Democracy Now! 2015-09-02 Wednesday

• Headlines for September 02, 2015
• After Mass Hunger Strikes & Lawsuits, Prisoners Force California to Scale Back Solitary Confinement
• Is Guatemala's President Going to Jail? Legislature Strips Pérez Molina of Immunity After Protests
• With a Record Backing Coups, Secret War & Genocide, Is Kissinger an Elder Statesman or War Criminal?

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Democracy Now! 2015-09-01 Tuesday

• Headlines for September 01, 2015
• The Next Not-So-Cold War: As Climate Change Heats Arctic, Nations Scramble for Control and Resources
• Despite Global Ban, Saudi-Led Forces Kill Dozens in Yemen Using U.S.-Made Cluster Bombs
• "Mr. Smith Goes to Prison": After Year in Jail, Former State Senator Condemns Mass Incarceration

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In a comment to one of my recent posts (1, 2) on converting from Org mode to Word doc format, Grant Rettke pointed me to an interesting Org Mode mailing list thread on how academics leverage Org mode for writing their research articles. It's a great thread and if you have a need to convert your Org documents to doc format, it's definitely worth reading.

One problem that arises when collaborating with a Word-using colleague is that they will want to turn on tracking and make their changes and comments directly in the document. You can, of course, simply copy the changes back into your Org document but that's a hassle. Happily, in one of the posts, Ken Mankoff outlines a method for getting those changes back into your Org document. Rettke captures the method in a recent post on his blog.

Once you have the Org document with the changes, you can do an ediff with the original to chose the changes you want to keep. For more on that idea, see Mickey Petersen's post on writing a book with Emacs. He didn't use Org mode but he did deal with integrating editorial changes back into his master file.

Today I want to talk about the concept of pages in GNU Emacs, how I use them, and why I use them. In my experience pages are often overlooked by Emacs users, most likely because they look ugly, but I will show you a package to deal with that. And along the way I will show you a package that I use to make it easier to navigate between pages.

A Crash Course Introduction to Pages

‘Pages’ in Emacs refers to text separated by the form-feed character, i.e. the ^L character, meaning Ctrl+L. We can type this character by pressing C-q C-l. Using C-q tells Emacs to directly insert whatever key you press next. Normally C-l runs the recenter-top-bottom command. And so we cannot simply type C-l to get the form-feed character. But C-q C-l tells Emacs to ignore any command bound to C-l and thus inserts a literal ^L, the character we need to separate text into pages.

We use C-x [ and C-x ] to move backward and forward through pages, respectively. Those keys, by default, invoke the backward-page and forward-page commands. By pressing C-x C-p we can mark whatever page we are on.

And that’s pretty much it. Later I will come back to talk about some packages to help us navigate pages. But this is all we need to know in order to get started with pages.

Why Use Pages?

I like to use pages, particularly in programming, as a means to divide content into sections. For our game, my studio has recently created the Chance library. The source code has page-breaks dividing each section, although you won’t seem them on GitHub; they will appear as blank lines, e.g. line 228. But in Emacs that page-break line looks like this.

What turns those ugly ^L characters into those pretty horizontal lines? Steve Purcell’s terrific page-break-lines package.

The Chance library uses LDoc for generating its documentation—a form of Javadoc for Lua. In LDoc one can use the @section markup to group the code into related chunks. I have a page-break directly above each comment block that creates a new @section. Doing so divides the source code itself into the same sections by treating each section as a page in Emacs.

The result is that I can easily navigate through the source code per-section by using pages. I could use the aforementioned C-x [ and C-x ] commands for this navigation, but instead….

A Nicer Way to Navigate Pages

I like to use helm-pages to move between pages in a file. When I invoke helm-pages in the Chance source code this is what I see. Since it shows the first line on each page this results in an easy, and in my opinion pretty, way to quickly move between sections of the code base. The test suite for Chance uses page-breaks in the same way, and again helm-pages works well since the first line on each page is a call to describe() which indicates what part of the library that section tests—I use Busted for the unit tests.

Conclusion

A short article, I know, but honestly there’s nothing else to really say. Hopefully this demonstrates how using pages in Emacs can be a useful way to divide-up source code (or any kind of file) and easily navigate to those divisions as needed. If you have never used pages in Emacs then give it a try sometime because, like me, you may find it to be a useful tool for organizing a single file into nice, logical chunks which you can jump between quickly and easily.

Update (15 September 2015): I highly recommend reading info by Artur Balabarba on page-breaks.

In May 2014, the Syria Centre for Policy Research in Damascus released a report on the economic and social conditions in Syria. Its findings were staggering. More than half the country’s population lives in extreme poverty. Most school-age children no longer attend school, and 45 percent of its public hospitals are out of service.

By the time the report was published, almost 3 percent of the Syrian population had already been wounded or killed in the conflict. The carnage has only increased since.

As the human toll of the Syrian catastrophe spirals ever higher, one detail on which everyone can agree is that the situation is an ongoing tragedy. And the specter of humanitarian crisis has compelled every stripe of policymaker and pundit to call for some form of action — the need to do something.

But far too often the demand to “do something” sidesteps what has already been done — there is a foundational assumption that the ruin and bloodshed of this terrible war have been produced by inaction.

Take as an example Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, heads of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. Their edited collection, The Syria Dilemma, hopes to present an “array of contending perspectives [reflecting] the profound dilemma that Syria confronts us with.”

What perspectives have they set into contention with one another? Most are united by a call for some projection of American power. Familiar interventionist tropes are presented. Responsibility to Protect (R2P) receives frequent mention. The book cites the Bosnia example at least eight times, along with mentions of Rwanda.

This isn’t unique to discussions about Syria. Policy wonks, such as Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute, see the example of Bosnia — indeed, of the total breakup of Yugoslavia — as a sound precedent for American policy goals in Syria. In a paper dated June 2015, O’Hanlon places Bosnia alongside Afghanistan and Somalia as a desirable model for the fragmentation he recommends for Syria.

In addition to a “confederate” Syria that could entail all-out partition, O’Hanlon calls for increased intervention in the form of guns and training provided to selected Syrian opposition outfits, protective safe zones governed by US troops, and the demolition of the existing government air force. For O’Hanlon, the problem with US policy in Syria is that it hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

Or, to try another example, there is Robert Kaplan’s recent article in Foreign Policy proclaiming that the violence in which the Middle East is currently mired comes as the result of a “demonstrably hands-off approach” to recent events in the Middle East by an Obama administration that has neglected its role of “organizing and stabilizing the region.” News sources like CNN have, as late as August 2014, been asking why the US has not yet intervened in Syria as it has in Iraq.

All these narratives share either explicitly or implicitly a history of the Syrian conflict that simply does not hold up under critical scrutiny. Indeed, the official chronology of events in these pro-intervention narratives — about a peaceful revolution turned reluctantly to arms, and thus in need of a military savior — eclipses the actual, far more complicated one.

The Tropes of Interventionism

Indeed, calls for increased intervention have a long history in Syria. These appeals in the US press have long been tied to calls made within the Syrian opposition. They began early, within the first year, and often rather vociferously. But the signals regarding intervention from what was then the most influential exile opposition outfit, the Syrian National Council (SNC), were in the first year of the uprising muddy.

On the one hand, they claimed to oppose military intervention, but on the other, called on the “international community” to “protect the Syrian people.” Still, this SNC line was always clearer than any of their other demands, suggesting that intervention was for many a crucial piece of the vision for what they and its local Syrian allies called the Syrian revolution.

Another claim which reality complicates is the frequent one of how, when, and where the revolt turned to arms. The popular narrative in the United States, promoted by the US State Department, is one in which a people in the face of state repression turned to violence only when they had to. But that is not quite true. Violence and militarization from the opposition on the ground began quite early — during the first month of the uprising.

Joshua Landis, director for the Center of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, for example, published information in April 2011 contradicting claims made in the Western press about nine Syrian soldiers shot and killed in Banyas. News outlets had reported that the soldiers were shot by Syrian Army officials for refusing to shoot on protesters.

Among the pieces of evidence that Landis brandished was testimony from Col. ’Uday Ahmad, who claimed that the soldiers, driving in a moving truck, were shot at from two directions — from a rooftop and from “behind the cement median of the highway.” Video footage corroborated the story.

Normally to bring forward such facts is to invite the suggestion that one is offering apologetics for the government of Bashar al-Assad. In fact, that has been a consistent leitmotif of Western and Arab debate over the conflict. As a result, that debate has gone forward without the necessary information to understand what exactly has been going on in Syria over the past four years.

That undigested information includes even the true extent of US involvement in Syria. When reports first emerged that the United States was sending troops to the Jordan-Syria border, the general response of the US left was a collective shrug. More reports emerged that the US has been using its new Jordan base as a staging ground to train elements of the armed opposition. And from there, US arming of rebels has only increased in recent years.

These reports point not only to general conclusions, but also to specific questions: how large is the US base in Jordan and what exactly goes on there on a day-to-day basis?

Nowadays, fewer guesses are necessary as to the size and scope of this project. On June 12, the Washington Post published a story about “budget cuts” facing the CIA program for Syria. Shoehorned into the story was the disclosure that the initiative “has become one of the agency’s largest covert operations” to the tune of nearly $1 billion dollars a year, with “Syria-related operations [accounting] for about $1 for every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget” and the CIA having “trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program.”

In other words, the United States launched a full-scale war against Syria, and few Americans actually noticed.

Another major assumption driving calls for interventions is a belief that interventionist action and local Syrian revolutionary action are complementary. In order to stage this argument, commentators tend towards assuming rather than demonstrating that a revolution has been underway in Syria since 2011. Perhaps the core of this incoherence lies in the dedication of Hashemi’s and Postel’s book: “To the Syrian People.”

The abstract embrace of this people, in itself belying the concrete conditions of a four-year war, is connected to another leitmotif of Syria discussions: any refusal to replace analysis of the situation within the country and its relationship with broader international politics with a neat, generalized “will” of the people narrative is to deny Syrian “agency.”

Hashemi’s and Postel’s project stands with the Syrian people. But with which Syrian people exactly? Syria is gripped by war, and it is clear that large sectors of the lower classes, particularly those among the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, are still with the government.

The popular narrative of the People versus the Dictator — one piece in Hashemi’s and Postel’s book describes it as a conflict between “a dictatorship” and “a democratic opposition” — elides the reality of varying classes and sects with various social roles and politics.

This narrative is, in other words, a cartoon. More than that, it is a cartoon that overshadows the central contradiction currently at play in the Syrian situation: one between imperialists and various resistance movements, as well as the states supporting them.

This is not to say that works like The Syria Dilemma deny the internal divisions of Syria altogether. The reality of sectarianism is too obvious to ignore, and no responsible discussion of sectarianism in Syria can ignore the sectarian flavor of much of the Syrian opposition — the most powerful factions of which, from Jabhat al-Nusra to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, either pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda formally or, even in the case of portions of the US-backed “moderate” armed opposition, adopt many of its main attitudes and beliefs.

