Bruce Melton : The Climate Change Awareness Drought is Over / 1

Photo © Bruce Melton, 2012.
The climate change
awareness drought is over
Part One: It’s time to change the tone

The shift in awareness is very encouraging and seems quite likely to be more or less permanent because the number of unprecedented weather events will very likely continue to increase.

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2012

[This is the first of a three-part series exploring the recent change in public awareness of climate change issues, the causes behind the change, biases, the latest science showing how much our climate has already changed, and academic support for a vigorous change in messaging.]

AUSTIN, Texas -- Polls, surveys and academic evaluations of public opinion are showing a shift in our collective understanding of climate change. Since the turn of the century, belief in the causes of and reality of climate change has fluctuated wildly at levels below those seen in the 1990s.

Some of this change has been caused by political cues. These are the messages that we get from our leaders and interest groups motivated to “advertise” their message. Change in awareness is also caused by actual climate extremes. Because the extremes are here to stay and there is a growing distrust of the “voices” that advertise the message being disproven by the extremes, the increasing change in awareness is grounds for a shift in advocacy policy towards how we urge for climate change action.

In a 2008 report, George Mason University says that only 60 percent of climate scientists believed that Earth was warming in 1991, compared to 97% today. Public understanding of climate issues was fair to poor until the Bush Administration came into office and awareness significantly declined. But President Clinton is not blameless because he first failed to do something about Senate Resolution 98 (in 1997) that refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and for four more years did not sign.

Bush’s subsequent failure to sign and then his premeditated campaign to derail international climate change policy work gave Americans permission to deny. The United States was the only country in the world except for Afghanistan and South Sudan that did not sign Kyoto.

Beginning in 2005 we saw a string of unprecedented blizzards in the northeastern U.S. and northern Europe. The cold weather convinced many that climate change was indeed as the voices were saying, and that they could continue to disregard the message from scientists. In 2009 more political cues penetrated the media deeply with the theft of climate scientists’ emails and attention being drawn to a single error in the 2007 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Report (Known as Himalayagate) -- and a slanderous campaign discrediting the 2007 IPCC reporting on the Amazon was faulty (Amazongate).

The climate science community hoped things would change with Obama’s election in 2008. His message about climate change, although with muted action, was radically different from the Bush Administration’s message. Political cues had radically changed across the country and even the failed Copenhagen Summit kept climate change in the news and was laying the foundation for a change in awareness.

In 2010 it finally happened. The press was paying attention to scientific findings showing that blizzards and snowtastrophes were associated with an unprecedented weather pattern in the Arctic, caused by climate change, sending abnormally severe winter weather far south on a berserk jet stream.

Then unprecedented weather simply exploded in 2010 with the Russian heat wave and Pakistan floods and in 2011 the extremes went off the charts. A study led by Anthony Leiserowitz out of Yale released in February 2012 tells us:

A large majority of Americans believe that global warming made several high profile extreme weather events worse, including the unusually warm winter of December 2011 and January 2012 (72%), record high summer temperatures in the U.S. in 2011 (70%), the drought in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 (69%), record snowfall in the U.S. in 2010 and 2011 (61%), the Mississippi River floods in the spring of 2011 (63%), and Hurricane Irene (59%).

For 20 years, the vast majority of climate scientists have been warning us that changes like these would happen if we did not reduce our emissions. We did not and they did. Now these same scientists (and more) are warning us that the extremes will continue to worsen even if we do stop all emissions, and a longer delay means more danger than otherwise. The message is getting through.

The Yale study tells us that over the past several years, Americans say the weather in the U.S. has been getting worse rather than better by a margin of over 2 to 1 (52% vs. 22%). The National Climatic Data Center tells us that 14 weather disasters costing more than a billion dollars each (inflation adjusted) happened in 2011. This is 56 percent more than the previous record of nine set in just 2005 and three times as many as the average of the last decade (4.8 per year, 3.8 in the 1990s).

Peer reviewed literature is now coming out that shows, in addition to the unprecedented blizzards, things like the Moscow heat wave in 2010, the Pakistan floods in 2010, the European heat wave of 2003, and the Texas heat wave of 2011 (in-press) were caused by climate change. The National Center for Atmospheric Research tells us that across the planet high temperature records are happening twice as often as low temperature records. In a stable climate this ratio should be one to one. The Yale study goes on:

About half of all Americans say that heat waves (53%), droughts (46%) and very heavy rain storms (43%) have become more common in their local area over the past few decades. People in the Northeast and Midwest are more likely to report that heavy rainstorms have become more frequent in their local area, while people in the South and West are more likely to report that droughts have increased.

Many Americans also say that extreme weather has increased the occurrence of other problems in their local area, including harm to crops (46%), floods (39%), problems with air quality (38%), forest fires (34%), problems with water quality (31%), and problems with transportation (23%). People in the Northeast and Midwest are more likely to report that local floods and harm to crops have become more frequent, while people in the South and West are more likely to report that forest fires in their local area have become more frequent.

The shift in awareness is very encouraging and oddly, even more encouraging is the concept that the shift seems quite likely to be more or less permanent because the number of unprecedented weather events will very likely continue to increase. The Brookings Institute tells us the change in awareness began in the spring of 2010.

Americans' environmental priorities have shown global warming at the very bottom since at least 2004. But it’s the relative position of the issue that counts, however (and of course the other issues being measured). When we compare March 2011 to March 2012 we see that those who “worry a great deal” about global warming have increased 5 percent to 30 percent. The lowest it has ever been in this record that dates back to 1989 is 24 percent in 1997.

Gallup’s 1997 to 2011 poll about public belief in the seriousness of global warming shows a 4 percent increase from 2010 to 2011. Pew shows a 6 percent increase in the belief that evidence is ”solid” from 2010 to 2011. Rasmussen is up 4 to 6 percent since 2010. Another Gallup poll from 1989 to 2011, about how much individuals personally worry about climate change, is also up 4 percent in 2011.

The Brookings Institute shows a 10 percent increase in the belief of solid evidence showing Earth’s temperature has been getting warmer in the 18-month period between spring 2010 and fall 2011. And finally, once again looking at Gallup’s long-term list of Americans' environmental concerns, global warming is still on the bottom but that five point increase from 25 to 30 percent is a 20 percent increase in one year.

Overall this is a solid 3 to 5 percent annual increase (or more), which is a very healthy change in overall public perception. Considering that this rate will likely increase, in just two or three years public sentiment could be at an all-time high.


Biased? (The science and/or the polls and petitions and “is this weather or climate we are talking about?”)

Nonbelievers out there would say my evaluation is one-sided or cherry-picked and that I should be looking at “other” sources of information and that public belief is a consequence of the climate scientists’ or government conspiracy. So looking at the three major treatises of the dissenter groups, the most astonishing is the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Global Warming Petition Project with signatures of more than 31,000 scientists.

The original petition in 1998 that collected 17,000 signatures included a 12-page peer review-like paper that looked exactly like a U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) publication, complete with date, volume, and page numbers (it was not a published paper of any kind). The author of the petition, Frederick Seitz (founder of the Marshall Institute), is a former president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS has taken the extraordinary step of disassociating itself from the Oregon Petition in this statement:

The petition was mailed with an op-ed article from The Wall Street Journal and a manuscript in a format that is nearly identical to that of scientific articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. [the NAS statement goes on]. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.

