You're viewing all posts tagged with politics
“
Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.

- Glenn Greenwald in a worthwhile salon.com post built around this idea: “To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic.”

To start, as this 11/18/2010 post will show, I realize how stubbornly wrong Hitchens was about Iraq. What I’d somehow missed was that “he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being ‘sluts’ and ‘fucking fat slags’ for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief.” I’d say that this made my blood boil. But blood can’t boil. Not while you’re alive at least. What’s real is that my pulse sped as my body tried to cope with a squirt of fight-or-flight hormone.

The main way I try to cope in these situations is to click some links, get closer, and give my indignation a chance to deepen, dissipate, or grow more complicated. So I did.

I started by clicking the words “fucking fat slags” in Greenwald’s post. It led to the Google Books version of a book I don’t know, The Left At War. This passage, specifically:

At a debate a few hours earlier, he lost his temper when someone asked about the country band the Dixie Chicks and the flak they copped for criticising George W. Bush’s Iraq policy.

“Each day they dig up dead bodies in personal death camps run by a Caligula dictator,” Hitchens shouted, “and I’m being asked to worry about these fucking fat slags—do me a favour!”

Then I clicked “sluts,” which led to a YouTube clip. I’ve transcribed what feels like the relevant part:

One must show some contempt and some defiance, and the best means of doing that that I know of: irony and obscenity. Which is why it was a mistake for that guy to ask me about those slut Dixie Chicks and the hideous holocaust to which they’ve been subjected.

Greenwald’s post is about the perils of creating “false history.” But it’s false history to summarize these two Hitchens quotes as “he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being ‘sluts’ and ‘fucking fat slags’ for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief.”

The most Hitchens-friendly reading of the quotes is that he wanted to bludgeon audiences into understanding that nothing in the jingoistic backlash against the Dixie Chicks  came close to “dead bodies in personal death camps.” A slightly better man would have made the point while dismissing Natalie Maines and her band mates as rich pop stars, rather than “sluts” and “fucking fat slags.” A vastly better man would have made his point and then pivoted to warning that mass demonization of dissenters — from Dixie Chicks to atheists — can lead to Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” and, in turn, to the hell of ”dead bodies in personal death camps.” 

But, as Hitchens said in the same YouTube clip, “I may look friendly and meek and so on, but I have a mean streak a mile wide.”

You may remember that I hassled you to shell out actual money to read a New Yorker investigation about “allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.” If you read it, thank you. If you didn’t, you have a fresh chance. Some wise person at newyorker.com sprung the article from behind the magazine’s paywall. You can read it here. In a related link, the image above comes from a redacted U.S. Department of Homeland Security “Significant Incident Report.” Mattathias Schwartz, who wrote and reported the New Yorker story, has posted the incident report to his site. It’s here. This story is gnawing at my conscience. It’s partly because there’s a significant U.S. component. As I wrote in my one previous post about this, “my government is sitting on a copy of a video that ‘could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.’ Morally, if not legally, this amounts to obstruction of justice. Crap like this is why Wikileaks enjoys legitimacy.” If you make time to read Schwartz’s story and emerge sharing my sense that the U.S. government should help confirm or refute these ghastly allegations by releasing its surveillance footage, please consider blogging, Tumblring, Facebooking, tweeting, etc. about the case. I’m groping my way toward trying to get something started via Twitter. Even simply retweeting this tweet of mine would be a help. I’m hoping any tweets about this push to release the video can include the hashtag #JamaicaMassacre and mention the president (@BarackObama). If you have any ideas for how to do this better, please get in touch here or via quiggblog [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks. Click for high-res photo

You may remember that I hassled you to shell out actual money to read a New Yorker investigation about “allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.” If you read it, thank you. If you didn’t, you have a fresh chance. Some wise person at newyorker.com sprung the article from behind the magazine’s paywall. You can read it here.

In a related link, the image above comes from a redacted U.S. Department of Homeland Security “Significant Incident Report.” Mattathias Schwartz, who wrote and reported the New Yorker story, has posted the incident report to his site. It’s here.

This story is gnawing at my conscience. It’s partly because there’s a significant U.S. component. As I wrote in my one previous post about this, “my government is sitting on a copy of a video that ‘could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.’ Morally, if not legally, this amounts to obstruction of justice. Crap like this is why Wikileaks enjoys legitimacy.”

If you make time to read Schwartz’s story and emerge sharing my sense that the U.S. government should help confirm or refute these ghastly allegations by releasing its surveillance footage, please consider blogging, Tumblring, Facebooking, tweeting, etc. about the case. I’m groping my way toward trying to get something started via Twitter. Even simply retweeting this tweet of mine would be a help. I’m hoping any tweets about this push to release the video can include the hashtag #JamaicaMassacre and mention the president (@BarackObama).

