Some of Them

The recent broohaha over Chick fil A's (about as lame a name as ever for just as lame chicken) president (in poetic irony, dude's name is "Cathy") coming out against gay marriage has kicked off a bit of a dust up with even some mayors coming out punitively, others -- most notably Bloomberg -- saying that it would set a bad precedent for NYC to boycott.

As much as I support gay marriage I think Bloomberg's right. Let the friggin market decide. It's like the tbtf banks; they jack over the entire world, but if peeps are too stupid to divest from them, well, then they deserve what they get.

In fairness, our school system and mass media ain't helping the masses one bit and if I had to say whose side they aid and abet -- regardless of whether or not they have consciously decided to -- it'd be the evil empire's side. Let's face it; young couples are walking around with a kid in the stroller and one in the oven amid the most historic economic crisis in history. I know who they are, the Cal post-grad students thinking they're invulnerable, still armed with pieces of plastic handed out by the very drug dealing cartel that was in action when I was in school. Only now, they're far larger, more highly conglomerated, and their fangs drip with bloodlust out in the open.

And the argument -- "some of them" -- comes into play in both the tbtf banks and the Chick fil A weirdo. "Not all white people...." "Not all cops...." "Not all men...." "Not all priests...." so therefore, some of them....

All groups do it. When the Latasha Harlins case went down, I said -- immediately -- that the Korean community should denounce Soon Ja Du. I also had no problem at all with saying to anyone that would listen that if we're going to go kill anyone, it shouldn't have been Saddam but that asshat in North Korea who terrorized and murdered millions.

Why is that so hard? It's what truly mystifies me about Jews who, despite a bounty of information on what's going on, continue to support Israel's systematic visciousness. And too, despite the work and protestations of Jews like Anna Balthzar and of course, Chomsky.

Malcolm famously said that a white girl once asked him what she could do to combat racism, and he said "Nothing." He later said that he regretted that and went on to say that what white people should do is help other white people see the way that they are the beneficiaries of racism.

I think that's right.

No group is as guilty as us Americans. All it takes is one look at the murderers row of reprobates we have in Congress who've managed -- mis-managed -- this country down the tubes and safeguarded all the resources for their masters. I think it was the no bs talkin' Gerald Celente who said, "Ever notice that despite Democrats or Republicans in office, things continue on the same way?"

Oh, hold on. Some of the Democrats and Republicans.

Lessons in Privilege: Initiatives, Black Power Mixtape and Moneyball

credit: Meme generator. Funny stuff.

THOSE WHO KNOW

I'm helping a group of associates here in Berkeley investigate the initiative process toward participatory budgeting, whereby everyday people will have a direct say in where tax dollars will be spent, and, by implication, oversight of the process. Like the foregoing run-on sentence, it's a long slog, but that's the nature of the fight.

Recently, several of this group attended an event organized by Zocalo, who I know a thing or two about as they've been churning in LA for some time. When I learned of this event, I thought of my past experiences with Zocalo, a group given to theory and not unique in that respect, but with a fine veneer of polish.

The first thing that struck me upon looking at the Zocalo panel was they were all wonksters in one form or another.

I braced myself. Expectations were lowered, expectations were met. It's my own personal coping mechanism.

Subsequent to that event, a participatory budgeting group member forwarded an announcement about another event with the theme of "slow money", which piqued my interest, given my stake in researching and keeping abreast of EM08, the economic meltdown of '08. Then I noticed that the lowest entrance fee was about $600.

So, in light of these developments, I think keeping in mind the history of the way the so-called left has consistently been shot through with elitist values should be talked up.

Those "thought leaders" that are Zocalo or the slow money event permeate just about everything in our society, from new media to, yes, resistance movements. It's one of the reasons, for example, when someone starts waxing poetic about ted conferences I roll my interior eyes. Or when Esther Dyson begins one of her diatribes about the Net, let alone when Paul Krugman pontificates about economics.

NOTHING NEW
One key thing to remember is that this is nothing new. Power in whatever form obviously has a generative goal which implies surviving and prospering. The history of the left is ripe with internal strife and infiltration, but an important distinction must be made; just as the NOI or the BPP were infiltrated and disrupted, it's impossible for, say, my group of everyday people to infiltrate the board of Goldman or B of A, much less to monitor them at a level that would make us satisfied. Right now, a group of protesters is "occupying" Wall Street, and it's gone viral. Will it reach Goldman's board room? I'll give 3 to 1 on that not happening.

