I cite

the disappearing individual

On a commes de garcon fashion show:

"The theme for her show was “Invisible Clothes.” And in seeming contradiction to that idea, she offered some of the most outsize, extreme and extraordinary notions: kilts that were as enormous as a tent, trousers that could hold a veritable crowd within a single leg and a giant hood that took on the proportions of a sarcophagus. This wasn’t so much a line of clothes destined for your closet as it was a statement for the season — for the times."

"There were elements to these clothes that recalled past Kawakubo collections, such as their flatness, which reduces them to two-dimensions, their almost monstrous size and the sheer discombobulating nature of them. They are not, in literal terms, invisible.

In these enormous creations, you can often make out the silhouette of the body even as the garments extend far beyond it. It’s as if a child has pulled the bed sheets over his head and declared himself invisible even though the shape of his body can be seen beneath the blankets."

 

Jackie Stevens: response to Slammer

Some people may know that the person Jackie Stevens identifies as "Slammer" in her account of the outrageous proceedings at Northwestern University that have resulted in her being banned from campus pending examination by a university appointed psychiatrist posted an account of his own yesterday. Jackie has responded (see the link below). Among the complex politics of sex, race, sexuality, law, and academia running through these events -- or, better, which the university is using in an attempt to override tenure and punish an outspoken faculty member -- is the repeated use of tropes of mental illness and instability to characterize a woman who does not back down, who defends her position, who makes argument, and who is brave enough to take controversial positions. The language of fear, potential danger, and need for safety is used to bully and coerce.

Here is the response:

Brand NU
Response to Slammer

September 2, 2016

Yesterday, the colleague I called "Slammer" -- he slammed the door and then claimed I had a "break from reality" in reporting this -- posted his version of events on Facebook and shared this with a circle of overlapping "friends," many of whom are political scientists.  Several forwarded it to me.  Since he is not identifying himself publicly outside FB, I will continue to use his pseudonym.

There are two parts of his account that he weaves together such that his horrifying and life-altering experience of being lynched at the age of nine, unknown to me before yesterday, produces his experience of my scholarship within critical race theory, and my comments opposing certain sorts of faculty appointments (spousal hires), as "borderline racist."   I hold no ill will against him for these beliefs, but I am outraged to learn that people in positions of authority at NU instrumentalized his anxieties to serve their goal of banning and firing me.  These are simply not "feelings" on which a research university can rely for firing a tenured faculty member. I also now understand why no one at NU would share with me the basis of Slammer's fears of me--he reiterates on his FB page that he is "aboslutely afraid" of me: you cannot deny someone access to students and her office because someone claims her scholarship and views on academic governance make him afraid, even if this is accurate.  Banning me is neither a legal nor helpful means of  addressing this colleague's insecurities.

The Weeds
As my colleagues know, my opposition to spousal hires has nothing to do with race nor qualifications.  As I pointed out, when the Office of the Inspector General attacked the Executive Office of Immigration Review for nepotism in the assignment of interns to immigration courts, the accusation was not that the children of headquarters' officials were untalented, but that the practice creates a climate of patronage inconsistent with the impartial handling of official business.  I am  concerned about the patronage implications of faculty spousal appointments, and how these arrangements may produce tacit expectations of quid pro quo with the administration.  

This is a minority view in my department, perhaps just held by me.  According to Socrates and John Stuart Mill, my colleagues should be grateful I am sharing this with them.  This concern about the large number of spousal hires at NU is one I've voiced for several years.  I realize many factors go into appointments and I may be wrong about this, but it is not a view that is insane, nor is it racist.

Before turning to the politics of sex, sexuality, race, law, academia, and much more running through all this, I want to focus on March 8.  

I filed the complaint about these events on that date.  The Chair, close friends with Slammer, and the Dean of Faculty, a former Department Chair, completely ignored my complaint, even though I pointed out a student witnessed this.  The events I described were not visual but aural.  Slammer yelled.  Slammer slammed a door. These events make noise. You didn't need to see this to overhear it.  Why not investigate threats to my safety, then and now, psychological and otherwise?

No one contacted me or the student. Here was a specific allegation of specific violations of NU policies, but no one bothered to follow up on my claim about being exposed to Slammer's aggression.  The investigator was brought in much later, to investigate Slammer's claim that in reporting the incident, per NU policy, I had defamed him!  The double standard is self-evident.

In the aftermath of March 8, I figured that Slammer would apologize. I was hopeful the episode would occasion bringing in a mediator to meet with members of my troubled subfield, as I had requested several times in the past.  Slammer is right: the issues that divide us are not disagreements about the Buffett Institute, though Slammer has made statements avowing his long-standing support for the U.S. military, based, he wrote, on the honorable service of several generations of men in his family. That puts him on record as hostile to my own views on this.  That is fine with me, but, as with his claims about our different views on portions of Black Political Theory, he may find this intolerable as well.   (My request for a mediator has been rebuffed by two other members of my subfield, whose actions I believe are at the heart of this.)  

To be clear on a point Slammer misconstrues: I never claimed that Slammer or other members of my department were provoked to claim they feel unsafe bcause of me because of my research and organizing on the Eikenberry appointment.  I believe that they loathe me for reasons that are entirely indefensible in an academic community. Furthermore, the efforts by the anti-Jackie clique would be moot were it not for the fact that Board and Provost's office want me out of NU because of my ongoing research on NU's prominent role in the military-industrial-academic complex, research that uses undergraduate research assistants, as they know from my article about this.

(Among the far more egregious actual incidents of misconduct NU administrators have ignored was a Chair throwing a chair during a faculty meeting, one colleague told me.  And where is the discipline for the Provost who demonstrably threatened someone might sue students who disapproved of his Eikenberry appointment?)

March 8, 2016: What was Reported

In the event, here is a screen shot from the statement of the student who overheard Slammer.

Please note that the student points out that he made this statement to the investigator and she omits it from her report.  

Why did this happen?  The person who conducted the investigation, Kathleen Rinehart, was brought in because she was close with NU's attorneys and specializes in how to fire tenured faculty. NU seems to be following her game plan, which, by the way, is to claim that faculty are "erratic," "disruptive," and so forth.  According to Professor Stephen Eisenmann, who helped write NU's Faculty Handbook, the procedures Rinehart outlines are inconsistent with the Faculty Handbook.  NU's attorneys seems to be ignoring NU's rules and following Rinehart's script.  (See Barbara A. Lee, Kathleen Rinehart, "Dealing with Troublesome College Faculty and Staff: Legal and Policy Issues," Journal of College and University Law, 2011.)

That script requires someone who is incoherent, erratic, unbalanced, and so forth.  I am not that.  So they had to invent a paper version of me as though I am.  And who better to do that than the co-author of the article on this, who was closely coordinating her investigation with the Department Chair, whose improprieties I also had challenged and reported?

Notice Slammer's claim that the my version of events indicate that I had a "break from reality."  

What a weird claim.  Slammer's PhD is in Politics, not Psychiatry.  Why say I had a "break from reality," and not just that I lied?   Also, is my psychosis contagious?  Did the student who heard Slammer also have a "break from reality"? 