If you have any ideas for how to do this better, please get in touch here or via quiggblog [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks.

how to hand your bank a sack of manure

From James Surowiecki’s “Financial Page” column in the current New Yorker:

Paying your debts is, as a rule, a good thing. But the double standard here is obvious and offensive. Homeowners are getting lambasted for doing what companies do on a regular basis. Walking away from real-estate obligations in particular is common in the corporate world, and real-estate developers are notorious for abandoning properties that no longer make economic sense. Sometimes the hypocrisy is staggering: last winter, the Mortgage Bankers Association—the very body whose president attacked defaulters for betraying their families and their communities—got its creditors to let it do a short sale of its headquarters, dumping it for thirty-four million dollars less than the value of the building’s mortgage.

… Strategic defaults would help distribute the pain more evenly and, if they became more common, would force lenders to be more responsible in the future. It’s also possible that a wave of strategic defaults—a De-Occupy Your House movement—would get banks to take mortgage modification more seriously, which would be all for the better. The truth is that banks have been relying on homeowners to do the right thing. It might be time for homeowners to do the smart thing instead.

The data Surowiecki cites about how steadfastly homeowners try to meet their mortgage obligations echoes what Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus describes in his book, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty. This passage by Yunus shows how it might sound if American banks modified home loans more readily and took a compassionate, pragmatic approach to this crisis:

We may be accused of being naive, but our experience with bad debt is less than 1 percent. And even when borrowers do default on a loan, we do not assume that they are being malevolent. Instead, we assume that personal circumstances have prevented them from repaying the money. Bad loans present a constant reminder of the need to do more to help our clients succeed.

Surowiecki cautions that defaulting on a home mortgage “is still a lot of trouble, and to most people it’s scary.” Still, read his full column, seek other advice, think it all through, and permit yourself to act with the cold-blooded rationality of a corporation.

“

Tomorrow, we can expect to see not only the obvious faces—civil-society activists, liberally inclined journalists—but investment bankers and even bureaucrats. The spirit of the last week has been surprising and moving in a way that an objective reporter should not admit to being moved by. But even without rooting for either side, and with the full understanding that these protests may easily come to naught, one can’t help but marvel at the spontaneous, utterly organic outburst of civic feeling, and the fact that, for lack of a better term, a point of no return has very clearly been passed.


… All the government’s resources have kicked into panic mode, it seems. The police have leaked reports saying that the protests will be scoured for those dodging Russia’s military draft. Those arrested will also be drafted. Suddenly, Saturday has been made into a mandatory, full day of school for Moscow high schoolers. To ensure attendance, students will be given an important Russian test. (This after reports that students were forced to populate pro-United Russia protests on Tuesday instead of going to school.) Most bizarrely, the health minister has warned people to stay home lest they go to the demonstration and catch the flu.

- Julia Ioffe reporting from Moscow for newyorker.com

I can’t be sure that my pulse actually spiked as I read Ioffe’s latest dispatch, but I did catch myself breathing far faster than makes sense for a person at rest.

One way or another, this is history happening. Ioffe is @ioffeinmoscow on Twitter. I also recommend “The Decembrists,” a piece she wrote for Foreign Policy this week. My 3/29/11 post on Ioffe — and, among other things, the eccentricities of her Twitter feed — is here.

“

Unarmed men of fighting age were interrogated on the spot, and more than a thousand were sent to detention centers, from which they were released a few days later. Mickey Freeman was one of dozens allegedly shot to death in custody.

A year and a half later, the Jamaican government has refused to make public what it knows about how the men and women of Tivoli Gardens died. So has the government of the United States, despite clear evidence that the U.S. surveillance plane flying above Kingston on May 24th was taking live video of Tivoli, that intelligence from the video feed was passed through U.S. law-enforcement officers to Jamaican forces on the ground, and that the Department of Homeland Security has a copy of this video. The video could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents, and could help identify the alleged killers.

- Mattathias Schwartz in a piece from the current New Yorker that’s, unfortunately, behind the magazine’s paywall.

To summarize, my government is sitting on a copy of a video that “could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents.” Morally, if not legally, this amounts to obstruction of justice. Crap like this is why Wikileaks enjoys legitimacy.

Paywall or not, I urge you to read the piece. It’s on newsstands. There’s a Kindle edition, an iPad edition. You can probably find a copy in a library or the waiting room of a nearby dental office.

Do seek it out. This passage especially got to me:

A suitcase on top of a bedroom dresser holds what remains of her old life. When she wants to explain who she once was, she will carry it to the kitchen table, spill out a bundle of loose papers, and begin picking out the vital documents—identification cards, letters of reference, phone numbers of supervisors who will attest that Mickey Freeman was a good man.