If it's one thing I've learned it's that framing conveys a lot, and I don't just mean rhetorically. The Zocalo event was a "serious" environment, just as any large college lecture hall is. "Real" thinking happens there, and if knowledge springs forth from the streets, well, how can those who "know" pontificate, theorize and profit? More, how can those who "know" take seriously those from the streets? Finally, why should those from the streets take what those who "know" seriously? It's an assumption at best to even think that those in the barrio take seriously those who "know", and yet, those "knowers" act as if it doesn't matter because of the privileged places they occupy. In other words, the "bubble of knowing" accords insulation; they have certainty that the evil empire they are (ostensibly) fighting up above is a noble if not strategically and morally correct fight, and since "they know" are only doing what's best for those who do not know below them.


BLACK POWER MIXTAPE & MONEYBALL
Over the weekend I saw both Black Power Mixtape and Moneyball, and the more I thought about it, the more I was impressed by the latter and just kind of indifferent toward the former. On the surface, BPM is the kind of flick right in the boomers' wheelhouse; big names, big times. And while the footage is great and in good condition, it's a pastiche, and I came away thinking it was just a walk down memory lane, nice in its nostalgia, but fairly tame stuff. Angela Davis, the poster child of the 60's black power movement, is given prominence, occupies the poster for the film, and yet was never involved with movement building. She was an intellectual, and very good at it, but never involved in the day to day work of building a grassroots movement the way the BPP was. It also comes off as contrived; having Talib Kweli, Eryka Badu and Questlove ruminating on the crucible of the 60's/70's is like Britney Spears talking about the merits of Steal This Book. Ok, maybe not like that, but....

Which brings me to a point; for progressives who are truly concerned with changing the system, if everyday people's voices aren't present in their diversity, run. This is embodied in Malcolm's words when he said:

There's one thing I want to make clear; no matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition whites show toward me, as far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country it doesn't exist for me.

Moneyball, on the other hand, is ostensibly about as far from the progressive left this side of the skynet death star. It's "about" major league baseball general manager Billy Beane, but is about thinking but also about guts; how a mind can free itself from the societal strictures of tradition and pressure. It's about breaking through old hat.

Corporations love to say "think outside of the box", while doing everything to suppress it. Make no mistake, Major League Baseball's franchises are corporations, and in some ways, are arguably more pressurized than working for Citigroup. It was Noam Chomsky himself who famously pointed out that, contrary to popular belief, Americans are very smart and analytical, and as proof, just turn on sports talk radio and listen to the callers running down everything from the efficacy of man to man versus zone defense to matchups, coaching strategies, trades and their implications... any sports fan knows what he means. And it's true.

Amidst that comes Michael Lewis, about as good a writer as there is (on EM08 and other subjects, like being a dad), who just happens to be a sports nut. And he discovered something funny; that despite a payroll dwarfed by industry behemoths like the Yankees and Dodgers, the Oakland A's were doing something against all odds; they were winning.

What Lewis discovered is not just a great story, but a platinum lesson for those seeking change against the evil empire. Because Moneyball is really about the Godfather of Billy Beane's adopted approach (Sabermetrics), Bill James. And while Beane's story of struggling against convention is a great one, the fact is that Moneyball would never be without James, who first thought of the system of looking at baseball from outside of the box of tradition. And who is Bill James, a former player, a coach? Nope. He was an everyday joe who loved baseball, thought about it from a different angle, and went on a journey of discovery.

In a movie brimming with the lesson of breaking through, Beane himself is served up a cardinal lesson late in the movie. In about as contrived a scene as can be, and yet perfectly pitched, he's schooled in some of the greatest lessons of all; to see himself and the big picture. It works, but I'm a sucker for old Hollywood; I've seen Capra's opus, It's a Wonderful Life, countless times, and it never loses any of its power, in fact, like a fine wine, it only seems to get better. Moneyball is a throwback movie to that Golden Age of Hollywood, and for two hours, I was a little boy sitting in the Golden Gate Theater, enthralled. Thanks also to director Bennett Miller, for time well spent.

The fact of James being an everyday person who had such an enormous impact on a tradition over a century old whizzes right by the viewer in Jonah Hill's dialog and a short burst of James' photo, but listen and watch for it: It's the golden Easter egg, the moneyball within Moneyball.

See this movie.

At the game: The great Bill James

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Some common misconceptions have people buying into uncle scam's hard sell of democracy = capitalism while others also misconstrue capitalism as democracy when it comes to globalization. The elementary reading would be the former is a domestic perception and the latter foreign. This topic will rest here but is ripe for future picking.