If Slammer simply said I lied, then this would have to be characterized as a violation of a specific university policy. Discipline would require a specific charge and evidence that I lied, evidence that I could challenge in the Faculty Senate. I believe that Rinehart and other NU administrators were eliciting statements from Slammer and my Chair that they "feel unsafe" around me and to claim I "break from reality" to suit their legal strategy.  NU's attorneys seem to believe that they may legally restrict my research and teaching in an indefinite time frame (the actions against me began at the end of April), without sharing with me any charges or evidence.  

 Slammer tells his FB friends not to credit my account of the events of March 8--they weren't there and shouldn't write in my support.  But claiming I "broke from reality" is not a factual claim about what happened.  It is a claim about the personality and psychology of the person who put forward a narrative other than the one Slammer and his clique who dislike me want to advance and can and should be refuted by evidence I am not someone who would ever "break from reality."

As recently as last Sunday, August 29, Associate Provost Lindsay Chase-Lansdale wrote to me: "Regarding your question about a review by the Committee on Cause, I would point out that no sanctions have been imposed to date." (NU's attorneys must be going nuts over the fact that Slammer in his FB post referenced the "recent disciplinary actions that Northwestern has taken against" me.  This is evidence that clear the actions against me are indeed punitive and that the "safety" claims are a ruse.)

Chase-Lansdale states she will forward my request to the Committee on Cause after a new Chair is named, but this will be far too late for me for me to have the ban lifted in the near future. It likely means that my classes this fall will be canceled, which was the stated objective of the Provost's office and my Chair since the fall, 2015.  

March 8, 2016: The Substance
Slammer claims that I am a "disruptive person" and that in his position of Associate Chair, this became unbearable.  The position of Associate Chair in my department carries few responsibilities that put the person holding this position, appointed by the Chair, in regular contact with other faculty.

In fact, the meeting on Mach 8 was the second of two interactions Slammer had with me as an Associate Chair the entire year.  The first was in the fall, when I asked him to have the Advisory Committee consider for including on the Department agenda the fact that the Chair had cancelled the Department's election for Faculty Senate.  He told me she "has her reasons" for this -- I believe it was to ensure I could not hold this position -- and that he was "close personal friends" with the Chair. On this basis he refused my request to raise this matter with the Advisory Committee.

In the end, it seems I was right to be suspicious of the reason Slammer provided me as to why he wanted to change my schedule; having me teach a seminar instead of the scheduled large lecture class would cause less havoc with student schedules.  There is a third party involved (who did not request this change) but I can say that a)  the rationale Slammer gave me is contradicted by the last five years of posted course schedules; b) it fits the timing for pushing me out in the fall.  In an April 29, 2016 letter to the Dean of Faculty, the Chair of my department, who already had banned me from hiring undergraduate research assistants, writes: "removing [Stevens] from the workplace in advance of the start of the fall 2016 quarter is advisable, likely necessary."

The April 29 letter also states that "[Associate Provost] Lindsay [Chase-Lansdale] and I have been conferring all year" (emphasis added).

Paranoia
The colleagues who wrote the Dean, as well as Slammer, call me paranoid.  As one colleague in the Political Science Department told me recently, apparently I was not paranoid enough.  I knew the Chair had cancelled the Department's fall election for the Faculty Senate after failing in her efforts to dissuade me to run. (The Chair and Slammer both intended he would assume that position without opposition; apparently fearing he would lose a department election, they cancelled it altogethe.)  The Chair gave me an explanation that was clearly pretextual and resulted in the Department's Senator being an assistant professor who was on leave in France. The Chair also had instructed staff to lie to me about how they were handling the applications of students who were applying to work for me under the auspicies of the Farrell Fellow program.

Still, it never occurred to me that these people would spend months and months plotting with the Provost's office, NU's attorneys, and a hired gun to try to remove from campus a productive, respected colleague who was doing her job, including appropriately voicing questions and stating reasonable concerns on matters that bear on faculty self-governance and pedagogy.

More to come...  

In the meantime, if you want to take a look at the scholarship informing my critique of Slammer's views on Black Political Thought, which came up just once as I recall, in the context of discussing the wording of a position request, please read my essay, "Recreating the State," which first appeared in a special issue of Third World Quarterly I co-edited with Richard Falk and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Third World Quarterly, 27.5 (2006).  This essay explores how essentialist identity politics of White and other racial, national, and ethnic groups consolidate nationalist, imperialist, racist state power, and points out the changing characteristics and dynamics of these subject positions as evidence for demanding critiques of nationalist insitutions that consolidate intergenerational identities, including those that may appear to be harbors of temporary safety for a few but that perpetuate systemic violence and inequality for most of us. A few years ago I was honored to learn that Angela Harris had selected this essay for incluion in her reader, Race and Equality in Law (Vermont, Ashgate: 2013).

Northwestern University bans Prize-winning Political Theorist from Campus

(material below originally posted at brandnu.world)

 

Brand NU
An Introduction

Northwestern University Bans Political Science Professor from Campus, Retaliation against Critic (September 2016)

 At the end of July, with no warning and no specific charges or evidence of wrong-doing, Weinberg College Dean Adrian Randolph banned me from contact with students, including students not enrolled at Northwestern, and from the Northwestern campus, including my office and the libraries in Evanston and Chicago. The alleged rationale?  Claims of faculty "feeling unsafe" around me, assertions untethered to any specific actions or statements on my part. These prohibitions are in place as I await my mandatory "fitness-for-duty" interview with an NU-chosen psychiatrist. And yet for over a month, NU has failed to provide the psychiatrist with the materials he needs to even schedule our interview.  I recently learned that my Department Chair had been coordinating this event with the Provost's office since last fall, shortly after the publication of my article in Perspectives on Politics offering an unflattering portrait of Northwestern as exemplifying the military-industrial-academic complex. The fact that I played a key role in obstructing the appointment of a retired military officer whose leadership of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies was a hard fought for objective of NU's Board and administration must have hardened their resolve.