———————————-

UPDATE (12/15/2011): The story is now free to read on newyorker.com. Here’s a link!

“

(Occupy Wall Street) was an absolutely necessary eruption that forced the central but unspoken issues of our time on to the center stage. Indeed, what has been achieved is so important that it is now imperative that the victory not be sacrificed by continuing to focus on tactics. Translation: letting this movement descend into a prolonged cat and mouse battle over physical space, tents and parks would be tragic. The fight for physical space is not only unsustainable, it is also politically insufficient and ineffective. The more OWS becomes about itself, the more it looks inward, the more pointless it will become.

OWS must look outward.

- USC’s Marc Cooper, author of Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels of A Radical Reporter, in a post called “Occupy What?”
“
Notice that Reagan was not quibbling about the precise meaning of “torture”. He signed a Convention against anything that could even faintly be considered torture - any “inhuman treatment” of prisoners. This current incarnation of Republicanism is so crude, so un-American, so fascistic in its disdain for the rule of law and its relish for violence that it should have no place in a Western polity. To have leading Republican candidates embrace torture in this way renders it the only political party in the entire Western world to embrace the abuse and torture of prisoners. It is unique in the West in embracing the tactics of totalitarian states throughout the world.
- Andrew Sullivan today in a post called “Why Huntsman and Paul Matter.”
“
And that’s why when Herman Cain is president, we’re gonna tear down the IRS headquarters. We’re gonna start from scratch. Our tax plan is simple as can be. I love it. We call it 9-9-the uh — what’s the third one there? — … oh five, okay … 9-9-and the uh uh uh ………. EPA! There you go!

- vice presidential nominee Rick Perry, addressing the Republican National Convention in Tampa Bay on August 29, 2012

It’s a big world and someone else probably thought of this already. Still, dream ticket.

“
We don’t have brain farts about the substance of things we know well and care deeply about. So, if Rick Perry had carefully combed through the federal budget and concluded that the functions of those three agencies were either unnecessary, or best moved elsewhere, he’d know that. He’d know that he wanted to either eliminate funding for energy research, or move it elsewhere. And thinking about the substance of the issue for a millisecond would give him the name of the department he planned to cut.
- a Dish reader on the slo-mo trainwreck of Perry’s “I would do away with the Education, uh the uh Commerce and, let’s see, I can’t. The third one I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”
“
Today, one vision of how America works is that it’s an even game, that anybody can get started — just roll those dice; that booms and busts will come and millions of people will lose their homes, millions more will lose their jobs, and trillions of dollars in savings retirement accounts will be wiped out. The question is, Do we have a different vision of what we can do? There’s been such a sense that there’s one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It’s so pervasive that it’s not even hidden.

Elizabeth Warren, from a new profile in Vanity Fair well worth reading. (via nervousacid)

================

A related Warren quote from the Vanity Fair profile:

America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression—just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it. Coming out of the Great Depression we said, We can build a structure that makes us all safer. And notice, it’s from the end of the Great Depression to the 1980s that we built America’s middle class. That’s when we got stronger as a country. That’s when that big, solid, boring, hardworking, play-by-the-rules group in the middle emerged and defined what America was. You still had the ability to become a billionaire, but the center stayed strong and, notice, provided opportunity for growth, opportunity for getting ahead, opportunity that your kids were going to do better than you did. That was what defined America. And then we started, inch by inch, pulling the threads out of that regulatory fabric, starting in the 1980s.

One more quote. I’m always skeptical of conversion stories. Rhetorically, they’re so effective, so convenient. Writers and politicians and communicators of all kinds know this, and there are time when the I-used-to-believe-in-vanilla-but-the-facts-converted-me-to-chocolate narrative feels like a flagrant sham. But even with a grain of salt, this seems worthwhile:

In 1978, Congress had passed a law that made it easier for companies and individuals to declare bankruptcy. Warren decided to investigate the reasons why Americans were ending up in bankruptcy court. “I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters,” she said in a 2007 interview. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us.” What she found, after conducting with two colleagues one of the most rigorous bankruptcy studies ever, shook her deeply. The vast majority of those in bankruptcy courts, she discovered, were from hardworking middle-class families, people who lost jobs or had “family breakups” or illnesses that wiped out their savings. “It changed my vision,” she said.

From then on, Warren would focus her research on the economic forces bearing down on the American middle class.

Having been shut out of the job she wanted in the Obama administration, Warren is running for Senate. Her campaign site is here.

