Step 1: Put the economy into a "crisis" or "state of emergency" (George W. Bush, Rick Snyder, Scott Walker, etc.). It doesn't have to be a real crisis, you just have to claim there is one.
Step 2: Claim unprecedented executive powers "confront" the crisis YOU created/fabricated.
Step 3: Use those powers to privatize anything you can get your hands on. Massively deregulate corporations and cut their taxes. Bust unions and attack the public sector. This sets up the perfect conditions for another crisis.
Step 4: Repeat as needed until pesky middle class removed.
The "shock and awe" used to bring the free market to Afghanistan and Iraq has come to the USA. This is disaster capitalism at its worst. This is a war on people who have to work for a living, and it's about time we fought back.
Republicans want to simultaneously end all federal funding of contraception providers and criminalize abortion. Can't they just come out and say that they think bundles of cells are worth more than living, breathing women already? It's a war on women, nothing more, and nothing less.
For more information, see this story from TPMDC discussing the pro-choice fight against the Republican efforts. Also check this great post at Shakesville shellacking Republicans for their hypocrisy on the sanctity of human life.
I thought I'd share a couple of stories that caught my eye this weekend.
1. http://lat.ms/alfJIW In this story, the LA Times reports on a US Army return to massive combat training in lieu of counterinsurgency. To quote from the piece:
"Writing recently in Foreign Affairs magazine, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said, "The United States is unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of those in Afghanistan or Iraq anytime soon — that is, forced regime change followed by nation building under fire." Instead, U.S. forces will probably be called on to help other countries' armies defend themselves, particularly against terrorist attacks but also against conventional armies"
Seems to me to be a pretty big snub of the Bush-era nation building strategy evident in their post-invasion operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/25/local/la-me-gays-military-20100925 . This article discusses a district court's recent overturning of the discharge of Maj. Margaret Whit under DADT. Interestingly, the case was remanded to the District Court by the 9th District Court of Appeals after they said that the judge had to look at whether Whit individually endangered her unit and the army's cohesion and security interests. Judge Leighton found she did not. Alarmingly, the Obama administration argues that the ruling overturning DADT should only apply to Maj. Whit. This seems backwards from a history legal jurisprudence perspective (e.g. Brown vs. Board of Education)
"the Log Cabin Republicans brought suit on behalf of their members in the military. So now the Obama DOJ is arguing that they're the only ones who could possibly be affected. Meaning, by analogy, that Brown v. Board of Education should only have desegregated those children who were plaintiffs in the suits combined under Brown."
If the Obama DOJ had its way, the USA would still have segregated schools.
Yesterday, the ACLU's team that was challenging a post-9/11 US program that flew terrorism suspects to secret prisons, suffered a major legal setback. Jeppesen, a Boeing subsidiary was contracted out by the CIA to conduct said flights. The ruling, which was handed down by the 9th district Court of Appeals, was divided 6-5 and narrowly upheld the state secrets doctrine used by the Bush Administration and now defended by the Obama DOJ. The case will undoubtedly be appealed to the SCOTUS, which in all likelihood will uphold the appeals' court's ruling.
In light of the recent developments Jeppesen case, I thought I'd share a couple of relevant links. In this first video from a panel hosted by the American Constitution Scoiety (ACS), Ben Wizner, the ACLU's attorney in the Jeppesen case, discusses state secrets and national security. This is back from 2008, but the points Wizner makes are the same as the ACLU made in Jeppesen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJpcq6VO7N4
Here are two other great clips of Wizner on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#29129616 - This one starts a little silly with a reenactment of a 9th circuit ruling on Jeppesen from 2009, but quickly gets serious as Wizner joins Maddow to discuss state secrets, national security and the details of the Jeppesen case. This clip is the only one I could find where Wizner specifically discusses Jeppesen.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#31378360 - This clip has Wizner discussing the Bush Administration's state secrets doctrine. Wizner additionally provides proof of the use of State Secrets for political purposes.