     In 2010 I was hired as a full professor in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University, where I teach political and legal theory.  I also am the founding director of the Deportation Research Clinic as well as a founding co-convener of a research working group on the Global Research University, both housed in the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwesterrn University. In 2013-14 I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2014, I was the keynote speaker for the Association of Political Theory.  
     In 2011 I received the Project Censored award for #4 of the Top 25 Censored Stories of 2010, for "America's Secret ICE Castles," an article revealing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Fugitive Operations were being surreptitously run out of unmarked buildings in office parks across the country, as well as New York City's Chelsea Market, which also houses the Food Network. My scholarship, most recently on private prisons, also has been used in successful individual and class action lawsuits.  For more on my work, please go here.  
    For several years I also have been a scholar and critic of the militarization of political science. In 2015 I published in Perspectives on Politics an article exposing NU's militarized Board of Trustees, including Boeing's side contracts supporting Doha's "Education City," where NU runs a journalism school the U.S. State Department tasked with changing Al Jazeera's anti-U.S. coverage.  
    Last year I was at ground zero of an effort by faculty, students, and alumni to block the appointment of retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry to run NU's Buffett Institute for Global Studies. Eikenberry didn't have a PhD or any peer-reviewed articles, but he did have excellent connections in the Department of Defense and State Department, not to mention China. The administrators said he'd help rotate NU faculty through government, like Harvard, they said. The CEOs and directors of Abbott Laboratories, Boeing, Caterpillar, and General Dynamics who run NU thought the China contacts would be good for business, a colleague with ties to the upper echelons of the administration told me.  
    In mid-April, 2016 we were elated to learn that the private letters, public petition, and the resolution opposing the appointment two students introduced for consideration by the Associated Student Government worked!  Instead of showing up in the fall, 2016, the Chicago Reader announced in mid-April: "Northwestern surrenders..."  (Eikenberry later explained that he couldn't handle the criticism: "...opposition proved so persistent that Eikenberry decided in April to pull the plug," the Washington Post reported.)
     A jointly crafted, oddly worded press release conveyed NU's responsibility for not adequately managing the situation.  The Chair of NU's Board of Trustees, William Osborn, told the Faculty Senate in June that the appointment was "not properly socialized."
     A dis-appointment, if you will.        
    June brought another momentous announcement: Provost Dan Linzer was "stepping down," as NU's President Morton Schapiro phrased a decision widely understood as the Board firing Linzer for botching the Eikenberry appointment.
     The triumph of faculty and students over the administration and its Board was covered by the Washington Post, which exacerbated and actually called the episode an "embarassment" for NU's administration.
      And so it came to pass that by the end of July I learned I was next.   
     As a number of collaborative projects with about a dozen students and recent graduates from NU and other campuses were humming along quite nicely (student names are pseudonyms)--e.g., Richard was coding FOIA litigation over redactions asserting claims of proprietary information or trade secrets; Diane was coding cases of Illegal Reentry with claims of U.S. citizenship; Maria was drafting a FOIA lawsuit to obtain contracts from the State Department; Margaret was doing legal research on historical criteria for evidence of U.S. citizenship; Mark was analyzing FOIA releases on ICE facility work programs; and I was advising Anne on her research comparing the FOIA law in England with that in the United States--Weinberg College Dean Adrian Randolph emailed to me a two-page letter with edicts banning me from campus, prohibiting me from all contact with students, including those enrolled elsewhere, and ... ordering me to undergo a mandatory fitness-for-duty examination with a psychiatrist chosen by Northwestern.       
    The reason? Dean Randolph was just following up on reports he and my Chair helped stir up, the gist of which was that I might explode at any moment and cause a "blood bath" in Scott Hall.  (Turns out Randolph had numerous reports claiming the opposite, including one from a student grateful for my   support after the Provost let it be known Eikenberry might sue her for defamation. He disregarded each and every one of these.)  
     Right.  Completely outrageous.
    And yes, also surreal.  If this reminds you of Stalin's Soviet Union you can join the chorus of my colleagues at NU who know me and, as importantly, know the folks behind this.  Watching this unfold feels a bit like finding myself in the middle of the sort of twisted plot you'd encounter in "House of Cards," especially when I read the report of the pseudo-independent investigator NU hired.  It turns out she's very close with several attorneys in NU's Office of General Counsel (OGC) and co-wrote an article on how to fire tenured faculty.
     Just for the record: I have never been diagnosed with a mental illness, nor prescribed psychotropic medications, nor even had this suggested to me. I also have never physically threatened much less assaulted anyone, anywhere; I have never made any statements to third parties threatening anyone else, anywhere; and the single factual allegation on which the Dean based his ban -- that I spoke "aggressively" and was "threatening" -- is from a faculty member whose aggressive conduct toward me was the reason the investigator was called in!  

Slammer
    That's right: I followed NU procedures and filed the complaint accurately pointing out my colleague's unprofessional conduct, but the investigator had arranged our meeting in a tiny windowless room adjacent a university police officer, due to her alleged concerns about her physical safety. Meanwhile, prior to meeting me, she met the guy who slammed the door -- let's call him Slammer -- in his office and with no adjacent police. Slammer, it turns out, was overheard by a student, who, on hearing yelling and a door slam, approached me and reflexively asked if I was okay and what happened.  The student has signed a sworn statement that if called to do so he will testify in court that he heard a man's voice yelling, including "get out!", no other voice, and the door slamming, and that he told this to NU's investigator.  
      In other words, there is one specific allegation of my actually doing something that supposedly made this guy (who is larger than me and has bragged about being an athlete) feel "threatened by" and "unsafe" around me and a student has signed a document stating he will give evidence under oath that will show this guy lied.  
    Slammer has denied in writing raising his voice and stated that he closed the door quietly; my contemporaneous complaint stated that Slammer blew up, yelled at me, and slammed the door.  NU's investigator reported the student "never actually saw anything," and omitted what the student told her that he heard.
    I know.  Lots of head scratching.  I must be leaving something out.  
    I am.  
    According to letters alleging I pose a risk to campus safety--authored by five members of the Department who are part of the administration and/or people about whose improprieties I had complained:   "she is a 'No' vote on many matters before the Department"; I have a "bias against the military"; am "peculiar" (i.e., gender non-conforming, queer); "feel [I] can say anything"; am "disrespectful"; and "question [the] integrity" of the Chair (according to the Chair); and some students disliked how I ran a class.
     The documents shared with me purport to show wrongdoing, but contain not a single specific charge of any rule violation, even though NU's Faculty Handbook (pp. 30-31) requires this be shared with faculty prior to taking any actions that impede our research or teaching.  
    The best this little clique can do to support the alleged fear of me is to reference several ridiculously petty and false allegations unrelated to physical safety, many involving third parties.  The idea appears to be that if they can show I am unstable (by voting no, being "biased" against the military, questioning admissions decisions made by people who did not read most of the files, and so forth), that must mean I have a "borderline personality disorder," as one colleague suggested, and that must mean I will attack people physically.  
    No one explains how I could have this severe, dangerous psychological disorder and yet have never actually threatened or harmed anyone.
  My favorite email is from a political scientist stating that the editor of the Daily Northwestern rejected a letter by a graduate student who supported the Eikenberry appointment and told the student it was because  "Professor Stevens is a powerful person." This was the sole example this individual had to support his claim I posed a threat to students.  
     In the end, the Daily published the student's letter.  Or at least it published a letter by a Political Science graduate student (a major in the Air Force) claiming I was a "conspiracy theorist." And someone posted this letter on both ends of the hall in the Political Science Department when Eikenberry gave a talk, where the letters remained for some time thereafter.  (Based on my research on the nation-state I object to militarism; so do the veterans who opposed Eikenberry's appointment, including Aaron Hughes, whose Tea Project at Northwestern was organized and supported in this same time-frame by several anti-Eikenberry faculty and students, myself included, as discussed in this Letter to the Daily.)
     Someone must have been pretty hard-pressed to step up for the administration if the best he could do to speak on behalf of apparently vulnerable students references nothing I have said or done.  To be clear, outside the classroom I have no authority at all anywhere in the university, save that awarded by evidence and logical analysis--in this case documenting Eikenberry shilling for Rwandan political leaders the U.N. stated had perpetrated genocide and who were currently jailing and killing dissidents and journalists.  

Why?

