The Double Standards

all I’ve got on the Mumbai attack so far:

Two incidents about how this event is being framed.

First from the BBC: the day after the Mumbia ’standoff’ finished, there was a riot in Nigeria that killed 200 people.  This is the counterpoint to all the vague moralizing about the loss of human life on the coverage of the Mumbai attack, because it has garnered only a tiny fraction of the Mumbai attack’s press.  The (false) report that the attackers targetted ‘westerners’ is one big reason why this became as big as it did: the attack was against the ‘west’ and the friends of the west – it had little to do with loss of life.

Second, from Andrew Sullivan: within a few hours, he made two posts about torture.  one was about US torture policy, which he refers to as the “Bush Cheney Torture Regime“. However, when discussing torture committed by the (presumed) Islamic terrorists in Mumbai… the big rhetoric comes out.  In this case, we’re dealing with “Barbarians“.  Another shameless and senseless pro-west bias that taints an effective analysis of what just went down in Mumbai.

Mind the Gap

Apologies for taking off for a second there, I needed a few days to recharge and I figured the dead week around Thanksvegan was as good of a time as any to take a few days.  Now I’m back (and a little sick), but there’s lots of important shit going down.

I’ve decided to revert to a 3-posts a day format to acomodate my need to sleep and work on school more.  expect regular posts on this schedule until further notice.

The ‘O’

from menfes queddes' flickr

Obama’s ‘O’ logo is one of the most impressive elements of his political identity – it functions as a condensation of Obama’s message, a badge for supporters, a lucrative branding tool, etc.  I love this interview with the designer at the NYT, because it shows a more or less face of the campaign, and reveals so much about how electoral politics works these days -

First, it shows the deliberate, calculating side the the campaign, rather than the exuberent, movement-building face.  Axelrod and Plouffe deliberate about what logo serves them best, debate the advantages of different ‘O’s and make a calculated decision.  No doubt this is why the interview is happening only after the election.

The logo works because it condenses so much meaning. The ‘O’ itself refers to his name, which signifies him as something different, a ‘change’ – Obama has a ‘funny’ name that sets him apart from other candidates and past presidents.  The ‘rising sun’ image also connotes change, the lines imply the open feilds and rural areas that supposedly define America.  it implies unity (a full circle), and an accessible simplicity that can be molded to fit any number of messages.

The multi-valent iconicity of the ‘O’, and it’s basis in Obama’s biography (both of which the designers read before going to work) reveals the imagistic and narrativized foundations of contemporary politics.

Transparency, Comments and Power

'd. - none of the above'

First of all: a shoutout to techPresident for being a great resource for thinking about the relationship between technology and politics.  Full of consistently engaging and challenging work, and just generally pretty dope.

Anyways – the much-ado about Obama’s plan to use the internet to govern needs some fleshing out.  The key remains changing the internet from a tool of access and transparency into a tool for people (writ-large) to make decisions.  Questions remain about how to transform feedback and criticism into decision-making authority, and transparency into power for the people viewing.  As it stands, the folks in government being monitored by internet-tools often still have the authority to act as they please, even if hundreds of thousands of voices dissent.

At the very least, internet tools put into more explicit terms the incongruencies of power and time that define the modern bureaucracy.  In the same way that I think that Obama’s Presidency throws into better contrast certain types of exploitation (and makes certain new stridant critiques more sayable), internet transparency movements do the work of making critiques of state power more visible and potent.

‘Debate’ About Torture

I’m not particularly happy with the idea of Brennan as the head of the CIA – but then again, I’m not particularly OK with the CIA in the first place.  Anyways, there’s also a problem with the idiotic rhetoric of ‘opening a debate‘ about the use of torture.  I definiately don’t take issue with debates – I’m pleased with the defeat of a challenge to NYU’s Coke ban in a debate, to cite the most recent example – but I’m fairly sure that any ‘national debate’ about torture will look nothing like a productive discussion about torture, or state violence.  The terms of the debate will be left up entirely to people like Brennan – not only will he choose what people talk about, but also the forum in which they do it, and the terms in which it is described.  The cacaphony of a truely national debate will be reduced to the talking points of a hoarde of ‘national security experts’ and other apologists for the exercise of US military power.

