A small victory for the "human nature is good" camp

A new poll shows strong support for universal health care. 65 percent of respondents rate extending insurance to those who don't have it a bigger priority than keeping health costs down for those who are already insured. 48 percent support universal health care even if their own costs increased as much as $500/year.

Republicans in the survey acquit themselves better than expected, as 30 percent support a government guarantee of health care even if it raises their own costs. On the other hand the 52 percent of Republicans along with 13 percent of Democrats and 22 percent of independents who oppose universal health care reveal themselves as the true assholes of the country. You can make a superficially plausible case that poor people are to blame for being poor - it's a lot harder to make that argument about sickness and disease. Here the pretense of personal responsibility is dropped, and we see that most Republicans are just selfish bastards.

For many years polls have consistently shown strong popular support for universal health care. Every time one of these polls comes out the media seem surprised - an indication of the deep contempt the media hold for democratic priorities when popular desires don't mesh with those of the business and political elites. In every article except those on polls like this, universal health care is assumed to be utopian. It's truly remarkable that despite being told at every opportunity that universal health care is impossible, large majorities of Americans continue to support it.

What will the Democrats do with these popular demands? Mike Davis, discussing the state of the party following the midterm elections, is probably right that as long as popular forces remain unorganized and apathetic, the Democrats will continue to pursue corporate money at the expense of any real reforms. But as I've written, John Edwards's health care plan is actually quite good. If Clinton and Obama match him (unlikely) or if they're denied the nomination because they can't find the political courage to support universal health care, we might make real progress.

letter to the editor, re: expanding public transit

Hey look at that, the Tribune printed a letter I wrote. It's inferior to the op-ed, but hits the same points. Unfortunately they changed my correct spelling of the word El to the Tribune's style "L". Three of the seven letters today criticize what's going on with the CTA.

Moving the public

You argue that the CTA should take care of its basic maintenance needs before building new services ("Crosstown back from the dead," Editorial, Feb. 26). But often federal funds are available that can only be used on new construction. Adequately funding existing public transit should be the first priority, but it shouldn't distract us from the ambitious expansion plans that might someday allow the metro region to escape its destructive addiction to cars. In fact, long-term planning is going on right now—but for the wrong things. Mayor Richard M. Daley and the CTA have fast-tracked the Circle Line and Block 37 airport express. These two projects might please Daley's well-heeled campaign contributors, but they do little for the huge sections of the city underserved by public transit.

Let's spend that money instead building the Mid-City Transitway "L" line on the old Crosstown Expressway route and extensions of the Dan Ryan Red Line, the Orange Line and the Yellow Line that have been discussed for years.

[me]
Chicago

Paving over the Mid-City Transitway

As I started writing this post I was suddenly taken by the idea of submitting it to the Tribune as an op-ed, which explains the writing style. Since I have no hope of them publishing it, here it is for your enjoyment.

As the reelection of Mayor Daley approaches and the Illinois legislature gears up for a big budget battle in Springfield, an important but largely unknown issue has hit the media in the last week. In an alarming display of poor judgment, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan announced his support for a new highway running through the Northwest, West, and Southwest Sides.

Madigan seems not to have consulted anyone on plans for the unused railroad corridor just east of Cicero Avenue that the first Mayor Daley had planned to turn into a highway called the Crosstown Expressway. He did not speak with Governor Blagojevich, the City of Chicago, the Illinois Department of Transportation, or the toll authority before proposing the new highway. Area transportation experts expressed surprise at Madigan's plan, and skepticism that it would ever be politically viable. In 1979 the original plan was killed by the strong opposition of residents who would have been forced out by the highway construction's swath of destruction. Perhaps Madigan failed to consult a recent map of Chicago's population as well, but a lot of people are still living there.

Good thing, too. The last thing Chicago needs is another highway. As study after study have shown, new road construction does not alleviate congestion. Rather, traffic expands to fill the new space, leaving road conditions unchanged but adding a lot more pollution, greenhouse gases, and road accidents.

What the city desperately needs is not more roads, but more transit options. If Chicago is going to meet Daley's goal of becoming the "greenest city in America", it has to come up with an adequate infrastructure for people who want to get out of the traffic jams and away from the road rage. It will have to revive and expand public transit.

A plan to do just that in the Cicero railroad corridor has been under discussion since 2002. Known as the Mid-City Transitway (MCT), the plan would develop the corridor as a new El line instead of a highway. Running from the Blue Line Jefferson Park stop south to Midway Airport then heading east along 74th, the MCT would end at the Red Line 87th Street station.

If built, the MCT would provide a direct connection between O'Hare and Midway. It would finally establish a north-south El line in the western part of the city, linking the Blue, Green, Orange, and Red Lines. And it would bring the El to huge swaths of the city that have been excluded. According to a 2005 study commissioned by the city, an MTC El would attract about 90,000 riders a day - numbers similar to the heavily used North Side Red Line and twice that of the Brown Line. (See information on neighborhood population densities here and here.)

In response to Madigan's proposal, Daley has voiced his support for building some sort of mass transit and a trucks-only road in the Cicero corridor. The idea is certainly better than Madigan's, but why has Daley made the MTC such a low priority?

The MTC has languished as a "long-term proposal" with no political urgency behind it. Instead, Daley and the CTA have pushed forward projects like the Circle Line and Block 37. The Circle Line would form an outer Loop linking El and Metra lines just outside of downtown. Because part of it would be underground and because it runs through valuable land, it would cost about as much to build the Circle Line's 5 miles as it would to build the MTC's 22 miles. The Circle Line would draw far fewer riders and run through parts of the city already well-served by transit. Yet it moves quickly forward while the MTC remains endangered by hare-brained proposals like Madigan's. Could the percentage of condos in the Circle Line's vicinity provide some clue to this otherwise baffling development?

Until our city's leaders get serious about public transit, and about serving all parts of the city rather than just the professional set, our atrocious traffic situation will only get worse. An MTC El should be an integral part of a serious plan to dramatically improve Chicago mass transit.

More on the Democrats

Here's a short and unsatisfying list of John Edwards's policy positions. He sounds a lot better than Obama on energy, sounds about the same on Iran. Here's a much more satisfying interview with Edwards, mainly about Iran and Israel. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama all seem to have the same dishonest policy on Iran - they harshly criticize Bush for not negotiating with Iran, but insist on "keeping all options on the table". It's dishonest because the goal of the negotiations - that Iran renounce nuclear weapons even as it is surrounded on literally all sides by hostile nuclear powers - is simply not realistic. And that only leaves military action or a continuation of the "containment" policy pursued by all administrations since the American client regime was overthrown.

So Edwards seems pretty bad on foreign policy, just another liberal imperialist. When asked "What does Iraq say about the feasibility and the bar for invading countries in the Middle East?", Edwards responds, "It means that we have to be much more careful." In other words, for Edwards the problem with the Iraq war is that it was done recklessly, under false pretenses. He refuses to condemn the crime of aggressive war, and he refuses to condemn American supremacy.

Here is an article on Obama's Israel policy. Surprise! He blames the Palestinians for being oppressed. So on Israel, too, Clinton, Edwards, and Obama are tied - all lousy.

I suppose it's a bit much to ask for an anti-imperialist to emerge as a viable Democratic candidate. The American elite has been united behind American supremacy since 1945, and Democratic presidents have been some of the most violent in their defense of it. To the extent this election is worth spending time on, Edwards still seems to be the best candidate at this point. Sad that in the first race in which a woman and a black man are viable, they are also the least progressive. Sad, but revealing.

Took 'em long enough

Chicago has finally enforced its ban on foie gras for the first time. The target was the owner of Hot Doug's, the hot dog place by Lane Tech. This guy has been a real asshole about breaking the law, so it's good to see him fined.

If you want to send an email to Hot Doug's, the address is info@hotdougs.com.

letter to the editor, re: subsidies for drivers

I've always thought it a little strange that I've managed to get a half dozen letters published in The New York Times and even one in The Washington Post, but still not a single one in the Chicago Tribune. This one, which I sent last week, continues the streak.

To the editors:
If car-dependent suburbanites think they're subsidizing public transit in Chicago, they're dead wrong ("Transit agencies go after billions", 2007 February 8). It's those of us who don't own cars that are subsidizing them: paying to build roads for them, paying the clean-up costs and hospital bills incurred by their pollution and car accidents, sacrificing valuable urban space to eyesores like parking lots and gas stations.

But even more than nondrivers, it's future generations who are subsidizing drivers. As the IPCC report on global warming makes clear, our children and grandchildren will spend huge amounts of money to deal with the mess we're giving them. What is this but an enormous transfer of their wealth to us, so that we can enjoy the convenience of traffic jams and road rage?

We should dramatically increase taxes on cars and gasoline and use the money to build an outstanding public transit system for the whole metro area. The faster we do it, the less money we'll be stealing from those who come after us.

At last, the big Obama post

Well now that he's finally running and has become the great black hope of white liberals, I suppose I should pass judgment.