This “petition” contains signatures of over 13,000 medical doctors, engineers, and general science majors. Many, if not all, of these good folks could be qualified to say something about climate science, but are they? Generally, expert opinion in science is relegated to those with advanced degrees in specific disciplines. Engineers and medical doctors do not practice fundamental science, they apply fundamental science. There’s a big difference.

Out of all of the signatures that can even be identified, only an exceedingly small fraction are actual climate scientists. From the sidebar of Scientific American's “Climate of Uncertainty” in October 2001:

Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. [of the original 17,000] in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition -- one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages.

As an example of the lack of control in who signs this petition, there are 10,102 in the category of general engineering and general science broken down into I) Engineering (7,280), II) Electrical Engineering (2,169) and III) Metallurgy (384), and General Science (269). Not included in the engineering category are 223 nuclear engineers, 2,169 electrical engineers, 1,693 chemical engineers, and 2,637 mechanical engineers.

Over half (16,555) of the signatures are from engineers. Are engineers capable of understanding climate? Sure. I am an engineer. Are engineers represented in the academic literature publishing about climate? The answer is a resounding “no.” To finish with the Oregon Petition; it includes 81 food scientists and 384 metallurgical scientists.

Climate Change Reconsidered is an 880 page report prepared by the Marshall Institute and co-authored by Fred Singer. The opening remarks of the original video press conference of this 2009 report on their website primarily refers to the 31,000 “scientists” of the Oregon Institute Petition as their scientific support.

The header on their website tells us to “Learn the Benefits of Atmospheric CO2.” Singer is an 83-year-old physicist who made a name for himself studying clouds. Singer also made a name for himself fighting against the anti-smoking movement and he was outspoken against regulations to curb acid rain. Then he fought against global protection for the ozone layer.

Emailgate, Himalayagate, Amazongate, etc.: Theft of personal emails; a single error about Himalayan glacier among thousands of facts in the 2007 IPCC Report, and a Scribner’s citation error about the Amazon are resources that have been considered. The email scientists have been cleared of all charges by four separate independent investigations.

As for public opinion, there are certainly other sources of information on public opinion that I have not cited, and many of them say the same thing that I have reported, like the Public Religion Research Institute. But then there are those sources like The Heartland Institute or the George C. Marshall Institute that have carried out long and expensive campaigns to discredit.

When the Heartland Institute compares those who believe the consensus position on climate change to the Unabomber, a line must be drawn. Rush Limbaugh and the talking heads on Fox News use similar crude tools to frighten and attempt to discredit with their “message.” This is not something that happens in credible science.

Photo © Bruce Melton, 2012.
To conclude part one of this series, the relatively recent increase in unprecedented weather extremes has shaken up an increased public apathy towards climate change that has been prevalent since about the turn of the century. The opinions of the dissenters are well established, prominently advertised, and look enormously authoritative, but they lack hardly any credibility.

Climate scientists have been warning us that weather extremes would happen sooner if we did not reduce emissions. We did not and they did. The American public has broadly taken notice, blamed the unprecedented nature of these weather extremes on climate change, and this is represented by numerous public opinion polls, surveys, and recently published academic work.

It’s time to ramp up the discussion.

[In Part 2 (out of 3) of this series -- titled “Voices Tell Us the Warmists are Dead” -- we will explore academic work showing the lack of credentialed viewpoints in the scientific opinions of the dissenters, and the exceedingly small number of credentialed climate scientists that do not support the consensus.]

[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, and author in Austin, Texas. Information on Melton’s new book, Climate Discovery Chronicles, can be found at this link. More climate change writing, climate science outreach, and critical environmental issue documentary films can be found on his website. Read more articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog. Photography © Bruce Melton, 2012]

References:

Gallup, March 30, 2012 In U.S., Global Warming Views Steady Despite Warm Winter: http://www.gallup.com/poll/153608/global-warming-views-steady-despite-warm-winter.aspx
Pew Center, Modest Rise in Number Saying There Is “Solid Evidence” of Global Warming, November 9-14, 2011 (Published December 1, 2011) : http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/12-1-11%20Global%20warming%20release.pdf
Yale 2012: Weather extremes caused by climate change have changed public awareness: Leiserowitz et al., Extreme-Weather-Climate-Preparedness, Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, April 2012.pdf http://www.climateaccess.org/sites/default/files/Leiserowitz_Extreme%20Weather%20Climate%20Preparedness.pdf
Gallup, March 30, 2012 - Americans' Worries About Global Warming Up Slightly: http://www.gallup.com/poll/153653/americans-worries-global-warming-slightly.aspx
Public belief that climate change is happening has only recently risen above 1991 beliefs of climate scientists: Climate Scientists Agree on Warming, Disagree on Dangers, and Don’t Trust the Media’s Coverage of Climate Change, George Mason University, STATS, 2008. http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html
Climate Change Cues: Brulle et al., Shifting public opinion on climate change. An empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the US 2002 to 2010, Climatic Change, Feb 2012. http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~brullerj/02-12ClimateChangeOpinion.Fulltext.pdf

Leaders and interest groups capable of advertising climate misinformation: Cooper, Media Literacy as a Key Strategy Toward Improving Public Acceptance of Climate Change Science, Bioscience, March 2011. http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.8
Change in advocacy policy: Yale, Climate Change in the American Mind, Public Support for Climate and Energy Policies in March 2012. http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/Policy-Support-March-2012.pdf
Weather Extremes Caused by Climate Change: Rhamstorf and Coumou, Increase of extreme events in a warming world, PNAS, October 24, 2011. http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_coumou_2011.pdf
Prominent Dissenter Campaigns: Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine Petition Project: http://www.petitionproject.org/
Climate Change Reconsidered: http://www.nipccreport.org/index.html
Brookings Institute, Fall 2011, National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, Issues in Governance, Feb 2012. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/02/climate-change-rabe-borick
Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D.: http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~kotliar/honors/honsem/somalwar/honsem/2002/articles/sciam_uncertainty.html

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Tony Platt : Justice for the Living Dead

A graduate student at an anthropology museum at Berkeley uses a craniometer to measure an ancient Indian skull. This collection alone contained more than 10,000 Indian skeletons. Photo from Life magazine, October 25, 1948. Image from The Buffalo Post.
Death's double standard:
Justice for the living dead

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2012

It’s good news that the United Nations has authorized University of Arizona professor James Anaya, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to carry out its first investigation into the status of Native Americans in the United States, with a particular focus on American compliance with standards embodied in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the U.S. became a signatory in 2010.

The focus of Anaya’s scrutiny no doubt will be on today’s inequalities and injustices that deeply impact 2.7 million Native Americans throughout the country. But let’s not forget the inequities of death.

Despite popular images of tribal members getting rich from gaming pay-offs, the overwhelming majority of Native Americans remain mired in poverty, the victims of structural unemployment and racial exclusion, compounded by devastating rates of diabetes, suicide, infant mortality, and cardiovascular and alcohol-related diseases.

There is a long way to go before, in the words of the Declaration, “indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples” entitled to the right to “self-determination” and to “be free from discrimination of any kind.”