    In response to the head-scratching as to why NU would undertake an action that is so blatantly bullying and hence damaging to its reputation -- as though it needs one more round of national publicity to add to its recent violations of academic freedom and speech (e.g., Laura Kipnis, "My Title IX Inquisition"; "U.S. Bioethicist Quits over Censorship Row at Northwestern University; and Provost Linzer threatening students opposing Eikenberry with a defamation lawsuit)-- my response is what I've been saying all along: NU is not a research university committed to the free exploration of ideas. It is an appendage of a military and corporate board that for close to a century has been using its authority to further a range of unsavory deals.  
     Yes, inspiring research, scholarship, and teaching occur here.  Every day I wake up excited to work with the wonderful colleagues and  the students I have encountered here, including in the Political Science Department.  The Mafia-owned Rao's restaurant served great food, but even a four star chef wouldn't last if the family felt its illicit deals were being exposed.  
    In my view, the end game for NU is not a legal victory, but rather an effort to cloud my reputation by accusations of insanity.  NU's Office of General Counsel is run by Philip Harris, who used to be a partner in the Chicago law firm that for decades represented General Dynamics and the Crown family.  Harris is well-aware of my research into the financial and personal ties that reflect poorly on the Board, most as yet unpublished.  Harris, instead of recusing himself because of the appearance of his own conflicts of interest in my case was, and I assume still is, overseeing the current actions pursued against me.  My view is that the individuals behind this care more about their own reputations than that of NU and are thus willing to sacrifice the latter in a pathetic attempt to discredit as a "conspiracy theory" my disclosures.
    Alas, the actions these attorneys and administrators are pursuing will bring a great deal of unnecessary and unflattering attention to the Political Science Department, whose faculty and students do not deserve this.  My reporting is my reporting and I imagine people will decide on the basis of the evidence whether my analysis of NU is correct or off base.  Likewise, I have no intention of relinquishing my responsibilities for faculty self-governance, including challenging and reporting, in accordance with NU's policy, conduct that I find unprofessional or abusive.  That said, this is a shot across the bow to all faculty, tenured and otherwise, that you should be worried about  being harassed if not fired by an unaccountable officialdom disloyal to Northwestern's research and teaching mission.   (First the Chair and Dean prevented me from paying the undergraduates; and in July, when the students were working with me for no pay, the Dean shut down our work entirely.)
   

Now What?

    Can you fire, or even ban, a tenured professor because of the junior high school antics of a few bullies asserting that they are the ones "feeling threatened" and "unsafe"?
    Common sense, NU's Faculty Handbook, employment law, and my lawyer, say "Are you kidding?  No way!"  This is such a transparent ploy to retaliate against me for inquiries into unsavory actions by political science faculty and the university that my colleagues and the former students with whom I have discussed this to date concur: it's going to waste a lot of time and money, cause a huge distraction, and I will keep my job.  
    The next step is a mandatory interview with an NU-selected psychiatrist.  However, it is over a month since I received the letter and I cannot even schedule an appointment; Northwestern failed to send the documents the psychiatrist needs to schedule this. This delay seems consistent with the Chair's stated goal of keeping me off campus for the fall quarter and, as I read her letter to the Dean, eventually to fire me.
    Fortunately, I have the support of colleagues and former students at Northwestern and elsewhere who are shocked and disgusted by these transparently retaliatory and thuggish tactics.  Again, I assure everyone reading this that there is nothing I have ever said or done that would justify, even remotely, this treatment.    

How Can I Help?

Email to Northwestern, short is fine, from people who know me and simply can vouch they have never known me as unbalanced, retaliatory, or physically threatening in any way would be extremely helpful.  To date Randolph has completely disregarded positive letters--he omitted any reference to them in his summaries or his August 17, 2016 letter for the psychiatrist-- but perhaps if they are tallied in the dozens or more this will make a difference. Please write to Dean Adrian Randolph (weinberg-dean@northwestern.edu) and copy my attorney Rima Kapitan (rkapitan@kapitanlaw.net).   Thank you!

 

Facebook and US electoral politics

from the New York Times

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics. Using this data, I was able to speak to a wide array of the activists and entrepreneurs, advocates and opportunists, reporters and hobbyists who together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in media.

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic. And unlike traditional media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to lure readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.

...

This year, political content has become more popular all across the platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with a growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in general. But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.

While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms. These are professional Facebook users straining to build media companies, in other words, not the other way around.

From a user’s point of view, every share, like or comment is both an act of speech and an accretive piece of a public identity. Maybe some people want to be identified among their networks as news junkies, news curators or as some sort of objective and well-informed reader. Many more people simply want to share specific beliefs, to tell people what they think or, just as important, what they don’t. A newspaper-style story or a dry, matter-of-fact headline is adequate for this purpose. But even better is a headline, or meme, that skips straight to an ideological conclusion or rebuts an argument.

...

“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”

In retrospect, Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce substantial traffic. In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.

Continue reading the main story

 

 

This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’ daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.

Facebook, from a publisher’s perspective, had seized the web’s means of distribution by popular demand. A new reality set in, as a social-media network became an intermediary between publishers and their audiences. For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and celebrities.

From the start, some publishers cautiously regarded Facebook as a resource to be used only to the extent that it supported their existing businesses, wary of giving away more than they might get back. Others embraced it more fully, entering into formal partnerships for revenue sharing and video production, as The New York Times has done. Some new-media start-ups, most notably BuzzFeed, have pursued a comprehensively Facebook-centric production-and-distribution strategy. All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you cannot control.

The news feed is designed, in Facebook’s public messaging, to “show people the stories most relevant to them” and ranks stories “so that what’s most important to each person shows up highest in their news feeds.” It is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.

Dying white women

from here

White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

Washington Post series on rising mortality among middle aged white women

from here

White women have been dying prematurely at higher rates since the turn of this century, passing away in their 30s, 40s and 50s in a slow-motion crisis driven by decaying health in small-town America, according to an analysis of national health and mortality statistics by The Washington Post.

Among African Americans, Hispanics and even the oldest white Americans, death rates have continued to fall. But for white women in what should be the prime of their lives, death rates have spiked upward. In one of the hardest-hit groups — rural white women in their late 40s — the death rate has risen by 30 percent.

The Post’s analysis, which builds on academic research published last year, shows a clear divide in the health of urban and rural Americans, with the gap widening most dramatically among whites. The statistics reveal two Americas diverging, neither as healthy as it should be but one much sicker than the other.

In modern times, rising death rates are extremely rare and typically involve countries in upheaval, such as Russia immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In affluent countries, people generally enjoy increasingly long lives, thanks to better cancer treatments; drugs that lower cholesterol and the risk of heart attacks; fewer fatal car accidents; and less violent crime.

But progress for middle-aged white Americans is lagging in many places — and has stopped entirely in smaller cities and towns and the vast open reaches of the country. The things that reduce the risk of death are now being overwhelmed by things that elevate it, including opioid abuse, heavy drinking, smoking and other self-destructive behaviors.

White men are also dying in midlife at unexpectedly high rates. But the most extreme changes in mortality have occurred among white women, who are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death.

White women still outlive white men and African Americans of both sexes. But for the generations of white women who have come of age since the 1960s, that health advantage appears to be evaporating.