Ben Wizner also came and spoke at Oxy in October 2009 about Jeppesen, the history of the state secrets doctrine, and ACLU involvement with other torture cases. I took extensive notes on the lecture/Q&A and posted them on my blog here: http://powertothepundits.blogspot.com/search/label/Ben%20Wizner
I'm back from Chile, and decided to resume blogging. Thanks to my many loyal readers, AKA the people that stumble across this blog by mistake. I appreciate you anyways =).
Check THIS gem out: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/13/sharron-angle-on-privatiz_n_681726.html
Sharron Angle, the GOP candidate for Senator in Nevada and a self-identified tea-partier is also a PINOCHETISTA. This woman believes that victims of rape or incest should turn "lemons into lemonade" instead of getting an abortion (which she would like to make illegal). She wants "2nd amendment remedies" for Harry Reid ...should she lose (AKA shoot him). She also thinks that unemployment benefits are spoiling Americans. This woman is a nut job, and THE Republican national party backed candidate for US Senate from Nevada.
There were many subjects I considered discussing for my presentation. I considered showing media clips, or discussing the arc of my blog (thanks to those of you that followed by the way). Ultimately what I decided to discuss however is disability. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to begin with a personal story and then tie it in to the course and the creation of the other.
This may seem like a strange topic considering that I personally am not disabled. Disability, however, has shaped my life. When I was five, my father was in a wheel chair for a year when he had a cancerous back tumor removed. The chemotherapy he had following the removal caused a rare condition to occur wherein the nerves in his legs no longer correctly transmit motor information, severely limiting their use to this day. When I was nine my mother’s auto-immune condition, Sjögren’s Syndrome (which is akin to Lupus or Coeliac disease), drastically worsened. To this day she is constantly nauseous, suffers from daily migraines, is severely limited physically and is only active for 8 hours a day. Today, as they have been for most of my childhood, my parents are severely physically disabled. In other words, I grew up in a disabled household.
My parents’ disabilities affected me directly in many ways. More important in defining who I am today though is how their disabilities affected them. Unlike my younger brother, I still have strong memories of when my parents were able-bodied. My mother in particular was an incredibly dedicated worker, administrating family planning clinics for ContraCostaCounty, pulling long hours and still finding time to spend with my brother and me. Even when a drunk driver ran her down while she was on a bike, crushing one of her spinal disks, she persevered. When her Sjögren’s Syndrome flared up, everything changed. My mother’s seemingly unstoppable lifelong effort to succeed in the workplace and in the community was crushed within the course of a year. Her work was not all that changed. My mother to this day cannot do lengthy social engagements or even meet with friends outside our house without great physical cost. As a result of this, most of her long-term friendships buckled and collapsed, and many in her family alienated. My mother’s Sjögren’s Syndrome will be with her as long as she lives, and its many burdens along with it.
Despite the amount of suffering my mother endures and the loss of her career, there is an additional layer of unnecessary suffering that greatly compounds her hardships. American society has, to put it mildly, a disturbing view of physical disability. For those who we acknowledge as “legitimately” disabled we have developed limited accommodations but by and large have not committed ourselves to bringing about true equal opportunity. One look at Occidental’s campus will tell you that the school simply wasn’t designed and largely hasn’t been updated to accommodate the basic needs of the physically disabled. Sure there are methods whereby the wheelchair-bound and those with reduced mobility can get into Johnson and Fowler, but can you imagine trying to get into Weingart? Or trying to get food at the Marketplace? Or live for that matter in any of the dorms? Despite its debatable “bet intentions”, Oxy operates out a standard playbook for American social thought: human beings when “normal” are physically “well”, and that additional “accommodations” are desirable but not urgent. I’ll return to this standard of normalcy and wellness in a minute.