Inequality is a problem for the dead as well as the living. According to Article 12 of the UN Declaration, native peoples have a right to “the use and control of their ceremonial objects, and the repatriation of their human remains.” Repatriation as a central demand of Native American movements in the United States speaks to the long history of plunder of native artifacts and bodies.

Over a period of some two hundred years, from Thomas Jefferson’s exploration of a Native American barrow near his home in Virginia, to passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, several hundred thousand native grave sites -- maybe as many as one million -- were dug up in the name of science, recreation, and commerce.

There was a brisk trade in native body parts and funerary artifacts, propelled by the popularity of commercial and recreational “collecting,” scientific curiosity, and the heritage industry. The artifacts removed from graves ended up in private collections and public display cases around the world, including the Smithsonian, Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, the British Museum in London, and museums in Prague, Zurich, Vienna, and Moscow.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists in universities and museums engaged in a frenzy of acquisition in the hope that native bodies would shed light on the origins of the species or on racial typologies of human difference. They were particularly interested in the bodies of Indians, who, it was believed, had been frozen in time since the Stone Age, and whose remains therefore were thought to hold the key to “secrets of human origins,” as well as provide physical evidence for claims about European superiority and native degeneracy.

This science made it easier to frame the near extermination of native peoples in the imagery of natural rather than social history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as the result of human intervention and -- in the case of California -- genocide.

In widely read treatises -- such as Samuel Morton’s Crania America (1839), Ales Hrdlicka’s Directions for Collecting Information and Specimens for Physical Anthropology (1904), and Edward Gifford’s Californian Anthropometry (1926) -- the measurement of brain cavities, nostrils, and degree of slope in foreheads generated all kinds of scientific quackery to justify the civilizational superiority of white Europeans and innate inferiority of native peoples.

Aside from the racist assumptions that guided research on native bodies, the science was also flawed because documentation of provenience of bones and artifacts found in graves was often nonexistent. Moreover, scientists harvested far more corpses than they could ever study. Tens of thousands of native dead were stashed in boxes, cellars, and personal collections, only to be resurrected for display in cabinets of curiosities, museums, schools, and international expositions.

A skull collected on Santa Rosa Island was included in the U.S. exhibition at the Columbian Historical Exposition in Madrid in 1892. In the 1920s and 1930s, a self-styled amateur archaeologist dug up hundreds of dead Tongva Indians and used their bones to decorate his Catalina Museum of Island Indians. To this day, the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, proudly displays native artifacts looted from graves.

With passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, the practice of widespread grave looting was officially stopped. Moreover, NAGPRA requires federally funded institutions to publish their holdings of native body parts, as well as artifacts taken from graves, and to facilitate their return to tribes that are able to make a case for genealogical or cultural connection.

NAGPRA was as significant a piece of legislation for Native Americans as the Civil Rights Act was for African Americans. And, similarly, it represents an unfinished revolution. The pace of repatriating human remains is glacially slow: by 2009, less than five percent nationwide had been returned to tribes. By 2010, the University of California at Berkeley had repatriated only 179 of its 10,000 native body parts.


There is nothing inherently wrong with using the dead to reconstruct the past. With the help of new developments in chemistry, DNA analysis and dating methods, we can learn a great deal from human remains about how our ancestors lived, worked, and died. Respectful collaboration between community groups, advocacy organizations, politicians, and scientists in New York in the 1990s, for example, made it possible to excavate what had been the Negros Buriel Ground, resulting in a detailed portrait of the daily lives of Africans in colonial New Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A similar collaboration between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, archaeologists, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company -- following the inadvertent exposure of native burials in Santa Clara, California, in 2008 -- produced a great deal of information about the lives and deaths of Ohlone neophytes buried in the mission at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

For most twentieth century archaeology, however, the decision to excavate and exhume native remains was typically made unilaterally and imposed by fiat. The problem is not with the search for knowledge, but rather the unequal relations of power between investigator and subject, collector and collected; the lack of consultation and permission, the arrogance run wild; and how the products of knowledge are misused.

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult. Remembrance and treatment of the dead is a highly selective political project. Some of our collective dead are respected, others humiliated. Consider some examples:

• The priests who worked at Mission Carmel in California from 1771 to 1833 are buried in solid tombs and named in headstones. Junipero Serra, architect of the mission system, is interred in an ornate crypt. The thousands of Ohlones, whose slave labor built and ran the mission, are buried anonymously in mass pits. When I visited Mission Carmel in February with Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, she picked up several items from the ground. “Look,” she showed me, “these are human bones dug up by gophers. I’ve asked the authorities to bring in soil and cover the graves with some protection, but they don’t do anything.”


• In the second half of the 19th century, while scientists and collectors raided native cemeteries for booty and bodies, the nation made amends for the Civil War by creating a system of national cemeteries and making a conscientious effort to preserve the names and identities of those killed. Today, a Defense Department unit with an annual budget of $55 million searches the world for unaccounted soldiers killed in the line of duty. No comparable effort is put into retrieving thousands of native remains unceremoniously stored in university, military, and museum basements.


• An expensive effort, led by the FBI, is currently under way to find the remains of a six-year old boy killed in New York more than 30 years ago. Recently, a national scandal erupted when it was revealed that the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware dumped in a landfill the body parts of some victims of the September 11, 2001, tragedy. Similarly, the Pentagon expressed strong condemnation of the Los Angeles Times for publishing photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghan insurgents. No such objections were made when museums and newspapers throughout most of the 20th century displayed native skeletons as objects of curiosity and entertainment.


• A debate is under way today about the propriety of excavating the wreck of the Titanic when it may contain corpses that, say Federal officials, should be accorded the respect of a graveyard and shielded from “looters and artifact hunters.” In contrast, the University of California, Berkeley, is closing the Hearst Museum for two years in order to “renovate and transform its public spaces.” There are no plans, apparently, to give 10,000 native remains stacked in a dank basement a respectful burial or commemorate their theft from native graveyards.

Federal policies of repatriation are a step in the right direction. But most native remains are unclaimed or unknown. What should be a national ritual of remembrance and mourning has become a technical, bureaucratic process. In addition to tribal claims for the return of their dead, there is also a need for public commemoration that speaks to a national tragedy.

Throughout much of the 20th century, while the government built memorials to the victims of world wars and now, as it continues to make efforts to account for every person missing from the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of native bones and skulls have been stored anonymously in basements and boxes, and their burial goods displayed as mementos of a “vanishing race” or as freak show curiosities.

However much we have tried to assiduously forget this sorrowful history, the past continues to reverberate in the here and now. It is time to do justice to our living dead.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. Platt taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). He is a Visiting Professor in Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. His publications have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. His latest book -- Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past -- was recently published by Heyday. He lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California, and serves as secretary of the Coalition to Protect Yurok Cultural Legacies at O-pyuweg (Big Lagoon). He blogs on history and memory at GoodToGo. Find more articles by Tony Platt on The Rag Blog]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : David Harvey's 'Rebel Cities'

Living for the city:
David Harvey's 'Rebel Cities'

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / May 21, 2012

[Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey (2112: Verso); Hardcover; 206 pp.; $19.95.]

I live in the small city of Burlington, Vermont, in the United States. Most every day I walk through the city's main public square known by its street name, Church Street.

A public street that has been semi-privatized, the street is often the center of a struggle between citizens and private interests over the nature of the public square. Battles over the rights of street performers, political activists, panhandlers, and regular citizens who want to hang out without shopping are frequent.