This reversal may be fueling anger among white voters: The Post last month found a correlation between places with high white death rates and support for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Public health experts say the rising white death rate reflects a broader health crisis, one that has made the United States the least healthy affluent nation in the world over the past 20 years. The reason these early deaths are so conspicuous among white women, these experts say, is that in the past the members of this comparatively privileged group have been unlikely to die prematurely.

Laudy Aron, a researcher with the Urban Institute, said rising white death rates show that the United States’ slide in overall health is not being driven simply by poor health in historically impoverished communities.

“You can’t explain it away as, ‘It’s those people over there who are pulling us down,’ ” Aron said. “We’re all going down.”

For this article, The Post examined death records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, breaking the information down geographically, county by county, by level of urbanization and by cause of death.

Big cities and their suburbs — metropolitan areas of more than 1 million people — looked strikingly different from the rest of the country. The Post divided these populations into urban and rural categories, with the rural population encompassing smaller cities as well as small towns and the most remote places.

The statistics show decaying health for all white women since 2000. The trend was most dramatic for women in the more rural areas. There, for every 100,000 women in their late 40s, 228 died at the turn of this century. Today, 296 are dying. And in rural areas, the uptick in mortality was noticeable even earlier, as far back as 1990. Since then, death rates for rural white women in midlife have risen by nearly 50 percent.

In the hardest-hit places — 21 counties arrayed across the South and Midwest — the death rate has doubled, or worse, since the turn of the century for white women in midlife.

In Victoria County, Tex., a rural area near the Gulf Coast, deaths among women 45 to 54 have climbed by 169 percent in that time period, the sharpest increase in that age group of any U.S. county. The death rate climbed from 216 per 100,000 people to 583.

Lisa Campbell, medical director for the Victoria County health department, said a third of adults in the county are obese, roughly in line with the national average. Also, 1 in 5 smokes — well above the national average — and people can still light up in restaurants and other public places.

Campbell said she has been struck by how many white women she knows who have some kind of cancer.

“It’s kind of weird, actually,” she said.

...

Researchers circled the dying-whites phenomenon for several years before clearly recognizing what they were seeing. In 2014, the increase in the death rate of relatively young white women was right there in the CDC’s massive annual report on American health, but it drew no comment in the introductory highlights. Readers had to scrutinize Table 23 on Page 109 to spot the trend.

Other reports were more explicit. A 2013 study at the University of Wisconsin looked at the geography of death and discovered that mortality for women of all races had risen in 43 percent of U.S. counties between 1992 and 2006. Men’s mortality had risen in only 3 percent of counties.

Also in 2013, a sweeping study, “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” from the National Research Council and the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine showed a broad “health disadvantage” among Americans, compared with people in other affluent countries.

Aron, the Urban Institute researcher who co-authored the study, wrote in January 2014 that “increases in mortality are especially pronounced among white women of reproductive age, not a group we generally think of as being disadvantaged.” Last year, she and two co-authors published a separate article highlighting the perplexing number of white women who are dying prematurely.

Then, in November, Case and her husband, Angus Deaton, another Princeton economics professor, published their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Deaton had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, an honor that added media gloss to the dying-whites study. Suddenly, it was a national story.

Other researchers weighed in, debating aspects of the Case-Deaton statistical analysis. For example, their study played down differences in gender; Case and Deaton contend that the noticeably higher death rates for women were largely driven by smoking patterns.

Communicative capitalism Chinese style

"In 2015, four of the world’s top 10 Internet companies ranked by market capitalization were Chinese, according to the data website Statista. China is now the world leader in e-commerce, with ordinary Chinese using their phones to invest, buy groceries or pay for street food."

...

In the past five years, China’s Internet population has soared. There are now almost 700 million Chinese Web users, about 20 percent of the world’s Internet users.

...

The focus on beauty and self-expression resonates in particular with Chinese women, who are a rising consumer force. A 2012 Boston Consulting Group report estimated that female earnings in China will grow from $350 billion in 2000 to $4 trillion in 2020. 

“Meitu sits at the intersection of two exploding forces: Chinese mobile use and rising Chinese women,” said Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investment at Peking University in Beijing.

“I don’t know if they saw that coming, but they went with it.”

...

“Nowadays, when girls go out, it just means finding a place to take pictures and post them on social media,” she said. 

Though you’d think that an app designed to “beautify” your face might inspire feelings of inadequacy, superfans insist it gives them confidence, providing an escape from real-world pressure. 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/a-viral-selfie-app-with-1-billion-downloads-is-shaping-chinas-start-up-culture/2016/08/03/c89e985a-4348-11e6-b34c-ced7e11f0ca6_story.html?wpisrc=nl_draw2&wpmm=1

Liberals against the Left

Lately we've seen more examples of liberal erasure of the left via the equating of left and right. A couple of years ago, my friend Korinna Patelis wrote a brilliant article on this phenomena in Greece that we published in Theory & Event. In the UK, this erasure manifest in the occlusion of Lexit and subsequent ceding of the terms and terrain of Brexit to the right. In the US, we've seen this most recently in liberal equating of any critique of HRC with a right-wing attack.

The basic move begins with the claim that HRC isn't trusted because she has been attacked from the right for over thirty years. Liberal feminists repeat this trope, adding the point that the basis of right-wing attacks is sexism. HRC herself furthers this narrative as she says she recognizes that people have a hard time trusting her, that she has to earn this trust, and that this is hard because of the decades of attacks from the right.

But the fact that the right attacks her and that some of these attacks are sexist does not mean that all attacks are from the right and that all attacks are sexist. Attacks from the left emphasize her involvement in the coup in Haiti, her militarist adventurism in Libya, her support for war in Iraq, her embrace of Israel, for starters. When liberals ignore these facts of HRC's political position, when they erase the critique, they are implicitly supporting these positions. Coups, regime change, imperialism are reinforced as the bedrock set of liberal positions.

The same holds for big money in politics, the rule of finance capital, and the buttressing of oligarchy. The liberal equation of all attacks on HRC (or the Democrats or Obama) with right wing attacks negates the left, It doesn't consider or engage left arguments, it doesn't tolerate them, it erases them as left, proceeding as if they did not exist at all.

DNC: Hillary. Because balloons.

If I were Buzzfeed, I would write a list of the 27 things that most depress me about the HRC nomination. But I'm not Buzzfeed and I prefer anger to depression.

I'm disgusted by the manipulation of feminist goals to generate support for imperialism. This isn't new. The critique of liberal feminism has been well-known for decades. And yet its explicit suspension is disavowed by those who want us to all share in the excitement of breaking the glass ceiling. I don't share it. I feel nothing but rage. Thatcher was not a victory for women. Neither is Clinton.

I'm appalled by the falling into line of ostensibly progressive intellectuals who not only seem to have suspended all their critical capacities as they repeat the elements of the very politics they ostensibly reject -- unity, nationalism, demonization of dissent, paranoia -- but who ignore HRC's actual record as if the wars and coups she has furthered, the deaths for which she is responsible, do not matter.

I'm shocked that critical intellectuals parrot the worst elements of mainstream media and Clinton talking-points, failing to analyze the convention, its pageantry, and its speeches as an ideological production designed to create an appearance and a feeling. Somehow ideas of the partition of the perceptible have fallen away before fawning over attractive people, rhetorically well-constructed speeches, and balloon drops.