I read thru the interesting (nonbiographical) parts of his book some months ago and took extensive tho sometimes illegible notes. Based on that, I have no great enthusiasm for the man.

It seems to me that the key issues in the presidential election should be (in no particular order):
1) health care,
2) Iraq and other foreign policy,
3) global warming,
4) immigration,
5) poverty, economic decay, and its connection to race.

(You'll notice I did not mention the goddamn middle class, because there are some people who have real problems.)

So how does Obama rate?

1) Health care.
The only acceptable solution here is a single-payer health care system, or the extension of Medicare to everyone in the country, preferably with the nationalization of the pharmaceutical companies. The patchwork solutions that Democrats have been pushing are expensive and inefficient and will be rolled back next time the budget has some problems. Obama seems to recognize this when he writes, "there may be other more cost-effective and elegant ways to improve the health-care system" (186), but he goes ahead and signs on to the same old incremental, fatally flawed approach anyway. I don't remember the specifics, but my notes refer to his proposal as "half-assed health care".

2) Iraq and other foreign policy.
Unlike many Democrats, Obama opposed the invasion before it began. In the book he calls for a phased troop withdrawal by the end of 1996, and it seems likely that as president he'd get most of the combat troops out. Whether he'd establish permanent bases and continue to interfere in Iraq is less clear.

His general foreign policy discussion in the book makes clear that he's a liberal imperialist, willing to defend America's world hegemony but preferring to do so with bribery and shows of consultation rather than thru unilateral violence. He speaks admiringly of Truman, Acheson, Marshall, and Kennan - the architects of the cold war - as "marr[ying] [Woodrow] Wilson's idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of America's power with a humility regarding America's ability to control events around the world. . . . America needed to maintain its military dominance and be prepared to use force in defense of its interests across the globe" (284).

As for the present day, he writes, "So long as Russia and China retain their own large military forces and haven't fully rid themselves of the instinct to throw their weight around - and so long as a handful of rogue states are willing to attack other sovereign nations . . . - there will be times when we must again play the role of the world's reluctant sheriff. This will not change - nor should it" (306).

When he speaks of "rogue states willing to attack other sovereign nations", he's not referring to the USA, but it's unclear who he is talking about since in the last 15 years the only country to attack other sovereign nations has been America (you might want to include the Eritrea-Ethiopia war, or possibly Israel, but I don't think this is who he has in mind). Regardless, it should be clear that Obama is just another great power hypocrite, willing to use violence to protect American supremacy if he needs to. In light of this, his reference to China as a "potential rival" (307) and his warlike statements about Iran appear rather ominous.

3) Global warming.
Political space to address global warming has been opening with suprising speed over the last couple years, so Obama's failure to say much of anything about it in his book is doubly disappointing. He does call for an end to oil company subsidies, taxing those companies one percent of their revenues to fund alternative fuel research, and for increased fuel efficiency standards. But he mostly justifies these in terms of national security and economic stability, with nary a word on global warming. The centerpiece of what there is of an environmental program is expanding ethanol production. That will serve Obama campaign contributor and corporate agriculture giant Archer Daniels Midland well, but will not do much to fight global warming. Obama is also supportive of (energy intensive) technologies that turn coal into oil, a nice sop for downstate coal interests but terribly regressive on global warming.

4) Immigration.
Obama writes that "American citizenship is a privilege and not a right, that without meaningful borders and respect for the law, the very things that brought [immigrants] to America, the opportunities and protections afforded those who live in this country, would surely erode" (267). This is simply not good enough. It does not address the root cause of massive immigration - global inequality - and it does not condemn the racism that has been animating anti-Mexican legislation and invective. What we need is an amnesty, not cliched rhetoric.

5) Poverty, economic decay, and its connection to race.
Obama calls for many useful economic measures, including a raise in the minimum wage, increased earned income tax credit, stronger unemployment insurance, better legal protections for unions, and government subsidized jobs programs in the inner city. But these are crumbs - they're not imaginative, they certainly don't go far enough, and Obama stays away from the real problems here, institutional racism and capitalism. He also doesn't have much to say on reviving economic activity in the ghetto or reforming our system of so-called criminal justice.

On other issues, Obama doesn't look much better. He opposes gay marriage. He admits using marijuana and cocaine so he should know that drug prohibition is asinine, but if he does he's not doing anything about it. His biggest funders are corporate law firms and finance capital. His close advisers and friends are a collection of campaign mercenaries, corporate bigwigs, and Daley proteges. Perhaps the most damning thing about Obama is that he hasn't used his huge media presence to push any truly ambitious progressive policy.

All that said, Obama may be the best choice among the viable candidates - the only one that may be better, at least in rhetoric if not policy, is Edwards. Certainly, some useful organizing could take place under cover of campaigning for Obama. But we on the left should be clear: there is almost no evidence that this man is our ally, and investing great hope in him seems deeply misguided.

Global warming miscellany

So last weekend I spent far too much time going to blogs that mentioned the IPCC report on global warming and leaving comments like this:

probably the single biggest thing thing we can do as individuals to fight global warming is to go vegetarian. a recent UN report found that the livestock industry accounts for 18 percent of human-induced greenhouse gases (more than cars!), and a university of chicago study concluded that switching from a typical american diet to a vegetarian diet reduces your contribution to global warming more than if you switched from a regular car to a hybrid. not to mention all the other environmental damage done by the meat industry, or the horrific suffering of the animals.

The media literally haven't reported on either of these studies (the only thing a Lexis-Nexis search turns up is a half-assed New York Times editorial), so I thought it was a good chance to try and educate people about meat's role in global warming.

I was really surprised by the strong presence of global warming deniers. On any thread that discussion got going, they seemed to be as numerous as those who believe in science. And I only visited blogs that seemed concerned about global warming, so there was a significant number of denier bloggers that I didn't even bother with. The deniers seem particularly strong in the USA, Australia, and Canada. Those three also happen to be numbers 1, 2, and 3 in per capita carbon emissions among large industrial countries (there are a handful of island nations and oil-producing kingdoms with higher levels, plus Luxembourg).

But I don't think the deniers are our biggest problem. I suspect popular complacency and resistance to reducing our consumption will prove much bigger obstacles.

Some interesting numbers I've come across:
Carbon emissions per capita, 1990-2003. The USA, Australia, and Canada are the worst by far. Deutschland/Germany, 日本/Japan, 한국/South Korea, and the UK all emitted only 1/2 the carbon of the those three, slightly less than Россия/Russia. I was a little surprised that Japan, with its amazing public transit system, was almost as bad as Germany and worse than Britain. Among the rich countries, the two standouts are France and Sverige/Sweden, both emitting less than 1/3 of the carbon of the USA and 2/3 that of Germany. 中国/China's output in 2003 was 1/6 that of the USA. Tho that figure is increasing rapidly, it will not even rival France's any time soon. Brasil emitted less than half as much as China, and India and Indonesia slightly less than Brasil.

Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2004. There's a lot of good information on US greenhouse gases in here. Carbon is responsible for 85 percent of the total share (all numbers are weighted according to how powerful each greenhouse gas is), with methane and nitrous oxide accounting for most of the rest. An overwhelming majority of the carbon is, of course, produced by burning fossil fuels. The biggest sector consuming fossil fuels is transportation (33 percent), with private vehicles accounting for over 60 percent of the total. The other fossil fuel culprits: industrial (28 percent), residential (21 percent), and commercial (17 percent). Burning oil for mainly transportation uses and burning coal to produce electricity are the main carbon producers, each accounting for around 40 percent of the total.

From these numbers and the UN and U Chicago studies above, it should be clear that the two main things Americans can do as individuals to fight global warming are to stop eating meat and other animal products, and to stop driving. But it remains the case that these two have small shares in the total production of greenhouse gases, together accounting for perhaps 25 percent of greenhouse gases. The solution to global warming must involve an organized political movement to force much stricter emissions standards and much higher prices for greenhouse gas-producing consumption, as well as more efficient and less individual consumption.

Freedom to invest is really just like free speech

I went to a U Chicago protest today demanding that the university divest from companies involved in supporting the Sudanese government because of its involvement in the ethnic violence in Darfur. This issue doesn't really do much for me - I generally think Americans should concentrate on preventing their own government from killing hundreds of thousands of people before they go crusading against other governments. And the actual investments at stake are fairly minor; divesting would be mostly symbolic. But the divestment activism seems to be the biggest campaign on campus, and I think the principle is important. First, the university should not be free to invest in companies that are complicit in gross human rights violations. And second, the university should be accountable to the people that make up the community.

Instead, the administration and board of trustees have argued that if they give in to this political pressure, then they will have abandoned their duty to maintain an atmosphere of open discussion. Needless to say, this is a bizarre argument meant to provide only minimal pretense for retaining the administration/board of trustees' autonomy from the university community and to avoid the slippery slope of permitting open debate on what the university should do with its money. Divest from Sudan today, what's next? Turn down money from the War Department? Spend money to ameliorate the vast expanse of poverty that surrounds the university?