Thanks to quick public reaction from these groups and others, most efforts by merchants and politicians to further privatize the street have been beaten back. Yet, the space is more tightly controlled than downtowns in other similar sized cities that I have visited. In what might seem a contradiction, it is also more vibrant than many cities both larger and smaller.

One might attribute this latter fact to the so-called nature of Vermont itself; a nature that considers democratic engagement a valued part of human existence. Alternatively, one could attribute the lesser vibrancy of other downtowns to the lack of such a democratic consciousness.

Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements, and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine.

Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why it needs to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland, for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism.

Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned.

Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, these people are determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism.

They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anti-capitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community.

Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people.

Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle.

With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements, and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality.

He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements is proof of these movements' success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / Leslie Griffith : Dan Rather's 'Rather Outspoken'

Dan Rather is Rather Outspoken

Reporters had best be careful when they set about the business of digging up news. Dan Rather's unsettling 'push under the bus' is an instructive case in point.

By Leslie Griffith / Reader Supported News / May 21, 2012

[Rather Outspoken by Dan Rather (2012: Grand Central Publishing); Hardcover; 320 pp.; $27.99.]

In Rather Outspoken, one of broadcast journalism's elder statesmen reflects on the state of the news business, and a career that spans from the glory days to what many of us see as the bitter end.
Soaking up his life's worth of wisdom compels the reader to ask a familiar question posed to those in power during America's infancy -- a question just as pertinent today.

"What will be the old age of this government (including the fourth branch) if it's so early decrepit?"

Sadly, Rather's latest book reminds us that reporters had best be careful when they set about the business of digging up news. And they damn-well better make sure the media corporations for which they work are ready and willing to stand by them. Of course, Rather's unsettling "push under the bus," as he describes it, is an instructive case in point.

It's hard to believe CBS was once the network of the "Murrow Boys" who exposed the fear-mongering of Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. The same network that sent a young Rather into the middle of firefights in Vietnam, and managed to make 60 Minutes the most successful news program in history.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. And I don't mean Dan Rather.

He has proven that he is and will always be a reporter... no matter the venue. Keep in mind, I am not saying he has always been right; however, in my humble opinion, he has always been earnest, tireless, and willing to put his life on the line if it meant delivering news and much-needed context to the American people.

While newsrooms have drastically (and dangerously) cut staff during this era of mega-media conglomerates, the mighty managers have fallen upwards. Upwards of $70 million is what CBS President Les Moonves made in 2011. That would be okay by me if most of that money were put back into the newsrooms, but it's not. And Moonves is not likely sitting up at night worried about what the people of America are not being told.

Regarding property, privilege, and abuse of power, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Let our countrymen know, that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose, is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance."

Without saying it flat out, or even having to, Rather Outspoken reminds us that there are precious few reporters still working to fight the powerful and privileged who profit from harming our democracy, our planet, our food supply, our water, our air, our institutions of learning. (This list could go on for quite some time.) And Moonves' stunning salary reminds us exactly what is valued by the few powerful corporations currently controlling the news.

Those blessed few reporters left standing are not naive. They can't afford to be. We all know that the louder the warning to the American people, the stronger the "push-back." Today, corporate media minders harbor an unimaginable ambition for wealth and power while maintaining meager ambitions when it comes to informing American citizens.

Mostly, they want to protect and keep those corporate commercial dollars flowing. Journalism, as it functions today, certainly is not designed to keep America honest, or democracy working as Thomas Jefferson intended.

In Rather Outspoken, we get a not-so-shining example of how this era of corporatized news works to the detriment of democracy.

The key story takes us back to the 2004 election. That's when Dan Rather was first betrayed by Viacom/CBS. Just two months before the presidential election, Sumner Redstone -- Viacom's ultimate corporate master -- was quoted as saying: "From a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on... I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one."

That statement reads like a warning to any and all of CBS' reporters who might be digging into anything critical of George W. Bush or his administration. And, at the time, that was exactly what Mr. Rather and his ace producer Mary Mapes were doing. They had a story that reflected badly on George W. One that, if accepted by the American people, most certainly would have scuttled George W Bush's disastrous second term.

In retrospect, the mind boggles to think what might have been different had Viacom/CBS backed Rather and Mapes instead of backing away from them.

The chronicle of Rather's take-down reeks of Cassius cunning... so Shakespearean is the plot.

Rather and Mapes went running into a house on fire, only to turn around and find those carrying the fire hoses had deserted them. From Rather's account, it is clear his beloved CBS network had, by the time they'd left him twisting in the wind, devolved into nothing more than a money-grubbing entertainment machine seeking favored status with the powerful. A recent Texas Monthly story backs him up .

Rather Outspoken is a cautionary tale on many levels. And it's a story that finally explains why Rather and Mapes fought so hard to run their story. And why, in the end, the story ultimately fell flat after a strangely convenient information snafu.

To fully grasp the implications of this sordid tale, you have to put yourself into the "Black Op" line of thinking: If Cassius cannot discredit the story, then he must discredit the storyteller.

Think Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. Luckily for the "Black Operator," documents are malleable and always open to question and to opinion. Fame-seeking and often mediocre but ambitious "experts" are readily available to discredit them, too. Think Obama and the interminable birth certificate debate. If the Black Op works -- the story gets thrown under the bus along with the reporter brave enough to tell it.

Oh, how convenient it must have been to have a former CIA chief watching over his presidential son. The CIA building in Langley is not named after Poppy Bush for nothing.

Like any reporter worth his or her salt, Rather has stepped on a lot of toes over the years. The list of people who wanted to see him blackballed and blacklisted stretched all the way from Pennsylvania Avenue to Langley, Virginia. And there were plenty of well-heeled spin-doctors and PR people ready and willing to aid and abet the process.

As Rather points out, and as many reporters know, there are now huge public relations firms regularly hiring Rovian characters who make their coin leaking false stories. By the time the spin-doctors get finished, the real story is as twisted as a pretzel, completely unrecognizable and, more times than not, the wagging finger gets pointed right back at the reporters. The messenger becomes the story, not the message. Oh, how Cassius smiles.

When Rather and Mapes were ready to wrap up and air their story of George W. going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard -- George W. was two months away from the 2004 election.

It's important to note here that Rather and the Bushes had butted heads for years. The Bush-AWOL story was the culmination of a long, acrimonious history between Rather and the Bush clan. You see, reporters who hail from Texas, like Dan Rather, cut their teeth on the duplicitous-outrageous-red-dirt-throwing, go-for-the-jugular-style of politics that made Texas famous.

Lee Atwater, who worked for G.H.W. Bush, was the first to say out loud that in Texas politics... the end justifies the means. (Cheney and Rove both come from Texas politics too.)

Love it or hate it, Texas politics is unique in both its homespun punditry and slaughterhouse savagery. The late Texas governor Ann Richards, who was eventually unseated by George W., stood at the Democratic National convention in 1988 and said, "Poor George. He can't help it -- he was born with a silver foot in his mouth." Jim Hightower, then-Texas agricultural commissioner, said of George W., "He was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple."

These were the politics that helped define Rather's bare-knuckle style. He knew the hidden secrets and where the skeletons were long buried. But he was not about to bury the story of George W. running away from a war while telling America's young men and women to run toward one.