Well, actually, the balloon drop was really great. Endless. Abundant. Different sizes. And some had stars. I loved the balloon drop. I wish I was in there, too, surrounded by thousands and thousands of balloons. Maybe, like Bill, I could grab a big blue with stars and take it home. Or bounce the big red and white ones back into the crowds. And then confetti.

Balloons and confetti. So magic.

Bernie's international policy

From a Code Pink report:

Sanders’ foreign policy positions are better than those of his Republican and Democratic opponents—though that’s not a terribly high bar, it must be said. He is the least hawkish of the major party candidates. As he has stated repeatedly, he’s proud that he voted against the war in Iraq—in contrast to Hillary Clinton, who has only grudgingly said that her pro-war vote was a mistake[1]—and note that even now she calls it a “mistake,” not a decision that was fundamentally wrong. Like Clinton, Sanders supported recent moves toward normalization of relations with Cuba. He also supported the nuclear deal with Iran; though Clinton too supported the Iran deal, with her trademark “muscular” approach to foreign policy, her tone is quite different from Sanders’: she has emphasized that, if elected, she would back up the U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement with the threat of military reprisal if Iran violated any of its terms.[2] Indeed, she seems coiled and almost looking for a justification to spring into action. Sanders condemns past U.S. interventions in Guatemala, Central America and Iran, and has sharply criticized Clinton’s embrace of Henry Kissinger. (Note by the way that Clinton doesn’t stand alone in Democratic Party establishment circles in her enthusiasm for Kissinger; in May 2016 President Obama’s Defense Secretary Ash Carter presented him with the Department of Defense’s Distinguished Public Service Award.)

Obama, despite his frequent impassioned anti-nuclear rhetoric, has called for a trillion dollar modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons. Sanders strongly opposes the plan. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has been, in the words of Lawrence Wittner, “more ambiguous about her stance. . . . Asked by a peace activist about the trillion dollar nuclear plan, she replied that she would ‘look into that,’ adding: ‘It doesn’t make sense to me.’ Even so, like other issues that the former secretary of state has promised to ‘look into,’ this one remains unresolved. Moreover, the ‘National Security’ section of her campaign website promises that she will maintain the ‘strongest military the world has ever known’ —not a propitious sign for critics of nuclear weapons.”[3] Sanders favors the eventual complete elimination of nuclear weapons and says he would work to get U.S. and Russian weapons down to 1,000 each—a goal which Clinton too says she favors. Sanders calls for cuts in the military budget, but he gives no specifics and makes it sound as if the cuts will all come from eliminating waste and cost overruns—a standard politician’s evasion to avoid discussing policy. Such trimming of the fat in a military budget that stands at close to $600 billion will be too small to provide a real revenue source for Sanders’ social and infrastructure programs. (The likely Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, on the other hand, calls for a 50 percent cut in military spending and indicates how the saved funds will be used. Full disclosure:Stein is the candidate I intend to support.), and too vague to generate a useful conversation about a different sort of U.S. foreign policy, one that doesn’t depend on overwhelming military power.

The Middle East

Sanders has reflected and amplified a growing feeling in the American public— including among younger American Jews—that the United States shouldn’t automatically fall in line to uncritically support the Israeli government no matter how badly it treats the Palestinians. Sanders hasn’t gone far enough: crucially, he hasn’t called for an end to the U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support that sustains Israeli policy toward Palestinians. However, his sharp words of criticism of Israeli policies during the Democratic presidential debates, even if those criticisms were limited, have helped further a much-needed public debate about the future of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Unfortunately, Sanders’ foreign policy positions are too often inconsistent with his democratic and anti-elitist domestic politics. Taken as a whole, his foreign policy approach doesn’t come anywhere near constituting an agenda that addresses the needs of the global 99 percent (or, say, 90 percent) who suffer from today’s wars and the cruel global economic order of neoliberalism and austerity that the United States promotes.

As recently as October of last year Sanders has said that he supports keeping U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan.[4] He voted for NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which caused one of his staffers, my friend Jeremy Brecher, to resign in protest.[5] And Sanders voted for the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), which has been used to justify U.S. military action in the Middle East (apart from the 2003 Iraq invasion) ever since.

Notwithstanding his criticisms of Hillary Clinton for her inclination to favor U.S. military intervention around the world, Sanders himself has generally supported America’s wars. Rather than putting forward a progressive, non-imperial alternative to ISIS and Al Qaeda that can appeal to ordinary people in the Middle East, Jeremy Scahill reminds us that in the 1990’s Sanders supported the Iraq Liberation Act and the brutal economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and that he supported President Clinton’s bombings in Iraq that were packaged as part of the so-called no-fly zones. And this is not just in the distant past. For example, in October 2015 Sanders said he wouldn’t end Obama’s drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, saying only that strikes must be deployed “selectively and effectively.”[6]

On MSNBC’s April 25, 2016 town hall moderated by Chris Hayes, Sanders repeated his endorsement of drone strikes, and said that he supported a “constitutional, legal” presidential kill list. He agreed with Obama’s action in sending 250 Special Forces operators to the ground in Syria, saying to Hayes, “I think what the President is talking about is having American troops training Muslim troops, helping to supply the military equipment they need, and I do support that effort. We need a broad coalition of Muslim troops on the ground. We have had some success in the last year or so putting ISIS on the defensive, we’ve got to continue that effort.”[7]

The basic problem with Sanders’ approach is that he believes that the solution to the threat of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and their ilk depends on resolute action by reactionary Middle East governments, backed by the United States, Russia, and other powerful countries. But the solution actually lies in the opposite direction. What is needed is an end to intervention by outside powers (including regional heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and Iran) and a thoroughgoing transformation of the Middle East, a transformation that can only be begun by the revival of the grassroots democratic movements of Iran’s Green movement and the Arab Spring that challenged and threatened to replace despotic rulers across the region.

Sanders summed up his anti-ISIS strategy on November 19, 2015, when he said:

While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations—with the strong support of their global partners. . . . A new and strong coalition of Western powers, Muslim nations, and countries like Russia must come together in a strongly coordinated way to combat ISIS, to seal the borders that fighters are currently flowing across, to share counter-terrorism intelligence, to turn off the spigot of terrorist financing, and to end support for exporting radical ideologies. . . countries in the region like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE—countries of enormous wealth and resources—have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change. King Abdallah [of Jordan] is absolutely right when he says that that the Muslim nations must lead the fight against ISIS, and that includes some of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the region, who, up to this point have done far too little.[8]

The governments of these reactionary “Muslim nations” can’t possibly offer the millions of people in the Middle East an attractive alternative to ISIS. Jordan uses a broad and vague counterterrorism law to strictly curtail freedom of expression and outlaws criticism of the king, of the government, and of Islam. Kuwait’s government aggressively cracks down on free speech. Qatar engages in the trafficking of ruthlessly exploited forced labor and provides for penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment for criticizing the emir or vice-emir. UAE courts have invoked repressive laws to prosecute government critics, and a counterterrorism law poses a further threat to government critics and rights activists. And Saudi Arabia’s hideous police state is a byword for blind and bloody repression—against women, religious minorities, and even the most peaceful of government critics[9]—little different from ISIS itself.