Discussing a US and Saudi-supported commander of the Syria Revolutionaries Front, Matthew Barber calls attention to his insistence on justifying opposition to ISIS on the grounds of anti-Shi’ism.

Barber insists that the problem with this justification is twofold: “first, no one has targeted Shiites with more violence than al-Qaida, and second, one of the defining features of al-Qaida’s immoral character is the intolerance that typifies their ideology.” Barber goes on to state that such logic demonstrates that “even the rebel enemies of ISIS are more influenced than they’d like to admit by the intolerant outlook of al-Qaeda itself.”

The armed opposition groups that hold the most territory are like-minded. Large swaths of central and eastern Syria are ruled by the Islamic State. Highly influential in Idlib and Aleppo are groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, and Ahrar al-Sham, now being marketed in mainstream US publications such as the Washington Post as a “moderate” organization worthy of US support. The two organizations work together routinely.

In Idlib particularly, Ahrar al-Sham delegated responsibilities for governance of Druze villages to Jabhat al-Nusra, which proceeded to massacre at least twenty Druze. The BBC has reported that “activists in Idlib have reported that Druze in Idlib have been subjected to religious persecution by al-Nusra with several hundred forced to convert to Sunni Islam.”

These dynamics present only one of the major challenges to anyone making claims of a Syrian revolution. The most politically determinant parties in war are, after all, armed actors. If the armed revolt in Syria is part of a revolutionary movement, why are the most powerful and influential actors among the armed forces bigoted?

Now, the sectarian question has always in one way or another exposed the domination of liberal academics in Middle East Studies through the sheer preponderance of opinions assuming sectarian conflict to be a permanent feature of the region.

Hashemi’s and Postel’s book may ultimately avoid this crude and popular determinism, but only to end up trading one major misbelief for several others. To begin, a piece in the book by Michael Ignatieff declares the Syrian government the sole cause of sectarianism when he calls it Assad’s “poisonous gift to Syria,” presumably because of the high representation rates of Alawis — the minority sect to which the Assad family belongs — throughout the Syrian government.

Ignatieff’s strategy is popular, wherein sectarian tensions in Syria are laid at the doorstep of the historically repressed Alawi minority sect — the target nowadays of open calls for genocide from segments of the armed opposition — and the Syrian government, with both entities treated as one another’s means of enforcement.

Certainly major positions in the Syrian state have long been occupied by Alawis. One reason dates back to the French colonial period, when Alawis — long kept from the levers of power — were encouraged to join the armed forces. Another dates back to the ascendency of the Ba’ath Party in the 1960s, when rifts between Sunni party members opened up positions to Alawi officers. (Many Alawis, who were peasants, had been attracted to the Ba’ath Party for its emphasis on the peasantry.)

But for the claim that sectarianism was injected into Syria by Assad to stick, it must be proven that regular Alawis generally benefitted uniquely from the government’s rule. The evidence for this claim does not seem to exist, and at any rate Ignatieff does not seem in a hurry to provide it.

Likewise, the sectarianism cannot be pinned on Syria-supporter Iran, governed by a Shi’i Muslim government, which continues to negotiate its ties to the Sunni Islamic Jihad of Gaza (albeit, in an increasingly complicated environment) and sends arms and funds to the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

But these realities are often ignored, while Salafi supremacist sectarianism within opposition ranks in Syria is explained away: it exists, in the words of Hashemi’s and Postel’s introduction, at once “due to funding from Islamic charities in the Persian Gulf,” and due to “the absence of significant support from the international community for the opposition’s more democratic elements . . .”

In other words, sectarianism among the opposition exists both because of intervention and because of a lack of intervention. Once again, perhaps then the wisdom of intervention in Syria may be judged by the intervention that has already occurred: not only have “Islamic charities” armed and funded the opposition, but so have entire states, including Saudi Arabia, which exploits sectarian Wahhabi ideology to dubious ends while maintaining rather amenable geopolitical relations with Hashemi’s and Postel’s “international community,” i.e. the United States.

Alternatively, the sectarian elements that dominate the armed opposition in Syria are, according to one writer in The Syria Dilemma, Afra Jalabi, the result of a revolution “hijacked” by outside forces.

This is not entirely accurate, although to draw the relationship between local Syrian forces and outside imperil connivance has at times invited the charge of “conspiracy theory” — another leitmotif tossed at anti-imperialists in the course of debates about Syria.

Here it must be said that while international connivance against Syria — one involving varying degrees of coordination between the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and other parties — has played in important role in the tragedy before us, the ruin of Syria is really a product of these powers’ relationship with reactionary forces in Syria and elsewhere.

To be more specific, Saudi Arabia, which has intervened with sectarian propaganda years in advance of 2011 and also with arms and funds, has certainly accelerated the sectarianism seen now among opposition ranks, but it did not single-handedly create the class base for it. Rather, conspiracy proved successful precisely because imperialist forces had a local social base with which to work, even before troves of sectarian fighters began invading Syria from other countries.

Even the (by far) strongest entry in The Syria Dilemma, an anti-intervention effort from Aslı Ü. Bâli and Aziz Rana, fails to delineate the politics of the rebels in Syria. This particular article does prove an exception in the book, containing real strengths.

It states, against the spirit of the book’s introduction, that “it is intervention, not its absence, that fuels the blood-letting in Syria.” It endorses a negotiated political settlement with elements of the Syrian government as a path to peace.

All of this is to say that one cannot comprehensively understand the imperialist assault on Syria without undertaking a thorough analysis of Syrian society and recognizing who is who. Any serious review of recent events in Syria must attempt to grapple with the class basis of this armed insurgent movement: that is, both with the conditions that led to its creation and its general vision for Syrian society.

Therefore, a historical corrective is in order — one which gives justice to the dynamics of Syrian society, but also places them into the context of global capitalism.

The Major Political Players

Before a specific study of the origins of the armed sectarian insurgents in Syria can be advanced, a general analysis of the currently contending forces in Syrian society outside of the armed insurrection must first be set down.

The 2011 revolt was launched in three major layers: the protests in towns like Dara’a, Idlib, Homs, and Hama; the exile organizations in dialogue with the United States, namely the Syrian National Council (and now the National Syrian Coalition); and the violent agitations against the Syrian state, which eventually evolved into a total insurrection.

The protests began in the southern city of Dara’a, where anger stirred against the local head of security (a relative of Assad’s) following the arrest  of children writing anti-government graffiti. In response to the abuses extending from the state’s harsh security response to protests, the Syrian Communist Party backed calls for investigations into the state’s harsh crackdowns on protestors and called for reforms to reverse “the trend toward economic liberalization,” such as the full nationalization of several industries to prevent further infiltration of “private monopoly capital.”

In the case of both Syrian Communist Parties, historically victims of state repression in Syria, there was a call to oppose imperialist machinations against Syria, to oppose civil war, and for the implementation of economic and political reform.

Also active early on, as something of an alternative to the SNC, was the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change (NCC), chaired by Hassan Abdel Azim. The NCC, unlike the SNC, maintained a staunch position against militarization of the Syrian opposition  and against foreign intervention.

As a Ya Libnan report from 2012 makes clear, the pro-revolution online voices launched a sustained campaign to paint the NCC, an organization with members who have been among the Syrian leftists jailed in government prisons, as capitulators.

The report noted that the NCC “rejects all forms of foreign military involvement, including arming the FSA” and that “it is common to see activists online charge the NCC and jihadist groups with the same unforgivable crime: collaboration with the mukhbarat, Syria’s hated internal intelligence services.”

A major component of the NCC’s prescience regarding the effects of foreign intervention was not only its theoretical rejection of militarization as a plan easily exploited by outside powers, but also its rejection of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) — the initial name for military opposition in Syria — as an entity. The outfit was not, the NCC stated, representative of the country’s best interests.

In 2012, the NCC released a statement on conclusions reached at an opposition conference in Cairo. In addition to blaming the government for fomenting sectarian violence and declaring solidarity with Syrian Kurds, the statement emphasized that the FSA was not subject to checks within the opposition, betraying opposition groups and declaring itself sole representative of the opposition; that it destabilized the country with violence, opening up space for sectarianism; allowed for infiltration of foreign and jihadist groups; opened itself up to splintering and factionalism; and lacked the power to carry out its fight, allowing it to be easily co-opted.

The NCC does not deserve dismissal, as it is, unlike the exile SNC, Syria-based; it must live with the material consequences of whatever political path it decides to pursue. From the beginning, it has forwarded conditions for dialogue with the Syrian government, a prescience that has now been extended into a path for a war-ending solution. Dialogue is no less the route to a solution today.

The NCC and the SNC were defined by a larger split between leftism and liberalism, with the latter speaking exclusively of liberal human rights and a “civil state.” Expressing an anti-capitalist politics, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which developed in 2003 amid intense repression from Syrian security forces and out of a history of Ba’athist denial of Kurdish national claims, tentatively took the side of the Syrian state against the opposition movement.

This early decision is an important example of how exactly the question of intervention, and the related issue of Syrian sovereignty, formed the primary bases for the dawning divisions of the war.

The PYD’s decision was an immediate matter of survival, made in partial response to the SNC’s decision to deny Kurdish requests for autonomy to appease Turkey, the historic enemy of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), of which the PYD is an affiliate.

Here the call for intervention entailed an exclusivist vision, one that illuminates one of the many threats intervention posed: between its implementation and anti-Kurdish racism, one went with the other.

In stark contrast, the PYD has forwarded an inclusive vision — a commune — for Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmen, Chaldeans and others. The space for this revolutionary project was created in opposition to the movement that was labeled revolutionary in Western media, including the Free Syrian Army.

Amid the brutal sectarian strife across Syria and the Middle East, the PYD’s project in Rojava has over the past year understandably appeared as a spark of hope to many leftists in the West. Their admiration is not misplaced.

But it must still be said that the future of Rojava very much rests on how much room the PYD decides to give to the United States as it considers exploiting the party to deepen divides in Syria. If that room is too spacious, the PYD will compromise more than its anti-imperialism.

The position of tentative support for the state was also generally adopted by both ethnic and religious minorities, including Armenians, Alawis, and Christians. As Joshua Landis has commented, Bashar al-Assad “very much has a power base. The core constituency, of course, are Alawite Syrians, about 12 percent of the country, 3 million people, give or take. Christians, another 5 to 6 percent, support him but are not carrying a lot of water. So [are] the Druze and other religious minorities that make up 20 percent of Syria.”

According to the thesis of The Syria Dilemma, the chief blame for these decisions would fall on these minority groups for following the sectarian logic of the Syrian government. Consider another possibility: these people knew things about the armed revolt that others did not.

Any understanding of the ways in which these events — the armed insurgency, the protests, the calls for intervention — and political bodies interacted with each other cannot be separated from the structural elements that produced them. These elements existed within the overlapping realms of politics and religion at once, with class at the core of it all.