Rather quotes a "highly decorated retired Army colonel" who says soldiers who had risked their lives in Vietnam had long known about George W. Bush going AWOL. It was no secret. A solider who goes AWOL can be court-marshaled and tried for treason, particularly those unlucky enough to not have a former president and former CIA director as a father.

Rather writes,

For a journalist, the truth always matters and that should be reason enough [to do a story]. The arrogant hypocrisy of it makes this story much more disturbing. A young man born of privilege whose family secured him a spot in the National Guard to avoid military service in Vietnam, and who then walked away for more than a year from even that safe level of obligation, eventually became the commander in chief who ordered tens of thousands of our young men and women, including those in the National Guard, into harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rather continues,

This same young man who gamed the system to evade deployment to Vietnam became a president who did nothing to prevent, halt or disavow the distorted character assassination of his opponent, John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam Veteran.

Remember the Swift Boat controversy? It all follows the same CIA Black Op pattern. Instead of ignoring the lack of George W's service in Vietnam, make the opponent appear to be what your candidate really is. Remember the Swift Boat controversy. It implied Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was a coward.

Back at CBS News, Rather and Mapes' story was cut up and shortened without Rather's permission. He felt crucial back-up information was eliminated. Then the story was relegated to "60 Minutes Wednesday." An explosive, history-altering story like this one got no real promotion, no real back up and was relegated to the second-string broadcast. It is telling.

Plus, no one cared enough to push it beyond a bevy of entertainment lawyers and frightened middle-management ladder-climbers who put up roadblocks every which way.

Finally, the story aired. It got some traction. And then, as if according to a playbook, the documents were attacked. The same technique was used on Mr. Obama (the birth certificate was forged!?). After reading Rather's book, it's clear the proof of Bush W.'s AWOL was well established. Rather and Mapes didn't even need the documents.

But the document began the undoing. First, the message was lost, and then came a full-blown attack on the messengers. In the middle of the black storm at Black Rock, Rather was directed to issue an on-air apology. And he did, basically saying he and Mapes could have always done more. Viacom/CBS followed-up with an "independent" investigation. Heading the "independent investigation" was a well-known Republican and long- time friend of Bush's daddy. "Beware, yon Cassius has a mean and hungry look."

This is how our politicized and corporate media works today. It has become so common to shoot the messenger, other reporters just fall in line and keep quiet. If Dan Rather can get set up... who are we to think we won't be targeted too? Better to play it safe and avoid investigative reporting. Trouble is, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, "ignorant citizens" cannot support a democracy.

It should also be pointed out that while living in the bubble of big media, it's hard to see and understand how all this plays out. Now, that Rather is "outside" the mainstream, it has certainly made him wiser and more contemplative about what goes on "inside."

He is now an elder statesman with much to teach. He's seen all sides of the corporate-political news game and lived through its development. He knows how we got here. We need to listen to him about how best to get out.


Full Disclosure

Final note: Since "failure to disclose" has become an epidemic by reporters in this country... here is my disclosure.

I sent Dan Rather a book I'd written two years ago. He read it and endorsed it. I'd never met him, but he called to ask what he could do to help the book get published. "Forget that," I said, "Would you just call my dad in Texas and tell him I've not been sitting here doing nothing?"

Rather asked for the number. But, truthfully, even though I'd heard from friends who interned at 60 Minutes that Rather was kind and generous... and still wrote his own stories! I never really expected him to phone home for me.

Sure enough, about 20 minutes later, my father called me.

"You little shit," he said. "Next time you have Dan Rather call me, at least give me a heads up first."

While writing Rather Outspoken and endlessly traveling for HDNet, Rather has done some fine reporting. His reports from Gaza come to mind. Nothing like a reporter who has actually been to the places he is talking about.

Stretched so thin with a weekly hour broadcast, traveling and doing most of his own interviews, Rather later asked if I could help with two outside projects. I did. It was an honor.

Hopefully, after reading his book, the skeptics who refused to see the set-ups and betrayals, finally will.

[Leslie Griffith has been a television anchor, foreign correspondent, and an investigative reporter in newspaper, radio and television for over 25 years. Among her many achievements are two Edward R Murrow Awards, nine Emmys, 37 Emmy Nominations, a national Emmy nomination for writing, and more than a dozen other awards for journalism. She is currently working on a documentary, giving speeches on "Reforming the Media," and writing for many online publications, as well as writing a book called Shut Up and Read. To contact Leslie, go to lesliegriffithproductions.com. This article was first published at and was distributed by Reader Supported News.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

IDEAS / Bill Meacham : How Evolution Works

Charles Darwin: Blame it all on him. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Evolution

Regardless of your opinion on the ultimate purpose of it all, it is important to understand how evolution works because the theory reflects reality, and basing your actions on reality works out much better than not.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / May 20, 2012

If we want to know what human nature is -- and we do, as that will tell us how to live a fulfilling and happy life -- then we have to understand evolution.

The theory of evolution describes how generations of living organisms change over time. Humans are living organisms. We are subject to and products of the same evolutionary pressures as all other living things. Understanding how we got to be as we are gives us insight into how we function. Knowing that, we can adjust our actions so as to function well.

It is called the theory of evolution, but “theory” does not mean conjecture, speculation, or mere opinion. The term in its scientific sense means a well-supported body of interconnected statements that explains observations and can be used to make testable predictions.

The theory of evolution has been confirmed over and over again.(1) No serious biologist takes it as anything but fully established. In the words of Theodosius Dobzhansky, author of a major work on evolution and genetics, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution... Seen in the light of evolution, biology is... the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts, some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.”(2)

It is unfortunate that religious fundamentalists, misusing the term “theory,” regard evolution as unproven. Some go so far as to say that all the evidence that leads us to believe in the immense age of the universe and the proliferation of species over time, as opposed to instantaneous creation some 6,000 years ago, were planted by the creator merely to give the appearance of great antiquity.

Dobzhansky, a Christian, has this retort: “It is easy to see the fatal flaw in all such notions. They are blasphemies, accusing God of absurd deceitfulness. This is as revolting as it is uncalled for.”(3)

The religious believer may view evolution as God’s way of creating the world. The pantheist mystic may view evolution as the One Being’s way of unfolding and coming to know Itself over time. The secularist, the atheist or the merely agnostic may view evolution as the way living beings have propagated themselves, blindly and without foresight, in increasing diversity and complexity.

Regardless of your opinion on the ultimate purpose of it all, it is important to understand how evolution works because the theory reflects reality, and basing your actions on reality works out much better than not. So the rest of this essay is a summary of the theory of evolution.


The term “evolution” in a general sense means a process of change or growth, often taken as a process of continual change from a simpler to a more complex state. In biology, the term refers to two things:

• The observed fact that the distribution of inherited traits in a population of organisms can change from generation to generation.
• The theory that the various types of animals and plants we find around us, including ourselves, originated in earlier types and that their differences are due to modifications in successive generations.