These regimes are part of the problem, not part of the solution. But that’s equally true of the “U.S. and other Western nations” that Sanders believes can play a crucial role in the fight against ISIS. The international financial institutions the United States and other Western nations dominate, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have helped to create the conditions that gave rise to ISIS in the first place. They pressed governments across the region to adopt policies of privatization, cutbacks in state investment, and government subsidies for energy and other day-to-day essentials. These governments—from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya and Syria—acquiesced to Western pressure and implemented such neoliberal policies, using their repressive state apparatuses to squelch popular discontent with the painful consequences. The Arab Spring was a rebellion against both despotism and the economic suffering inflicted by the despots.

Sanders, then, is looking in all the wrong places for a lasting victory against ISIS. Bombings and military intervention by the United States and NATO, with their killing of hundreds of innocent civilians, have only succeeded in creating more terrorists and driving millions of people in the Middle East into passive acquiescence or sometimes actual support for ISIS and other reactionary fundamentalist forces. Likewise, Syria’s murderous Assad regime, with critical assistance from Iran and Russia, has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Assad’s war against his regime’s opponents is not, as Sanders seems to think, the first step toward defeating ISIS. In fact, the effect has been the opposite, and the only way Assad can triumph is by turning Syria into even more of a wasteland than it already is, which will actually serve to encourage groups like ISIS.

Unlike Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders isn’t drawn to dictators. Nor is he a macho warmonger by nature. The problem is that he hasn’t systematically broken with the foreign policy of the 1 percent. What is needed is a new, independent foreign policy of solidarity with grassroots movements for democracy and social justice around the world—an internationalist extension of Sanders’ domestic program. To the extent that Sanders enmeshes himself in the Democratic Party, an institution deeply entwined with corporate and financial interests, he will be unable to champion political or social revolution abroad, or, for that matter, at home. It is to be hoped that the millions of Sanders supporters will come to see that they need to build a new political party not only to reverse America’s militaristic, anti-democratic and imperial foreign policy, but even to achieve many of the more limited goals for which they are fighting today.

Foreign Trade

Sanders opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. So does Clinton, although many pundits consider her position to be totally opportunist, designed for battling Sanders in the primaries, and the president of the Chamber of Commerce has suggested that Clinton will switch to backing the deal if she wins the election.[10] Certainly, Clinton has been an enthusiastic supporter of corporate-oriented free trade deals for her entire career, whereas Sanders has consistently opposed them. Trump opposes the TPP too, but his stance is based in part on his belief that no one can negotiate a deal like he can, and also on his economic nationalism—which also leads him to threaten China with a 45 percent tariff.[11]Given the current U.S. tariff rate of about 3.5 percent,[12] Trump’s policy could not fail to create havoc in the U.S. and world economies.

Sanders emphasizes fair trade over free trade, and insists that workers not corporations should be the beneficiaries. But he has done a poor job of articulating a progressive foreign trade policy that is not narrowly nationalist. It has to be admitted that the left as a whole has failed to outline such a policy, and that’s a challenge that lies before all of us. One thing certain, though, is that the type of global democratic economic planning that would be required to achieve economic security and wellbeing for all will never be adopted by the 1 percent.

Badiou and the communist horizon

So you’re continuing to look to communism as a horizon?

Yes, not only do I keep this horizon open but I think it is very important to do so. For if there is no strategic idea then movements undergoing setbacks or recuperation risk having devastating subjective effects. There you risk demobilisation, the thought that ‘well I was young then, I threw myself into this adventure and it didn’t work’. Our thinking has to be that while there are strategic setbacks we will maintain our course despite the sinuosities of History. History does not march in a straight line but in a very tortuous way, and we should not imagine any royal road leading to emancipation. There are reverses, negatives, and that is why we need to have a compass come what may. If we have no compass we end up old and disheartened.

From here

Article on sexual harassment charges against Yale philosopher Thomas Pogge

article here.

“It breaks my heart to have to say it,” said Christia Mercer, a former colleague from the Columbia philosophy department, “but it’s clear that Thomas uses his reputation as a supporter of justice to prey unjustly on those who trust and admire him, who then — once victimized — are too intimidated by his reputation and power to tell their stories.”

Martha C. Nussbaum, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, said that since learning about the accusations Pogge faced at Columbia, she has chosen not to invite him to conferences and workshops. She also declines to participate in projects he is involved in.

“The time has come for a public investigation,” she wrote in a statement that Lopez Aguilar’s lawyers later gave to Yale.

That investigation may soon commence. The Department of Education recently informed Lopez Aguilar that her civil rights complaint is still under review. And this month the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a separate government entity, said it would not conduct its own additional investigation, meaning the path is now clear for her to file a lawsuit of her own.

Not Me, US

(my essay in the Battle of New York broadsheet distributed in NYC)

David Harvey interview

original in Roar

So, looking at examples from southern Europe—solidarity networks in Greece, self-organization in Spain or Turkey—these seem to be very crucial for building social movements around everyday life and basic needs these days. Do you see this as a promising approach?

I think it is very promising, but there is a clear self-limitation in it, which is a problem for me. The self-limitation is the reluctance to take power at some point. Bookchin, in his last book, says that the problem with the anarchists is their denial of the significance of power and their inability to take it. Bookchin doesn’t go this far, but I think it is the refusal to see the state as a possible partner to radical transformation.

There is a tendency to regard the state as being the enemy, the 100 percent enemy. And there are plenty of examples of repressive states out of public control where this is the case. No question: the capitalist state has to be fought, but without dominating state power and without taking it on you quickly get into the story of what happened for example in 1936 and 1937 in Barcelona and then all over Spain. By refusing to take the state at a moment where they had the power to do it, the revolutionaries in Spain allowed the state to fall back into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the Stalinist wing of the Communist movement—and the state got reorganized and smashed the resistance.

That might be true for the Spanish state in the 1930s, but if we look at the contemporary neoliberal state and the retreat of the welfare state, what is left of the state to be conquered, to be seized?

To begin with, the left is not very good at answering the question of how we build massive infrastructures. How will the left build the Brooklyn bridge, for example? Any society relies on big infrastructures, infrastructures for a whole city—like the water supply, electricity and so on. I think that there is a big reluctance among the left to recognize that therefore we need some different forms of organization.

There are wings of the state apparatus, even of the neoliberal state apparatus, which are therefore terribly important—the center of disease control, for example. How do we respond to global epidemics such as Ebola and the like? You can’t do it in the anarchist way of DIY-organization. There are many instances where you need some state-like forms of infrastructure. We can’t confront the problem of global warming through decentralized forms of confrontations and activities alone.

One example that is often mentioned, despite its many problems, is the Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbon in refrigerators to limit the depletion of the ozone layer. It was successfully enforced in the 1990s but it needed some kind of organization that is very different to the one coming out of assembly-based politics.

Transcript from interview discussing Crowds and Party

Excerpts from my interview on This Is Hell talking about Crowds and Party:

CM: You were saying that the left denies its own collectivity. Is that only in the US? Is that unique to the US culture of the left?