The Origins of Revolt

The Ba’ath Party, in its initial years, organized along class lines with a broadly populist program and, more so than is the case now, was staunchly secularist.

Although capitalist classes increased their influence in Syria after Bashar’s financialization of the country’s economy, and before that with Hafez’s liberalization in the early 1990s, the Ba’ath Party established its legacy in the countryside. The Arab Socialist Party, which would merge with the Ba’athists in 1952, was the first organization to politically organize the rural territories of Syria.

This policy did not make the Ba’ath Party socialist in any meaningful sense — it never opposed private property or carried out deep structural reforms, even though it did redistribute wealth and, in the words of a report by Raymond Hinnebusch, “block the bourgeoisie from reasserting control over the bulk of the agrarian surplus which in part was retained by the peasantry.”

The Ba’ath’s empowerment of the peasantry challenged the stakes of some of the largest landowners. Underneath that broad conflict, a struggle ensued within the Ba’ath Party from 1963 to 1970 between Hafez al-Assad and Salah Jadid. The battle between these two men is often described as one between a pragmatist (al-Assad) and an ideologue (Jadid). Indeed, Jadid’s government was likely the most radical in Syrian history, described by historian Sonoko Sunayama as “menacing pro-Western Arab regimes.”

But both men, Assad and Jadid were pragmatic when it came to internal politics. Jadid made calculations according to political necessity. In the 1960s, for instance, Jadid, then head of the Ba’ath Party, cracked down on the left-wing Armed Workers’ Battalions, which had even acted as an unofficial enforcement wing for the government during periods of political turbulence. He had tacitly allowed for the battalions’ formation only a few years prior.

The significance of Assad and Jadid’s disagreements rested in the fact that they appealed to slightly different social bases. Jadid sought to deepen socialist gains within the countryside, while Assad gained tentative support in the cities. In 1970, Assad, then defense minister of the party, launched a coup against Jadid and his loyalists. Jadid would go on to die in Syrian prison in 1993.

In the immediate aftermath of the coup, urban merchants, in an account offered by Hanna Batatu, “sent demonstrators into the streets of the big cities with banners that read: ‘We implored God for Aid—al-Madad. He sent us Hafiz al-Asad!’” The manner in which Assad came to power, and the classes he sought to buttress in order to make it happen, would prove a good predictor for the ways in which classes would ultimately shift and change under his rule.

When examined in aggregate, these conflicts — the ideological and class tensions tied into the inter-Ba’ath rifts — can offer some idea of the Syrian Ba’ath Party’s place in Middle Eastern political history. Formed against the backdrop of Pan-Arabism and popular support for the independence and postcolonial state-building that movement represented, Ba’athism was part of a progressive wave, even as it stomped out political parties more progressive than itself.

In this sense, the Syrian Arab Republic has historically embodied both the innovations and the limitations of the nation-state itself, increasing literacy rates in the countryside through centralization of political power while co-opting and repressing the more radical social movements that made literacy a priority in the first place.

The CIA at one point even backed the Ba’ath Party as part of an anticommunist push. Given that the Ba’ath Party has historically found itself in conflict with both communists and feudal landowners, and the United States supported Ba’athists against communists, it would be safe to assume the any movement the US backs against the Ba’athists would be more akin to feudal landowners, with all of the political and economic baggage that class carries.

In other words, this devolution of Syria is necessarily an objective as well as subjective, economic as well as social, material as well as ideological phenomenon. In turn, the lack of working-class participation in the state as it mediated social change through the management of capital ensured the solidification of bourgeois regimes under the Arab socialist project. Nonetheless, the military incursions of the West have historically decreased, rather than increased, working-class participation in the state.

Class
The social base for the armed insurgency in Syria arose out of a meeting point between revanchist resentment harnessed by the old bourgeoisie in the aftermath of populist land reform; the increased loss of class position for the old bourgeoisie against the creation of a financial elite; and the emergence of a poor, mostly Sunni, rural migrant class from the breakdown of the government’s social pact with the countryside.

According to Volker Perthes, “the roots of Syria’s old bourgeoisie can be traced back to the ‘landowning bureaucratic class’ of the late Ottoman period, those influential families of local notables and Turkish officials that owned estates, and were active in commerce and government and in the religious establishment.”

Later, “the land reform law of the United Arab Republic (uniting Syria and Egypt) struck the first blow against the old bourgeoisie, limiting its property and influence in the countryside. When the Baath took power in a 1963 coup, the new rulers, whose origins were mainly middle-class, pushed the old (socially conservative and religious) bourgeoisie out of government.”

As Bassam Haddad adds, the Syrian state under Hafez al-Assad reached out to select businessmen as a way of making inroads with old Sunni elites, a tactic that “bore political fruit in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the regime faced a revolt led by the Muslim Brothers. Asad had enacted a series of policies that harmed the interests of the Brothers’ cadre and constituents in the traditional suq (market) and other small traders and artisans.”

These alliances became doubly important as the Ba’athists implemented more policies that “caused especially profound resentment in the conservative Sunni quarters of Syrian cities” and escalated “tensions between the state and small business owners with Sunni Islamist leanings.”

This tension produced kernels of sectarianism before 2011. Quoting Haddad on changes in societal attitudes before the 1970s:

Big business, notably merchants and religious groups, was most affected [by early Ba’ath policies]. Antirural and anti-Alawi attitudes and jokes proliferated in the private popular culture of the cities, signaling the beginning of a shift in the perception of the nature of the conflict — especially from the perspective of hardliners within and outside the regime — from a class-oriented to a socio-communal conflict.

Accompanying the state-assisted creation of a new bourgeoisie, a budding business elite in Damascus and Aleppo that was dependent on the influx of international capital into nascent markets, was a breakdown of the government’s traditional pact with the countryside.

As the Syrian Center for Policy Research’s important paper “Socioeconomic Roots and Impact of the Syrian Crisis” states, “Within Syria, poverty was more concentrated in the Eastern and Northern regions, and especially in the rural areas.” The text goes on to say that reduction in arable land brought on by drought, which roughly occurred between 2006 and 2010, was a major contributor to this poverty .

Post-2011 sanctions only made matters worse for Syrian workers:

The sanctions led to a shortage in diesel and fuel gas for home use, and to surge the prices of oil derivatives by about 200 percent. Using input/output model to simulate the impact of the oil derivatives prices increase due to sanctions, the report estimated a reduction in the real GDP by 6 percent, a reduction in the private consumptions by 10.7 percent, and an increase the CPI by the same percentage. Prices increase harmed the real expenditure of the households unequally; since the negative impact on the poorest was higher than the richest . . . This increase in prices affected mainly the basic goods which formed a major part of the vulnerable and poor households’ consumptions weakening their food securities and standard of livings.

The countries that have participated in the sanctions against Syria include the US, whose first sanctions were inflicted in 2003, the European Union, Australia, Canada, and most of the Arab League. In other words, Syria has been starved by the very international community that Danny Postel calls on to save it from starvation by military force.

On account of the harsh economic realities faced by Syrians, protests broke out in 2011, primarily among the rural poor and recent migrants from rural areas to cities in the south of the country. But the protests faced a problem that never came close to any resolution: they lacked a vision and, therefore, any revolutionary agent.

Haddad, highly critical of the Syrian government, pointed this difficult reality out when he wrote an “idiot’s guide” to opposing both Assad and military intervention: “First, I must admit that the tenor of the position elaborated in [my argument] lacks a clear agency (e.g., an institution, party or movement) that might convert [the uprising] to a real and actionable path.”

The consequences of this omission has been that the imperialist forces long setting on Syria — as put by Haddad in the same article, those forces that saw “taking out Syria . . . would weaken Hizballah and isolate Iran, the big prize” — have succeeded in achieving some rather horrifying goals.

Religion

The fact that the influence of the Sunni ‘ulama has increased in Syria since the revolt of the 1980s — and it has — is not as important as the fact that the influence of Salafi and Gulf-backed rhetoric has specifically increased.

Important members of the Syrian clerical class have long held relationships with the state of Saudi Arabia, although the ‘ulama of the early twentieth century depended primarily on Syria-based private capital derived from the merchant class to fund their activities.

When the Ba’ath Party first came to power in 1963, it generated the resentment of both the merchants and the clerical classes. It was simultaneously adverse to the profits of the industrial class, which it frustrated with its nationalizations, and to the merchant-linked Sunni clerical class, which it frustrated with its steadfast secularism.

For instance, in her account of Syria-Saudi relations, Sunayama notes that the Ba’ath Party’s earliest reforms resulted in a “Syrian community in Saudi Arabia who had immigrated in thousands since the 1960s.”

These immigrants “consisted mainly of traditional landowners and entrepreneurs” who “suffered material losses” due to Ba’ath nationalization as well as political repression for their affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. These exile Syrians funded religious opposition movements in Syria through “private donations.”

One consequence of the Ba’athists’ initial refusal to incorporate preachers into its political processes was that any institutionalization of religious activity happened outside the direct control of the state.

The Ba’ath Party felt it necessary to reverse these trends later on, to incorporate a preacher class within its mainstream institutions after the late 1970s and early 1980s, after an armed uprising against the state occurred. The forces that orchestrated this uprising represented the vanguard of the right-wing attitudes, turning class tensions into sociocultural ones, operating within Syria.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood traditionally stood as the most politically organized expression of these attitudes, but it was always but one expression, that is, one aspect of a larger political current. The activities of the Brotherhood have often overlapped with those of other conservative religious currents.

For example, Issam al-Attar, the leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood from 1961 to 1980, took up an expressly Salafi line of thought, which has proved highly influential in the current armed Syrian opposition ranks.

These currents are by no means interchangeable, although they have historically coordinated in Syria in anti-government campaigns.

During the period of turmoil from 1979 to 1982, the group through which ‘ulema and “lay Islamists” united, according to Thomas Pierret’s Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution, was called the Islamic Front in Syria. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was part of this outfit, which was established in Saudi Arabia.

Eventually the Muslim Brotherhood engaged in violent confrontation with the Syrian state after events spiraled into open warfare, but the organization that headed most military operations was called the Fighting Vanguard, funded by supporters of the fundamentalist Marwan Hadid. Its first attack was carried out in June 1979, when it massacred eighty-three Alawis at Aleppo Artillery School.

These moments demonstrate that violence from the opposition in Syria did not begin in 2011. In fact, Hadid — after whom a rebel brigade that attacked Lebanon with rockets during the current strife was named — embraced selective assassination of state officials as a tactic as far back as the 1970s. This tactic reappeared in 2011. Likewise, leaders such as Adnan Sa’ad al-Din and Said Hawwa called for armed jihad against the government as early as the 1960s.