I like comparative history and think it's a useful tool, particularly when in the hands of someone as eloquent as Wolfgang Schivelbusch (trusting Jefferson Chase's translation), in his Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany 1933-39. Schivelbusch shows how in considering fascism - it itself a term up for revision - vs. capitalism vs. socialism, how we are conditioned to look at differences. On another note, it's interesting to consider the possibility that the model itself - or as it's been conditioned - has a tendency toward difference, and that similarities are a very viable mode of comparative analysis.

I'm reminded of an old Polish proverb;

Under capitalism, man exploits man.
Under communism, it's the reverse.

Fighters say that only they can know the special bond they have. This is a timeworn dimension of the sweet science, and recently drawn out very poignantly in the great documentary, Facing Ali, which I plan on writing about soon. In it, Ali's adversaries, now gray and rounder, speak with reverence about The Greatest. Despite their differences, they all recognize the common bond they share.

If nothing else, Schivelbusch's analysis exposes - among other things - one of the great fallacies of our age; the belief in our twin systems of capitalism and democracy rolled into one as being the Gemini of perfection. Americans love to put the pedal to the metal, and they believe, with all of their patriotic god fearin' hearts, that "the American System" stands wholly apart and even diametrically opposed to fascism, communism, socialism. In other words they take a fundamental error and proceed to blow it up to worldwide proportions.

It's this kind of conditioning that interprets 50 varieties of dry cereal on the shelves of their supermarkets into "freedom" - yet another fundamental error - and then proceeds to impose it on to the world. This level, keep in mind, is the foot soldier level. This is the war of the mind, ideology. The oligarchs, well, let's just say I'm cynical that they actually believe all of the "God and Country" BS. Their motives are all about fixing power in their favor. Whether via economic hitmen, jackals or neo-colonization, it's all about controlling resources, and that includes people, perhaps most of all.

Refusing to ever let a catastrophe remain an infant, America takes this to another level and compounds the foregoing error by not educating its citizens in much more than rote memorization, and the ones who do have a functioning analytical brain are devalued in monetary ways so as to dissuade critical behavior. Or, conversely, they are incentivized toward "dry analysis." Indeed, some of the most prized minds on Wall Street in the recent derivatives gold rush bubble were quantitative number crunchers. These are the other breed of economic hitmen charged with running the numbers and either creating the "financial products" - complete with structured finance traunches containing toxic mortgages rated AAA by CRAs - or doing the calculus to check the validity of "models." Those who do well are, of course, promoted, thus, never gaining any insight outside of their world and if anything, having their cosmology vise-tightened.

These are the minds that can run a right side analysis of Credit Default Swaps and weep at the thought of regulating derivatives, without the slightest awareness of dialectical materialism which, if nothing else, tells us in perfect Newtonian symmetry that for every action....

Just yesterday, Mikey and I were citing Chomsky's classic, Manufacturing Consent, in regards to American style capitalism/democracy, and how dissidence actually bolsters the illusion that it works, simply because if it weren't working, then Chomsky wouldn't even be able to function. The problem is that the articulation of Chomsky's non-relevance in the greater society goes unstated, not his ideas, but the way he is allowed to openly function and yet is ghettoized via discrimination. Thus, the solution to the puzzle is, and should be, a structural critique.

Z Mag and John Pilger are vets of this war, and Chomsky has a long history with Z Mag, as do all the old lefties. I came across this particular article by chance (with a wink and a nod to the great "Black Looks"), and, lo and behold, in 2005, Pilger was saying these words that are so apropos, given the devastation in Haiti and Dambisa Moyo's recent book criticizing western aid to developing countries.

Last, a personal note; my brotha Rom, stay up. We'll talk Sunday.

Z Magazine, at:
http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/2311

June, 11 2005
Sleeping With The Enemy

By John Pilger

The National Union of Journalists and the Blair government are planning a "launch" ceremony, at which they will announce their "partnership". According to John Fray, the NUJ's deputy general secretary, this collaboration will "promote awareness among journalists of the issues that surround the struggle against poverty on a world scale... We want to help the media to tell it like it is."

In a glossy letter to NUJ members, Fray says that joining hands with the government is "enhancing the understanding of the need for a positive approach to international development amongst those who report and comment on the issues...". For this "positive approach", the government is paying the journalists' union 80,000 pounds. What a bargain price for the principle of independence from power.

A "partnership" with the NUJ is a master stroke for a rapacious British government whose "aid" and "debt relief" are intended to mask, as Gordon Brown put it, an "obligation" on the poorest countries to "create the conditions for [business] investment". The chief civil servant at the Department for International Development wrote, "We are extending our support for privatisation in the poorest countries from the power sector in India to the tea industry in Nepal."