Here’s the point: I don’t think debate is a problem, but in the narrow, imagistic environment that constitutes public discourse, the idea of a ‘debate’ all too often only serves as a fig-leaf to media campaigns meant to justify some pretty fucked up stuff, and I’m not buying it.

Lining Up for Democracy

lining up for the exit. from Tony the misfit's flickr

Get yer democracy, right here folks:

City Hall paints out a flow chart for the possible chain reactions in state and local government that could occur if Hillary Clinton goes to Sec. of State.  It inadvertantly gives you a perspective on the insider-baseball of NY state politics – all of these people are connected in one or two degrees of seperation, and the assumtpions about who could fill whose spot shows the chain of political favors that connect them.  I think this provides yet another argument for term limits – everything should be done to shuffle these folks out of office just to break up the insular club that only changes up when someone resigns or is offered a higher office in government.

Dreadful Genius

Another recommendation: “The Dreadful Genius of the Obama Moment“

A pretty jarring analysis of the numerous problems left unsolved, and the problems created by the Obama election.  I’m worried that my own focus on the symbolic/rhetorical elements of politics sometimes distracts from the real material facts of US exceptionalism.  We really do have a war on most of the world, with terrifying implications.

I feel very conflicted.  On the one hand, I know that no matter how right you are, you have to be able to effectively communicate and organize people for your voice to matter.  In the current political environment, trying to take ‘hope’ head-on and out and out deny that people should enjoy Obama’s election feels like political suicide.  On the other hand, I know that arguments about ‘effectiveness’ can straight-jacket real dissent, and prevent people from saying what needs to be said about Obama and the violence of the US government.

I guess my real feelings go something like this: I agree with the commenter on the article above that the real alternative is to ask people to hope further.  What did we hope for?  Was it Rahm Emanuel and a return to the Clinton foreign policy?  Or are we really hoping for an end to racism (white supremacy), and something more fundamentally just in the world?

All Bloomberg All the Time

staying around. from carbonnyc's flickr

Highly recommend Wayne Barrett’s Village Voice feature on Bloomberg and his third term – you get a sense of the collusive egomania required for someone like Bloomberg to run again.  Barrett sees the move as a pure act of self-obsession, an argument I try to avoid for its narrowness, but it’s pretty persuasive in this case.  Bloomberg co-ordinates his business interests, city office and charity donations into an independent economic force all of his own, turning them into a vast machine that serves himself and enough other rich and powerful folk to keep himself in power indefinately.

Stunts like unilaterally withholding property tax rebate checks (which, he, um, can’t do legally) are the real legacy of the Bloomberg Mayoral reign.  He has vastly centralized power into the executive of city government, and sidelined the power of the City Council by leveraging his personal wealth and business connections.

Against this background of intimidation by Bloomberg’s money and clout with fellow billionaires, no viable candidate has fully stepped into the ring to challenge him.  Any serious challenge would work wonders to undermine the rising hegemony Bloomberg exercises over the city, injecting dissent into the developing consensus that Bloomberg offers the last hope to our city.

NYU Coke Ban Gains More Support

NYU’s ban on Coke products was reaffirmed by the CAS Student Council yesterday.  After an hour long debate between a member of Students Creating Radical Change, and two members of the College Republicans, the CAS Student Council General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to continue backing the ban.  Two reports of the vote count gave 21-5 or 30-4 as the margin of victory.

The CAS vote supports a ban put in place by the NYU Senate in 2005 in response to the paramilitary assasinations and kidnappings of Columbian Coke Bottling Plant union leaders and their families.  The vote rejects claims made by the Coke Company and their supporters that a document produced by the International Labor Organization constitutes a ‘independent investigation of human rights abuses committed against the Sinaltrainal Union’.

The ILO report not even contain the words ‘human rights’ or ‘assasinations’, but it never even claims to be an investigation – it writes up an 11 day walkthrough of bottling plants in Columbia, where workers were interviewed in the presence of their bosses, and no evidence was demanded to support or disprove claims.  Also, Coke’s director of global labor relations, Ed Potter, is the US ambassador to the ILO, putting the independence of the organization in question.

Human rights abuses, including kidnappings, torture and death threats against the SINALTRAINAL union continue to this day.  NYU made a promise to workers in Columbia that it would hold Coke accountable for this reign of terror.  Lifting the ban now would betray that promise, and provide a foothold for Coke to undermine support for the ban in the 52 colleges and universities that stood up to them and demanded respect for the right to organize, and an end to human rights abuses.