After the fighting in the early 1980s, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood increased efforts towards diplomatic relations with the state. With the outbreak of protests in 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood entered into more direct dialogue with the Western press, as its exiles played a substantial role in the SNC, formed in Turkey, along with liberals with an opportunist attitude towards the Muslim Brotherhood.

While the Muslim Brotherhood was slowly modifying its own role in Syrian politics, the influence of the Salafis within both Syria and the larger the Middle East quietly increased.

The growing capitalist economic base of Syria contributed to the creation of an internally displaced  Sunni population that was in some quarters receptive to a Salafi ideology as a reaction to what Haddad describes as Syria’s “socialist-nationalist superstructure.”

This reactionary ideology, which claims itself “true Islam,” achieves stark expression whenever ISIS fighters burn Palestinian flags for the supposedly “un-Islamic” nature of Palestinian nationalism.

This ideology was distributed by, in the words of Pierret, “the spread of Egyptian Salafi journals… Wahhabi proselytizing through Syrian-Saudi trade networks . . .” As Pierret writes: “Now more than after, it has become impossible to seal [Syria] against the vehicles of Salafi conceptions — in particular, migrants returning from the Gulf and mass media such as the Internet and satellite channels.”

And so the available evidence suggests that as the conservative Muslim Brotherhood delved further into traditional politics, more reactionary elements were making gains on the ground, or, in the words of Pierret, “at the grassroots level.”

Some of those gains were militaristic in nature. When armed operations against the Syrian state finally caught the attention of Western media in 2011, they were carried out under a catchall title of “Free Syrian Army.”

The politics of those early brigades remain murky. As far as the FSA was an actual organized force, as the armed wing of the SNC, it failed to proclaim much of a political program beyond its promise to kill Bashar al-Assad in a manner reminiscent of the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya (along with its calls for foreign assistance, even as it operated within Southern Turkey).

Now it barely exists — and is more of an idea or umbrella heading than an actual organization. Among those groups that have replaced it in influence is the Nusra Front, formed in January 2012, which began as a branch of the FSA.

The bigotries of this social base gained more teeth from outside forces seeking to capitalize on internal divisions within the country. The reason why imperialists are willing to supply these forces is clear. As Amal Saad-Ghorayeb writes in Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion, they “view their local regimes as their immediate enemy,” in contrast to, say, Hezbollah, which “perceives Israel as the much greater threat.”

Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States worked in conjunction to flood the country with guns, widen the specter of war, and halt the development of a country governed by an unreliable regime.

If it is true that Syria became a conduit for international finance and contained for a time a growing capitalist economic base, the question arises of what exactly makes it “unreliable” to imperialist powers . The answer lies, naturally, at both the levels of economics and politics.

In 2011, the encroachment of international finance capital into Syria was not complete. Haddad writes that “the lack of trust between the regime and the business community, based on deep-seated historical antagonisms,” prevented the kind of total union between the two interests that had come together in Middle East states such as Egypt.

This antagonism would allow for the Syrian government to honor at least some of its populist promises in ways that were not true of other Arab states. Among those promises is the cause of Arab resistance to Zionism and imperialism. For this reason Syria funded Hezbollah, a Lebanese guerilla army that proved in 2006 to be Israel’s most formidable military enemy in history.

The whole of these outside countries’ investment in the destruction of Syria can quite plainly be called imperialism. The Syria Dilemma, with all of its invocations of intervention, never approximates an analysis of imperialism.

If intervention is cautioned against, it is only because it will not succeed in stopping the bloodshed or because the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan ended up disastrous. Intervention is opposed on pragmatic or cost-benefit grounds. The right of the United States to determine the affairs of others is never questioned.

What Can Be Done?

Here is the latest news, as of this writing. Israel bombs Syria in repeated attempts to disrupt the organizational capacity of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, which finds itself engaged in struggle against jihadists of the Syrian opposition.

Reports have emerged that Israel is coordinating with rebels and even operating within and around occupied Golan Heights under a tacit pact with al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra in an anti-Hezbollah push. In fact, the night the United States began bombing Syria, ostensibly to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, Israel downed a Syrian fighter jet using US-supplied Patriot missiles.

Israel’s activities in Syria have reignited tensions around an often neglected aspect of Israeli occupation — its military rule in southeastern Syria. In January 2015, Israel assassinated Hezbollah and Iranian commanders in Syria, rupturing the 1974 Agreement on Disengagement signed between Israel and Syria.

Hezbollah has responded by trying to formulate a military resistance against Israel in southern Syria. Israel, grounded as it is in settler-colonialism, will look to extending its grip in the Golan Heights and possibly even to expanding — perhaps with the protection of the Druze community in Golan from its own rebel proxies as a justification.

In the northern end of the country, Turkey withheld full cooperation with the US during the latter’s bombing of ISIS approaching Syrian Kurdistan in February 2015. The US, in addition to dropping bombs, dropped aid finding its way both into the hands of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the fighting unit of the PYD, as well as ISIS.

Since that period, evidence has mounted of Turkey allowing ISIS fighters to flow into Syria while it cracks down on cross-border exchanges of men and supplies between Kurdish fighters and their non-Kurdish leftist comrades. This policy is in line with Erdogan’s expressed fears of what he calls the Kurdish “terrorists” of the YPG as it makes gains on ISIS in the border town of Tal Abyad.

Turkey’s policy of supporting armed revanchists in the Syrian war is long-standing: last year, documents revealed that Turkey assisted al-Qaeda organizations in their takeover of the predominantly Armenian town of Kessab.

This direct intervention, from the bombs to the aid, should be understood as a strategy for war that is, in effect, against Syrian society as a whole, though it is in aim a war against the Syrian Arab Republic.

These intentions continue to be made clear, even as the US bombs enemies of the Syrian state, for the US’s plan for bombing those enemies involves the training of more “anti-Assad” rebels in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Not to mention, the US continues to make noise about the possibility of a no-fly zone in Northern Syria, which would require a defeat of Syrian air defense systems.

The implementation of such a plan would require compromise between the US and Turkey on the Kurdish question. Both parties will push to sever Kurdish leadership in Syria from the leftist Kurdish PKK in Turkey. If the PYD’s radicalism is sufficiently hollowed out, it is not at all outside the realm of possibility that NATO-aligned powers use the Kurdish movement to establish a military and economic base in Northern Syria, as they did in Iraq.

Alternatively, if the Syrian Army is destroyed, Rojava will be easily overrun by armed Salafi movements — a scenario the US could use to try to justify a military protectorate in Syria. Every such imperial contingency plan should be opposed.

With these developments in mind, it becomes clear that the war in Syria exists on two levels that interact with each other. There is a civil war based on divides between Syrians professing differing ideas for the future of the country. Then there is the imperial war on Syria designed to bring local social struggle to a screeching halt, and without the war on Syria, the civil war would never have got going.

The class basis for the armed insurgency has existed for a while now; the critical difference since 2011 has been the investments of empire.

To call these events “revolutionary,” rather than a set of depressing steps backward, is to insult the intelligence and integrity of anyone who prefers that word mean something. And it prevents an understanding of what should be done — the question of what to do is actually a question of what not to do, or what to cease doing. For local struggle of any kind to be restored, the US and its allies must stop what they have been doing proxy-style — arming reserve forces in the region — since at least 2011.

If the supplies to anti-government fighters can be cut off in Syria, negotiations for a political solution will be more meaningful. Leftists could actually find themselves in a position to agitate for the reforms demanded in 2011: more representation in government, deep political reform and civil rights, a negotiated settlement with the Syrian state for Kurdish political autonomy that maintains the current movement’s secularism and socialist economic program, and a renewed development pact between the state and the countryside that will, hopefully, serve to cut off support for reactionary movements.

In the United States, our main focus must be struggling against the intervention of our own government, drawing links between its actions in Syria and its broader agenda elsewhere.

Of course, such a solution cannot begin to recompense the heart-shattering extent of pain and loss Syria has experienced. The fact that such a solution is so devastatingly belated only adds to its urgency.

Towards these ends, the Western left shall be stuck with the tedious task of untangling the logic of amnesiac little books and Beltway policy papers discussing the carve-up of distant nations as if it were a trivial matter.

And the task does not end there. The Syria dilemma provides a lesson to the Western left. In a society run on marketing, the Left’s own words, such as “revolution,” can easily be gutted of all content, so all that remains is a rush, a haze, a feeling. Images of triumphant demonstrators may mingle seamlessly with images of corpses, the spectacle flitting past like a ticker tape, billed in its totality as the news from Over There.

If those dubbing this spectacle a “revolution” happen to be capitalists, think twice — consider that these events might look much differently after the smoke clears. Think three times if the alleged culprit is a nominal enemy of the United States.

The obligation goes well beyond opposing intervention in name; it requires extreme skepticism at all times of official narratives to be able to unearth intervention as it actually and already exists. In other words, act as an actual anti-imperialist.

Emails and financial documents released by the University of Kansas on Thursday reveal earmarked funding from Koch Industries to develop research used to lobby against the state renewable energy standard.

On November 12, 2013, Art Hall, the director of the university’s Center for Applied Economics, emailed Koch Industries’ Laura Hands to discuss a grant from a Koch-controlled foundation to fund research on the Renewable Portfolio Standard.

Hall is the former chief economist for Koch Companies Public Sector, the lobbying subsidiary of Koch Industries, the largest privately owned company in America with a significant stake in oil refining, pipelines, gas production and coal. Hands is the current community affairs director at Koch Companies Public Sector.

The Koch money was part of an ongoing project Hall described as an effort to develop “intellectual products” to be used “as a tool in economic policy debates.” Hall’s center also provides special classes to teach about the virtues of capitalism. Koch-controlled foundations approved $40,000 for work that included the renewable energy standard, as well as at least $250,000 to the center in 2008 and $100,000 to the center in 2009.

Following his grant request, Hall testified before the Kansas legislature in 2014 in favor of repealing the state renewable energy portfolio, which calls for major utility companies to use an increasing ratio of renewable energy such as wind and solar.

The emails and financial documents were released in response to a Kansas Open Records Act request filed by KU student Schuyler Kraus, the president of Students for a Sustainable Future.

Hall also helped craft unprecedented tax cuts signed into law by Gov. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and backed by Koch’s local political network. The tax cuts have been viewed roundly as a historic flop, resulting in a downgrade of the state bond rating and drastic education cuts that forced public schools to close early this year. Critics argue that the tax cut and ensuing budget chaos may have hurt employment as bordering states such as Missouri are quickly outpacing Kansas on job growth.

President Barack Obama recently criticized Koch Industries owners Charles and David Koch, scolding the billionaires for “pushing for new laws to roll back renewable energy standards.” In response, Charles Koch said he is opposed to “crony capitalism” in all forms.