Since when did privatisation have anything to do with "the struggle against poverty"? Privatisation is about control of markets and profit. Period. Britain's "new global deal" for the poor is one of those brilliant propaganda illusions that enjoy widespread sycophancy among courtier-journalists who, like rock stars, prefer to think of their government as benign, regardless of its record of exploitation, lying and violence. That's how Blair got away with his WDM lies for as long as he did and how he's getting away with "aid" tied to extremist free market World Bank and IMF policies that have devastated the poorest countries.

For example, Zambia was pressured to sack thousands of teachers if it wanted to qualify for "relief". As Caroline Pearce of the Jubilee Campaign says: "Debt is used as a tool of control."

Now in the pay of the government, will the NUJ tell this truth about aid,"like it is"? Will John Fray publish another glossy newsletter, this time describing how the Department for International Development, his new "partners", have handed out millions of pounds of "aid" money to the far right-wing Adam Smith Institute, and Halcrow and KPMG, to push privatisation, such as water? And what will be the NUJ's new "positive approach" to the Blair government's impoverishing arms sales to 14 of Africa's most conflict-ridden countries?

The NUJ, of which I have been a life-long member, has done excellent work highlighting abuses against fellow trade unionists around the world, as in Colombia. I asked Jeremy Dear, the general secretary, about his new "partners". He, too, cited the NUJ's work in Colombia, "the most dangerous country for journalists in the world, where the British government fund the murderous Uribe regime." He then disclosed that the union was taking money from the Foreign Office in order to establish in Colombia "the first independent trade union for journalists so they can expose what is going on in their country."

This is the same Foreign Office that is "fund[ing] the murderous Uribe regime". Such is the familiar game of having it both ways: a game at which governments are well practised.

He also revealed that, in the Ukraine, "dozens of NUJ activists" had taken British government money to set up "an independent union for journalists". How independent is it? The Ukraine is, of course, a Washington/Whitehall "showcase project". He also said the union was taking British government money for its work promoting press freedom and journalists' safety in Iraq and Palestine. "There is not one single example of the NUJ compromising its independence as a result of securing outside funding," he said, "... and no government or individual can buy it."

Accepting tainted money - money from the same source that "funds a murderous regime" - is itself a compromise, and a dangerous one. Why should a government, which has a clear, ideological world view and a proven record of warmongering, give money to a trade union whose members should be exposing not collaborating with its manipulations? I urge my fellow NUJ members to take up that question urgently, remembering that the current US government also funds journalists who also protest their innocence.

What this "partnership" promises is harm to the union's credibility abroad, because it will be seen as yet another example of "embedding". It also lowers a threshold, demonstrating just how insidious "embedding" has become, as if it now has a certain legitimacy. In Iraq, the BBC, embedded up to its ears, has all but lost its credibility, because it broadcasts the occupiers' news - rarely spelling out that 80 per cent of the deaths are caused by the Americans and their clients. Read the instructive exchanges between the editors of MediaLens (www.medialens.org) and Helen Boaden, the head of BBC News, about why the BBC has remained silent on American atrocities in Fallujah and the use of Napalm, and why it suppresses independent eye-witness reporting.

Another form of embedding was clear in most of the reporting of the "shock" rejection of the European constitution. The French were caricatured as haters of change, ratting on the "European dream". On 29 May, the Observer, once a celebrated liberal newspaper, published a cartoon headed "The Completely Bonkers Frog". The image of a huge farting frog might have been lifted from an especially grotesque Sun front page.

That a spectacular majority in two European nations voted against the market fundamentalism that has torn the very fabric of British life was not the news. Neither was the fact that 80 per cent of working class people and 60 per cent of those under 25 voted against the greed of the European rich and the autocracy of the central banks: against poverty, unemployment, war and the betrayal of post-war social democracy once proclaimed as a mainstay of Europe's post-fascist ideal of "never again". (How desperate the true right are; with the contortion of intellect and morality that distinguishes New Labour, Denis MacShane, a former Blair minister, smeared the voters with the absurdity they were beckoning fascism and anti-Semitism).

It was also a vote against media-ism. Almost the entire French media had demanded a "yes" vote, and the "shock" was theirs. There is a lesson in all this for journalists who care about their craft. Millions of people across the world no longer credit the "global" (western) media as independent or truthful. This is especially so of young people. In Korea, during the last general election, a majority turned to the internet for their political news, dismissing the likes of CNN and their own establishment media, just as people in Stalinist countries used to.

For most human beings, the evidence of their lives is that consumerism is not democracy and "globalisation" is a vicious war against the poorest, a form of terrorism, and millions of them are taking action. The National Union of Journalists should not collaborate with their enemy.