The basic concept of biological evolution as we understand it today is surprisingly simple. Charles Darwin, its originator, called it “descent with modification.” The concept is this:

• An organism’s offspring may vary slightly from the organism itself. Offspring may have slightly different traits from the parents or the same traits in different degrees.
• Organisms typically produce more offspring than can survive and reproduce, given the resources available such as food, shelter, sexual mates, etc. Hence, there is competition for such resources.
• In the competition for resources, some variations have an advantage over others. For example, one child’s beak may be slightly better at picking up small seeds than another’s, or one child may have slightly better eyesight than the other and hence be better able to find food and avoid predators.
• The individuals with advantageous variations have more offspring than those without.
• Since traits are heritable (are inherited from parent to child), this causes the population, over time, to contain more of the favorable variations and fewer of the unfavorable ones.

Darwin called this process “natural selection,” as opposed to artificial selection, the intentional breeding for certain traits that produces such differences in the same species as the Great Dane and the Chihuahua. The underlying mechanism is the same in both kinds of selection: certain individuals have more offspring than others, so their traits become more widespread in the population of that type of organism.

A subset of natural selection called “sexual selection” is a result of competition for mates. In order to have offspring, an individual must not only survive but reproduce. Competition for mates, most often among males for females, selects for traits that enable males to dominate other males, such as horns and antlers, and for traits that attract females, such as plumage and other adornments.

This process happens slowly but inexorably. The variation between parent and offspring is most often minuscule, but over enough generations large changes result. A series of small, incremental changes can, given enough time, produce the extraordinary variety of speciation we find around us.(4)

This process is not purposive.(5) No organism intends to produce a better beak or a better eye. It is merely a fact of life that those with favorable variations tend to have more offspring than those without, each of which in turn have the favorable variation. Among that generation’s offspring, those that further amplify the favorable variation have more offspring, and so on for generations. Conversely, unfavorable variations tend to die out over time. We should not take phrases such as “designed by natural selection” as implying a conscious, deliberate designer.

What is inherited is a trait, a feature of an organism such as eye color. Traits are passed from generation to generation as discrete units. Gregor Mendel conducted a famous study in which he mated pea plants, some of which had purple blossoms and some of which had white. The offspring did not have pale purple blossoms, but rather some had purple and some white, in distinct proportions.

What passes these discrete traits from generation to generation is the gene, the fundamental physical and functional unit of heredity. A gene is a segment of nucleic acid that, taken as a whole, specifies a trait. Genes are contained in chromosomes, which are composed of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), a polymeric molecule found in cells of the body. DNA governs the production, growth and reproduction of the cells of the body. The current understanding of biological evolution, developed since Darwin’s time, recognizes the gene as a fundamental, if not the fundamental, unit of natural selection.

Functionally, genes pass traits from generation to generation. They do this by replicating themselves from parent to child. Physiologically, the same chemical structure appears in the child as was found in the parent. In combination with other genes and triggered by environmental influences, the genes cause the parent’s traits to appear in the child.

The term “trait” includes physical forms, such as bone density or eye color, behaviors such as sounding mating calls in certain seasons, and mental abilities or talents such as stereoscopic vision, empathy, or language.

Genes are not the only replicators. Ideas, symbols, behaviors, and other elements of culture replicate as well. Genes replicate from generation to generation; their cultural analogues, dubbed “memes,” replicate from mind to mind through writing, speech, gestures, rituals and the like.(6) The principles of evolution apply the same: like a gene, a meme is a replicator, except memes replicate contemporaneously between minds rather than historically between bodies.

Just as genes are subject to competition -- the ones that replicate to the next generation are those that help their host bodies to survive and reproduce -- so also are memes: only those that are catchy enough to secure attention in human minds replicate from mind to mind. What makes a meme catchy can be something as trivial as a memorable tune or limerick, or something that has continuing usefulness, such as ideas that hold cultures together.


So there is an abbreviated account of evolution. What does it mean for understanding human nature? To know what we are we must understand where we have come from. It is not just in our physical form that we have evolved, but in our mental capacities and in our cultures as well.

Are we, then, merely products of our evolutionary heritage, unable to change? No, but in our attempts to change, it certainly helps to understand what we have to work with. Understanding that inherited traits are the result of natural selection can help put in context findings about how we humans actually function in the world, a topic to which I intend to turn in future essays.

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes

(1) See, for instance, the section titled “Predictive Power” in Wikipedia, “Evolution as fact and theory.”
(2) Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.”
(3) Idem.
(4) There are three sources of variation: mutation, gene flow and genetic shuffling through sexual reproduction. Mutation happens when environmental influences cause tiny changes in the chemical structure of genes, altering their functioning, or when cells divide and imperfectly replicate their DNA. By far the majority of mutations are destructive, degrading the gene’s ability to do its job of directing the growth of organs and characteristics, but some enhance that ability, or change it so that the result is advantageous. Gene flow refers to the transfer of genes between populations of an organism. Individuals from one population mate with individuals of another and transfer genes between them. Genetic shuffling through sexual reproduction causes the combination of genes in each child to differ from that of its parents. In species that reproduce sexually, each individual has two copies of every gene (specifically, each has two strands of DNA, each of which contains chromosomes, which contain genes). In sexual reproduction, the child gets some genes from the mother and some from the father, and the combinations vary with each child.
(5) Religious or mystical thinkers may postulate a divine purpose that guides the process of evolution, but the science of biological evolution does not need that hypothesis to explain the process.
(6) Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, chapter 11, pp. 189-201.

References

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene, New Edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Dobzhansky, Theodosius. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” American Biology Teacher vol. 35 (March 1973) reprinted in Evolution versus Creationism, J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983. Available online at http://www.2think.org/dobzhansky.shtml as of 14 May 2012.
Wikipedia. “Evolution.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution as of 2 February 2009.
Wikipedia. “Evolution as fact and theory.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_fact_and_theory as of 14 May 2012.
Wikipedia. “Meme.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme as of 16 May 2012.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jonah Raskin : Protest 101 at Sonoma State

Front page of the Sonoma State Star, May 14, 2012. Image from Shame on Sonoma State..
Protest 101:
A textbook case of campus unrest, 2012

Everyone in the crowd seemed relieved that no one had shouted, thrown a pie in Weill’s face, or staged a sit-in on stage.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 20, 2012

ROHNERT PARK, California -- Sometimes, as Chairman Mao Zedong observed, a single spark can start a prairie fire. And sometimes the spark fizzles and the prairie lies there peacefully without a blaze.

For a really effective protest, activists apparently need more than a single spark. It helps to have several essential ingredients: an obvious issue or cause; a slogan that resonates; a dynamic leader or spokesperson; and brave souls prepared to risk failure, arrest, or rebuke from more cautious citizens.

Indeed, the May 2012 commencement ceremony at the normally sleepy Sonoma State University (SSU), one of the 24 campuses in the gigantic California State University system, had the potential to turn into a rowdy protest.

Protest 101 at SSU gained momentum in part because it was fueled by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The protesters had an obvious villain in Sanford Weill, the Wall Street billionaire responsible for the big financial meltdown of 2008 who would be on hand to receive an honorary degree. Not one but three strikes were against him. Largely responsible for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that made it possible for bankers like him to turn into modern-day pirates, he looted the economy, and ran Citigroup into the ground.

Veteran reporter, Robert Scheer, helped to ramp-up local discontent in a column in The Nation, in which he called the billionaire a “jolly good Scoundrel” and claimed that he was “laughing all the way to the bank.”