The Nation smears vegetarianism

Here's a choice piece of anti-vegetarian dreck. This sort of thing can be found on blogs all over the internet, but this one was published in The Nation. Now I don't expect The Nation to publish anything explaining the strong case for progressives being vegetarian - it has never done so (with the partial exception of Peter Singer's short and rather tepid contribution to the food issue last year). But I do expect them to not publish muddled and ad hominem pieces like this one.

The first part of the article is a review of Tristram Stuart's The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism From 1600 to Modern Times. It's a fine review, tho Lazare spends a suspicious amount of time talking about Nazi vegetarianism (only a minor part of the book, which focuses primarily on Enlightenment-era England according to other reviews). Then we get this:

The idea is that instead of reigning supreme over nature, humanity should take its place within nature alongside its fellow animals. Instead of domination, this implies sharing, harmony and other New Age virtues. But the trouble with sovereignty is that it cannot be fragmented or reduced; either it's supreme and indivisible or it's not, in which case it's no longer sovereignty. Although vegetarians may think that surrendering human supremacy will reduce the harm that people do to the environment, any such effort is invariably counterproductive. Denying humans their supreme power means denying them their supreme responsibility to improve society, to safeguard the environment on which it depends and even--dare we say it--to improve nature as well.

First of all, since when have "sharing" and "harmony" been exclusively New Age values? Second of all, this is a ridiculous argument. Does anyone who lacks supreme power thereby lack all responsibility? How exactly could humans improve nature? If Lazare stopped playing word games and offered some sort of example, at least his point might make sense.

Instead we move on to this:

Regardless of whether they are consuming more meat and poultry than is good for them, it is yet another reminder, as if any more were needed, of how thoroughly Malthusian myths about limits to human productivity have been shattered. Scarcity no longer serves as an argument for vegetarianism, and neither, for that matter, does health, since we know from studies of Okinawan centenarians and others that small amounts of meat and dark-fleshed fish are good for you; that moderate amounts of alcohol (which vegetarians for some reason appear to avoid) is good for you as well

I think he's right that the health argument for vegetarianism is a bad one (altho it's pretty clear that most Americans would dramatically improve their health if they went vegetarian). The scarcity argument, on the other hand, is probably less discredited than Lazare believes since current plenty is being bought at the cost of environmental destruction that might severely limit future plenty. And where is he getting this idea about vegetarians avoiding alcohol? I've never even heard that stereotype before.

I'll end with Lazare's conclusion, which could have come from the pen of George Will but for the Castroite slogan:

So the next time you tuck into a plate of tagliatelle Bolognese, a leg of lamb or a proper coq au vin made from some rangy old rooster that's had more lovers than most of us can dream of, you should see it not just as a chance to fill your stomach but, rather, as an occasion to celebrate humanity's ongoing struggle to create abundance out of scarcity. Venceremos! It's a lot better than wallowing in the silly defeatism of a diet of tofu and sprouts.

Zionist hysterics

Here's a classic and hilarious example of Zionist excess - in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who can be blamed for supporting widespread and serious - but nonfatal - human rights abuses, is transmogrified into an evil far worse than Saddam Hussein, who incidentally is directly responsible for killing a couple hundred thousand people. The speaker is Abe Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League.

“There is a difference between Ahmadinejad and even a Saddam Hussein,” Foxman rejoined. “Here is a man who says time and again, ‘I will wipe this nation’ ” — Israel — “ ‘off the face of the earth,’ and says afterward that the Holocaust never happened. This is not ‘Israel as victim’; this is the destruction of Jewish identity.”

Foxman made a beseeching gesture, his fingertips cupped before his mouth. “Plus, it has happened before,” he went on. “It’s not an abstraction. By a man, by a government, who aids, abets, fuels suicide bombers, makes them martyrs, celebrates them, who asks for volunteers from his country, and I don’t know what they have, 40,000 now, who have volunteered in future to go kill Jews!” Foxman was now shouting at me across the table. “And you arm yourself to take out as many Jews as possible!” Foxman’s hands were wheeling in circles before him; this possible Holocaust, so remote to many of us, seemed to rise up before him with a terrible clarity. “Oh, my God!” he cried, as if reeling in horror before the vision he had himself conjured.

Are Asian Americans becoming white?

There's a long article today in The New York Times about the dominance of Asian Americans in the University of California system. California as a whole is 12 percent Asian, but the freshman class at UC Berkeley is 46 percent Asian, at UCLA 43 percent, and at UC Irvine 56 percent. In all these schools, there are more Asians than whites, and blacks and Latinos are even more underrepresented than whites.

You would think that even a short article would concern itself with how such dramatic imbalances could emerge, but the reporter only makes gestures at addressing the problem. To the extent we can conclude anything, based on the quotes he includes, the reporter endorses a cultural explanation: Asian families teach their kids to value education, so they succeed. One expert explains the cultural imperative that Asians, Jews, and WASPs have shared: "work hard, defer gratification, share sacrifice and focus on the big goal". Another notes, "many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest."

But the explanation is much simpler I think: the success of Asians in entering college is simply a feature of class reproduction. In 1965 immigration laws were finally changed to end the tight restrictions on Asian immigration. But the new law gave strong preference to professionals, and as a result first-generation Asian Americans are unusually well-educated. Today 47.9 percent of foreign-born Asian Americans have a college degree, compared with 26.8 percent of the population as a whole. (The stat is from this webpage, an excellent compilation of demographic and socioeconomic information on Asian America.)

The magic of class reproduction also explains why all those Asian college students are the children of Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Filipinos, Indians, and Pakistanis, and why we don't see many Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian students. Most immigrants of the first group were professionals brought over to meet the demands of American capital, most of the latter group were refugees from the American war against Indochina.

So just like professional parents of all races, Asian American professionals have the resources to get their kids into college, they know the tricks of applying, and they impart the (rather arbitrary) habits and knowledge that allow them to succeed. It's just that there are more Asian American professionals.

The interesting question is whether all this will allow Asians to follow the well-worn path of the Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, &c into a reformed dominant race that embraces both whites and Asians and excludes blacks and Latinos.

Some of the racial barriers remain strong, which explains why Asians easily join the ranks of professionals but have had a hard time entering the highest levels of the ruling class. But in other ways Asians are already settling down within the new racial formation: they increasingly live among whites, marry them, and work with them. Blacks and Latinos remain segregated from whites and Asians and typically only interact with them as their servants or as objects of their control (unemployed, jailed).

The Asian path has thus far followed the Jews, who became white thru education, rather than the Irish or Italians, who used numbers to force their way into government. Alas, there are far fewer Asians than there were Jews interested in socialism and racial justice.

When meat-eaters ask a good question

Sometimes people who defend meat-eating come up with good questions for us - even if they themselves could care less about the answer. Here's one Chris wrote about in comments to the last post:

if factory farming no longer existed, what would become of the cows that now exist?

First off, unless veg*nism were implemented all of a sudden (following a ALF coup, perhaps), the number of livestock would gradually decrease as more and more people stopped eating them and the industry lost the incentive to rapidly reproduce them. So we'd have more manageable numbers once everyone was veg*n, but the domesticated animals would still be around.

So here's my question - would keeping livestock on farms and treating them well be exploitation? I recently read a series of well-informed posts from an environmentalist arguing that the only kind of agriculture both sustainable and practicable is one built on small-scale mixed farms that incorporate raising and killing animals for food (scroll down and read the four posts November 12-18). As I pointed out in the comments on his November 18 post, his argument for meat rests on the financial necessity of these small farms surviving in a world of low-cost factory farms, and wouldn't seem to apply if factory farms were eliminated or if the economy set prices differently (under, e.g., a parecon). So killing animals doesn't seem necessary, but farms still seem more efficient if they incorporate animals.

farms work best, maximising yield and minimising inputs, with an integrated relationship is fostered between plants and animals. Our grandparents knew this to be self evident, Permaculture espouses it, and nature wouldn't function any other way. The best way to cycle nutrients on a farm is to use our microbial friends (soil and compost) and animals to make nutrients available in a form that plants can use to create surplus calories from the sun which can then feed us humans and the animals. It’s a nice tidy system. Without animals on the farm, you invariably need to import fertilizer or organic matter to make the needed tons of compost, incurring transportation costs and burning more fuel. And even then, raw manure, especially urine, is still the best fertilizer. By splitting the system we are wasting energy to poorly mimic what nature will give us for free.

If the farm animals were treated well, would this be exploitation? Even if they were used for (small amounts of) milk and eggs, wouldn't this be more of a symbiotic relationship than one of exploitation? Or am I way off base here?

Al Gore left something out

There are a lot of reasons eating meat is far worse for the environment than eating vegetarian or vegan, including the destruction of waterways from the concentrated animal waste of factory farms, pesticide pollution from all the extra crops needed to feed livestock, and the huge amount of land and water needed to sustain meat production. Now we can add global warming to that list.

