of rape and sexual misconduct in the last decade and called for a recruitment stand down day in 2005. After widespread reports of rape, unwarranted jail threats, cheating drug tests and falsifying documents, thousands of recruiters were ordered to attend ethics training.

So what do we do about abusive recruiters? Oh, right, we let them into our schools.

Recruiters have unprecedented access to girls (and boys) thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act which demands that public schools turn over student contact data to military recruiters so they can "work their market." In addition, the majority of school districts in the country have relaxed rules that allow recruiters to come and go at will. As a result, more young people have personal and sustained contact with recruiters.

I've long supported the anti-recruitment movement, simply on the grounds that I do not think recruiters should be allowed to prey on the most disadvantaged youth at a time in their life - the end of high school - where their future first begins to look unstable. But there is absolutely zero reason to allow a military culture which turns a blind eye to abuse - from Abu Grahib to the 33% of all military women who will be raped by fellow soldiers - cannot be tolerated in our schools any longer.

Obama's populism: pro-black, pro-union - Anti-Hilary?

Matt Stoller of OpenLeft recently made some insightful comments on the shift towards populism in Barack Obama's political rhetoric. He pulls some telling bits from Obama's discussion of health care:

On health insurance, for example, Obama repeated his pledge to sign a universal health care bill by the end of his first term, saying, "I shouldn't have better health insurance than you since you're paying the bill for my health insurance."

This is very different than the call for universal health care in January. Today, he's directly blaming the lobbyists and industries. In January, he was blaming cynicism and unnamed skeptics.

"And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, with each side keeping score of who's up and who's down, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process."

It's a good piece. And I had come to a similar conclusion about Obama's new populist posture having read of Obama's recent pro-labor stances.

"I stood on the picket line and marched with workers at the Congress Hotel in Chicago last week," Obama said. "I had marched with them four years earlier and I told them when I left that if they were still fighting four years from now, I'd be back on that picket line as president of the United States and we'll get the Congress Hotel organized."

I definitely respect Obama's conviction. I think that, when/if I raise children, they will know never to cross a picket line from about the same age they know never to steal or start fights. But I have to wonder about how much of this new populism is coming from a more strategic place of interest.

It's no secret that there is something of a divide between the Democratic establishment and the Democratic activists. The former tends to include people with high-school educations, organized labor, working-class folks, etc. The activist wing tends to skew to college students and people with graduate degrees. Right now, as the insurgent candidate, Obama is wildly popular with the activists. He has made himself into a phenomenon largely by ingratiating himself to the intellectual vanguard of the party, due in no small part to his own unabashed intellectualism. But what has made him a phenomenon outside the activist community is that he expertly combines his intellectual posture with soaring rhetoric and a workmanlike affability.

Nonetheless, Obama's deficit in support relative to Clinton and Gore shows that the Democratic establishment, including the parties more populist elements, have yet to be entirely sold on his candidacy. So while I do not doubt the sincerity of Obama's anti-special interest, pro-union politics, I also think it's clear that he needs to emphasize those aspects of his campaign if he is to make any inroads with Hilary's base.

If anything about Obama has been made clear in this campaign, it's that Obama is a fast learner. Mary Mitchell recently compared his underwhelming performance at Howard, where Clinton nailed the most crucial issues affecting black Americans at the expense of a wavering Obama, to his comfortable position as an "in-your-face" black populist before the NAACP.

"The massacre that happened at Virginia Tech was a terrible tragedy, and we were grief-stricken and shocked," Obama said. "But in this year alone in Chicago, we have had 34 Chicago Public School students gunned down, and for the most part there has been silence. We have to make sure that we change our politics so that we care just as much about those 34 kids in Chicago as we do about those kids at Virginia Tech."

Accused by critics of being too "skittish" to address black issues head on, Obama's spirited responses seemed crafted to put those critics to rest.

The pressures of political candidacy in a divided party are legion. Obama is learning to walk the wire between being too black for white voters and note black enough for black voters. Ann at Feministing has noted that Hilary faces similarly perplexing demands from feminist voters. Balancing populism with intellectualism is just one more act that Democratic candidates are expected to perform. While clearly not as linked to identity politics as the concerns of race and gender currently confronting the two front-runners, there is a sense in which candidates, owing to their elite credentials, are expected to prove their populist credentials without resulting to furious Lou-Dobbs-style pulpit-pounding.