To the outraged organizers of the protest, it was clear that Weill had bought his honorary degree with a $12 million dollar check he’d written to the University. On the speaker’s platform, he’d have nowhere to hide, though, of course, he’d be surrounded by administrators and faculty members. A crowd composed of thousands of students, many of them in debt, along with their families, also in debt, would observe every move that he’d make.

The week of graduation, the student newspaper, The Star, primed readers for the protest with a banner headline that echoed the slogan coined by campus activists: “Day of Shame on Sonoma State University.” Just days before graduation, employees loyal to the university were observed gathering copies of the newspaper. They claimed to be “cleaning the campus.”

The protest quickly expanded into a First Amendment issue. SSU seemed on the verge of an explosion. The organizers wouldn’t have to do much at all, except sit back and watch the University self-destruct.

Then, reality kicked in. Graduating seniors insisted that commencement wasn’t a “day of shame” for them but rather a “day of pride.” Sandy Weill didn’t spark their ire. The university harnessed its public relations team and pointed out that Mr. and Mrs. Weill were generous philanthropists who gave millions of dollars to the arts and who earned their honorary degrees.

Then, too, the faculty divided among predictable lines, with old school radicals forming a small, core group and the majority of professors opting to remain seated while others stood and turned their backs to the podium.

Temperatures soared on the Saturday afternoon in May scheduled for commencement. Protesters distributed thousands of leaflets, and campus police, expecting the worst, were out in force. I was on hand to observe the drama. A professor emeritus at Sonoma State, where I taught for 30 years, I sat with the students, and stood out in the black cap-and-gown crowd because I wore a red shirt and a black baseball hat.

Four different police officers on four separate occasions approached me and asked for identification, though I didn’t have to produce papers. “He’s our professor,” students shouted. “He’s okay.”

When the critical moment arrived, Ruben Arminana, the president of the University, awarded the Weills their degrees. Half-a-dozen or so faculty members turned their backs on the podium and about 50 or so students did the same. Sandy Weill smiled, thanked the University, kissed his wife and sat down.

Marc Lamont Hill gives the commencement speech as Sonoma State. Inset below: Sandy Weill, Joan Weill and SSU President Arminana at commencement exercises. Photos by Sandy Destiny / The Rag Blog.
Everyone in the crowd seemed relieved that no one had shouted, thrown a pie in Weill’s face, or staged a sit-in on stage. Surprisingly, the best was yet to come. Marc Lamont Hill, the commencement speaker, took the podium and delivered an oration that in 1968 would have been described as “militant.”

By the standards of 2012, even by those of Occupy Wall Street protesters, it was as Maoist a talk as any heard on the campus. An African-American professor at Columbia University, and a regular commentator on CNN and MSNBC, Hill denounced Wall Street greed, the war in Afghanistan, and social injustice. With a big booming, impassioned voice, he invited graduating seniors not to conform, not to accept the big lies of the society, but rather to be brave and to oppose the political and economic system.

Students and faculty members stood and applauded him at the end of his speech. From where I sat and from what I saw and heard, Hill’s oration was the highlight of the day.

That evening at a party for faculty I talked to professors who had not taken part in the protest. “Every day is a day of shame in our capitalist society,” one woman told me. “Today was no different.” Another told me, “All universities give out honorary degrees to millionaires and billionaires these days.”

David Walls, a former dean at SSU, a veteran of the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, and an organizer with MoveOn.org, stayed away from the event. He said he was out-of-town. “Most of the commentary on Weill had little humor,” he told me. “The protest was mostly a venting of outrage, with no achievable goal in view. I imagine the issue of the honorary degree will disappear as quickly as it arose. Questions around campus finances will probably remain, but it is difficult to imagine that they will preoccupy Occupy.”

Shepherd Bliss, a former U.S. soldier who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, was ecstatic about the protest against Weill. “We were highly successful for many reasons,” he explained. “We distributed thousands of flyers documenting Weill’s crimes. We mobilized students, faculty, alumna, and community members in a direct action against his criminal behavior.”

The role I chose for myself was to moderate the rhetoric of the radicals. One friend sent a letter to the local weekly in which he expressed his “extremely negative feelings toward robber baron Sandy Weill who never should have had his $12 million in green washing money accepted by Sonoma State University or anybody in this county.”

He went on to say, “If the powers-that-be were not above such temptation, they first should have exposed each county citizen to the fetid corpse and stench of the murder he perpetrated on Wall Street and our nation. As to Sonoma State University, 'Shame, Shame, Shame'"

Phrases like “fetid corpse and stench of murder” didn’t help the cause. Shaming didn’t help, either. I also discovered that the simple act of wearing a red shirt in a crowd in which everyone else was wearing black made a strong statement and engendered discussion. Sometimes simple understatement works better than bravado.

I asked SSU’s president, Ruben Arminana, to answer a single multi-choice question. Do you feel, I asked, if you:
     a. came out smelling like roses
     b. dodged a bullet
     c. made the best of a bad situation
     d. all the above?
His answer was: "d. -- all the above.”

As for the protests at SSU, I’d assign them a C. Marc Lamont Hill deserves an A+.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. A former Yippie, he is a a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jay D. Jurie : Are We Colonized? A Response to Chris Hedges

Activist/journalist Chris Hedges speaks at Occupy Washington, DC, Freedom Plaza, Jan. 9, 2011. Photo by Scott Galindez / Occupy Washington, DC.
'Colonized by Corporations':
A Response to Chris Hedges

Hedges says that corporations play the same role in the U.S. today that British or French colonialism played in India or Indochina.

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / May 18, 2012

According to Chris Hedges, we're no different than Third World inhabitants subjugated by foreign colonialism.

In one of his most recent columns ("Colonized by Corporations," Truthdig.com, May 14, 2012), Hedges relies on the book The Developing Nations by Robert E. Gamer, to tell us "we have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized."

This means, he goes on to say, that corporations play the same role in the U.S. today that British or French colonialism played in India or Indochina in the past. Part of how this works is through the construction of "patron-client" relations, whereby real power is concealed, and the oppressed deal only with client regimes who do the dirty work of the foreign oppressors.

This is among the latest in a series of books and essays Hedges has written about the economic and political crises affecting not only the U.S., but how these are related to crises on the global level, and how this contributes to the rise of resistance movements, such as Occupy here at home.

His column is produced regularly on Truthdig.com, and according to his biosketch on that site, he was a foreign correspondent for almost two decades in locales including Africa, the Balkans, Central America, and the Middle East.

He has worked for a variety of media sources, and as part of a New York Times team, once won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage on terrorism. He left the Times after being reprimanded for speaking out against the attack on Iraq launched by the George W. Bush regime.

Hedges has written for a number of publications, including The New York Review of Books and Adbusters. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Colgate, a master's in divinity from Harvard, and speaks several languages, including Spanish and Arabic.

Over the past several years Hedges has become directly involved in the resistance he once wrote about, most specifically the Occupy movement that grew up around the U.S. in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street events this past September. He has been arrested at Occupy-related protests, including one on November 3, 2011, outside Goldman Sachs in New York City.

This past January, he was joined by several others in filing a federal lawsuit against the threats to civil liberties posed by the National Defense Authorization Act -- which resulted this week in a federal judge enjoining enforcement of the controversial provisions.