A recent report by two University of Chicago scientists found that meat eating is a significant contributor to global warming (see also this article, which is a little more accessible for the layman). Using conservative numbers, they calculated that switching from the average American meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet reduces your greenhouse gas footprint by as much as an average American driver does in switching from a normal car to a hybrid.

The major impact of the meat industry on global warming is partly due to its energy inefficiency. To raise animals you have to use far more energy growing crops to feed the animals than if you just ate the crops directly. Interestingly, eating fish is also far less energy efficient because of the long distances that wild fish catches have to be transported and because fish farming is relatively energy inefficient.

The paper compares the average American diet, which gets 15 percent of its calories from meat, with three separate diets drawing that 15 percent exclusively from red meat, fish, and poultry, as well as a vegetarian diet. The red meat and fish diets tied for most wasteful and were considerably less efficient than even the average American meat diet. The poultry and vegetarian diets were most efficient, with the vegetarian diet being even more efficient depending on how low the level of animal products is in it. A vegan diet, of course, is more efficient than any of the others.

Meat and fish add a lot of carbon dioxide by wasting so much energy, but meat (and dairy) make global warming worse in another way - by producing methane and nitrous oxide.

While methane and nitrous oxide are relatively rare compared with carbon dioxide, they are—molecule for molecule—far more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. A single pound of methane, for example, has the same greenhouse effect as approximately 25 pounds of carbon dioxide.

So all those cows farting and the manure lagoons used in pig farming have a big impact.

Do we really need another reason to stop eating meat? The damage that the meat industry does to humans, other animals, and the environment is so massive that even if it had no effect on global warming, the arguments for ending meat production would be overwhelming. But as the dangers of global warming finally begin to penetrate popular consciousness, that fun fact about eliminating meat from your diet being as helpful as switching to the best car out there could be effective in illustrating how urgent it is to reduce or eliminate animal products from our diets.

US media's prescription for Ecuador: neoliberalism good, democracy bad

Doing a little research for this post, I came across a pretty extensive group of people who criticize The New York Times for being biased in favor of the Latin American left (see, e.g., the comments on this blog post - here's a taste: "bunch of bloody morons to [sic] busy enjoying chavista hospitality to see the real story. . . . you left wing liberal chardonay swilling pin head"). This is bizarre, to say the least, but I think the problem is that these over-the-top far right-wing critics just can't recognize fellow travellers who use more subtle language.

The "news analysis" on Ecuador's presidential election that The New York Times ran last week is a good example of this kind of subtle dismissal of leftist politics in Latin America. The winner, Rafael Correa, is an American-trained economist whose decisive runoff victory over the richest man in the country was based on populist condemnations of Ecuador's elites and the USA. The question for reporter Simon Romero is whether Correa will govern as he campaigned (bad) or pursue a more "pragmatic" course (good):

when Mr. Correa starts talking about his ideas, in rapid-fire Spanish interspersed with tangents in English, French and even the occasional phrase in Quechua, he conveys a more sophisticated image than the nationalists who have risen to power elsewhere in the region out of the armed forces or trade unions.

And what is it that makes him seem more sophisticated?

“Foreign investment that generates wealth and jobs and pays taxes will always be welcome,” Mr. Correa, 43, said in an interview here, sounding precisely like someone with postgraduate degrees from universities in the United States and Belgium. (His are from the University of Illinois and Catholic University of Leuven

So someone who caters to foreign capital is well-educated and sophisticated. But is this the real Correa?

Mr. Correa wears tailored suits and chats about how North American economists like John Kenneth Galbraith have influenced him. Yet before crowds, he rails against the Bush administration and the International Monetary Fund.

This is a curious formulation because John Kenneth Galbraith, before his death earlier this year, was himself strongly critical of both the Bush administration and the IMF. Yet thru the magic of journalism we are shown how the world really breaks down: on one side stand the United States, the Bush administration, all American economists, American corporations, and the "moderate leftists" like Argentina's Kirchner and Brasil's Lula. On the other side are the uneducated, irrationally nationalist Latin American poor, the opportunistic politicians who exploit their anger to come to power, and the "dogmatic" ideologues of the left.

This propaganda line, which runs steadily thru mainstream reporting on Latin America, is here destabilized by the mention of Galbraith. This is an aberration - usually reporters only quote American scholars who support US state and corporate hegemony over Latin America. Yet bringing up Galbraith - a Keynesian liberal, certainly no anticapitalist, yet still critical of the status quo - reminds us exactly how right-wing the political and media consensus on neoliberalism really is. And Romero betrays the media's habitual contempt for democracy as well, when he devotes more space to the judgment that foreign capital will pass on Correa than that of the Ecuadoran people.

Left unmentioned is what happened the last time an Ecuadoran president threw in his lot with foreign corporations and betrayed his platform of opposition to neoliberalism and corruption. Lucio Gutiérrez was overthrown by massive protests in 2005.

Ted Koppel is as far left as they get (on tv)

Last week I watched Ted Koppel's Discovery Channel special on Iran called "Iran: The Most Dangerous Nation". While the show was far better than what the American media usually manage on Iran, since it featured Iranis as humans rather than only as demons, it still managed to serve the US government agenda and present a deeply distorted picture of Iran. Of course we had to learn about the ancient Persian heritage of Iran - how else could we understand the essence of this proud people? We also learned that, being Shi'a, Iranis glorify martyrdom. For example, during the Iran-Iraq war, some Irani soldiers actually sacrificed their own lives in service to the nation. Combined with Hizbollah suicide bombers who attacked innocents like the Israeli soldiers occupying Lebanon and dark suggestions that Ahmadinejad believes in the apocalyptic Mahdi, it all sounds very sinister. Guess there's something unique about Shi'a that causes them to resist occupying forces or die in battle to save their fellow soldiers.

Simply by going out and talking with a wide range of Iranis, the program largely undermines these ridiculous generalizations about the Irani national character. Koppel et al make gestures toward examining key issues in Iran, like class, gender, and political authority (altho oddly they completely ignore minorities, which have been prominently featured in neocon plans to destroy the regime). The effort is superficial, but still better than the yawning black whole in the other media.

The presentation of Iran's relationship with the USA is a bigger problem. Unlike other media, the program does bring up the various crimes the USA has committed against Iran - most prominently the overthrow of the democratically-elected government in 1953, decades of support for the brutal dictator that the CIA put in power (including training the secret police in torture and murder, a detail the program didn't mention), and giving extensive support to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, including coordinating intelligence and agreeing to Iraq's use of chemical weapons. But these crimes are positioned merely as part of the tit-for-tat relationship between Iran and the USA.

This is false moral equivalence - the destruction of an entire country's democracy and complicity in Iraq's aggression and killing of hundreds of thousands of Iranis is equated with Irani revolutionaries taking several hundred Americans hostage in the late 1970s or Lebanese Hizbullah (which is cast as continuous with Iran) killing several hundred Marines in Beirut in 1983. Koppel evinces no understanding that using massive violence to dominate a foreign region might in some way be different from shouting slogans of "Death to America". It's all just part of cycle of hostility.

In the end, after examining the likelihood that a military strike would fail, Koppel calls for dialogue and diplomacy. But he adds, "If that fails, there's still the military option." He doesn't explain why Iran is not allowed to have nuclear weapons but the USA - which is manifestly a more "dangerous nation" - gets to have as many as it wants (in violation of the NPT, also unmentioned). He doesn't explain why America has a right to unprovoked attack. And he doesn't even raise the real reason for Irani-American tension: the US obsession with crushing those few countries that resist its hegemony.

Speaks for itself

From Toilets Underused to Fight Disease, U.N. Study Finds:

it would cost $10 billion a year to halve the percentage of people without access to safe drinking water and to provide them with simple pit latrines. But that is less than half what rich countries spend annually on bottled water.

Election highlights

Even tho I don't actually believe in the system of American so-called democracy, I've always found watching the election returns to be a lot of fun. So here's some random observations.

1) Almost unnoted, the Green Party candidate for governor of Illinois won over 10 percent. Now would be a good time to put pressure on the Illinois Democrats to implement instant runoff voting in their own interests, since ballot access is now easier for the Greens and there's no similar third-party threat to Republicans. And, after the coming four years of Blagojevich scandals, the next election won't be quite so easy for the Democrats.

2) Greens elsewhere did badly, even where we might have expected some hope. In California the Democrat running for governor had no hope of winning and the Democrat running for Senate, Dianne Feinstein, had no hope of losing - and is a well-known shill for big-money. Yet only two percent of supposedly liberal Californians voted Green in the two races. In New Mexico, once a stronghold for Greens, the party didn't even run candidates in the Senate or governor races, which Democrats ran away with. Does anyone know what happened to the New Mexico Greens?

3) Completely unremarked upon, the first self-proclaimed socialist (so far as I know) won a Senate seat. Bernie Sanders of Vermont took the open seat in a blow-out. Sanders strikes me as more of social democrat than a socialist, but I also don't know much about him. Regardless, you'd expect the media to notice. Instead they didn't even bother to acknowledge that Sanders was running as an independent and colored Vermont blue for Democrat.