As of now, I'm actually glad to see Obama take some more aggressive stands, whether or not it's emergent from some calculated anti-Hilary politicking. A passionate candidate who wants to unite everyone is great, and easy to get behind. But the same passionate candidate who is willing to call the anti-working class, anti-black and anti-democratic interests of the American establishment to the mat is all the more inspiring. Obama's had the insurgent's crown for awhile now - it's high time he's begun to do some in-surging.

Tourture banned... again?

Not that we torture anyway, but we do occasionally lapse into the cruel, inhuman and degrading business. So, George W. Bush has signed an executive order disavowing that too. And this time, he didn't even gut it with a defiant signing statement!

Call me cynical, but I'm not convinced this will do much, especially given the total lack of oversight within the detainee system and the continued assertions by military leaders that there are only aberrant torturers and not a culture which facilitates torture. And the White House is still playing coy. They "declined to say" whether the CIA currently manages a detention and interrogation program. Transparency is clearly not winning any battles here.

I was also struck by the stated intentions of the order:

Mr Hayden said the executive order gave CIA officers "the assurance that they may conduct their essential work in keeping with the laws of the United States".

Military lawyers say the main point of the orders is to offer protection to CIA officers who might get sued in US courts if they were deemed to have abused prisoners.

Those thoughtful military lawyers, always with their hearts in the right place.

Speaking freely

The Gauntlet reports that Canada's universities are not taking warmly to the idea of a boycott on Israeli's academic institutions. It's increasingly rare that I find myself in Israel's corner, but I have to think that Canadians are making the right decision here by rejecting an unfair and ineffective policy. One of the professors quoted correctly points out that such a policy presumes an intellectual consensus (perhaps even homogeneity) amongst all of the implicated communities at the university calling the boycott as well as the universities being targeted. I agree, and I'd add that trying to isolate Israeli thinkers is not the way to cultivate a critical consciousness for Palestinian justice amongst academics or students. Israel, like the United States, finds many of its most prominent Leftists and critics in the ivory tower - making it into an ivory Bastille just doesn't seem promising. All this concerns the potential utility of Israel's students and academics to anti-militarist, Pro-Palestinian consciousness, so I'll note for the sake of clarity that even an Israeli academia that loyally supported the IDF and showed no sign of altering its perspective would not be deserving of a boycott.


One argument made in this controversy does strike me as disingenuous, though, and that is the move to contrast "boycott" with "academic freedom", as in this sentence:

"Universities, idealistically, are supposed to be politically free," said Stortz. "The university is all about freedom of thought and activity. It is designed to create ideas, research them, and deconstruct them for critical discussion, and therefore, must take a fairly non-political posture to try and understand ideas intellectually."

I take issue to this line of argument not because I disagree that a boycott would strike a blow to the exchange of ideas that is crucial to intellectual development. It most certainly would be. But I do not think we should be fooled into thinking that not engaging in such a boycott in anyway leaves us with a politically neutral forum for discussion, or that the ideal of the "politically free" university is anything but that.

Universities, like all other forums of discourse, are inevitably pervaded by power. At my school, brining in a pro-Palestinian feminist activist to speak about her work required that a student coalition of activists (of which I was a part) to put forward the funds and, more importantly, to name ourselves as her host. No department (like Political Science) or student-service institution (like Multicultural Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Center) on campus was willing to risk the political liability of affiliating with her. Even those that were sympathetic to her work and excited about the prospect of her visit simply did not want to face the backlash of defying the considerable pro-Israel consensus amongst faculty, administrators and trustees. Certainly no one was being boycotted, but political power was still brought to bear on the exchange of ideas. To introduce something like an academic boycott would not impose power on what once was a power-neutral territory, it would merely reform the existing networks of power.