Though the Koch Industries chief executive has said that he opposes corporate subsidies or mandates of any kind, the Koch political network has carefully singled out renewable energy while working to preserve government support for fossil fuels. Groups founded and funded by the Koch political network regard repealing oil and gas subsidies as a “tax hike” while deriding renewable energy subsidies as “a textbook case of corporate welfare.” Moreover, Koch’s lobbying campaign to distort climate science and prevent government action on greenhouse gas emissions transfers costs from the company, a major polluter, to the public.

The post Emails Show Koch Industries Backed Effort to Undermine Renewable Energy in Kansas appeared first on The Intercept.

US - IN - Notre Dame, A post doctoral associate position is available in the Jones Lab at the University of Notre Dame. This position is part of a recently funded NSF project that will model long-term, regional lake carbo

Mottainai combines elements of Buddhism and Shinto to create a nuanced approach to the environment and wasteful practices.

Environmental scientists from the local, national and international levels will convene at North Carolina State University to discuss climate change...

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.

Freddie Gray became a household name when he was killed by police officers earlier this year.

But before his death, and before Baltimore exploded into protests and riots, Freddie Gray was another kind of victim.

As a child, Gray was poisoned by the lead paint in his Baltimore home. According to a 2008 lawsuit filed by his family, the poisoning led to a number of educational and medical problems for Gray, which may have contributed to his troubles with police.

Eventually, after a lead paint lawsuit, Gray was awarded a structured settlement. But not long after, a company named Access Funding reached out to him, encouraging him to sell portions of his structured settlement—which was designed to pay him over the course of many years—for a lump sum.

Predatory companies offer to buy structured settlements from lead poisoning victims, but the victims rarely understand that the windfall is for pennies on the dollar. Gray gave in, and he was just one of hundreds who've done the same.

Terrence McCoy of the Washington Post looks at Gray's case, and many others, in his new in-depth investigative piece: "How Companies Make Millions Off Lead-Poisoned, Poor Blacks."

(updated below)

The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens). As George Will noted last week, “Trump’s roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent.” It would require a massive expansion of the most tyrannical police state powers far beyond their already immense post-9/11 explosion. And that’s to say nothing of the incomparably ugly sentiments that Trump’s advocacy of this plan, far before its implementation, is predictably unleashing.

Jorge Ramos, the influential anchor of Univision and an American immigrant from Mexico, has been denouncing Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Yesterday at a Trump press conference in Iowa, Ramos stood and questioned Trump on his immigration views. Trump at first ignored him, then scolded him for speaking without being called on and repeatedly ordered him to “sit down,” then told him: “Go back to Univision.” When Ramos refused to sit down and shut up as ordered, a Trump bodyguard physically removed him from the room. After the press conference concluded, Ramos returned and again questioned Trump about immigration, with the two mostly talking over each other as Ramos asked Trump about the fundamental flaws in his policy. Afterward, Ramos said: “This is personal. … He’s talking about our parents, our friends, our kids and our babies.”

One might think that in a conflict between a journalist removed from a press conference for asking questions and the politician who had him removed, journalists would side with their fellow journalist. Some are. But many American journalists have seized on the incident to denounce Ramos for the crime of having opinions and even suggesting that he’s not really acting as a journalist at all.

Politico’s political reporter Marc Caputo unleashed a Twitter rant this morning against Ramos. “This is bias: taking the news personally, explicitly advocating an agenda,” he began. Then: “Trump can and should be pressed on this. Reporters can do this without being activists” and “some reporters still try to approach their stories fairly & decently. & doing so does not prevent good reporting.” Not only did Ramos not do journalism, Caputo argued, but he actually ruins journalism: “My issue is his reporting is imbued with take-it-personally bias. . . .  we fend off phony bias allegations & Ramos only helps to wrongly justify them. . . .One can ask and report without the bias. I’ve done it for years & will continue 2 do so.”

A Washington Post article about the incident actually equated the two figures, beginning with the headline: “Jorge Ramos is a conflict junkie, just like his latest target: Donald Trump.” The article twice suggested that Ramos’ behavior was something other than journalism, claiming that his advocacy of immigration reform “blurred the line between journalist and activist” and that “by owning the issue of immigration, Ramos has also blurred the line between journalist and activist.” That Ramos was acting more as an “activist” than a “journalist” was a commonly expressed criticism among media elites this morning.

Here we find, yet again, the enforcement of unwritten, very recent, distinctively corporatized rules of supposed “neutrality” and faux objectivity which all Real Journalists must obey, upon pain of being expelled from the profession. A Good Journalist must pretend they have no opinions, feign utter indifference to the outcome of political debates, never take any sides, be utterly devoid of any human connection to or passion for the issues they cover, and most of all, have no role to play whatsoever in opposing even the most extreme injustices.

Thus: you do not call torture “torture” if the U.S. government falsely denies that it is; you do not say that the chronic shooting of unarmed black citizens by the police is a major problem since not everyone agrees that it is; and you do not object when a major presidential candidate stokes dangerous nativist resentments while demanding mass deportation of millions of people. These are the strictures that have utterly neutered American journalism, drained it of its vitality and core purpose, and ensured that it does little other than serve those who wield the greatest power and have the highest interest in preserving the status quo.

What is more noble for a journalist to do: confront a dangerous, powerful billionaire-demagogue spouting hatemongering nonsense about mass deportation, or sit by quietly and pretend to have no opinions on any of it and that “both sides” are equally deserving of respect and have equal claims to validity? As Ramos put it simply, in what should not even need to be said: “I’m a reporter. My job is to ask questions. What’s ‘totally out of line’ is to eject a reporter from a press conference for asking questions.”

Indeed, some of the most important and valuable moments in American journalism have come from the nation’s most influential journalists rejecting this cowardly demand that they take no position, from Edward R. Murrow’s brave 1954 denunciation of McCarthyism to Walter Cronkite’s 1968 refusal to treat the U.S. government’s lies about the Vietnam War as anything other than what they were. Does anyone doubt that today’s neutrality-über-alles journalists would denounce them as “activists” for inappropriately “taking a side”?

As Jack Shafer documented two years ago, crusading and “activist” journalism is centuries old and has a very noble heritage. The notion that journalists must be beacons of opinion-free, passion-devoid, staid, impotent neutrality is an extremely new one, the byproduct of the increasing corporatization of American journalism. That’s not hard to understand: One of the supreme values of large corporations is fear of offending anyone, particularly those in power, since that’s bad for business. The way that conflict-avoiding value is infused into the media outlets that these corporations own is to inculcate their journalists that their primary duty is to avoid offending anyone, especially those who wield power, which above all means never taking a clear position about anything, instead just serving as a mindless, uncritical vessel for “both sides,” what NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen has dubbed “the view from nowhere.” Whatever else that is, it is most certainly not a universal or long-standing principle of how journalism should be conducted.

The worst aspect of these journalists’ demands for “neutrality” is the conceit that they are actually neutral, that they are themselves not activists. To be lectured about the need for journalistic neutrality by Politico of all places — the ultimate and most loyal servant of the D.C. political and corporate class — by itself illustrates what a rotten sham this claim is. I set out my argument about this at length in my 2013 exchange with Bill Keller and won’t repeat it all here; suffice to say, all journalism is deeply subjective and serves some group’s interests. All journalists constantly express opinions and present the world in accordance with their deeply subjective biases — and thus constantly serve one agenda or another — whether they honestly admit doing so or dishonestly pretend they don’t.

Ultimately, demands for “neutrality” and “objectivity” are little more than rules designed to shield those with the greatest power from meaningful challenge. As BuzzFeed’s Adam Serwer insightfully put it this morning, “‘Objective’ reporters were openly mocking Trump not that long ago, but Ramos has not reacted to Trump’s poll numbers with appropriate deference . . . . Just a reminder that what is considered objective reporting is intimately tied to power or the perception of power.” Expressing opinions that are in accord with, and which serve the interests of, those who wield the greatest political and economic power is always acceptable for the journalists who most tightly embrace the pretense of “neutrality”; it’s only when an opinion constitutes dissent or when it’s expressed with too little reverence for the most powerful does it cross the line into “activism” and “bias.”

(Ramos’ supposed sin of being what the Post called a “conflict junkie” — something that sounds to be nothing more than a derogatory way of characterizing “adversary journalism” — is even more ridiculous. Please spare me the tripe about how Ramos’ real sin was one of rudeness, that he failed to wait for explicit permission from the Trumpian Strongman to speak. Aside from the absurdity of viewing Victorian-era etiquette as some sort of journalistic virtue, Trump’s vindictive war with Univision made it unlikely he’d call on Ramos, and journalists don’t always need to be “polite” to do their jobs.

Beyond that, whether a reporter must be deferential to a politician is one of those questions on which people shamelessly switch sides based on which politician is being treated rudely at the moment, as the past liberal protests over the “rudeness” displayed to Obama by conservative journalists demonstrate. That Ramos is not One of Them — Joe Scarborough appeared not even to know who Ramos is and suggested he was just seeking “15 minutes of fame,” despite Ramos’ having far greater influence and fame than Scarborough could dream of having — clearly fueled the journalistic resentment that Ramos’ behavior was out of line).

What Ramos did here was pure journalism in its classic and most noble expression: He aggressively confronted a politician wielding a significant amount of power over some pretty horrible things that the politician is doing and saying. As usual when someone commits a real act of journalism aimed at the most powerful in the U.S., those leading the charge against him are other journalists, who so tellingly regard actual journalism as a gauche and irreverent crime against those who wield the greatest power and thus merit the greatest deference.

UPDATE: Caputo, while noting that he disagrees with many of the views in this article, objects to one phrase in particular and sets forth his objection here. I quoted and/or linked to all of his referenced statements and am happy to allow readers to decide if that one phrase was accurate. I am quite convinced it was and stand by it.

The post Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

Democracy Now! 2015-08-25 Tuesday

• Headlines for August 25, 2015
• "Casino Capitalism": Economist Michael Hudson on What's Behind the Stock Market's Rollercoaster Ride
• As Peace Talks Collapse in South Sudan, Film Shows "Pathology of Colonialism" Tearing Apart Nation
• Hip-Hop Legend Boots Riley on #BlackLivesMatter & How His Cousin Was Acquitted in Cop Shooting

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Democracy Now! 2015-08-26 Wednesday

• Headlines for August 26, 2015
• Two Separate Americas: David Simon's New Mini-Series Looks at "Hypersegregation" in Public Housing
• David Simon on Katrina Anniversary: New Orleans "May Be the Greatest Gift We Have to Offer"
• The Drug War Has to End: David Simon on "The Wire" & Over-Policing of the Poor

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Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most celebrated and prolific filmmakers in cinema. He directed more than 50 films in six decades, mastered the art of...

As new Greek elections are on the horizon, what is the shape of European democratic reform and the former Finance Minister's role in it?

After shutting down a Bernie Sanders speech at a Seattle rally for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, Black Lives Matter activist Marissa Johnson declared to MSNBC’s Tamron Hall that she was motivated by a desire to hold liberal candidates accountable.