4) MSNBC commentators Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough at one point argued that the American people were demanding more nationalist policies. And I'm not using that word polemically like I usually do - they actually said "nationalist". I don't think I've ever heard mainstream types say "nationalism" when they mean nationalism.

5) The commentators were falling all over each other advising the Democrats to pursue a course of "moderation". The American people are tired of partisan gridlock, they said, and many of the newly elected Democrats are less ideological than the Congressional leadership. It's funny, because I read the exit polls as saying voters wanted to get out of Iraq, raise the minimum wage, and end government corruption. Why do the media make a fetish of moderation? Why did Harold Ford, who almost certainly lost his race for the Senate in Tennessee because of a series of racist advertisements, call for "healing" in his concession speech?

6) My favorite quote of the night comes from Rod Blagojevich, reëlected to governor of Illinois: "[when I first came to office I found] a state government more interested in serving itself than the other way around." Presumably Blagojevich has been hard at work setting things right - ie, making itself serve the state government.

If you vote, vote Green

Voting is awkward for every radical. You can cast your ballot and implicitly register a vote of confidence in a system that is deeply undemocratic. Or you can abstain and be counted as one of the "apathetic" half of the population who doesn't vote. If you do vote, you get to choose between a big-money Democrat who might win or a third-party candidate whose voters barely register in the statistics.

The amount of time progressives waste debating these choices is already far too great, so I won't belabor my point. If you feel you have to vote for Democrats, go ahead - but check the polls first and if your Democrat has a solid lead, don't waste your vote. Vote Green. Send the Democrats a message and help build a real progressive electoral alternative.

I haven't changed my mind about electoral politics - I think it's a waste of time for progressives unless they use the elections to organize locally and for longer-term battles. Right now the left is too weak to waste its energy in an electoral system that is rigged against it. There are some key issues worth working on - campaign finance reform and instant runoff voting would immediately increase the power of progressives. But until we can boast popular support and financial power, in the guise of grassroots organizations and democratic businesses, voting is going to remain awkward.

And you thought Larry Rohter* was bad

As if to confirm Kyle's critique of the mainstream media's incredibly open orientation toward privilege and power, the AP published a report on Lula's revival of class struggle rhetoric in the Brasilian election runoff.

Fiery speeches contrasting the lives of Brazil's poor with the wealthy elite have left many Brazilians wondering whether he would push the country to the left if he wins a second four-year term in Sunday's runoff election. Silva, a former union firebrand and Brazil's first working-class president, faced similar fears four years ago, but calmed them by adhering to market-friendly, pro-business policies that won praise even from conservatives.

!!!! Who writes this stuff? "Brazilians" have "fears" that Lula will move to the left? Lula's right-wing economic policies won praise "even from conservatives"? Maybe it's a typo and is supposed to read "won praise only from conservatives".

While few believe Silva would adopt the radical populism of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, they worry that he could entrench divisions in Brazil, which has one of the world's widest gaps between rich and poor.

It just gets worse and worse. Apparently "one of the world's widest gaps between rich and poor" doesn't count as an entrenched division. But some opportunistic rhetoric from a faux-populist could very well give rise to such a nightmare.

"It's very easy to mobilize the poor. What's hard is to demobilize them after the election," said Bolivar Lamounier, director of the Augurium political consulting firm. "I'm afraid if he wins a second term, which looks likely, he will be tempted to take an authoritarian turn."

Authoritarian, i.e. any policy that might upset of the highly participatory model of extreme wealth inequality.

"It's not very difficult with the low level of education in Brazil to motivate this prejudice," Lamounier said. "It was very hard to carry out privatization in Brazil, and while it a made good business sense, when poor people got their phone bills or light bills they just saw that things cost a lot."

If only the poor had a better education! Then they'd realize that paying more for utilities in order to enrich wealthy CEOs is solid public policy.

[Lula's] socialist fire has already inflamed prejudices among upper-class Brazilians.

So now criticizing rich people and calling for government programs to help the poor qualifies as "socialist". Does anyone else feel like we're in the 1880s?

I can just imagine the newsgathering work done by the reporter for this article: relaxing at a café in a fancy part of São Paulo, talking with the rich folks who apparently exhaust the category "Brasilians".
______

* Larry Rohter is The New York Times's Brasil correspondent who serves power in slightly more subtle ways.

Savage Love does not love animals

Dan Savage this week has a strange explanation of why it's okay to kill animals.

it needs to be said that if zoophilia is wrong because animals can't consent to sexual acts, then hamburgers, lamb chops, and Jell-O brand gelatin, along with leather shoes, belts, pants, slings, and hoods, are all equally wrong. It's possible that meat and leather are, you know, wronger. If we could talk to the animals, I'm pretty sure they would tell us they would rather be screwed than stewed. But until we can talk to the animals, eat them and wear them­—don't fuck them.

His email address is below.

From: [me]
To: mail@savagelove.net
Date: Oct 22, 2006 10:00 AM
Subject: eating and wearing animals

I've always admired you as a defender of the most marginalized people in society, people considered so weird or disgusting that "normal" people feel free to abuse them however they want.

So it's sad for me to read your outright dismissal of another group defined as inferior and thereby left open to the most horrific abuses humans can think up. As with other oppressed groups, we're taught that animals are not "us", are less than "us", and so we can exploit them, torture them, kill them. Their suffering does not matter, their lives do not matter.

The big difference is that, as you mention, we can't talk to animals. But is that really such a difference? Could whites talk to slaves? Could straight Americans talk to gay people before the 1970s? Physiologically, yes. But oppression creates its own silence, which only a few brave souls dare to break. Did we really need to interview statistically significant samples of slaves or gays to know that they wanted an end to the social brutality they faced every day? Isn't it morally necessary to end oppression regardless of whether the victims can express their opposition to it?

Isn't it time to stop eating and wearing animals?

The hermits have the bomb!

So 조선/North Korea tested a nuclear weapon (probably). I haven't bothered to post till now because it just doesn't seem like that big a deal. A country with no real allies, constantly threatened by the most powerful country in the world, feels the need to develop nuclear weapons? There are no grounds for either surprise or outrage here.

If the Clinton administration had actually followed thru with its commitments under the 1994 Agreed Framework, we wouldn't be in this mess. (It's worth emphasizing that the USA broke that agreement at least as badly as North Korea did. For some reason the media only remember 김정일/Kim Jeong'il's perfidy.) The Bush administration repudiated the entire thing, and things have been spiralling donward since.

There's a few obvious principles that we should be adhering to, but which are never raised in the current "debate".

1) The United States has no right to forbid other countries to make nuclear weapons as long as it continues to have them.

2) The United States should be following 한국/South Korea's lead since these decisions affect South Korea more than any other country except North Korea. Instead, the Bush administration has openly rejected the South's strategy, which is to try to integrate the North into the region politically and economically without the use of military threats.

3) The real victims here are the people of North Korea, who suffer from political tyranny and economic collapse. Most of them are living so close to disaster that any increase in instability is likely to kill a good many of them. The Bush administration's ideal solution - the collapse of the North Korean government - would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe and heavy burdens on both 中国/China and South Korea. Neither one would manage those burdens in the interests of the destitute North Koreans.

Clearly the best approach under the circumstances is a return to the Agreed Framework and an intensification of South Korea's efforts to build connections with the North. That means the United States should pay for light water nuclear reactors that can replace the energy lost from the North's current reactors (which can much more easily be used to make bombs), provide security guarantees, normalize relations with North Korea, and support South Korean efforts. I'm not usually one to champion market penetration, but since the alternatives in North Korea are war, internal collapse, or the status quo, there doesn't seem like a better alternative.

Yet we should go further. If the USA wants to stop proliferation, the only fair way - and the only practical way - is to move toward total global nuclear disarmament. We're passing up a golden opportunity to rid the world of this terrible menace once and for all. The USA faces no real enemies, and even unilateral nuclear disarmament wouldn't reduce American security. But because of the USA and its belligerence, that's not true for any other country. The United States could bring a lot to the table - elimination of its own arsenal, offers of non-aggression treaties, development assistance. It has even greater leverage over allies like Britain and Israel.

In this moment of low superpower tensions the elimination of nuclear weapons could be accomplished relatively easily. I'm afraid that someday people will look back and curse us that we let the moment slip by.

Meat is murder - of humans, too

This is interesting: apparently the E. coli outbreak in spinach was actually caused by groundwater pollution from factory farms that raise cows. Cows aren't built to handle the grain diet forced on them in the factory farms, leading to the proliferation of this particularly harmful form of E. coli, which gets into the water and contaminates everything.

Of course, an even more serious and similarly indirect way that factory farming hurts people is from pesticide runoff in our drinking water. It takes about 10 times more grain to feed animals and eat them than if we just ate the crops directly. So to produce enough grain for all the animals we eat, we have to use pesticide-fumigated monoculture agriculture rather than relying on the lower yields of organic farming. All the chemicals that get in our water are one of the main reasons most of us will probably end up with cancer.