This is the same argument I make in reply to conservatives who believe that "political correctness" will compromise the political neutrality of campus speech. Campus speech is manifestly not politically neutral even absent a speech code or an anti-harassment policy. True such a policy might shift some power in the direction of, for example, queer students. But in discursive climate of the American university, there is nothing that I, as a gay student, can say to a straight interlocutor that has the psychological or social capacity to induce shame, self-doubt, or marginality based on her or his sexual orientation. But my straight interlocutor wield precisely that power, and can unleash it by using homophobic stereotypes or epithets. Similarly, there are a variety of speech situations in which my race, gender, ability status and national origin grant me a considerable amount of power. The subject position of an interlocutor and their relative power in a conversation depends upon their place in structures of privilege that accrue on all types of social axes. To the extent that the array of policies lumped under the banner of "political correctness" by conservative critics can help to reverse asymmetries of power (or at least blunt their capacity to induce harm) I support them.

Similarly, I might support reform policies that could dampen the ability of powerful campus figures to exert influence over the type of political activity that students engage in. But the boycott of Israeli universities would do no such thing.

Are Republicans MORE likely to support a single-payer healthcare system? No, but maybe they should be.

Much of the controversy surrounding filmmaker Michael Moore’s lambasting of the American healthcare system in his recent documentary SiCKO has revolved around his analysis of healthcare costs in America as compared to costs in other Western countries. Moore and CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently debated some numbers on Larry King Live after Gupta suggested that some of the information presented in the film was misleading and even flat-out inaccurate. Regardless of whether or not Moore fudged some data in the film, his fundamental critique of our healthcare system cannot be disputed. Americans pay much more for healthcare than citizens of other nations while receiving lower quality care. The single-payer, government financed healthcare in these nations provides a high-level of care without wasting money on administrative overhead and without generating nauseatingly enormous profits in the private sector. Gupta and Moore’s data on healthcare costs may have been conflicting, but both sets of data reveal this truth.

Moore goes on to suggest that the major barrier to implementing a single-payer system is the size of the healthcare lobby in Washington. Politicians, including presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton, the leader of the failed 1993 effort to implement sweeping healthcare reform, depend on the support and financial backing of the healthcare industry. It’s not surprising that she and the other “first-tier” presidential candidates are not advocating a single-payer system. Insurance companies would have no role in a single-payer system and, to protect their livelihoods, are throwing money—the real thing that wins elections in the U.S.—at all the major candidates. Even if they were not so dependent on the industry for campaign dollars, the candidates would likely still balk at promoting a single-payer system for fear of the ruinous “socialist” label that would come along with it.

For obvious reasons, Republicans, typically the pro-business party in our two-party system, are overwhelmingly opposed to a single-payer system. But if they were to take a step back for a moment and consider the impact of lower-quality care on the American workforce, they might become the stronger advocate for single-payer. One of the most cited reasons for their support (albeit, sometimes lackluster and/or misguided support) of public education is that it pays of financially in the long-term. Educated people accomplish more and are more productive than uneducated people. Famed economist Adam Smith, hero of the Reagan administration when it sought smaller government, even posited the benefit public education provides to the economy. Taking this sentiment to the next step, wouldn’t better healthcare lead to higher worker productivity? In the long run, wouldn’t a healthier, more productive workforce lead to a healthier and more stable economy? Moreover, if a single-payer system lead to lower healthcare costs overall, wouldn’t new investments stemming from those healthcare savings grow the economy?

I think the answer to these questions is yes. Perhaps a single-payer system would be pro-business in the long-term. Unfortunately for us, politics in this country is rarely concerned with the long-term. As Niccolo Machiavelli realized a half-millennium ago, the most important goal of those in power is to do whatever it takes to stay in power. No serious presidential candidate will support a single-payer system until that breaking point when support from the for-profit healthcare industry does not translate into enough campaign cash to buyout the votes of an American electorate too fed-up with our increasingly dreary system of healthcare. I’m not going to get my hopes up, but maybe SiCKO will get a rise out of us.

Stop me if you've heard this one before

In preparation for my upcoming trip to Croatia, I've been reading up some regional history. This passage comes from Ann Lane's Yugoslavia: When Ideals Collide.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia was the response of a fractured community with little experience of the practice of pluralist politics to the rapid imposition of western democratic practices of government and the pressures on the economy and society arising from globalisation.

I'm trying to think of major policy decisions made in the intervening decade where this lesson might have been crucially relevant but overlooked. Maybe by people who later claimed there was no way of knowing the mess their decision would've created, that all the intelligence pointed their way?