This is more than understandable. Despite boosting progressives’ expectations, President Obama has continued to prosecute a shadowy global “war on terror,” undermined public education by promoting charter schools, and reneged on promises to organized labor for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and to the American public for a truly universal health care system.

All this has certainly made clear the importance of holding putative liberals to their rhetoric, even for someone as young as Johnson, whose progressive political awakening only dates back to Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 at the hands of sociopathic vigilante George Zimmerman.

On some level, then, Johnson’s circumspection about Sanders and Gov. Martin O’Malley (no word on Clinton) could be considered encouraging, even if her decision to hijack the Sanders rally falls somewhere between arrogant (she represents no constituency to speak of) and politically misguided — many black lives, including both of my grandmothers’, have benefited greatly from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for decades.

If we could chalk up Johnson’s actions in Seattle to youthful hubris, this incident could be easily dismissed. However, as the interview on MSNBC continued, Johnson laid out a problematic perspective that has spread through the universe of activists, political operatives, and pundits plugged into Black Lives Matter.

Johnson cast Sanders’s perspective as that of “basically a class reductionist.” She went on to say, “[Sanders] never really had a strong analysis that there is racism and white supremacy that is separate than the economic things that everyone experiences.”

The horizontal organization of Black Lives Matter ensures a diversity of perspectives among participants and even branches. Nevertheless, the now-commonplace claim at the heart of the recent Black Lives Matter protests against Sanders is that white liberals have long reduced racism to class inequality in order to deflect attention from racial disparities.

This is not just wrong, but the formulation — which ultimately treats race as unchanging and permanent rather than a product of specific historical and political economic relations — undermines both the cause of racial equality in general and pursuit of equitable treatment in the criminal justice system in particular.

Indeed, Sanders is more likely to draw links between economic inequality generally and racial disparities in employment, housing, wealth and incarceration than President Carter, the Clintons, or even President Obama.

However, liberals have actually tended to divorce racial disparities from economic inequality for longer than Marissa Johnson, the founders of Black Lives Matter, or even I have been alive. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, for example, traced the ultimate source of the high rates of black poverty and unemployment (which were roughly twice that of whites’) to what some today would call systemic racism.

According to Moynihan, however, “the racist virus that . . . afflicts all of us” set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty and dependence that all but ensured that neither economic opportunity nor anti-discrimination policies alone would be able to close the income and employment gap between blacks and whites.

By the late 1980s, Moynihan’s dystopian vision — which presumed that African-American poverty had taken on a life of its own, making it nearly impervious to economic intervention — had become liberal orthodoxy.

While centrist liberals like Presidents Clinton and Obama have encouraged conversations about race and have been willing to concede that racism can undercut the life chances of blacks and Latinos, they are more likely to trace poverty and inequality to the habits, attitudes, and culture of the poor than to the disastrous effects of labor or trade policies or even the health of a particular sector of the economy.

Sanders is thus more likely to draw attention to the linkages between racism and class exploitation than the sitting Democratic president or other presidential contenders, not because he is a liberal — like centrist liberals Carter, the Clintons, or Obama — but because he is, by today’s narrow standards, a leftist.

Situating Sanders’s leftism in the proper historical frame is key to understanding the myopia that shapes some Black Lives Matter activists’ criticism of him. The Sanders program — Medicare for all, a living wage, the right to collective bargaining, fair trade policies, free public higher education, etc. — sounds a lot less like the dictatorship of the proletariat than New Deal labor-liberalism.

And it’s New Deal–era black politics specifically — and what followed — that demonstrates the fundamental problem with the tendency of some activists, like Johnson, to treat race as “its own thing,” distinct from class inequality.

Many contemporary activists, broadly defined, are quick to dismiss as racist deflection any attempts to view racial disparities through the lens of class inequality, but in the 1930s and 1940s mainstream African-American civil rights leaders — among them Lester Granger of the National Urban League, Walter White of the NAACP, John P. Davis of the National Negro Congress, and of course A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) — frequently argued that precisely because most blacks were working class, racial equality could only be achieved through a combination of anti-discrimination policies and social-democratic economic policies.

But by the 1950s, the anticommunism of the Cold War had a chilling effect on class-oriented civil rights politics, setting the stage for analyses of racism that divorced prejudice from economic exploitation — the fundamental reason for slavery and Jim Crow. Indeed, this was the era in which racism was recast as a psychological affliction rather than a product of political economy.

As McCarthyism receded by the end of the 1950s, however, mainstream black civil rights leaders once again identified economic opportunity for all — decent-paying jobs and social-democratic policies — as essential to racial equality.

The black organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (it is telling that “Jobs and Freedom” are no longer part of collective reflections of the march), Randolph and Bayard Rustin — both of them socialists — were very clear about this.

Randolph — who more than twenty years earlier used the threat of a march on the nation’s capital to wrest the Fair Employment Practices Committee, a workplace anti-discrimination board, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt — asserted his continued support for a Fair Employment Practices Act, or what would eventually be known as affirmative action.

Still, even as Randolph was motivated by disparities in unemployment and income, he stated explicitly that anti-discrimination measures alone would do little to redress black poverty and unemployment which, he said, had less to do with racism or discrimination (which were certainly alive and thriving in 1963) than automation, mechanization, and deindustrialization.

One has to wonder if those who think Sanders got what was coming to him at Netroots Nation and in Seattle would today cast Randolph (Negro American Labor Council), along with Rustin, Whitney Young (National Urban League), Roy Wilkins (NAACP), John Lewis (SNCC), James Farmer (CORE), and Martin Luther King Jr (SCLC) as vulgar class reductionists.

This is why the March on Washington demands included not just anti-discrimination measures, but a full-employment economy, jobs programs, and a minimum-wage increase. Randolph and Rustin would go on to ally with economist Leon Keyserling to draft the 1966 Freedom Budget For All, which laid out a plan for social-democratic policies addressing black poverty by confronting its ultimate source — the erosion of well-paying jobs for low-skilled workers that had once served as the pathway to the middle class for white people.

To be sure, black Americans did not share in the fruits of those jobs on an equal basis with whites between 1940 and 1953, and racism had a lot to do with that. But it should be noted that this period witnessed the biggest expansion in economic growth — meaning the racial income and employment gap closed substantially — that African Americans had ever seen.

Regardless, these well-paying jobs for low-skilled workers were not going away after 1954 because of racism; they were disappearing, as Randolph et al, argued, because of deindustrialization.

Even during the debates over affirmative action in the early 1960s, mainstream black leaders were clear that anti-discrimination measures alone were insufficient.

Most had initially supported the anti-discrimination bill put up by Sen. Hubert Humphrey (S-1937), which was wedded to a comprehensive jobs program. That, however, was deemed too ambitious and swept aside in favor of what we got: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

From Richard Nixon forward, the view that racism is inextricably linked to economic exploitation began a steady slide into oblivion, both because of the conservative turn in American politics generally and the limits of Black Power ideology that, ironically, meshed with the conservative turn.

The growing acceptance of the view that racism was distinct from economic inequality and capitalist exploitation set the stage for underclass ideology and ultimately the paradox of the Clinton presidency. Clinton, though popular with black voters, did quite a bit to undermine the material wellbeing of black Americans.

NAFTA (outside of construction, blacks are overrepresented among trade unionists, and trade unionists are overrepresented within the black middle class), the Omnibus Crime Act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, and HOPE VI (the federal housing initiative that demolished public housing for the poor in favor of private, upscale “mixed income” developments, which ultimately displaced poor residents to the four winds) all had a disproportionately negative impact on blacks because they targeted poor and working-class people.

But despite the fact that these policies likely hurt African Americans more than any other racial demographic, Bill Clinton was and remains very popular with black people because he went to African-American churches and had black friends. This framework only works if one sees racism and economic marginality as two separate things — the worldview endorsed by Marissa Johnson and a host of liberal pundits, from Salon to MSNBC.

For that matter, President Obama’s “Race to the Top” and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s war on the Chicago Teachers Union have had a disproportionately negative impact on the African-American middle class because teachers are a vital part of the black middle class. And since the same can be said of public-sector employees generally, any official who calls for cuts to the public sector like Gov. Scott Walker is undercutting the black middle and working classes.

Sanders is therefore no more a class reductionist than the black leaders of the modern civil rights movement. And frankly, he and others who call for viewing racial disparities through the lens of neoliberal class warfare are often less guilty of deflection than those who suggest that racism and class exploitation occupy distinct terrain.

In separating the problem of police brutality from political economy, many activists — like, ironically, the liberal as opposed to left approach to racial inequality — not only undercut the opportunity for broader political alliances and perhaps some meaningful victories, but sidestep the same crucial point about police brutality that both liberals and conservatives look past.

Shortly after Michael Brown’s murder at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson, conservative radio talk show personality Michael Medved questioned the merits of the protests in Ferguson, MO by arguing that the majority of victims of police brutality are white, even if blacks are overrepresented. In Medved’s view, black whiners and guilty white liberals have exaggerated the pervasiveness of police misconduct, deflecting attention from the real problem African Americans face: so-called black-on-black crime.

While most people killed by police are indeed white, Medved’s claims proceeded from a narrow racialist framework that not only misrepresented the issues, but exhibited a similar disregard for political economy that some Black Lives Matter activists have displayed when discussing police brutality.

Specifically, there have been many publicized instances in which whites have been victims of police brutality or even egregious acts of prosecutorial misconduct (known as “railroading”). Of course, the white victims of blatant misconduct and abuse are disproportionately poor and working class.

Examples include: James Boyd, the unarmed white homeless man murdered by Albuquerque police last March; Ryan Keith Bolinger, the unarmed white high school graduate and state fair groundskeeper killed by police in Des Moines, IA this June; and Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin — the teenaged trailer park residents known as the West Memphis Three — who were convicted on bogus evidence in a set of horrific murders before finally being released from prison in 2011 after more than eighteen years.

While black victims of police brutality obviously run the class gamut, the reality is that African-American victims of police excess are likewise disproportionately poor and working class.

According to some Sanders critics, the Sandra Bland tragedy makes clear that race is not reducible to class. As Thegrio.com’s Joy Reid asserted on a July 21 appearance on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, “being gainfully employed . . . in Texas did not stop [Sandra Bland] from winding up dead.” Reid — like fellow guests Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson and former Ohio State Sen. and friend to the Clintons Nina Turner — questioned the relevance of O’Malley’s and Sanders’s focus on economic inequality to black Americans.

While there is no denying that a job did not insulate Bland from police misconduct, abuse of power, or even negligence on the part of corrections officers, it is worth considering here that the purpose of race in origin and its ongoing function today was and is to denote one’s socioeconomic status as well as one’s value as a laborer. From the start “negro” and eventually “colored” were essentially shorthand for highly exploitable laborers who, by the second third of the nineteenth century, were deemed to possess distinct, innate traits that made them uniquely suited to perform “bad jobs” — the most obvious example being slave labor.