In a RawReplay interview with Muriel Kane at The Raw Story on September 25, 2011, Hedges described Occupy Wall Street as "Where the Hope of America Lies."

In this same interview, Hedges characterized the U.S. as in transition to a "neo-feudal corporate state, one in which there is a rapacious oligarchic class, a thin managerial elite, and two-thirds of this country live in conditions that increasingly push families to subsistence levels...[the corporate state] wants to reduce the working class to a status equivalent to serfdom."

Hedges has since expanded on that theme, including in this present column. He brings up the work of Frantz Fanon, who described Algeria under French colonialism. Changing the on-scene managers won't bring about any changes in the real situation, as colonial rule will continue regardless.

In the U.S., this means a vote for either Obama or Romney won't make any real difference, the "neo-feudal corporate state" will remain unaffected. This "patron-client" facade must be destroyed and "new mechanisms of governance" put in place.

Yet, according to Hedges, it's not the "serfs" who are the real threat to the colonial apparatus, it's the "declasse individuals," the professionals who are losing their foothold as the economy hollows out, or are denied advancement as the ranks of the managerial elite grow thinner.

It is when these elements join with the lower echelon and share their message with them, that the apparatus is threatened. Malcolm X understood these dynamics, which is why he was more of a direct threat to the system than Martin Luther King, Jr., who still worked within "patron-client" relations.

Eventually the corporate elite will become increasingly venal and corrupted. They will resort to violence to retain power, but will become increasingly unable to stabilize the situation. Violent revolutionary groups will arise to challenge the elite, as did the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and others in the 1960s, but they will hold back, rather than advance desirable social transformation.

This is obviously a slap at the "Black Bloc," a current tendency that Hedges identifies with the earlier groups.

Ultimately, the "neo-feudal corporate state" will collapse when it loses legitimacy among the last of those responsible for upholding it, when they defect, and when some cross over to the resistance.

Hedges advises people to go ahead and vote this coming November, but only for a third party candidate, as a way of registering protest, then get back into the streets where the real changes will take place.

In response to Hedges, it's true that "unequal exchange" produces certain conditions that are functionally the same in developed as in underdeveloped countries. It's also true that these conditions are in some respects becoming increasingly similar. Shanty towns under bridges in Miami look increasingly like favelas in Brazil. But there are some differences, and Hedges glosses over the processes by which these manifest.

Although Hedges makes passing reference to Karl Marx, he seems unfamiliar with either Marx, or more contemporary Marxist sources, such as Samir Amin, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Ellen Meiksins Wood, David Harvey, and others, who for quite some time have addressed the conditions he seeks to describe.

Much of what Hedges describes in some ways fits well with Negri and Hardt's "empire" theses, wherein they discuss the transnational character of the capitalist system, and how conditions from the developed countries are reproduced in underdeveloped countries.

It's unclear why Hedges doesn't employ such analysis. Maybe he's trying to be careful and not alienate a predominantly liberal audience, maybe he doesn't like or agree with this source material, or maybe he's not conversant with it, and I suspect the latter.

In this column he makes direct reference to Alexander Herzen, a Russian who exerted some influence on the subsequent revolution in that country. Like Herzen as an earlier expression of the change process, Hedges seems to be feeling his way along, his perspective seems to be evolving, and he wants others to join in the voyage of exploration.

Following Garner, Hedges contends disaffected groups don't attack the underlying sources of problems, instead they confront what some Marxists have termed as "compradors" or in other words, "intermediaries." In this regard, Hedges misapplies Fanon, who was addressing a context dominated by an actual colonial power, where the French had put into place, and actively propped up, indigenous elites.

Though there are some similarities, the U.S. is not occupied by a foreign power, as was Algeria. If Hedges were to make this case regarding the U.S. in relation to Iraq or Afghanistan, he'd be much more on target.

As it is, the comparison has limitations. It is easier for subject populations to associate corporate domination with foreign rule. No doubt, the Iraqi people associated Blackwater with the U.S. occupation. It's not quite the same, or as easy, for people in the U.S. to make that same association. Nor do they have to cut through two sets of "comprador classes" to get at the problem.

There are other issues as to the comparative composition of the class structures that have been oversimplified by Hedges, but they are beyond the scope of the present discussion.

In terms of minor critiques, it's not news, at least not to many Rag Blog readers, that the election of either Obama or Romney will not dislodge, or do anything meaningful about, the underlying domination of corporate power. Hedges is basically correct in his assessment of "declasse intellectuals," but again, that's not news. Any serious scholar of revolutionary process would point out the same.

Though Hedges is correct that Malcolm X was much more forthright, it's not certain that Martin Luther King, Jr., harbored any illusions about the nature of power in this country. His speech on Vietnam reflected comprehension of the dynamics that initiated the war as well as its likely domestic consequences.

Hedges' assessment of "radical violent groups," at least in the case of the Black Panthers and AIM, is not wholly on track. A more nuanced and sophisticated position is required, that takes into account the self-defensive nature of much of that history.

Finally, there are serious questions about the "futility of elections." Hedges performs a service by raising this issue, but falls short in terms of a comprehensive assessment. Yet again, we full well understand that whether Obama or Romney is elected, we will not see fundamental change.

But that's not the same as some who mistakenly argue that "there's no difference between the two," plus it leaves out other situations where there's more of a difference to be made: for instance, it's better to have Bernie Sanders in office than not.

We also should not throw out the possibility that serious change could result through the electoral process. This doesn't mean the sort of phony examples represented in countries like France, Spain, or Portugal, where "socialists" keep getting elected and no basic social change transpires.

As exemplified by Mitterand, when he was president of France, this could be called "SINO," or "socialism in name only." No difference should be expected from Francois Hollande, who was just elected in France. He might modify French participation in the Eurozone, but will do virtually nothing to replace capitalism.

In actuality, the main European parties who call themselves "socialist" should be known as "social democratic," which in modern parlance is what they are.

But we do have some better examples. There was Allende's Popular Unity government in Chile, and the reason it was overthrown was that the government was genuinely moving Chile to socialism. It actively sought to free itself from both colonial and corporate domination. Today, we have Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and his government is on the road to a similar underlying transformation. I

n other words, the prospect of an electoral transition to real social change shouldn't be tossed out, but it's an absolutely essential imperative that it be led by significant popular organizations and a vast grassroots movement, as in Chile, which must have the involvement of disaffected "declasse intellectuals," as in Venezuela.

There has to be a strong and well-organized movement "outside" the electoral arena, most especially if any "inside" strategy is to be effective.

As to whether people should vote for third parties in November, as Hedges proposes, while I personally believe there may be some significant incremental differences, plus strategic advantages, to be gained through the reelection of Obama, I remain agnostic on the question of how anyone should vote.

There are good and valid reasons not to vote for Obama, and I'm not going to castigate anyone who should decide instead to vote for a "protest candidate" to his left.

[Jay D. Jurie, a veteran of SDS at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a resident of Sanford, Florida, where he teaches public administration and urban planning. Read more articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]

Sources:
Though I was aware of Negri and Hardt's Empire, I thank Bruce Goldberg for bringing its importance to my attention. Any misinterpretation is my error, not theirs, or his.
Muriel Kane September 25, 2011 interview: www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/chris-hedges-occupy-wall-street-is-where-the-hope-of-america-lies /

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...