NYU Admittance – A Growing Problem

This is hillarious.

Bikes Breaking the Rules

from operators are standing by's flickr

I fully support it.  Look, we have a whole transportation infastructure built up around the idea of moving people in cars, as fast as possible, in as large of numbers as possible.  And if people riding bike break those rules, so be it.  Streetsblog got it right when they said that cyclists need more safety protections – protections at the core of transportation infastructure, not just in helmet laws.  Helmets are important (I wear one), but they only protect you against minor, single person crashes, and not the catastrophic collisions that occur between cyclists and cars.

Considering the state of the world environmentally, every single policy decision – be it in infastructure, or law enforcement – needs to be directed at the cause of averting total climate crisis.  Cars, and the organization of transprotation in the city, crate a much more fundamental threat to wellbeing than rule-breaking cyclists ever could.

Obama and the Kennedy Effect

One of my favorite stories about American politics (besides Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72) is about JFK, and his popularity bounce after getting elected, then assasinated.  in 1960 Kennedy won a very close election, by about 100,000 votes.  But, magically, by the time he was inaugerated as President, 60% or so of Americans told pollsters that they voted for him.  Then, after his assasination in 1963, about 80% of people polled said they voted for him.  Somone was lying.

Obama won fairly decisively this year, but the same thing is happening: a low to mid 50’s percent win in the popular vote magically turned into a 65% approval rating (acknowledging that people polled is a different group than voters). It shows just how successful Obama was in posturing himself as ‘historic’ in the post-election aftermath, and the popular utility of his personal narrative in winning himself political capital.

The bump demonstrates the very different rhetorical posture Obama must adopt as President, rather than Candidate, and also forecasts the difficulties he might have in re-mobilizing his 3 million or so subscribers.  I think Obama’s need to make general, more cautious appeals once in power suggests that his ‘online army’ will perhaps go rogue and begin leading their own campaigns, rather than continuing to rally behind the more pragmatic rhetoric of President Obama.

Senate Can’t Police Their Own

from Random Factor's flickr

Both major parties showed some serious lack of fortitude in their failure to reprimand either (soon to be frmr) Senator Ted Stevens or Joe Lieberman.  While Uncle Ted will saw his day in court – and will soon he his day in prison – Joe will go more or less scott-free for his transgressions (which were of a different magnitude that Ted, but still).

The point is this: after an administration that tortures people to death, the first step towards making sure that rampant abuse of executive power and torture doesn’t occur again is open and earnest prosecutions of the folks at the top.  The Senate’s unwillingness to even really second guess either of these folks – particularly Lieberman, who Greenwald points out as a head cheerleader for the downright evil shit both parties let go down in the last 8 years or so – signals that no one close to the President will be publicly or legally reprimanded for their crimes.  And that is a disturbing precedent.

NYU in a Spat of Deceptions

For a few I had been planning a post in my mind about how NYU had avoided high-profile controversy this year, after last year’s Polytech-Abu Dhabi-Provincetown Playhouse smorgasbord of public debates, but it looks like they managed to prove me wrong.  Just in the last month, they’ve said and done a lot of stupid things:

Like “There will be no service cuts for students!” … which actually wasn’t true, and having the President lie to students never wins points.

Which, of course, never stopped Mr. Sexton – he also misled students on fair pay in a town hall.

Then, after the WSN did a pretty decent job exposing guard cuts on campus, NYU went out of its way to gag guards from talking to the press.

Now, NYU made headlines for more or less lying about its crime statistics on campus, on a day when they would have much rathered talk about the Silver Towers  and making nice with GVHPS.

THEN there’s the Sexton pay package, which, it turns out is ANOTHER example of NYU lying to its students – in 2005, the university said that Sexton’s salary wasn’t increasing, but at the same time the University vastly increased other forms of compensation that nearly doubled his overall pay.

MTA’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Not an expert on MTA business, but perhaps cutting service and making riding transit less appealing might *not* be the right strategy for saving a system that now relies on user fees?  I think time will show that the viability of large-scale public works projects like the MTA subway system relies on Keynesian-style government investments, not by trying to squeeze more out of user fees for less service.  This all depends on the state government folks doing the right thing and pushing for higher spending via targeted contributions from very high-income citizens in order to increase or maintain current MTA funding.  Otherwise, the severe cuts might become a reality, and sustainable will be a pipe-dream.