For me, all this is academic next to the horrific killing and torture of the animals. But for those people who are more concerned about the less severe - but neverthelss very real - suffering of humans caused by the meat industry, these can be very compelling arguments.

Wilmette repulses an attack of the subhumans

You always sort of know abstractly how reprehensible are the views of people in rich suburbs on the issue of poor people, black people, and other marginalized groups. But it's good to be reminded more concretely once in awhile:

A developer who wants to build a 50-unit apartment complex in Wilmette for low-income disabled people has met fierce resistance from village residents who complain the project would be a threat to property values and security.

This issue may have mobilized more Wilmette residents to participate politically than anything in a long time. More than 100 people went to the Zoning Board meeting and stayed late into the night to make sure they don't have live near people different from themselves.

The attitude was typified by one woman:

when [a developer of low-income housing] displayed a picture of a brick apartment building in Calumet City that most closely resembled the Wilmette proposal, a woman in the audience clutched her husband's arm.

"I think I'm going to be sick," she whispered loudly.

Recycling in Chicago

It seems like Chicago's ridiculous blue bag recycling program may finally be on the way out. If Chicago really is a laughingstock around the country, it should be because this program has lasted so long rather than because the city council banned one of the most repugnant forms of animal torture, raising foie gras.

The blue bag program, where you put recyclables in a blue bag and throw it in with the rest of the trash, from which it is then sorted at trash receiving stations, has been in place for 10 years now. It generated both low participation and low recovery of recyclables from those that were actually blue bagged. So it's good news that the pilot curbside collection program is being expanded, perhaps eventually to the whole city. It would be worthwhile to contact your alderman and encourage him or her to make the new program permanent.

But the blue bag program is only the beginning of Chicago's atrocious record on recycling. An outstanding recent article in The Reader revealed that even if the curbside collection program is adopted citywide, it will only cover about 25 percent of the garbage produced in Chicago - that coming from houses, two-flats, and other smaller residences. The other three quarters of waste comes from commercial properties and apartment buildings, each accounting for an equal share.

Chicago has a good law mandating commercial and large residential recycling, but as The Reader article detailed, the city has refused to enforce it since it was adopted in 1995. So there's two things we can do. First, talk to your landlord and tell her or him that they must provide recycling services to be in compliance with the law. Most landlords aren't even aware of this law, so bringing it to their attention may be enough (unless they figure out the city isn't enforcing it). Second, when you write to your alderman, tell her/him to demand that Daley start carrying out the law on recycling. You can also contact Daley at MayorDaley@CityofChicago.org and tell him the same thing.

Creating a progressive culture

It's shocking to me that, years after it became clear that global warming would be a catastrophe, people still drive when they could walk, bike, or take public transit, they still waste electricity by leaving lights on or leaving their cell phone chargers plugged in, they still buy SUVs when an energy-efficient car would be just fine, they still eat meat (even if the animal torture doesn't bother you, getting our calories and protein from meat is one of the most energy inefficient things we do). And they do all these things even tho the green alternatives are usually less expensive!

Obviously ignorance plays a big role, and we can thank the media, schools, politicians, and business leaders for that. But I know people, ostensibly environmentalists, who know very well that meat is environmentally destructive and still eat it. I know people who don't recycle. I know people who live in the exurbs with two SUVs for one family. It's not just ignorance. It's a failure of will, borne of the absence of a progressive culture that could counteract the dominant market-driven culture pushing everyone to buy things all the time, to drive all the time, to live in the suburbs and to hell with what kind of world that's going to leave their grandkids.

One of Michael Albert's themes has always been that the left alienates "regular" people - potential allies or members - by shoving an intolerant culture down their throats. But I think creating an intolerant culture is one of our most important tasks. A culture that does not tolerate racist jokes, sexual harassment, homophobia, or the slaughter of animals. A culture that demands popular participation, economic human rights, and respect for the environment. These values cannot flourish in a culture that celebrates inequality and does not hold people accountable for the effects their decisions have on everyone else.

How we go about creating this culture is a delicate task. Most people take it as their right to consume the resources of future generations or to sacrifice the lives of animals for the fleeting pleasure of a meal. Changing their mind about that cannot be done by browbeating them or excluding them. Good arguments and the power of example must remain our primary methods, at least when interacting one-on-one. Confrontation thru mass action has its place too, but the consequences should always be carefully considered.

Yet Michael Albert's point is also well-taken. Concentrating too much on individual purity distracts us from the fact that changing systems is more important that changing individuals. A progressive culture is needed not so much for our own self-satisfaction as it is to create a base area out of which progressive organizing can expand. What's so galling to me about people whose choices hurt people, animals, and the environment is not so much the miniscule impact those actions have on the world. It's that those choices make it hard for them to take part in the movement.

Hmm, I didn't originally intend to write about this. I was just going to recommend this article on California's admirable steps to fight global warming.

Anyway, any thoughts about this idea of progressive culture?

Corruption + sexism = Springfield

Christi Parsons, the Tribune correspondent on the Illinois legislature for the past 11 years, brutalizes the good ol' boys culture of corruption in Springfield. This is my favorite part:

My first day on the job, I was greeted in the pressroom by a visitor drinking a beer and smoking a cigar. He mused that I must be the "broad" they'd sent down from Chicago.

Not long after that, I introduced myself to a legislative staffer who flipped through a copy of Playboy as we talked.

By comparison, the famously chauvinistic Senate President James "Pate" Philip seemed a sensitive, modern man, merely rolling up some papers he was carrying at the time we met and cheerfully patting me on the head with them.

Having an exceedingly rare story like this makes it clear that "objective" journalism is just not capable of conveying how power works and feels.

The lightbulb revolution!!!!

Here's a breathless article ostensibly doing boosterism for the ultra-efficient compact flourescent lightbulb, altho doing at least as much boosterism for Wal-Mart. Even so, it does a good job driving home how amazing these lightbulbs are. They not only save electricity, reducing greenhouse gases and pollution, they also last for 5-10 years (10-40 times longer than conventional lightbulbs), saving huge amounts of energy and resources currently expended on the production, packaging, distribution, and disposal of conventional lightbulbs. And because they're more energy efficient and last so much longer, they also save the consumer quite a bit of money in reduced electricity bills and lightbulb replacement costs (GE's new packaging promises $38 in saved energy).

The main problem is that the efficient lightbulbs cost a lot more than conventional ones up-front ($3-$4 vs 30-50¢) and most people aren't aware that they'll not only help the environment but also save money by buying them. The author of the article sees Wal-Mart as the Lenin of the lightbulb revolution, both lowering prices and educating consumers thru a promotional blitz.

The writer is wide-eyed and enthusaistic in the face of Wal-Mart's attempts to portray itself as environmentally responsible. He passes on this touching story:

"Last fall," says Kerby, "we had had two hurricanes"--Katrina and Rita--"we had oil production disrupted, we had millions of people displaced in the South, and at a Friday officer's meeting not long after Katrina, Lee Scott said, 'Our customers are hurting, our customers' dollar is not going as far as it could.' He challenged everyone in the room to find relevant rollbacks, to lower the price of living and make a difference for our customers." (Wal-Mart-ers really talk that way among themselves.)

I guess the reporter knew this because Wal-Mart executives told him so?

(Kerby, a vice president and divisional merchandise manager, is the same person who at another point refers offhandedly to "Our friend Oprah".)

The writer sees Wal-Mart's massive market power, its ability to decide the rise and fall of entire industries, as unproblematic - even beneficial, given Wal-Mart's efforts to protect the environment and "make a difference for their customers". Nor does he see anything wrong with the fact that Wal-Mart's patronage will give GE a stranglehold on the efficient lightbulb industry.

He also suffers from a bit too much enthusiasm about the potential of energy efficient lightbulbs. If every American family replaced a single convential bulb with an efficient one, he writes, the energy savings could power a city of 1.5 million people. So the potential really is huge, and Wal-Mart really could be a force for good - if we look at the issue in a highly circumscribed way. Yet to pretend that solving the environmental catastrophes that consumer capitalism is crafting for us will be as easy as changing your lightbulbs (and saving money in the process!) is a bit naive. We have to consume better, but what's more important is consuming less.

The coming war with Iran

It's taken quite awhile, but I'm finally convinced: the Bush administration intends to attack Iran.

From the moment that an invasion of Iraq was raised, I was certain that it would happen. All the conditions were in place: the administration had carte blanche from an uncritical, nationalistic, and xenophobic American public to do as it pleased following 9/11 and the seemingly successful attack on Afghanistan. Iraq was a perfect target in the eyes of US government planners: its military was pathetically weak after over 10 years of devastating sanctions; destroying its government would eliminate one of the few in the world that still defied US hegemony and serve as a lesson to the other holdouts; it would give the USA an even tighter grip on the world's oil; and it would allow the USA to establish permanent military bases to police the Middle East now that the existing bases in Saudi Arabia were becoming a liability. Eventually Iraq and Afghanistan could serve as the launching pad for a ground invasion of Iran, which the US government all along has seen as the real threat to American control over the Middle East.

