Category: Politics

Citizen Works has a full-page ad in the NYTimes today describing the Bush administration’s assault on privacy and civil rights. Not news for most anyone who normally sees this weblog, but posssibly a reminder, if not a terrifying reality check, even a goad for action, for many who will see it in the paper around the country.

The University of California has suddenly reversed its decision forbidding its own Emma Goldman Papers Project from printing quotations from Emma Goldman about war and the suppression of free speech. [See my post of three days ago.]

“Now I understand, maybe one tiny, tiny, tiny part of what Emma Goldman’s life must have been like in the sense of both taking risks and also appreciating what it feels like when your voice is really speaking for others who have similar concerns,” [the director of the Project, Dr. Candace S. Falk,] said.
She said she had been overwhelmed by public reaction to news reports about the deletions. Since Tuesday, Dr. Falk said, the Goldman Project had received more than 300 letters and e-mail messages from around the world, all but a few supporting her view that deleting the quotations amounted to censorship. The university had insisted the disagreement was about fund-raising techniques, not free speech.

This small victory is good news, but we still shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking it’s free speech if an authority (any authority) is permitted to decide when it’s not ok to speak freely, or even to decide when it is.

I can’t take it anymore! The American media has been misrepresenting events in Venezuela, slavishly adopting the account, one of pure invention, furnished by the Right in both Caracas and Washington. Too much time has passed for me to believe that the reportage error is purely a matter of ignorance, especially when the NYTimes, normally more subtle about its heavy corporate slant, follows the cant so readily.
What we read and what we hear is a lie.

This is clearly an oil strike, not a “general strike,” as it is often described. At the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which controls the industry, management is leading the strike because it is at odds with the Chavez government.
Over the past quarter-century PDVSA has swelled to a $50-billion-a-year enterprise, while the income of the average Venezuelan has declined and poverty has increased more than anywhere in Latin America. And while Venezuela depends on oil for 80 percent of its export earnings and half its national budget, the industry’s workers represent a tiny fraction of the labor force.
Outside the oil industry, it is hard to find workers who are on strike. Some have been locked out from their jobs, as business owners – including big foreign corporations such as McDonald’s and FedEx – have closed their doors in support of the opposition.

Read on.

Not my quote, but that of that wacky agitator, John le Carré, printed as the headline of his piece in The Times of London.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
. . .
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Thanks to Fred H. for the le Carré tip.

In a column whose overall message is the continued decline in Dubya’s popularity figures. Maureen Dowd hits a few bullseyes, but none better than her take on what passes for foreign policy in Washington these days.

It’s equally hard to fathom the president’s bipolar approach to nuclear threats. Yesterday he hurled new ultimatums at Saddam Hussein. “I’m sick and tired of games and deception,” he said, even as he responded to Kim Jong Il’s games and deception with pleas and promises to send food and oil to Pyongyang. There are inspectors in Iraq who are not finding nuclear weapons, while inspectors have been kicked out of North Korea, which has admitted to a nuclear weapons program.
So what’s the message here? If Saddam had already developed nukes, we’d send him a fruit basket? But since he hasn’t, we’ll send him Tomahawk missiles. We know Saddam’s weak, but we’re pretending he’s strong so America can walk tall by whupping him.

Not all of us are blind.

DEFINITIONS OF WAR
To the Editor:
Re “Detention Upheld in Combatant Case” (front page, Jan. 9):
If the definition of “wartime president” has changed from being president at a time of war that has been declared (Harry S. Truman most recently, as I recall) to when Congress has authorized money for military force but has not declared war (Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Bosnia and the Persian Gulf war, to name the major conflicts) to the president’s simply declaring a war (on poverty, on cancer, on drugs, on crime, on terrorism), then we have had a “wartime president” for as long as I have been alive.
The war on terror is not a real war. It is not declared by Congress. This is a continuing, never-ending excuse to forward an agenda and, at least as described in your article, trample civil liberties in the name of “war” — a conflict that is politically nurtured despite its terrible and very real roots.
BEBE BROWN
Barnstable, Mass., Jan. 9, 2003

I believe however that Bebe Brown is mistaken, in this letter which appeared in the NYTimes today, about Truman declaring war. Truman inherited the Second World War and Korea was a police action where no war was actually declared.

Almost a century after she helped create the conscience of a once lively American Left, Emma Goldman‘s words have been proscribed by a great American University. The University of California at Berkeley was the birthplace almost forty years ago of the free speech movement [Is America is regularly in need of a free speech movement, like, it’s a such a new idea?], and for 23 years it has been the repository of Goldman’s papers, but the school doesn’t seem to have learned a thing from its extraordinary history.

In an unusual showdown over freedom of expression, university officials have refused to allow a fund-raising appeal for the Emma Goldman Papers Project to be mailed because it quoted Goldman on the subjects of suppression of free speech and her opposition to war. The university deemed the topics too political as the country prepares for possible military action against Iraq.

And the words which are so offensive and political?

In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people “not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.” In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates “shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open.”

Just before they occupied the Administration building in December of 1964, Mario Savio had exhorted his comrades,

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to indicate to the people who own it, to the people who run it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Mario Savio

It’s that time again.

Zachie Achmat still won’t take his pills, even though Nelson Mandela has asked him to. It’s part of a very big plan, and it seems to be working, since, as he says, “The country is realizing that people can actually buy life, and that this is unacceptable.”
The class, racial or economic foundation of the world’s response to the AIDS pandemic has rarely, if ever, been illustrated so dramatically as it has been and continues to be in South Africa. A heroic activist in the country with the highest official count of AIDS-infected people in the world, Achmat has “dragged his government into savings its people,” fighting denial at all levels [the goverment of Thabo Mbeki questions the very existence of HIV as the cause of AIDS and minimizes the problem otherwise] and demanding access to AIDS medications for all regardless of ability to pay.
He needs those drugs himself, and he can afford them, but in 1998 he vowed not to take them until everyone in South Africa could. While that day may be dawning, at least in his own country, it may in the end be too late for the man most responsible for what would be a very great victory, one which would honor that associated with Mandela, who now calls Achmat a role model.

The parallels between the campaign and the A.N.C. are haunting. The [Treatment Action Campaign, of which Achmat is chairman] is one of the few organizations still wearing the A.N.C.’s mantle of activism. Its leaders are using techniques they learned in the anti-apartheid struggle. Mr. Achmat was jailed several times in the 1970’s, and spent the 1980’s living underground as an A.N.C. activist. The campaign is fighting an evil even more formidable and deadly than apartheid, and one that, absent universal access to AIDS treatment, is just as selective in bringing most of the suffering down upon South Africa’s poor.

While some may say the gesture trivializes and distracts from the gravity of the anti-war message, Unreasonable Women organizer Donna Sheehan said desperate times . . .
“It got your attention, didn’t it?” joked Sheehan of Marshall, who said she doesn’t even go into the kitchen without a robe on.

–maybe too stupid to deserve democracy.
I’ve always thought that the reason most Americans do not vote their interests, but instead support those of the super-wealthy, is that they actually expect to be among the super-wealthy themselves some day.
So goes a good part of the argument of an OP-Ed piece in saturday’s NYTimes.

People vote their aspirations.
The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent [the repeal of the estate tax, which is explicitly for the mega-upper class], he was taking a direct shot at them.