On ‘Being Out of Touch’

Not a voice in the wilderness. from babblingdweeb's flickr.

The second to last refuge of the scoundrel, accusations of being ‘out of touch’ or ‘behind the times’ abound these days, leveled at the UAW/Automakers in Detroit, and legislators unwilling to cut their way out of a crisis in Albany.  These appeals work because they’re ungrounded references to general sentiment, and build off the sense that many of our economic problems are insurmountable, or at least wildly difficult.  Calling folks ‘out of touch’ not only neatly condenses problems into a soundbite form, it also provides a definate scapegoat who already is in the wrong.  In the case of union rules, which is an important part of the Detriot discussion, the accusation of ‘out of touch’-ness typically begins an argument about why workers should get sold out for their bosses ineptness, or why they should lose the right to organize their labor.  Really, the argument comes down to this: someone has the bully pullpit, wants to get their way, but doesn’t actually know how to get it.

WSN Doing It’s Job?

Normally the target of ridicule for mediocre reporting and sycophatic relationships with NYU, the local Washington Square News has actually been doing a pretty good job of reporting and challenging the administration on a host of things, like:

Lying about crime stats

John Sexton’s Large large large compensation

Security Guard cuts on campus, and NYU’s attempted coverup

With the exception of the Coke ban article today, which continued a long and proud tradition of denigrating progressive movements on NYU’s campus.  This article is seriously a failure of the journalistic enterprise, and Phoebe Kingsak should not be allowed anywhere near a newspaper for the extended future.  Her article reads almost exacly like the pro-Coke op-ed published yesterday, and that’s an embarassment.

Spending, Pardons and GOP 2010

I do what I want. from motherpie's flickr.

Clinton spent his last months giving out pardons to felons and friends, but in the last few months of the Bush Administration, executive branchers spent trillions and trillions of dollars setting up shady loan deals with the people that ruined the US economy.  The real upshot from these deals will be hemming in the incoming administration financially with a near criminal excess of unaccounted-for and unauthorized loan programs.

At this point, the Bush folks see the writing on the wall and want to do their best to restrain the new government by running up deficits then demanding budget ballancing in the next Congress.  The military plays the same game with the defense budget, bloating requests for new spending to require cuts and then pigeonhole Obama as someone weak on defense.  With Bush functionally out of office, and all eyes on the incoming administration, no doubt these problems will look like an Obama problem, which will be the first step to a planned GOP resurgence in 2010.

War in Iran

got yr wish. from danny.hammontree's flickr.

Bullshit, bullshit and more bullshit.  Since 2003, left-folks warned of an impending attack on Iran by the Bush Administration.  Every time there’s an election since then, the shrill warning went out: October Suprise!  The attack is coming!  But every single time, they’re proven wrong.

The reasons the attack won’t come are numerous: even if the warnings about weapons sound the same, the US military cannot physically make the effort of launching another war, and the Bush Administration doesn’t have nearly the same political clout it did in 2002 to win any sort of support for its war.

At the same time as folks whip up anger about Iran, the US overthrew the first real government in Somalia since the early 90s, attacked Syria, and started invading Pakistan.

The point is, we have plenty to be upset about, and I’m ready to stop hearing about Iran and start thinking about rallying folks to the myriad problems that actually exist, rather than ones of fantasy.

Building on the Downturn

building your downfall. from havarde's flickr

New York rent control remains one of the most amazing institutions I can think of – during the wild upswing of the past few years, it seemed impossible that tenants could have achieved a position of power vis-a-vis landlords that allowed renters to set the terms of their tenancy.

Now, if real estate crashes and new building stops, tenant groups and other fair housing advocates will have a historic opportunity to negotiate with landlords and builders from a position of power.  A decline in prices that falls faster than wages or employment could allow renters to band together and establish new rent-stabilization systems in exchange for agreements to keep on leases.  Overbuilding and a wide decline in wages means that tenants for have relatively large amounts of power vs. landlords, and should seize on that opportunity to create a better future in a potential recovery.

The key will be tying in the current decline to long-range systems of exploitation in commercial real estate.  Landlord exploit the intrinsic human need for shelter, and the key to new ethical-housing systems will be finding ways to explain landlord abuses during the bubble as an example of systemic problems with real estate in America, but New York in particular.