To go back to the subject of my mother, she is not one of those I described above. Though her disability is crippling and prevents her from engaging in most activities the “well” (myself included) enjoy, it is not immediately visible to the eye like a wheelchair or a limp would be. Without a physical reminder of her disability, the social construction of “wellness as normalcy” comes to the surface in an ugly fashion. Again and again I see my mother’s friends, peers, acquaintances and even her own family question whether she was “really sick”.Some say it outright, calling her a “hypochondriac”, and inventing/perpetuating her own maladies. Others are, or grow to be more subtle, asking over and over again why my mother wasn’t investing “enough” time in their relationship, or why she couldn’t pick up their kids from school, or why she couldn’t just “overcome” and “be stronger than her sickness” for just one event that they wanted her to do. No matter how many times my mother explains her condition, and indeed demonstrates how limiting it is in her daily life, few truly believe her. With no job and very few friends and family that acknowledge the nature of her life, my mother has no choice but just to live.
This denial of illness and elevation of ability-based normalcy is from my life experience rooted in fear. As my mother’s friends and family look her in the eye and tell her she can overcome her illness if she sets her mind to it they are afraid. Afraid that when they look at her, what looks back is their own mortality. Afraid that the strength they see within her would not be in them were they as ill as she. Western culture is profoundly afraid of death and even more so, I’d argue, loss of our faculties. A post-enlightenment worldview has given the West an obsession with rational observation and our supposed ability to control our own lives. What is more American than the idea that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps? If someone is not satisfied with their life, shouldn’t they just try harder? If you’ve gotten to where you are in life through hard work, isn’t it insulting when someone says that they are stuck by their circumstances?
This brings me back to our coursework and the discourse of torture. In the very beginning of the course, Elaine Scarry made the claim that the pain of others is fundamentally inaccessible. As we progressed through the course, we saw this view reflected again and again in Western metaphysics. Only in some of our most recently examined theorists, like Levinas and Derrida have we seen an attempt to break this tradition and de-alienate the suffering of the other. These more recent challenges to the traditional framework are just that however: challenges to an acceptedreality. This standard conception of identity and the human experience as internal and isolated still governs our society today.
For the tortured and the disabled alike, there is a narrative of conflict between rational self-control and pain. The tortured, when the act is committed, are as we discussed “reduced to animals” and “rendered sub-human” by their loss of self (as Scarry puts it) and inability to overcome their pain through rational thought. When I read this at the beginning of the semester, I wondered how this fundamentally differs from the pain of the unwell or disabled.
While for one the pain is externally inflicted and the other the pain is internal, there is a parallel inherent in the two groups of people in the Western tradition. Neither group has control over their pain, nor can exert the rational faculty that defines humanity in Western metaphysics to stop it. For these two groups that should elicit the most sympathy from us, sympathy is impossible (Scarry). Ingrained in our thinking is the fundamental internalization of the pain of the “other” and their own obligation as humans to overcome their adversity through rationality and re-establishment of a “well” self. As Du Bois put it, the torturee is just “a body”. Asad says that torture in the ascetic tradition releases the soul from the body. Like the tortured, the disabled are reduced to the limitations of their body and hence have a damaged “self” from their inability to exert rational control.
In perhaps an even more frightening manner, this Western metaphysical tradition compounds with American exceptionalism, the American dream, and the neo-liberal tradition. Ingrained in this tradition, as I mentioned earlier is the expectation that everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and be a productive member of society. External barriers in this tradition are non-existent: the expectation is that whether you succeed or not depends on whether you have the willpower and personal drive to achieve what is offered to everyone equally. The tortured and the disabled are similarly demoted in the eyes of society by their inability to fulfill their Hobbesian social contract. The torture have allegedly already exited said contract for their alleged crimes, and the disabled face an inherent barrier that prevents them from contributing as “productive” members of human society. By “refusing” to use their rational control to fulfill their contract with society, both groups have failed to live up to the supposedly barrier-less American dream.
I know that significantly more biopolitical analysis is needed here, and that this is only an initial exploration, but it was important to me to share with you how this class has made me reflect on my own life and the lives around me. Thank you.
This is a blog started by Isaac Hale for the 2008 election. It morphed in 2008 into a blog on LGBT rights under the Obama administration. Power to the Pundits in 2010 was scrutinizing and aggregating mass media commentary on the torture "debate" and its ongoing legacy. Power to the Pundits is now set to be a long-term politics and opinion blog. Thanks for dropping by!