JD: That’s a really important question, and I’m not sure. Traveling in Europe, I see two different things. On the one hand I see a broad left discussion that is, in part, mediated through social media and is pretty generational—people in their twenties and thirties or younger—and that there’s a general feeling about the problem of collectivity, the problem of building something with cohesion, and a temptation to just emphasize multiplicity. You see this everywhere. Everybody worries about this, as far as what I’ve seen.

On the other hand, there are countries whose political culture has embraced parties much more, and fights politically through parties. Like Greece, for example—and we’ve seen the ups and downs with Syriza over the last two years. And Spain also. Because they have a parliamentary system where small parties can actually get in the mix and have a political effect—in ways that our two-party system excludes—the European context allows for more enthusiasm for the party as a form for politics.

But there’s still a lot of disagreement on the far left about whether or not the party form is useful, and shouldn’t we in fact retreat and have multiple actions and artistic events—you know, the whole alter-globalization framework. That’s still alive in a lot of places.

“I think holding on to the word ‘communism’ is useful, not only because our enemies are worried about communism, but also because it helps make socialists seem really, really mainstream. We don’t want socialism to seem like something that only happens in Sweden. We want it to seem like that’s what we should have at a bare minimum.”

CM: You mentioned the structure of the US electoral system doesn’t allow for a political party to necessarily be the solution for a group like Occupy. Is that one of the reasons that activists dismiss the party structure as something that could help move their agenda forward?

JD: We can think about the Black Panther Party as a neat example in the US context: A party which was operating not primarily to win elections but to galvanize social power. That’s an interesting way of thinking about what else parties can do in the US.

Or we can think about parties in terms of local elections. Socialist Alternative has been doing really neat work all over the country, organizing around local elections with people running as socialist candidates not within a mainstream party. I think that even as we come up against the limits of a two-party system, we can also begin to think better about local and regional elections.

The left really likes that old saw: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” And then it rejects parties—even though political parties are, historically, forms that do that, that actually scale, that operate on multiple levels as organizations.

"There's a special place in hell for criminals who launch hedge funds"

Holly Wood in the Village Voice -- best millennial writing on Bernie:

There seems to be no shortage of bizarrely sexist assumptions as to why I, a Millennial feminist, am not voting for Hillary Clinton. But speaking as a Millennial feminist, let me assure you: None of them is accurate. Granted, the span of my political biography is only as long as it took Howard Dean to go from human rights crusader to insurance lobbyist. But the reason for my political disaffection is plain: I've spent my entire Millennial life watching the Democratic Party claw its way up the ass of corporate America. There's no persuading me that the Democratic establishment — from where it sits now — has the capacity to represent me, or my values.

And I'm not alone. According to a 2013 poll by Harvard's Kennedy School, three out of five of my peers now believe politicians prioritize private gain over the public good. When young people open opensecrets.org to gauge just how cheaply our futures trade these days, are we being cynical, or just realistic?

If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it's not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders's clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can't help but drop the needle onto Bernie's broken record:

The economy is rigged.

Democracy is corrupted.

The billionaires are on the warpath.

Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading "MONEYLENDERS OUT." If you ask them, they'll tell you there's a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds.

...

f anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it's not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We're due for a hard rain.

If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who've appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is fucked is to counsel an adherence to fuckery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your shit.

The reason Wall Street is dropping zillions of quarters into Hillary's Super PAC-Man machine isn't because it wants change — it's because Wall Street sees revenue in her promises of keeping things much the same. Under Hillary, our prisons will continue to punish for profit. Our schools will continue to be sold off to private contractors. And despite 87 percent of Democrats standing behind universal health care, Hillary insists it will "never, ever come to pass." Not from her, I guess, since she's taken over $13 million from the health care industry.

We really can't, America, says Hillary. Nope. Not ever. We are a powerful nation, kids, but one run by the Great Market God. Leave your moral gag reflex at the door. Close that pesky Overton window, won't you? And be a doll and bolt those tables to the floor. You'll love the moneylenders, dear. I do. Hell, my daughter married one!

Science v. Oligarch: victory goes to science!

Drought, famine, and starvation -- brought to you by climate change

from here:

Policymakers on Capitol Hill got a dire warning that climate change threatens food production, safety and affordability.

That stark message came in a briefing by the American Meteorological Society to congressional staff members, climate scientists and federal regulators that linked climate change to a host of troubling scenarios involving worldwide food availability.

Wednesday's briefing drew on a peer-reviewed study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture released during the Paris Climate Conference last month. That report, "Climate Change, Global Food Security and the U.S. Food System," concluded that the effects of climate change on food will strike urban and rural populations in wealthy and poor nations alike.

While the threat depends on many factors, its impact will increase by mid-century, according to the report. Under the least-optimistic scenario––based on high carbon emissions and low international cooperation to combat climate change––agricultural yields could fall by as much as 15 percent, and food prices could rise more than 30 percent by 2050.

"Climate change puts the world's food security at risk through both direct and indirect factors," said Margaret Walsh, an ecologist in USDA's Climate Change Program Office and one of the authors the report.

Widespread drought caused by climate change could decrease crop production, Walsh told InsideClimate News. At the same time, sea level rise could impact cargo ships' access to docks for importing and exporting food.

"There are many, complex factors that have to be considered when assessing the threat to food security," Walsh said.

Huge setback for climate denialism -- NYT: Koch steps down from AMNH

NYT:

David H. Koch, a philanthropist who has given millions of dollars to the American Museum of Natural History in New York but whose businesses in energy and other industries have drawn criticism from climate scientists and environmental groups, has left the museum’s board after serving on it for 23 years.

A museum spokeswoman, Anne Canty, said Mr. Koch’s last day on the board of trustees was Dec. 9 and that his departure was not related to the criticism, but simply because his term was ending.

Mr. Koch, who served on the board since 1992, has donated some $23 million to the museum and his name adorns its dinosaur wing.

More than nine months ago, dozens of members of the scientific community signed a letter that called for museums of science and natural history to “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like Mr. Koch, who also sits on the advisory board of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. A separate petition by environmental activists urged the museums to remove him from their respective boards.

The letter expressed deep concern about “the links between museums of science and natural history with those who profit from fossil fuels or fund lobby groups that misrepresent climate science.” The letter was the project of the Natural History Museum, a mobile museum “that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature,” according to its co-founder and director, Beka Economopoulos.

But Cristyne Nicholas, a spokeswoman in New York for Mr. Koch, said that the letter and petition had nothing to do with Mr. Koch’s departure. “He was not swayed by that at all and it absolutely did not factor into his decision,” Ms. Nicholas said.

She noted that Mr. Koch is on about 20 different boards around the country and that he is cutting that number back while he focuses more time on cancer research. Last year, Mr. Koch, 75, who was once diagnosed with prostate cancer, donated $100 million to New York-Presbyterian Hospital and $150 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to help researchers develop a cure for prostate cancer.

Ms. Nicholas said that Mr. Koch had missed board meetings at the natural history museum and other institutions because of scheduling conflicts. “He remains supportive of the museum,” she said. “It is just that he does not have time to attend the board meetings.”

Ms. Canty said that Mr. Koch had served as an at-large trustee. These types of board members are up for re-election every year, she said.

Secondary visuality

I've been doing some posts developing the idea of secondary visuality.

Here is a link to the second one.