But, damnedest thing, I'm drawing a blank. Why do they even make us study history?

Least surprising news story ever

The Justice Policy Institute has published the results of a study on approaches to gang violence. Their conclusion: social justice is more important than criminal justice in de-escalating the levels of violence in American communities. What a shocker. The Star summarizes the findings:

More police, more prisons and more punitive measures aren't the answer to reducing gang activity, concludes a new U.S. study that experts here say underscores the need for Canada to reject that approach in favour of investing in jobs, schools and programs for disenfranchised youth.

Mass arrests, tougher prison sentences, increased surveillance and staggeringly huge gang databases typify the enforcement approach relied upon to respond to gang violence. These methods are rooted in rational choice theories which hold that if only law enforcers can make the penalties and risks of gang activity sufficiently scary in comparison to the perceived benefits, youth will stop joining gangs. There's a major problem with this trend, and it's that the decision to join a gang is hardly the result of cost-benefit analysis.

While a small proportion of youth will join a gang for protection or excitement, the vast majority report more subtle push factors that incline them to participate. Most youth join because they become connected to gangs through their family members or peer groups. The less connected the youth are to mainstream social institutions such as schools, workplaces and families, the more likely they are to join. This list of risk factors for gang membership shows that academic failure, unemployment, and family break-down consistently make the list across a wide range of studies. Drug use is also a major risk factor, as drug-using peer groups tend to overlap with gang-participating peer groups.

The solution is manifestly not imprisonment. While in jail, about 60% of inmates lose their jobs, another 40% lose touch with their families. Gangs, unlike employers, students, and mothers, are a presence in juvenile incarceration facilities. With their social networks and career prospects damaged by imprisonment, released youth are very likely to be pulled into gang activity once again. This also suggests that imprisoning drug-using youth is a poor approach (and an unfair one, since affluent white kids get an inordinate amount of the court-assigned rehab stints, while working-class minorities see much more of the prison time). More than often, as David Schraub recently noted, prison stints for minor drug offenders only produce especially hardened criminals who will only return to incarceration.

What is needed are better crisis intervention programs for at-risk youth, to connect youth on the edge to positive peer groups and proper educational facilities. Too often though, these development programs are alienating to urban and working-class youth, as they essentially try to integrate those youth into middle-class white peer groups. They also tend to emphasize the criminality and deviance of the community the youth came from (and was heading to), rather than emphasizing the institutional conditions producing these outcomes. A corrective to this would be development programs that are designed for minority and poor youth with a social justice approach to development that emphasize social awareness as well as self awareness in decision-making.

And of course, as the Justice Institute finds, there's no reason we should be worried only once we've identified youth as being at-risk. Stronger schools in low-income communities that try to tackle the cumulative developmental disadvantages of growing up poor (which range from poor nutrition to under-stimulation as a result of parents working long hours), employers that offer reasonable income and hours to poor adolescents, and reforms in both work and welfare that allow parents to spend more time with their children would all go along way to limiting the pull of gangs in low-income communities.

How might we pay for all that? Well, a strong progressive income tax has never hurt anyone. And de-criminalizing marijuana use would free up millions of dollars from enforcement and imprisonment expenditures. In these instances, we almost have the choice to look at a kid and decide if we're going to pay for his classroom or his jail cell.

In the mean time,trying to punish violence after-the-fact with harsh penalties is a no-win strategy. And there is no apparent gain to suppression tactics that use heavy surveillance and intimidation tactics, save to give poor children the experience of living in a police state. A more promising tact is to seek out the sources of violence and marginalization in American life that push so many youth into criminal circles. The war on crime and drugs has only produced what philosopher Brian Barry calls a Black Gulag, a vast and costly system of incarcerated black men as a result of unfair policing and sentencing, not to mention a flagging, underfunded system. of social programs - and which, as the ultimate insult, seems to have failed to significantly reduce crime rates in urban communities. The JPI report reveals disturbing but unsurprising parallels in the fruitless punitive-militarist approaches to gang activity that are too frequently adopted by law enforces. The police war on gangs appears, so far, to have been nothing more than a war on America's poorest youth.