Eventually, and this includes today, those alleged traits were also what made African Americans uniquely “qualified” for mass unemployment and incarceration. For people we might call racists, “black” and “African American” — despite changes in nomenclature — remain shorthand for “poor person” and/or “bad worker” today. Thus even in the mind of the average racist, race and class are inextricably linked.

One result of this reality is that irrespective of black people’s individual accomplishments — and this is one of the things that makes the Bland case seem especially tragic — African Americans are often treated by “less than enlightened” workers in the criminal justice system, prospective employers, supervisors, school administrators, etc. in much the same way that poor white people are: as morally disreputable, intellectually suspect, and potentially dangerous.

If one views the excesses and failures of the criminal justice system solely through the lens of race, then victims of police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct tend to be black or Latino. However, if one understands race and class are inextricably linked, then the victims of police brutality are not simply black or Latino (and Latinos outnumber blacks in federal prisons at this point) but they tend to belong to groups that lack political, economic, and social influence and power.

From that vantage point, the worldview expressed by Johnson and others misses the mark and falls into the same trap that, ironically, liberals have offered a stratum of credentialed black Americans for decades: opportunity within a market-driven political and economic framework that disparages demands for social and economic justice for all (including most black people) as socialist, communist, un-American, or even class-reductionist.

In principle the annual Burning Man festival sounds a bit like a socialist utopia: bring thousands of people to an empty desert to create an alternative society. Ban money and advertisements and make it a gift economy. Encourage members to bring the necessary ingredients of this new world with them, according to their ability.

Introduce “radical inclusion,” “radical self-expression,” and “decommodification” as tenets, and designate the alternative society as a free space, where sex and gender boundaries are fluid and meant to be transgressed.

These ideas — the essence of Burning Man — are certainly appealing.

Yet capitalists also unironically love Burning Man, and to anyone who has followed the recent history of Burning Man, the idea that it is at all anticapitalist seems absurd: last year, a venture capitalist billionaire threw a $16,500-per-head party at the festival, his camp a hyper-exclusive affair replete with wristbands and models flown in to keep the guests company.

Burning Man is earning a reputation as a “networking event” among Silicon Valley techies, and tech magazines now send reporters to cover it. CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Alphabet are foaming fans, along with conservative anti-tax icon Grover Norquist and many writers of the libertarian (and Koch-funded) Reason magazine. Tesla CEO Elon Musk even went so far as to claim that Burning Man “is Silicon Valley.”

Radical Self-Expression

The weeklong Burning Man festival takes place once a year over Labor Day weekend in a remote alkali flat in northwestern Nevada. Two hours north of Reno, the inhospitable Black Rock Desert seems a poor place to create a temporary sixty-thousand-person city — and yet that’s entirely the point. On the desert playa, an alien world is created and then dismantled within the span of a month. The festival culminates with the deliberate burning of a symbolic effigy, the titular “man,” a wooden sculpture around a hundred feet tall.

Burning Man grew from unpretentious origins: a group of artists and hippies came together to burn an effigy at Baker Beach in San Francisco, and in 1990 set out to have the same festival in a place where the cops wouldn’t hassle them about unlicensed pyrotechnics. The search led them to the Black Rock Desert.

Burning Man is very much a descendent of the counterculture San Francisco of yesteryear, and possesses the same sort of libertine, nudity-positive spirit. Some of the early organizers of the festival professed particular admiration for the Situationists, the group of French leftists whose manifestos and graffitied slogans like “Never Work” became icons of the May 1968 upsurge in France.

Though the Situationists were always a bit ideologically opaque, one of their core beliefs was that cities had become oppressive slabs of consumption and labor, and needed to be reimagined as places of play and revolt. Hence, much of their art involved cutting up and reassembling maps, and consuming intoxicants while wandering about in Paris.

You can feel traces of the Situationists when walking through Black Rock City, Burning Man’s ephemeral village. Though Black Rock City resembles a city in some sense, with a circular dirt street grid oriented around the “man” sculpture, in another sense it is completely surreal: people walk half-naked in furs and glitter, art cars shaped like ships or dragons pump house music as they purr down the street.

Like a real city, Burning Man has bars, restaurants, clubs, and theaters, but they are all brought by participants because everyone is required to “bring something”:

The people who attend Burning Man are no mere “attendees,” but rather active participants in every sense of the word: they create the city, the interaction, the art, the performance and ultimately the “experience.” Participation is at the very core of Burning Man.

Participation sounds egalitarian, but it leads to some interesting contradictions. The most elaborate camps and spectacles tend to be brought by the rich because they have the time, the money, or both, to do so. Wealthier attendees often pay laborers to build and plan their own massive (and often exclusive) camps. If you scan San Francisco’s Craigslist in the month of August, you’ll start to see ads for part-time service labor gigs to plump the metaphorical pillows of wealthy Burners.

The rich also hire sherpas to guide them around the festival and wait on them at the camp. Some burners derogatorily refer to these rich person camps as “turnkey camps.”

Silicon Valley’s adoration of Burning Man goes back a long way, and tech workers have always been fans of the festival. But it hasn’t always been the provenance of billionaires — in the early days, it was a free festival with a cluster of pitched tents, weird art, and explosives; but as the years went on, more exclusive, turnkey camps appeared and increased in step with the ticket price — which went from $35 in 1994 to $390 in 2015 (about sixteen times the rate of inflation).

Black Rock City has had its own FAA-licensed airport since 2000, and it’s been getting much busier. These days you can even get from San Carlos in Silicon Valley to the festival for $1500. In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg flew into Burning Man on a private helicopter, staying for just one day, to eat and serve artisanal grilled cheese sandwiches. From the New York Times:

“We used to have R.V.s and precooked meals,” said a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. (He asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize those relationships.) “Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning.” He added with a sense of amazement, “Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert!”

The growing presence of the elite in Burning Man is not just noticed by outsiders — long-time attendees grumble that Burning Man has become “gentrified.” Commenting on the New York Times piece, burners express dismay at attendees who do no work. “Paying people to come and take care of you and build for you . . . and clean up after you . . . those people missed the point.”

Many Burners seethed after reading one woman’s first-person account of how she was exploited while working at the $17,000-per-head camp of venture capitalist Jim Tananbaum. In her account, she documented the many ways in which Tananbaum violated the principles of the festival, maintaining “VIP status” by making events and art cars private and flipping out on one of his hired artists.

Tananbaum’s workers were paid a flat $180 a day with no overtime, but the anonymous whistleblower attests that she and others worked fifteen- to twenty-hour days during the festival.

The emergent class divides of Burning Man attendees is borne out by data: the Burning Man census (yes, they have a census, just like a real nation-state) showed that from 2010 to 2014, the number of attendees who make more than $300,000 a year doubled from 1.4% to 2.7%. This number is especially significant given the outsize presence 1 percenters command at Burning Man.

In a just, democratic society, everyone has equal voice. At Burning Man everyone is invited to participate, but the people who have the most money decide what kind of society Burning Man will be — they commission artists of their choice and build to their own whims. They also determine how generous they are feeling, and whether to withhold money.

It might seem silly to quibble over the lack of democracy in the “governance” of Black Rock City. After all, why should we care whether Jeff Bezos has commissioned a giant metal unicorn or a giant metal pirate ship, or whether Tananbaum wants to spend $2 million on an air-conditioned camp? But the principles of these tech scions — that societies are created through charity, and that the true “world-builders” are the rich and privileged — don’t just play out in the Burning Man fantasy world. They carry over into the real world, often with less-than-positive results.

Remember when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to help “fix” Newark’s public schools? In 2010, Zuckerberg — perhaps hoping to improve his image after his callous depiction in biopic The Social Network — donated $100 million to Newark’s education system to overhaul Newark schools.

The money was directed as a part of then–Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s plan to remake the city into the “charter school capital of the nation,” bypassing public oversight through partnership with private philanthropists.

Traditionally, public education has been interwoven with the democratic process: in a given school district, the community elects the school board every few years. School boards then make public decisions and deliberations. Zuckerberg’s donation, and the project it was attached to, directly undermined this democratic process by promoting an agenda to privatize public schools, destroy local unions, disempower teachers, and put the reins of public education into the hands of technocrats and profiteers.

This might seem like an unrelated tangent — after all, Burning Man is supposed to be a fun, liberating world all its own. But it isn’t. The top-down, do what you want, radically express yourself and fuck everyone else worldview is precisely why Burning Man is so appealing to the Silicon Valley technocratic scions.

To these young tech workers — mostly white, mostly men — who flock to the festival, Burning Man reinforces and fosters the idea that they can remake the world without anyone else’s input. It’s a rabid libertarian fantasy. It fluffs their egos and tells them that they have the power and right to make society for all of us, to determine how things should be.

This is the dark heart of Burning Man, the reason that high-powered capitalists — and especially capitalist libertarians — love Burning Man so much. It heralds their ideal world: one where vague notions of participation replace real democracy, and the only form of taxation is self-imposed charity. Recall Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s op-ed, in the wake of the Obamacare announcement, in which he proposed a healthcare system reliant on “voluntary, tax-deductible donations.”

This is the dream of libertarians and the 1 percent, and it reifies itself at Burning Man — the lower caste of Burners who want to partake in the festival are dependent on the whims and fantasies of the wealthy to create Black Rock City.

Burning Man foreshadows a future social model that is particularly appealing to the wealthy: a libertarian oligarchy, where people of all classes and identities coexist, yet social welfare and the commons exist solely on a charitable basis.

Of course, the wealthy can afford more, both in lodging and in what they “bring” to the table: so at Burning Man, those with more money, who can bring more in terms of participation, labor and charity, are celebrated more.

It is a society that we find ourselves moving closer towards the other 358 (non–Burning Man) days of the year: with a decaying social welfare state, more and more public amenities exist only as the result of the hyper-wealthy donating them. But when the commons are donated by the wealthy, rather than guaranteed by membership in society, the democratic component of civic society is vastly diminished and placed in the hands of the elite few who gained their wealth by using their influence to cut taxes and gut the social welfare state in the first place.

It’s much like how in my former home of Pittsburgh, the library system is named for Andrew Carnegie, who donated a portion of the initial funds. But the donated money was not earned by Carnegie; it trickled up from his workers’ backs, many of them suffering from overwork and illness caused by his steel factories’ pollution. The real social cost of charitable giving is the forgotten labor that builds it and the destructive effects that flow from it.

At Burning Man the 1 percenters — who have earned their money in the same way that Carnegie did so long ago — show up with an army of service laborers, yet they take the credit for what they’ve “brought.”

Burning Man’s tagline and central principle is radical self-expression:

Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

The root of Burning Man’s degeneration may lie in the concept itself. Indeed, the idea of radical self-expression is, at least under the constraints of capitalism, a right-wing, Randian ideal, and could easily be the core motto of any of the large social media companies in Silicon Valley, who profit from people investing unpaid labor into cultivating their digital representations.