Thruout the long, drawn-out debate over whether to attack Iraq, I knew that war was inevitable. Yet I expected the American strategy of dominating postwar Iraq to be different. I thought they would follow the model established in the post-World War II occupied nations of South Korea, Japan, and Germany: execute the top leaders but restore to power the bureaucratic and business elites along with the security forces, placing an American vassal at their head.

What I didn't realize is that the administration's policymakers, led by Cheney and Rumsfeld, harbored bizarre fantasies about postwar Iraq. They really believed the Shia would welcome them as liberators and accept an American-designated puppet (probably Ahmed Chalabi) as their leader. They expected to destroy the machinery of the Baathist (ie Sunni-dominated) state and be able to fairly easily suppress the Sunni backlash. I suppose they also thought that the loyal Kurds wouldn't make any trouble either.

The Shia, however, remembered how the USA abandoned them to Saddam Hussein's vicious reprisals after they responded to the American call to rise up after the 1991 war. They remembered the sanctions decade and the horrific toll it took on them. They remembered, in a way that Americans do not, the 60-year history of US machinations in the Middle East. The Shia forced key changes in the US-designed electoral process, preventing the emergence of a government of US pawns. Instead Iraq now has a fairly representative government that is using American power to attack the armed Sunni opposition, but has no intention of ceding permanent control to the USA. The massive failure of the American de-Baathification strategy is well-known, and has put Iraq on an irrevocable path to civil war.

For the last several years I had assumed that the administration was chastened by the mockery Iraq's reality made of their dreams. I had no illusions about the administration's orientation toward Iran - I'm quite sure that covert anti-Iran operations are ongoing. Yet I thought that the military realities of having so many resources tied down in Iraq along with the realization that neoconservative fantasy-ideology was fallible would prevent an open attack.

Seymour Hersh's article in The New Yorker changed my mind. Based on a variety of sources, Hersh writes that Israel closely consulted the USA before attacking Lebanon. The Americans were very enthusiastic, Hersh reports. They expected the attack on Lebanon to pave the way for their own attack on Iran.

The Lebanon operation would serve two purposes for the Americans. First, it would weaken Hizbollah, Iran's ally, making it hard for Hizbollah to act in solidarity when Iran was attacked. Second, "it would be a demo for Iran." According to a Hersh article from last April, the Iran war was to be executed primarily thru bombing - bombing Iran's nuclear facilities (possibly using nuclear weapons to reach those deep underground), but also bombing key infrastructure and non-nuclear military sites. The Americans hoped this would humiliate and discredit the leadership and a popular uprising (including uprisings by the ethnic minorities that have been a focus of covert US organizing) would then overthrow the regime.

It seems clear the fantasies of the neocons are completely intact. As the Lebanon war demonstrated, relentlessly bombing even a highly divided society - surprise! - turns the population against the agressor and not against the supposed targets of the bombing. (And Lebanon has far greater ethnic and sectarian tensions than Iran.) As Lebanon - and every other air war in history - has shown, air power is good at destroying infrastructure and killing civilians, but not good at removing political actors from the scene. And all this doesn't even take into account the fact that bombing civilians until they do what you want - eliminate Hizbollah, overthrow the Irani government - is a war crime.

Yet perhaps the Bush administration would be satisfied with more limited gains. Setting back the Irani nuclear program, destroying large amounts of Irani military capacity, disrupting Irani influence on Iraq, crippling the Irani economy - these are all within reach. A war might also provoke the customary upsurge of mindless patriotism that could ensure a Republican win in the next presidential election. If the USA didn't get sucked into a ground war, if Iran were prevented from taking effective countermeasures like blocking shipments of oil out of the Persian Gulf, and if the rise in the price of oil that followed the war didn't send the global economy into free fall, an attack on Iran seems like a good bet from the neocon perspective. The upsurge in global anti-Americanism and further discrediting of the UN would even be plus points.

The question is whether Israel's failure in Lebanon will end the administration's slow but steady drive to war. If Hersh's sources are right, the Bush administration remains unabashed by the disaster in Iraq and the threat of overextending the military. But will the failure of what was billed as a test run for the Iran attack have a stronger effect? Early indications are that it will not. The New York Times reports that administration officials and their allies in Congress are pressing intelligence agencies to heighten their estimation of the Iran threat. Iran is standing firm against America and Europe's ultimatum that it give up its nuclear weapons program, allowing the USA to move one step closer to establishing the diplomatic pretext for an attack.

America's goals in Iran are less ambitious than they were in Iraq - crippling it (or inspiring popular rebellion) rather than occupying and rebuilding it. Because of the Irani nuclear "threat", it has greater international support. I'm now convinced that the Bush administration intends to attack Iran. Yet I do not believe the Iran war is inevitable. The American public is more skeptical now, and international support may evaporate as the American plan to attack becomes more clear. I think we can prevent this one, but the antiwar movement will have to shake off its torpor, and soon.

The human rights discourse and China

Last week was 六四 in 中国/China - June 4, the day the government massacred protesters around 天安门广场/Tian'anmen Square in 1989. I happened to be meeting with a friend of mine on the anniversary, a grad student at 北大/Beijing University, China's most prestigious university whose students were extremely active in the 1989 protest movement. I asked him what he thought about 6/4. He didn't even realize that it was the anniversary of the massacre.

The Tian'anmen massacre is understood very differently in China than in the USA. Americans see it as very black and white: the protesters were heroes fighting for democracy, the government was a villain crushing the people's hopes. Chinese people, on the other hand, tend to either accept the government line - that the protests were destabilizing and threatened chaos if nothing was done - or have some sympathy for the protesters' ideals and goals but nevertheless criticize them for being too reckless.

Even more striking is the contrast between appraisals of 6/4's place in history. For Americans, the Tian'anmen massacre is the defining event of the last 25 years of Chinese history. The strongest and most enduring American perception of China - of a country with common human rights violations and few freedoms - stems directly from 6/4. Chinese people disagree. For most, 6/4 isn't even worth commemorating. The discourse on human rights in China is seen as largely a foreign imposition used against the country by foreign powers that want to prevent China's rise to greatness. This isn't to say that Chinese people aren't worried about or critical of the violation of certain freedoms, but grouping all these issues under the rubric of "human rights" is rarely heard.

You might assume that this is because the climate of repression prevents people from saying openly what they feel, but the "climate of repression" in China is far overblown in American minds. Holding a protest or distributing essays might get you in trouble, but people have no qualms expressing themselves in private. Even writing critical essays on the web is tolerated to a certain extent, as related in a recent New York Times Magazine piece.

What people are worried about, and often very angry about, is not the rights of dissident intellectuals but the far bigger social problems of growing inequality and economic insecurity. The right to organize, the right to a stable job, the right to education, the right to health care - these issues are constantly being debated in China, even tho simply raising them is an implicit critique of government policy. Yet many, perhaps most, Americans wouldn't even consider these to be human rights. Recognizing both the latitude to criticize the government (within limits) that does exist in China, and the nature of that criticism as being primarily economic, makes the typical formulation of American writers - that the Chinese government allows economic freedom but not political freedom - seem like nonsense.

Other human rights violations, far more severe than those affecting intellectuals, are mostly ignored in both the West and in China. Two key ones are government-supported Han colonization of ethnic minorities' lands and all its accompanying repressions and the rights of prisoners. Many Americans have a vague idea that China is oppressing Tibet, but remain ignorant of the equally severe repression in Xinjiang directed especially against Uighurs. Han Chinese, far from seeing this as a human rights problem, harbor deep stereotypes against "dangerous" ethnic minorities, especially the Uighur, and see Han/Communist Party colonization as liberation. In this regard they're not so different from other imperialist peoples, including Americans, who rarely question the imbalance of power between themselves and their objects of domination.

At all levels of the criminal justice system, too, there are major violations of rights that go far beyond the unjust arrest of people for exercising their right to free speech. False arrest, torture, false testimony and forced confessions by the police, mistreatment of prisoners, execution - the list of rights violations in the Chinese justice system goes on and on. Americans hear about these when they affect dissidents, or sometimes professionals or Falun Gong members, but these groups make up a small percentage of the people suffering in Chinese prisons.

I'm not trying to excuse Chinese people for ignoring abuses against socially marginal groups or dissidents, but I do think the human rights criticisms of China coming out of the United States are imbalanced and in many ways distort the actual experience of Chinese people. As human rights is increasingly used as a rhetorical club by those favoring a new cold war with China, now seems like a good time to reevaluate what the human rights situation in China really is and what Americans can realistically do about it.

