happy birthday, howard

Today marks what would have been Howard Zinn's 90th birthday. Zinn, who died on January 27, 2010, was many things in his relatively long life: A WWII veteran, historian, author, playwright, social activist, teacher, the list goes on. I never really knew anything about him until I bought one of his short plays, Marx in Soho, at the local bookstore about four years ago.

I had locked myself out of my apartment, and Annie wasn't going to be home from work for a few more hours, so I went to look around the local bookstore for something to read until she got home. I happened to notice the small, reddish book sitting in the philosophy section—it was short and cheap, so I grabbed it. I spent the rest of my time reading it at a nearby coffee shop.

Not long after that, I rented a documentary about Zinn called Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train from the local video store. It was an excellent documentary, and from that moment on, Zinn became one of my heroes. But more importantly, it got me interested in American history, especially the history of the American labour movement. I ended up buying a copy of A People's History of the United States, and that book (true to Will Hunting/Matt Damon's words in Good Will Hunting) knocked me on my ass!

Zinn not only taught me a lot about the American labour movement, but he helped me to find my political bearings as well. At the time I discovered Zinn, I was in the process of figuring out where I stood and how far I wanted to go with my political activism. Zinn inspired me to get politically active for progressive causes at a time when I could easily have been lulled into being just another passive voter. So, in memory of his life, my favourite Howard Zinn quote:

An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

RIP, comrade.

panhandlers in detroit could face jail time

Ah, yes, liberalism in action. Fining and/or jailing the 'least among us' for begging in certain areas or in certain ways:

Panhandlers in Detroit could face jail time

Like most solutions to pressing social problems, if you don't like something and can't fix it, make a law to regulate it/turn it into a crime and profit from it, right? The saddest part of this is that it'll just make things more difficult for those stuck in the cycle of poverty, allowing police to legally harass them more than already do, and ultimately making panhandlers even more aggressive as they struggle harder to survive. Instead of treating these people as fellow human beings, we, as a society, often treat them as if they're some kind of pests, who, with their poverty and homelessness, are inconveniencing us trying to go about our day-to-day lives, never stopping to think about what it must be like to live a day in theirs.

Maybe instead of fining and jailing homeless people for begging, we could give them a place to stay for starters. There are more than enough vacant homes to house the homeless. Maybe a universal basic income is another possible solution. Or even providing better social programs that help the homeless and poor to find jobs would be infinitely more helpful than punishing them for being homeless or poor (e.g., by providing them with things like internet access, mailing addresses, phone numbers, showers, clean clothes for interviews, etc.).

Unfortunately, we currently seem to be more concerned about giving money to banks to bail them out of their irresponsible behaviour and spending money on invading and occupying foreign nations to provide for any of that. Christian nation my ass.

who's going to be the lesser-evil in 2012?

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This 1967 article might as well be titled, "Who's going to be the lesser-evil in 2012?":

Who's going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?

While reading the paragraph, "So besides Tweedledee-Tweedledums and besides the Lesser Evils who really are different in policy from the Greater Evils, we increasingly are getting this third type of case: the Lesser Evils who, as executors of the system, find themselves acting at every important juncture exactly like the Greater Evils, and sometimes worse. They are the product of the increasing convergence of liberalism and conservatism under conditions of bureaucratic capitalism. There never was an era when the policy of the Lesser Evil made less sense than now," a couple of recent examples immediately came to mind.

The first was President Clinton's signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, the latter of which repealed sections of Glass-Steagall Act and arguably helped lead to the 2008 financial crisis. The second is President Obama's continuation of Clinton and Bush era policies such as extraordinary rendition and drone strike-assassinations, as well as his administration's crackdown on whistleblowers (e.g., former CIA agent John Kiriakou) and his signing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, allowing indefinite detention to be codified into law.

Which just goes to show that, "In setups where the choice is between one capitalist politician and another, the defeat comes in accepting the limitation to this choice."

happy birthday, social security

As Social Security turns 77, it faces an uncertain future, with Congress unwilling to raise the income cap (currently set at $110,100) and deficit hawks threatening to dismantle it and donate its remains to Wall Street to gamble with as they see fit. Not much of a birthday present, is it? Which is why I agree with Richard Eskow that the best gift those of us who support this program can give is "the gift of ongoing citizen activism to demand that it be protected from predators who would gut it in the name of Washington dealmaking or tax breaks for the wealthy."

the long road to serfdom

By now, it's become rather cliche to invoke 1984 when talking about the budding US surveillance state; but the glaring similarities between Oceania and the US are simply too obvious to ignore. Many people seem to assume that the US could never get that bad since the book was obviously a critique of socialism and the Soviet Union, so there's no need for us to worry about that ever happening here now that the Soviet Union is no more and capitalism has 'won.' But people tend to forget that Orwell wasn't just critiquing the Soviet Union, he was critiquing aspects of the American and British empires as well. His real target was the growing threat of totalitarianism around the world, not socialism.

The seeds for a subservient totalitarian society aren't necessarily sown overnight, and the slow but steady march of neoliberalism is proving itself just as capable of arriving at oligarchical collectivism as the totalitarian Stalinist bureaucracy that, in the mind of Orwell (who himself was a democratic socialist), betrayed the revolution. As our basic liberties and freedoms are quietly being sacrificed to Moloch by both parties under the guise of security, we're merely taking the long road to serfdom.

romneymachus

With all the hype surrounding the Olympics the past two weeks, a lot seems to have been missed and/or pushed out of public consciousness. One of those things is Mitt Romney's comments at a fundraiser in Israel in which he equated wealthiness with superiority and suggested that Israeli culture is part of what's allowed them to be more economically successful than the Palestinians, just as the US's superior culture is what's allowed us to be more economically successful than Mexico.

Besides illustrating his (and the Republican Party's) belief that wealth is the supreme measure of all things, it completely ignores some inconvenient truths, such as the role Israeli policies have negatively impacted the growth of the Palestinian economy, from its blockade of Gaza (an area smaller than Portland, OR, with twice the population) via its almost complete control over Gaza's borders, airspace, and territorial waters to its occupation of the West Bank, replete with over 500 roadblocks and checkpoints obstructing Palestinian movement.

By implying that wealth in terms of higher GDP per capita is a sign of superior culture, regardless of things like regional hegemony, Romney betrays his belief in Thrasymachian justice, which is nothing but 'the advantage of the stronger' (Republic, 338c).

jim henson's the cube

I have a newfound appreciation for Jim Henson, especially for his experimental filmmaking, after seeing a collection of his experimental shorts, commercials, and TV appearances at the Hollywood Theater. Never realized how much he did before focusing entirely on his puppeteering work. For example, in 1969 Henson produced, directed, and co-wrote an hour-long existential teleplay about a man trapped in a white cubical room called The Cube that aired on NBC.

It's reminiscent of The Prisoner, and deals with a number of similar themes like alienation, identity, insanity, psychological manipulation and torture, and the fine line between illusion and reality, as well as questions about perception and the nature of reality itself that seem to suggest that life is ultimately a paradox and/or shows how someone can get 'trapped' in their own mind.



Definitely a helluva lot better than most of the rubbish they show on NBC these days. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already seen it.