- David Quigg, 10/21/2011

(this post was reblogged from nervousacid)
“

I had come close to dismissing the movement myself, and it was only when I read scornful appraisals by others that I realized that I didn’t actually want to see it dismissed. Having overcome that temptation, I proceeded to fantasize about “helping” the movement with advice that might make it more recognizable to me—and less like the strange, effective thing that it has turned out to be. Happily no one asked for, let alone took, my advice.

Whenever a writer considers endorsing a cause—whenever this writer considers it, at any rate—he worries: Do I know what I’m talking about? Am I distracting myself from my real work? Who cares what I think? Aren’t I just indulging a romantic sense of my own world-historical importance? Shouldn’t the cobbler stick to his last? Maybe. And maybe the movement will disappoint me by taking a nasty turn. I didn’t marry Occupy Wall Street; I just signed a petition supporting it. I think I did so as a kind of public recognition that my first impression of the movement has so far turned out to be more accurate and useful than my second thoughts. I signed in hopes of forestalling, or at least slowing, the impulse that other people might also feel to dismiss the movement out of hand.

- Caleb Crain in “Why I Signed the Occupy Writers Petition”

This passage is worthwhile, too:

My Keynesian hunch about the current economic troubles is that when wealth is too much concentrated in the hands of people who don’t need to spend it, it stops circulating. I suspect that America spent its way out of the structurally similar Great Depression of the nineteen-thirties through a campaign of wealth redistribution that lasted decades—the government hired soldiers, gave college educations to veterans, granted pensions to senior citizens, and went to war on poverty—and that the transfer laid the groundwork for the longest period of uninterrupted prosperity in American history.

Click here to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll through the long list of writers who have signed the petition.

please make me stop and re-read this post if I’m ever about to invite a bunch of strangers to defy the cops

Here — in order — are three things Naomi Wolf wrote in her account of getting arrested by the NYPD on Tuesday night:

1) “I saw that the protesters had been cordoned off by a now-massive phalanx of NYPD cops and pinned against the far side of the street – far away from the event they sought to address.

“I went up and asked them why. They replied that they had been informed that the Huffington Post event had a permit that forbade them to use the sidewalk. I knew from my investigative reporting on NYC permits that this was impossible: a private entity cannot lease the public sidewalks; even film crews must allow pedestrian traffic.”

2) “Finally a tall man, who seemed to be with the event, confessed that while it did have a permit, the permit did allow for protest so long as we did not block pedestrian passage.

“I thanked him, returned to the protesters, and said: ‘The permit allows us to walk on the other side of the street if we don’t block access. I am now going to walk on the public sidewalk and not block it. It is legal to do so. Please join me if you wish.’”

3) “The police are now telling my supporters that the permit in question gave the event managers ‘control of the sidewalks’. I have asked to see the permit but still haven’t been provided with it – if such a category now exists, I have never heard of it;”

——————

To repeat, the title of this post is “please make me stop and re-read this post if I’m ever about to invite a bunch of strangers to defy the cops.” If the day does come that I’m about to invite a bunch of strangers to defy the cops and you do get me to stop and you do get me to read this and I say “What’s your point? Leave me alone,” then please point to the next paragraph and ask me to re-read it again.

Wolf is not an attorney specializing in New York City sidewalk law, so it’s entirely appropriate and understandable that she would write, as she did, that “if such a category now exists, I have not heard of it.” But a person who will ultimately have occasion to write “if such a category now exists, I have not heard of it” is also a person who should dial her phone and consult an expert before inviting strangers to defy the cops on the basis of “I knew from my investigative reporting on NYC permits that this was impossible: a private entity cannot lease the public sidewalks.” “Impossible” and “I have not heard of it” really should not come out of the same mouth. Furthermore, a conversation with “a tall man, who seemed to be with the event” is hardly gospel and does not justify announcing to a group of strangers that “The permit allows us to walk on the other side of the street if we don’t block access. I am now going to walk on the public sidewalk and not block it. It is legal to do so.”

Just to be totally clear, arresting Wolf strikes me as a case of yet another NYPD white shirt needlessly escalating a nonviolent standoff. I’m grateful to whoever filmed her arrest and hope it boosts the odds that justice, restraint, and sanity will prevail.

In the name of helping sanity prevail, I hope Wolf will find a way to mellow the rhetoric. Her phrase “completely Stalinist,” for example, evokes slave labor, starvation, abuse, and death in Siberian prison camps rather than “my phone was taken and for half an hour I was in a faeces- or blood-smeared cell.” And I mostly think of the lack of similarities to Guantanamo and secret CIA prisons and Jose Padilla when Wolf writes “the protesters were lied to about our whereabouts, which seemed to me to be a trickle-down of the Bush-era detention practice of unaccountable detentions.”