Ahmadinejad the progressive

The best recent article i've read on Iran is this one. As strange as it seems, Ahmadinejad might be the best thing that could have happened to Iran. Not only is he consolidating power at the expense of the clerics, he's also taking a stand for women's rights. Here's some strange rhetoric to hear coming out of Iran: "Unfortunately, whenever there is talk of social corruption, fingers are pointed at women," Ahmadinejad said. "Shouldn't men be blamed for the problems, too?"

Of course the actual best thing that could happen is the rise of a feminist, secular, anti-imperialist, pareconist mass movement. But given the constraints of reality, I'd be pretty satisfied if Ahmadinejad can pull a Nixon going to China and both democratize Iran (accumulating power in the presidency, an elected position, would be a step in the right direction) and improve the place of women. This isn't to excuse Ahmadinejad's far-right positions on religion in government or the existence of the Holocaust. But, as painful and strange as this is, it seems like he might be the most progressive leader in the Middle East today.

Markets in China and their victims

I finally got around to contributing to The Protest again. This is my summary of what the market reforms have done to China and why massive opposition to them is unlikely to yield anything constructive.

for unknown reasons, the word "China" is not featured in the title

State Power, The Market and Oppression

China is a mess of contradictions. It has the most dynamic and fastest continually growing economy in the world. This economic expansion has lifted millions of people out of poverty and hunger and opened extraordinary new opportunities for millions more. Its cities are filled with construction cranes, new malls (including the biggest mall in the world) and all the luxuries available in the rich countries.

Yet social unrest is greater now than at any time since the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. According to government estimates, last year alone saw nearly 90,000 riots and demonstrations, a number that has grown rapidly in the last few years. Juxtaposed against the consumer opulence of the big cities is the appalling exploitation of restaurant staff, factory workers and construction crews, who work 12-hour shifts seven days a week for 40 cents an hour. These workers' employers house them in cramped dorm rooms and regularly interfere in their personal lives, setting curfews or threatening to fire them if they travel home to see their family on the lunar new year, China's most important holiday.

The sweeping market reforms of the last 27 years brought about these devastating contrasts. The government dismantled the planned economy — owned and operated completely by the state — and gradually imposed market forces and the profit motive. These reforms did solve many of the problems of the planned economy, such as an overemphasis on heavy industry, innumerable production bottlenecks, low productivity and allocative inefficiency.

Yet the market reforms also created a host of new social problems. Of all people, China's supposedly Marxist leadership should have foreseen that their reforms would entail increasing levels of worker exploitation, skyrocketing wealth inequality, rapidly expanding corruption and accepting a subordinate position in the global economy. Market-led development has also created innumerable severe environmental problems: China's cities are the most polluted in the world, its waterways are filled with industrial runoff, its forests are disappearing.

Of course we should avoid misplaced nostalgia for the prereform period. Aside from the clear economic problems with central planning, Chinese society before 1979 was highly repressive and imposed strict limits on freedoms of movement, speech, association, sexuality and job choice. Today these freedoms are still restricted in key ways, but the market reforms have helped to expand freedom in China, often in ways unintended by the officials responsible.

Yet neither should we succumb to the kind of free market boosterism so common in the Chinese and Western media. The reforms may have increased freedom, but they have done so in deeply unequal ways and often with ambiguous results. Peasants are now free to leave the land and move to the cities — where they become second-class citizens and highly exploited workers. People are free to pick their own jobs, but what exactly are their choices? For the millions of rural migrants to the cities, their choice is between one kind of degrading work or another, all for pittance wages with no job security or healthcare and no access to education for their children.

Though incomes in China have risen several times over, the new burden of fees for basic services and rising taxes have also increased rapidly, leaving many people actually worse off than before. Nearly everyone once enjoyed the system of public services that included free healthcare, free education and free housing. Of course the market now offers many more choices when it comes to these basic needs, but only the small middle class, 10 to 15 percent of the population, can afford such choices. Just one-third of the country has even basic health insurance, and a World Health Organization survey in 2000 ranked China fourth from last in healthcare fairness. Stuck between school fees for their children and medical fees for their parents or themselves, millions upon millions of peasants must leave their families, travel hundreds of miles to the cities, and suffer appalling working conditions and the contempt of urban residents just to get by.

The reforms have restricted the very intimate power that party cadres once wielded over people's work lives, family lives and even love lives. Yet the decentralization of administrative power has given local officials greater leeway to squeeze taxes out of peasants and expropriate their land, as well as to exploit connections in corrupt or nepotistic fashion. The central government has repeatedly promised to crack down on corruption, yet its power over localities has been deeply compromised by decentralization, and the anti-corruption campaigns amount to little more than rhetoric. Meanwhile the market reforms have ushered in a dramatic rise in previously miniscule social problems like unemployment, homelessness and violent crime.

Popular opposition to the problems created by markets is strong and growing. The Western media have generally misunderstood or ignored this trend. In the 1989 protests that culminated in the massacre around Tian'anmen Square, for instance, the media portrayed only a "Democracy Movement" led by idealistic young students hungry for Western politics. To some extent this was accurate, but what gave the protests real power — and what terrified the government most — was that workers protesting the effects of economic liberalization, especially inflation, joined the demonstrations. The complex reality didn't fit the media's story line, and their blanket prescription for solving China's problems remained unchanged: more market reform.

It's no different today, as the Western media's two most popular economic suggestions to China show. The first is to legally enshrine property rights, ostensibly to help peasants protect their land from corrupt officials who confiscate it and sell it to developers for their own profit. The second is to privatize state-owned enterprises so that they can slim down and start making money. Great suggestions from the point of view of investors, but these reforms would be a disaster for regular workers and peasants. All land is currently state-owned, a vestige of socialism that makes it easy for corrupt officials to force peasants off their land. Already 70 million peasants have lost their land this way. Yet changing land into a private commodity would expose peasants to another equally dangerous threat: expropriation through the market. One of the Chinese revolution's greatest achievements was destroying the old system of a few large landowners controlling masses of destitute tenants. That system would quickly reemerge if land were once again subject to the market.

As the government moves closer to privatizing land, it is already privatizing many state-owned enterprises. Since these businesses are some of the only ones still providing job security and full benefits to their employees, their higher costs leave them uncompetitive against all the rest, which exploit their workers to the breaking point. Not only does privatization lead to major job losses and benefit cuts, but it also allows corrupt officials and their family and friends to accumulate great private wealth at public expense as they buy the companies for next to nothing or rob the pension funds of the employees. Declining job quality and increasing unemployment: this is what economists call "efficiency."

The countless victims of the market reforms don't take all this lying down, as the rapid rise in demonstrations attests. But what are the chances for success in winning something better? Progressive movements face an uphill struggle.

China's two central problems today are the vast, unaccountable power of the state and the growing strength of the market and private wealth. Since the reforms began in 1979, these two forces have forged a powerful and mutually beneficial bond. The state imposes markets, pays for key business requirements like infrastructure and skilled education, develops key sectors through targeted subsidies and protectionism, and represses the social unrest caused by markets. Intimate personal links nourish an alliance between the two sides: most successful businessmen are either former government officials or officials' close friends or family.

Given the strength and unity of elites, workers and peasants can only win meaningful change by uniting as well. Yet protests in China remain local and isolated. The government is partly responsible, controlling the news media and repressing any organization that might serve as a unifying force. But perhaps the bigger problem is how protesters themselves see their problems.

Rural protesters generally aim their ire against some local official who has imposed heavy taxes or expropriated their land or against a factory that has poisoned their air or water. When, inevitably, the official refuses concessions, the peasants frequently send a representative to Beijing to appeal to the central government for help. Labor protests are similarly local in focus. Protesters complain that their boss has stolen their pension fund or illegally forced them off the job, rarely taking aim at the market structures that encourage such abuses.

The problem, directly tied to the fragmented and isolated nature of social protest in China, is that the victims of the state and markets have no structural critique of the forces working against them, and, therefore, no consciousness of how closely related their struggles are. They direct their anger against mere agents — local officials or factory bosses — of those forces, rather than against the government and the economic system, which gives those agents power in the first place. In my two years living in China, I've heard many people criticize the course of their country, but I've never heard anyone locate these problems in the fundamental systems that structure Chinese power and wealth.

The problem should be familiar to Americans, because we suffer from the same short-sightedness. Every new war, every new corporate scandal, every time we hear that the government is spying on citizens or torturing foreigners, every time the number of people without health insurance increases — every perfectly predictable result of the power structure in the United States takes us by surprise. The answer to unceasing abuses of power, in the United States as in China, is to develop a structural understanding of how the inequality of power is built and maintained and how we can undo it. This approach also points toward the strategic and moral necessity of a unified social movement demanding fundamental restructuring rather than tinkering on the margins.

The problems of China may seem far away, but they're not so different from those Americans face, and they're connected in important ways. To address these problems we must all understand what we're facing and all get involved to fix it.
For more information:

On the healthcare system, see The Wall Street Journal, December 5 and 30, 2005.

On inequality and social unrest, see The New York Times series “The Great Divide,” October 13, November 10, December 8, 21 and 31, 2004.

On migrant workers, see Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market.

On the economics of market reform, see Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993.