It is in their interest that we are as self-interested as possible, since the more we obsess over our digital identity, the more personal information of ours they can mine and sell. Little wonder that the founders of these companies have found their home on the playa.

It doesn’t seem like Burning Man can ever be salvaged, or taken back from the rich power-brokers who’ve come to adore it and now populate its board of directors. It became a festival that rich libertarians love because it never had a radical critique at its core; and, without any semblance of democracy, it could easily be controlled by those with influence, power, and wealth.

Burning Man will be remembered more as the model for Google CEO Larry Page’s dream of a libertarian state, than as the revolutionary Situationist space that it could have been.

As such, it is a cautionary tale for radicals and utopianists. When “freedom” and “inclusion” are disconnected from democracy, they often lead to elitism and reinforcement of the status quo.

Four-star General Ray Odierno retired from his position as U.S. Army chief of staff on Friday. Now, less than a week after mustering out, he’s cashing in. The former general has taken a job as a senior adviser to the investment firm JPMorgan Chase.

In a press release posted on JPMorgan’s website on Thursday, the firm announced that Odierno is joining the company in “a senior advisory capacity,” providing “strategic advice and global insights” to CEO Jamie Dimon as well as the company’s board of directors. The announcement also said Odierno “will represent JPMorgan Chase through engagement with clients, government officials and policy makers in the U.S. and internationally.”

Odierno, who led the U.S. 4th infantry division during the initial stages of the occupation of Iraq, has been criticized for the allegedly heavy-handed and brutal behavior he permitted as a commander. While troops under his command were credited with the capture of Saddam Hussein, they were also criticized for their extremely harsh tactics in dealing with the local population. In Thomas Ricks’ 2006 book Fiasco, Odierno was characterized as helping enable indiscriminate mass detentions, prisoner abuse, and extrajudicial killings of Iraqi civilians in the area under his control.

In one particularly brutal 2003 incident documented in the book, Odierno overruled a recommendation that a soldier under his command be court-martialed for the killing of a Iraqi detainee who had turned himself in to U.S. forces, saying that the soldier accused of the murder was “a cook, he didn’t get proper training,” and that the detainee was “very aggressive, a bad guy.” The detainee, an Iraqi man named Obeed Radad, had turned himself in to U.S. forces after learning that they had been looking for him. He was shot and killed while being held in an isolation cell at a U.S. detention center in Tikrit, after allegedly trying to escape through a barbed wire fence.

The kind of behavior exhibited by Odierno’s forces would be said to have fostered the insurgency against U.S. troops in the country.

Odierno later returned to Iraq and became one of the major architects of the U.S. military’s “surge” strategy. Despite the surge’s failure to achieve its goal — which was to achieve political reconciliation that would result in long-term stability — it has taken on a mythological significance to those who prefer to blame President Obama for the chaos in the region, rather than President George W. Bush.

Odierno rose to become U.S. Army chief of staff in 2011, and in that role was a consistent public critic of plans by the Obama administration to draw down troop levels from their post-9/11 peaks. He has also been a steadfast defender of the original decision to invade Iraq, stating earlier this year that Saddam “was moving toward terrorism and I believe if he continued to have problems, we don’t know what he might have done in terms of being part of the problem with terrorism.”

Odierno is far from being the only top military official to retire and take on a high-level position with a private sector firm. In 2013, shortly after retiring as the head of U.S. Central Command, former Marine Corps General James Mattis took a position on the board of directors of military defense contractor General Dynamics. A 2010 Boston Globe report documented that 80 percent of retired 3- and 4-star generals who retired between 2004 and 2008 went on to take positions as consultants or executives in the private sector shortly after retirement, primarily in the defense industry.

In the press release announcing his new role with JPMorgan Chase, Odierno stated, “I’m excited to work with Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon [and] to have the opportunity to contribute to JPMorgan Chase — a globally recognized industry leader.”

Caption: Ray Odierno, then the No. 2 U.S. military official in Iraq, briefs reporters in Baghdad on Feb. 27, 2007

The post Iraq War General Ray Odierno Cashing In With New Job at JPMorgan Chase appeared first on The Intercept.

The founders of Rokk Solutions, a new political consulting firm that serves corporate trade associations and other lobbying ventures, offer their clients an unusual value proposition: whichever party triumphs, they’ll have had a hand in a big-money group that can claim victory.

While bipartisan political consulting firms are a dime a dozen in Washington, D.C., what makes Rokk noteworthy is that it is comprised of campaign operatives with major roles in two big-money groups — one Democratic, one Republican — expected to play major roles in the 2016 elections.

Rokk co-founder Rodell Mollineau was the first president of American Bridge 21st Century, one of the primary Super PACs supporting the bid of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Though he stepped down as president of American Bridge last year, Federal Election Commission reports show that Mollineau is still the treasurer of the group — and his LinkedIn profile describes him as being on the group’s board. Mollineau is also on the board of Working America Education Fund, an organized labor-backed campaign group that helps to elect Democrats.

Rokk co-founder Brian J. Walsh, meanwhile, is leading a nonprofit campaign group called Our Next America, which was formed to support the Republican policy agenda in the Senate. Politico described the group as following in the footsteps of GOP Super PACs that have worked in recent years to elect congressional Republicans. Rob Jesmer, a partner with FP1 Strategies, a consulting firm retained by Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, will also advise Our Next America. Walsh is the former communications director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

The other Rokk co-founder is Ron Bonjean, a Republican consultant who has worked for Koch Industries to help develop political attacks against company critics.

Rokk, which formally launched in May of this year, says it has already signed clients across a diverse range of industries, including the financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and retail sectors, according to a company press release. For clients, the Rokk team will use “campaign tactics to promote the interests of corporate clients,” according to a story about the firm in CQ Weekly.

Neither Bridge nor Mollineau responded to a request for comment.

The consultants, who fashion themselves professional spin artists, chose the name Rokk because it is Norwegian for “spinning wheel.”

Correction, August 21, 2015

Brian J. Walsh is one of the founders of Rokk, and leader of Our Next America. Brian O. Walsh is leading a new Super PAC called Future45, devoted to supporting the eventual Republican presidential nominee in the general election. An earlier version of this story mistook one for the other. As a result, it mistakenly reported that Rokk’s founders included founders of two rival Super PACs that would play key roles in the presidential election.

 

The post Corrected: Major Figures in Democratic and Republican Money Groups Go Into Business Together appeared first on The Intercept.

This cartoon was inspired by this disturbing NYT article. I like to think the right to bear s’mores without being shot at falls under the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Alpha Natural Resources, one of the largest coal companies in America, was a player in major congressional election efforts last year — but you won’t find records of their corporate donations on the Federal Election Commission website or in any public record.

You will, however, find signs of the Virginia-based coal giant’s secret political activities buried in a creditor document filed last Thursday. The recent downturn in coal prices and high debts forced the company to seek bankruptcy protection earlier this month.

The filing lists organizations with which Alpha Natural Resources had any kind of financial transaction, including recipients of grants, creditors and contractors. The filing does not list amounts given or owed by Alpha Natural Resources. A spokesperson for the firm did not respond to a request for comment.

Alpha Natural Resources gave money to an array of nonprofit entities that are not required to report donor information. These groups were pivotal in helping Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives and in electing the new GOP majority in the Senate.

The corporation helped fund the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, a secretive nonprofit group that refused to disclose any donor information during the election last year. The Kentucky Opportunity Coalition was the largest outside campaign entity in the Kentucky senate race, spending over $14 million on television and radio commercials to successfully reelect Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in his campaign against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.

Alpha Natural Resources also helped finance campaign entities associated with the Koch brothers campaign network, including Americans for Prosperity, Themis Trust (a campaign data company), and Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a clearinghouse used to fund a range of organizations supporting Republican election efforts. The Institute for Energy Research, an advocacy group founded by Charles Koch that lobbies in support of fossil fuel subsidies and against renewable energy policies, had a financial relationship with Alpha Natural Resources.

The company, with operations in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Wyoming, had once been viewed as a coal industry powerhouse. In 2011, Alpha Natural Resources borrowed $7.1 billion to purchase Massey Energy after 29 employees were killed in Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine.

The creditor filing reveals a number of other revelations about Alpha Natural Resource’s undisclosed political operation. For instance, the company gave money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a trade association that spent over $35 million during the election last year, largely to benefit GOP candidates. It also donated to Americans Allied for Jobs and Security, a group that spent a small amount supporting Republican candidates during the midterm elections.

The company donated to a number of political groups that favor environmental deregulation on the coal industry, including the Ripon Society, a foundation to support moderate Republicans; the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Virginia; and the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit that works with lobbyists to develop business-friendly template legislation used by state lawmakers. ALEC recently produced template legislation to block states from submitting compliance plans with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, new regulations designed to combat carbon emissions.

The bankruptcy filing lists “Arthur C Brooks C/O AEI 1150 17th St. NW Washington DC,” which appears to be Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has campaigned against the EPA’s new rules governing carbon emissions from coal power plants. 

Alpha Natural Resources backed the Heartland Institute, an Illinois-based think tank that aggressively works to counter the belief in climate change. The Heartland Institute, which organizes an annual gathering of climate change deniers, gained notoriety in 2012 for sponsoring billboards comparing those who believe in climate change to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and cult leader Charles Manson.

Bankruptcy filings are providing a rare window into the subterranean world of money in politics. Earlier this year, The Intercept used a bankruptcy filing to reveal secret donations to dark money campaign entities and think tanks made by Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit college with a high rate of student defaults. Many of the beneficiaries of Corinthian Colleges’ secret money helped the school beat back regulations governing the $1.4 billion per year in federally backed student loans the company received.

Just days after his reelection victory, made possible with the support of the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, Sen. McConnell announced that his top priority would be to rein in the EPA’s power to regulate coal companies. Alpha Natural Resources considered the EPA rules a top priority as well.

The post Giant Coal Company Bankruptcy Reveals Secret Ties to Climate Denial, GOP Dark Money Groups appeared first on The Intercept.

Marc Lewis is a neuroscientist, professor of developmental psychology, and author of the new book The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease. On the show this week we talk to Lewis about the biology of addiction—and what it does to our brains.

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There's a growing concern on college campuses that scholarship is suffering at the hands of emotional sensitivity. Critics argue that trigger warnings and avoiding microagressions are taking precedent over intellectual discourse. Still, others say that feeling safe and respected are prerequisites for any learning environment. We'll discuss the realities of today's classroom, where students and professors bring their trauma and prejudice along with them.

Oxford academic and author Sudhir Hazareesingh explores the reasons behind the recent loss of confidence among France’s preeminent thinkers.

After Donald Trump insulted Fox News' Megyn Kelly, the network made a strange deal with the GOP front runner. We hear what it says about media relationships with candidates in this election cycle. Plus, an anniversary in Ferguson, and writer David Lipsky on his interviews with the late David Foster Wallace.